Moon
Dreams
By M.A. Harris
Copyright 2011 M.A.
Harris
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<<>>
1. Near Boston.................................2. Air Discontent
3. Isle of Discontent........................4. Washington D.C.
5. Primus Junction, Utah...............6. Breakthrough
7. Just Waiting................................8. October
9. Plots.............................................10. November
11.To the Moon.................................12. Build Up
13. Questions.....................................14. Incompatible Ideals
15. February......................................16. Transitions
17. Mars Intrudes.............................18. Town Warming
19. Weaponized.................................20. Crosswise
21. Future Options............................22. Desert Rat
23. End of Stage................................24. A Meeting
25. Recovery......................................26. Hot Shot
27. Death and Enigmas.....................28. Greetings
29. Purple Passion’s Surprise...........30. The Audit from Hell
31. Cut Off..........................................32. Blinding
33. Cutting Out..................................34. An Ending
35. Passages........................................36. Constitutional
37. Attacked.......................................38. Plots
39. Ambush........................................40. Gathering forces
41. Kick-In.........................................42. Battle of New Port
43. Epilogue.......................................After-Note
<<>>
Near Boston, October, Third Decade of the Twenty First Century
Paul Richards pushed open the unlocked back door to Coopertek and yelled into the cluttered dimness, “Cooper, where the hell are you? We had an appointment twenty minutes ago!”
The tall, skinny figure crouched over a bench in the middle of the concrete floored industrial condo jerked erect. Dr. Cooper Paaly, president, resident genius, and currently the only employee of Coopertek, recovered quickly, “Hey Paul! Good to see you!”
Cooper was over six feet tall, at sixty six he was still ruggedly handsome, with brilliant blue eyes and white hair. As usual he was a bit scruffy, having selected his clothes by guess and grab off the floor in the dark.
But even from twenty feet his infectious smile was powerful and Paul felt his anger drain away, unable to resist smiling back. “Hello Doc, you should listen for the door bell you know, investors might not walk around the back.”
He knew it was pointless, it was infinitely too late for investors now, and they both knew it. He’d tried and tried with Cooper but it went in one ear and out the other.
While Paul’s relationship with Cooper was care of the US Navy’s Office of Research and Development, for whom Paul worked as a part time contract project monitor, part of his job was finding commercial venture money for the ideas that the Navy funded researchers came up with. At twenty two Paul had started his own technology company, and though he had lost it in a squeeze play it was still in existence and his name was still attached to its start, which gave him an in with a certain crowd. He had a phenomenal success rate in getting ‘his’ people investment funding after their ideas had been tried out on government programs, Cooper Paaly was a conspicuous failure.
“Ah, they’ll come begging once it’s all in the open, I won’t need to court them.” There was a great deal of easygoing arrogance in Cooper Paaly, a not uncommon failing of PhD’s Paul had found. He wasn’t sure if it came from the PhD training or if it was a trait of people who went on to get their PhD’s.
“Cooper, you said you had some things to show me and that you would have a report ready for this meeting, let’s get to it shall we?” Paul tried to keep his voice businesslike, he wanted this over as quickly as possible, he had spent a lot of time psyching himself up to cutting Cooper off and he was going to do it.
The big frizzy head shook energetically, the blue eyes danced. Except for the hair and hands with big age splotches it was hard to tell that Cooper was almost seventy years old. He was vigorous and positive and his voice didn’t have the slightest sign of aging vocal cords, he could easily have been fifty. The wide mouth smiled, “Paul, you told me that I would have some things to show and a report. I simply grunted acknowledgment of your orders.”
“Cooper!”
The smile faded, the eyes lost some of their sparkle, but there was no contrition, no give, “I know Paul, I think I know anyway.” A pause, a shrug, “Come and have a look at the most recent Stack.”
The ‘Stack’ was, on first inspection, a fairly nondescript stainless steel cylinder with domed caps top and bottom, a vacuum chamber with the requisite pipes, knobs, hoses and portholes marring its basic simplicity of form. Leaning down Paul glanced through the porthole to look at the actual Stack, a silver gray cylinder with masses of fine wires sprouting around the periphery every few inches. The majority of the silver gray cylinder was made of thin platters of silicon wafers, the basic starting material of computer chips, each one metalized and etched with a complex, though by chip industry standards crude, pattern. The thicker slices with wires sprouting from them were ceramic-coated matrices of extremely powerful electro-magnets. This Stack had four magnetic slices and twelve of the big silicon plates.
Paul was impressed; this was a lot of progress considering that Cooper had been working essentially alone for almost three months now. The chamber and the electro magnets had been reused but assembling the big stacks took hundreds of man-hours and Cooper had no help.
For all his frustrations he still felt some awe when he saw the Stack. If the damned thing would only work like the early prototypes had appeared to they’d get a Nobel Prize, be ‘going to Stockholm’ for sure. The analytical models said that this should be a fusion reactor, a very efficient one operating at low temperature, generating electricity directly.
Conventional experimental fusion reactors essentially trapped a donut of intensely hot and dense hydrogen gas in a magnetic field. If you got the gas, or plasma, hot enough and dense enough the hydrogen nuclei would start to combine to create helium and a little bit of extra energy. This extra energy was extracted as heat, used to boil water, drive turbines and generate electricity.
Experimental reactors had been getting above the break-even point of energy in to energy out for more than a decade but the scientists and engineers still said that a practical reactor was still twenty years away. More really since research had all but stopped due to budget constraints.
Cooper had spent most of his career in various fusion programs and teaching plasma dynamics and astronomy at various universities. A decade ago he had been working on magneto-hydrodynamic generators. MHD systems generate electricity from hot gas flowing through electrodes.
