“Ground troops—‘Martie the Terrible’ is finished in your area. I see two to three vehicles still driving around trying to hide. They are about a mile in front of you and I’d set up a road ambush if I were you, plus a couple of side ambushes in case they try to rough it, but the trees look pretty dense and I don’t think they can get far off the road. I see eight burning vehicles, three sitting still on the highway, and three mobile—and a couple of those have smoke coming out of them. We’ll be in bright and early tomorrow, guys. The sunset is beautiful. As they say ‘red sky at night, trooper’s delight.’ Out.”
“Thanks for the lift, ma’am. We can see that that girl can shoot and we’ll see if we can leave a couple of bad guys for you to deal with tomorrow. Out,” replied the major on the ground.
Martie went in from the north since they were hiding in the trees on the south side of the road. She watched as her first two rockets landed 20 or so yards short and blew up in the verge not causing any damage. She flew over and around and on her second attempt, her two rockets went straight into the group of five trucks and she watched as the middle truck literally lifted off the ground and exploded about ten feet in the air, spewing the other trucks with fire. She screamed the Mustang upwards as the sun went down over the horizon.
Apart from the several fires burning up and down I-20, the area was getting dark beneath her.
“Come on girl, let’s go home,” advised Sally. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere tonight, and if they are I believe they are in for a nasty surprise. The boys are heavily loaded with everything they could carry. I have you on visual about a mile to my south.”
They moved into formation and flew home silently, Sally letting Martie alone as she worked through the ramifications of her action. Men had died down there, even if they were the enemy. Either she was made for this type of work, or she wasn’t. Sally knew her friend well and believed that Martie was a fighter—a good person to have around in times of need—but left her alone to her own realizations. The end of the fifth day of the new world looked like there could be hope.
Chapter 9
China
The board room on the 30th floor of Zedong Electronics in Nanjing was busy, and there was mixed feelings of excitement, apprehension, and dread. The 16 men were getting ready to tour Shanghai’s International Airport and then go on to the harbor. They had just finished an early breakfast and the bus was ready for them downstairs. It was 5:00 am, early on the morning of the seventh day in Shanghai and thirteen hours ahead of East Coast time in the United States. The first of the Boeing 747s would be taking off for its nonstop flight into John F. Kennedy Airport later that morning, which in a few weeks would be renamed Guomindang International Airport.
Chairman Wang Chunqiao raised his hands, and everyone took their seats. The room was cleared except for the 16 men sitting around the boardroom.
“Comrades, we have achieved something nobody in the world has ever achieved—the control of every living man, woman and child in the western world!” The men in the room applauded this statement.
“To remember the words of our great leader, Mao Zedong, ‘If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more.’ Comrades, I believe we are carrying out and completing his legacy, and whomever must die in this transfer of power from world capitalism to world communism will be replaced by our own breed of people. The most powerful influence in my life was my training, and much of your training, by our leader’s great wife, Jiang Qing. As you know, our success will be the ideas of controlling the world that I learned from her teachings for 15 years. Her vision was a world full of people where everybody was equal and worked for the state. Now, the remaining 2.7 billion people will work for us. They will work for her, and they will work for the world’s greatest leader, Mao Zedong, and the original Guomindang Communist Party. We are its 16 leaders. We are the Politburo of the future. Tomorrow, we leave our country of birth and with 4,000 of our Red Guards, go forth and carry on ‘The Great Leap Forward’ and multiply and complete the ‘cultural revolution’ our beloved leader began over 50 years ago. As my father, Zhang Chunqiao, believed, the Cultural Revolution created in 1966 was designed as a necessity for world maintenance and the survival of our species on this planet. The capitalistic system of greed followed by every person in the western world does not work. Human freedom does not work, could never work, and will only lead to the end of human civilization. Now it is our turn, and we will rule every man, woman, and child in a state of perfection, where they are the worker bees of life, all equal, and they will live and die to make our world the greatest in history.”
He was given a standing ovation as he stood there. It had taken him 40 years of work to start his crusade to cure humanity of greed and place everyone in their rightful position, and he knew that nothing could stop them now. He had three close allies—family members on the board from the most powerful force in China a half century ago—and his father’s wish to him was to keep the “Gang of Four” alive, take over China and the world, and to prove that they were the rightful leaders of the modern world.
They were leaving Headquarters for the beginning of their two week journey to New York harbor. This was the last time they would see their boardroom for a couple of years, maybe even longer. The 15 men were asked to stand up, each man wearing the same uniform of the new Politburo—the same clothes Mao Zedong wore most of his life. They were asked to stand in a line facing their chairman and each member was presented with two gold encrusted red books, the size of a postage stamp, to wear on their lapels to show their status in the world as a member of the new Zedong Politburo. They left the boardroom for the last time for their departure transfer from the Zedong Electronics building to their final destination: Shanghai Harbor, 170 miles away.
The chairman returned to his private office, which took up the entire 20th floor of the second building next door. As usual, he was followed by the 12 security guards and the engineer carrying the special packet and equipment, and the consul with the five special red buttons. He looked around for the last time. It was totally empty. All the furniture and priceless Chinese artifacts worth millions of dollars had been packed and placed aboard one of the container ships, taking up an entire, specially-made armored steel container to be unloaded in his new office in the White House—the Oval Office.
Each man had been given a set of two pieces of red leather travel luggage and these, with their silver suitcases were already placed in the lower hold of an extremely modern bus, fully armored-plated, with 16 rich, thick, reclining leather chairs.
Once all were aboard, the bus left the Zedong Electronics buildings with every one of the men looking at the two largest buildings in the area—one 30 stories high and the second newer building added in 2005, 20 stories high, where they had their suites of offices on the top 16 floors. It was the last time they would see their old place of work for a long time. Their new offices would be the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
The trip to the Shanghai airport from Nanjing took three hours. A dozen Red Guard motorcycles, the riders dressed in their red parade uniforms, rode in front and behind. It was a site to see as the bus, still with its motorcade drove into the airport. The airport road was thronged with Red Army Guards waving little red Mao Zedong flags. They drove into the airport and in front of them were the fleet of 30 shining new Air China 747ERs standing in three rows, and then off to one side were five of the biggest passenger aircraft in the world—Air China Airbus A380s—which had been delivered over the last two years. The chairman had done his math well. The first payments to Airbus Industries were due to begin on February 1st.