Delquan began to sweat, they had him. He couldn’t believe that Mr. Kagan would sacrifice himself in order to destroy him. He tried to come up with a plausible excuse for his behavior, was he blackmailed, forced, overpowered by Mr. Kagan……he couldn’t fit any of these excuses within a reasonable narrative that the Principal would buy. He hoped his silence bought him some time.
The Principal continued, “Delquan, admit it, you lured this poor man to his destruction for a better grade. Your conduct is so unbecoming I cannot allow you to continue as a student here unless you admit your complicity. If you do so, I will allow you to graduate, but you can forget any endorsement from this school. Understand that you are only being extended this courtesy because of your parent’s sterling reputation as educators.”
Delquan sat stone-faced. He was in check for the first time in his life, and he did not like it at all.
His father was the first to speak, “Take the deal Delquan; it’s the best one you are going to get.”
His mother looked at him with barely contained disgust, “Listen to your father, it’s your only way out young man!”
Delquan hung his head and accepted the deal. Two weeks later he graduated from Rufus King just like everybody else in the herd. He fumed as the honor roll names were read off, and the crowd clapped at the other student’s achievements. He should have been up there, but the fates conspired against him, and for the first time in his life he tasted bitter defeat. He vowed never to be defeated again, no matter what he had to do. The future he envisioned for himself; rich, powerful and top of any profession he chose was gone. Despite his parent’s best efforts to give him a chance to be accepted to Marquette University were slammed shut, never to open again. He decided that he was not going to attend some no-name school in the middle of nowhere just to get a meaningless scrap of paper that might land him a dead end job. Another plan began to form in his mind that would make the best use of his talents and reward him in a different way.
After a week of living like a prisoner in his home under the disapproving looks of his parents, he couldn’t take it anymore. He left home that night without telling his parents where he was going, leaving a post it note on his pillow saying “YOU ARE DEAD TO ME." When the morning came, he went to his local recruiting office and signed with the first military service that could get him out of town.
The Marine recruiter nearly howled with glee when he found Delquan on his doorstep with all of the necessary documentation in hand. In two days, Delquan was on a plane headed to Parris Island, South Carolina, and Marine boot camp. Delquan excelled in the hyper-masculine environment of boot camp. He was able quickly to identify weaker members of the platoon who possessed skills he needed, and soon had his very own little cadre of minions. He was able to usurp the coveted role of the platoon leader by way of pure ruthlessness from the person that rightfully held it. To Delquan, it appeared that the traits he had in the Marines held some value, and to his delight, were heartily encouraged by his drill instructors. He graduated at the top of his training platoon, receiving the accolades he desperately needed and did not receive at Rufus King. He received a transfer to Lackland Air Force Base, Texas to the military police school that the Marine Corps and The Air Force Security Police shared. Once again, his ruthlessness and ability to recruit different minions paid off and he quickly rose as a contender for Class Leader for his academics and physical skill.
However, the Air Force, in the form of Chief Master Sergeant Maren identified Delquan for what he was, a manipulative psychopath. Chief Maren hated Delquan’s sneaky nature and obsequiousness, and made efforts to monitor young Delquan's activities as he progressed through the training regimen. In week three of training, Maren was able to quantify how dangerous Delquan was, and began to take steps to stop him. Chief Maren observed Delquan threaten and blackmail another classmate for his homework, and further, threaten the student’s life if he ever reported him.
One day, as Delquan was passing by the Instructor’s office, he heard Chief Maren make several negative comments regarding him and his methods. He overheard Maren say to his commanding officer, Gunnery Sergeant Dale, “Jim, I am telling you, that Delquan ain’t right, he is a mean and sneaky little shit I saw him strong arm Smith for his homework yesterday and threaten to cut his dick off if he told. Smith won’t say anything, which makes my job in getting rid of him all that much harder. Did you see what he did to McCurran in training last week?”
“No.”
“Well, I was there and with this other incident, I am going to try recommend that we get rid of this kid…at least kick him out of security and back to regular infantry.”
