Yerevan, Armenia

A road, lined with lush, green maple trees entering their early summer livelihood, followed the calm Hrazdan River. The two-lane residential road was quiet, unlike downtown Yerevan’s infamous traffic, with only a single car or two rolling past. Alongside the road were a multitude of new buildings, mostly modest apartments with street-level cafes and corner stores. This was the 4th Block neighborhood, one of the pricier regions of the city and a nice place to get away from the increasingly-dense urban center. The buildings of 4th Block sat below a series of gently rolling hills to the northwest, hills with construction sites set up for more apartments. The effects of a post-independence rise in birth rates could be seen in the sprawl of Yerevan: a new generation of youths who knew nothing of the Great War were reaching adulthood, graduating from universities, and buying their own homes in new neighborhoods. Many of these adults could never fathom what life under a crumbling Ottoman Empire was like. The country to their west seemed a far cry from the once-mighty Sultanate that stretched to Arabia and Egypt.

The campaign office of Hasmik Assanian occupied a four-story brick building sitting by a park that overlooked a bend in the Hrazdan. The squat, nondescript building featured only a banner to denote the presence of the top Armenian presidential candidate: Assanian 1960: Security! Peace! Prosperity! A single policeman, wearing a blue uniform with his cap sitting crookedly on his head, read a newspaper in the guard shack next to the gate. Outside, some staffers were smoking cigarettes and talking about a car accident that had happened on the National Highway the other night: a drunk driver had hit a truck, crushing his car underneath it and stopping traffic for almost three hours as it was towed away. One of them flicked his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, but caught the ire of the policeman. “Put that in the damn ashtray,” he commanded. “We pay too much money to keep these streets clean without you flicking your trash everywhere. I could fine you for littering, you know.”

The staffer apologized, picked up his cigarette, and tossed it away in the ashtray just steps away from him. As the policeman nodded and went back to his paper, the staffers agreed to get back to work before their boss noticed their absence. These particular staffers worked in the outreach section of the campaign and, with a month to go before the election, were due that afternoon to head out and prepare an event in Freedom Square. Hasmik Assanian was busy preparing for that very same event in what amounted to his second apartment on the top floor of the campaign office. Inside a modest dressing room, he adjusted his characteristic purple tie underneath a navy blue suit jacket. His jacket featured an Armenian flag lapel pin, his cufflinks bore the regimental insignia of his former Armenian Army cavalry unit. He had played his relationship with former president and personal mentor Mikael Serovian greatly during the election, including his veteran status.

Once the suit was adjusted to Assanian’s liking, the slim man combed his hair to his liking: enough to cover up the steady recession of his hairline, but not too much to make it look like he was combing over while worrying about balding. He checked the silver watch on his wrist, a present from an old friend, and picked up his briefcase to head to the waiting car. His transportation chief had prepared a small convoy for him consisting of one vehicle for him and one for a small cadre of supporting staff. A white police car, marked in blue livery, was parked beside the guard shack. The two policemen conversed, making small talk as they waited. Assanian walked out the door, flanked by an aid, towards his vehicle. Catching the attention of the police escort, Assanian called out: “How are you doing today, my friend?”

The policeman immediately stood a little straighter out of respect, one hand moving to level off his slouching pistol belt. He was a slightly overweight beat cop, the beginning of a beer belly filling out his light blue uniform shirt. On his face, a thick and greying mustache betrayed his true age. “Good morning!” he greeted. “I’m doing alright, I can’t complain too much.”

“Is carting me around a good detail or a bad one?” Assanian joked, smiling at both of the policemen. With election day soon, he was working up the personal charm.

“Well it’s a pretty calm way to spend a Friday, if I do say so myself,” the driver proclaimed. He relaxed his stance a bit, put at ease by the humor. Assanian laughed, told him to drive safely, and clambered into the door of the grey sedan parked next to the black-and-white painted curb.

The door shut, and Assanian found his aid had already withdrawn papers from his briefcase about the Freedom Square rally. Freedom Square was located in central Yerevan, with the Presidential Palace at the north end. Holding a rally there was a political kick in the guts to the incumbent running for reelection. At this point, President Vadratian was becoming wildly unpopular: his brand of hardliner nationalism was failing to produce results and the recent uptick in internal tensions pointed to deeper underlying problems. The solutions from Vadratian seemed to be more of the same, propaganda and thinly veiled attempts to marginalize the Russian minorities. His rhetoric had gotten fiery to the point of aggression, and had made mistakes in the reelection campaign that ultimately lead to his falling-out with the Armenian people. The polling graphs showed a slight downward trend before dropping off dramatically in the last few months, while Assanian had come out of relative obscurity to become his party’s representative.

The Armenian Liberal Democratic Party was one of the heavy-hitter leftist organizations in the Parliament. They focused on combating Vadratian’s Independence Party and what they believed to be short-sighted policies. While many of the extreme ones did not go through, laws such as the infamous selective-rent policy did. The selective-rent policy enabled landlords to choose who received a better rate on property based on factors other than bank information: this amounted to a kindly-worded enablement of racial bias. A Russian could be charged more for rent than an Armenian with the same history of debt. It was blatantly unfair but, at the time, Armenians wanted Russians out of their neighborhoods. The refugees from the fracturing of Czarist Russia were thought to bring crime and drugs around. To be fair, huge problems existed with the Russian population and crime: the Russian Mafia had been popping up here and there with murders and robberies, not to mention the myriad of other mostly-monetary crimes like counterfeiting and laundering.

Among the Russians who could jump through the absurdly convoluted hoops to become Armenian citizens, Assanian was hugely popular. He promised to review and address legislature enacted by Vadratian and the Independence Party. To the average Armenian, his promise did not sound like he was trying to take away their jobs and homes and give them to immigrants like Vadratian countered. It was simply a “review”, and it might just help settle tensions. A little bit of guilt never hurt either: all Assanian had to do was remind the Armenian people that not long ago, they were suffering under a majority that wanted nothing to do with them. The subtle comparison of Vadratian to the Sultan made the president furious, but was effective. Talk about how the Russians might have been wronged was spreadi/ng, particularly amongst the older Armenians. Younger voters still had sizeable hardliner holdouts, mostly as a result of the Artsakh War.

Veterans of the Artsakh War and many people in the Artsakh itself were opponents of liberal attempts to ease the burden on the Russians. They were still frustrated by the stalemate result of the conflict and what they saw as unnecessary damage to Stepanakert. They argued that the government was giving in and became too soft, leading to a Turkish-encouraged Azerbaijani invasion. Forces fought the Azerbaijanis to a standstill and pushed them back to the borders of the Artsakh just as the Persians swooped in from the south. The Azeris, left decimated by the Persian armies, reluctantly agreed to become vassals for the Shah’s empire. The residents of the Artsakh, still reeling from the war, did not think that the surprise Persian attack was an absolution of Yerevan’s responsibility. They called for tougher measures against foreign threats, and they got President Vadratian to deliver. The next foreign threat happened to be migrants, not a standing army. While militia camps to the north of Armenia were swiftly eliminated, the refugees swamping northern cities could not be so easily taken care of.

Yerevan quickly became denser as Assanian crossed the Hrazdan and drove downtown. Buildings rose higher and higher, advertisements colorfully lit up the street. Government-sponsored propaganda featured Armenians working or enjoying life with positive, confident slogans. Some of the buildings that the cars passed bore murals of the revolution. On one, a Fedayeen with a small Armenian flag wrapped around the handguard of his bolt-action rifle charged defiantly from a trench as bullets tore up the ground beside him. Behind the brave militiaman were his comrades clambering over the trench walls to join him. Another one featured a burning Ottoman light tank with the writing: David: Killer of Goliath!. Assanian pulled through to a traffic circle, took a right, and headed to Freedom Square. The beige stone walls of the Presidential Palace came into view as the square appeared behind the surrounding buildings. Freedom Square, from the sky, was a stone square that was patterned like an Armenian rug. To the south was the government residence and its surrounding gardens and, to the north, a statue of a Fedayeen victoriously raising his rifle to the sky faced it.

Already, a podium had been set up directly in front of the Presidential Palace. A crowd of people had already gathered in place, awaiting their candidate’s speech. The lead police car turned on its light, alerting people to move out of the road. The driver cleared the way to the podium, stopping just shy of the bollards that kept cars off of Freedom Square’s pedestrian terrace. He stepped out of the police car and blew his whistle, motioning for the crowd to clear a path. Assanian quickly followed, going where the policeman motioned. Assanian clutched a leather briefcase in his hand: inside, his speech was tucked neatly into a divider. He wordlessly climbed the steps up to the podium, flanked by two Armenian flags, and spoke briefly with a staffer who had just set up the speaker equipment. Assanian’s podium consisted of four microphones for the four main Armenian radio media groups, alongside a speaker to reach out to Freedom Square. Directly in front of the podium was the press pool, while the general public waited behind it.

Assanian straightened his suit, unfazed by the crowd in front of him. After all, he had done this plenty of times before. This speech was just another one about his campaign promises, and how he was going to make life better for the Armenian people, and how he was going to secure the future of the Armenian state. He extolled the virtue of the country and its people, how they worked hard and never quit and how every other country looked at the Armenians as symbols of resilience and dedication. He brought the history of his people into the speech, imagining what the ancient Hayk would say if he looked upon the modern Armenian state. He ended with a condemnation of the present politics of hate perpetuated by Vadratian, and how he would work to change that so Armenia could continue its role as a role model for others. The country was small, but the Armenians knew what they could do. All and all, it was quick and sweet, nothing new in the playbook. The crowd loved it, cheering at all the right moments and clapping as it ended. Camera flash bulbs lit the podium and the candidate, surely to be printed in the next day’s paper.

Assanian left as easily as he entered, climbing back into his car. His aide offered to take his jacket once the candidate had settled into the leather back seat. “That was a good speech, I think they liked it,” he complimented almost robotically, making small talk like he was on a date.

“We’ll see what happens next month, shall we?” Assanian sighed, leaning back into the seat. “Let’s go, we still have some work at the office to do.”

Armenian-Georgian Border

Two small jeeps kicked up dust as they drove through the winding border roads separating Armenia from its neighbor. Painted olive-green and bearing the logo of the Armenian Border Service on their side doors, the lead vehicle maintained a swiveling machine gun while the one in the rear sat four in its bed. Their mission was the same as every day’s mission: drive along the border and look for Georgians crossing into Armenia. Refugees used the rugged terrain to move through cracks in the Border Service’s monitoring. Mounted patrols such as these augmented static watchtowers, hoping to try and keep the influx of northerners out of the country. Sometimes they were successful in turning back the ones brave enough to attempt a crossing during daylight. Other times, they found themselves skirmishing with bandits trying to exploit the situation. These bandits, funded by the meth trade into Armenia, had been getting bolder in recent years.

The patrol had been driving for four hours, long enough for them to reach the designated turnaround point. In theory, two patrols from opposite bases would drive towards each other for four hours, interface, and head back to their home stations. The rationale for this was to build confidence in each patrol’s area of responsibility and to check in on the others to see if there were any problems. This patrol in particular seemed to be a little early, since their partners were evidently still moving through the mountains. A radio call using the lead vehicle’s manpack yielded no reply: typical in the rugged terrain. The patrol decided to wait. The contingency plan was to call again if the other patrol had still not come by in another hour, and then head out to look for them. The order was given to dismount and keep watch: the troops aboard the vehicles got out and went to find cover. In this case, since this was the usual meeting spot, some areas had been reinforced with dug foxholes and sandbags. Like most days of waiting, the soldiers occupied their positions.

Corporal Joseph Yaglian had been a team leader in the Border Service for just under six months. The tall, lanky twenty-one-year-old wore his gear loose on his body and had lazily rolled up his battledress sleeves in the heat. His young face was unshaven, and hair far longer than regulations allowed brushed up against the collar on his faded jacket. After stopping to wick the sweat out of his soaked patrol cover, he went to his comrades to check on them. Yaglian’s fireteam consisted of himself, two riflemen, and a machinegunner operating a clumsily large weapon. They were all younger than him and local to the area, mostly conscripts posted to the Border Service for their language skills. Yaglian himself was from Yerevan, a volunteer who had naturally received a promotion before the conscripts. The Border Service had historically been smaller and less-well-managed than the Army, dedicated solely to guarding the Georgian and Azeri borders. However, with the recent uptick in border-security-related issues, the service was expanding. This led to quicker promotions for younger and less experienced guardsmen as they tried to fill more slots.

“Hey man, we’re all good,” the machinegunner mumbled through his cigarette as Yaglian crouched next to him. He was a stout, strong man from north Armenia named Gagarian, who spoke Russian and Georgian alongside Armenian. Just a Private, Gagarian had proved himself in combat actions three times over his seven months in service.

Beside Gagarian was the seventeen-year-old Lingorian, who held his binoculars steady against a sandbag to scan for movement in the Georgian mountains. Lingorian himself looked no older than fourteen, dressed in a flowy uniform that looked like he was wearing his father’s clothes to work. He had just gotten to the unit to replace another conscript who was injured in a car crash during a similar patrol. As the youngest, he was often burdened with the most equipment by those who didn’t want to carry it. In his pack was an assortment of binoculars, rifle grenades, flares, and other extra pieces of equipment. Although young, he worked hard to earn the respect of the others: something that Yaglian admired, even if he did make fun of the kid. The other rifleman, Gaznian, was almost as old as Yaglian but nowhere near as experienced. He was the only non-conscript, joining the Border Service after his parents died of hypothermia during the particularly difficult winter of 1958. He sent a portion of his paycheck to his little sister, now living in Hrazdan.

“Good to hear,” Yaglian answered simply. He withdrew his own cigarette from a breast pocket and lit it up. Doctrine said not to smoke on patrol, for fear of the red glow being spotted from afar, but nobody listened to doctrine anyways. “We’re just gonna wait for these late fucks and then go home. Easy day, right? Not seeing anything?”

“Not yet. Lingorian would’ve squealed by now,” he said, elbowing the Private next to him sharply in the ribs. A grimace came across Lingorian’s face, but aside from a small grunt he didn’t say much more.

“Okay, that’s good news. I’ll come by in a few minutes,” Yaglian replied as he puffed on his cigarette again. Quickly flicking what would come off into a nearby pile of rocks, he went back to his section leader to report. Yaglian’s section leader nodded, and went wordlessly back to the map spread across the hood on the jeep. He mumbled calculations under his breath, taking measurements of kilometers and speed and trying to figure out where the other patrol could be. This continued on for the next hour, until it was time to go looking.

“Hey, lead truck!” the section leader called out as he put his carbine beside the passenger’s seat in the rear open truck. “Hey, go call the other patrol on your radio and let me know if you get a reply. These idiots are fucking late again.”

A radio call was sent out. Again, no response came back through the airwaves. As per their orders, the section leader gave the call to mount up and move out to go find the others. Yaglian recalled his team and put them in the back of the truck. He talked to his section leader about where they were going, and hopped over the side as the engine rumbled to life. The lead vehicle spun its wheels for a second, kicking up gravel before speeding off. Yaglian’s jeep followed. They drove for two hours, getting more worried as they continued. Wordlessly, they followed the trail until the sun began to set. Every fifteen minutes, the lead vehicle would send out a radio transmission to no avail. The search was hopeless until the jeeps rounded a bend in the road and the headlights picked up something in front of them. The two trucks drove into range before the first slammed on the brakes. The team leader in the passenger seat leapt out and waved his hands at the section leader: “Hey, it’s them!”

A chorus of cursing and orders to take positions followed from the section leader: one of the trucks had been hit with explosive or something of the sort while the other was empty in the back. Blood covered the windshield of the lead vehicle, and two bodies were slumped over the dashboard. A third body was laying, arms spread wide, across the spare tire in the back. The truck’s machinegun was angled downwards, a short belt hanging from its receiver. Around them, bodies from the other truck were laying around. These men had been killed in combat, with the exception of one who, based on the blood trail, seemed to have crawled behind the second truck only to die there. Yaglian emplaced his men and ran to his section leader, who was surveying the damage. “What’s going on?” he asked, an intonation of fear in his voice.

“Looks like a rocket attack stopped the first truck. Look at the rest of them, bullet holes everywhere. Fuckin’ bandits did this. We were probably too far away to hear the damn fight, too,” the section leader lamented as he checked the dog tags on the dead patrol’s other NCO. He was just about to order a mount-up when a rifle shot cracked them and sent the patrol bounding to cover. “Sniper! Sniper! Sniper!” the section leader called out.

Immediately, fire from the Armenians leapt out into the dusk. Yaglian’s machinegunner had seen the muzzle flash of the bandit and was showering rounds at the area while the two other rifleman tried to do the same. The other machinegunner, far more experienced than Gagarian, rattled off bursts while Gagarian went quiet. This so called “talking guns” method enabled a suppression of the enemy position. The sniper was apparently frightened, and only got off a few more inaccurate shots. Each one was answered by more gunfire from the border guardsmen. Yaglian fired off his carbine from behind the hood of his vehicle, rhythmically and precisely. In between bursts of gunfire, he sounded off to check on his team. So far, no casualties. It had been a trap, but the troops were left wondering why there had only been one sniper. Yaglian’s section leader wasn’t going to stick around to find out, and ordered the dead tossed in the back of the other jeep. Nobody was leaving bodies or weapons there, lest the bandits get a propaganda victory out of the deal.

Only three more attempts came from the bandit sniper, each time answered by overwhelming fire on the Armenian side. It was nighttime by the time the bodies were loaded up and trucks were on the move, and the shots were getting wilder and wilder. As fast as they could, the trucks moved back to the other patrol’s home base. Someone needed to know what happened, and the bandits were going to pay soon. As the patrol left from the ambush site, Gaznian shot a rifle grenade at the disabled Armenian jeep to deny its recovery. This time, the fuel tank exploded, and the whole vehicle was consumed by fire. The fire lit the mountainside, flickering against the escaping border guardsmen. They still had a while left to drive before they got to the next base, but they were determined to do it quickly. Something had to happen soon.

The German Exile, Part One

Lingayen Gulf

Ludwig von Seckendorff looked ridiculous in his water buffalo-drawn carriage, especially with his out-of-place aristocratic uniform, which in turn contrasted sharply with the straw hat that protected him from the sun. His thick mustache was also a point of light ribbing from the Filipino workers digging trenches and setting bamboo spikes at the edge of the beaches; he had already supervised the excavation of deeper tunnels several miles into the interior. With concrete being expensive and at a premium, the 'Iron Lady' of the Philippines had tasked the former geologist to examing whether the soil of the area was suitable for earth-and-bamboo tunnel networks and bunkers; a service he had performed for Von Mackensen before the reactionary forces' victory and his series of exiles after that. A frown of resentment, before he looked at the hardworking people putting up the defenses he had planned.

Getting off from his carriage, Ludwing went over to the person overseeing the current fortification effort; a middle-aged woman with a machete and pistol strapped to her long skirt. She was dirty from having joined in the digging for a few hours herself, and was still holding her shovel as she addressed Von Seckendorff in Filipino: "Hoi! Glad you finally arrived; as you can see, we've completed the first trenches." She then looked at the contents of the carriage. "You brought the machine guns yourself?"

"Brought and bought," was Ludwig's reply; he had learned the native languages during his stay here. "More of these are coming; along with ammunition." He looked at the beach and the blue waters beyond it, hoping against hope that war would not taint them in the future. "I will make sure your country is defended from any invader."

The lady foreman grinned at that. "We'll never be taken over by any conqueror ever again; that's for sure. Especially with me and my people running the machineguns. I learned how to use one, back in the war against the hacienderos. A captured American piece; we didn't know how to oil it, so it fell apart after some use."

Ludwig smiled and nodded. "Well, I still trust you with the ones I'm giving, then. Now, let's unload them, shall we?"

Some of the lady foreman's old deference towards white people and aristocrats must have returned, as she mildly protested, "Oh, please no! You've done so much for us and the defenses we're building; we certainly can't ask more of you. Besides, you might ruin your clothes."

Ludwing tilted his head slightly towards her. "Ah, but my good lady, as you can see, I need the exercise to lose weight!" He playfully patted his pudgy belly. "But seriously; you people have shown me so much hospitality and given me so much; this is the least I can do to repay you."

