by T I WADE
“Yes, we had purchased some of these now useless electronic parts made in China, and yes, we also replaced older U.S. parts with these more modern chips, fuses, etc. Luckily, we had a habit of not throwing anything away. So in the last four weeks, we have placed our older stored parts in an aircraft radar system—a directional system using radio waves, much like our older aircraft are currently using—and, more importantly a more modern computer system than Carlos made operational in January. Of even greater importance is an out-of-date analogue dial-up computer-communication system we can restore in the next few months which will utilize the electrical lines crossing the country. There are several other systems we are still working on with new teams of men and women in Silicon Valley. We have had three meetings with electrical engineering crews at the old electrical production plants in Silicon Valley and the RTP area in Raleigh North Carolina.
“I will start with our project in Silicon Valley. There are only skeleton teams working at one manufacturing plant which made guidance systems for our latest missiles. There are now twelve engineers working on a new project, out of 300 who used to work there. We still hope that more of the missing will arrive. The Marines from Camp Pendleton have set up a defensive perimeter around seven blocks of Silicon Valley’s main buildings so these engineers, if or when they arrive, will join safe environments which are peaceful and good places to work. We are taking in skilled workers who can prove that they have built electronic systems and they are invited to join our new little town where accommodations, food and drink are being made available so they can work in peace. Many housing systems, mostly where engineers lived, have been cordoned off by wire and security gates and are places where these workers can live a normal life.
“As of today we have three projects moving forward. First: radar screens, approach and landing guidance systems for all aircraft which need one. Computer boxes are being emptied of their useless insides and the new radar systems are coming off the assembly line three per day. Carlos, Mr. Lee Wang and I will be working on getting satellite guidance from what we have still operational in space. ‘Project Radar,’ as we call it, could have satellite guidance by the end of this year.
Second: ‘Project Electricity.’ We are repairing the electrical systems in the manufacturing plant’s local grid to become live. We started with the basic wall plug and worked backwards to the control box and then outside to the nearest junction point in the streets around the compound. Yesterday we began to go through every part in the area junction station, one of those fenced-off electrical stations in every suburb in the country. So far we have listed over fifty pieces of equipment we need to copy and reproduce. It is all possible, but will take time. Just to build a prototype and produce the machinery to build them will take a year. The same is true with all production. Once we build a manufacturing line and get it powered by electricity and implement a system of organization, we can pump out large numbers.
“Third is ‘Project Nuclear Power,’ a study of the nearest nuclear power station to Silicon Valley in California. We will then start a duplicate project here in North Carolina, once Preston Strong had visited the plant again in New Hill. The plant is to be cordoned off with a military barrier against any unauthorized entry. The engineers there are to be identified and work started to get the plant operational again. It is quite simple to get any nuclear power station running, once we have all the necessary electrical communication and control parts working. That will also take time, but once we get Project Two and Project Three completed, then we can mate them up and hopefully deliver power along electrical lines. Estimated time is six to twelve months before we can join these two projects together. Up until then we are on generator power. Any questions so far?” Michael asked.
“Project One,” asked Martie, who hadn’t had much chance to speak to her father for a month. “Your revamped radar systems which, with Carlos’ help, could one day give us guidance, how are they going to work compared to the old Navistar system and how accurate will they be?”
“The system will be as good as any system in use today from the 1980s. The screens will be black and white, not color, to begin with as we don’t have very many color-screen working parts, but we can reconstruct these black and white screens into color once we build their needed modifications and set up a line of manufacture. From our side, the manufacturing side, there are millions of products for which we need to build and manufacture new parts. Many will be never built and we will wait for new innovations to give us new and better machines, like the all vehicle engine-management systems of which billions are sitting in piles of junk on the highways around the country. I believe electric power vehicles are now the way to go. No more combustion engines will ever be built, I can see that now. And, since money has no value now, hydrogen-powered engines and naturally-powered engines, which did not prove to be financially positive in the past, are all feasible now. It doesn’t matter anymore what they cost. On the satellite side, Carlos has been briefed on what he is allowed to say to you. Carlos, please come up and answer Martie’s space topic. That is all from us. Thank you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen and Martie,” started Carlos, once he had reached the podium, “I am not allowed to say how many satellites we have operational in space. We could have more in the future, but what is dead up there, or technically dead, will stay that way until they fall back to earth in the next few decades. We need to produce new satellites to replace them. We are talking about several decades and maybe not even in our lifetime, but we do have communications, as I believe all of you in here have or are with someone who has a satellite phone. Those satellite phones are and will be the only satellite communications we have until we send up something new. What we have working up there are multipurpose satellites which can send and receive communications, the normal bounced messages we are currently using. Only one of the satellites has GPS possibility and this satellite will be worked on to aid the radar project. The other satellites with their multipurpose usages will help give us a sort of miniaturized GPS system. As you all know, we need three or more satellite-fixes to get an accurate GPS position for fifty-meter accuracy. We can do that once we move satellites into position. That means all we have up there must be re-positioned within 500 miles of U.S. airspace, or within 500 miles of our borders and lowered into dangerous orbits—far lower than our old Navistar system operated. We will get our new GPS operational for about a decade at this altitude before it becomes impossible to stop these satellites from being attracted by the earth’s gravity and disintegrating in our atmosphere. That means we have about ten years, give or take a year or two, before we could lose a system we haven’t even got yet. We have backup satellites, but like four flat tires you don’t have enough spares for all the tires.
