INVASION USA (Book 2) - The Battle For New York (6 page)

“That’s Steve Crockett’s old computer,” acknowledged Carlos, “and I think one of the original terminals he must have used when they built this observatory. They must have transferred over to more modern computers and a new mainframe in the 1990s.”

“It was, I think, in 1985 when Zedong Electronics started making parts for PC computers,” continued Lee Wang. “This model came out just before Zedong Electronic began to build the parts.”

“Zedong Electronics?” asked Carlos. “Zedong Electronics makes parts for everything in the world and has ever since I was a kid!” And then realization hit him like a brick and he hit his forehand with his open hand. “Zedong Electronics! It is all of their parts that have malfunctioned. Of course! All their parts have malfunctioned, or have all been directed to close themselves down, possibly through satellite communications!”

“Terminated,” corrected Lee Wang.

“And all the back-up spare parts, everything, even whole units, everything we use today are made by the same company!” realized Carlos, sitting back in his chair and looking upwards with his eyes closed. “They have crippled the world, the whole world, and every electronic gadget in the world apart from their own, I’m sure.” He sat quiet, his eyes closed and his brain working faster than any computer could ever do.

It took him a minute and then he opened his eyes and stared at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of him. “Lee Wang, you and I need to have that long talk. Tell me now, are you a spy or work for Zedong Electronics?”

“Yes, at least until they tried to kill me and my family last week,” Lee replied. “It was then that I became a real American citizen and wanted to resign from the company. They were terminating all of their employees, I believe, so that we couldn’t tell anybody about the plan. I wasn’t a spy like James Bond. My job was to find new products they could copy and then manufacture replacement parts, or obtain a contract to build those parts cheaper than any other company. That was my job. It was more the commercial stealing of blueprints or finding out future ideas. The first device I worked on in China was a new prototype of a Toyota engine-management system in 1982. I had to catalog all the small and important parts so that they could copy and reproduce them for the Japanese manufacturer. They gave me the same model back again a few months later and asked me to dissect it again and see if anything was different. I did, and the electronic parts manufactured by Zedong Electronics were well-made—perfect, but had a small microscopic antenna that you could only see with a microscope. One of these was included on every new part.”

“Big enough to receive an electronic impulse?” asked Carlos.

“I would never have seen them if I hadn’t used a microscope, and we were not supposed to use microscopes to dissect the new parts, just eyesight. I got curious and wanted to look through the powerful microscope on my desk and saw the antenna sticking out, but was nearly caught. The miniature part dropped on the floor and broke. I gathered it up, put it in a piece of paper, and looked at it again through my own microscope when I got home.”

One of the soldiers came over. They had been patiently waiting by the front door, eating cookies out of the observatory’s food dispenser, and had made some tea after Lee had shown them where it was.

“It’s time to go,” the soldier said.

“We can’t go now,” replied Carlos. “We are about to get important feedback. Lee and I need to stay here overnight. We brought enough gas for the generator for at least 12 hours and it is starting to warm up in here. The temperature in here must be at least 40 degrees. I recommend you return to the base and either tell General Allen to come up here or come back and pick us up at dawn tomorrow morning. What does the weather look like?”

“It’s getting overcast, but I don’t believe it is going to snow tonight, sir. The clouds are high clouds, the ones that show change, but not immediate change. I think it will snow tomorrow sometime, but not tonight.”

“Good. Go down the mountain and tell General Allen to look for any old military computers at the base. I mean old junk like this Amiga here,” Carlos showed the sergeant the computer Lee was pulling apart. “Tell him ‘Zedong Electronics’ are to blame for all our woes, got that?” The man nodded. “Amiga computers pre-1985 and tell him to get over to the local television station. I want him to get one of those mobile television trucks—you know, the ones that have the satellite-feed dishes on top?” The sergeant nodded again. “Somehow get it loaded onto a trailer or whatever. If there are six of the satellite-feed trucks, take all six. Get every one he can, because I think Lee and I can reroute the electronics to give us a satellite feed from one truck to another somewhere else in the country. The TV trucks should fit into a C-130 and be moved around the country.”