A sigh escaped the lady foreman's lips, before Ludwig and her went to the back of the carriage, being instinctively joined by two other workers. They would then take out the carefully packaged machine guns - two light and one heavy, as well as the crate of ammunition at the back of the water buffalo-drawn carriage. Ludwig's uniform would be stained by this, but he didn't mind; a minor price to live in (Priscilline) Concilliarist paradise. I never knew I'd find Arcadia in the Jungle, were his thoughts.

"So," asked one of the workers, a nineteen-year-old who carried a catechism - either 'Pure' Catholic or Independent Philippine Church, he didn't know - on his belt, "Are we getting mortars next?" When he received a nod from Ludwig, he would then smile widely and say, "Salamat (Thanks)!"

Once the machineguns were safely on the ground; they were going to be taken to a nearby arsenal instead of being deployed into the trenches right away, Ludwig's stomach would rumble, causing the lady foreman and the workers to chuckle. The former partisan of Von Mackensen would then say, "Oh, the next wagons are bringing food and clean water. Am I allowed to join you in lunch, lady foreman?"

An audacious request, but the female foreman smiled. "Just make sure to get your clothes cleaned afterwards. And wash your hands; we're going to eat with our hands."

Not too long ago, Ludwig would have thought of such habits as barbaric and monkey-like. But memories of the Lady President's hospitality and the genuine improvements being made on such a shoestring budget, of the happiness that can be found here, those had worn down his opinions. Who knows, he might even find a wife in a race he had once seen as just above animals, but were now just below angels. But that would have to wait.

South Central
3:15 PM

The old black lady turned her nose up Jeff Thomas. He was on her porch, the screen door between the two of them. Jeff had his badge out and up against the screen mesh for her to see he was official. Jeff could smell something cooking inside the house, probably greens. He could also smell booze, closer and wafting through the screen.

"They don't hire niggas to be police," she slurred.

"Right," said Jeff. "But they do hire negroes. I'm one of those, ma'am. I'm here because Wendall Brock had this house listed as his address."

"The motherfucker didn't live here!"

The old lady swayed on her feet and gripped against the screen to help from tottering back further. Jeff put his badge up and pulled out his notebook.

"But you knew him, right?"

"He rented the garage behind my house. He was late on his rent. Now, I gotta clean his shit out and try to fix it up for a new tenant."

"You haven't touched it yet? I need access to that garage."

"Well, I need a warrant, Mr. Po-lice."

Jeff ignored her. He stepped off the porch and walked around the side of the house. The old lady squealed and tried to chase after him. She walked on unsteady feet and yelled at Jeff as they headed into the backyard. There was a detached wooden garage will a metal roll-up door.

"Uncle Tom motherfucker!"

"You want to go to jail, granny?" Jeff asked as he looked at the woman. "Public intoxication, obstruction of justice, harassing a police officer. Take your pick and I can call patrol up. You'll be in central lock up before five, hanging with the whores and the bull dykes. What do you say?"

The fight went out of the old drunk. She started to back away from Jeff and towards the house.

"I'll get out of your hair so you can work, sir."

She shuffled back into the house and slammed the door shut. Jeff heard the loud clang of the bolt locking into place and laughed softly to himself. With her gone, he turned to the garage and pulled on a pair of leather gloves.

The autopsy on Brock proved very little insight into the events leading up to his murder. The massive gunshot wound to the head had been the cause of death, no surprise there. Jeff also wrote up a request for the lab downtown to do a blood test on Brock for any kind of narcotics.

He pulled open the roll-up door and looked in on a one-room apartment. There was a dresser that looked like it opened up on a Murphy bed, a cheap desk with a folding chair and a typewriter, and a toilet and sink in the far corner of the garage. Jeff sketched a layout of the apartment before stepping in.

The place was neat, far neater than he expected it to be. Whatever Wendall Brock had been in life, neat had been among his features. The clothes in the dresser were neat and folded on the hangers. Jeff pulled out the bed and was not surprised to find it made with the corners tucked in neatly. He scribbled "military?" in the notebook before turning to the desk.

Nothing was in the typewriter, but a stack of typing paper was in the top drawer of the desk. He rifled through it and found something he wasn't expecting underneath the paper. Pamphlets and political tracts on a variety of subjects rested at the bottom of the drawer. They skewered to the far-left and approached radical. One was titled "Houism: A Crash Course", one said "LAPD: KKKorupt KKKops," still another was title "Who Will Survive in America?" Jeff took notes on the tracts and stuck a few in his pocket.

He walked out the garage and pulled the door down. He heard a rattling noise and looked towards the house to see the blinds in one window closing shut quickly. Jeff smirked and pocketed the gloves in his sports coat before walking back towards the street. He was starting to feel the need for another snort. His last had been a few hours earlier and had managed to last him longer than he thought it would.

Jeff laid out a small line of the brown stuff on the dash of his car and snorted it up. He let out a sigh of relief and leaned back in the seat. The wave of pleasure crashed through his body and put his mind at ease. It also helped him think. The case Hoyt had dismissed as Darktown intrigue seemed a bit more complicated than even Jeff thought it would be.

Wendall Brock was a neat, politically interested man who probably was a writer. Did he write the tracts in the drawer? Maybe. The DOB on his license put him at the right age to have taken part in all the political shit that happened during the war. If he was as left as the pamphlets implied, he would be on a list somewhere. He started the car and headed back towards 77th Street Station, buzzed on both big H and the progress in the investigation.

----

Hollywood
9:09 PM

Elliot Shaw exited the movie theater along with a pack of people. He had been among them during the showing of Shall We Dance?, a ballroom dancing farce picture Pinnacle Studios wrote, shot, and released all in the span of two months. It was middle of the road stuff. Raymond Hollister starred as a nice guy engaged of a shrew of a woman. The shrew demanded that he take dancing lessons before their wedding. Enter Bridgette Davenport as the beautiful dancing instructor. Anyone who's seen a movie knew the rest of the story. Shenanigans ensue, and Hollister and Davenport fall in love and end up together.

Clair Beauchamp had a supporting part in the picture. That's why Elliot had went to see it, to see her in action. It would have been easier to watch the film at one of the private screening rooms Pinnacle had on its lot, but Elliot wanted to watch it among the people to see if she lit up the screen as much as Jeannie claimed she did. Her part was Davenport's best friend, shoulder to cry on, and comic relief. Jeannie was right that the girl lit up the screen. She had about fifteen minutes of screen time but always stole focus anytime she came into the picture. A couple of the gags made even Elliot laugh. He knew the people in the theater ate it up. So maybe there was something to the claim she was the next big thing.

Thunder rumbled somewhere off. Elliot lit up a cigarette and hit a payphone. He fed it a few quarters and dialed Sid's number. It rang a few times, letting Elliot take a long drag off his smoke and exhale it before the ringing stopped abruptly.

"Whisper Magazine, from your lips to our pages."

"Sid, it's Elliot Shaw."

"Elliot! Long time no speak, buddie!"

Sidney Applebaum, managing editor for Whisper, was a cockroach. He scuttled around Hollywood in search of what he labeled "prime sinnuendo." He was one of the people who knew where the bodies were buried. He was rumored to have file boxes stashed somewhere filled to the brim with dirt on movie stars, studio moguls, and anyone in the entertainment industry. Shit too depraved to put into his magazine. Applebaum was hated by the studio heads because of the dirt. The potential for blackmail loomed large with Sid.

Elliot was afraid he had dirt on him as well. 5/6/56 writ large. That was the day of the shootout Dorchester. The day he quit the Boston PD and headed to west to escape the bad press and any potential incitements. If anyone knew about it, it would be Sid fucking Applebaum.

"You got some hot copy for me, Elliot?"

Elliot would often feed Sid gossip he heard about rival studios. He was nominally an executive, so he occasionally hobnobbed with the competition and talked shop. He was sure the others did it with him as well, which is why he always gave them low-level gossip.

"Not this time, Sid. I need information. What do you know about Darktown nightclubs?"

"Oooh, you mudsharking, Elliot? I've been thinking of doing an all interracial issue. The love that dare not speak its name, tiny white ingenues with well hung Mandingos. What do you think?"

"Fascinating, Sid. I'm working on something. Gimme the lowdown on some nightclubs and I might give you some copy if it all goes according to plan?"

A lie, but a small one. He wouldn't tell shit about the girl, but he could always let slip that Dexter Parkerberry was currently in a dry out farm in Malibu because of his Big H addiction. It was dirt, but not damning enough to hurt Parkerberry's career the way Clair Beauchamp would be hurt if it got out she liked dark meat.

"The big spot is Minnie's Playroom. There's also The Voodoo and Red's. T-Bone Harris is supposed to be playing The Voodoo. You should check him out. I don't like that blues shit, but that boogie is doing something else."

"Thanks, Sid," Elliot said with a smirk. "I'll be sure to get his autograph."

----

Mullholland Drive
11:19 PM

Jessica Hyatt drove along the curvy road at speeds that were too fast. Her thoughts weren't on the road. They were back in that little room with Agent Parker. The man had her dead to rights. He knew all about her history with marches and protest. And he knew about who she was before she was Jessica Hyatt.

Tears were forming in her face, making the road blurry. It wouldn't be that hard, she thought. Just let go of the wheel and at the next turn she would fly off the side and down into the canyon below. There would be pain, so much pain. But that would be the last thing she would feel before death. No more hiding who she was, no more lies and no more secrets.

She turned off the lights of the car and let it race down the road in darkness. It got the better of her and she quickly turned them back on in time to see a bend in the road. Jessica cut the wheel sharply before the curve. The over adjusting caused the car to spin out in the middle of the road before the side of it banged against a metal barrier on the road's edge.

She sat there, heart racing and gripping the wheel. She wanted to live. Goddammit all, she wanted to live. She thought of herself as a coward. The will to live, even in this shitty situation, had won out over her courage. She thought of her father and how he had ended his life before he could be caught. The people who knew who she really was had called him brave and said he had gone out on his own terms, a radical to the end. But she never knew the man because of that act. But that was different, wasn't it? There was no way he would have lived had he been caught. The government would have seen to it.

Jessica started back the way she had come, back towards LA. A few miles down the road she pulled off the side and lit a cigarette, her thoughts back to Parker and his mission. A simple infiltration job, he had said. For someone with her pedigree, getting in and earning trust would be easy. Once she was in, she would let the Pinkertons know everything there was about the Good People.

According to Parker, they were a small group of like-minded individuals operating in LA. Radicals, anarchists, socialist -- you name the leftist philosophy-- all part of a secretive meeting group hosted somewhere in the city. The FCB and the Pinkertons were actively looking for them, but they could never get close. Jessica knew that people like her could smell a fed from a mile away. They were rumored to have entertainers in their midst, people who could shape the messages coming out of the studios. If subversives were influencing the culture, that might actually make Mr. and Mrs. Small Town America question their government and the Pinkertons couldn't have that.

Jessica flicked the butt of her cigarette out the car and started it back up. She pulled back on to Mulholland Drive and flicked her lights on. Find them, Parker had said. Find them, identify them, and we're square. You go about your business and we never bother you again. She didn't believe that for a second. But what choice did she have? She was against a rock and another rock. Helping Parker was like gnawing her arm off to get free. But better one-armed and free than trapped and dead.

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October 27th, 1916: The Battle of Segale
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Hassan al-Himyari was only fourteen years old the first time he mounted a horse for battle. His strongest memories of that time came from the harrowing ride from Hargeisa to the mountainous homeland of the Abyssinian Christians in the fall of 1916. So many years later the pain and hardship of that time melted into vague impressions, but the romantic was magnified until it became dominant. The tribal infantry of his grandfather's army had been left behind by the flying cavalry. They rode on swift horses, their ammo limited to what they could carry in a single pouch, a scimitar hanging by their side to do the rest. They wore no armor, no steel helmets like the Europeans on their Western Front, but only the white linens of desert dwellers to protect them. Most of them were armed with Mauser carbines of the kind that had once outfitted Bismarck's cavalry, but this was the only modern aspect to this army. Otherwise they looked like they'd rode straight out of Arabian Nights. The romanticism especially touched the younger members like Hassan. It was buoyed by the chanting of prayers, making it easy for them to imagine themselves in the place of those first Muslim warriors who struck out from the deserts fifteen hundred years before, riding toward battle with the infidel Persians along the ancient banks of the Euphrates.

Their destiny was much more muddled than the simple truths of holy warfare. Their leader, Khalid al-Himyari, Hassan's grandfather, had launched them into the middle of a civil war between their Christian neighbors. They rode through hostile territory, eyed suspiciously by the women and old men whose husbands and sons would be either with them or against them when they arrived on the battlefield. Their flapping banners presented sayings of the prophet and prayers to allah, reminding the natives of older battles between the two faiths, battles that lived in the persistent memory of East Africa; a land keenly aware of its living past.

The call "Allahu ackbar" rose up lyrically in the roaring wind, and Hassan added his cracking voice. He kept up the best he could. Amongst all of these veterans, he felt like an imposter, unready to be a warrior. Would he ever be ready at all? But he was here, driven by the intense passions of youth, and the pressure of his birth. Most important to him, he wanted to see history, and was afraid that it would leave him behind to rot as an inactive observer in Hargeisa.

"Allahu ackbar!" they cried out. The valley filled with their manly worship. Hassan questioned if his voice added anything at all.

The battleground came at them in slow, awe-inspiring pieces. They heard the muted thump of artillery from far away, and saw a stream of frightened refugees fleeing. An unnatural dry-season rain fell around the battlefield, leaving only the places where troops fought dry, as if Allah set an arena of lightening around the fight as a backdrop for greatness.

Next came the appearance of Ethiopian soldiers, going to or limping from the field. These were wild looking men with months of untamed growth on top of their heads and along their faces, pointing out wiry and wooly as if they had been hit by the lightening. They wore sturdy clothes, mostly homespun, wrapped in shammas and strung with bandoliers. The peasants had given their Somali visitors weary looks, but the soldiers looked surprised, even delighted.

Rifles cracked and machine guns quaked. The smoke produced by the fight rose into the air and obscured the distant lightening, creating an otherworldly sky that seemed like the very ceiling of hell. The Somalis ululated, announcing their arrival. Khalid mounted a knoll so that he could be seen. His white beard and stoic expression made him look like the resurrected ghost of one of the Rashidun. He barked orders, but Hassan could not hear him over the fiery warfare. The men in the front of the riding column split from one another and dismounted, advancing up the hill and toward the battle on foot. The rest, including Hassan, lurched forward on the swift war horses. War-cries called out. Hassan imitated.

Down along a river belching with unseasonable rainfall was a battle scene from a Boschian nightmare. The splendid parade-ground images of war were replaced here with a chaotic killing field. Bullets whizzed by, and the mechanical jerking of machine gun fire spoke of a terror newborn to the world. The screaming Muslim riders charged with a force that felt like they were being pulled by a runaway train. Hassan pulled out his scimitar and wailed. His hand gripped the hilt of his weapon so hard that his fingers went white, but he could not feel them. His extremities were numb.

A man fell from his horse, a spurt of gore leaving his back like an exhaust jet, and his confused horse ran wild out of the column. Hassan passed by stunned enemies, but the war was going too quick for his battle-addled brain to comprehend, and he held his scimitar steady in front of him and screamed for his life, swinging at nobody.

It all ran together; the bloody water kicked into the air, the screams rushing by so fast that Hassan couldn't run together context, the sight of mangled bodies and his comrades falling into the muck dead or wounded. It was over when they wheeled back around and took a stand of artillery sitting on top of the hill. After that the battle seemed to dissipate in the way a thunderstorm does.

In the end, Hassan didn't kill a man at the Battle of Segale. He didn't even swing his scimitar. Even as he grew older, this would be come his deepest secret, the thing about his life that shamed him the most. He would make his battlefield kills later, but those future fights carried none of the greatness of Segale, where the fate of East Africa for all the twentieth century was decided. He did nothing there but use his voice and shadow the men who really did make a difference.

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May 1960: The Deserts of northern Somalia
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Hassan sprinted forward and threw his scimitar. It whistled through the air, struck the hanging target, and split open the bag. Sand spilled out, making a satisfied hiss as it returned to the desert from whence it came. Several other bags hung next to it waiting to be opened, dangling testicularly from the barrel of a tank, which was colorfully painted in the Africa fashion. This particular one was made to look like a raging fire, though the dusty desert storms of central Somalia had scoured the paint and caused the original brown color to peek through.

"Well struck." Rais Said said, his tone formal even though it was only the two of them. Rais was a thin and nearly hairless man, looking like a living mummy dressed up in a starched General's dress uniform.

"Don't let them say that I'm old" Hassan replied, chuckling as he walked away from the target. Hassan wasn't old, but he was middle aged, a ring of salt and pepper hair clinging to his temples. He was a barrel chested man, and middle age was starting to give him a barrel gut to match. But there was a hardness to his face, a mix of Somalian black from his mother and Yemeni Arab from his father, and a battle-won scar on his cheek to compliment this hardness.

Rais pulled a scimitar stuck in the sand beneath his feet and lined himself up with the target. His stance was rigid, but his method was precise, and when he threw, he stuck his target. The scimitar lodged itself in a bag and stayed there.

"Good. Good. You're not old either." Hassan said.

"Have you made your decision?" Rais asked.

"About?"

"Rhodesia."

"Oh." Hassan pulled a scimitar from the sand. "Lutalo will veto it one way or another. I do not know what friends the Emperor expects to make with this move."

"White faces." Rais said.

"Yes." Hassan lined up and threw. His scimitar struck Rais's and sparked, making a shrill clang. Hassan punched the air and laughed. "That is how you do it, my friend. And look at that, I am spilling your sand."

"Should you be in Addis Ababa then?" Rais said.

"No need" Hassan leaned against the tank, "Lutalo's veto is enough. There is no point in me sticking out my neck. In politics, my friend, you only fight the battles you have to fight."

"And what if Lutalo doesn't exercise his veto?"

Hassan shrugged. "Then welcome white Rhodesia, welcome to the African Congress! We apologize for the sunburns, but our sun does not like white faces."

Rais threw. It clipped the bottom of a bag, dumping its sand all at once. In the distance, the lyrical droning of an Islamic call to prayer came hauntingly across the dunes.

"It's time" Hassan said. They picked up and left.

The two men walked past the tank, passing a number of silent mud-brick buildings. Long diesel trucks sat in front, their beds outfitted with benches to carry troops, completely unmanned but recently used. The crying adhan seemed to be coming from below. They walked up a dune until they came to a place where it ended abruptly. Below them was a giant corkscrew pit, large enough and deep enough that most of the buildings in Addis Ababa could be dismantled and thrown inside before it was filled up again. At the bottom, like men seen from the air in a plane, a larger number of small bright-white figures bent over in prayer.

The Dervishes were the best warriors in Hassan's Somalia. The nation was held together by localized regiments of regular soldiers sequestered in barracks and given police duty when there was nothing else to do. It was only the best of them that had a chance at becoming a Dervish. These soldiers were clad in the white, the loose clothes hearkening to the Bedouin nomads, though the robes were replaced with shirts and pants. There heads were wrapped in a scarf so that only their eyes were visible. Whereas the uniformed regiments of the regular army were awkwardly armed, the Dervishes wielded new assault rifles and sharpened scimitars. Better then the glory and fresh equipment, the Dervishes were the only members of the Somalian government to receive a pension if they lived to old age. It was the most sought over position in Hassan's government. That was the way he wanted it.

The pit was one of his gold mines. It helped him to pay the promised pensions that caused so much competition for Dervish service. He wondered, when he held drills out here, if their presence in the place that paid them had any effect in reminding them of their duty.

"We serve Allah and the Emir" their voices said all at once, loud enough that Hassan and Rais could hear. Emir was one of his conflicting titles. To some, he was the Emir of Somalia to the Somali people, and he was the Ras of Adal to the Ethiopians.

Hassan stood still, the wind scouring the back of his neck. For a moment, all was quiet.

The men in the pit broke formation and spread out. They headed for the walls. A road corkscrewed into the pit, but they did not use it. Instead they climbed straight, moving up the steep walls like mountain climbers, their rifles on the backs and their scimitars dangling from their sides. Some, whether for dramatic flourish or to keep from getting snagged, held their scimitars in their mouths.

