Devil's Fork

by Spencer Adams

CHAPTER 40

  EARLY THURSDAY

  Wuhan, China

  NATPAC instantly awoke when he heard his phone ring. He lay on his couch, at home, in his apartment. He had let himself drift off into a light sleep for a moment. He grabbed the phone’s handle but put his phone on speaker.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “No. What do you want?”

  “The Snatch mission has been initiated. They have her in a safe house. They are waiting to extract her to the North.”

  “Did they find anything out about this spy’s mission?”

  “The mission team is just a snatch team. They don’t have any details other than their orders to take her. So they can’t interrogate her. It will be easier once they bring her across. Hopefully they can do this in an hour. An interrogation team is standing by.”

  “Well in the meantime we still don’t know what this spy is doing. Any update from the team patrolling near our facility?”

  “No. They haven’t caught anyone yet.”

  “But the facility hasn’t been broken into? The guards there have not let anything get by them?”

  “That’s right. I was told that team has been standing right in front of the door all night. If anyone gets through it would have to be over their dead bodies.

  “That’s good. Maybe this spy is just planning to go deeper into the country, towards a city. Maybe we’ve been overreacting. They probably don’t know anything about our facility.”

  “Have you guys figured anything out yet? What’s your SLOTHMAN working on? Does he have anything?”

  “Not yet. He’s close though. Maybe he’ll have some information by the morning.”

  NATPAC hung up the phone. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the table and lit it up.

  Everything is moving too slowly.

  NATPAC wanted to jump into the fray himself. He wanted to take the controls from SLOTHMAN and infiltrate the CIA’s systems himself. He wanted to get on a boat and take this South Korean over the border and interrogate her himself. He wanted to grab a gun and patrol the base himself. It seemed that without him, everything was too relaxed. That made sense, he thought. Nobody but him really had much skin in the game. This whole project could be discovered, he thought, and he would really pay for it.

  He tried to tell himself to have patience. People always told him to work on his patience. Have patience like the leaders, he told himself. The leaders had a fifty year plan, maybe even a hundred year plan, between Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3. His favorite subject to dream about took hold of his mind again. Act 1 was almost complete. China’s foreign reserves were in the trillions and growing. Act 2 was on its way. China was already buying assets around the world, especially in America. Then, in Act 3, China could take almost any path it wanted. It could decide how to use its growing power and wealth. NATPAC believed the best path would be to build the strongest military in the world. China would be able to dominate world affairs. NATPAC was stunned whenever he read about how the Soviets were able to check the United States just because they had a comparable military power. But what would happen if China’s military were more powerful? Then all American wishes to dictate world affairs could be put down. NATPAC was sometimes shocked to read that the number of military aged men fit for duty in China was over 350 million. Once much of the world was working for China-based companies, the leaders could put more people in the military, say 100 million men. A 100 million-man army with the latest technology and virtually unlimited resources could do whatever it wanted in the world. Who would stop it? Even if the rest of the world allied itself together, including America, would they be able to match that force? China could now dictate world affairs. It could impose its system on others. Its will could be imposed on the Middle East, Europe, South America, and of course North America. “We will be the only superpower again,” NATPAC thought. China will regain its lost glory.

  That is where NATPAC got the idea for his username, or handle. He got the idea from an economic history book he read a long time ago. In it, he read about a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true. It was known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. In the 1910’s and 1920’s, American cities started to see the development of streetcars. These were trams that drove through the city making stops. They were connected to electrical wires above them, and so they ran on electricity, rather than gasoline. They were clean and quiet. They did not pollute either by smoke or by sound. Modern day San Francisco still had a system like this operating. NATPAC read that General Motors, Philips Petroleum, Firestone, and a number of other American businesses became worried about the growth of these streetcars. If such an efficient system of transportation developed in cities around the country, people would be relying on vehicles that were not from GM, that did not have tires from Firestone, and did not use gasoline refined by Philips. The technology behind the electric vehicles could potentially have been developed further into standalone cars. Then nobody would buy a car, tires, or gasoline from these businesses. But what these companies did, NATPAC thought, was brilliant. They saw their fates ahead, and they acted. GM, Firestone, Philips, and several others created and funded two companies. One was called National City Lines. The other was called Pacific City Lines. Starting in 1936, National City Lines and Pacific City Lines bought 100 electric tram companies in cities throughout the US, including New York City and Los Angeles. Then National and Pacific dismantled the electric systems and replaced the trams with buses. They cut research related to electric vehicle systems. National and Pacific ensured the future dominance of GM, Philips, and Firestone. These companies were the tool to achieve an end goal. They achieved it by buying their enemies. NATPAC remembered being so fascinated that he derived his username from this conspiracy:

  National City Lines Pacific City Lines

  NATPAC was pleased to see that now China was slowly buying its rivals. He leaned back on his couch. He stared straight ahead for a moment as he thought about the future. Ten years from now, he thought, he would just view tonight as a hiccup. Maybe he would not even think about it at all.