INVASION USA (Book 1) - The End of Modern Civilization

by T I WADE

  “The tapes I would like to view, sir, are from Monday last week,” continued the police detective. “Let’s say from Monday midnight to Wednesday, also around midnight. That’s 48 hours of tape. If the black SUV we are looking for ever stopped at your gas station for anything, it would have been within that 48-hour period. Can we zoom in and see license tags with your cameras?”

  “Yes,” replied Pete. “We installed the more powerful cameras because we thought it would be valuable if we ever got robbed. Our store and gas station has never been robbed in the 40 years it’s been there,” Maggie’s father stated proudly.

  “Some sort of record, sir,” replied Detective Smart. “It’s not often we find any location in L.A. that hasn’t had a problem of some sort in the last several years. You must have a lot of guardian angels around here.” Will Smart turned, noticing that he was being watched by the station owner’s daughter. It took him only a split second to give her the professional once over and like what he saw. “Detective Will Smart, LAPD, ma’am,” he said, nodding to her with a straight face.

  “Ms. Maggie Bridges, student of electrical engineering at UCLA, sir,” replied the girl, nodding back and copying the way Will had introduced himself to her. Will was suddenly at a loss as to what to do with this young lady looking straight into his official detective eyes without blinking once, chin forward, showing off her toughness. As is usual for men when they have suddenly met their match, he tried to backtrack and gather grace by changing the subject.

  “If you don’t mind, sir, I could get a black and white to stop by the gas station in the morning and pick up the tapes.”

  “No problem, Detective,” replied Pete with a slight grin on his face, understanding that the poor policeman was having an internal problem with the straightforwardness of his elder daughter. “I’ll have them ready to be picked up by 9:00 am tomorrow morning.” The detective bowed slightly, thanked the family, and left through the front door.

  It just so happened that Maggie had the next day free from school and was helping in the store when an unmarked car drew up outside at exactly 9:00 the next morning and none other than Detective Will Smart got out and entered the gas station. His face showed signs of pleasure when he noticed that what he had hoped and come all the way out again for was there. It had been a very short introduction the night before, but somehow he knew that he was going to see her again, and there she was.

  That morning, without thinking anything about it, Maggie drove her mother to work. Her father always left at 7:00 am, but Joanne always fussed over Joanna in the mornings, even though she was in her last year of high school and sometimes missed riding in to work with Pete. Pete usually returned for Joanne later if Maggie didn’t bring her mother to the gas station on the way to school.

  “Detective Will Smart, LAPD. Good morning, ma’am,” he stated a little sarcastically to Maggie as he entered the store.

  “Still the same Maggie Bridges as last night, just having a free day from campus, sir,” replied Maggie in the same sarcastic manner as he had.

  “I’m here to pick up the tapes your father said would be ready at 9:00 am, ma’am,” Will continued. “They are all here in the box, Detective Will Smart, LAPD,” was her still sarcastic reply. “Do you want to sign for them?”

  “Of course… would you… um… like to meet for a coffee sometime downtown?” was his answer, looking her straight in the eyes like she had with him the previous evening.

  “If you will stop calling me ma’am, I might consider it,” was her reply, not blinking or averting her eyes from his gaze.

  “Of course!” he said, for the second time in three seconds. “What do I call you, then?”

  “Maggie is what you call me, and 454-4747 is where you call me, Detective Will Smart, LAPD. I will be back on campus tomorrow.”

  Still feeling uncomfortable, the detective signed for and picked up the box, nodded to Maggie’s mother behind the counter, then to Maggie, and carefully backed out of the store.

  “Shame on you, Maggie,” laughed her mother. “You scared the bejeezus out of that young boy! He’s surely not going to phone you after all that!”

  “If he’s got a big joystick and instrument panel, he’ll call,” Maggie replied to her mother, walking off to the rear of the store. Her mother’s face went quite white upon hearing her daughter’s reply.

  “I don’t know what you learned at that MIT University,” admonished her mother, holding a hand up to her mouth. “But it sure wasn’t decent English.”