"These men could take Mombasa." Hassan said proudly.

Rais looked at him. "Is that your plan?"

"No. No." Hassan said. His eyes stayed on the clambering Dervish troops. "Let the Reds do that. I have no friends among white faces or red flags."

"They could take Mombasa." Rais agreed. Hassan had sounded liking a bragging father, but Rais sounded like a scientist giving a professional opinion.

"If they had to swim."

The Reds had asked him about helping with Mombasa. He'd ignored them. This was the normal dance among the East African Confederates. It was not a true confederation of course, but rather a vague submission to Addis Ababa, and once held together by a fear of recolonization that was beginning to fade in the modern world. Mombasa, where the last of the white settlers of Swahililand resisted the rise of Lutalo's reds, was under an uncertain siege by the confused Communist revolutionaries. That was fine. Let the Reds chew on Mombasa until their teeth were worn to the gums. Let them break in and in frustrated rage murder every last white man. The weaker they were, the happier Hassan would be in his power. He'd even throw them a bone or two if it helped make their conflict bloodier. But his Dervishes were more than a mere bone, and he would not throw them until it was worth it.

When the Dervish soldiers made it to a stretch of the road, they dashed across it. To Hassan's pleasure, they treated this drill as a sort of race.

"Could any man in Africa ever stand against these men?" Hassan asked.

"Probably not." Rais answered.

"Definitely not" Hassan said. "I'd pit them against the world. They would win."

Greetings!

(I have been unable to find an OCC thread for this...? But I will move this comment to whatever thread is correct if this isn't the right spot)

I have been keeping up with this RP for some time now, and really like where it has evolved to.

Would it be possible to join the RP? If at all possible I respectfully submit my candidacy for the Congo (specifically a state comrpised of several areas within the greater Congo area)

Thank you for your consideration.

LM

Greetings!

(I have been unable to find an OCC thread for this...? But I will move this comment to whatever thread is correct if this isn't the right spot)

I have been keeping up with this RP for some time now, and really like where it has evolved to.

Would it be possible to join the RP? If at all possible I respectfully submit my candidacy for the Congo (specifically a state comrpised of several areas within the greater Congo area)

Thank you for your consideration.

LM

There is an 'OOC Tab' at the top of the thread itself.

Barstow
10:11 AM

Johnny Leggario stood in line beside the short, German man with the thick glasses and the even thicker mustache. "Prussian Joe" Wittenberg was proof of the old adage do not judge a book by its cover. While he looked more at home in an accounting firm, the little man was one of the finest criminal minds on the planet. He was known through the criminal underworld as the Herr Doktor. Johnny had crossed paths with him a year and a half ago in Chicago. The two had worked together on a bank job that went sideways. After a double-cross during the getaway, everyone but the two of them had been killed. Johnny broke the neck of the double-crosser, a Chicago Police lieutenant. The heat was too much for him to stay in town so he beat tracks south. That was why he was serving in the neon light purgatory of Sun City now.

"We're next," Joe said in his thick accent.

"Tickets," the stewardess said with a wide smile that didn't reach all the way to her eyes.

Johnny passed her their tickets and stepped through the tunnel with Joe walking in his wake. Both men had traded in their suits and hats for slacks and button up shirts. Leisurewear didn't hang right on Johnny's stout frame, however the sweater and khaki pleated pants made Joe look even more like an average working slob.

The tunnel came out on a tarmac with a waiting plane. It was a four-prop NEWI DC-6. Johnny and Prussian Joe boarded and took their seats near the rear of the plane. The model could hold eighty people, and all of the seats were filled by the time the plane taxied to the runway for takeoff.

Joe ordered a Scotch right once takeoff was over and they were stabilized. Johnny got a bourbon and sipped it as they flew above California. The two men made small talk during the flight, Joe halfheartedly replying while he jotted down notes in a spiral notebook on his lap. Johnny killed his drink just as the pilot was making an announcement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are beginning our final approach. To the right of the plane, you will see Cloud Nine in all its glory."

Johnny and Joe looked out and saw something moving through the clouds. The clouds parted and Johnny smiled. The giant airship was Cloud Nine, the world's only airborne casino, floated aloft on a network of lighter than air balloons and moved by giant propeller engines the size of ones used by passenger ships and battleships. It flew on an endless scenic tour above California and never landed unless there was an mechanical emergency.

It could hold a thousand people and was always at capacity. The highest rollers in the country and the world came to Cloud Nine to gamble, and they paid a pretty penny for the privilege. The waiting list that went until the winter of '64, but Johnny had friends who didn't have to wait to for anything. The plane bounced as it touched down on Cloud Nine's runway and came to a stop.

Five minutes later they were walking down a plush corridor lined with red carpet. Johnny pulled out a pack of Henry's and lit up before passing the pack and lighter to Joe. The two men came out of the corridor and on to a balcony that encircled the main gaming floor of Cloud Nine. Below them, the floor was packed with gamblers in the middle of over two dozen games of chance. Johnny could see stacks of chips on the tables, some chips with denominations as large as five hundred dollars.

"How much cash do you think is being circulated on the floor, Doc?" Johnny asked.

"At least a million. Maybe more."

A million on the floor, at least another two million in the vault. That's why they had come to Cloud Nine. The casino in the sky was ripe for the taking, its security softened by the fact that it was seen as impossible to rob and make an escape. It was possible, alright. Prussian Joe had a plan. And Johnny had a crew just crazy enough to do it.

---



Senate Office Building
3:12 PM

"What did you expect, Eric?" Alex Roy asked. "He's Wilbur Helms, Eric. You look up reactionary in the dictionary and you see his wrinkled ass face smiling back at you."

Eric Fernandez sighed and leaned back in his chair. He and Roy were in his office, going over his less than stellar meeting with the senior senator from South Carolina. Alex fixed Eric a drink before they got into it. He was sipping it now and thinking back on Helms' stoic face during his talk.

"The bastard gave me the stink eye when I said my name," said Eric. "He heard Fernandez and he got his back up. My family's probably been in this country longer than his family."

"Again, Eric. Look at who you're talking to. The man served in Huey Long's cabinet for god's sake."

"Wasn't he some undersecretary?" Eric asked.

"Secretary of State. He tried to work out some deal with Ethiopia where they would airlift Negroes to safety. It was a fucking back to Africa movement disguised as humanitarian aid. I think the Ethiopians just laughed him off."

Eric chuckled to himself and finished his drink off. It helped.

"Look at it like this," said Alex. "We never expected the south to follow us. They're only hanging with Norman because of Reed. They want him to run in '64 and put a southerner back in the White House."

"I know," Eric said with a sigh. He stood and pulled his jacket off the back of his chair and slipped it on. "I have to head over to the Senate floor for a vote. Can you call my wife and see what's for dinner?"

Alex said he would as Eric left and hurried from the Senate offices towards the capitol across the street. Within ten minutes he was in the democratic cloakroom with about a half dozen other senators. Bert Marshall, the minority leader, sat in a leather chair with a legal pad on his lap. Eric was on the way to see him when he was cut off. Russell Reed stood in front of him. Eric had three inches on the man, but Reed had a way to make it feel like he was the taller man as he got in close.

"Senator, how are you doing today?" Reed asked as they shook hands.

"Mr. Vice President," said Eric. "About to vote on this bill."

"Democracy in action. You look good, Eric. You gotten some sun recently?"

"I went out west to see some people." Eric saw the twinkle in Reed's eyes. A twinkle without any warmth in it at all. "You look like you've been in the sun, Mr. Vice President. Have you been out west?"

Reed laughed and slapped Eric on the back just a tad too hard.

"Just meeting people. Shoring things up before the convention. We've got a lot of backers."

"I bet. Also a lot of critics, lot of people who want a change."

The hand on Eric's shoulder gripped it tightly.

"I think it's a small minority who are very loud, Eric. Very loud. They won't amount to a damn thing when it comes time to vote. You'll see at the convention."

"If they're not ready for a change now," said Eric. "They certainly will by 1964."

The thing that passed for a fake smile disappeared from Reed's face. The vice president walked away from Fernandez without another word and stormed out of the cloakroom and back on to the senate floor. Marshall looked up from his legal back and furrowed his brow.

"Fernandez, what's going on?"

"The vice president is just feeling the heat," Eric said with a grin. "Is it my turn to vote?"

The Agriculturalist, Part Two

Despite his humble manners, attire, demeanor, and mindset, Archibald Santos was allocated more resources than a regular farmer or even an ordinary government official. This was not because of corruption, but because of trust, trust given to him by figures as varied as the President, the Bangko Sentral, and the local Credit Unions that dotted the land now as far as Mindanao. As he drove his ethanol-powered Automobile (made in China) to his workplace, the middle-aged man looked at the fields of tall, knobbly and rough, but still young Neem trees planted at strategic places in the fields surrounding the Agricultural College of Central Luzon. These trees, also known as Azadirachta indica, had natural anti-insect and anti-fungus properties, keeping away pests naturally. Not merely that, but the seeds of the tree were farmed for their oil, which acted as a natural, non-toxic pesticide.

The fields also contained Sigarilyas/Winged Beans, and another 'wonder-crop', Moringa oleifera, or in Filipino, Malunggay. Moringa oleifera/Malunggay was a fast-growing tree that easily reached heights of 12 meters, with thin, soft trunks. The leaves were edible, and contained vitamins, manganese, protein and even iron. The seed pods/fruit can be turned into a curry, and contained much the same, along with fiber. The seeds themselves contained Vitamin C, like Citrus, and the roots can be used as a condiment as they tasted like Horseradish when ground. And best of all, it resisted drought, as it needed less water than other crops. That was the true quality of it as a wonder-crop.

Archibald watched as the people he had paid to farm Neem, Winged Beans, and Moringa; poor people recruited from the cities, as well as second and third sons of smallholder farmers, practiced using new agricultural techniques. The payment not just included a generous sum of cash, but also the greater part of the harvest.

Build credibility, Archibald thought as the parking lot of the low-rise building came in sight. We need the farmers to believe in us, and our new seeds and techniques. Then we can spread our true ingenuity to all. Once he parked his car and opened the door, he was greeted by two of his 'associates', members of the 150-strong R&D team he was a member of. He smiled, looking at the leftmost associate, and spoke, "So, any word from my Alma Mater?"

Said associate, a slightly younger man about to leave his mid-thirties, replied: "None yet. The University of Minneapolis has not replied to your request to rebuild ties. At the same time, attempts to approach the University of Paris have suffered from problems of distance. Japan and China, as usual, are quiet. We are on our own."

A sudden surge of bitterness struck Archibald then, but he pressed it down; it was a distraction, it would not help. "If this world forsakes us, then it will only postpone the date of starvation further down the line. I saw what I saw in my Alma Mater, how their conformist thinking led them to ignore the fact that so many plants, including their own staples of potatoes, can feed people as well as rice and wheat or even better. How fertilizer is based on finite minerals that will eventually run out. And of course, the toxic effects of pesticides."

He clenched his fists. Is Borlaug's ghost haunting us from beyond the grave, convincing the world that one form of wheat, one form of rice would fit all? That 'agricultural advances' that give power only to a few sociopathic agri-businesses are the way to go? Archibald would have lost himself in anger then, but the second associate, realizing where this was going, tilted her head and said: "The Ministry of Foriegn Affairs has agreed to your request; the next trade mission heading for Ethiopia will buy seeds of Teff, as well as buy or commission agricultural texts and almanacs on how to farm it."

Teff was a relative of rice and barley, a thin plant with small, edible seeds also known as Teff. These seeds, being smaller than wheat or rice, cost much less fuel to cook, and thus much less energy and money. It was also adapted to both dry and wet conditions, perfect for the Philippines, with its dry and wet seasons. Not merely that, but a handful was enough to sow a large area; the potential was evident (though not to Borlaug, obviously).

The young woman, her hair tied in a bun as her lab coat glimmered in the early moonlight, spoke her words calmly and coherently. She knew exactly how to calm down Archibald's mood; the team leader himself appreciated that, as did the other associate. A few seconds more, and the Agriculturalist would say:

"Let's go inside." Already, the lights were shining from the windows, powered by methane from processed biomass (including human and animal waste), along with secondary generators that used ethanol or just oil.

-----

"So, Anita," Archibald spoke to the female associate once they were inside the building, seated around a small table that if not for the notes on it, would have been mistaken for one used for poker: "How's your project?" He meant her attempts to create a type of 'sugarcane charcoal' in order to add further productivity to the sugar farmers of the former haciendas of the Philippines. Anita smiled, then spoke:

"It's doing well. I've proven that charcoal can be made using bagasse, one of the waste products from sugarcane processing. This charcoal, when made into briquettes, burns clearly, without smoke or fumes, thus decreasing the risk of athsma in children and adults alike," The young woman then frowned. "But the costs are higher than expected; I have to use not only a kiln to burn and carbonize it, but also a binding agent and a press to turn the waste into briquettes."

Archibald nodded, "Nevertheless, we have a product that is less wasteful than the normal charcoal made from wood. You did well; I suppose we will just have to contact the Worker-owned cooperatives in the cities to produce presses and binding agents for us." If there was anything Archibald disliked about this new system, it was that several cooperatives, all with different standards and prices, were needed to do the work of one old-style Corporation. It was even worse with anything involving chemicals as well as machines.

Nevertheless, the benefits still outweighed the risks. In the old days, he would not have gotten to this height through ability and prestige alone. He had to remind himself of that.

--------------------------
The Maltese Sahle
--------------------------

Addis Ababa is a hard town, like the asphalt that crowns its central street. The people who call this corrupt moshpit home have a saying: "Live slowly or live quickly, you'll die eventually". And it's true. It's always been true in this goddamned place.

Samuel Selassie sat underneath the only working ceiling fan on the block, watching it chop up the smoke he'd filled the room with after a morning's worth of smoking. From his seat, he saw his name printed backwards on the door to his office. If he were standing outside, it would read correctly, but as seen from the glass on the inside, it was backwards, and he wouldn't have been able to read it if he didn't know it was his own name.

"This is a hard city. Like the asphalt that crowns its central street" he muttered to himself, flicking ashes into an ashtray. Chain-smoking had made his originally white clothes, a robe and a shamma, the yellow of unclean teeth. His straw hat also bore the stains of tobacco abuse.

That is when she came in, pushing through the door, letting it swing in so that Samuel could briefly read his name from the right side before it swung shut again. She was a young kitten of a woman, her richly embroidered clothes telling him that she had money. Her legs didn't quit until they hit the floor.

"Weyzero" Samuel greeted, "What can I do for you..."

"Shanani Haile" she sat down and swooned just a little, "I hear you can find lost items?"

"I can do that, and so can a dog." Samuel smashed his cigarette into the ashtray. "How did you lose this... item?"

"It was..." she looked both ways nervously, like she was crossing a street where all the cars were driven by her ex-lovers. "...it was stolen."

"Stolen. That is my kind of business." Samuel said. "What is the item?"

"A golden bust of the Emperor." she said, still nervous, but now Samuel understood why. The Emperor gave busts of himself out to close friends every year on his birthday. Such an item was priceless, and if the Emperor were to visit the young lady and find out she hadn't kept track of the bust, she could hurt his feelings. Emperors were sensitive souls. Soft. Not hard, like this town.

"I think I can find your missing head. What is in it for me?"

"I'll pay you." Shanani said. "My family has a lot of money. We could give you an island in lake Tana if you desired. The bust is important enough for that. The Emperor gave it to my father..."

Samuel waved, and she went quiet. "I don't need an island. What can I do with an island if I do not have a boat?"

"We could give you a boat too." she offered.

"Well that really is generous." he paused to drag on another cigarette. "But I think I will take the money. Money has more... possibilities."

"It's settled." She said, "Now, what will you need from me?"

"I will need to see the place where the bust was last seen." Samuel said, "Is there a good time for you?"

"Three this afternoon. That is when my roommate comes back from work. She is a civil servant, you know."

"I will be there. In the mean time, did you have any enemies?"

"No"

Samuel shrugged. "That's the only question I have. Go about your business for the rest of the day. I will be at your place at three. I will just need the address..."

She wrote down all he needed to know and left. He spent the rest of the early afternoon considering how hard this town was.

--

Samuel Selassie arrived at the woman's flat around three. She lived above a shoemaker's shop. Samuel inspected the place briefly, but made the determination that there was nothing suspicious about the shoemaker except for his workmanship. He knocked at the door to the flat, and a younger woman who he had never met before answered. She also had noteworthy legs, and heavy eyelids that made her every glance sort of seductive.

"Excuse me, is Shanani home?" Samuel asked.

"I'm here!" he heard her voice from the back. The younger girl let him in. He was greeted by a room decorated in wicker and wooden furniture of the nice hand-crafted type.

"You look like the hard-boiled type." the younger girl said, "Like the egg in a spicy doro wat."

"I am." he said. "Who might you be?"

"I'm Tigist" she said, "The roommate."

Samuel found Shanini swooning a little in the back room. "This is where it was, before..." she swooned a little more. Samuel found the place; a dusty table with a great big undusted spot conveniently marking where the base of the bust once had been. Samuel ran his finger along the table. It tasted like dust, and a little bit of something else..."

"Cocaine." Samuel said excitedly, "Do either of you partake in satan's powdered sugar?"

The girls look confused and shook their heads.

"Of course you don't. Cocaine has another nickname in this hard town. Some people call it 'The Emperor's Nose Jizz.'"

"Does that mean the Emperor stole it?" both of the girls asked, startled both by the idea, and the fact they had said it at once in exactly the same words.

"No, but it tells me that the statue was authentic. A regular golden statue would just shed gold and dust. Only a statue in the presence of the Emperor would shed this much cocaine."

"Tigist." Samuel grabbed the girl before she could react and held her by the shoulders. It was like he was trying to drill out her eyes with the power of his own eyes, that was how intense his look was. "Did you steal this bust?"

"No!" the young girl squealed, "Let go of me you hard-boiled egg!"

He decoupled from her dramatically. "I must believe you. This means I am out of ideas. There is only one other option..."

"What is it?" Shanani asked, sounding worried.

Samuel took out a smoke and started to smoke it. "Don't you worry, sugar. I have my ways. My mysterious ways..."

--

"You sure you need that many berries, friend?" the fruit seller in the bazaar asked, giving Samuel a sideways glance. "That many berries are liable to put you into a coma, or maybe some kind of trance like state."

"I know what I am doing." Samuel answered, his voice as hard as this town. He took the berries away to his office, where he mixed them with the ingredients handed down to him from ancient generations. He smashed the berries into a juice, staining his hands red so that when he pulled his hands up, they looked as if they were covered in blood stains. The finished pulp looked like somebody farted out their beating heart into a cup. He covered it with a lid and went outside, walking down those hard streets, alone. He walked along the gravel path until he saw a young boy playing in the mud. As natural as a cat, Samuel pulled out his gun and approached the kid.

"Hey kid." he said, opening the cylinder and taking out a bullet. "I'll give you this bullet if you drink what is in that cup."

"Woah, a bullet!" the boy said. "If I hit it with a hammer, would it go off?"

"Probably." Samuel said. "But first, you must drink."

The kid shrugged and drank. "This tastes bad." he complained.

"Life is bad. Keep drinking if you want the bullet."

The kid finished the concoction with a constipated look on his face. "I feel bad. Did you poison me?"

"No." Samuel said, "Feeling bad is normal. That's why people drink. Lay down and the feeling will pass."

The boy seemed to fall asleep, but at a snap of a finger, his eyes shot wide open. The boy's eyes were completely vacant.

"A bust of the Emperor Sahle was stolen from this neighborhood. Do you think you can find the culprit?" Samuel asked.

The boy said nothing. He ambled off dead of soul like Frankenstein's monster. Samuel followed from a distance. He watched the kid turn corners, moving as if every turn had a scripted purpose, no question about where he was going. Of course. How many busts of the Emperor had been stolen? Just this one, like, since forever. Whatever magic fed this result of the drug had no background noise to contend with. The boy went inside somebodies home. Samuel sprinted across the street and burst in, where he saw the child go to sleep on a couch.

