AMERICA ONE - NextGen (Book 5) Read online

  Ryan invited the girl in, the last remaining person, and asked her age. She was 25, and funnily enough refused to give her name, only that she called herself Jane Doe. He detected a slight East Coast accent. She told him that she was in college studying astrophysics, but she didn’t say which one.

  The German was introduced to the girl a few minutes later. Compared to his slight build, thick glasses and pale complexion weeks earlier aboard the mother ship, he now looked sunburnt, and seemed to suddenly experience love at first sight at seeing the girl.

  “Jane Doe, may I introduce Hans Dietrich, PhD in Physics, University of Berlin. He will be your chaperone.” The girl with one small suitcase in her right hand seemed to accept the man’s introduction. He did have a PhD in the same subject after all. They headed off up the hill to the second gate with a security guard, the German dancing around her like a dog with its owner.

  Martin Brusk and family had driven through the gate and were waiting for Ryan. All the equipment Ryan had ordered had been delivered and what he could take in the first load was already aboard the Dead Chicken sitting in the coolness of its own hangar.

  “No corporate jet?” asked Ryan when he caught up with his old friend. Martin had helped him when he was in need, and now it was Ryan’s turn to repay the favors.

  “A few misunderstandings with Washington about my business dealings in other countries. They have forbidden me to use my jet. A free country no longer I’m afraid, Ryan.”

  “What is wrong with these people?” Ryan asked. Martin’s wife drove the car, in front of the other two family’s vehicles and behind two security guards, one in a military jeep and the other driving the Volkswagen. The two men walked.

  “A simple problem,” Martin responded, smiling. “You have been away nearly eleven years. Not much has changed since you had those differences with the last President you didn’t like. This country always claimed to be the most powerful in the world, and its President the most powerful man in the world. Well, sometimes that possibility goes to their heads, and they believe themselves above the rest of the world. So did many of the Greek and Roman Emperors in their reigns. It also happened to Hitler. It seems that Washington will not understand that the U.S. is not the policeman of the world anymore, and its new anti-freedom polices, especially toward its own people, are not welcomed in many freer countries. Every day, we are told that we live in a nation that puts freedom above everything else, but what the media dictates and what is truth are actual opposites. The Constitution is all but gone. Blown away as ‘ancient history and not important in this modern world’ as Washington said. The current President gave a speech five years ago saying that it was for the good of the people that the American Constitution must be forgotten. Everything administered from Washington today is ‘for the betterment of the people.’ Forbidding me to complete international business is ‘for the betterment of the people.’ So is bickering with the rest of the world, and even this administration who is trying to extend the President’s term another four years states that he is ‘totally for the betterment of the people.’ Washington has lost it.”

  “Washington had lost it last time I was here,” replied Ryan.

  “Two statistics since you left will sum up this country, Ryan. Unemployment, 21 percent. Growth, zero. When you left, unemployment was at 8 percent, growth just over 1.5 percent a year.” Ryan nodded, he didn’t need to be told anymore, but Martin went on.

  “It is about the same in China, although most of their unemployed have gone back to farming, and they might be in a minus growth scenario these days. Exactly the same with Russia, and pretty much as bad in all the countries around the world. Without international trade, there is no hope for most of the population of this planet to survive. Many countries are seeing a decline in population numbers.”

  “So that is why you now want to come with me?” Ryan bullied his friend jokingly.

  “I have the most modern electrical car technology in this country, and possibly even the world. I would like to get my auto manufacturing plant in California out of this country. To do this, I will need two of the largest container ships afloat to move. The government won’t let me have them. I either set up in Europe or Australia, or on Mars. I don’t mind which.”

  Ryan’s crew had just increased by 13, and there was no way that he could get them all into space. They would have to leave the country in the Dead Chicken.

  Jonesy radioed back from Denver that he’d picked up his parents, he was being tailed by two aircraft and he had just reached cruising altitude for the return flight.