“Yes, sir,” smiled the sergeant, now understanding what Carlos was trying to do.

“We will need to have constant generator power up here, so bring up more fuel in the morning in case we need to stay longer. Lee and I are going to try and work out a permanent connection here and then bounce the feed back to Hill Air Force Base, and then hopefully to any other place in the country that we want. If we can do that, we can use one of the television trucks as a mobile head quarters. But, we need these old Amiga computers and the dishes on the television vehicles to work together. Tell the general that I need to move the satellite into position where it is directly over us here and that will hopefully give us simple but viewable pictures of both our coastlines, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” and he was gone.

“I have the Amiga operational,” Lee spoke up. “It had an ancient burned-out fuse, and I just re-routed the feed past the old fuse. Not a Zedong Electronics fuse—it says ‘Made in America.’”

For the next couple of hours, Carlos and Lee worked, downgrading the whole system. It got dark outside and much colder, and they put on extra jackets to keep warm.

By 10:00 pm that night, Carlos pushed the ‘A’ command for Navistar P and a dark picture of the Earth—a very poor-quality picture—flickered on and was displayed on the old Amiga screen. Carlos could just see the dark outline of what looked like the North Pole, the northern area of Canada and the top of the United States with the sun’s rays off to one side and a quarter of the dark planet in the bottom right corner of the computer screen. Carlos typed in new coordinates so that the satellite would reposition itself directly over Salt Lake City.

Navistar P was already moving in a fixed orbit at 241 miles above Earth, but was rotating a mile a year slower than it was meant to so it wouldn’t keep a constant position. The readout from the computer stated that it would need several hours to perfect its rotation speed, complete the repositioning process, and asked for permission to move. Carlos gave it the necessary permission and the latitude and longitude coordinates on the screen slowly started to change.

“That’s all we can do for now,” Carlos said to Lee. Lee nodded. “Now tell me your story, Lee. I want to know everything.”

Lee did. It took two hours, several of cups of tea, and several packages of junk food from the food dispenser the soldiers had broken into. Lee told Carlos about his studies, his degrees, the old man who met him in the corridor one day, their family’s new home on the island that looked like America. Then he told him about his work in America—how he stole plans for new PC computers from Microsoft, sent over many new software programs, motherboards from several companies Microsoft was working with. Microsoft had themselves stolen parts from IBM, Acer, and all the other major computer manufacturers to make their new programs compatible.

Lee then worked for several smaller companies that were in the forefront of new communication technology. Nokia was a big one. He even worked for Intel, cleaning floors for a year until he got a new job with Apple. With Apple, he became a sales agent for Zedong Electronics.

Until 1998, he had cleaned floors and downloaded plans from computers belonging to directors, designers, and scientists. After 1998, he wore a suit, used his knowledge, and sold several firms on producing everything they needed to be made in China—the whole product from computer chips to cell phones. He was the one who got the contract for everything Apple was about to design to be made by Zedong Electronics in China “I never thought that it was for anything bad,” added Lee, over his second cup of tea.

They glanced at the screen. The Earth was still there, still very dark, and the center of the planet had moved an inch closer to the middle of the screen. If it had been daylight, they would have been able to make out Salt Lake City’s position faintly in the bottom right corner.

“I never thought for a second that something bad was going to come from all our work and selling for Zedong Electronics. The Russians were stealing technology from you. America was blind to it all. America was trying to steal technology from the Japanese and when we came out with the first parts, I’m sure the Japanese then tried to steal it from us. Even a few American spies went over to China. I met a couple of them, and unbeknownst to them, they tried to steal their own technology back!”

“It was nothing new, just a copy of what was stolen, and a cheaper price that nobody could refuse. For years I tried to understand the logic of selling parts at cost or even below cost, but once they started making whole units, the profits must have risen quickly. Zedong Electronics must have lost billions of dollars in the first couple of decades and then got it all back and a lot more by the third decade. It was genius, I thought. The only bank that could have loaned them enough for those two decades would have been the Chinese government—or another country’s government, like Russia or America—nobody else was big enough.”

