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“Why, I had no idea!” The Admiral said, “It’s a splendid plan. Simply genius. That Adrian is one smart man, brilliant really…although he doesn’t seem confident of his own abilities outside of knowing how to fight. This just reinforces everything I’ve thought of him. Outstanding.”

“That reminds me Admiral.” Linda interjected. “I’ve been wanting to ask you if we could borrow Ryan to teach a class in military history. It’s just what the girls need the most right now. Any chance?”

“Absolutely. If you consent to letting the girls visit the ship, I’ll send Ryan back with them and start right away. Linda I can’t tell you what a morale lift it would be for everyone in Corpus to see the girls again. They really do miss them.”

“It’s a deal.” Linda said with a smile. Race and the girls jumped up and whooped loudly.

That evening the Admiral and his men met with Adrian and his Kitchen Cabinet; Linda, Roman, Sarah, Matt, Perry, and Tim. Adrian said, “We’ve talked this over and have come to the conclusion that our only legitimate course of action is to present your offer of the military to Congress and let them decide. We’ve also come to the conclusion that Congress will accept.”

“Just so.” the Admiral replied. “It’s exactly what we expected you would do, and once again I am happy to say it’s what I wanted you to do. It proves to me again that I am right, that you are the right man for this. Any other process would have been…scary.”

The Admiral opened his brief case for the second time and removed another thick folder of documents. “This is an operational readiness report. It contains information that we prefer be kept secret, for your eyes, and the eyes of your staff only and should be kept under lock and key. Every military installation, weapons inventory, number of men, the total count of equipment, and so on is in here. You’ll want to study this carefully so that you know exactly what you have at your disposal. You’ll also note that the location and disposition of nuclear weapons is included. We’ve gone to great lengths to keep the nuclear weapons secure...but they’re in too many locations; we’d like you to consider consolidating several of them to reduce the number of areas we have to maintain. You’ll find our proposed consolidation plan in the folder.”

“And now that you’ve constructively accepted the post of Commander in Chief, I have to brief you on what we consider to be an imminent threat to the Republic of Texas and the rest of the country. China had been building ships at a feverish rate before the grid collapsed. They weren’t nearly as damaged as we were by the CME. They were hit the same way we were, but while China had an emerging industrial complex to rival our own they were still a largely a non-electrified agrarian society. The farmers slightly out-numbered the urbanites. China was able to send most of its city folks out to live on the farms, which relied on human and animal labor, not electricity or tractors.”

“The farmers absorbed the city people, putting them to work alongside them, which kept starvation to a bare minimum. The government then began slowly bringing back the engineers and scientists and then the skilled workers and were able to start up their infrastructure again. They are far ahead of us in that. But China needs energy, specifically they need coal and oil. The quickest way for them to get significant amounts of oil are from offshore drilling rigs, rigs that are already in place and just need to be started up again. They have begun sending their Navy out to take over all the rigs within their reach. Not only their navy but they’ve taken nearly all the ships from their neighbor countries too.”

“Problem is, there aren’t enough local rigs to supply their growing demand. They’ve begun reaching out further. Our intel suggests that they’ll be heading for American waters soon. There are rigs all up and down our coasts, undefended rigs they can simply take by just pulling a ship up to them. Once they’ve taken those, it will be only a matter of time before they send massive amounts of ground troops onto our shores to take refineries and then into the interior to the major oil fields and coal mines. And by the way, Corpus Christi is a very rich target for them.”

“I hate to lay this in your lap Mr. President, but it looks like you may someday be in a war with China.”