  “I was learning about engineering, Mother, and how to fly airplanes.”

  It took Detective Smart a couple of days to pluck up the courage to call, and he was pleasantly surprised at how nice she was once they got over the initial few minutes in the coffee shop. They were married nearly a year later and she moved into his small rented apartment in San Fernando.

  In February 2009, Will and Maggie had fallen in love with the drier, desert-type life in Antelope Hills, north of L.A. and they paid cash for a decent-sized, newly-built ranch house on three acres a couple of months later. It hadn’t been cheap, but compared to renting the small townhouse with a 10-foot by 10-foot garden in San Fernando, this larger house and yard felt like a more independent way of life to them. It was also surrounded by noisy aircraft of all sorts flying overhead. Three airports were in the near vicinity, including Edwards Air Force Base. This satisfied Maggie, since she wanted to continue her flying hobby, something Will certainly did not like.

  Maggie’s MIT roommate Martie Roebels visited them for Christmas in 2009, flying into Fox Field—another commercial airport close by—in a beautiful old DC-3 with two friends: Buck, who owned the old bird and his current girlfriend, Chloe. They flew in a few days before Christmas with Christmas presents from the East Coast. Mother Christmas Martie had even dressed herself in a Santa’s hat and coat for the landing and reunion with her old pal.

  Martie had wanted to visit her old friend from MIT for a couple years now and had brought several gifts for the new “Smart Dude Ranch.” Martie’s boyfriend, Preston, was a specialist in engines and had rebuilt an old three-cylinder car engine as a power plant for their new ranch as a house-warming gift. Martie had asked him to do it and paid for the old engine that they found on a farm in South Carolina. It was from a 1936 delivery truck and was nearly the same-size engine that Preston had built for his own hangar a couple of years earlier. It used only a gallon and a half of gas per day to provide enough electricity for a small to medium-sized house. At nearly $3.00 a gallon for gas, it would halve the Ranch’s average electric bill.

  With the engine, Preston had set up a system of a dozen large marine batteries that would store and run the day-to-day needs of a house. The Smart’s new house had already come with several batteries, an inverter, and a small solar system on the roof like those sold with many houses in California, but Preston had done his homework to perfect their system and purchased several more solar panels and batteries from a friend. On paper, he had designed a complete package for the “Smart Dude Ranch” that could bring down the gas consumption to a gallon, or less, per day.

  With the batteries, panels, and engine, the DC-3 had carried an old farm-style 200-gallon gas tank Preston had purchased from a local farmer who didn’t need it, and had separated the legs to fit through the DC-3’s double cargo door. It was a great Christmas present and the Smart family would save a lot of money and could even make a few dollars selling un-used electricity to their local grid.

  Maggie Smart was very interested in the old DC-3, and once the new system had been unloaded, she was invited to co-pilot the old machine to the coast—out to Catalina Island and back, over Santa Barbara, with all aboard. Maggie was the only one of her ex-MIT roommates who did not yet own an airplane, but with Will’s inheritance still not all spent, she was working on her husband to get her something cheap, fun, and old to fly. Will, on the other hand, did not like flying at all, and could not understand his wife’s passion for leaving terra fi
rma.

  Christmas of 2009 was a fun affair at the “Ranch.” Martie spoke to Preston and Carlos in North Carolina with Ben Smart’s ham radio. Will’s son, Ben, was an avid enthusiast, and this had been the way the friends had communicated for a couple of years now. Ben Smart had received his used, yet powerful, radio for Christmas in 2007.

  Due to incoming weather problems, the DC-3 left on the morning after Christmas for its return flight back to Denver where Buck kept her. They took off in heavy fog and broke into the beautiful, warm sunshine at 1,000 feet. They flew into Denver, left Lady Dandy in her hangar and completed the rest of the trip back to North Carolina in the Huey.

  Buck was fascinated with the quality of workmanship and electrical design on the old truck engine, and after thinking about it on the flight home, he ordered one of his own through Martie. He lived in a small house on Long Island and liked the idea of nearly-free electricity.