  His father hadn’t changed much. The old man was a little weaker, needed a little help walking, and his mother had pure white hair.

  What did surprise Jonesy was that there was no air traffic control from the many places he was used to getting into contact with. Jonesy got airborne leaving the base’s 20-mile private perimeter and through usual radio procedure asked to file a flight plan. Somebody on the radio asked him where had he been, and was he authorized to be flying?

  Jonesy eloquently told the man that he had been to bloody Mars, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he was allowed to fly or not. The man didn’t respond again. Apart from two blips on his radar, he was all alone over this part of the Nevada-Utah border, and he didn’t see anything else flying for most of the flight.

  An hour later he checked the aircraft logs and screens for frequencies to fly into Denver International, and there were only four aircraft on his radar. One was traveling north, one east from Denver and the two “tails” about a hundred miles behind him. Maggie, in the right seat, told him to just head in as if he was about to land at a smaller unattended airfield, and to call out his intentions over the radio clearly. He wasn’t spoken at all the way down to the dusty runway.

  There were several aircraft at the gates, which made the desolate Denver International terminal look normal, but Jonesy was surprised that on many of them, important parts had actually broken off. One had no engines. One aircraft, a private jet actually leaving a gate for a flight, had no markings. Another had a wing that looked like it had been taken apart, pieces of flaps and air brakes strewn around the aircraft.

  What really surprised him was what looked like his mother’s car. The car was waiting for him in front of the terminal, on the actual apron, and right next to a broken-down American Airlines MD-80 with two of its four engines on one side hanging at an odd angle.

  Jonesy taxied toward his the car. It was over 20 years old. He had seen it on his two most recent visits to Colorado a decade earlier. His parents were standing up each side of their vehicle, waving and attempting to get his attention. They had flown in the Gulfstream before, and knew it was their son flying that aircraft.

  Maggie suggested that Jonesy stop at least 100 feet in front of the car, to allow them to get out of there fast. Also the noise of the jets too close would hurt his parents’ ears. As he parked, the old couple pulled two large suitcases out of the car’s trunk, closed it and began walking toward the aircraft. Nobody was about, and both pilots were thinking it was a trap, or some sort of setup. It looked just that.

  Even so, he throttled down the two jets, and Maggie went back with the two kids to open the rear door. Without anybody coming to halt them, or soldiers rushing out of hidden places, the passengers climbed up the short staircase.

  As Jonesy saw the door close on his instrument panel, he ramped the jets back up, and within ten minutes, in a slight crosswind, the Gulfstream left the runway, spewing dust off the dirty tarmac and leaving the rusty old Jones car to its fate.

  Three hours later, the entire Jones family was back at base, drinking a cold beer with Ryan and a few others. The older couple looked healthy, fit and seemed excited to be with family and friends again.

  “It hasn’t been a comfortable ride in the States since we got back from cruising,” said Jonesy’s father to the group around them.

  The work was done for the day. Two lasers gunners were circulating a
bove protecting them. The other two shuttles were down being refueled and loaded with the new cargo for liftoff an hour before the Dead Chicken in 48 hours’ time. Twenty engineers and a dozen of the security guards were working to ready both spacecraft for launch.

  Another dozen guards made sure the Air Force personnel were already in their apartments, and not seeing what was being loaded, and the sun set as the barbeque sizzled away next to the pool and the cold beers were replaced in an iced bucket next to the group. “We returned to the States, to Charleston, South Carolina aboard the tour ship, and were shocked to see how the country had changed,” the old man continued. “Was it 2022 or 23 when we returned?” he asked his wife.

  “We left in 2018, so I think 2023 dear, we were away a little over five years on our cruises,” she replied.