He’d been working on tiny MHD generators for a military program trying to build a hand grenade that would fry anything electronic within a hundred feet when it went off. The program was successful, but rapidly bypassed by much simpler solutions, many of which were used today by terrorists and thugs the world over to make life difficult for ‘agents of the west.’
During the project one sub-scale model of an early approach had produced very odd results. Unlike Cooper, who’d been entranced by the erratic effect, his manager had seen nothing of interest and quickly shifted focus to another approach that had shown greater promise.
Cooper had never forgotten those odd results and he had spent years of spare time following them up. Eventually he had developed a theory about what had been happening in those tiny plasma chambers, from which had evolved the Stack.
With the correct choice of pressure and field excitation a tiny cloud of ionized gas would start to spin, and at a specific point would collapse into a coherent ring of a precise number of stripped nuclei. The energy state of the ring was ‘quantized’ at one of several specific energy states. Add more energy and the ring spun faster and tighter. Add enough energy and the ring ‘tripped up’ and atom pairs fused. If all this happened quickly enough the resulting fusion event would emit a lot more energy than had been put in.
The trick then was to capture that energy. As a miniature MHD generator had been the starting point, this should have been simple. Each ring was created in the ‘throat’ of a micro MHD generator formed by an electrode-lined hole etched in the silicon discs. The microscopic thermonuclear blast would be ducted through the channel, which would capture the explosion’s energy, creating electricity and cooling the fusion products. Cooled hydrogen by-blow gas would dilute the still hot helium ‘ash’ and cool the Stack.
Paul had spent hundreds of hours in the first year, much of it late at night, helping Cooper’s design team. More recently he’d also spent many hours making friends with the engineers at the IBM experimental wafer fab. It had been no small trick to get them to let him use their facility almost free of charge without telling them what he was making.
That first, almost messianic, excitement had long ago burnt out but he still believed that the theory was right. It made sense to his engineering instincts and he had shown bits and pieces to various friends who had all said the bits made sense.
But they had hit a brick wall about eight months ago. After the small scale, and mid scale successes they had scaled up. This latest generation stack was designed to actually provide significant power. The damned things ought to work but stubbornly refused to do more than get hot. The percentage of helium in the chamber went up after a run, but they got no net power out.
Paul glanced up at the gangly scientist, “This the Gen III litho Cooper?”
“Not really Paul, it’s a modified Gen II, highly modified.”
“But we decided that the pinch inlet needed to be completely redone Cooper?” Paul was angry again, Cooper had said one thing and done something completely different, without keeping Paul informed and that was nearly enough to get him in legal trouble, “Another complete wafer run of the Gen II Cooper? When you know that the design won’t work?”
“Paul there were some interesting results in the Gen II that I wanted to investigate and I replicated them, made them stronger. And by the way, the amount of helium we get after a run is significantly greater now for no increase in temperature or input power.”
Paul’s heart skipped a beat, that was almost the proof they needed, almost. “Do you have the data Cooper, and have you wrapped it up in a report? That plus the hardware would be enough to keep the funding going for another three months. But that would be about it, we have to go before at least a rump review panel to go beyond the current funding level.”
Cooper shook his big head sadly, “Paul, I don’t have the time, I hardly have the time to eat and pay the bills. You will have to trust me on this; it is good work you know it is! As for the panel, no, as in the past, I got the Admiral to accept this as a dual use program with limited data rights, you are it Paul. One word leaks beyond you and the Navy is getting sued.”
Paul’s head was pounding with rage, why had he put up with the arrogant son of a bitch for two and a half years, slaved hundreds of hours on his own time? He’d also spent some personal capital with IBM and others to support the unmitigated, pig headed bastard. But he couldn’t let his temper get away from him, he counted to ten, “Cooper, is that your last word?”
“I am sorry, but yes Paul.”
“Then this program is terminated for cause, prepare a program termination plan. I will send you an e-mail confirming that in the morning,” Paul spun on his heel and stalked for the door.
“Paul.”
The big clear blue eyes were sad, “Paul, thank you for putting up with me as long as you have. And thank you for all the work and support, you know you were more help than anyone, and I appreciate it, little though you think I do.” Cooper sighed, “I hope we can meet on better terms sometime,” he looked tired and old.
Paul’s rage faltered and died, damn the man, “Cooper so do I, you’re on the edge of something great. I’d hoped it would be you and me making the leap, not some other team. Someone else has got to be working on something like this?”
The big head shook, “I don’t think so Paul, I think the cold fusion fiasco destroyed so many reputations it’s poisoned this sort of approach for a half century, we have time. I need time, there’s more here than I ever suspected, we are on the edge of something even more remarkable.”
“More remarkable than the stars Cooper?” Paul waved at the stainless steel chamber. “That could give us the solar system as well as remove our worries about power forever, more remarkable than that?”
Cooper smiled, a flare of warmth, “Ever the dreamer Paul! Yes more remarkable, remarkable enough to give you and me Mars.” The eyes were level.
Paul lifted his hands in supplication, “Cooper, something, anything?”
A shake of the head, “I’m too close Paul, too damned close.”
Paul nodded, “Fine Cooper,” he sighed, “good luck Cooper, keep me in mind for that first ride, OK?” He turned and trudged for the door.
“I will Paul, I will.” The door closed and Paul walked out into the cool New England fall day, the brightness hurt his eyes, made them water.
Outside he walked through the trash strewn mud at the side of the building towards the rental hybrid he’d driven here. When he got to the car he slung his leather satchel inside and grabbed the insulated cup out of the warmer between the seats and took a swig of the lukewarm latte he’d picked up after breakfast. His head pounded a little, he’d had a bad night, the flight out of Dulles had been early and now this.
