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by Clint Townsend

  Chairman Patterson banged the wooden mallet, “Minister Su-yong, you have not been recognized!”

  The quarterly summit for the Independent Council of International Affairs had, once again, suffered derailment at the hand of Ri Su-yong, the venomous and outspoken minister of intelligence for North Korea.

  The council, comprised of representatives from nearly every country on the planet, was a creation of Dr. White and designed to be a proactive alternative to the corrupt and impotent UN. To add insult to injury, the ICIA intentionally scheduled their assemblies to coincide with those of the UN, on the same floor of the SUBOS.

  “As I was saying,” said the minister of defense for Canada, “we are in total agreement and alignment with Engenechem and the NSA. Canada will be a great benefactor of the proposal, along with the nations gathered here today.”

  “Mista Chaiman!” Ri Su-yong yelled, leaping from his seat, “Mista….”

  “The Chair recognizes the minister to North Korea,” Chairman Patterson announced with a crack of his gavel.

  “Noth Kowea wi not stand fo lyi and spyi!” Ri shouted, pointing at Cain Wyczthack, who sat quietly behind and to the right of Chairman Patterson.

  “We ha bee lie to by Cain! Dis Impealis company lie!” Ri Su-yong declared, turning to the council delegates.

  The auditorium exploded with angry displays of objection from council members. Ri Su-yong stepped from behind his desk and quickly approached the minister to South Korea, two desks away. Had it not been for the Norwegian representative blocking the path of the irate North Korean and the swiftness of the ICIA security detail, there surely would have been a brawl.

  ICIA Secretary General Adolphus Bleakly abruptly rose from his chair and headed straight for Chairman Patterson.

  “Order!” Chairman Patterson shouted into his microphone, “Order!”

  “Cain lie!” Minister Su-yong continued to scream, even as bodyguards dragged him back to his seat.

  “Mr. Chairman!” and “Mr. Secretary!” the delegates shouted, tossing their headphones aside.

  Cain slowly withdrew his cell phone from the interior left breast pocket of his suit coat. As he visually monitored the situation that lay before him, Dr. Wyczthack nonchalantly dialed the number for Jay Hickman, the director of the NASA STEREO Telescope Program. Cain waited impatiently as the phone rang over and over.

  “Hickman,” the man said flatly, finally answering the call.

  “Jay? Cain.”

  “Good afternoon, sir. I’m sorry I didn’t answer my….”

  “No time for apologies,” Cain quickly interrupted. “I need you to update me on the exact position of the Kwangmyongsong Three satellite. Now.”

  “Now? As in right now?”

  “Yesterday!”

  “Sir, we’re recording the largest CMEs we’ve ever seen! These coronal ejections are capable of hitting Earth in less than….”

  “Now, Jay. You have two minutes.”

  Cain coolly disconnected his phone call and immediately dialed Riggs.

  “This assembly will come to order immediately!” Adolphus blasted, leaning in to the chairman’s microphone. “And remove that man! At once!”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Cain calmly and softly stated, rising from his seat, still on his phone. He slowly sauntered to the elevated stage and podium.

  “Woodburn,” Riggs dully answered.

  “Riggs? Cain. Call Jay at STEREO in sixty seconds. Be prepared to deploy the SPUD as soon as he gives you the trajectory and telemetry for the Kwangmyongsong.”

  “Are you kidding? North Korea, sir? Are you sure you want to….”

  “Just do it. I’m tired of dealing with this fat punk. Call me when it’s a go.”

  Cain deftly slid the phone in his coat as he approached Chairman Patterson and Secretary General Bleakly.

  Ri Su-yong was still shouting at his fellow ministers as Secretary Bleakly moved the podium microphone to the side.

  “Don’t have the minister escorted out,” Cain softly requested. “By all means, please, let the man stay. This should be interesting.”

  “Dr. Wyczthack,” Secretary Bleakly whispered, “the minister’s behavior is unacceptable in this….”

  “Adolphus, please, return the man to his seat. Everything will be just fine.”

  Secretary Bleakly shook his head and reluctantly stated to the armed security guards, “If you gentlemen will please escort Minister Su-yong back to his chair, I’m confident we can bypass any further unpleasantries.”