  “I think Preston has four or five really big Man diesel truck-engine generators he completed a few years back,” Martie reflected, sitting in the right-hand pilot’s seat of the Huey and accepting a steaming hot cup of thermos coffee from Chloe, behind her. “They each weigh a ton and are tuned to put out a tremendous amount of power. They could light up a couple of city blocks.”

  “I’m sure,” said Buck. “Those old big truck diesels are very powerful, but I bet they use a couple of gallons of fuel per day at full output.”

  “About 20 gallons a day, actually, and with diesel at over $3.00 a gallon, they are pretty expensive to run,” replied Martie. “He did them one by one. His neighbor Joe had several old trucks from his father’s trucking days and offered them to Preston over the years. We don’t need these massive generators, but Preston is Preston and when one is finished, he starts another one.”

  “I think they are a little big for my 1,000 square feet of house,” laughed Buck. “But, I’ll remember the information and maybe a larger building or company might be interested in them.”

  “I’m sure they’ll just sit in our old barn forever and ever,” sighed Martie. “But if you know anybody who might need them as a backup system, let us know. I hate to see them go to waste. I offered one of them to Carlos’ observatory on top of the mountain in Salt Lake City last year, but he got a lackluster response from management. All I had asked for it was $15,000 to cover the initial cost and the time Preston spent on them.”

  It took Maggie Smart a couple hundred dollars and a few weeks of work with her husband, but by the end of January 2009, the “Smart Dude Ranch” had its own power and a full 200-gallon tank of gas standing on its tripod legs next to their small barn. Will was quite impressed with the whole set-up and was even more so when they received their first check for a couple of hundred dollars back from the power company a few weeks later.

  Maggie still had to travel into LA to UCLA, but managed to cut her weekly commutes down to three days a week for lectures and worked online to finally complete her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in November of that year. Will also now had a much shorter commute into Lancaster and, with far less crime in the more rural area, managed to spend more time at home than he ever did in his old precinct.

  Ben and his twin sister Oprah got on well at their new school and their grades improved to A’s during their first year. Oprah Smart was much like her mother. She helped enthusiastically with anything related to electronics and was her mother’s right-hand woman in putting the final touches on their new electrical system. Oprah loved playing with the hardware on computers and her Dad proudly stated to his colleagues down at the station every time they had a car stolen that he hoped it wasn’t his daughter, because she could hot wire “anything from a lawn mower to an aircraft carrier.”

  With Ben and Oprah interested in much of the same things, they were a team to be reckoned with. They studied Preston Strong’s workmanship on the engine rebuild and tried to copy it with a Briggs and Stratton lawn mower engine. Preston never used any electrical systems in his work, but used engine-balance to allow the engine to work with as little effort as possible and produce more energy with less consumption. They used their pocket money and purchased three old John Deere lawn mowers in a one-lot auction from the local county surplus agency, and their rebuilt units worked well after a couple of upgrades. All three engines had a lot less power than the three-cylinder, 33-horsepower truck engine, and all drank a little more fuel. Two of their close neighbors each purchased an engine, which included several solar panels, a newly purchased wind power generator, several new deep-cycle batteries, a grid inverter, and complete installation for $15,000. Both kids made $1,000 each for each sale and they used those funds to add two 1,500-watt wind generators to their own system, which cut down the need for their engine to only excessive winter and summer usage.

  In October, Maggie finally persuaded her husband to buy her a small plane. With only a couple hundred thousand left from his inheritance, he gave her $70,000 to buy a Cessna 172. It was really a graduation gift for finishing her degree at UCLA and in celebration of her new job with a local electronics company in Simi Valley. Her salary starting in the New Year far outpaced his meager one with the police department.

  Maggie’s next wish was to visit her other MIT roommate, Sally Powers. Sally had been transferred to Yuma, Arizona with the Air Force. She was transitioning from C-130s to an F-16 fighter jet— Sally’s dream aircraft since childhood. It was a short trip of around 250 miles, but in a slow Cessna 172, any flight can quickly turn into a long one with severe headwinds. Maggie’s old 172 had an average cruising speed of 105 mph, but she made it there and back and enjoyed the solo experience.