Like many engineers these days he was a technological gypsy, moving from job to job. He was lucky in several ways, he’d actually salvaged something from the tech bust that had ruined this industrial park and had enough money to be able to ride out dry patches. He also had a steady part time job, the job that had brought him to this depressing patch of real-estate today.
The air was crisp with Fall but still had a faint tang of decay. Back here, behind the still impressive granite front entrance just off Boston’s I-495 beltway there were no signs of caretaking. Several half completed shells sagged and rotted nearby and the brown grass was waist high even in the medians and planters. The mild tech boom at the end of the last decade had died before this place was finished, leaving it a ghoulish half-life because the town couldn’t allow it to default. The few tenants stayed because the leases were ridiculously cheap and no one bothered them.
His latte finished he pulled his magnesium shelled tablet out of his satchel and applied his thumb to the corner to bring it to life. The glass turned paper white with crisp print like letters. He brought up the contract docket for Coopertek and quickly dictated a note to the iSec. He then had the system prep a couple of memos for him, changed his flight to an earlier one and put the tab away.
Just before he got in the little car he glanced around sadly, he was pretty sure he’d never see this sad place again. Sighing he got in, he had a stress headache now, and no aspirins, he’d have to pick up an overpriced package at the airport.
<<>>
Winter came early and bitter to these steep rocky hills; and ice and snow hung on in crevices and shadows among the rocks long into the spring. The hills rose in ranks towards a low mountain range to the north and a semi arid desert to the south. The aging Merlin helicopter painted in brilliant white and orange stripes, the Human Freedom Foundation’s colors, was operating at near its maximum altitude and speed; the locals were usually armed and had a habit of shooting at any low flying aircraft.
In the cockpit the satellite based aircraft navigation and communication system beeped for attention, a message appeared on the pilots flat screen. Approaching Davona control zone, confirm intent. Julia Chisholm reached to the interface panel, tapped the message, and pressed her thumb on the screen, when it toned acceptance, she said, “Landing.”
The system was supposed to deal with complex sentences but in the noisy environment of a chopper’s cockpit she found it better to keep it simple. The aging if well maintained Merlin was quieter than some of the Human Freedom Foundation’s fleet but all things are relative and it had started life in oil rig service, not as a VIP transport.
There was a tone from the comm system, “Human Freedom Foundation Flight Delta Niner Tango Two, this is Davona Air Traffic, Base Swampy. That you Julia?” The airwoman’s voice had a drawling western accent, Julia could picture her wrapped up in the cramped and chilly tent next to the heaved concrete of the old runway.
“Hey Diana, how’re things?”
“Same ol’ same ol’, cold, damp, ugly, but only three weeks, five days, ten hours and some odd minutes till my time here is up.” Diana groused good naturedly.
“Good to hear you in such a positive mood.”
“Uhyuh, this place brings out the best in everyone. Anyway, come in from the west, the wind’s blowing that way and the Maj called west the entry channel of the day. Stay clear of the notches in the hill line that way, hostiles have been spotted out that way.”
“Roger that Base Swampy, west approach, watch for hostiles. Talk to you later Diana.”
Despite the warning the approach went smoothly though Julia and her copilot Ricky Halberg kept their heads and eyes sweeping and their ears listening for the first warning tone from the warning and defense suite that even a pacifist NGO had to outfit their aircraft with.
Base Swampy had once been a Soviet airfield, a typical mix of bare bones military and civilian infrastructure in a backwater. The only sign of human habitation surrounded the airstrip, a bare strip of concrete on the almost flat top of a hill slightly taller, longer and wider than its brethren. A good base for the UN and the NGO’s that tried to keep this part of the world from sinking into a new dark age. A rutted road threaded its way across the side of the hill and out of sight, heading to Davona itself, huddled in a tight little valley nearby, somewhat protected from the weather and other marauders.
With its ecology ruined by Soviet era exploitation, even the dispersed population pushed the land to its limits of sustainability. On top of that poverty a lethal brew of civil, religious and ethnic discontent had ignited a war that had burnt across the region for decades. When the war had finally guttered out it had left well armed criminals to prey on a crippled society.
The NGOs, UN and finally the US government had become involved over the years, especially when bio-warfare of a crude sort had been unleashed. These days this whole part of the world was one vast Petri dish and the outsiders came to get a handle on the lethal new disease strains as much as anything else.
Julia brought the chopper in on a crudely painted landing spot on the ‘civilian’ side. As soon as the rotors had stopped turning Ricky was out of his harness and sliding aft, leaving Julia to finish the checklist before heading aft.
In the back she made sure the passengers were sorting themselves and their luggage out. Two medical types were getting off here, two more were going on to the next stop along with two American missionaries, she also had a message that she was picking up some kind of bureaucrat for the trip back to Jenna, the city near the Black Sea that was home base for this stint.
She dropped onto the ground and looked around; there were four dilapidated trucks and a staff car all in dingy green and rust plus one shiny new Mercedes four by four parked on the edge of the concrete. Halberg was standing by the Mercedes talking to someone hidden by the tinted windows. She didn’t like that; she didn’t like much about Halberg, for all his golden haired All American collegiate good looks.
“Hey Julia!” She turned to find a couple of the doctors who worked out here approaching at the head of a line of men and women carrying boxes and burlap bags, outgoing cargo. Not far behind them were a couple of UN soldiers with equipment to inspect the incoming cargo.
She had a schedule to keep so she talked to the disease specialist while she directed the unloading and loading of the cargo and topping up the chopper’s tanks. While she did that she also kept an eye on Halberg who seemed to be on surprisingly good terms with whoever was in the blacked out all terrain limo.
