You can’t fly through a restricted area without prior permission. To get that, I’d have to call the base’s approach frequency before entering… a frequency I did not know. So, if I screwed up, I could expect to soon see a couple of Tomcats, war lights strobing, insisting that I land so that I could have a little talk with base security.
It’s the sort of thing that inexperienced pilots want to avoid…
Ahead now I could see an iridescent mushroom that had to be the big city glow of Colon. Separated from Colon by a panel of darkness was a galaxy of anchor lights at the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal. Lots of freighters and cruise ships waiting to transit.
It was still difficult for me to accept the reality that the Panamanian government had chosen the power brokers of Taiwan and Hong Kong as the canal’s major concessionaires.
China?
It gave me something new to think about. Something to take my mind off the picture that kept re-forming behind my eyes…
Axiom: Whoever controls the ports of Panama controls the Panama Canal. Accept the premise and you have to also accept the fact that, as of December 1999, it will be China. To be exact: Panama Ports Corporation, subsidiary of a major Hong Kong conglomerate.
At first, I was shocked… but then, as I flew along gazing at the lights of ships at anchor, it began to make some sense… then it made perfect sense.
It wasn’t just business, pure and simple; it was business and the politics of the coming millennium.
Most believe that the United Nations will provide scaffolding for the emerging “World Government” or “New World Order.” That’s what right-wing conspiracy kooks and leftist dilettantes preach, anyway.
Both are wrong. Unnoticed by the working public, a world government has been emerging strongly, steadily, for the last decade, and it is not the United Nations. It is a government made up of international conglomerates. These conglomerates have become the behind-the-scenes arbiters of power worldwide. Toughened by the economic expedient, they have become efficient and mobile administrators of legislation and policy. They have their own legislative and executive branches; they have their own sophisticated intelligence-gathering capabilities and their own loyal citizenry. Microsoft, British Petroleum, NEC, Canon, Toyota, Dow Chemical, Time Warner, Turner Broadcasting-of the world’s largest one hundred economies, more than half of them are not countries, they are corporations.
So, yes, it made sense. Couriers of the New World Order were taking control of the earth’s most important and profitable canal, and it had nothing to do with conspiracies. It was the Darwinian template acted upon by political dynamics. Yes, there were some Panamanian legislators who stoked and tended hard feelings toward the U.S. Maybe that was part of it. But Asia, booming on-the-move Asia, was a sound financial choice.
China now controlled the Panama Canal…
It was a difficult truth to accept.
Some critics will say that, somewhere, a good man who was devoted to the well-being and security of his own great nation is rolling over in his grave; a hardened little Rough Rider who, to his credit, had nothing in common with New Age chief executives who lack what he most admired: courage, integrity and fidelity to the greater good.
And those critics will be correct.
There will also be advocates who point out that after years of manipulation, murder, ill-use and what amounts to political slavery administered by the United States, the small nation of Panama has not only a right but an obligation to do what is best for its own people.
They will be correct as well. But neither viewpoint carries an ounce of currency when applied to this new Darwinian template of world government. The dynamic is neither evil nor good, neither left-wing nor right-wing. It is pure. It is power. In such an environment, liars often prosper and cheaters usually win. Things are changing. The hubs of world authority are in a constant state of flux. Why did I find that surprising? Why would anyone find it surprising?
“We almost there yet?” Garret was stirring in the left seat. He glanced out the window, then he sat up quickly. Jammed his headset down over his ears and said, “Christ, that’s Colon over there! We were supposed to cut inland way back.”
“I know, I know, but I didn’t want to wake you up and I didn’t want to fly into any mountains, so I reset the GPS and it gave me a new route.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to fly.”
“I’m a terrible pilot, but I’m a fair navigator. Some people feel safer over land, I happen to feel safer over water. Besides, I’ve never flown down the canal at night.” He said, “That’s the first problem. We’re not allowed to fly down the canal.”
“Can we fly along it?”
“Yeah. Just don’t buzz any cruise ships. We don’t want a bunch of newlyweds and nearly-deads complain’ to the Panamanian authorities about us.”
I was banking southwest now over a vast darkness that was Gatun Lake, one of the largest manmade lakes in the world. The channel was lit up like a freeway. Open all the locks at once, and it would be like pulling the plug on a bathtub. The lake would drain almost dry, not enough water left to float a pontoon boat, let alone a thousand-foot-long container ship.
The mountains fed the lake, the lake fed The canal. Thus the necessity of the locking system on this highway between two seas.
Garret said, “Your friend who’s picking you up at Paitilla Airport? He’s gonna be sittin’ on his hands twenty minutes or so longer than expected, ‘cause that’s how late we’re gonna be.”
“He’s the friend of a friend, really. A real live Zonie, fourth generation. Born here, went to high school here, and now he’s been temporarily stationed at the embassy. That’s what I was told, anyway. He’s a Company man.” Garret flew for a while before he said, “One of the Christians in Action fellas? One of the blue-shirt guys, is that the company you’re talking about?”
I didn’t reply to the question. “The best thing is, he says he lives near Gamboa. And he’s got a car I can use. Some kind of transportation once I get there.”
“Good on ya’,” Garret said. “Seems like it’s coming together bloody well.”
“So far.”
Panama City lay ahead, a void of the tangible insinuated by hills on the rim of horizon and moonlight. Gaillard Cut and the Continental Divide were out there. Gamboa and Gail Calloway were out there, too.
I was watching thunderheads to the southwest crackle with sulfurous light. The clouds vanished, then reappeared. The Aussie surprised me a little when, after a long silence, he replied, “No, that’s not what I meant when I asked if he was CIA. What I meant was, if you’re going to kill the fat man, it’ll be handy to have a guy like that on your side. A spook, I mean.”
18
The man driving the van from Paitilla Airport was probably in his mid-twenties, not more than a year or two out of some Ivy League college. He assumed a telltale variety of nasal wit that requires careful tending. Princeton, maybe Yale. The Company has always been big on recruiting from the Ivy Leagues.
But he was a Zonian, he said, the great-grandson of an engineer who’d come to the Zone back in the 1920s and stayed. Before the transfer, his mother and father both had had offices in the museumesque Canal Commission administration building with its red-tile roof up there on Ancon Hill. Now his great-grandparents and his grandparents were in the cemetery at Corozal, beneath the mango trees.
His name was Matt Davidson. Or so he claimed. Big rangy blond with a gawky, grinning Opie Taylor face. Had his aviator sunglasses in the pocket of his blue button-down shirt, sweat stains beneath both arms.
On the ground now, I was sweating, too. A hot night, like being immersed in bath water. So humid that when I first swung out of the plane I thought maybe that it’d just finished raining. But no. The tarmac was dry. Thunderheads were still strobing out there over the Pacific, sailing landward with the wind.