  As he watched Minister Su-yong and the armed security guards, Cain reached for his phone once more and called his friend, Luther Parks, at Jet Propulsion Labs. Without so much as a pleasant hello or polite greeting, Cain immediately, and quickly, gave Luther his orders as soon as he answered the call.

  “Call Riggs at the SUBOS and Jay Hickman at NASA STEREO. After the three of you track and calculate the orbital pattern for Kwangmyongsong, launch the SPUD for immediate interception.”

  Cain didn’t wait for Luther’s delayed response of “Uhhh….” and hung up.

  The auditorium was still at a dull murmur when Dr. Wyczthack motioned for Patterson and Bleakly to take their seats. He momentarily studied the delegates’ facial expressions and body language. Ri Su-yong appeared unmoved at the calamity and chaos he caused. The North Korean wore his arrogant pride as a badge of honor, with a smug and despicable grin to go along.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Cain pleasantly stated, “I humbly apologize for the disruption. I think that we should take this moment to indulge our friend and give him the opportunity to air his grievances with this council.”

  A look of bewilderment washed over the faces of not only Chairman Patterson and Secretary Bleakly, but even Minister Su-yong was surprised by the kind gesture of Dr. Wyczthack. Cain backed away from the podium and, with an insincere smile, began clapping. The delegation was slow to join in on the applause and void of enthusiasm.

  ***

  “Riggs? Are you there?” Jay frantically called out.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Where’s Luther?”

  “Hold on, guys,” Luther shouted.

  “Riggs, is SPUD ready to deploy?” Jay asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he proudly replied. “Garret initiated remote assembly and both blades are fully erect, locked, and functional.

  “Okay, okay,” Luther cried out into his headset. “Are you boys ready to party?”

  “Bring it on!” Riggs hollered back.

  “Here it is! Get it right ‘cause this thing is flying! All right, semimajor axis is 6,921 kilometers; eccentricity 0.0065; perigee 492.5 kilometers; apogee 584.9 kilometers; inclination 97.4 degrees, and a period of … 95.42 minutes.”

  “An hour and a half?” Riggs asked, astonished.

  “I told you! This thing has a motor on it.”

  “What’s the mass? What are the dimensions?” Jay inquired as he began configuring the speed and inclination for the SPUD.

  “Five hundred twenty-five pounds and four-foot square,” Luther quickly answered.

  “Four by four?” Riggs exclaimed, “We might as well be trying to catch a butterfly.”

  “Hey, man! This is what it’s supposed to do!” Luther barked.

  “I thought when Sohae launched this that Korea said it was for communications and monitoring weather patterns?” Riggs commented.

  “That’s what they told the UN, ICIA, and IAEA. That’s what they wanted the world to believe,” Luther stated.

  “So when did that all change?” Jay asked as he speedily worked through his calculations.

  “Earlier this year, Cain had some of his secret supermen hack into the Kwangmyongsong. They discovered imbedded coding in Korea’s digital transmissions that proved our military installations were being secretly monitored and attacked by their cyberpunks.”

  “What’s my inclination and speed, Jay?” Riggs impatiently inquired.

  “All right, y’all ready? SPUD inclination needs to b
e 74.8 degrees with a burnout of eighty-seven seconds to rendezvous with target at perigee of 526.8 kilometers.”

  ***

  “Cain usin Koea! Dey bill towa to spy on us! Dey ty to….”

  “Thank you, Minister Su-yong,” Dr. Wyczthack interrupted, stepping up to the podium. He slightly bumped the much shorter man with his hip and again applauded the minister.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Cain repeated.

  Just as Minister Su-yong marched off the stage, Cain felt a vibration in his coat pocket. He retrieved his phone and opened a text message from Luther at JPL. The note simply read: ‘17 minutes.’

  Cain placed his phone on the podium and opened a timer application, entered a countdown of seventeen minutes, and pressed ‘start.’

  “I remember when my grandfather, Cain Wyczthack, took me on a road trip,” he said. “He took me to New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. That was, gosh … over fifty years ago.”

  Cain took off his suit coat and draped it over the back of the vacant chair immediately to his right.

  “Anybody here enjoy just … getting outta town and driving? Anywhere?”