The doctors were worried about ‘Udovich’ one of the most infamous of the local warlords. A beast who’d been rumored killed, but who’d resurfaced, apparently with money to buy arms and loyalty and the NGOs were running scared. The HFF was often seen as more than just a cheap and reliable cargo carrier, and they were right, but Julia didn’t know any more than they did. She did promise to keep an ear to the ground, and to make sure there would be a quick exit available if need be.
The doctors left with the trucks, and she realized Halberg and the big Mercedes were nowhere to be seen as she climbed into the chopper and shut the hatch. She smiled at the passengers in the cabin as she checked the manifest; she glanced at the woman who had gotten on. “Hello Mrs. Alms, I’m Julia Chisholm, your pilot for today.” She’d done this a hundred times; she went through the spiel, checked their harnesses and then gave them a reassuring smile.
She shut the sliding panel that closed off the cockpit with a snap. “You’re supposed to have briefed them while I was finishing up outside Ricky.” The movie star smile was really a sneer, “The cattle give you a problem Jewel?”
She looked at him levelly for a moment, “Ricky, it’s on the copilot’s checklist, just like it’s on mine to check that you checked.” He didn’t even deign to answer, just making a show of checking his checklist. Slipping into the pilot’s seat she fastened her harness, thinking about the report she was going to write about Halberg; when she was done he would be gone, top ten thousand family or not.
As the rotor core turbines spun up, she ran down her much longer checklist before tapping the satellite link to life and checking in with the zone traffic center at Jekka and the local center at Pondla and finally HFF headquarters in Denmark. She glanced at the time, she was ‘on schedule’ but the weather was closing in. She might get stuck at Pondla tonight; she was not going to fly into bad weather at night in the middle of a war zone.
The take off and flight were uneventful but they were slowed by strong headwinds that added almost ten minutes to the flight. Even then everything would have been fine but at Pondla nothing went right. The trucks and vans weren’t there for cargo transshipment and the fuel bowser was broken down and had to be towed over. Then the local official found some mix up with the cargo manifest.
When she was finally done the sky to the north was a wall of black and to the west it was beginning to color up as the sun swung low, “OK folks, I have to call it, I’m sorry but we’ll be spending the night here. The weather is supposed to clear through before first light so we will get an early start in the morning.” She ignored the couple of protests but noted that Halberg didn’t give her grief about being a chicken hawk like he usually did.
Pondla was a tiny ramshackle place in the valley between two tall barren hills. The airfield started a quarter of a mile down valley from the edge of town. It was a section of fenced in road with gates at either end to keep out goats, cars and trucks while aircraft were using it and a gated concrete apron area with fuel bunkers protected by earthen berms, two rusty hangars and a crumbling concrete block operations center.
The Merlin was towed to one of the hangars, where it would be mostly protected from the weather. Julia just hoped the hanger didn’t choose this night to collapse; it looked like it should have been knocked down when she had been in day care. There was an inn of sorts in the village that the stranded passengers used but Julia had a bedroll she carried for this eventuality.
As Julia played cards with some westerners in the operations center she realized that Halberg had vanished. In one sense it was a relief, she didn’t have to deal with his constant needling. But she didn’t like him not telling her what he was doing out here. This was a dangerous place even though this whole province was an island of government control in a sea of unrest. But there was little she could do except note it in her report.
The storm hit with buffeting winds and slashes of snow, ice and freezing rain. With the locals she huddled near one of the smelly stoves, drank hot tea and ate spiced mutton, still cold in her fleece lined leather coat. She got two not too subtle invitations to share sleeping accommodations with the locals, which she turned down with good natured firmness. About nine she spread out her sleeping roll with its rugged self inflating air mattress in one of the back rooms and went to bed.
About two in the morning she woke up and lay listening, finally realizing that the ‘sound’ she was hearing was silence. The storm winds had died away and unless it was snowing the weather had cleared out as predicted. She got up to check, the ops center was dark except for the glow of a few status leds, and still except for the snores coming from the main bunk room.
Outside it was very cold and still, the sky a bowl of stars. There were sentries but they no longer depended on light and worked better in a quiet environment. There was a mutter of a diesel in the distance then silence again.
Then she heard a faint screech of metal on metal, quickly gone. It had come from the direction of the hangars. She walked quietly to the end of the building and peered around. An instant later she was face down on the ground with the muzzle of a gun pressed, hard, against her skull.
“You really should have stayed indoors miss.” The voice was prissily British. She didn’t make a move, she’d been taken completely by surprise from behind, she cursed herself, how had she let that happen?
“Very good sense there miss, put your hands behind your back, wrists together, hands out.” He bound and gagged her quickly and efficiently with tie wraps and left her laying on her stomach against the wall, he threw something heavy and stinking of oil and jet fuel over her, a kind and confident move, he was sure she was out of it, whatever it was, and the tarp would probably stop her from freezing to death before the morning.
Julia felt rage seething somewhere deep down, but she kept it down as she tried to think, and worked at her bonds to see if there was a weakness, she need brains not rage right now. Someone was running a black op of some kind, some kind of independent job given their objective of the moment. It only made sense if they were after her Merlin and that made her very angry, it was her ship, her responsibility.
How had they gotten inside the perimeter without setting off all sorts of alarms and getting blown to hell by mines or roboguns? They had to have been let inside. Then she remembered the arrival of several UN trucks about seven, cargo awaiting an early morning flight. The UNies had seemed to be British troops under their blue caps. This had to be a black op possibly a very black op.
There was a sharp call from somewhere nearby, essentially, “who is there,” in the local language. That was followed by a snapping sound and a moan, and suddenly Julia was struggling hard against her bonds, things were going nonlinear.
