“I believe you, Colonel,” laughed the president, impressed at the 30-year old vintage trucks with the extremely modern-looking soldiers standing in front of them. The picture just didn’t look right, but at this stage who cared.
The night grew cold, but the hangar was warm. Much of the snacks from Preston’s large stocks had already been handed out to the soldiers—chocolate bars, packs of jerky, several bags of peanuts and potato chips, as well as 200 cases of all types of beer, much from the gas station’s supplies Joe had bought. A line was formed, and each soldier received three cold beers each, enough to have a party.
*****
Mo Wang was still baffled as to why the plan was not going according to what the Politburo had expected. The chairman, he had realized, had been blinded by his own sense of power and that he could not handle a disruption in his power breakdown. Mo was quite shocked that the man who had designed this master plan could not accept that things could, or would go wrong. Mo knew little about the unwinding of the master plan, but he tried to work out the possibilities.
First, the termination squads in North Carolina disappeared. The same little airport which seemed to be in the middle of the turmoil was attacked for the second time, and 200 of his best troops suddenly stopped communicating with their satellite phones. Then, this voice is heard, this voice of Lee Wang who says he is Bo Lee Tang from the past, which leads him into a false sense of security. Then the Headquarters Building in Nanjing is bombed, with aircraft coming out of nowhere.
Mo thought about the situation for a long time, but could not piece the little airport in North Carolina together with the bombing in Nanjing. There was no way a little airplane out of a little airport in America could suddenly fly across the world and accurately bomb a building several thousand miles away, with no method of communication and no directional satellites to lead it precisely into an attack. Then it hit him hard!
“Somehow they were using Zedong Electronics’ satellite system to direct some special type of aircraft across the planet. That’s why nobody speaks to me,” he suddenly realized. “They are using code to speak on our captured satellite phones to each other. Lee Wang pops up from nowhere, the squad sent in has not terminated him, and he joined forces with somebody who can fly aircraft across the world.” It was the only explanation Mo Wang could come up with.
“Somehow how they have cut into the continuous feed coming from the three satellites ….” and then the big one hit him. “If they are seeing everything the satellites can see, they could be tracking our ships and our attack force. They know we are coming and they will be ready for us with a far bigger force than we expect!”
For the rest of the day and well into the night on the second full day aboard the aircraft carrier he pondered the situation and what he could do about it. He slowly pieced together parts of what had actually happened, in the same way Carlos and Lee Wang had done days earlier. Mo managed to get through to 15 of the termination squads, now in convoy and still on their way across America from the West Coast. He warned them about a possible surprise attack against them, and that they should be careful when they entered New York. He wanted them to get into position and survey the airports, reporting back to him what they found at the three airports, and then check out the harbor.
It was now dawn on the third day aboard the aircraft carrier, and the convoy was in the middle of the Pacific—1,000 miles from China and halfway to reaching the Panama Canal where resupply ships were waiting to refuel and restock the ships and men on board. From there, they would set sail for the final part of the journey into New York Harbor, now only 11 days away. Something had to be done, and he bravely went up on deck as the sun climbed into the empty horizon. There was nothing visible apart from the ships around them sailing at 18 knots, and he knew what he had to do.
The sun was fully over the horizon 20 minutes later when he went in search of the chairman’s rooms. He had wanted to view the sun rise, an hour ahead of Shanghai, since it could be his last.
He knocked and was surprised to find the chairman dressed and having a breakfast of tea, noodles, and strips of fried pork.
“Come in, Wang, I’ll get some breakfast and tea ordered for you,” the chairman stated when he saw who was at the door. “It looks like you have been up all night.”
“Yes, Comrade Chairman. I have been trying to work out what has happened around the world in the last couple of days,” Wang replied bowing and entering the large set of rooms behind the portly chairman.
“Well, I suppose I’d better hear your results of a full night of thinking,” the chairman replied, showing Wang a chair at the table and ordering his man-servant to get breakfast for his guest. “It is so nice to get up one hour earlier, thinking that one is refreshed and fully awake while others in Shanghai are still asleep or trying to get the drowsiness out of their systems.”
Over breakfast, Mo Wang told the chairman his worst fears, everything he believed could have happened in America— Lee Wang, the satellite phones, the satellites they had lost control of, which he believed were now controlled by the Americans. He had been speaking for 20 minutes when the chairman’s own satellite phone rang. He picked it up off the dining table and answered it.
He listened for several seconds and then Wang saw the chairman’s face go red as he replied angrily into the phone. “What do you mean that I should have a nice flight into Beijing, Colonel Wee? Have you lost your marbles or something? I’m not at Pudong Airport. I’m here on our aircraft carrier 1,000 miles away from Shanghai. What do you mean that a man like me is dressed and entering an aircraft! That’s not me! That’s an imposter! Send out the guard and stop any aircraft from taking off. Go upstairs to the control tower and find out who the men are that spoke to the traffic controllers! Do it now, Colonel Wee, or you will be reverted to a private, you stupid man!” he shouted into the phone. “Somebody is trying to steal our aircraft in Shanghai,” the chairman stated to Wang. “Do you hear that? Imbeciles are trying to steal our troop aircraft!”
“It must be the same Americans who have been causing our problems,” answered Mo Wang. “I have all the termination squads heading for New York to find out the truth at the Kennedy Airport, what happened there, and what happened to our passenger aircraft that supposedly went down with engine failure.”
“You and those damn Americans!” replied the chairman angrily. “Those stupid Americans are not worth worrying about. They have always been the most stupid people on this planet and I promise you, Comrade Wang, they are not clever enough to beat an attack from me, which has been thirty years in the making. They couldn’t even win their wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan, and how many more! They have actually never won a war, unless you consider their Civil War a war. Wang, I’m sick of your stories about Americans. America is the most useless nation I have ever known! They always push their beliefs and views into every other country’s daily life and blend reality with their Hollywood-film rubbish. America, its politics, and its people are nothing more than a massive wave of insecurity, totally destroying themselves with fake beliefs and their fake lives of plenty. I’m doing the survivors of America a favor by taking them over. First, I’m going to turn every American into a hard working slave—a slave who will wish for nothing more than to have died when we turned out their lights.”