  The ICIA audience of two hundred sat quietly but scanned the room, looking for someone to raise their hand in response.

  “Come on! There’s gotta be at least one other person that loves getting in the car and heading out on an adventure!”

  A female aid, seated at a table that housed the ministers of foreign affairs for both Australia and Denmark slowly and cautiously raised her hand.

  “See? I knew it! I knew it! Thank you, miss. Where do you enjoy traveling to?”

  Like a bunch of kids on the first day of school, the delegates leaned and strained to see who was brave enough to answer one of Cain’s rhetorical questions.

  “Ah lak trekin’ in thu bak cuntry … otsada Sidney.”

  ***

  “Where’s the point of intersection?” Riggs asked excitedly.

  “From their inclinations and velocities, it looks like northeast Canada,” Jay volunteered.

  “Jay!” Luther jumped in, “Get ESA on the horn and see if Newton can track Kwangmyongsong. I’m gonna check in with Chandra Observatory and find out if they’ll track and record.”

  “What about the SOFIA?” Riggs inquired.

  “Get on it, man!” Luther snapped. “Don’t wait for both of us to tell you what to do. Wyczthack’s gonna want to know where and when SPUD completes the objective. If SOFIA is in the air, have them track and record as well.”

  ***

  “So my grandfather would go to all of these out-of-the-way, one-of-a-kind, local mom and pop dives whenever we traveled together. No chain restaurants, he wanted the good stuff. You know what menu item we fancied ourselves to be aficionados?”

  Two hundred sets of eyes were glued to Cain’s every word, waiting for him to supply an answer.

  “French fries,” Cain said. “We developed such an appetite … for French fries. Can you believe that?”

  The mood in the room lifted and suddenly, the stiff ICIA representatives began to smile, nod their heads, and quietly converse with their neighbors.

  “Who here likes French fries?”

  The delegates now felt comfortable enough to raise their hands.

  “What about you, Minister Su-yong? Do you enjoy eating French fries?”

  The staunch North Korean turned his head to see who was watching.

  “What is flench fly?”

  Several of the members chuckled out loud, but even more turned away in embarrassment for the minister. He covered his microphone as an aide leaned over and explained what the food item was.

  “Oh!” Ri Su-yong exclaimed once he understood. “Tatu tot! Yes! Yes!”

  The entire assembly roared with laughter, smiles, and applause.

  Cain’s phone vibrated and a text message appeared, reading: ‘Eight minutes. Point of contact Nova Scotia. Newton and Chandra tracking.’

  Cain smiled and said, “Me? I’m partial to the fries at Blake’s Lotaburger in New Mexico. Some prefer McDonald’s or Burger King’s, while there are those who lean towards Jack in the Box and their curly fries, or maybe Sonic and their tater tots.”

  The Nigerian representative boldly stood at his desk and proclaimed, “Or de krees kut potato at Chick-fil-A.”

  “Yes, yes,” Cain jovially agreed, clapping his hands. “Waffle fries. Good … but not Blake’s good. Don’t you ever wonder how all these French fries are made? It’s fascinating!”

  The phone vibrated again with a new text message that read: ‘Five minutes. Debris field seven miles SE of Hofn, Iceland. SOFIA over White Sea, tracking in infrared.’

  “I was watching a program on the History Channel one evening and the show focused on potato production and the different ways we use them. In vodka, restaurant menu items, potato chips, mashed potato flakes in the grocery stores … everything. So, globally, roughly four hundred million tons of potatoes are grown and harvested. The US is responsible for about twenty million tons, and China is in the ballpark of eighty-seven, eighty-eight million tons. Did you know that there’s as many as five thousand different potato cultivars?”

  ***

  “We have less than two minutes, boys! Is everything in order?” Luther asked his partners.

  “SPUD blades are fixed and locked,” Riggs stated confidently, leaning into his phone base. “SOFIA is monitoring both the Kwangmyongsong and SPUD in infrared.”

  “Newton, Chandra, and STEREO are all fixed on point of intersection and recording,” Jay added.

  “JPL is monitoring, as well as Hawaii and ASU,” Luther stated. “Ninety seconds! Keep your fingers crossed!”