  Sally stayed with the Smarts for the long July 4th weekend in 2010. She had already spent a month at the Marine Air Corps Base in Yuma when she managed to hitch a ride up to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas and then to Edwards with her old colleges in one of her old section’s C-130s.

  “Okay, you are Air Force, but you are training at a Marine Corps air base?” Will asked at dinner on her first night with them.

  “Asking questions as usual, Will Smart,” laughed Sally. She knew the Smarts well and always waited for Maggie’s husband’s questions on everything out of the ordinary. “I knew you were going to ask me that,” she continued. “The Air Force owned the base in 1956. It was named Vincent Air Force Base. It was inactivated in 1959 by the Air Force and handed over to the Navy, if I have the story right. Remember, I’ve only been there a month. The Navy changed its mind about owning the base and offered it to the Marine Corps, and they have been in command ever since. Last year, the Air Force wanted to use the massive air-to-ground weapon ranges outside Yuma for training. We are getting some sort of new electronically-guided missiles later this year and the Air Command wanted the training away from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, for some reason. I think there is a specific difference in ground terrain between what they have at Vincent and what they have at Nellis. I don’t mind, tho, ‘cause Yuma is smaller, the Marines keep to themselves, and they’ve given us our own area with hangars. We hardly mix with them. I think it’s only for a couple of years and it looks like I’ll complete my flight training at Vincent.”

  “Will, sometimes you do not need to know,” Maggie admonished her husband. “I’m sure Sally can’t tell us too much without getting into trouble.”

  “It’s not a secret that our F-16s are based at Vincent,” laughed Sally. “It’s just not very important. There is a fun bar in town and the local folk are very friendly. Also, flying over the area last winter in the slower C-130s, I was surprised at how many RVs there were around Yuma. I flew over a small town north of Yuma called Quartzite several times last winter, and the desert around that one-horse town was full of luxury motor homes. There must have been thousands there.”

  “Where’s Quartzite?” asked Ben.

  “Just over the California-Arizona border on the Arizona side and directly south of Lake Havasu,” answered Sally. “I flew up yesterday to Nellis and we passed to the
west of the town. It was beautifully clear and I couldn’t see an RV anywhere. The heat in that desert must have been well over 105 degrees yesterday.”

  “I’m sure the RV snowbirds find the area warmer in the winter than up north,” added Will.

  Didn’t you want to do your training at Nellis?” asked Maggie. “You said last time you visited… when was that… Christmas 2008… that you were expecting to be at Nellis?”

  “The changes were pretty recent and I only knew that I would be stationed at Vincent a couple of months ago. I was expecting Nellis, yes.”

  “So tell me, pilot-girl, how is the F-16 to fly?” Maggie asked the question she had wanted to ask ever since Sally had arrived.

  One word –“WOW!” was the reply. “Take off is a little difficult up to air-control speed, and the air movement is active around the aircraft, but once she is airborne, she turns into a rocket.”

  “A little faster than a C-130?” asked Oprah.

  “Like a hare and a tortoise,” laughed Sally. “I can see why the male pilots love flying these babies. It’s like a drug fix. I don’t think I could fly anything else for awhile.”

  After dinner, they all gathered around Ben’s ham radio and spoke with friends across the country. Martie and Preston were happy to hear of Sally’s visit to the “Smart Dude Ranch.” It was about to get dark and already 9:00 pm on the east coast. Preston told them that he wanted to visit soon, but they all knew that he was busy with his own aircraft rebuild and probably would not make it for some time. Carlos came online, happy to hear Sally’s voice. He was in Salt Lake City atop his mountain doing computer work and waiting for nightfall, which was still a couple of hours away, so that he could look at the stars.

  Buck was on Long island and got on the radio a few minutes after everyone else. “Sorry guys,” stated Buck. “Traffic out of Manhattan was just as bad as usual, even though it’s a long weekend. I suppose there was more traffic out to Long Island for the weekend.”