“The United States will be the only country able to use the system and we will also have visual security from one of the satellites until it hits the atmosphere a year or two from now. Just before I left on my last trip, we decided to lose accuracy to half a mile instead of fifty meters and position the needed satellites a hundred miles higher. This could give us another year of operation, but of course the whole project could go down from other space junk hitting our system at any time. It will take just one glance to trash what we have up there and this year there is far more out-of-control trash up there than last year.
“We then realized that if we want visual as well, we will need every satellite re-positioned, which means we now have no spares. The satellite with cameras aboard will need to be in the middle of the United States. So we changed the planning, so we win and lose time at the same time. The good news is that at this altitude, the cameras are much closer to earth, can see something as small as a ship, or a block of buildings pretty clearly and we can monitor hundreds of different actions we, or an enemy take by watching them from the sky.”
“Any chance of getting guided missiles or drones operational?” asked General Patterson.
“We haven’t checked the communication abili
ties of what we can send and receive,” replied Carlos, “but Michael and his father and their team are working on the idea of interchanging the directional orders transmitted to a slower drone vehicle, not a guided missile as we would never be able to give out such rapid communications. Let me describe that better. Remember the old dial-up systems for computer communications Michael just spoke about?” Everyone nodded. “Compared to the high-speed internet we had last year, that is how fast we will be able to communicate over our new system—a thousand times slower. To get back to drones, yes, we could relay photos from our eyes in the sky and attack with unguided rockets from the drones’ wings, but understand the situation: We need to remake the drone’s electronics to get it flyable first. Time frames: We have visual pictures of the USA; you know that as we defeated our attackers with forward knowledge. We have satellite communications and 489 working satellite phones, the only worldwide communications device for the next decade or two. I believe we also will have a low-powered GPS system by year-end and maybe drone defense within a year or two after that.”
“Carlos, are you saying that any aircraft that could fly in the near future will be all unmanned aircraft?” asked Buck.
“Correct, Buck. It is cheaper and easier to rebuild the electronics of an unmanned drone than our old fighter jets or bombers. Of course anything in mothballs older than 1985 could be flying soon, but I believe we have already found a large proportion of the flyable or drivable machinery, military and civilian.” Carlos bowed and sat down.
“Thank you all for coming. We all now have much work to do,” continued General Patterson. “Please introduce yourself to people you don’t know here. Everybody in this room is as important as the person next to you. We need teamwork for the rest of the year to achieve what has been described here today. You will all be kept up to date on a daily basis and we will gather here for our next meeting on April 1st, at 12:30 pm.”
There was applause for the general. Necessary information had been given and many in the room had to decide their part and what to do for their country, most of them sitting in the front row.
Martie and Preston had no idea what they could do and they looked at each other, questioning in which direction to go.
Preston suddenly knew where Martie would want to work—to join the team in Silicon Valley. She was a very accomplished engineer and he felt sure the pull of working with her father and grandfather would be as strong as the earth pulling in those satellites Carlos had described. He felt at a loss as to where he would be best suited to help. Protecting his home and being close to Martie began pulling at him at the same time. Also the new member of the family, Little Beth, needed time to bond and be with both of them.
“I’m thinking like a mother!” he suddenly thought to himself, sitting there in a dream world.
Chapter 5
North Carolina
The meeting was over and the people attending milled about, chatting and discussing what had just taken place.
“Only unmanned aircraft in our flying future, Carlos?” Preston asked as he walked up to his friend who was talking to General Patterson, the Ambassador of Colombia and Grandpa Roebels, still seated in his wheelchair.
“Unfortunately, Preston,” laughed Carlos, slapping his friend on the back, “for the foreseeable future, there is no chance we can get any of our modern aircraft flying again, military or civilian. We had a team of over a hundred engineers check out three of the most modern 747-400ERs at JFK last week. Two were untouched, totally closed up and parked away from the terminals. One was a newish Qantas aircraft, the second a Singapore Airlines 747 and the third a United 400ER in their locked and protected maintenance hangar. Compared to the totally working China Airlines 747s, one of which needed a few repairs and was using the same maintenance hangar and personnel, the team concluded that we would need to re-build over 7,200 separate electrical pieces, or total parts from scratch. We also went through the electronics of an F-16 and two other dead military aircraft at Andrews. There were Air Force technicians, engineers and a dozen aerospace engineers and in these aircraft the news was even worse. We found over 12,000 new and different minute electrical parts of all types which would need replacement. And, Preston, that was per aircraft! It’s just not worth the effort… it would take years. With the unmanned vehicles being only half the size of a manned fighter jet, the Air Force is pulling a ten-year-old mini-drone, the size of a large model aircraft, apart at Edwards as we speak.
