by T I WADE
“Are you in trouble?” she asked with a serious look on her face. “Can I help you?”
“Please, Ms. Dennis,” he replied. “My wife is not well, my daughter just called me and I need to go and take her to the doctor, but my old car is not working well.”
“Take my car, Lee,” she insisted. “I’m leaving it here over the Christmas break since my boyfriend is picking me up later and we are going south to spend the holiday season with his parents in St. George. I won’t need it for a week. Take it. Here, here are the keys. Just drop them back at my station when you are done. It’s the old blue jeep parked in the back.”
He thanked and bowed to her as he went to find the supervisor to tell them he had to leave and it was an emergency. Then he ran outside and saw his own car parked outside the door of the observatory. That was not a good place to leave it—he didn’t want them to burn down the valuable observatory building. He chose to drive his car to the main building a hundred yards away from the observatory itself, closer and in better view from the entrance to the gated compound, just in case. Lee left for the day and drove slowly in the jeep. He was not a good driver and his eyesight was getting bad.
The jeep was old and had over 100,000 miles on the odometer and he felt inconspicuous in it. The drive was 40 minutes down the mountain the same way Carlos had driven earlier, and it wasn’t long before he drove into his neighborhood, put on a pair of sunglasses to hide his face, and drove up to where he had told his wife and daughter to hide. He phoned them from his cell phone and told them to open the garage door, if there was room for him to drive inside.
The automatic door opened and as he drove in, it closed behind him as he parked the jeep away from prying eyes.
“We saw Chinese men in a car!” his wife blurted out as he got out, greeting them. “It was a black SUV, a Cadillac, and we saw most of the number.” Pat, their friend came into the garage and asked what all the fuss was about.
“I think our lives are in danger,” stated Lee. “Some Chinese men, I think a Chinese gang, are trying to make trouble for Chinese-Americans and we want to get out of here without being seen, just in case.”
“This is America, Lee,” stated Pat sternly. “That’s absurd! Things like that don’t happen around here. They wouldn’t dare, especially in this neighborhood. We have three sheriff families living around us.”
“We need to leave for Christmas, just in case these men are bad,” replied Lee. “We don’t want to cause you any trouble and we will go on vacation for a week until these men go away. If something happens to our house while we are away, please give the information about the black SUV to the police. Maybe they can track them down. Also, phone us on this number if you see our house on fire or anything out of the ordinary.” He bundled his family into the jeep, throwing all that the girls had carried over from the house into the back and asked Pat to open the garage door. He ordered the two girls in Chinese to lower their heads so as to not be seen, put his sunglasses on, and started reversing slowly out of the garage. He stopped and waved goodbye to Pat standing inside the garage by the door-opener, still looking very puzzled, and looked into his rear-view mirror. A black SUV passed behind them and he could see through the darkened glass that the occupants were looking in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see their faces but he felt like he knew who they were. He pointed the vehicle in the opposite direction and left the housing division, driving as slowly as he always did.
His first stop was the bank to draw out the several thousand dollars he had saved there, and then drove to a gas station on the highway to figure out what to do.
On the I-85 and ten miles north of Salt Lake City, the gas station felt safe, and then he suddenly remembered that his friend Carlos was going to Hill Air Force Base and he might still be there. He knew the area and worked out that it would take him about 20 minutes to get there.
Ten minutes later, Pat called screaming on the phone that she saw flames and black smoke coming from the area of their house and what should she do? “A fire truck is coming into the housing division,” she said urgently.
“Go around to our house when you think it’s safe and give the SUV information to the police or firemen. Tell them that this car came screaming down the road dangerously just before you saw the fire and the SUV’s California plates should make them want to check it out. I’m sure the nightly news will tell us if they got them, Pat. And don’t you worry, we will be okay until we know and then we will come back. Thank you and Melly Clistmas to you and Mark.” Lee Wang was not above a little humor, even in an unpleasant situation such as this.
He drove up to the main gate at Hill Air Force Base, and the guard thought that this Chinaman was lost until Lee Wang told him about his friend’s old silver airplane.
“Oh! I let in a civilian earlier this morning who is friends with the commanding officer. He flies an old Mustang. I’ll phone through to the main office and see what I can do,” said the uniformed guard. He was on the phone for several minutes before he returned to the jeep. “The commanding officer is coming over to see you, come in and park in those visitor’s spaces over there,” he ordered. Lee felt a little safer as he drove through and the boom was lowered behind him.
It took 20 minutes before a military car approached them. A superior officer got out and the guard saluted him and motioned him in the direction of the jeep.
“Can I help you?” the General asked Lee Wang, still sitting in the jeep with the window down. “I was told that you are friends of Carlos Rodriquez. You just missed him. He flew out less than an hour ago.”
Chapter 13
Jiangsu Province – China - December
The board room was again in session, the same men in the same seats, and not a piece of paper in sight. This time there were no assistants in a line of chairs against the wall opposite the large windows. The room was empty except for the sixteen men sitting around the boardroom table.