"What is going on here!" a fat man came from the back, "I will have you know that I am a very important falasha, and I don't need people treating my front room like a bar! What is the meaning of this!"

"A Jew, huh?" Samuel smirked. "I have you dead to rights."

"Excuse me?" the man was surprised.

"Where did you hide the bust of the Emperor?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You gonna play it like that, huh?" Samuel grabbed the man and took firm hold of him. "We'll see what the magistrate says."

--

After depositing the suspect at the Magistrates house, Samuel retrieved Shanani and brought her as a witness. It was the four of them there in the Magistrates front room - Samuel, Shanani, the criminal, and of course the Magistrate himself.

"What is the meaning of all of this?" the magistrate asked.

"This morning Shanani Haile reported a missing Imperial Bust." Samuel began, "An investigation of the crime scene revealed traces of cocaine where the bust had once sat..."

"The Emperor's Nose Jizz" the magistrate said astonished, "So it was a gift from the Emperor himself!"

"Precisely as Shanani reported. She is an honest broad."

"So how did you discover this man was the culprit?" the Magistrate asked.

"I'm not!" the guilty jew cried out.

"Shut up." Samuel shouted. He turned to the magistrate. "At first I though Shanani's roommate Tigist was the culprit. She's poor, shown by the fact that she works outside of the house like a prostitute, even when she has the example of Shanani sitting around the house like a swooning vegetable, which is how a true lady should act."

"Naturally." said the magistrate"

"That lead me to the ancient ritual of Liebasha. The boy I chose for the ritual lead me to the house of this man." Samuel motioned to the writhing Jew.

"Liebasha is admissible as evidence, this is technically true." the Magistrate said, "But modern judges do not consider it legitimate, since Western methods fail to reproduce it. Plus there are many problems that might arise if the ritual of Liebasha is improperly acted. For instance, did you correctly administer the potion?"

Samuel smirked. "You know me. Have I ever failed to drug a young boy?"

"Perhaps not." the Magistrate conceded, "But I want something more than the Liebasha as evidence in this case. Did you recover the stolen statue?"

"No." Samuel admitted, "But this man is a Jew."

"That's enough for me. I declare this Jew guilty of theft!"

Shanani broke down crying. "Why did you do this to me?" she pleaded at the bewildered Jew. "Did I ever do anything to you?"

"I didn't steal the bust." the Jew replied. Shanani went running from the room, her hands pressed against her bawling face.

"You are sentenced, you thieving Jew, to have both hands cut off at the wrist as punishment for your crime."

"What the fuck!" the Jew screamed, "What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Beg? Entertain men with my mouth? I can't do that! My teeth are too sharp!"

"Shut up or I'll take your balls." The judge threatened. The Jew shut up.

Samuel left the building and found Shanani crying around the corner behind the Magistrate's house. "It is over. This town is hard, but you cracked it."

"Why is the world so cruel." she looked up at him.

Samuel pulled her close. "I want to hold you like a refugee holds onto their worldly possessions." he said, "I would kiss you like that too. Together, sweetheart, we'll crack every hard town in this whole universe. This town won't mean an amba of teff to me if I am with you."

"I love you, Samuel Selassie" she swooned, "Even though I only met you this morning."

-Kharkiv, People's Republic of Ukraine-

The sun dipped just below the horizon, and its rays shone past the bombed-out remains of a few buildings in a small town on the outskirts of Kharkiv to illuminate a couple of soldiers gathered around a fire. A soldier, patched, worn hat emblazoned with a bright red metal star, stood up, took up a nearby stick, and pushed around some wood in the fire. "Andrei, quit messing with that radio and get some more firewood." The man whose name was Andrei, fiddling with electronics in his lap, replied "Hold on, I've almost got it how I want it." The man standing up sighed, and threw the stick into the fire. He walked into the nearby group of trees. After a short silence, Andrei exclaimed and twisted a wire into position. The radio immediately began producing a song in a foreign language, interspersed by bursts of static.

"Oh, I know this one! Come back, check it out!" He waved to his fellow soldier in the trees. "It's all over, but the crying... and nobody's crying but me~" he began singing in heavily accented English. The man who went to get firewood turned back just long enough to shake his head, when a sudden crack resounded through the ruins.

The expression of mild disappointment and amusement frozen onto his face, the soldier fell limply forward.

Andrei immediately threw the radio off of him, silencing its somber notes, and picked up his gun. He ran as fast as he could. All the way away, he heard continuous cracks as bricks fell out of houses and holes appeared in the dirt around him. He cowered in the doorway of a building some distance away, waiting for the sounds to stop.

He pushed open the door of what used to be a restaurant, plates and silverware dropped askance around the floor, and a scent of dust and decay thick in the air. Trying to make as little noise as possible, he moved to the back entrance he had seen earlier. The crunching of detritus under the floor worried him, though, but he thought it would take sometime before whoever it was caught up with him. Pushing open the door, he looked carefully to the left and right. Convinced the coast was clear, he took one step out of the building.

A knife stabbed into him from the back, and the world went dark.

---

A woman in a black motorcycle jacket and skirt took out a handkerchief and wiped off her knife, glancing disdainfully at the man now laying quietly in the dust. "A Russian, as per usual. Do they have any actually Ukrainian soldiers, or can they not find any that actually want to work for them?" She briefly smirked, before she turned on her small radio. "Чорна (Chorna) here."

"About time, Чорна. I was beginning to think something unfortunate might have happened."

"As if, Colonel. There was a patrol where the data didn't indicate there would be, so it was necessary to eliminate them. It's unfortunate, because it might cause trouble for me later on, but nothing can be done."

"Understood. Our agent has verified that the target is headed to the rendezvous point on schedule. Consider the operation underway."

"Very well, I won't disappoint you."

"You had better not. The country could very well be dependent on this mission. Leonid out."

Чорна, or Khrystyna Yehorivna as her name actually was, turned off the radio and returned it to her jacket pocket. Picking up her old Mosin-Nagant Model 1891/30, she slung it over her back. Most of the regular infantry had been issued the new Zroya rifles, but she had requested to keep hers as it was much better suited to the work that she usually carried out either as a battlefield sniper or in her new capacity as one of the Ukrainian State's elite special forces troops, the Pryznyach. She had put a lot of work into it to keep it purring nicely, so she'd be damned if they took it away from her for one of those peashooters that couldn't hit much farther than 300 meters.

Smiling at her work, she jogged back to her motorcycle. "Just a little bit farther, old girl." She kicked a broken chair out of her way and revved the engine, heading east towards the city.

---

"Come on, old man, get out of the car." Khrystyna adjusted her sight slightly and leaned farther against the wall of an old, disused office complex. Her target was none other than the General Secretary of the People's Republic of Ukraine himself, the 69-year-old Hryhoriy Hrynko. "You've done enough blasted damage to our motherland, now your time has come to pay the price."

Below, the armored car stopped at a small condominium complex. Hryhoriy was allegedly going to visit some important civilian official or other, she could hardly care less. Nothing was more important than the moment-

A crack sounded through the city street, and yet another communist was dead.

Khrystyna quickly replaced her rifle on her back and ran out of the room. Here was the final task that awaited her... to somehow make it out of the city alive.

-Kiev, Ukrainian State-

"Anastasiya!" "Anastasiya Artemivna!"

Anastasiya was vaguely aware of someone calling her name. She shook off the sleep that clung to her mind, becoming aware of the fact that she was in a chair looking out of the window.

"Yes, Yeva? My apologies, I was deep in thought." Anastasiya turned around to look at her personal maidservant, who was watching her attentively.

"Were you now? You were so long in answering that I was half convinced you had fallen asleep in your chair."

Anastasiya blushed, and chuckled so as to cover it up. "Now, now, that's quite silly." Yeva looked concerned, and continued, "You have been working so much recently, I wouldn't be surprised. You really ought to take a rest, you need not take all of your father's burden onto yourself so quickly."

"That's where you're wrong, Yeva," she replied. "On the contrary, I should be taking it on even faster. No one will take me seriously if I do not. It would be that way even if I was a young man, but I'm not, so even more so."

"If you say so, your highness." Yeva appeared to have not changed her mind, but she continued anyway. "The Ground Forces Command has need of you."

"Very well." Anastasiya stood up, adjusted her dress, and took Yeva's arm. "Lead the way."

---

Anastasiya entered the war room to the sound of shouting.

"-your underhanded plan may not make the slightest difference!" "Sure, but at least I did something. What was your brilliant plan to unite Ukraine, to sit on your ass?"

Upon noticing her entry, the belligerents in the room froze for a moment, and then stood at attention along with the rest of those who had been merely observing the fight. The two most senior members of the Ukrainian Royal Army, General-Polkhovniks Valentyn Stefanovych and Ruslan Mykolovych, after a moment gestured for the remaining officers in the room to sit down. Valentyn quickly began to try to explain the situation. "Your highness-"

"Your Provisional Highness, you mean. She hasn't even been crowned yet," interrupted Ruslan.

"It doesn't matter in the slightest. She's still the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, by the constitution, not to mention the crown princess. Or have you forgotten that minor detail?" Valentyn gave him a pointed glare. Ruslan glared back, then let it drop. "Anyway, your highness, we have a considerable dilemma on our hands. Normally, as you have seen fit to leave the military matters to us until your coronation, we would have not bothered you with this issue, but we have reached an impasse which we have been unable to resolve."

Ruslan picked up the thread of the explanation. "We received word that the General Secretary of the People's Republic of Ukraine, that vile old man, was headed to a meeting with a commissar in the city of Kharkiv. The window of opportunity was very small, so there wasn't time to consult the whole chain of command. The officer in charge of the Pryznyach-"

"That's the Ukrainian special forces unit, correct? I've only heard stories from my father," Anastasiya interrupted.

"Indeed, we've done the best we can to keep them under wraps." Ruslan looked slightly irritated, but continued. "The officer in charge, a Colonel Viktor, gave the go-ahead for an assassination. Since the People's Republic is hardly an internationally recognized state, we felt that it was more akin to eliminating the leader of a rebel organization on our own soil." Now it was Valentyn's turn to glare disapprovingly at Ruslan. "The Republican command structure is in disarray, what with the intense centralization of power in his person. There are multiple factions jockeying for power within their Soviet. As such, we thought it would be the optimal time to renew our offensive and eliminate the travesty that is our eastern neighbor for good."

Valentyn followed by saying, "I completely disagree. There are factions within the Soviet that would be at least willing to consider working with us. I don't agree that such an important decision should have been left to a lower-level command, but the least we can do is not unfairly take advantage of it. There's no honour in it."

"That's quite enough information, thanks," Anastasiya replied. She put her finger to her lip and thought for a few moments. "While I may not have necessarily approved of this plan, it certainly turned out to our advantage, no? I see no choice but to exploit it to the utmost. The other countries in the world will not take us seriously if we cannot keep even our own country in order. In order for that to be the case, Ukraine must be reunified. No, it will be reunified. And it is our job to make it so." She looked around, seeing the generals on Ruslan's side and even a few previously on Valentyn's side nodding. "The world looks at us with dismay and condescension, one of the remnant states that sprung out of the Imperial collapse. The stagnant old government in St. Petersburg no doubt seeks to reassert control eventually. We have no legitimacy except that which comes from our national identity, and so we must bolster that at any cost."

"And so, my decision is this. Begin the offensive."

"Yes, your highness." went the chorus of voices.

"Very good. Carry on," Anastasiya saluted to them, and then swiftly departed, the voices of eager discussion rising behind her.

Ruslan looked at Valentyn with an expression of amusement. "I've only said this about one other in my life, and she's my wife, but it must be said: she's a hell of a woman."

"I'm inclined to concur," replied Valentyn, opening the folder of war plans. "This country will either become great, or fail miserably and fall under another's sway again. Time will tell."

Chinook
7:39 PM

Charlie Braddock hurried out of the Blaine County courthouse with Vic trotted in his wake. The square around the courthouse was deserted, only Charlie and Vic's cars were parked in front of the place this time of evening. Charlie's battered truck sat beside Vic's Ford. Both vehicles had a large star on the door with the word's BLAINE COUNTY SHERIFF stenciled inside of it.

"I'm driving," said Charlie.

"C'mon, boss," pleaded Vic. "I'd like to get there in one piece."

"You still aren't used to the roads here. You might get us lost."

"Bullshit."

"That's insubordination, Deputy Klein. Remind me to write you up when I get back."

They climbed into Charlie's truck and sped through Chinook. The town was quiet, as Charlie expected it to be. There were only a little over two thousand people that lived in town, most of them family folks who went home for dinner after they were done working. Those that didn't went to the roadhouses out in the county for drinks and dancing and whatever they needed.

Vic reached into the glovebox and pulled out the glass bubble with the magnetic bottom. He reached out and slapped it on top of the truck's roof. Charlie flipped a switch on the dashboard and the bubble on the roof flashed blue lights. Vic put on the radio and they listened to a station out of Billings that played big band music. The reception was spotty and crackly. Charlie reached over and changed the dial to a Canadian frequency out of Saskatchewan that had a better transmitter, but it played western music.

"I don't wanna listen to that shit kicker music, boss," Vic huffed.

Charlie chuckled and turned it up. Deuce Hopper and his Oklahoma Orchestra were in the middle of a set, broadcast live from somewhere. They were playing "Shame on You." Charlie beat time on the steering wheel with the song as Deuce crooned and played the fiddle. Vic crossed his arms and looked out the window as Chinook's small town faded away and the plains opened up.

Montana sat on the edge of the Great Plains, but Blaine County was smack in the middle of it. Buttes and small mountain ranges helped break up the monotony, but for the most part it was that large, empty expanse that seemed so big that it could swallow entire towns whole.

Vic perked up when they passed a sign on the side of the highway that announced Tony Strafford's campaign for Blaine County Sheriff. Vic shook his head and looked over at Charlie.

"When are you gonna but your signs up, boss?"

"I'll get around to it," he said with a shrug. "We still got almost six months until the election. Easy enough for Tony to put up signs when he works for the highway patrol. Nobody gives a rip about the election until summer's passed anyway."

Vic grunted, his way of disagreeing without disagreeing. Charlie ignored him and went back to listening to Deuce and the boys. It was after dusk when they finally reached Jordan's Crossing. Deuce was in the middle of "Cotton Eyed Joe" when Charlie turned the radio off.

Chinook was a small town and looked like a small town was supposed to look, houses laid out in grids and a main street with businesses. Jordan's Crossing was a nightmare of progress. Hastily built houses lined dirt roads that needed to be paved, liquor stores on damn near every corner, and Dixon Oil signs as far as the eye could see. Even the main street was named after the company.

Late in '58, they had struck oil in this part of Blaine County. In the year and two months since, this small patch of the county had been turned into a boomtown complete with all the problems that came with boomtowns. Migrant workers from all over the US and Canada flooded the place, guys looking for work or looking for an escape or maybe both. They would get liquored up on payday and in a town where men outnumbered women ten to one, fights up ensue. A bar fight was the reason they were out here now.

"What's the place again?" Charlie asked.

"Mac's, I think it's on Third Street, just off Dixon Way."

Charlie found the place a few minutes later. Mac's was a Quonset hut with a door and two windows. A wooden sign with "Mac's" scrawled on it hung above the door. Charlie and Vic got out and went in.

Either a bar fight or a tornado had occurred in the small place. There were overturned tables, broken chairs, blood on the floor. Vic immediately pulled out a notepad and pencil and started sketching the scene. Charlie walked up to a group of people by the bar. There was the bartender, looking pissed. Along with two other men.

"I'm Sheriff Braddock, what happened?"

"Son of a bitch Crowder, is what happened!" the bartender spat. "He always starts trouble in my place, I always gotta kick him out. Tonight he went too goddamn far."

"He pulled a knife," said one of the men. "He fucking stabbed Matt Relford six times. A bunch of the guys in the bar loaded Relford up in a truck and took him to the hospital."

"Where's this Crowder?" Charlie asked.

"Being looked for," said a voice from behind.

Charlie turned and saw a man in a very expensive suit walk through the door. He was about Charlie's height, so six feet even, with gray hair and gray mustache to match. Patrician would be the word Charlie would have used to described him. He had a Roman nose and oozed money. He was flanked on both sides by musclebound men in black fatigues carrying rifles.

"My security staff are combing Jordan's Crossing and the outskirts looking for Jason Crowder."

"Appreciate the help,' said Charlie. "But that's our job, Mister?"

"Dixon," he said without offering his hand. "Bob Dixon. The Dixon in Dixon Oil. Sheriff, you and your deputy here can rest easy. We've got this under control. The security staff here are made up of ex-police and military officers. So, take it easy."

Charlie chuckled to himself and looked back at the bartender and the witnesses. They didn't know what to do or say now that the man who was responsible for their livelihood was in the room.

"Vic," Charlie said after a moment of silence. "Get statements from these three men here. Same with Mr. Dixon and his two friends."

Charlie walked passed Dixon with a friendly nod. "This is a sheriff's department investigation, Mr. Dixon. I appreciate your cooperation.

Charlie squeezed between the two security goons on his way out the door.

"Where are you going, sheriff?" Dixon asked.

Charlie paused and looked back over his shoulder.

"Going to do my job," he said before walking out the door.

----



The Voodoo
12:12 AM

The Voodoo was made up in witch doctor chic. Candles provided the lighting for the place, they were mounted in tiki torches around the club. Tribal masks, bones, and voodoo dolls hung on the wall alongside fake shrunken heads.

The dance floor of the nightclub moved and shook, filled to capacity with young, black men and women dancing to the band onstage. Front and center was a young black man with an electric guitar, dancing as he played a loud and fast-paced riff. His kinky hair had been straightened and done in a large pompadour, he wore a bright purple suit and gaudy rings on his finger. Behind him, a drummer, bass player, and two horn players tried to keep up. The words 'T-Bone & The Bone Patrol' were stenciled on the drumkit. T-Bone slung his guitar behind his back and grabbed the microphone in front of him. The crowd cheered and the band went into a holding pattern as he half-sung and spoke the verse.

"Man, I came home the other night and all my shit was out in the front yard. I said there couldn't be one thing going wrong, that crazy ass girl of mine. Let me go over here and see what's wrong with her this time."

The crowd, the men in the crowd at least, cheered at the words.

"Went up in the house and she's sitting looking all crazy I said 'What's wrong baby?' She said 'You don't love me.' I said 'You know I love you.' She said 'No you don't. You stay out all night with yo friends, drinking and carrying on and you don't even think to call and let me know where you at' I said,'Well hold on a minute baby. Let me tell you one more time and maybe you'll believe me', so I told her something like this:"

T-Bone whipped the guitar back around and started playing a furious riff that sounded like a mix of the old blues standards and big band, but big bad music was never this fast or this aggressive. He kept his face close to the mic as he howled the chorus.

"I said I love you baby until the day that I die! I Spell it L-O-V-E. C'mon girl why you do this? You know I love, I love you, I love you! You know I tell you!"

In a flash, the guitar was back around T-Bone's back and he was clinging to the mic while the crowd erupted in cheers. Sweat was pouring off his face as he spoke again.

"I said c'mon baby let me back in the house. You know I love you. She said 'You don't even buy me presents'
'Yeah, I did. I bought you a box of chicken but I ate it on the way home.' She said, 'You don't even know my name!' I said yeah it's Melissa. She said 'No dumbass, it's Roxanne. Spell it out for me' Damn, man. Hold on. So I had to tell her something like this:"

This time, T-Bone danced to the beat in a strange duck-hop as he went into a guitar solo. He ran from one side of the stage to the other as the crowd went wild. He returned back to the mic, throwing his head back and slinging sweat across the stage, to belt out the chorus.

"I spell it R-O-X-A-N-N baby! Her name is Roxann and she's rocking my world. You know I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her, and so I tell her!"

More claps and whoops and T-Bone wiped the sweat from his face.

"She said 'Alright, you know I love you. I can't say no to you. You can come in the house.' I thought we was going to make some love but I heard a knock at the door... I was like, 'Goddamn. Who is it man?" White man said, 'I apologize for knocking so hard. This is Houston PD, we're looking for T-Bone Harris.' I said 'Hold on. He's in the back. Let me go get him for you.' So I went to the back of the house, man my woman's sitting there and says 'Where you going?' I said 'I gots to go!'"