“With nearly 80 percent of the inspection done, we can replace the first 50 of 350-odd individual terminated parts from the Chinese supplies they brought in and modify another 100 parts, which Grandpa Roebels and his team in California have already revamped. Several dozen of the actual parts can be replaced from older electronics—computers, cell phones and strangely enough, even the odd control switch from civilian kitchen equipment. In these older 1990s drones, many of the electrical parts were off the shelf and the exact same fuses and control devices were built into commercial ovens, refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers.”
Preston scratched his head at this surprising information.
“That’s right,” he said, being an electronics engineer himself. “In those days the parts were mostly still made in the U.S. or Germany and there must have been stockpiles of the electronics.”
“We can use all the non-intelligent parts, like fuses, resistors, coils and anything that didn’t need to think out an action,” added Grandpa Roebels.
“That gives us about a year before we can get the first drones operational,” stated Carlos as the President came up to join them.
“Preston,” stated the President, “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but I would like to get together a smaller meeting down at your airfield tomorrow. General Patterson, to get the Secret Service off my tail, I want you to increase the guard at his airfield by a dozen more soldiers. These guys won’t give up and follow me around like a second skin. The family will attend and a couple of days of privacy would be pleasant.”
“I’ll get it organized,” stated the general, walking off to find Seymour Johnson’s base commander.
“Tell the base commander that we want the same guys back he took from us yesterday,” shouted Preston to the general, getting a nod from him.
“Who do you want at the meeting, Mr. President?” asked Carlos.
“You and Mr. Roebels. Buck will fly us down. Just the group who have met there before. Most of these officers need to get back to their bases and jobs. Captain Mallory doesn’t need to attend, and he has enough going on. Ask Will Smart and his family to join us and ask the general to get engineers from the Corps of Engineers back to your place. We need more housing built there for future meetings. If you don’t mind, I want a secure house for my family and me, and more overnight accommodations, perhaps a dozen rooms for others to stay. I’ll get some engineers in from Fort Bragg to see if we can extend your runway a little. Is that possible?”
“I have mapped out a second runway possibility, Mr. President,” replied Preston. “I don’t know about tarring and production equipment though.”
“There must be tons of usable building equipment lying idle,” replied the President. “I want a second private headquarters. It is a waste of time sitting around the White House; Washington is out of the loop. I think that many of our larger cities will become ghost towns soon. We might just close this whole city down and make it off limits.”
Everybody looked at him, shocked. It sounded crazy, but in this new age nothing was impossible anymore. What the President had just said stayed with them for a long time. It would be a major topic at the next day’s meeting.
Oliver and Puppy knew something was up the next morning as the airfield woke up at dawn, several minutes after they had decided to complete their morning inspection. The temperature was cold, 67 inside the kitchen and 27 outside showed on the house temperature gauge. For some reason, the gauge was still working.
“No Chinese parts in that
baby,” thought Preston as he went through to make coffee. He turned on the kitchen light and always felt that he was walking into an old-fashioned age. Over the last three weeks, he had exchanged all the modern electronics in the kitchen with appliances he found in the old barn and at Joe’s place, which had a barn that looked like a reconditioning mechanics shop. Joe always enjoyed playing with old bits and pieces. The new-old electric oven was a horrible lime-green color. It stood next to an old avocado-green gas oven, its new gas line heading out to a 100-pound gas bottle outside the rear kitchen wall. A lime-green refrigerator had also been sent over, an extra at Joe’s house. The horrible old-fashioned colors took him back to the very same kitchen his parents had been proud of when he was just a kid.
Joe had used his tractor-trailers often since the end of the war a month earlier. David, his five sons and he had headed out every day once it was safe to do so. With the armed rat-patrol jeeps as bodyguards they found all sorts of crashed tractor-trailers at different locations around the major highways.
The idea started when Joe and David had found an undamaged John Deere tractor-trailer filled with 35 new lawn tractors on I-40, just south of Clayton, North Carolina, 40 miles to the south. The road, presumably cutting through lower-populated rural areas, had few people looking around. The dead bodies in the crashed vehicles had only been desecrated a little by crows. He had swapped trailers, left his old one there and returned home.
The next day Joe returned with his convoy of bodyguards to collect his empty trailer. A quarter of a mile further south on I-40, they saw a slightly damaged freezer tractor-trailer, a reefer with no markings on the side. He couldn’t believe it as he had heard the reefer motor still idling and he checked to find out that the driver, who was dead in the cab, must have just filled up with diesel, and the old and rusty freezer motor was connected directly to the main fuel tank.