  “So much had changed. We wanted to get a flight from South Carolina to Denver. There was only one flight a week. We waited in a rundown bed-bugged Best Western for five days for our flight. There were only 7 passengers aboard, plus us. There was no security door to the cockpit, and only one pilot and one cabin attendant. Before we left for our cruise in 2018, the security was unbelievable. Everybody was nearly strip-searched. There were armed flight personnel aboard every flight. Now, on our return flight, the security door to the cockpit was stuck open. The pilots said there was no way to repair it. Son, all flight protocol by the pilot was completely lacking.”

  “One pilot, and he looked unshaven and tired. I could have slept in the bags under his eyes,” added Jonesy’s mother.

  “Now there aren’t any flights,” the old man continued.

  “And very little in the department stores,” added his wife. “We haven’t seen a penny of our government pay for several months. We took out the rest of the money from our bank account the first month our social security checks didn’t arrive, and our bank’s branch was closed a month later. We still pay for food in dollars, but it’s more of an auction system now, and you just hope you can afford your groceries every month.”

  “We spent more and more time extending the vegetable garden, canning and bottling for the winter months,” added Jonesy’s father, “and now eat the deer I shoot and skin when there is no meat in the stores. There isn’t much meat, or anything left these days. I purchased a one hundred pound piece of meat three months ago, one single slab of meat, cow or horse I think it was, at Walmart or Costco in Denver. It still had fur on it, and cost me a thousand dollars.”

  “We even started brewing our own whiskey,” added Jonesy’s mother.

  “Brewing whiskey sounds like a Jones family tradition,” joked Ryan, and he got a dirty look from his chief astronaut, the astronaut’s father, and young Saturn Jones.

  Up in space, the crew on the bridge were monitoring aircraft movements around the world. At the same time the barbeque was taking place, they noticed the blips of a dozen aircraft take off from Eastern Australia. With nothing much to do, and since the movement of aircraft from this region was expected, they followed them. The Australian aircraft flew nonstop over the Pacific in a northwesterly direction, and to the captain it seemed that they were being refueled in the air, as some had large shadows and a few looked like smaller jet fighters. There was no other movement in Europe, or Russia, or the whole of Asia.

  In one whole orbit, he counted only twenty other aircraft around the globe. These flights were all along the four borders of the United States, with a couple flights flying east to west into Arizona and Texas. This was the route the Dead Chicken would take, and he hoped that the government wouldn’t let them down. Captain Pete couldn’t understand the petty thinking of his proud old country, the country he had been told by Ryan he didn’t belong to anymore.

  Thirty hours after taking off from Australia, he watched three of the larger aircraft take off and fly on from where the formation of aircraft had originally landed, close to Caracas in Venezuela, and these three headed toward the C-5’s destination: the Sahara Desert.

  It wasn’t more than 20 hours after that takeoff in Venezuela when his computers told him of the first shuttle’s liftoff from Nevada, and then the second shuttle launch 50 minutes later. They were all observing complete radio silence.

  Both orbiting lasers pointed down on U.S. territory from opposite sides as the large shadow of the C-5 left the ground an hour after SB-III and headed out of Nevada. Finally, two small blips on his radar told him when the Gulfstreams took off, and they followed the Dead Chicken eastwards.

  Chapter 4

  The Atlantic

  Only the pilots got all the sleep they needed on base in Nevada for the final 24 hours. There was much to do during the night hours. The aircraft was already packed to the brim, the heavier cargo on the floor and the lighter cargo piled on top of that. A C-5 took a lot of stuff to fill up.

  Though certainly not the normal procedure of Air Force loading of an aircraft, its gaping holes front and back were filled to capacity. Even inside the vehicles were filled with supplies and suitcases of the new passengers. After that, people sat anywhere they could. The interior of the aircraft began to look like a refugee camp.

  Several of the flight crew had wanted Ryan and his family to fly back into space in SB-III’s passenger compartment until he told them that there was only room for the more important returning scientists and engineers. Much of the passenger compartment had electronic equipment strapped down in and around many of the seats. The flight was full. Ryan was going to fly his own Gulfstream out of the country with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, VIN, Mars Noble and Saturn Jones. Martin Brusk, an experienced pilot, would fly Jonesy’s family aircraft with a copilot and Martin’s own family aboard.