The Chairman was again at the podium, this time asking questions to the others, one by one. “How is the government reacting to our latest communiqué to them last week?” he asked one man.
“They are not happy, but have heeded our warnings and said that they will have all commercial and military aircraft grounded in Chinese territory by midnight,” was the answer.
“What vibrations are we getting from our generals and armed forces about their ability to fight wars?” he asked another man.
“They are not ready. The new aircraft carrier will not be able to accept its aircraft for another month to six weeks. The army is worried that they might have purchased the electronic parts from third-party deals. The Air Force doesn’t care to talk to us as they have so few aircraft with any global attack capabilities. The Navy wants to go straight in and attack anything disabled they can find with their submarines. They could be a problem, Chairman Chunqiao.”
“Do we have any control over their submarines?” the Chairman asked the same man.
“No, Comrade Chairman, we don’t, except to cut off the serpent’s head if they get out of control.”
“Get three termination squads into to Navy Headquarters,” he ordered. “Activate the squads on December 30th and we will take control of the submarines earlier than planned.”
“What about our current intelligence leaders controlling our glorious China, Comrade Yun?” he asked the man on his right.
“They are 45% positive on numbers, Chairman Chunqiao. We hope to have a positive majority in the government by January. They are going to stay out of our way, but I believe they will cry foul if anything goes wrong. Many of them are currently happy to wash their hands over the project, but take over if we are completely successful—combat cowards every one of them.”
“Do we have them in our pocket, Comrade Yun?” he asked more seriously this time.
“Yes, as long as everything goes according to plan,” was the answer.
“Comrade Chief Engineer Gung, you are our designer and in charge of the billions of electronic part
s around the world,” continued the Chairman. “We have had several reports recently about early malfunctions in several America nuclear power stations, three European power stations, and a Japanese power station. Why is this?”
“Chairman Chunqiao, we have done exhaustive tests on all the parts and systems we have had installed in many power stations around the world. All we can find is that the excessive energy caused by the massive outputs of power these nuclear plants are putting out is making the Strontium in our parts unstable. Still, up to now we have had less than 0.1% failure rate with all our parts in the nuclear power stations worldwide, and I feel no blame has been put on Zedong Electronics as of yet.”
“I agree with you Comrade Gung, but what about other early malfunctions, especially in directional equipment? We had that problem with the American/Russian space station. The same problem was seen in several aircraft, commercial and military. What I’m getting at is the big question: what will our success rate be when we deactivate the billions of parts and systems around the world? What will our deactivation failure rate be—also 0.1%? That is a big number when we talk billions.”
“We have tested every design and first there is the Strontium in 60% of the older parts we first manufactured. The destruction of the Strontium should give us a 90% success rate when we first transmit its destructive break-down high frequency to the electronic parts through the antennae. Then the backup electronic deactivation system in every single piece of electronic equipment or part we have ever made, plus the dozens in every complete system we have made should be our fail safe when the time comes. I’m willing to state that if we have more than 0.000001% failure rate in the small parts, which will be a failure on my side. That number means no more than 1,000 failures in every one billion parts.”
“Let’s add the total of 100 billion parts, of which 60% of them are bound together with other of our electrical parts in a system; that leaves a balance of 40 billion single parts operating on their own. The worst scenario is that 40,000 parts may fail. In 190 countries, this number is again divided. Our game plan was to have a 99.9% success story, Chairman Chunqiao, and we are well above our numbers. I believe only God could have done a better job than you.” The Chairman smiled at the last sentence.
“Comrade Wang, a report on your dealings around the world with our past and present employees,” stated the Chairman, looking at Lee Wang’s old friend and initial employer, the man he had met when the older man was cleaning floors many years ago.
“Our squads have done a good job so far with only seven terminations to go—three of these in the United States. Asia has been 100% complete for a month. Australia is now 100% complete and the termination squads have gone ‘underground’ in Sydney. Africa is 100% complete. We only had 120 operatives in Africa, 112 returned here and the final eight were terminated in South Africa last year. Europe has four terminations to go. We have missed one termination so far in Europe, and we have lost contact with one in Italy. He worked with Fiat and Ferrari and we missed him, but we man-aged to terminate his Chinese girlfriend. Currently he is in France and we are getting closer. I believe it’s now a matter of days.”
“There are three missing in Russia. They just disappeared off the map and we have six teams searching for them in Moscow, which is the only place where they can be hiding. Two of our teams were terminated by Russian gangs and we have not retaliated as yet. If we don’t find them, the Russians will kill them anyway and we have nothing to fear. Canada became 100% terminated early this morning with our last operative terminated at the Blackberry Company. I’m sending the ten Canadian squads down to the United States, to prepare for our next phase and help look for a family we missed in California. We had six families in that area and four are terminated, one is still in operation for another week and one went missing when the squad went in. He has left a trail and we have three squads on his tail. Washington and Seattle were completed yesterday, but unfortunately the news media got hold of the Chinese family deaths, and blew it up. We have a Chinese reporter, one of ours; telling the media that the crime was all Hong Kong gang related and the Americans believe him. Our teams are on the trail of our final terminations with our best operatives, and the project will be completed a day or two before Christmas.”