A moment later there was a yell and the crack of a pistol and another shout then silence for a few moments. Then there was a crackle of gunfire from someplace almost overhead, the soft popping of a suppressed machine pistol responded. Again the distinctive rattle of an AK, then the crack of a high power rifle, she had seen several of both inside. Then there was a terrible shrieking hiss followed by a shuddering crack-boom, the wall against her back seemed to slap her. More shrieks and cracks and booms, the wall shuddered twice more. Someone had fired three bunker busters into the ops center, unless they had been undercover everyone inside was dead.
In moments the heat beat through the wall already and the stench was choking, she rolled and wriggled away, desperately afraid of the tarp with its oil and fuel stink, she didn’t want to burn to death in the thing. A few moments later she was in the clear, the base lit by lurid flames gushing from the wrecked ops center, the rockets must have been explosive-incendiaries.
There was motion nearby, a small shape low to the ground, a boy, one of the boys who had been delivering food and drinks and cleaning up in the ops center. She saw the gleam of his eyes, then he scuttled towards her, she felt a blade next to her ear and the gag was cut away, “Captain Julie, you are O K?” he sounded young and scared but his English wasn’t bad.
Vlad, they’d called this one Vlad, “Yes Vlad, can you get me free?”
“Yes Captain Julie, my knife is sharp,” Julia felt the cool hardness of the blade and the pressure as he slid the edge against the bonds and cut, the tough plastic gave away after a short struggle. She rolled over and borrowed his knife to free her feet.
There was a rising roar, the Merlin’s turbines coming up to power. She and Vlad were still lying on the ground, among the trash between the ops building and the tottering hangers. They were also masked by the leaping shadows from the firestorm the murderers had caused.
“They have Udovich.” Vlad said in her ear.
“What?”
“Udovich, the UNies took him, two days. Fly to Hague tomorrow.”
That was the black op, a jail break for the warlord, but for all its import she hardly heard Vlad because rage was flaming out of control in her head. In the light of the fire she saw Halberg, Ricky Halberg her copilot, speaking with someone in the Merlin’s cabin as the last couple of mercs hopped up to sit in the hatchway, their weapons at the ready. Ricky was smiling like a mad man, enjoying the rush of action and his own treachery. Somehow she wasn’t surprised, but she was utterly determined that he wouldn’t get away with it.
Next to the corner of the building was a body, probably of the man she’d heard die first. His body was sprawled with an angular shape lying over a leg. She low crawled to the body; it was one of the locals she had been playing cards with earlier. A cheerful man with a bushy graying beard and bad teeth, the shape she had spotted lying across his legs was a semi auto hunting rifle, scope and all.
“Is good gun.” Vlad whispered, he was feeling in the man’s pocket, he pulled out an ammo clip with a nasty smile. Julia slipped back, making ready to use the man’s beer belly as a rest for the rifle, the man, Dusan she suddenly remembered his name, didn’t care any longer.
She came by the appellation “Captain” honestly, Julia Chisholm, Captain US Air Force, Air Guard now, had flown search and rescue choppers for a living for four years. A job that required a small arms rating, and of course she was a Wyoming native, she had shot her first elk when she was twelve.
One of the men in the door must have spotted something in the leaping shadows, his gun came up. Julia’s rifle crashed and the gunman flopped back onto the cabin floor. The second gunman got a burst off before she shot him as well. Other figures were in the doorway, guns were flashing at her, but they were standing and shooting off hand, and the Merlin was moving, beginning to lift, its tail coming up, moving forward.
She changed her aim point and with grief in her heart slammed round after round into the engine nacelle of ‘her’ big beautiful bird. She ran out of bullets and the big chopper slid out of her line of sight before she could change magazines. She took the magazine Vlad was holding out and reloaded anyway as she stood up.
There were a series of explosions nearby that sent her and the boy ducking again. A pillar of fire erupted into the sky from the fuel bunker behind the ruined ops building. And with a moaning roar the two hangars collapsed, flame gushing out around the falling sheets of rotting metal. Udovich was a beast; he had never intended to leave his enemies unharmed.
-o-
The pretty brunette talking head looked serious, “.....In other news, the infamous warlord Udovich was broken out of UN custody by a group of gunmen and flown back to his stronghold. There was heavy loss of life during the breakout and the stolen helicopter used was found burnt out thirty miles away. There were four dead bodies in the wreckage but Udovich was not...CLICK”
Julia shut the TV off with an irritated flick of the wrist. Udovich had gotten away, as had Halberg and most of the team who’d broken him out. His retainers and supporters had already taken over his old stomping ground and Udovich’s enemies had started disappearing. The mess in ‘The Stans’ was going to get worse again.
She went back to the ratty chair in the corner of the dingy hotel room and sat down. She was still in Jekka because no one knew what to do with her. Nobody was happy, the local government, the local police, the Army, the UN, the HFF.
Her cell phone rang; it was her boss, “Evgeny?”
“There’s a ticket on a Turkish Air puddle jumper waiting for you at the airport, it takes off in two hours, you need to be on it Julia. Udovich has put a price on your head, not enough to make it worthwhile outside of the Stans but enough for some local punk to try and collect.”
“Damn it.” She had figured as much.
“Agreed. When you get to Istanbul we’ll have a ticket for Sydney, Australia waiting. We have lots of work out in the Pacific these days.”
“The peaceniks back down?” The ‘office workers’ of the HFF tended to be pacifists and they’d kicked up a stink about her violent reaction to murder, theft and jail breaking.
“No, but Jenny is telling them to get stuffed, that you did right,” Jenny Welldinger was the head of the HFF. “And you did, Udovich would have created havoc with the Merlin,” he finished.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, oh and Jenny also told the Halbergs to get stuffed when they protested his innocence. Their son is a sociopath and they need to understand that. He’s on the most wanted list in most civilized parts of the world.”