T-Bone picked his guitar and played furiously as the song came to a climax.

"I started running! I started running for this white man take me away. She said 'Get yo shit and get outta here boy!'"

The song ended suddenly and the crowd thundered its applause. Harris waved his hands and bowed. The band followed his lead.

"Thank y'all," he said into the mic. "Y'all too kind. We gonna take a break, but we'll be back in about twenty or thirty minutes."

Harris set his guitar down on a stand by the stage and followed the rest of the band out in the back. A Petey Peterson tune came on the sound system, a fast-paced number that got the people on the dance floor moving once again, although plenty headed back to their tables during the lull in live music.

Elliot Shaw watched all of this from the Voodoo's bar. He nursed an old fashioned and watched the comings and goings of the club goers. Except for himself and a Mexican pachuco in a baggy suit, the rest of the club was all negro. No showing of Claire Beauchamp so far. An hour in and Sidney Applebaum's tip looked to be worthless.

He lit up a cigarette and thought about prowling by Beauchamp's pad when another white man came through the door. He was tall, close to six foot six, with a baggy suit and dark blonde hair in a crew cut. Elliot made him as a cop right away. The suit helped hide his piece in a shoulder rig. If he was the type of cop Elliot figured him to be, then he would have a drop piece and a sap somewhere on him. A negro followed him into the bar. He was tall, but not quite as tall as the white man. The negro's suit wasn't as baggy, so Elliot could clearly make out the service weapon in his shoulder. LAPD had a handful of negro cops, but he had no idea there was one working plainclothes.

He turned away as the two cops found a table. They didn't so much find one as the white man flashed his badge at a couple sitting at a table and made them leave. The Petey Peterson number ended. Following it was a slow Little Sadie Hamilton song that cleared the floor for slow dancing. The white cop stood and walked up to one of the cocktail waitresses. She wore a low-cut purple dress that showed off legs and cleavage and the cop was staring hard. He took her by the hand and walked her out to the dance floor.

"Motherfucker," Elliot heard the bartender muttered over his shoulder. "Fuckin' Hoyt."

He turned around and saw the man giving the dancing couple the stinkeye.

"He do this often?" he asked the man.

"Shit yeah," he said with a shake of his head. "Always coming in her with his token nigga Detective Thomas, getting free drinks, fucking my girls, and shaking me down for money. You okay, man. You been nursing your drink, which I don't car for too much, but you been keeping to yourself. So many white men come here and walk around like they're the fucking mayor of South Central. Imagine if I went into a white club. Not strutting, just going in for a drink. They'd lynch my ass."

Elliot nodded in sympathy and killed his drink.

"Another old fashioned."

"That's what I like to hear," said the bartender.

He turned to look back at Hoyt. The big man had his hands on the girl's ass as they danced. He saw several men at tables staring at them, glaring was more like it, as they moved across the dance floor. For his part, Thomas paid little attention and was staring at a notebook on the table.

Elliot polished off his second drink and paid the bartender for the two drinks, a hefty tip included.

"For your Hoyt troubles," he said as he passed over the money.

"Much obliged, mister."

With two drinks under his belt and no sight of the girl, Elliot was preparing to leave when he saw a man bolt on to the dance floor from the back room of the club.

"Somebody call the police!" he shouted. "There's a dead body in the alley!"

Murmurs broke out and people started to hurry towards the side exit of the club, the two cops taking the lead. Elliot was one of ones going towards the door. He muscled his way through the crowd and came out in front just at the exit of the club. He saw blonde hair tangled on the ground and a white woman in a red dress laying on her side. Hoyt and Thomas were above the body, Thomas squatting down to brush the hair from the body's face.

It was Claire Beauchamp with a neat little hole in the middle of her forehead.

Everything was black. Then an angelic choir broke out, creating the feeling of light, though no light was visually present.

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality
Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see

Unseen piano played as a vision of Sahle's brother appeared, older and haggard, a two dimensional image like that drawn on paper or cut from cloth. He started to sing alone.

I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy,
Because I'm easy come, easy go
Little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me

The piano. Yaqob faded away and was replaced by a handsome young Ethiopian man in a black trench coat. He was holding a smoking gun. A feeling of dread welled up as the man began to sing hauntingly.

Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
Mama, oooooooooh
Didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters

Piano. Yaqob appeared again, laying on the ground and bleeding next to the handsome man. The impression of colors swirled against the black field. Yaqob's face distorted in pain. Sahle didn't feel his own body, and found he had no way to confirm it in space, but he felt like vomiting. He was nausea as an ethereal force. The bleeding Yaqob continued the song.

Too late, my time has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Body's aching all the time
Goodbye, everybody, I've got to go
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Mama, oooooooooooh
I don't wanna die,
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all

Strange music. Yaqob faded, and action in the form of light exploded against the void. White men and black men in military uniform went to battle, stacked on each other in a way that implied three dimensional space in a two dimensional plane, like the epic painting of Adwa in the national museum. Soldiers on both sides traded lyrics, one line going to one man, another to another.

I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning
Very, very frightening me
(Galileo) Galileo
(Galileo) Galileo
Galileo Figaro
Magnifico-o-o-o-o

A white kid mutilated by a passing tank cried out.

I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me

The rest of the soldiers on both sides shouted in unison.

He's just a poor boy from a poor family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity

Piano. The blacks were losing the battle, tanks blowing up, guns running out of ammo and becoming spears. They fell back, fighting desperately, and they began to plead with their white enemy. The whites argued back.

Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go (let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go (let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go (let him go!)
Will not let you go (let him go!)
Never, never let you go
Never let me go, oh
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
Oh, mama mia, mama mia (mama mia, let me go)
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me

The unseen music surged. Something changed. New people showed up waving many different flags, and they stood by the blacks. Some were recognizably white, some asian, and they suddenly outnumbered the aggressor whites. They continued the song.

So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?
So you think you can love me and leave me to die?
Oh, baby, can't do this to me, baby
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here

The whites fled for their lives as the music climaxed. Everything faded away, and rising up like a balloon came Sahle. He didn't recognize himself visually - this Sahle was unshaven and wore his hair in a ragged afro like a mountain shifta. But it was him; he felt it. The dream told him so. The mood in the vision died down and went somber.

Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me...

Sahle woke up. His head was spinning and he was disoriented. Above him was the blue sky, rushing by him as the wind whistled past his ears. In his arms were two girls, sleeping naked. Beneath them was something metallic.

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May 14th, On a Moving Train in the Danakil Desert
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Two years ago the Sultan of Egypt gave the newly crowned Emperor Sahle a golden train. To the Sultan's credit, real gold leaf had been used in some of the details, but most of the surface was just painted gold. It was, of course, garish. Even Sahle was vaguely aware there was something inappropriate about rolling through poverty-stricken places in such a ridiculous show of wealth. But he was the Emperor, and it was his right, so he did it.

There was something almost Gothic about the design of the train itself. Its busy frame was hardly aerodynamic. One of its flaws was a walled depression on top like the widows walk of an old European mansion, which looked impressive, but collected rain water during the monsoon season and had to be drained by hand. But sometime in the past, he didn't remember when, Sahle had discovered a second use for this feature. When it was dry it was an useful place to take women. It was like something out of a Hollywood movie, giving adventurous girls a cheap thrill as they climbed onto the top of a moving train and ducked from the rushing wind. And when pressed into this space, adrenaline pumping, Sahle had time to make a move...

He'd led the two of them on top of the train the night before, equipped with a strange new drug Rudolph von Lettow-Vorbeck had acquired for him, from a head doctor of all people. There was nothing around for miles, the empty desert hills outside of Djibouti passing them by. The drug came in the form of small paper tabs, the image of a black man with wild hair, a golden cane, and a Victorian way of dressing printed like labels on the face of each one. Sahle ingested as instructed, and helped the two girls they had picked up in Djibouti to ingest theirs. That was the last thing he remembered before the weird dreams.

He woke up disoriented and disturbed. The girls were wrapped with him in the blanket like a threesome kebab. He noticed immediately that they had all lost their clothes at some point, floated away, a gift in the desert for some wandering Afari tribesman to prove to him that the gods must be crazy. The girls woke up with difficulty, and as they knuckled the sleep from their eyes he told them about their predicament. Only one complained. He gave her the blanket to hide her shame from the empty desert and led them both to the ladder. Going first meant he had a good view of the second girl, and he didn't shy away from enjoying it. They all wrapped in the blanket together and went in the car. Rudolph was inside reading, and sipping on a whiskey. He didn't look up at them.

"Whatever you gave me fucked me up." Sahle said.

"Lysergic acid diethylamide" Rudolph replied, still not looking up.

"Sounds like a poison. Did you poison me, Rudolph?" Sahle slipped out of the blanket and walk across the train car.

"The Emperor has no clothes." Rudolph said dryly.

Sahle opened a cabinet and grabbed three robes. He tossed two at the girls, and they dressed underneath the blanket. "What the hell was that stuff?"

"I told you."

"You want to know what I saw?"

"You can't tell me what you saw." Rudolph looked up, "That's the point. You had a brief glimpse into your inner psyche. All those questions we have as humans, about religion and our true nature within the universe, that tab gives you a little window view into all that. You saw your soul, your majesty, and you can't very well explain your soul to me now that you are sober."

"Well if that's my soul, I'm fucked." Sahle took a bottle of wine and took a swig.

"Maybe that is the point." Rudolph looked back down to his book.

Sahle snapped his fingers in the general direction of the back of the coach where a guard stood. Guards always stood there, to the point they were invisible to their Emperor, at least until he needed them. "I need real clothes. How far are we from Dire Dawa?"

"One hour, your majesty." the guard said.

"We'll need to find a place for my guests. Get... uh... get somebody on that." The guard went for another car.

Sahle tossed the bottle of wine to the two girls, who were clothed in robes that were very baggy for them. Now they had clothes though, they committed mitosis from the blanket and became two separate entities once again. The guard came back with a wave of servants. Some whisked the girls away with their wine while the rest dressed the Emperor. The baggy emergency clothing was replaced with a fitted robe with embroidered detail, and a thicker robe over it, so that he looked presentably imperial.

"What is a head doctor doing with those kinds of drugs?" Sahle asked, sitting down, propping his booted feet on an unused chest board.

"Experiments I suppose" Rudolph said, "Stress tests for the psyche. I can't say I completely understand the psychiatric profession."

"Keep me abreast on whatever weird stuff you find." Sahle said, "But I don't think I want to see that one again. The dreams..."

"Perhaps your majesty should stick to cannabis?"

"No" Sahle "I get bored of just one thing. People don't realize how boring it is to be an Emperor. If they knew that, they'd feel more sorry for me."

"I weep." Rudolph replied. He glanced up at the window in front of him. "It looks like we are coming into Dire Dawa"

Sahle looked up and saw the same thing. The Danakil desert gave way to climbing foothills. Plant life returned to the scenery, in the form of scrub brush and wiry trees. Desolation extreme was replaced with desolation in the regular sense, like traveling from Mars to Arizona. A town was cradled in these hills, an out of place garden of green trees interspersed by buildings as dusty as the surrounding lands.

Dire Dawa means "Empty Plain", a name that conjures the image of shrugging founding fathers coming down from the highlands, finding a place with no outstanding features, and trying to make a name for it. It was not put here for any feature attractive to life. Dire Dawa was built only sixty years ago as a mid-way stop for the railroad connecting Addis Ababa to Djibouti. There was a town here now, a mixture of Afaris and Somalis coming up from their deserts to live with the Ethiopian mechanics and merchants.

The train slowed down, passing humble churches, mosques, and personal homes. It approached the train station, came to a stop in front of the platform, where a small delegation of officials waited to board Sahle's personal car.

Zemichael Hagos was secretary to the Minister of the Pen. He was a stone-faced bureaucrat with a short patch beard. Sahle swung around and smiled when he saw the man come in. "Hey look, the Minister of the Eraser is here!" Sahle said jovially. Zemichael's expression didn't change. "Your majesty." he said politely. Sahle motioned for him to sit down, and he sat.

"How is Desta Getachew? Is he ready for his party?"

"The Minister is fine." Zemichael replied.

"I bet he is, the old dog! Did he send you to hurry me up?"

"I'm here to discuss government matters. The minister wants you to review these before he signs them."

"Ah." Sahle's smile died.

Zemichael had a leather case with him, and he opened it to produce papers, sliding them over to Sahle when appropriate. "Are you ready, your majesty?"

"Lets get this over with." Sahle sighed.

"First, there is the cost of the party in..."

Sahle signed the paper in front of him. "Done. Next."

Zemichael paused broodingly. "The ambassador to the Philippines is requesting a metric ton of teff seeds for an agricultural project in their homeland."

"Don't they eat rice?" Sahle scrunched up his face. "Never mind, I don't give a shit, send them the grain." Zemicheal slipped him a paper and he signed it.

"Ras Hassan of Adal regrets to inform your majesty that he will not be able to attend the Minister's birthday celebration."

"Okay." Sahle shrugged.

"Your brother has returned home. We have been informed that his meeting with the Rhodesian government did not go well. Your brother preached to the Rhodesian president about the behavior of his government toward their blacks."

"Mother Mary..." Sahle cursed, "Why did God see fit to give me a priest and a nun for siblings? I try to live my life without headaches and there they go, making headaches for me. I give them enough to entertain them, they have all the money they need to enjoy themselves, why do they spend their leisure time fucking with me?"

"Taytu hasn't caused you any headaches since she left for America." Zemichael said.

"Yes, and I am grateful for that, but it is more difficult to send Yaqob away. He is the heir."

"You are healthy. If you get married, you can do away with that necessity..."

"I don't... shit. I've heard all this." Sahle complained. He put his head on the desk as if he were going to sleep. "I'll think about Yaqob. I can't send him to America though."

"Why?" Zemichael asked, "The Americas are already Europe's trash can, why couldn't it be ours as well?"

"Be careful." Sahle sat up straight and warned. Warning done, he slackened again. "I don't want them together, working each other up into a noise. Where would I send him if not there?"

"This is a conversation for the minister." Zemichael said.

"You're right." Sahle replied, "I'll put it off until then."

The Brothers' War, Part One (Of Ten?)

Sultan Al-Hakam Kiram I, spiritual head of the Muslims of Mindanao, sat at the porch of his Sulu residence, guarded by only a couple of experienced men. On his rocking chair, the prematurely wrinkled man - he was only in his mid-thirties - read a letter from his friend, Anthony Walter Dayrell Brooke of Sarawak. He smiled as he read the portion about developments in Sarawak itself, how it was at last prospering as an independent state. The other portion, about developments in Sabah/North Borneo, made for much more sobering reading; note that Al Hakam Kiram was always sober due to the demads of his faith.

He heard light footsteps behind him as the manor door opened, and a figure stepped out, his wife, Sabiha, who wore a rainbow-patterned headscarf. Smiling, the young woman then say, "grieved again, my lord?"

A nod from Al-Hakam Kiram, who would say, "My brother has crossed the line." Mubarak Mansur Kiram was every bit the opposite of Al-Hakam, a warrior when his older brother was an intellectual, contempteous of patience and caution. Sent to reestablish the Kiram family's hereditary rights over Sabah, Mubarak had allied with a clique of hardline Muslim clerics and taken control of the region for himself, claiming to be the 'True' Sultan of Sulu and calling his brother an apostate for coming to terms with the Lady President and her regime. "He has massacred several dozen protesters in Kota Kinabalu. More importantly, there are rumors of pirates gathering at Lahad Datu, only a stone's throw away from Sulu itself. If that is not an indication of an upcoming attack, I do not know what is."

Sabiha indigantly exclaimed: "He would not be so brazen!"

The two both knew it was a lie. The Sultan then said, "He is. But I am not without teeth; I may not rule Sulu in name, but I have friends everywhere, even in my brother's domain." He then pursed his lips. "Sabiha, take a ferry to Manila; stall our Lady President so that I can move with impunity. For all her merits, our glorious leader will only support the cause of the people of Sabah if there is a rebel movement waiting in the wings. She will not act in a way that portrays her as hungry for territory."

Sabiha would tilt her head slightly to the right, "But the Lady President - Priscilla - has your claim to Sabah; you are a citizen of her country now, and thus she has inherited your rights to the region."

Sultan Al-Hakam Karim I smiled faintly and said, "She does not see it that way; it would be 'feudalistic' for her to do so. No, she will pay genuine service to the ideal of self-determination until my brother has crushed all opposition and brought all of Sabah under his iron boot. Then, when he attacks Philippine Territory, only then will she wage a war of self-defense. Idealistic, but not what we need."

A nod from Sabiha; already, she was mentally preparing the lines she was going to feed the Lady President, "I and my servants will pack my bags. I will also bring bodyguards, but not so much that you are left undefended. I love you, my lord, and I promise, I will do my best."

The reply was, "Bring poems, calligraphy, and minature paintings; our Lady President loves beautiful things." He then held out the letter from Anthony. "My brother has also ordered a ban on miniatures; remind the Lady President of that once the truth comes out."

Sabiha sighed, "You do not need to make me hate my brother-in-law more. Either way, I don't need to know about how you are going to create rebels under that man's iron fist. Or what your plans are at all. I may stay loyal, but I am not immune to pain or even blackmail." This was a kind reminder that if the Sultan was serious about this, he should exercise prudence and caution. Loose lips sank pirate ships, after all.

Al-Hakam Kiram I got up from his chair; he was still perfectly capable of walking normally, it was just that rocking chairs were relaxing. "I'm going to visit the local Mosque; it is almost prayer time."

A smile from his wife; the residence had its own attached prayer room, but the local Mosque had 'old family friends' whose business she didn't pry into too much. She then gave a bow of thanks, and said, "To the downfall of your brother."

Another reply, "To the downfall of my brother."

Vienna, Austria, Danubian Federation

"His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of the Danubian Federation, Kaiser Franz Joseph the Second!" Those words bore into his head, before being drowned out by the thunderous applause drowning out all noise across Michaelplatz. He stood on a podium, look down across the thousands of people who had come to hear the speech he had been preparing for far too long.

"My people! Citizens of Vienna and the Federation! For years we have worked together, rebuilding and reforming our great nation into one where all people and religions may live with the same rights and liberties as all others. Though we are still recovering from our economic downturns, the damages of the civil war, and the severe issue with Russian immigration… we must continue to stand strong in the face of these adversities." He proclaimed into the microphones before him, the cool wind moving his hair and tie ever so slightly.

"I, and the Imperial Council, will continue to work with the Principalities across the Federation to tackle their problems individually instead of continuing our broad reforms that only fix a few issues and cause more elsewhere! This will tie in to the "Infrastrukturreparaturge setz" enacted in 1958, allowing us to focus bringing up the Bundesautobahnen to standard everywhere in the Federation. However, to our east in Gallicia-Lodomeria, our people are dealing with a new challenge. The collapse of the Russian Empire has caused turmoil through out their lands, and tens of thousands of people illegally enter the Federation every month. Rape, stealing, and murder are starting to become rampant. I will not tolerate our people being forced to suffer for this, and I am of this moment enacting an Imperial Decree that the Federation's borders are officially closed to all successor states of the Russian Empire and the 'Kommando Militarstreife & Militarpolizei' to be deployed to enforce this."

Several reporters immediately began yelling questions at the Kaiser, their pens scribbling fanatically in their notebooks. "What of the Russian and Ukrainian people that already are inside the Federation? What will be of them?" Asked on of them, with several other reporters vocalizing similar questions of their own.

"All civilians that entered the Federation legally, and have family who are citizens of one of the Principalities, are allowed to remain and live freely in our nation. If they have entered legally but do not have family, they will remain in Galicia-Lodomeria. Otherwise, all others will be deported. Because of this decree, the Federation has now officially declared it's support and recognization of the Ukrainian State as the official state of the Ukrainian people in the collapsed empire."

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Krakau, Galicia-Lodomeria/"Austrian Occupied Poland", Danubian Federation

It was a quiet morning in Krakau on this day, the sun's rays just barely starting to creep over the horizon to start their job of illuminating the world. A faint mist clung to the damp air, ever trying to reduce visibility. Several people were already up and awake despite the time of day, either on their way to work or conversing on street corners with friends. A group of four men were doing just that, smoking cigarettes and making idle conversation while a young boy walked up to them.