  ***

  “Ore-Ida processes hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes every year. The delivery trucks pull in, tilt back, and dump their loads into several huge loading bins that feed the potatoes onto conveyor belts. They pass through these massive sorting machines that separate the various sizes, then they’re washed and partially peeled. This is the interesting part.”

  The smart phone on the podium vibrated, and a new text message flashed across the screen: ‘Sixty seconds.’

  Cain turned slightly to his right and leaned on the podium with his left elbow. As he began speaking, he focused his attention on Minister Su-yong.

  “The potatoes, now clean and peeled, are dumped, along with the water, into a twelve-inch diameter tube. The water is pumped through the tube at a velocity of nearly thirty miles an hour. Unbeknownst to the potatoes, waiting for them is a grid of razor-sharp blades that are spaced one quarter inch apart. The potatoes cannot avoid the grid. Anything that goes through the tube will be cut to a quarter-inch square. Voila! French fries!”

  Cain gloatingly stared at the pompous and pudgy North Korean. Minister Su-yong had no idea of the drama unfolding four hundred miles above his head.

  Most of the global elite sat politely through Cain’s spew of specificity, careful not to distract him. There were those, however, who slyly darted their eyes to see how others around them were responding.

  The Kwangmyongsong collided with the SPUD at nearly 18,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the spy satellite stood little chance of surviving the impact. The grid of tungsten and magnesium composite blades on the SPUD shredded the satellite into thousands of tiny fragments. Gravity would quickly draw the debris into Earth’s atmosphere, where the pieces would either burn up on reentry or fall harmlessly into the sea off the coast of Iceland.

  Cain’s dubious glare was broken by a blinking mobile phone screen that simply read: ‘Sliced and diced!’

  “Sshh!” Cain hissed, holding his finger up to his lips. “Can you hear that?”

  The international bureaucrats froze, struggling to hear any obscure sound. Cain slowly crept down off the platform and extended his arms. He bent his knees and spread his fingers while stepping heel to toe, ever so slowly.

  “Dr. Wyczthack!” Secretary Bleakly snapped, “I find this whole….”
r />   “Sshh!” Cain again ordered, motioning for him to sit.

  The delegates cocked their heads and rolled their eyes from side to side, listening, as if trying to decipher Morse code.

  “Do you know what that sound was?” Cain pleasantly asked, straightening himself. He placed his hands behind him and approached the table where Minister Su-yong was seated.

  Once he was directly in front of the minister, Cain stated, “That, my dear friends, was the sound of a potato being diced.”

  With that, Cain smiled, bowed slightly to his audience, turned around, and strode to the podium. He leaned over the table and grabbed his coat, then reached to the top of the podium and snatched up his phone.

  “Dr. Wyczthack?” Chairman Patterson asked, rising from his seat.

  “I don’t imagine you’ll be experiencing any more problems with Minister Su-yong,” Cain stated, glancing over his shoulder. “Call me if you need me.”

  Cain snapped his fingers and his three-man security detail sprang to their feet. Two men hurried ahead of Dr. Wyczthack as he crossed the floor of the ICIA Conference Hall, opened the doors, and checked the hallway. The third personal security guard followed closely behind Cain.

  As he and his bodyguards briskly walked to the elevators, Cain pulled out his phone. He dialed Riggs’ phone number and waited.

  “Yes, sir,” Riggs confidently answered.

  Cain quickly stated, “I want three more SPUDs!” and hung up.

  CHAPTER 17

  AGENDA

  “With Eden now online and fully operational, we can focus our attention and energy on the Arks and Clouds,” Dr. Phu stated confidently before sitting down.

  The crowded conference room broke out into a tepid round of applause.

  With almost fifty engineers, scientists, physicists, and designers packing the hall, there wasn’t much space to maneuver about.

  “Thank you, Ashlynn,” Dr. Wyczthack politely remarked from his office via the monstrously large flat screen monitor on the wall. Cain had so many cameras and microphones hidden in the conference room that he could listen to every little whisper and watch each individual keystroke on a computer or phone. He also tracked and recorded all phone conversations in the SUBOS. There were very few occasions where Cain and Dr. White didn’t know exactly what was being said to whom and when.