“Good.” Though most likely he’d just go to prison rather than the scaffold like he deserved. But he might not survive long in prison, he’d never understood that sometimes being rich, photogenic and smart were just no substitute for caution and knowing what you were doing.
<<>>
Sunil Sukala listened to the grunt of truck engines in the village below and the mutter of patrol boats on the lake as well as the more distant beat of helicopters departing. The breeze brought the smell of smoke to his nostrils and he could see a faint glow from the direction of the village. Something had caught fire, probably not on purpose, the land thieves wanted the village and the farmland intact, it was their goal.
There was a purposeful rustle, and then a soft voice, “More farmers coming up the trail Major.” Faswethet, his corporal, was crouching by his hip; the rustle had been her letting him know she was near. Like the other tribesmen and women her jungle craft was phenomenal, he never heard them coming, never saw them till they wanted him to.
“Anyone following them?” the last group of refugees had passed thirty minutes before, too long ago.
“Night Stalkers,” she spat at the mention of the Admiral General’s Special Forces. The Navy had been his power base for the coup, and the Naval Infantry had become his hell hounds, the Night Stalkers. Sunil Sukala, Major, Sunatran Army, Retired, had once respected the Naval Infantry, these days he despised them as human beings, as soldiers he had to respect them.
“Let the villagers pass, arm the mines as soon as they are through and prepare the ambush. But we have to be ready to pull back in five minutes, the Stalkers will have designators and the patrol boats will have homing rounds for their mortars and the choppers could come back.”
Sunatra had been a peaceful South Pacific archipelago in Sunil’s youth, he was the son of a shop keeper and small farmer on what was then called East Sunatra. He’d joined the army and risen through the ranks to become a chopper pilot and then an officer. He would have made it his career except for the Admiral General’s coup.
Admiral Josef Mindow had been a very ambitious and canny officer and politician, a patriot of Sunatra. Over his thirty year career he had built up the Navy to the point that the Army and Air Force had been little more than gendarmes, militarized police, rather than combat forces. Then he’d used his control of the Navy to stage a coup. A coup that had, to almost everyone’s surprise, failed, at least in taking the bigger western isle. After almost five years of fighting the UN, at the behest of the Chinese, had brokered a peace. A deal that split the archipelago into the rump Sunatra, and the self styled Admiral General’s Palalo Sadong. Many of the inhabitants of East Sunatra had protested vehemently, but the politicians had surrendered.
Sunil, along with many other officers in the Army and Air Force had resigned on the day the peace was signed. Sunil had moved back to his family village on Palalo Sadong, nee East Sunatra. Many of the others had emigrated.
For two years things had seemed peaceful enough. Then the unemployed in the cities had started rioting about food prices and mythical land rights. This had initiated a steadily more vicious war against the farmers and mountain tribes. Sunil’s home village, close to the newly renamed Mindow City had been one of the first to suffer.
There were four main ethnic groups on Sunatra, the original islanders, whose warring kingdoms had divided the island for thousands of years. Then Indian farmers had started to arrive followed by the Chinese town dwellers and most recently Filipino technicians, city dwellers. They had lived together, for centuries in some cases, and decades in others, in relative peace and calm.
The Admiral General’s coup and civil war had changed all that. To a large degree the old line inhabitants, farmers and hill tribes, had supported the old regime and the cities and larger towns had supported the Admiral General, and each side had demonized the other.
The process hadn’t ended with the war, at least not in Palalo Sadong. The fast expanding urban population’s viewpoint had been twisted so they saw the island as theirs, the Indian farmers as squatters and the indigenous peoples as dangerous barbarians. And with that fall from the ranks of humanity they had become targets, their property forfeit.
Early on Sunil’s village had come under pressure from land speculators. He’d become a spokesman for the village, then for the farmers and the Indian sub population. That had lasted for less than six months, then his home and the family store had been firebombed, two days later he’d been shot and wounded in broad daylight. The next night a ‘spontaneous’ peoples convoy had arrived, filled with city thugs and frightened men and women from the shanty towns around Mindow city. More general forced relocations had started a year ago and stories of massacres in the mountains and the badlands on the eastern slopes. Anyone who had tried to resist had been dragged out of their homes, anyone who had tried to fight had been beaten, some to death.
Now Sunil fought with the resistance and tried to organize it into something more than just a collection of near tribal groups living in the bush, armed mostly with bows and spears. His unit was armed with modern weapons stolen from the armories of the Army and the Police and shipped in, in small quantities, by sympathizers in India and other places. He was also in communication with several NGO’s, in particular the Human Freedom Foundation, trying to get the message out that the Admiral General was on the move again.
There was a ripple of bangs as anti personnel mines exploded into the line of killers driving the refugees away from their home. The mine detonations were followed by gunfire, the loose rattle of his fighters, then shockingly the heavy snarl of a rapid fire automatic weapon flailing the jungle. In a pause between ripping bursts came the single sharp crack of a heavy rifle. The auto gun was silent for a long moment, then started and ended almost instantly with another heavy shot. A third a moment later resulted in a WHUMP, a column of fire and screaming and shouting along the trail.
By that time Sunil and his unit were trotting away along pre-marked exit corridors. A minute later a fluttering wail came out of the sky to end in shattering crashes and yellow white flashes of high explosives, repeated again and again until the wails were drowned out by the crash and bang of detonations as the rain of high explosives and steel lashed the now empty jungle.
His corporal, Faswethet appeared, “this way my Major.” And he followed the silent shadow through the darker shadows making a terrible racket in his own ears.
“Was that Sathwathet who took care of the machinegun?” he called after the corporal.
“I did Major,” Sathwathet, Faswethet’s younger sister said from just behind him.