“I want a completed report once you are done, Comrade Wang, and I want all the 400 trained men in the 100 termination squads in America to be joined by the ten squads arriving from Canada and be prepared to attack and kill military and any civilian outposts. Ammunition, money, whatever they need.”
Comrade Wang nodded.
“And make sure they transfer to old carburetor vehicles before Z-day. I think we should end up with an army of 20 squads in Los Angeles, 20 squads down on the American southern border killing Americans trying to escape south, 20 squads in New York, and at least 50 of the squads spread around elsewhere in the bigger cities. We certainly won’t have any problems with smaller rural areas.”
Chapter 14
The Fly-in over Christmas and New Year’s Eve
Christmas morning arrived in North Carolina at the Strong Farm with its usual sleepiness, the sun attempting its cold rise over the horizon at 7:44 am. It was going to be a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature usual for the time of year—35 degrees. The two large aircraft sat patiently at attention next to the barn, as did the two aircraft and helicopter on the apron. The lights at either end of the runway had been replaced in case of any night emergency landings, and the two ferret armored cars, the Saracen and the two rat patrol jeeps displayed a ring of ground protection around the apron. All regained their camouflage colors as the sun climbed over the trees and lit up the area.
Apart from the noise of the birds, the runway, closed hangar, and dark house were silent, as all of its many occupants—even Oliver— were still fast asleep.
David was sleeping at Joe’s farm in the guest room. It had been a loud night on Christmas Eve, and the party had finally died down a couple of hours after midnight. Nobody was expecting to fly for a couple of days. The plan was just to enjoy each other’s company, catch up on their lives, and enjoy the togetherness of people who loved airplanes and flying them.
Oliver was the first to make an appearance, as dogs usually do. He had a special doggy door he could use if Preston and Martie slept in, which was at least every Sunday. His brown coat shook as he exited the door. He looked at the sun, then in the vicinity around him, and then naturally towards his favorite tree. Oliver couldn’t lift his left like smaller, less weighty dogs could, but he made a half attempt anyway and missed the tree as he always did. Then he walked around in a circle to see if there were any foreign smells. He was now acquainted with all the new adults he had memorized by each of their smells. It was hard work for a dog to get used to the heavy movement between the hangar and the house and so he went further afield to try and water the new and sterile-smelling tires around the apron.
As usual, most of the tires were dry after he left, with only small marks of liquid pretty close to a couple of them. One got hit, but with so little moisture that it was dry a few minutes after the dog had departed—the radiant sun was already doing its job. Oliver slowly loped along the whole runway smelling for any other dogs or animals that might have crossed it since he last checked a day or so ago, but as usual there were very few smells from small animals. The aircraft noises kept away most of the larger animals, and half of the farm was fenced in many areas where the farmer had thought it necessary many years ago.
His patrol and duty done to his master, Oliver returned and looked for that steak bone someone had thrown him the evening before, and his next big decision was to either chew on it for a while, or find a place to bury it. He dropped down and decided that his first choice was the best place to start, and he got busy.
With the bone chewed on for an hour, and the remains now not worth burying, Oliver heard movement from the hangar. The side door opened and Sally emerged. She headed off to the two aircraft on either
side of the barn and Oliver jumped up to follow her.
“Hello, boy!” she said, ruffling his ears. “You’re up early. You must be on early patrol duty.” She knew the 30-foot runway was far wider than she had needed in the C-130. She had had at least nine feet of asphalt on either side of her twelve foot wheel-span, but compared to the large airfields she was used to, this one was tiny— apart from the dozens of dirt landings she had done in training. She marveled, though, at the time and effort Preston had put into his airfield and never thought for one second that she was in danger coming in with an empty aircraft. She and Jennifer had fueled the aircraft for the a one-way flight into Pope and Seymour and the tanks were empty, with just enough fuel aboard for another hour’s flying plus 45 minutes in reserve. “I reckon I can get her off the ground in 2,000 feet,” she said to Oliver, still looking happy for the company beside her as she lowered the side steps and walked into Jerry to collect the Christmas presents for her friends. It was Christmas Day after all. She did a quick ground check on both aircraft, checked the tires for any brake wear or damage and returned to the hangar.
Carlos was also up and chatting up a sleepy-looking Captain Watkins by the coffee machine. Sally Powers knew she was going to marry Carlos Rodriquez one day, if she had anything to do with it, but she knew that playing hard to get and waiting for the right moment was necessary to keep him interested. Carlos smiled as she walked in and she walked up to him and kissed his cheek playfully, showing her wing woman who was boss around here.
“Do that again, Captain Powers, and I’ll have to ask you to marry me,” he looked at her seriously.
“You keeping on wishing, Senór Rodriquez, and it might just happen one day,” she replied, putting the wrapped gifts by the Christmas tree, which was still lit up from the night before. “Come on, Carlos, help me put all these foul-smelling glasses into the dishwasher, then we can start partying all over again.”