McCurran was an Air Force trainee and also a contender for Class Leader. He was a favorite amongst his peers as well as the training cadre for his mental quickness, his ability to build constructive teams and his willingness to help his classmates achieve their goals. Each man had their promoters, but the odds were in favor of McCurran for Class Leader
When they were in hand to hand combat training last week, McCurran and Delquan were sparring. One would hold a boxing pad, and the other would strike it. Delquan was striking the pad with a furious set of blows, and McCurran was holding the pad and fending off the attack. Delquan saw McCurran look away for a moment and saw his chance to eliminate his competition. With his left hand, he pulled the boxing pad down, exposing McCurran’s face and delivered a punishing right to McCurran’s face. McCurran’s nose flattened and both orbits of his eyes were shattered by the punch. He fell to the canvass and was immediately surrounded by his classmates. As they were conveying the broken man to the hospital, several students approached the instructors and voiced their suspicions, they knew Delquan did McCurran dirty, but nobody could say they witnessed Delquan illegally strike McCurran. Much to the chagrin of Chief Maren, It was written off as another training accident.
He heard Gunny Dale come to his defense, “Bob; I don’t see what you are seeing, yeah, he is a little brownnoser, but I think he just wants to get through training like every other recruit here. As for McCurran, it was an accident it was just the way the boxing pad moved down at the right moment. I know McCurran is in the hospital for the next week with broken facial bones, but he’s a tough kid and will make it with the next class.”
“I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse Delquan. You know what Dale, I’m going to recommend dismissal from the Academy. I just can’t have this kid around anymore. I know he is a Marine, and I’m Air Force, but I’m the chief instructor and what I say goes.”
Delquan scurried away from the office, wondering what to do, how could he get rid of Maren without having a bright red neon arrow pointing back at him? As he made his way back to the dormitory, his mind began to calculate the angles of his new predicament.
Delquan became Class Leader by default, much to the chagrin of Chief Maren. Delquan kept his energies under a tight leash; he knew Maren was watching his every move, looking for that excuse to kick him out. Delquan chafed at the negative attention, so he quietly plotted and planned his next move.
Five weeks later, it was obvious that Maren’s efforts to remove Delquan failed, and Delquan was staying. The squad was on the obstacle course, going through their final exam when the opportunity Delquan was looking for presented itself. Chief Maren was at the top of the rope-climbing tower directing the class over the obstacle when it became Delquan’s turn on the rope. He easily climbed the rope hand over hand and reached the top of the tower to come face to face with Maren. He glared at Delquan and then looked away for a brief moment handing Delquan his chance. Delquan shifted his weight ever so slightly and nudged Maren off of the railing-less platform, where he fell 35 feet to the hard ground, dying instantly of a broken neck. To the untrained eye, it appeared to be just an unfortunate training accident, and no investigation could prove otherwise. The death of Maren sent a shockwave through the tight community of Lackland, and the class was quietly graduated and sent off to their individual assignments. Delquan, like mos
t Marines ended up on Okinawa. While there he decided to bide his time and do his tour of duty as quietly as possible. He quickly became the First Sergeant’s right hand man, acting as if the power of the First Sergeant was his own. Being the first Sergeant’s right hand gave him entrée to special training, duties and assignments that would benefit him if he ever had to go back down into the mud with his fellow Marines. In 1990, Delquan’s life changed significantly when he became a part of the military buildup to destroy Saddam Hussein.
