“Can you see my eyes, Mr. Legend?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. There must be no misunderstanding my intent and my message. I have been assigned by the government to accompany your voyage. Furthermore, it is the message of the leadership of the Chinese government that I am, in fact and reality, in command of your voyage. While it is within the interests of the People’s Republic that you be allowed to conduct your little experiment in survival, Beijing wishes to remain in full control of its interests and its assets.”
Legend’s immediate impulse was to explode in anger. Inside, he seethed in reflexive rage. He somehow resisted the instantaneous impulse to pull the little man’s arms off and beat him to death with them. Legend was an American who only happened to end up in Hong Kong to knowingly and deliberately siphon private Chinese money. This capital he stuffed into his personal Cayman bank account by selling the Chinese images of manhood that just happened to look and ride like Harley Davidson motorcycles. Legend was an avaricious American capitalist through and through. He loved and prized his independence and his freedom more than the average red-blooded American. He thought of himself as an American patriot, an American cowboy, an American Indian, an American native, an American dreamer, an American entrepreneur and an American nationalist just a short hair shy of a full-blown jingoist. Had he not employed so many beautiful Chinese women, he would have stepped over that line, too.
The one thing on earth Legend despised more than personal poverty was a Chicom - any Chicom. As far as Legend was concerned, the only good Chicom was a dead, dismembered, crushed, mechanically separated and burnt Chicom. He loathed their culture, he loathed their brief history, he loathed their despotic government and he especially hated their faceless, harsh, brutal treatment of the Chinese people. The more he came to know and love his Chinese friends, the more he came to understand and abhor the Chicoms and everything they represented.
To Legend, the Chicoms were a subhuman species – mere human parasites with no personal intelligence or individual creativity. Indeed they survived only because they sucked the life’s blood from the personal drive and energy of capitalist intellect and entrepreneurial strength which they then banned from public life. To his way of thinking, Beijing was nothing more than a massive human termite colony and its minions like the one that stood before him had all the worth of walking human carrion. The single reason that he did not kill Doctor Adams on the spot was the risk of losing his prize to Chinese retaliation. He did not trust Doctor Adams, but he did believe his threat was real.
“Very well, Dr. Adams. I’ll assign you a personal stateroom,” Legend replied in a supernatural effort to control every hint of emotion. He knew very well that the only chance he would have of eventually getting rid of this vermin and protecting his project was to string him along in a precisely executed plan that was to begin immediately. He had suspected that this moment might eventually come, so he was somewhat prepared for this meeting.
Legend’s eyes locked onto Adam’s and neither man would look away; another unspoken Chicom custom that harkened all the way back to their recent evolutionary past: wild dogs and wolves. It was unwritten that the dominant one held the stare the longest.
Long minutes passed. Neither man blinked. “American roots?” Legend eventually asked maintaining eye contact.
Adams laughed a stern, tight chortle. “Is it not obvious? My Chinese mother worked in a laundry in Cincinnati where I was born to a Chinese-American father. He was a typical beer drinking Bengal’s fan, who beat my mother after the team lost on Sunday afternoons, which meant my mother was beaten up a lot. So I took my paper route money, forged over a million dollars in life insurance documents in my father’s name, and then killed him – all before I was able to get a driver’s license. His accident was so well staged, that even I could not tell what had really happened. After my Harvard education was complete, I moved back to the motherland and unlearned the sewage of capitalism that had infected my mind and mass produced savages like my father…like you.”
Legend chose to break the stare and looked away, resisting the powerful urge to actually feel sorry for the little Chicom. In the end, staring contests were petty and inconsequential. When the inevitable moment came, the only thing that mattered was whose eyes remained open at the end of the day. He knew well it was only a matter of time before the deadly contest actually came to pass.
“The staterooms are already complete,” he said with no trace of emotion. “You can move in to yours at any time.” We launch in 52 days. Other than that, you may, of course, come and go as you please.”