"Morning Mr. Kus! I have your paper today." He said, his Hungarian Accent already showing despite being quite young himself.

"Thank you Varga, what tells of the Pawie's today?" The largest man said, taking the paper from the lad and giving him what could best be described as a fatherly head pat.

"The Pawie's and their Szkop's are busy in the eastern city with the Kacap's, who are causing a stir over "rations" or something. I didn't pay much attention about the reasons since I figured it wasn't important." He said, nodding at Kus as he took another drag from his cigarette. Kus would look over to the left, at another member of the group who was just putting out his own cig with his shoe.

"Looks like my group will have an easy time in the north then, Kus. Need to stay alert though, the Pawie's are stupid but even they'll notice large movements of weaponry no matter how hard I try to hide them. I say we keep avoiding the west of the city. Even if the Szkop's are busy in the east, they still pay more attention in their neighborhoods."

Kus would nod, tossing his own cigarette into the street behind him before turning back to the group. "Just remember to keep everything you write down in Russian or Ukrainian, it'll keep the eyes on the troublemakers and not us if they happen to find out. Alright boys, let's get moving. Cracow and Poland aren't going to liberate themselves without us guiding their way."

Then, in one voice, they all proclaimed "To hell with the Kaisers!"

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Two Hours Later
Eastern Krakau, Galicia-Lodomeria/"Austrian Occupied Poland", Danubian Federation

"Get moving, back to your designated areas. Move!" Shouted an Austrian MP, who was standing in the back of an old military flatbed. "All Russian Refugees are to move to their designated refugee zone, or you will be arrested!"

Here, the streets were chaotic. Trash and broken glass littered the entire area, let alone all the people. The situation had started to get worse over the past few months, and now MPs were forcing the refugees to move at gunpoint. Many Russians put there hands up whenever one of them came up to him, shouting in German or Czech, depending on their nationality. Many of them simply didn't know what to do most of the time, due to neither party having many speakers of the other's languages. Which led to many Austrians beating Russians down, before handcuffing them and leading them to nearby trucks.

"Oberwachtmeister! Most of the Russians have been moved to their zones or arrested, but a squad Bohemians report that a group of them has holed up in a house, evicting the residents. They're armed too!" Shouted a corporal, running up to the man in the truck. "Wachtmeister Schleibaum, take additional men with you and get them to reinforce the Bohemians. Then, remove those Russians through any means nessecary. Vienna is sick of these inbred wichsers, and wants them dealt with." The Sergeant nodded, and rushed off to gather more men.

The Czechs were already positioned outside the building, which was a communal housing building on the corner of a less-travelled back street. Some were hunkered down in nearby buildings, rifles aimed at the occupied residence. The Czech sergeant glanced down as his watch, and back at his men, and then at Schleibaum who was approaching with another squad behind him. "Schleibaum! Good, with you here we can storms the building if we must." He said, his thick accent making his German a bit off.

"We're going to have to, the Oberwachtmeister gave us the order to remove those Russians. I want you to provide cover for us should they attempt to resist." He responded, the Czech Sergeant nodding.

"That won't be a problem, they seem to mostly be hiding. We've tried to get them to peacefully exit but we've had no response."

Schleibaum nodded in return, motioning for his makeshift squad to move towards the building, their boots much louder to his ears as they moved forward. One of the Gefrieters under his command looked around him for a moment once everyone was in position around the door, and quickly forced the door open. The rest of the Squad pouring into the building with their rifles raised.

There were screams almost immediately, dominantly of children as the squad found themselves in a group of unarmed refugees. Elderly, Mothers, Children. The few men who are with them immediately surrendered themselves, and were checked by a couple privates to see if they were armed. "All unarmed, Schleibaum. What do we do?"

"Line them up outside, so we know who to send where."

It took several minutes to coax the elderly out of the building, but eventually they were escorted outside where they were all lined up against a wall. Arranged from youngest to oldest, and separated between sexes. Schleibaum paced down the line, reading the makeshift refugee papers that were issued to all of them. He handed the papers back to all of them, and stood before the children. "Find your mother, then I want you to head to your zones." He said in broken Russian, but thankfully the children seemed to understand and the majority of them left with their mother. "All elderly are free to move to their zones as well, if you need assistance moving, a truck will take you there."

They also nodded, able to gauge through his lack of complete knowledge of what he wanted them to do and they left as well, boarding one of the trucks the MPs had parked for the occasion. Once Schleibaum had seen the children and elderly were away for several minutes, he motioned for the rest of his squad to move up. The only refugees left were three adult males, and a single young male child. "Do you have any parents?" He asked, before nodding slowly as the child shook his head no.

He looked back his squad who had joined him mere moments ago, and returned to speaking German. "Alright, shoot all four of them and be done with this. Make sure they're dead too."

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May 20th, Maputo, Rhodesia
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He blinked, a fully concerted effort, tears running down his cheeks, pain ripping his body apart like a thousand hot knives. The sky above him should have been the brightest blue he had ever seen, and yet it was marred by dirty black smoke that boiled across it. The ringing in his ears had died away enough for him to hear the sound of a fire crackling nearby. His left side was warm, far warmer than the right, and he knew that the flames were getting closer. Something big and black flashed across his vision and he felt rather than heard passage of a helicopter above him. Flashing spots of light descended from the helicopter as it roared over him and he was suddenly aware of being struck by hundreds of small metal objects. It took him a moment to realize what they were. Shell casings.

Pain lanced through his chest as he tried to turn over. He risked a glance down to see his shirt was torn and bloodied, from what he couldn't say. The last few seconds had been one huge explosion of pain. He moved his fingers and toes, that was encouraging. Smoke was stinging his eyes as he brushed at them, succeeding only in adding soot to the blood and tears. He was about to make another move when he remembered that someone had just tried to kill him. He blinked again, trying to refocus his mind on what had happened.

He was brooding. Eyebrows pinched together, eyes slightly out of focus, lips set in a firm line, the very image of a man who was worried about something. The room around him was silent, though well lit with sunlight that poured in through a pair of tall white colonialesque windows that looked out over well manicured lawn and neatly spaced trees. A man in desperate need of money had agreed to buy the house and register it in his name in exchange for a small yearly payment, and his life. Andrew Walls was always generous to those to helped him.

The sound of tires on gravel caused him to look up as a red Buick town car rolled past the window. Normally he might get up and hurry to greet the occupant but today it increased the worries that were already filling his head. He was a businessman, granted an illegal one, but he had done well for himself. The house he now enjoyed was a well built former estate home on the edge of Maputo. Most of the farmland that came with the estate had been sold off but he'd kept the outbuilding, they made for useful storage of merchandise.

"Andrew, she's here." The head of his personal security, simply called Jim, stuck his head around the white doorframe, his black face and hair a stark contrast to the white paint.

"She". The one. The only woman he had felt anything more than lust for and now he was afraid of her. Why? Because of the raids? Fifteen raids in five days as the Maputo Local Police, with the aide of the Rhodesian Security Bureau ("RSB"), kicked in door after door and his associates began to die or vanish with alarming regularity. But this woman, this white woman, who he had come to believe might love him, was she the one who was feeding the RSB inside information on his operation?

He could hear her high heels, imported by him from America, clicking on the tile as she entered the main foyer of the house. In a moment she would walk into the room and smile at him, a devastating flash of teeth beneath Opaline eyes and long brown hair. She was his weakness. But was she also the author of his doom?

The cigarette in his hand, an expensive Cornell Brand, had burnt low in his fingers and he dropped it without noticing onto the tile at his feet. Such carelessness and disregard for the cleanliness of the house was out of character, but then this was no ordinary day. Was she one of them? Had she lied as she lay in his bed, kissed him and fucked him, all the while feeding information to the RSB?

For an instant he was keenly aware of the sounds of the house. The sound of the wind as it blew through the staircase beyond, the barely audible laughter coming from the kitchen were the staff worked at making a lunch for his guest. Only Jim was nearby now, the rest of his cadre were out hunting gazelle with semi-automatic weapons and drinking up a storm. Normally he might join them, but not today. Maybe never again. She would tell him. She had to tell him.

The footsteps came closer. Was it his imagination or could he hear an airplane? He glanced out the window. The bright blue sky that had seemed so inviting that morning now seemed to be filled with unspoken dread. His pistol was heavy against his leg where he had concealed it with a jacket. Were they coming with her? For her? Where had everything gone so wrong.

Then she was in the doorway. Long white legs bare from her toe strap heels to just above her knees where a red dress began and continued up to very attractive and pronounced cleavage. Above that her eyes gleamed with the intense sexuality he had always found so irresistible. She flashed him a devastating smile and did a small twirl as she moved into the room, the dress riding high enough to show him that she wore no underwear beneath it. Was this the actions of a woman about to betray someone she loved?

Then there was that sound again, steady, persistent, like a large insect droning through the African morning.

"Andrew." She said, her voice low and seductive as it always had been. She was a front office staffer at the local Police Detachment and had been quite helpful to him, warning him of impending operations. At first she had been a tool, a means to an end, but she had soon wrapped him around her little finger and he had given her whatever she wanted. Perhaps it was the sex, she was hungry for it, or maybe it was the danger of her job, the rush of being so close to discovery. She was irresistible.

The sound was growing louder. Only a second has passed since she'd twirled and his gaze was drawn back to the window. That was when he saw the plane. You could not live in Rhodesia and not recognize the De Havilland Mosquito. Two powerful engines on either side of the aircraft drove the plane at speeds of over 300 kilometres an hour and with eight machine guns it was a formidable aircraft. Exactly zero of the planes were privately owned which meant only one thing. The Feds were coming.

He blinked, a small fraction of a second and in that fraction of time he saw the bomb bay doors drop open. So many things flashed through his mind in that moment as he turned back to her. The red dress, her white skin, cheeky smile, all of it imprinted on his mind forever as he reached towards her. In that moment he did not care if she had betrayed him. He was going to die and he wanted to be with her when it happened.

Above them, even as she reached towards him, a 250 pound bomb detached from the underside of the aircraft and it leapt skyward. The bomb fell, the small whistle that might have warned someone beneath it of a drop had long been removed. It separated cleanly and silently from the aircraft, wobbling slightly as a strong wind buffeted it, pushing it slightly off target, only by a foot or two, but would be enough to save his life.

But not hers. She was to close to the doorway as the bomb slammed through the roof of the house and buried itself in the floor. For a brief moment he saw surprise and fear on her face. Then the bomb exploded.

They had been so close, their finger tips an inch a part. The concussion of the blast had thrown her into the air before the fire incinerated her. He had been behind the wall, sturdy adobe brick, that did very little to redirect the blast but either through luck, or perhaps gods will, he had been blown through the big picture window he had been staring out of seconds before.

He had hit the ground, bounced, and then continued to bounce into the fields beyond the house. The last thing he could recall was the blue sky above his head before be blacked out.

He wanted to scream at the sky, shake his fists at god, anything to make himself feel better but his desire to survive held him in place as the helicopter swept overhead again. He had never actually "seen" one before and now he hated them. He could see a white man sitting on the edge of the open cargo doors, firing a machine gun that appeared to be mounted on a moveable arm that stuck out from the side of the aircraft. What the hell was he shooting at?

His head was pounding as he slowly raised it to look toward the house. It was fully engulfed in flames now, the white walls peeling and collapsing in on themselves. The trees that had been so beautiful an hour before were turning black and curling, recoiling from the heat. A number of vehicles were scattered around the driveway, most of them riddled with bullet holes. He recognized them his own, the bodies of his men thick on the ground. A few of them moved, screaming sounds he could not hear as they tried to crawl for whatever cover they could find.

Another explosion caused him to duck involuntarily. He looked up again to see two armoured cars advancing up his driveway, their machine guns slaughtering the wounded even as their main guns targeted the out buildings. He felt more tears. It was gone. All of it.

The smoke was thickening, blowing across his hiding spot, and he took the opportunity to begin crawling away beneath the black cloud. It hurt to move but his desire to live was strong. He had survived Detroit, Chicago, a new country, built a financial empire, and though he had lost all of it, he would live on. He would live for her.

Sixty odd planes flew through the abnormally windy skies above Truk, their propellers chopping into the warm tropical air as they combed the ocean. If the neighboring Philippines happened to have anyone observing the display then there would have surely been an international incident. The planes were not alone, and below them sailed a small task force led by the carrier Shiroyama plus the battleships Katsuragi and Musashi. Accompanying the capital ships were a handful of destroyers and light cruisers. It was enough to constitute a strike force against any number of of the less powerful nations in the area, and it was no secret which one in particular it was targeted at.

Far ahead of the task force was a rare sight, a dirigible flying the naval ensign of Japan. Though the Empire had adopted airships after the loss of the fleet at Dalian with the intent of using them as a cheap, quickly assembled alternative to an actual naval force, little had ever come of the effort. Plans to create "torpedo airships" to perform attacks from a relatively safe position on enemy warships never came to fruition thanks to the 2nd American Civil War which cut Japan off from helium supplies. Forced to use hydrogen, they couldn't risk sending an airship into the range of flak for fear of the gas igniting. And so, Japanese airships only remained in support roles.

In the case of the Hayabusa, the dirigible flying before the fleet, it served an anti-submarine role. Where it might have instead carried torpedo tubes, it instead carried dozens of compact sonar buoys. Many of then had already been deployed, but were picking up nothing so far.

"Deploying buoys eighteen through twenty-five, switching seven through seventeen over to the Katsuragi's operators. Switch your frequencies."

The twin lines of men hunched over sonar equipment re-tuned their receivers to match the transmitting frequencies of the newly-dropped buoys. Had the airship not been built as a torpedo boat, then they would have had enough room to house operators for all the active buoys. At least IJN battleships had sonar suites of their own that could be used in a pinch in concert with airship-dropped buoys.

Yumi flipped his equipment over to buoy twenty-one. Nothing, just as usual. For a force sent specifically to hunt down a submarine, there sure weren't any submarines to be found. Out of boredom he peered out of the gondola's window, hoping that he might catch one surfacing to recharge out of a stroke of luck. Unsurprisingly, he didn't. The specific submarines they were looking for hadn't left their home port nearly long enough ago to be running out of power in their batteries.

"Captain!" Yelled out the Hayabusa's radio operator, turning quite a few heads. "The Katsuragi has been torpedoed, they're dead in the water!"

Impossible! Thought Yumi, frantically switching back to the frequencies of earlier buoy's to make sure he hadn't missed anything. Still nothing. A modern submarine might go unnoticed in these conditions, but not some old clunker from the 30's!

"It might be among our own fleet," said Yumi, "hiding in the noise from our own ships."

"No, they couldn't attack from that range without almost surfacing." Said the Captain. "Switch all buoys to active sonar, find it."

Yumi did as he was told and went through each of the buoys, ordering them to begin sending out sonar pings.

"All buoys on active, sir!" Said the crew in unison.

"We'll backtrack, start monitoring your assigned buoys from nine to seventeen."

"Yes, sir!"

Ping

Yumi heard it the moment he flicked back to buoy ten, the faint noise of a sonar ping being returned. A quick look at the deployment plans on the clipboard next to him confirmed that it wasn't any part of the task force.

"I've got something! Buoy ten!"

Ping

Ping

"Off the Katsuragi's portside!"

"I'm reading it too! Buoy twelve!"

"Buoy nine, I confirm."

"Buoy ten, distance estimate... nine kilometers? Can anyone else confirm?"

"Buoy eleven, I hear it too."

"Buoy nine, distance estimate nine-point-five kilometers."

"That wasn't a Mark 14 torpedo," said Yumi, "too far out. I'd guess it's not even a P-Class boat."

"Buoy twelve, I confirm location. Depth approximately two-hundred and fifty meters."

"Radio it to the fleet and set a course for the location, prep the depth charges."

The Hayabusa did technically carry depth charges. Technically. Due to the nature of its role (spread buoys everywhere, then sit back and listen) it rarely got a chance to use them. Even so, everyone knew that the Captain would order their use even after they got the enemy submarine. Mainly because if they ever did need to be used he wanted his crew to actually know how to set and fire them.

"Buoy ten?"

Yumi turned around at Captain Saeki's voice. He was an old and wise man, ever since being assigned to the Hayabusa Yumi had looked up to him. They had never spoken before off-duty, but one-duty he could tell that the Captain was just the sort of man he wanted to serve under.

"Yes sir?"

"What boat and what torpedo do you think it was, if not a P-Class with a Mark 14?"

"I'm not sure about the class, but it seems similar to the Hakuryū Class. Assuming it's an American boat I'd say its carrying Mark 38 torpedoes. If we're sticking purely to American classes then my best guess would be a T-Class. Test depth of two hundred meters, much like the Hakuryū, although with a much higher never-exceed depth."

"And why is that?"

"The American and Filipino navies set the test depth at one third of the design depth, we set ours at one half. They've been using roughly thousand megapascal steel to construct their submarines for a while now, we haven't been able to mass-produce it until recently."

"Buoy ten, you're a fine sonar tech."

"Thank you, sir."

The radio operator took off his headset and turned around.

"The destroyers got it, I have confirmation that the enemy submarine has been sunk."

"Well at least we still managed to go without any losses despite the sub's captain going directly against the exercise's plan and failing to emulate the P-Class he was meant to. The Philippines doesn't have anyone to import new submarines from, and certainly not any that can match an American T-Class. I can guess that the idea was to see how we perform in the face of an unexpected threat, but it seems a little far-fetched that the Filipinos would have a sub equal to our own cutting-edge. I suppose we know now that we can deal with it if they do, though."

---

"Torque wrench."

Yumi picked the tool up out of the box next to him and threw it to the mechanic, who responded with a smile and a nod as he went back to work. Whenever he didn't have anything else to do, Yumi would go over and help the guy out. He'd never actually asked his name, even though it had been a good few weeks since the Hayabusa was rebased to Truk, but despite that they had become good friends. The mechanic was happy to have an assistant, and Yumi was happy to watch him work on the planes.

Originally, Yumi had wanted to be a pilot. It had been his dream for as long as he could remember. Things turned out differently though, and by the time he joined the military he ended up enlisting in the Navy since it was just as the high brass was drawing up plans for southward expansion. Not to mention the talk of restarting the old dirigible program. He thought he might have had a chance of ending up as a pilot on the dirigible carrier that had been planned, but instead the program was canned again and he settled for being a sonar tech. Not nearly as glorious as being a pilot on a flying aircraft carrier.

At least it was still in the air.

"I'll bet you know enough to do my job by now," said the mechanic, "all the time you spend here and all. You a Navy pilot or something?"

Yumi chuckled at the thought. He had a license, and could fly the fighter the mechanic was working on, but he wasn't even close to capable of a carrier landing. Or a takeoff. Or combat. He could keep a plane steady and not much else.

"No, not at all. I'm a sonar tech on the Hayabusa."

"Oh really? I heard about the exercise you did yesterday, sounds like you screwed up. The sub got a shot at the Katsuragi, didn't it?"

"The briefing said the sub would be acting like a Filipino P-Class. We all took it at face value and started looking for a noisy piece of junk from the 30's. Instead it was acting like a T-Class and we had to use active sonar."

"I dunno what any of that means, but why'd they deviate from the plan?"

"It was part of the plan, but nobody in the task force was told that. T-Class subs are some of the more recent American designs, they dive deep and move quietly. Totally different beast from a P-Class. Anyhow, the whole point of it was to see how we handle unforeseen threats. The Admiral said that there'll be another exercise eventually with the same purpose."

"It sounds like they're planning to redeploy you, the Philippines won't have anything unexpected after all. Do you think you're headed to China?"

"I'd like to think that, but the Chinese fleet is almost entirely ships stolen at Dalian. There's not much point in a large-scale naval redeployment, especially since we have a land border anyways."

"It seems that way, doesn't it?" Said a familiar voice.

Yumi turned to the hangar's entrance and found Captain Saeki standing there. It took a couple seconds for him to process it.

"C-Captain?" Stuttered Yumi, jumping up into a salute along with the mechanic. "Why are you at the Air Service base?"