  The night work on the base slowed as the flight drew closer. The routine didn’t change. The security guards and Ryan’s staff were ordered to stay put on the base, until the flight had left. Ryan hoped that the visitors hadn’t had anything to report back and hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. He would know if an attack on the base was due while they were in flight.

  Nobody thought that there would be an attack on the base while they were in radio contact or still over land. Everybody had agreed that once the C-5 was over water and out of radio communications with the base, only then might an attack happen. The most likely time would be once the C-5 had run out of fuel and Ryan wasn’t around to order reprisals. The American government would class the destruction of the military aircraft as an accident if it happened.

  All were sure the President of the United States didn’t want the White House demolished around him, as Ryan’s laser had done to the Banker’s headquarters in Manhattan.

  The chamber below ground was still full. Martin’s Tesla was stored, so were the newcomers’ cars and the new girl’s old original Volkswagen beetle soft-top, a ride Ryan had been excited to look over, as he had owned one in Germany when he was in his twenties.

  Between the thousands of spacecraft parts and engines were freezers full of meat and storage shelves still full of equipment dotting the entire chamber. Ryan wished he could take it all with him.

  All the rare earth metals, gold, platinum, three large tennis-ball-sized uncut diamonds, and the complete list he had offered the U.S. government was now on pallets in one of the hangars ready for pickup by the American troops. Ryan was a man of his word.

  The morning of the departure for three aircraft that day was a typical Nevada morning. Several of the America One crew had been seen running around the runway perimeter the last couple of days, and Ryan and VIN had been two of them.

  VIN had used his metal legs now for eleven years. Every second year on board America One he had been separated from the machines, and the hybrid lithium batteries were replaced. About the size of two red bricks, these plug-in systems gave him power for about 100 hours of constant exercise, such as walking rapidly, or lifting cargo or mining. That meant that VIN had to plug into the nearest electrical socket, of hundreds around America One, or aboard each spacecraft next to each pilot seat, once every two weeks. Whil
e doing heavy exercise as on the asteroids or running around the runway perimeter, he needed a recharge every 6 to 7 days. A charge took twelve hours, and he usually completed it during sleep.

  Jonesy, alone with his partner in one of the mining craft, had often told VIN that it was like sleeping with “The Terminator.” Suzi had the same batteries, and now a dozen of Martin Brusk’s latest fourth-generation power packs had been built exactly the same size and could last twice as long as the current third-generation batteries in the metal limbs. Jonesy had wanted to know before liftoff whether when running, if his partner opened his mouth, would his batteries get an added charge? For once Ryan, Martin Brusk and others had erupted in laughter.

  The sun’s faint light could just be seen on the eastern horizon, and all five aircraft were out of their hangars and prepared for takeoff. SB-III had the most important cargo aboard, the engineers and mechanics, and it took off first at 5.30 a.m. Because there was room for only eight in the rear cabin and two sitting on the cockpit rear jump seats, four of the engineers would need to go with Martin Brusk. So would Martin’s wife and children. Suzi and her one team member were heading up with Michael and Penny Pitt.

  The Dead Chicken had the balance of America One’s new crewmembers: the new families, the German scientist and his new blonde friend, who both seemed to be attracted to each other, and Walls’ family members. Lieutenant Walls said his goodbye to his best pal, Sergeant Meyers, wished him luck, gave him everything he owned, and then thanked the rest of his security detail.

  Minutes later SB-I, with the Pitts flying, launched and deafened all further speech, 55 minutes after SB-III.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jones, as well as all of the newbies, were awestruck at the precision, speed, and noise of the shuttles. They had been given the opportunity to see the two spaceplanes, readied a mile away and half a mile apart on the launch ramps, and two launches within an hour.