“You are a very smooth operator, Mr. Legend,” Adams said with typical Chicom suspicion and offensive purpose. “And do not ever tell me what I may or may not do. That is always my decision and mine alone. In the future, I will be the one who instructs you on your boundaries and it will be me who issues your permissions, is that clear? I will decide when we launch.”
“Of course,” Legend replied in a tone that bordered on undisguised sarcasm.
“I will take the Master’s cabin, Mr. Legend; your cabin. I will not accept a mere stateroom.”
Legend paused and swallowed hard to suppress even the flicker of a smile. He had already anticipated this inevitable request. The Chicoms were victims of their own arrogance and one-dimensional culture that ran in an unbroken, very short and narrow path straight from Mao Tse-Tung. Unlike the ancient Chinese dynasties and their sensitive, wise and refined traditions, the Chicoms had bastardized them to the point that no one could have recognized the two as the same people. Legend knew long before the first welded joint that this request would inevitably be made, so he designated the Master’s cabin on the plans as a large but severe space with few amenities and comforts located directly next to the machinery space. His own cabin was designated the “Cook’s Quarters” and was spectacularly outfitted.
PHOENIX – VIEW FROM BELOW
“Yeah, of course, Dr. Adams. The Master’s Cabin shall be yours.”
“I will return tomorrow and shall assume leadership control,” Adams said, still staring, unblinking at Legend.
“Yeah, whatever…”
“What did you say, Mr. Legend?”
“I said, yeah, cool, great, see ya tomorrow.”
Adams dropped his now barely glowing cigarette butt onto the ground and crushed it expertly under his toe without apparently even looking down. Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness.
“Shall I kill him, boss?” said a light voice from the shadows. Legend could see his beautiful Chinese aide emerging from the tentacles of darkness that surrounded them. She had obviously been quietly listening and evaluating. She approached him and stood silently before him, her petite body covered by a sleek, black silk dress that did little to hide the perfection of her shapely form.
Sam took the last step toward Legend and as she did, his right arm slid slowly down her back and came up under her dress, his fingers sweeping over her warm, naked flesh as he lifted her effortlessly up and into his arms. Her dark eyes looked deeply into his, hovering inches from his face. Legend could feel her sweet breath as he allowed himself this moment to be overtaken by her limpid, Oriental eyes.
“I can take care of him, boss,” she whispered again, convincingly.
Legend knew Sam was right and was fully capable of eliminating the arrogant Chicom before he ever left the premises. She had been born into a sect of women trained in the martial arts. Her group was so secret that its name could not even be spoken except by those within its circle. Unlike the preposterous Hollywood models involving long, drawn out and dramatic fight scenes, her art was based on total and absolute surprise from dark places. Even her light, 84 pound form was a lethal instrument that was trained to emerge out of the shadows and strike decisively without any warning. In her training, if the quarry was not dead on the street in but a single second, the attack was deemed a total failure. Legend had no doubt but had he said the word that Dr. Adams would never m
ake it out of the boatyard alive.
“No, Sam,” Legend said. “No. Let’s play his game until we’re in the safety of the open sea. Then we’ll talk. Besides, didn’t ya hear? The good doctor says I’m not the boss man anymore,” he teased in a whisper.
Sam’s lips danced lightly over Legend’s as she formed the words, “Then the doctor’s in for big surprise,” in her best, exaggerated Chinese accent. As she finished the statement, she covered his mouth passionately with her own. As for Legend, he instantly forgot about the barely significant Chicom. He really did not care anymore, lost in the immediacy of the passionate, white hot flame that engulfed him in his neon lit shipyard standing beneath the strange, black steel behemoth rising tall into the dark and brooding sky.
20
Lew Warren had always been a kind of high-tech survivalist packrat. Stuffed into every nook and cranny of his Winnebago were various odds and ends, such as a single shoebox chock full of Peltier thermoelectric chips. Another larger box held multiple palm sized microprocessors of every shape and description. There were four mini hydroelectric generators as well as multiplied thousands of wafer thin solar cells of all shapes and descriptions.