He jumped, “Damn, Sathwathet.” He looked down; she seemed tiny, especially with her huge sniper rifle over her shoulder. She had smooth black hair and smooth café latte skin, her eyes bright and calm. She never seemed to smile but neither did she ever seem unhappy and she never got excited, at least in battle.
Faswethet, ‘his’ corporal had been running what was now the core of ‘his’ unit for almost ten years now, since she was twenty five and her little sister sixteen. Their village had been destroyed and most of their relatives killed in the first year of the civil war and they had fought on the side of the Government, which had abandoned them to make peace.
They were the daughters of a headman and had gone to one of the catholic schools in the mountains. They were surprisingly well educated, and both loved to learn, reading anything they could get their hands on. It was a wonder that they hadn’t become animals, but they were civilized and peaceful except when they had to fight, then they were killing machines and he was utterly sure that they would fight to the death rather than be captured.
Sathwathet spoke quietly as they reached the rally point, “It was a machinegun on a little six-wheel all terrain, no one was driving it or manning the gun, it just followed the men. A gunbot I think they are called. I saw a picture of one in an article from a magazine we took from that army outpost last month.”
“How did you stop it?”
“I shot out the optics, then I shot out the traversing yoke, then put an explosive round through where I thought the fuel tank was, I guessed right.” She smiled sweetly and vanished into the jungle having made her report.
It was almost certain the gunbot had been Chinese. They supplied the Admiral General with all his best toys. It was another sign that trying to fight this war the old fashioned way was just going to get a lot of people killed with no good resolution.
Insurgency needed a base in the population and the tactic of ethnically cleansing whole townships was making that impossible. They were being driven into the wilds where they could be tracked and then pinned and destroyed. In past jungle wars the ability of small light forces to hit and retreat at will with relatively minor losses had been paramount. With the Admiral General’s modern toys that was impossible for groups who didn’t understand how to do it.
He was doing some good as a military leader and trainer but somehow they needed to get help from outside. Sunil had friends in America and relatives in India, as well as contacts in many other places. Somehow he needed to use those contacts to find a lever to stop the Admiral General.
<<>>
Washington D.C. a couple of years later
Derry Jenkins, commander USN, jogged next to Paul through the pre-dawn gloom. They both liked a morning run and the department of defense worked an early shift. Most worker bees, and here even a commander was just another worker, were at their desks by seven thirty.
They did this most days they were both in town, trading off topics, Paul technical and Derry international affairs, today Derry had chosen the latest sensation, a relatively tiny island nation called Palalo Sadong.
“...So Sunatra is a pretty peaceful and prosperous little country made up of two big islands East and West Sunatra, and a string of smaller islands and coral atolls. Four years ago this nut job calling himself Admiral General M, otherwise known as Commander Joseph Mindow, stages a coup and after some years of very nasty fighting he settles for East Sunatra. Which he claims is really called Palalo Sadong in the local language. Which is bullshit by the way, it’s an invented name, means beautiful sea mountain. Anyway the Chinese, who we think were his sponsor from the beginning, get the UN to accept the facts on the ground and to provide a lot of NGO support. For a couple of years things are pretty quiet. Now the two major sub-populations have ganged up to wipe out - or drive out - the two smaller populations and when it’s all over they’ll turn on each other! Why-in-the-HELL can’t people just treat each other like human beings and work things out!?”
They accelerated up a hill and neither had the extra breath for a while. The two men were very similar in basic size and build, both were also bachelors and going bald early and burr cut the remainder. The fact that Derry was ‘black as the ace of spades’ and Paul was as WASP as they came didn’t affect their friendship, formed years before when they both worked for Crazy Pork, the group that Paul still worked for.
Since then Derry had done a stint at sea as first officer on a destroyer, now he was back doing DC desk penance for all that fun. They’d drifted back into their old habit of jogging when they got the chance, and having dinner at one or another of DC’s great restaurants every once in a while.
Today Paul was in Washington to chat with his boss at the Crazy Pork offices. Washington was going through one of its anti-pork campaigns and Crazy Pork was on its last legs. Paul was the last contract employee left and he knew he might not be back in DC for a while. He’d miss these morning runs with Derry more than the job.
Of course the Navy was always mixing things up. Derry was romancing his new love, the still unnamed guided missile cruiser CG-103, which he would be taking command of for launch and outfitting. Currently he was at the program office, in six months he’d be at the shipyard in Maine.
Paul tried to push off the regrets, “I thought the mess in Sunatra had blown over. They have a shiny new treaty and constitution that solves their ethnic problem, right?”
Derry snorted, “Sure they do! When has that mattered to these piss pot dictators? My read is that the Admiral General has a long plan, which includes a little ethnic cleansing. He’s using the old wave Filipino settlers and the big Chinese community against the indigenous tribes in the mountains and the émigré Indian community. Redistributing land and wealth and giving the young hotheads an outlet.”
“Why are you so riled up about it Derry?” Paul felt bad about it but Derry seemed a little more upset than simple humanitarianism would explain.
“It looks like a precursor Paul. We never really recovered from 9/11; the Great Recession and the so called War on Terror; and demographics and economics are not on our side. China and India are the up and coming powers. We still spend a lot of money on our military but you know most of it goes to keeping things tamped in Afghanistan and Iraq and the other ‘Stans. Most of our ships, planes and combat vehicles are obsolescent at best and we can’t afford to keep them in the field and upgrade at the same time.”
This was familiar ground; in fact Derry had just reiterated something Paul had pointed out to him years ago. But Derry had started out with another point, “A precursor to what Derry?”
Derry grinned a bit grimly, “The Chinese have been on an upslope for a half century, and I think they, and others, are thinking about flexing their muscles. Just like the great powers used to play the great game, and try out their new toys in border colonies. Like Germany tried out the weapons they took into World War Two in the Spanish Civil War.”