“Why did you end up here?” asked Carlos. “There’s nothing to steal from here, not from this observatory anyway.”

“I think that after Microsoft, Acer, Intel, Nokia and Apple, and all the information I had gathered, I was relocated to a place that would hide me from the people in Silicon Valley. I think they were scared that employees from those different companies would remember me and put two and two together. I was getting old, my daughter was about to go to university, and my assistance was not necessary any more. I was a liability to them,” Lee replied bluntly.

“You were paid for all this information?” Carlos asked.

“Yes, 1,000 dollars for each contract, and I got paid 63 times in 25 years. Then they told me to come here, they paid for my little house in Salt Lake, purchased our small dry cleaners shop in Holladay for my wife, and told me to sweep floors up here and disappear until they contacted me again.”

“How did they contact you?” was Carlos’ next question.

“Either through a satellite phone we were issued in late 1999, or here by satellite communication.”

“Can you find the satellites they used to contact you from here?” Carlos asked.

“Yes. There were three Chinese satellites that belonged solely to a subsidiary company of Zedong Electronics in Shanghai. All the other Chinese equipment is, or was, controlled by the Chinese government. They must have forgotten that I had enough knowledge to trace their contacts back to the source. I was only contacted here once, then I assume I was forgotten until last week when it was time to terminate me and my family. They often checked to make sure I was cleaning floors here and that I was living in my house, and that my wife and I were happy. The last time I was contacted was a year ago.”

“Where did they contact you from, Shanghai?” Carlos wanted to know.

“No, from their headquarters. It is a large building in Nanjing. I saw the building go up in 1979-80. It took two years to build, was about 30-something stories and the biggest in the area at that time.”

“Who tried to terminate you?” was Carlos’ next question. Lee told him about the four men in the SUV who looked like special soldiers. His friend from Las Vegas had warned him, explaining that he himself was running away from a Chinese hit squad of four men. He had seen this squad of four set fire to his house and a couple of other Chinese families’ houses. Lee explained that a number of families had been killed all over America at the same time, and that it was the work of more than one team of men.

Lee then described the size of the island village north of Shanghai and explained that there could be hundreds of termination, or killer, squads in America, and all the other countries for that matter. Zedong Electronics could have a whole army of them.

*****

General Allen was busy. By lunchtime, he had met with Vice Admiral Martin Rogers in Norfolk. The Navy, he had learned, was in far more disarray than the Air Force. The Navy had zero communications, and the two men went over possible attack scenarios. The general told the admiral that the Air Force was already under wartime conditions with no transponders or lights during flight. General Allen suggested that all naval shipping use the same secrecy because they were definitely being spied on from space.

The meeting was brief, only an hour, but the general left Norfolk for Salt Lake City knowing that the Navy had two old World War II destroyers in operational status and three old diesel-powered submarines used for training that still had usable torpedoes. Martin Rogers had explained that this was what was left of the whole Atlantic Fleet, and that there were about the same number of operational vessels stationed in San Diego—the remains of the Pacific Fleet. He also disclosed that they still had tons of armaments for these rusty buckets on both sides of the country. They had at least a small chance of sinking a couple of ships, if and when necessary.

Captain Sally Powers was flying the general to Salt Lake City. They arrived an hour after Carlos had left, had a late lunch with the base commander, and took Lady Dandy’s crew with him in the C-130 over to Edwards Air Force base. They all arrived in California around 4:00 in the afternoon. Maggie and the kids were happy to see Will and decided to stay with him until they were needed elsewhere. Will Smart was still not happy about flying across country.

The general met with the Edwards base commander while the troops lifted the fourth generator from Preston out of the belly of the aircraft, after which he took off for the return flight with Buck and Barbara still aboard, back to Hill AFB in Salt Lake City.