Nearly all of it he had purchased online from a well known auction service but some of it he found at local garage sales. In addition to 1,500 man-days of food, Warren had managed to squirrel away enough techno-gizmo apparatus to outfit a small community as a self-sufficient, off-the-grid unit. Warren believed with all his heart that the social fabric was always in danger of imminent collapse for one reason or another and he said to anyone who wanted to listen that he was “…damn well gonna be ready.” And he was: food, power, refrigeration and shelter were his game, and after they unloaded the RV into the cave, they were ready for the coming disaster now predicted to begin in less than 180 days.
They had managed to stuff the cave with everything they could strip out of the Winnebago, all the food and even pieces from the formerly elaborate concrete structure below the television tower at the top of the mountain. Then they carefully hid the opening to their cave by strategic placement of trees and rocks over its narrow external gap in the rock shelf.
The main cave chamber was slightly sloped to one end, but was covered in nearly white sand from wall to wall. It was isolated from the outside by adequate shielding so that their radiation levels would never rise above any known danger points even in the worst of the predicted storm. The chamber floor was sufficiently large so that each man had set up their own large, family sized tent. At one end of the chamber was a ledge wide enough to walk along which gently sloped naturally down the side of a 25 foot crevice to a gushing stream that had cut a deep channel into the solid rock. At its base was a small, relatively flat, open area also covered in sand. Here Warren set up just one of his hydroelectric generators which provided more than enough power for his four direct current batteries and the refrigeration unit they had constructed from the Peltier chips. The stream also doubled as a private cold water bath.
The cave had enough power for more than adequate lighting and refrigeration as well as energy to the various monitoring devices they had scattered about the immediate area. These devices included radiation monitors, a pair of tiny cameras mounted on the tall tower atop the mountain and various radio antennas from commercial to short-wave.
In the center of the cavern was a large table made from a single sheet of plywood they had stripped off the transmitter building atop the mountain. Lance Charles had shown himself to be an expert carpenter and hands-on man. Between all of them, they had enough talent to build quite a secure and comfortable hideaway.
Dale Wattenbarger lent the perfect balance required to prevent the Concharty Mountain trio from inevitable self destruction. Wattenbarger managed to prevent Lance Charles from slipping into terminal, suicidal depression as he waxed on endlessly, long and hard, about the inevitability of a cornucopia of endless diverse death scenarios so hideous and colorful that it made the Texas Chainsaw Massacre seem like a Sunday School picnic. Likewise, Wattenbarger often stood careful guard over Charles since Warren wanted to gag and bag the poor Wagoner County Deputy who was simply emotionally overwhelmed by the onrushing catastrophe.
Wattenbarger sobered up nicely and cleaned up respectably. His years of alcohol abuse kept his weight in check so that he was a wiry man of average build. He wore his straight brown hair in a neat row across the top of his oval, wire rimmed glasses. Although middle aged, he had lost not a single hair and there was only a hint of grey around his temples. His face was always creased in a smile lined by a row of perfectly straight teeth and his expression reflected his life’s attitude of unbroken confidence, and some degree of self-assurance, soundly tempered by a reality he somewhat successfully ignored.
Wattenbarger handled the lack of alcohol reasonably well and did not seem to dwell on its absence to any extreme degree. Indeed, he exchanged his addictions by throwing himself into implementing Warren ’s complex survival strategy. He became obsessed and worked like a man possessed. His intelligence was razor sharp, his eyes always boring into the empty void just beyond his nose as his brain worked and reworked the never-ending list of projects he was bent on solving by tracking multiple handfuls of complex items simultaneously.
Warren watched as Wattenbarger was hunched over the flat table in the center of the cave, illuminated by a row of bright lights partially powered by a carefully camouflaged set of solar panels rigged in the tree canopy on the ridge just above them.