Paul whistled, “Our friends and economic partners the Chinese as the Nazis, Chairman Chien as Hitler? You think the Chinese are playing power politics with Sunatra?”
“Not politically correct am I?” Derry’s mouth twisted ironically. “The Chinese support the Admiral General, did long before they sponsored that sad sack treaty and constitution in the UN. He has an effective, if small, military, with a lot of bang-bang toys for its size, most of them from China’s Noricum. He’s built up a huge intelligence service that has its fingers everywhere in the Pacific.”
They were silent as they passed a couple of female runners, while the two of them were bachelors it was more because of shyness and lack of opportunity rather than anything planned and they both enjoyed looking, even if neither of them could think of a single decent pickup line to save their life.
Paul decided to provoke his friend, “How bad can it be? We’d squash him in a day if he gets too big for his britches.”
Derry almost rose to the bait, “Damned civilian....” then he laughed, “good one Geek boy. I just wish that I thought it’s not what most of the public and politicians think these days.” He grimaced, “He should have been tromped early and hard. Instead we’re playing war games about what we might have to do to rein this asshole in, deployments to Sunatra, the whole nine yards.”
“So, you think the world’s getting a little tipsy again? We’ve hardly had too much peace, by some counts we’ve been at war for twenty five years” Paul asked,
Derry snorted, “We’ve been fighting large scale terrorism and theological thugocracy not a war, and no one remembers what a real war is supposed to be like!”
“You think things might get hairy if we go after this jerk in the sunny South Pacific?”
“Who knows what it might start. Who knows if our politicians will have the balls to make a move, either way we may be screwed. If we do give the finger to the Chinese, what happens if this asshole Admiral General stopped us cold the first day, sank a major warship in a stand up fight? It’s possible the USA would back down, and we’d look like a second rate power.”
Derry scrubbed his head, “I’m probably full of shit, everyone else thinks I’m paranoid.”
“Yeah, but sometimes the bastards really are out to get you.” Paul said quietly.
-o-
Later that day Paul stood in the window of the suites hotel that he stayed in during his trips to DC. Tomorrow he was on his way home to Indiana; he could have taken a flight this afternoon but had been too tired to bother. He wouldn’t be back any time soon, as he’d half expected he’d been called in for a polite last discussion and to hand in his security tags. His SecNet permissions had been canceled and the NavApps on his tablet were now dead icons.
Arms crossed, shoulder propped against the painted concrete wall he stared out the window; it was a modernists view, between two glass and brick low rise towers were more distant hotels, office buildings and some blots of green arched with darkening blue. In its way the view was therapeutic, pulling him out of himself for the long view.
No one, least of all Paul, would have predicted that things would work out this way. He’d blasted through the normally rocky adolescent and teenage years with a rooster tail of academic and sports excellence and really hit his stride in college, six years to a triple masters, electrical and mechanical engineering with technical management. He’d started a company before leaving college and been able to pay his parents and friends back their initial investment after only two years.
The power technology boom had been a wild ride; Paul had made - and lost most of - a fortune during those years. His little company, BladePower, had attracted a lot of interest in a half decade when, stimulated by a couple of breakthroughs in power semiconductor technology, everyone had come to believe that distributed power, fuel cells, micro turbines, wind turbines, photovoltaic and smart power electronics were going to be the saviors of the world - and they probably would be - in another thirty years or so.
When that timing discontinuity had finally sunk in the bubble had burst. BladePower’s backing had drained away almost overnight and in the end he’d been lucky to sell the core IP and the product name to an old guard industrial controls company. They had kept about half of the staff, though not the old management team, especially its twenty-seven year old president.
Paul didn’t really regret the loss of all those millions, he had never really believed in the fantasy stock valuations. He had believed in his dreams and treated his people like family; most of his money had gone to support those men and women as the company spun in.
In the end that had saved what little he had been able to keep, BladePower had survived long enough and had enough of a reputation and sales base to be of some value. The sale of the company had left him with a small nest egg.
Paul could have scraped by without working, but most weeks he put in sixty hours or more because he couldn’t imagine not working, not because he had to. That pot of money allowed him to pick and choose his gigs, a wonderful stress reliever…or it had been.
Being a technological gypsy had been different, fun and glamorous for a while, but the lack of any constants in his life was taking its toll. Most of his friends from BladePower days were off doing their own things these days, he talked with several of them regularly but they rarely had time to meet. With no wife or girlfriend, and his parents happily retired in Arizona, he had no social life to speak of.
With a string of successful projects behind him he had a reputation that was attracting new work all the time, but Paul knew that he was burning out and turning inwards, getting more and more solitary, at times bad tempered and arbitrary. Recently he’d turned one contract down cold for no particularly good reason he could think of now. A few days before he’d chewed out a teammate on one of his other projects for a minor, if stupid, mistake. To many bosses his increasing reputation for finicky nit picking wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. To Paul it was a symptom of deep discontent.
He knew part of it was that he really wanted to find someone to share his life with, but he was damned if he knew how. He’d fallen so low as to try a computerized dating service, which had been close to an unmitigated disaster. He still felt rotten about some of those dates, some of the girls, women, had been very nice, but he simply found it impossible to relate to them.
At times it seemed like he was seeing his life slip out of his hands without leaving an impact. So many people had made it by this age. Here he was, ex-millionaire, ex-CEO, quietly making a living on a few minor technical projects, far from living the wide life he’d dreamed of in his college days. But then he’d found out that his dream would cost others dearly. He could have made a lot more money off BladePower if he’d been willing to ditch his people. He wondered a little bitterly if he’d make the same decision now…he hoped so.
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