Life on a Navy ship sucked for Delquan. Being a Marine, he was kept under pretty tight scrutiny during onboard time. What was worse for Delquan was that he met others like him in his sister service that had all of the illicit concessions wrapped up tight and running for their benefit, making the journey across the pacific and Indian Oceans intolerable. Once offloaded to Qatar to guard the Headquarter element of the Sixth Fleet, he found an opportunity in selling pieces of U.S. Government equipment to the locals for a pretty penny. He scored when he was able to snatch about 5000 rounds of 5.56 ammunition and sell it to a shady character who made it know that he was in the market for as many guns and as much ammunition as he could get his grubby paws on. With the money in his pocket, he set to work creating his own little arms dealing concern. In three months, he had made several deals with his newfound friend Mohammed, and amassed several thousand dollars in cash. Theft of equipment was extremely easy, thanks to the large amount of stuff flowing back and forth to and from the expected battle zone. Nobody missed a crate of bullets here, and a few grenades there, and even a rifle or two from the convoys of shipping crates that moved through the port. By his fourth month in business, he had $50,000 in cash that he was able to send back to the US in regular parcels.
It all came crashing down the day Qatari security forces caught Mohammed with his latest load from Delquan. The police in Qatar don’t read people their rights, so a couple of well placed shocks to Mohammed’s genitals got them the name of his co-conspirator inside the American forces. Delquan got arrested, and court marshaled for theft and war profiteering. The sentence was five years in the Naval Brig at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a reduction in rank and a dishonorable discharge for his crimes.
Delquan’s stay in Portsmouth was not as bad as he thought it would be. He quickly rose to a leadership position in the prisoner hierarchy, thanks to his vicious nature and his skill at spotting and exploiting weakness. In short order, he was the king of the sports book, and had a large piece of the drug smuggling business within the walls of the prison. He enlisted people to put some of the money he had sent home from the big sandbox on the books for him, and settled into the quite life of a prison inmate merely doing his time until his release. He lived the low and slow life, having his army of minions doing his dirty work for him and counted the days until release. When that day came, he donned the cheap suit given to all parolees, and a bus ticket back to the place of his birth, Milwaukee.
Milwaukee proved to be a tough town to break into crime wise. He didn’t have any friends in the criminal underworld, and the new breed of criminal who had taken over was even more insane than him and quite trigger-happy. These new crime lords were willing to kill your entire family over a real or imagined insult, or for the shoes you happened to be wearing. Delquan decided that crack was far too dangerous a profession to be in, so he chose another route, he sold heroin on the behest of the South Side Spanish Cobras as their representative to the primarily black North Side. At first, he was barely making a living, but the crack epidemic, and the violence that came with it began to subside in the late 1990’s. Heroin became the choice of white suburbia, and Delquan’s fortunes once again turned in his favor. He became the biggest supplier to the suburbs of Waukesha, Brookfield, Mequon, and Cedarburg. His Spanish Cobra masters were very pleased with his progress, so they sent him to a new and potentially more lucrative market full of white Liberal suburbanites that were ripe of the picking, Madison, Wisconsin.
Life was great for Delquan in Madison, the white farm girls, as well as the affluent white girls from the suburbs, quickly fell under his spell as he blended into campus life and sold his product with impunity. He kept up the appearance of a manabout campus, social activist, and older student trying to make good. He ingratiated himself with the most liberal of academics and professors who swooned at his hard luck story and staunchly defended him when he occasionally ran afoul of the Administration.
However, with graduation approaching, he had to find a way to keep control of this very lucrative market. So he recruited the best and the brightest criminals from the ghettos of Milwaukee and Madison. He arranged to have their education paid for in exchange for being his sales network on campus. Their instructions were simple, keep out of trouble, attend class and sell his product every chance they got. If they got caught, Delquan could easily blame it on youthful indiscretion and sent the offender back to the ghetto on a rocket.
When Delquan recruited Mustafa Jenkins from Milwaukee, the game changed radically. He saw a person just like himself, but instead of being totally out for number one, Mustafa saw himself as the savior of all oppressed blacks everywhere. In Mustafa’s view, if you were black, you were oppressed by the white man and it was your duty to attack and confound Whitey until ultimately they lost the simmering race war between the races. What better way to weaken Whitey than to poison them with the devil’s serum otherwise known as Heroin! Knowing (or thinking) he was a target of “the man," he chose to camouflage himself as a less threatening Louis Farrakhan clone and gave the appearance of being heavily involved in the development and success of minority youth on campus through study, good manners and community activism for the benefit of his people. His sharp suits and courtly manner also earned him entrée into the liberal academic circles and afforded him a degree of protection from the nosy campus cops. He became Delquan’s right hand man, organizing a distribution network around the campus and greatly increasing the bottom line. Delquan was very pleased, not only were profits rising, he earned himself another level of insulation from his drug distribution business. If Mustafa got caught, he would totally disavow him and leave him to his fate.