"You are well-prepared to do your job, Yontōsuihei Nakamura. More so than any other sonar tech recruit I've worked with, you've got a real drive. I looked through your file and wasn't surprised, you volunteered?"

"Yes sir, my father died during the battle of Dalian. He would have wanted me to join up."

"So you really are their son! Kei and Naoko Nakamura's boy!"

The Captain's eyes lit up with mirth Yumi hadn't thought possible on such a serious and old face. His dignified, respected captain suddenly started acting like an excited kid.

"You knew my parents, sir?"

"You father and I were good friends, I had a hunch that you were his kid after I looked at your file. We were both pilots and were in the same squadron for a couple years, I still remember your birthday-he kept on going on and on about you right after he got the telegram. I came down here to make sure it was you. How about meeting somewhere else, not as airmen, totally informal. I doubt you remember him well, and I can tell you plenty!"

Yumi wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, and all he could muster was a canned "Yes, sir". With the handing over of a hastily scribbled note with a time and address on it, the captain left the two alone in the hangar.

The mechanic let out some pent-up chuckles.

"So," he said, "your mother was named Kei and your father was named Naoko?"

"Yes." Said Yumi with a sigh.

"And they named you, their son, Yumi?"

"Yes." Said Yumi with a more exasperated sigh.

"Are you actually a woman?"

"The recruiter asked that too."

The German Exile, Part Two, The Agriculturalist, Part Three

Bataan Peninsula

Ludwig von Seckendorff waved at the red-shirted, plain-trousered Agriculturalist as the latter and his aides walked over to the former's Water Buffalo-drawn carriage; this, in turn, was driving down the road to Balanga City, the capital of Bataan province. As his old friend reached hearing range, the German aristocrat, now clad in a set of light tan semi-formal clothes, smiled and said:

"Mr. Santos, how good of you to come! It is delightful that the Lady President would ask us to chair the Farmer-Worker Defense Commitee together; I had the chance to see your work as I trekked south from Lingayen Gulf." There was genuine admiration in the German Exile's voice, and it was Archibald Santos' turn to smile as Ludwing continued to compliment him. "Your organic fertilizer formula has brought rich dividends to the local farmers; the surplus will definitely benefit both civilians and military."

Archibald chuckled. "Oh, it was nothing. Just a little carbonized rice hull, some rice straw, and manure. How are your earthworks?"

Ludwig's smile grew wider underneath his straw hat. "They're doing fine; lack of concrete has hampered our effectiveness at building aboveground defenses, but a bit of geologic research - examining soil density, water absorbency, and all those little factors that affect the construction of viable tunnels - has revealed various safe spots for underground networks in the mountains of this peninsula. Which, by the way, brings us to my own question; how viable is it to construct mushroom farms as part of the tunnel network? Fungi grow underground, right?"

The answer was, "I'd have to see the tunnels for myself, but I'd presume very viable if you're the one planning the networks. I actually have a copy of my paper as regards mushroom farming in the mountains with me; it might be of help."

"You're a lifesaver, Mr. Santos!" Ludwig responded. "Now let's go on to the city; the sun is hot and the farmers and workers can only tolerate so much lateness." A thought came to him. "By the way, are you still using the Chinese motor-cars? Travel by buffalo carriage is much cheaper, though slower."

The following remark was, "Well, let's just say I have to cover a lot of ground in a few months instead of just a few years. By the way, you should have seen the experimental farms in Central Luzon, as well as my efforts to promote potatoes and sweet potatoes. Actually, once we are done settling Bataan's defenses and how to feed them, why don't we ask Lady President for a side-trip there?"

Ludwig replied, "That is very noble of you, actually; very noble of you to offer, Mr. Santos."

-------

The Farmer-Worker's Meeting, held in an old American bungalow, went fairly well, with the locals discussing local issues while repeating their commitment to the defense of the province; their home. Some of said local issues involved the lack of suitable roads and transport for the excess produce being produced by the farms, as well as how education was held back by the lack of adequate lighting for the dark nights, which was when most people had free time after work. Something that Anita's Sugarcane Charcoal would help remedy; Archibald noticed before assuring the Farmer-Workers that was the case. Ludwig marvelled at his friend's achievment, before correcting himself; it was his friend's student's achievement - Mr. Santos would not want him mis-attributing the achievements of his beloved pupils, even to him.

When Ludwig's turn came, he would listen to the people's doubts about the tunnels and earthworks, as well as the experiences of the people maintaining them. He would also inspect some bootleg Mosin-Nagants made by the local defense co-operative, along with various petrol bombs and improvised explosives. And again, he would appreciate how cunning and crafty these people could be when united in a common cause.

Will that be enough to fend off foriegn invasion by the Chinese or the Japanese? The Lady President had administered a relatively long stretch of kind and benevolent rule, but she was somewhat isolated as well. Cunning, craft, and ingeniuity only went so far; the Philippines will have to rebuild international ties in order to survive.

-----------------------------------------
May 20th, Siege of Mombasa
-----------------------------------------

Thomas Jefferson Murungaru stood on the beach watching a catamaran bucking on the rolling waves of the Indian ocean. Four men manned it, two in each of the canoes that made up the homespun vessel, one of them hanging on a machine gun and its equipment trying to protect it from the spray. In the distance, hazy on the horizon, an unidentified yacht approached. Airbrush out the ominous weapon and the scene would have fit perfectly on a post-card, Wish you were here in playful font against a vacation paradise. Even when the gunner began to fire on the yacht, the sound was drowned by the roaring waves, and the flashes of light were barely visible from where Murungaru stood. A man could string up a hammock and take a nap here. It was a calm war, much to Murungaru's irritation.

Murungaru was Secretary of the Communist Party in Swahililand. This put him just below Chairman James Lutalo in terms of importance. He wasn't a marshal man, but his place in the hierarchy suggested him to this duty, and he commanded the patchwork forces here with an impatient zeal.

Mombasa is one of those rare blessed places, like Constantinople or Manhattan, in a spot that seems hand-made for a great city. It is a tropical paradise where the sand is white, the ocean a clear cerulean, and the palm trees offer seductive shade from a balmy equatorial heat. This describes the Kenyan coast for hundreds of miles, but geography offers more to make this place stand out. Mombasa is an island sitting between two tidal creeks and cut off from the mainland by a small connective channel. Its deep harbors ties it to trade, and the water doubles as a moat. The natives knew this, and they settled Mombasa long before the Arabs or Portuguese knew of the place. Its newest owners were the English settlers who came to British East Africa in search of land where they could build the quaint life of English gentry. That dream was ended, and its end was brought about by the descendants of those early black-skinned settlers who first lived on the island, now a mixed bag of tribal nations sewn together by the foreign ideas of Karl Marx.

On the beach, Communist warriors prepared another catamaran, lashing two canoes together in a hurried attempt to aid their comrades. Two of the men were black-skinned Africans of native Kenyan blood, but the other two were foreigners. Communist revolution is a magnet for outsiders, a fact that made many native Africans nervous who'd learned to distrust outsiders after years of Arab and European abuse. But Murungaru liked the foreigners. Of the two working on the boat, he got the most use out of Franz Agricola, a Spartacist engineer fled from the reactionary government of Germany to work in a place friendly to his ideals. But his favorite foreigner was the second one, his Red-Chinese paramour, Li Huan. She was a young head-in-the-sky idealist, drunk on Houism, fled from the safer work she had been sent to Africa for and joined to an active communist revolution in the same way an American child might be drawn to join the circus. She wore a pair of Chinese coveralls with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and the star and gear of Houism patched on the shoulder. Murungaru wouldn't say that he loved her, but he did enjoy her company, and her presence in his bed helped to calm him down through the tedious siege.

"We're going in" Agricola shouted up to him in heavily accented English.

"Get this one before it comes in range of Fort Jesus" Murungaru shouted back, "I don't want to fish you out when they shoot a hole in your boat. Again."

Li Huan beamed up at him, her youth shining through the grime and masculine lifestyle of siege warfare. "If we find more Madeira, I'll make sure you get first pick this time" she said.

Murungaru returned the smile and watched as they pushed off into the sea, headed for piracy, or something like it.

No ships. No artillery. No airplanes. Chairman Lutalo hoarded what little the Swahili Republic had in terms of heavy hardware and used it in Uganda to protect his 'Revolution-Town' Project, and his own personal ass, from being swept up by the counter-revolutionaries crawling in the Ugandan jungles. This left Murungaru with little to work with.

This would have been fine if it were only the British colonists in the city. The Kenyan whites had been few and far between. On their own, they might have surrendered and worked out a deal ages ago. It was volunteers and under-the-table support from the white governments on the southern half of the continent that kept this doomed counter-revolution afloat. Most of the fighters left in Mombasa were German-speaking Tanganyikans. They fought hard though, helped by privately chartered blockade runners passing through the weak net of re-purposed trawlers and catamarans the Communists called a blockade. Murungaru couldn't quite close the gap. He felt like a man with no thumbs trying to strangle his enemy.

The enemy trawler caught on fire as both catamarans pulled up along side it. From the beach, the flames looked like a bright sparkle. Murungaru smiled. He didn't care about retrieving their supplies - he had a knack for scavenging for his army. For a few months he had been purchasing supplies out of Mombasa itself from a corrupt Tanganyikan officer, until that man was caught and lynched from a motel balcony visible across the water. What Murungaru cared about was that he denied those supplies to his enemy. His siege, at least for one more day, was actually a siege.

The Catamarans stayed with their prey. Murungaru's smile wavered as he realized what was happening. The idiot pirates were plundering the burning boat! He couldn't replace Agricola for what the contents of that damned trawler was worth, and he didn't want to lose the comfort of Li Huan's presence. If there was ammo in that boat... if it exploded...

There had been spotty gunfire going on behind him this entire time, as one expects in active combat zones, but as he watched the burning boat the background noise reached an active crescendo, and Murungaru's attention was turned from the blockaders to the world behind him. It sounded like a raid. He couldn't help Agricola and Li Huan from the beach. He indulged in one last anxious glance toward the sea, then he drew his pistol and sprinted toward the action.

The commander of Mombasa's white defenders was a man called Commander Tom Trevor. The Communists knew very little else about the man, a state of things that embarrassed Murungaru. They didn't even know what country he was from, whether it was South Africa or Rhodesia, and this inconsistency of knowledge laid the foundation for the boogey-man legend Trevor had made for himself. The meat of this legend, however, was his raids. In his boldest moments he sent parties of men over, more to count coup than to win battles, with the aim of dragging off as many captives as they could. These captives would be lynched from the same motel the corrupt Tanganyikan officer had met his fate. So many bodies had dangled from that balcony that the place was now considered to be haunted. Trevor made this part of the torture too, and he housed those captives waiting to die in the rooms emptying onto that balcony so that their spent their last nights in terror of the supernatural.

There had been a raid. Launched in the middle of the day, it had been repulsed. Murungaru saw instantly that it was a diversion, meant to help the supply boat. White warriors fled back across Tudor Creek on rowboats as gunfire poured across the channel. It didn't look like they had taken any prisoners. Commander Trevor was not there. Sometimes, he stood on the lynching balcony and shouted bizarre pro-capitalist slogans over a megaphone, like "Death is a preferable alternative to communism" and "Communism is the very definition of failure." Not today.

"Comrade Kiprop" Murungaru shouted at an officer he recognized. "What has happened?"

"Comrade Secretary" Kiprop stood at attention, a tall man shaved completely bald and wearing a red sash around his fatigues. "We have not counted the bodies, but I didn't see any black faces on their boats."

Murungaru still held his pistol out as he came to a stop near the shallow trenches overlooking the river bank. Gunfire crossed from both sides. A boat full of white men tipped over, spilling them into the channel, making them into bobbing targets. "They pivoted. We're going in on the causeway. Radio them." Murungaru said. They were walking quickly along the trench line now. Kiprop motioned for a man with a handheld radio and told him what to say. He didn't finish before Murungaru barked "Get me a ride."

It was a motorcycle with a sidecar that picked him up, driven by a Maasai fighter with his red warrior's robe over his fatigues. As they took off, his thoughts returned briefly to his pirates and their burning boat. The bike sped down the rutted dirt supply road and onto a pontoon bridge crossing Tudor Creek. The rhythmic jostling of the bike on the bridge helped him to put those thoughts out of his mind.

The battle for the causeway was already starting when Murungaru arrived. The bridges to Mombasa had all been burned by the defenders, but a man-made earthen causeway crossed the connective channel to the northwest, and it hadn't been destroyed. Makeshift defenses were thrown together on both sides, turning the causeway into a miniature example of Great War style warfare complete with a mangled no-mans-land in between. That small strip of land was active now as Communist units moved through piled sandbags and scrap metal baricades and fired desperately at the faceless enemy defenses on the other side.

"Bring up a bomb." Murungaru said vaguely, but these men had worked with him before, and they knew what he meant. Not far from here sat an ammo dump, where stacks of fresh shells waited for artillery that wouldn't come. What else could he do but invent new uses? Even useless uses were better than no uses at all.

The communist forces were a medley, fed by different tribes and traditions into one national whole. "Swahililand" was a western construct, its borders designed ages ago by European colonizers who had little knowledge of the land they were designing. The only thing that united these people were a shared experience in an English speaking colony, and that was a very weak thread to sew a country together. Most of the men here knew nothing about Communism. They were drawn in through tribal alliances made to oppose foreign rule.

The battle moved in waves. A surge of brave men moved forward until they were checked by the other side. A lull set in, filled by bursts of gunfire. When one side noticed a new angle to the battle that might give them an advantage, the pitch rose again. Unlike the birds-eye view books afford to armchair generals, Murungaru was stuck with a poor view, posed in a trench on a rise behind the battle. What he mostly saw was smoke, and he lead more by ear than by sight, with full knowledge that he wouldn't completely understand what was happening until it already happened.

A bomb came up, moved by motorcycle in a manor so clumsy that it made Murungaru nervous. Never mind that, it was here now, and he moved with it toward the front, sending soldiers into the crowd to seed for volunteers. A small number of interested parties gathered behind the barricade with him.

"I will take the bomb" said Grenade-Man. Murungaru forgot the man's real name, since all of his comrades called him by his favorite weapon. A tall man with the limbs of a swimmer, Grenade-Man impressed his comrades with how far and consistently he could lob a good grenade. They were so impressed that they lent him their grenades when they got them. Grenade-Man wore them all on belts across his chest, looking like a suicidal christmas tree. "No" Murungaru said, "You are too valuable for this. It is a suicide mission."

"I will do this" another man said soberly.

Murungaru didn't recognize him. "You will do." he said, "You know what to do?" Murungaru showed how the mechanism rigged by Agricola worked. The soldier nodded.

"Okay." Murungaru jumped into action as the doomed soldier put the bomb harness around his shoulders, "Take your places. Give this city your temper, all at once!" He pulled out his pistol and looked beyond the ragged defenses toward the enemy ramparts. "Now!" He fired his pistol, and it sounded to him as if it had fired one thousand shots.

Grenade Man rushed ahead with the bomber, and they both took shelter in a cratered defense at the beginning of no man's land. Grenade Man started to throw, and the sound of bullets scraping against steel and cement was replaced by deep-throated explosions. The bomber dashed forward, the bomb dangling in front of him as if he had to carry his massive steel balls by a chain around his neck. Murungaru emptied his pistol. The bomber slipped into the enemy barricades. A large explosion went off, sending up dust and gore. The Communists ululated as if they had just won the battle.

"Take the city!" he yelled. His ululating hoard rushed forward, bristling with bayonets and machetes. The enemy weren't firing back. Murungaru's heart pounded in his ears. Was this it? His men disappeared into the enemy barricades. The sound of gunfire resumed, and it sounded hard and hateful in his ears.

"Send more!" he yelled, looking back at those men left behind to man the Communist lines. Those in front rushed forward. Murungaru had one hand on his pistol and another on the edge of a piece of corrugated metal. Both hands gripped hard, but he did not notice the pain, his eyes dead set ahead on the target. The gunfire and screaming was still active, still beyond his sight.

People reappeared. His eyes struggled to focus in the smoke. His heart sank when he saw white faces. In spurts, like liquid from a mud-clogged spout, he saw his own men running back across the corridor, the red flag put to flight.

"No!" he screamed, "Go back! Go with more men!" Nobody listened. The attack died there, and Murungaru grieved for it as if it were a dead child. The officers, afraid he would attract snipers, dragged him away screaming curses at his own tired men. The deadlock was alive and well.

--

The sun set on a battlefield unchanged from what it had been in the morning. Murungaru and Agricola sat on beach chairs, sipping pirated beers and looking out at the sea. Li Huan lay in the sand next to them where she had fallen asleep. She smelled strongly like smoke.

"I could settle down here." Agricola said, laying his head back.

"You already have." Murungaru replied.

"You almost finished it today. I hear the causeway was a close thing. If you had cracked it..."

"It wasn't." Murungaru said, "Ifs and maybes don't mean a thing. It wasn't any closer than the day before."

Agricola shrugged. "Tomorrow then. There is always tomorrow."

"It'll be the same. We did tomorrow today. We did tomorrow yesterday. We did tomorrow for hundreds of yesterdays. I don't see the pattern breaking. Unless you invent something to get us out of this."

"I built bridges back home" Agricola shrugged. "I could build you a bridge here, but they'd shoot at us."

"Didn't Alexander the Great build a bridge into a city he was laying siege too? Put your engineering skills to that test."

"Tyre didn't have Mausers" Agricola said. He laughed. Murungaru didn't.

The sound of the waves crashing onto the shore gave off a strange vibe, one that their battle adjusted minds suggested was silence. Gun shots were rare now that the sun was setting. Agricola laid his head back, looking as he was going to fall asleep too. Murungaru didn't. His mind was driving, searching everything he knew, hoping to find an answer, but nothing was there.

"You know..." Agricola stirred, "When I was at Stuttgart, there were these guys... they had a medieval engineering club. Just for fun. They built old type weapons and put on shows. Real old, catapults, that sort of thing. They'd throw together some quick building to use as a target, we'd bring them wine, and we'd all sit around getting drunk and watching them do their thing."

"And what did that accomplish?" Murungaru asked.

"Thomas." Agricola smiled, "I think I have an idea."

Iron Lady, Part Three, The Agriculturist, Part Four, and The German Exile, Part Three

As Ludwig and Archibald were ushered into Priscilla Aglipay-Rizal's modest house by Irene the armed housekeeper, they would find the Lady President of the Philippines fussing over an accountant's ledger as she sat in her study; when she registered the door opening, the middle-aged woman would greet her peers with a warm smile and a wave before saying:

"I heard about your job in Bataan; you both did well. However, disturbing news has come up from our trade union contacts in Japan; we have less time than we thought we did."

"How much less?" Ludwig's voice was matter-of-fact, secure in the knowledge that nothing was to be done by panicking and losing oneself in fear. "And what is the nature of this news? Long-suppressed Trade Union workers don't exactly have eyes and ears in the Japanese Military."

Priscilla's calm but weary reply was, "No, but they are the ones tasked with producing the high-quality steel that goes into submarines and building the submarines themselves. Guess what the Japanese are churning out, along with planes, tanks, artillery, and all the arms and ammunition that their money can pay for?"

"We've always known that the Japanese have superior machines than we do," Ludwig replied. "But this news is disconcerting. Is 'The Contingency' still viable?" He knew it was; the Filipino people would fight to the end to preserve their hard-won freedom, but it required that their Lady President be safe to lead them. "Your safety will be paramount in the coming trials; same for your military staff."

"It is," the Lady President said. "But my people's lives are paramount. There can be no victory without them, especially in a war of attrition like I plan to wage. Which brings me to my next worry."

She then took out, from a desk, a sketch of a Japanese Zero fighter. "Japanese Aircraft outnumber and outgun us; if we don't have a way of taking them down, our cities and troop concentrations would be reduced to rubble; even tunnels can be starved out in time. So we need Anti-Aircraft Guns, but as the French have not responded to my requests for aid in exchange for a base yet..."

A sigh; the implication was that she knew a way out of the problem they faced, but it required a solution that was not hers' to provide. Or was it?

Ludwig would then respond, "And I know where you can get one. I still maintain some contacts back in my old homeland; weapons manufacturers that managed to avoid the purges that followed the German Civil War. Right now, I heard from an old friend, Dietrich Kessler, that a few perfectly servicible flak guns are about to be scrapped for parts. However, in exchange for, say, Rubber..."