“So, how are the power calculations? Any improvements?” Warren asked.
“Great! Super!” Wattenbarger responded, not even looking up, his fingers dancing over the keys of his portable computer. “We have power excess, far more than the minimum requirement. With only four batteries, we can’t even store what we make. We still have to dump it into a power sink.”
“That is - until our batteries die,” Warren added blackly.
Wattenbarger looked up from his desk and smiled briefly at Warren . “You’ve been hanging out with Lance, I see,” he quipped, then added, “so, Lew, how goes the world outside? You’ve been spending a lot of time hunched over your satellite radio receiver.”
Warren thought about the question, and then responded, “About what you’d expect if the grand announcement was made that the world and everyone and everything in it was goin’ in the toilet. The city centers in most countries have become no-man’s demilitarized zones. After the initial spate of riots, the militaries captured them and continue to hold ‘em to prevent self destruction; although I can’t imagine why. It looks like they’re enacting some grand, national strategy of controlling civil unrest that has nothing whatsoever to do with the current state of affairs. It just proves the point that big governments are like big dinosaurs – gigantic and powerful but with brains the size of walnuts. What we’re witnessing is exactly what happens when you mush all the politicians’ brains together in a single useless mass.
“Meanwhile, out in the rest of the country, the populace first reacted by running around in meaningless circles. I saw that firsthand on my way up here from Florida . People wanted out, so they took to the highways all at once. Countless thousands literally headed for the hills. Funny thing was, when they got there they had no idea why they ran there or what to do, so in a short time, the roads got crowded again, after people found out they couldn’t even begin to live in the woods and the rest couldn’t live with their relatives. It was a weird kind of reverse exodus.
“Now things have settled out a lot. The President’s declared a national martial law as have most countries on earth. But, as you might expect, it’s rigidly enforced in some places and it’s totally ignored in others. Since most of the National Guard stayed home to look after their own families, police duties fall to local law enforcement and a combination of volunteers with remnants of the National Guard. Some places are near normal while about half the rest are in relative chaos and live day to day.
“The national infrastructure h
as pretty much broken down – the US Postal Service is totally out of business; cellular telephone is hit and miss, day to day, but mostly gone now. Land line telephone service is totally out. Satellite radio and television are nationalized and, aside from private shortwave, it’s about all the communications left.
“The power grid is unstable or is goin’ out in a lot of the country and probably won’t ever come back. With the power goes water and sewer, of course, which makes every dwelling above two stories uninhabitable. Food deliveries are all but totally disrupted and food riots have begun in earnest. There’re no stores or malls that haven’t been looted to the bare floors.”
“Excuse me, Lew, but as I look outside every evening, there’s a blanket of lights as far as I can see. What about that?”
“Now that’s an interestin’ story, actually. Some genius in the Department of Energy - and the genius who actually listened to him - came up with a plan so amazing that if there’s a history after this, it’ll measure right up there with the Apollo moon program. You see, before this all came down to an official announcement, some engineer in the DOE decided that power was the key to keeping a civilization like ours intact for as long as possible. To enable that, the government had to find a way to keep the power plants operatin’ no matter what.
“So, here’s the chief motivation: if you break our culture down to its most basic function, it’s officially greed. Greed drives the American equation, and it’s what’s made us so awesomely powerful. We work so damn hard because there’s somethin’ in it immediately for us. It’s the capitalist energy, if you will.
“So the DOE established armed encampments called ‘Power Villages’ around every important power generation facility in the country, complete with mobile home villages for the workers and their immediate family. They hired armed guards to protect them, and they stockpiled food to feed them. They brought in teachers to teach their kids, and they even supplied all the raw materials the families needed to build their own community shelter for the coming storms. Then the government quadrupled their salaries and paid ‘em in gold bullion. In exchange, the workers agreed to stay and generate power - just stay and do their jobs.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 14