Delquan kept up his image as social activist and mover and shaker. He often consorted with the legitimate Black leadership who needed Delquan’s story and charm to extort more resources out of the establishment. Delquan became intimately familiar with the routines, secrets, and private lives of the Black establishment, filing away the information until he needed it. He played these chumps when he needed to, and in order to maintain their status in the community; they played ball……and then the EMP hit.
Knowing that whatever happened was a bad thing, he started to take steps to ensure his prosperous survival in these new conditions. Delquan knew that he did not have the people to make a stand against the gangs that riddled Madison, much less the panicked civilians that would soon be flooding the streets. He decided to get as far away from the city as possible and wait it out for everyone to finish each other off. In order to survive this new environment and wrest the resources needed to continue his existence, he needed to build an army. Delquan, with the organizational help of Mustafa, gavefiery speeches at all of the black fraternities on Campus. He spoke of a world where they were in control, answering to nobody, and living like the proud black kings and queens they were, instead of fighting each other for scraps in the white man’s world.
This version of reality was widely appealing to the majority of the students within his thrall, despite it being very short on reality in America of 2013. In a short period, he had over 250 members in his new army, and as he stood on the hood of the snowplow they were able to start, he yelled “East my army, east, to finally rule!” On the way out of town Delquan had them stop at the local National Guard Armory, after all, he needed weapons to equip his newly minted military force. Lucky for him a few members of the reserve unit that occupied the armory were now under his command. They were able to bluff their way in and overwhelm the caretaker force le
ft to guard the remaining weapons. Delquan gave the vanquished soldiers a choice, join with him or be left to deal with the panicked residents of Madison, who would be knocking on their door within a matter of days. Most of the captured soldiers eagerly joined with Delquan’s army and helped load the small stockpile of weapons which consisted of M-4 Rifles and about 25,000 rounds of ammunition into the vehicle. As they left Madison, Delquan ran into some of his gang contacts and further expanded his army, marching in solidarity under the benevolent, yet firm hand of Delquan. As he rode on the snowplow with his army in tow, he thought to himself, “Man, am I good or what?”
Chapter 9
Upon arriving back in town, Chief Krusk sent a couple of runners to round up the town leaders to discuss the new threat that is at the town’s doorstep. She also sent for Grinker, and made arrangements to replace him on the road block. While we waited, Elaine changed into something a bit more suitable for a council of war. Gone was the uniform skirt and heels, replaced by 5.11 pants and boots. She opened a desk drawer and produced a bottle of Makers Mark Whiskey and poured Robert, Simone, Mitch and I two fingers of the liquid gold.
We raised our glasses, and Elaine said, “Here’s to new found friends and success in our future endeavors.” She then took her drink down in one shot, smacked her lips together and smiled saying, “That is good stuff, my friends, good stuff.” and winked directly at me and fixed me with a look that made me blush a bit.
In about an hour, the principal townsfolk had gathered and the story regarding the battle at the roadblock had been related, with Grinker nodding at the most important points and acting as a witnessto what happened. Needless to say, the town elders concern grew; it appeared that their town was in danger of being attacked by an unknown force that might be strong enough to win. As they were discussing this new reality, Jim Duffy remarked that Mr. McDonnell had not arrived at the meeting and that the runner they sent to bring him to the meeting, Jim’s boy, Zeke had not returned either. It was then that it hit me; the new threat may have taken up residence at Mr. McDonnell’s farm.
Lights out in America's Dairyland: An EMP Adventure Page 8