"We have plenty of it," Priscilla caught on. "Very well, I will commission the relevant co-operatives and smallholders to increase the production of that stuff. As for you and Archibald, the two of you are to arrange the deal with Germany through third parties and the implementation of new techniques to maximize rubber production and quality." She turned to the Agriculturalist, who had been quiet for most of the talk. "I would also like your team to begin developing new dry rations; carry my requests to them. In the meantime, I am sending a message to my ambassador to Japan; he is to return home with all due haste lest he become a hostage or worse. Feelers are also to be sent to the Trade Unions in that country; they are sacrificing much for us, and so the least we can do for them is to provide a safe refuge in our country should things there go south."

Archibald finally spoke; "You are generous, Lady President. Very well, I shall begin the preperations as soon as possible." A sigh. "But I have to ask; is it really coming to war? Can't you make an alliance with China and frighten them off?"

Priscilla pursed her lips. "Hou's Navy has not been refitted to match Japan's. No help will come from China even if they are willing to give it. And while Hou himself is a good person, I risk asking too much of him, and him becoming my master as repayment for the debt I may accrue." A sigh. "An alliance with Socialist France and the Market Socialist Dutch should have been my best bet; but they are slow to respond even when peril is knocking at my gates. No, we have to do what we can, or perish."

"That may have to be enough," was Ludwig's response. "I will contact Deitrich as soon as possible; you will have the Anti-Air Guns."

In recent developments in Chinese society, there has been recent doubts as to the viability and historical credit of a Chinese nation. These charges stem from foreign ideology and interests. The Chinese situation as a nation is viable, through its history and into its future. It is only the dark present that casts doubt. The failures of the Xinhai Revolution to create a stable European styled Republic do not defeat its purpose. The loss of the Chinese provinces of Mongolia and Tibet do not discredit the idea.

With the imposition of European thought on the global mind-set the institution of the Nation should be seen as a recent development in the world. The same is true for the ethnic family. Both were developed within the last two-hundred years after revolutions, in the British Colonies that became America, and in France. That by the end of the 18th century the political paradigm shifted from a nation whose government was dictated by the whims of a royal family who, sequestered away from the general populace, were all together irrelevant to the greater communal-familial relations that actively determined the look, sound, and type the population assumed as part of an ethnic or race family. And it is true that for the most part, this came to exist in Europe during the evening hours of the 18th century, when liberal nationalist philosophy imparted upon the peoples of Europe a unity of being, and the eventual enforcement of a single image, a single ethos, a singly mythology, and a single common government. This was the presumption of and execution of the bourgeoisie class.

As Europe spread itself out over the world, it came into contact with other peoples, and Europe saw and interpreted the civic relationships of the peoples in these new countries as being barbarian and without nation, not following what was the conventional rules of the European nation-state and that thus these people must be primitive. These people must lack a nation, and lacking the idea of nation they could have the European ideology imposed upon them. From Africa to Asia they imposed their political life upon the others, suppressing the existing political and civic relations of the people there with their own European political and civic values. If taken as truth, that China has not really existed as an entity until perhaps the Xinhai Revolution, or that it has never existed except as myth. But no, China has existed outside of this identity, that it was without the national family. And so, being a collage of different peoples under a single authority, that it was very much like that of the old European feudal state still; which while it was a feudal state, was very much not as Europe saw in it.

But this assumption is incorrect, and dangerously wrong. For the intellectuals of our days to believe it, and for our people to fall into the same trap, does the Chinese family a disservice by allowing ourselves to become puzzled by the enforcement of this doctrine seemingly imposed upon us. The concept, the idea of the national family, is very much a facet of the Chinese political life. That We do not need to, as a family of families, to go out and redefine our people as a single species as the peoples of Europe did in the 18th century. We have had their institution in China since time immemorial.

Expansion on this idea is required, to formalize the existing institution as such and to support that which has been said by Sun-Yat Sen on this matter. Before either are delved into however, it is important clarity is given to some terminology.

The ethnic or the race family is used to define a broad community of people whose language and customs differ from that of those nearest to them. Or in the most striking circumstances their physical appearance is at contrast with those of others. The Europeans have a distinct difference between the peoples of Africa and of Asia, and thus by physical difference we are members of three different families. But within each there are the particular differences that cut clearer differences between one or the other; as the French to the German or the Englishman. As such within that of Asia is the differences between the Han and the Cantonese to the Hmong. By applying European rules of the nation, it is the difference between being a Frenchman and a German that dictates that either should have a state for reasons as simple as language or of difference of religious practice; there is no clear cut instance in China where this has been true in the past few centuries.

To speak of Political and Civic life is to draw from Marxist critique. Political life and institution is that devoted to the operation of the state and one's interaction there-in. To speak of Civic life or Civic institution is to speak of the life of an individual as an individual; as he is a Buddhist or a Taoist, whether he speaks Mandarin or Cantonese. The demands of the political institutions of Europe deem it fit that the European state subsumes the dependence of the Civic Life into the political institution, making it a requirement to have privileges within the family that the individual assume the identity of the subsumed Civic Life as part of the Political Life and institution. There is only one other state where this is not the case, and it is the United States.

We now move on. In doing so I recommend that, as the conditions of China evolve, that attempts to impress upon it a singular ethnic or racial family be wholly drowned like the workman extinguishing his flame. Any attempt to raise one people over another must be extinguished in its primitive existence as a young ideology before it takes to a great flame and ignites the countryside, and burning the foundation of what has been the historical China. The idea of Civil-subsuming political state of the European ethno-family state must be held at arm's length from China. If it were introduced, it is to be made a sacrifice to security and destroyed.

And this shall be done with the re-proposal of what has been called the Zhonghua Minzu (Chinese State), the ideal of the National Family (Guojiaa Minzu). At odds with the Ethnic or the Race Family, the National Family is a broad idea, uniting all within itself. The National Family decrees that those peoples who preside in the area belonging to the state are members of its family no matter who they may be. The persons living in its territory shall have in their entitlement the full benefits of its family without differentiation between what family they may belong. The state shall show no preference to one ethnicity or another, and as in any liberated society their Civil Life shall be independent of the state, and that the state shall dissolve from itself the means by which is makes distinctions, to be blind to it so that it may treat all its families as one of the same.

For in any ideal political environment, the political institutions will not go to the field of civil life and rip up the budding flowers of different colors to repaint it anew with one wide brush, turning one field of a multitude of color into that of a single homogeneous color. This destroys harmony, and weakens only the health of the community.

We see this field of a thousand colors and a thousand flowers and we call it China.

What is the basis on which this exists? Is it something to be enforced by force of arms as the French to their brethren in the construction of the French state? Hardly, for we already own such an idea. We have already Zhonghua Minzu.

Zhonghua Minzu flows as water from a spring in China's history. Where much of the world was competing primitive estates China drew up into itself a strong and concise state identity so powerful it has come to define itself yet today in these troubled times. It is a mode sought to be emulated and reformed for a modern times; but not so distant from the present as many others have sought basis in their own past. From the past we adopted the name of our nation from the Dynasty of Qin, construction the national feudal framework of China and the Han who constructed its popular identity. From either they inspired the disparate communities of China to think of themselves first as Chinese, and lastly by their county or tribe. They became simply inspired by the force and will of the political center to become members of the Chinese Family, or later of the Han family.

It is from this ideological framework the idea of China has persisted on, interrupted sparingly and briefly before being assumed again. It was from this that the Manchurians of the Qing court integrated themselves into the Chinese family. And it can be said from this that they sought to be as China's equals as a family that is a member to the greater family; as much as they were its rulers all the same. Our definition of being a people as a people is such that no single element needs to be imposed or for a forced superiority made over the other, for it is recognized in the historical spirit of the nation that we are all members of the nation, of its state.

Unity can not be had in forcing upon our brothers what they are not, but to advance forward as a united whole under the same banner. To move ahead not under five races as supposed by the Qing court, but as the multitudinous thousands, to meet the demands of Sun-Yat Sen to unite all the peoples of China, for that is our state.

On Minzu
Hou Tsai Tang, 1941

---

The waves sounded against the shore. Crested, white egrets roamed along the white sandy beaches probing their long beaks into the wet sand on their search for crabs. It was early in the morning still and a faint orange glow shone from the dark ocean waters as Hou walked out onto the wooden deck off the side of his house. Distant fishing boats could be seen prowling the waters beyond the clear range of view, but their sails were clear against the misty cloudy easterly sky. A few among them from their silhouettes looked to be motorized. They were headed far out to sea, that much Hou could see as he walked to the railing with a cup of tea held in one hand, and a kettle in another. The boats weren't yet plying the waves parallel to the shore, so they were still fanning out to seek their spots.

Hou took a deep breath of the cool morning air, smelling the salt and the strong aroma of the tea as he rose it to his lips and took a delicate sip. It was still hot as it hit his lips and he lowered the small china cup at the first drop.

He turned on his heels, and placed the kettle on a small end table a few steps away between two wicker chairs. With the kettle down he eased into a chair and sat waiting in the still morning air, listening to the heart beat of the sea. After a moment's silence, the door to the house opened, Hou turned to watch Hou Ju step out into the cold sea air, holding a robe closed over her day time dress. She smiled as their eyes met and with the warm confidence of having partook in this ritual many times took her seat, leaning to the side as she folded her legs the other, a cup of tea held gently in her own hands.

The two say in an ancient meditative silence as they watched the egrets down below probe the sand for treasures. Every so many minutes, one would force one up from its burrow and toss it up into the air, devouring the struggling and fighting crustacean in one throw. In time the gulls and other sea birds joined them and after some jostling the competing birds managed to sort out the dispute for beach front ground. The harmony of the scene was broken only by a distant ship's horns as the morning drew on later. A guard had stepped out, setting down next to the tea a small wooden basket of dimsum dumplings before disappearing.

The men who kept guard over Hou and his home had become almost invisible to the leader. Their presence interwoven with the garden scenery and as long-staying guests at times when in the home. Hou Tsai Tang's home itself wasn't particularly large, not a mansion as the past emperors, presidents, or warlords had called home. He had little purpose of a home early on his life, being a migratory laborer in his youths after leaving home and his father's fishing practice; both to avoid war and take advantage of work opportunity made by it. But that too had been traded for an apartment in Hong Kong, then the tents and caves of military service.

When he had finally ascended to command of the ship of state of China he had foregone any options in larger homes in pristine mountain or forest environments, many of which were quickly moth balled or abandoned by his decree. He had instead chose to in essence return home, to the outskirts of Tianjin. And in no mansion, but a country home which he had built on and expanded over the years. Attempts against his life had only called for further growth with the addition of accommodation for security and the home began to threaten to turn into a compound before he stopped and set to living quietly enough for him to blow under radar. Many large parts of the year turned into him hiding out at his very residence as empty motorcades and trains traveled China ostensibly ferrying him, but being dead empty.

The couple nibbled on the dumplings in comfortable silence until it was empty. “What is the plan for the day?” Ju asked, the basket empty.

“No one has told me I need to be anywhere for anything.” Hou said, “Unless they call. The garden may need work.”

“Should I help?” asked Ju.

“You don't need my permission.” Hou turned, with a small smile, “Come if you want.”

“It looks like it might be a warm afternoon, I may bring the canaries' cage out so they can get fresh air.” he added.

“They would like that very much.” Ju said with a relaxed smile. “I should step in and warm up last night's rice, have an actual breakfast today.”

“That would be nice.” Hou approved with a relaxed nod.

Smiling, Ju rose to her feat and headed back in, leaving Hou alone on the deck.

The cold did not bother him much. Though he had known people who went out of their way to keep their world a passionate tempest of furnace heat after the Revolution, Hou's approach to the chill air was to become more comfortable with it. On the cool wet mornings of the coast he reminded himself that in his years in leadership and as a commander he had chattered his teeth in worse weather. That he had known winters that froze the fingers off men's hands. Today he had his comforts, consistently warm tea, a home, and the option to heat it.

He took a sip of the tea, and lingered on the deck some more watching the birds.

---

The canaries murmured and chirped contently as they were hung up on the branch of a flowering plum tree in the middle of the garden. Three in all inhabited a relatively large cage. As the cage settled on the branch the initial start given to the birds of their home in motion subsided to a comfortable ease as they took in the spring under the plum blossoms.

Hou's garden was an off-center space, built off the side of the old house he had taken as his own. Added as one of those projects through the years it had grown into a modest space with the plum tree at its center. Encircled by a covered walk way along opposite sides, a covered porch closest to the house, and a simple fence and moon gate opposite it was near to the size of his living room and the branches of the flowering fruit tree had grown since before Hou's residence to nearly encompass the majority of the garden space helping to shade the space with its reaching branches.

A gravel pathway encircled the tree, and without any clear sort of pattern meandered into broken winding spokes away. Stands of bamboo and numerous islands of peonies, orchids, and Chrysanthemums dotted the scene among islands of rocks that had been allowed to be covered with moss. Even some spaces were let to wildly grow grass which grew long.

Throwing an old rug onto the ground Hou dropped to his knees and deftly his hands began the work of pulling out the small weeds from between the stones around an island of China Roses. Early season bees were hovering near the open blooms of the all-seasons flowering shrubs and their low and soft humming set itself against the not-to-distant sounds of the ocean's rhythm.

Gardening was not something he always had done. While he had memories of sometimes helping his mother in her's, it had not been a habit he picked up until later in his life. The joy of gardening had come with learning its meditative practice. While he leaned over, pulling up weeds or wandering the flowers he could detach himself from the world for a moment and to recenter. Or, if need be: to mull over decisions that needed to be made.

“Comrade.” a hesitant voice said nearby.

Hou looked up to see the guard standing in the shade of the covered walkway. He held under his arms a small piece of paper. “A message came in just now, from Beijing.” the soldier said, holding out the piece of paper.

Hou reached out with a dirty hand and took the paper, scanning the typed print he sighed and folded up the message. Xiogang Wen had caught wind of developments towards intervention in Russia. “Tell comrade Wen I'll have it in the schedule next available Politburo meeting. Tell him it's not important right now. Tell him I'm waiting for developments.”

The soldier bowed and turning on his heels walked away. His heels clicking on the concrete on the walk itself. Hou sat up and rubbed his hands off against the breast of his shirt. With a resigned sigh he stood up from his spot and walked to his canaries, and stood watching them.




The motorbike rumbled into town. It was an old job, from the revolution. It was painted a flat field green, though it may have once been that. Over time the paint had chipped and worn away from the fuel tank and seat and what wasn't painted had begun to ruse over. To compensate its owner had painted over the holes and even the rust with Rorschach blobs of an olive green. As a result the whole vehicle parades around a rough and unintentional camouflage pattern under a layer of fine brown an d white dust.

To the sleepy border town of Qoqek the sound of the motor engine cut the stillness of the later afternoon air with the same smoothness of a hot knife in butter. There were no other engine sounds to compete with it and even the isolated military vehicles parked along the road-side of the main street were eerily quiet in this corner of China.

A rain had just recently fell over the sea, and the packed earthen road was dark with freshly fallen rain. The buildings still dripped with rain water and even the civilians strolling the street looked to have been freshly whetted. The distant mountains far beyond the city's northern and southern horizon themselves appeared to be wet and darkened with rapidly moving spring rain clouds sprinkling the cold northern steppe.

Chao and Guo came into the town, and pulled off to the side by a tea house. Looking around neither were impressed with the condition of Qoqek. Yet so close to the border it looked to not have the bustle of a border community. And to taunt them more were the presence of the military. The brooding uniformed presence of bored soldiers with their black fur caps, leaning on railings or against walls watching them with arms crossed. Both young men could feel the heavy gazes of a few dozen soldiers on them the moment they came into the city. They knew they couldn't have looked normal on the old motorbike and the heavy saddle bags that were slung off the back of the bike and on its dented side car.

Feel perturbed at the suspicion they believed they attracted they exchanged quick glances. A sudden flash of doubt for their plan blossomed between them. They were forced to swallow the guilt of doing something so daring. But the two had reached a point of silent commitment. Between the two of them they knew without words that they would turn back only if they were arrested. Then they knew they could not do it.

They went inside the tea house to consider their next move.

The lighting inside the restaurant was dim and the floor dusty. But care had been taken to give it a homey air despite the lack of chairs. The two visitors glided between chest-high tables with a feeling they did not belong. A radio somewhere off in the corner played music on the radio, music that was being performed in Uyghur. Neither of the young men could understand it, and the sudden confrontation with songs in a foreign language reinforced the expression of being in a totally alien land.

The two picked a table. “What do you say?” Guo asked, leaning onto his cross forearms as he looked around the tea house.

A few locals had already been at tables when they arrived. They stood over plates of small simple cakes and kettles of tea but mostly kept to themselves. Some wore Muslim skull caps and thin wispy beards, others were clean shaven. They regarded the two new visitors with passive disinterest before returning to their tea and cakes.

“We got this far.” Guo said restlessly.

“How far is the border from here?” Chao asked.

Guo rummaged in the chest pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded map. He unfolded it on the table and laid it out for his friend to see. In the dim moody lamp light of the house he ran his finger along the western Chinese border from Russia south until he came to the name of the town scribbled in small lettering far off on the border itself. “What do you know.” he said with a sarcastic smile, “We're right on top of it. I sure do wish we got a larger map of China!” he added in exasperation.

Chao grumbled. Of course they couldn't have known they would have decided to leave the country. And not only that for him to set the challenge they push themselves all the way to Africa. At this distance, at the very edge of China he was beginning to wonder if they should just turn back. They were at the edge of the lake now, and the cool dark waters of the world was at their toes. Should he declare he was out? Guo would follow if he did, doubtlessly; he had less reason to go to Africa than he.

“Well it hadn't occurred to me at the time.” he hissed. Guo rolled his eyes and folded the map up.

At that moment a waitress approached their table. She was an old woman with bags under her eyes and an uneven hobble.

“Tea?” she asked expectantly.

Chao nodded with a heavy sigh, “Yes, please.” Guo said he would like some tea too and the old woman hobbled off.

“So what's the plan to cross?” Guo asked.

“The army's here in force, obviously.” Chao moaned, “We can't just drive through I imagine. Not without some pass or permit.”

“We could go around them. What's the chances they have the entire border watched?”

“That might be our ticket. Might not hurt to stick around for a bit just to look around. We passed farm fields, vineyards on the way. Maybe we can get some work in before heading off. It'll give us time to look around, make the army less suspicious.”

“Not like it hasn't been how we've worked before.” Guo groaned, “Alright.”

The old lady returned to them with a tray holding an old tin tea pot and a few small chipped cups. She laid them on the table and asked the two of them, “Would there be anything else?”

“Yes, do you know if anyone needs an extra hand?” Chao asked.

The old lady raised an elbow and said mater-of-factly, “Oh, we might need some help.” she said in a surprised voice.



Li Chao

May 18th, 1960. Tuesday. Year of the Metal Rat

We left Yusup Bahtar's and headed north-west to a town called Qoqek. The road is has it has been throughout this province. Drylands and spring grasslands in the high steppe. We see mountains in the distance. We intended to leave earlier that morning, and despite our lack of drinking to pass the evening the two of us slept in later than intended. We ended up leaving just before high-noon and came into the town later that afternoon. It rained briefly on our way in. But before we could pull over to throw on some rain cover it has passed and we were soon back on our way, drying as we went.

The town as I can gather was once some kind of trading town back before the revolution. There's a wide sprawl to it but most of it feels empty and displaced. Perhaps like Yusup's son most of the sons went east or elsewhere to find work to do now that trade into and out of Russia ceased. There is in their place plenty soldiers.

We stopped at a tea house in the middle of town and got our bearings set straight. Apart from trade the city is one of those few oasis settlements in Xinjiang that can farm, not from the benefit of any mountain springs but because it rains often here. The planting season is beginning and being short of hands the farmer coops need assistance. The farms here are mostly all owned through the city and they grow barley, wheat, and grapes which they use to make raisins. On this lead we contacted the cooperative and set us up with some employment. We intend to use the time to scout the border and not just find exactly where it is but how we might avoid the army.