by T I WADE
After two weeks of daily meetings, the board room on the 30th floor became silent and empty. Nobody knew that a scenario for the destruction of the Western world had just been planned down to the day, minute, and second.
Nanjing became a hive of activity. In more than a dozen different areas around the city, large production buildings and warehouses started springing up. Young workers were hired from the city and surrounding areas by the thousands. Hundreds of prominent Chinese scientists and engineers began showing up in local restaurants. Most city folk did not notice the larger manufacturing plants being built further out from the cities, some as far as 20 miles away. Little towns grew overnight from a few hundred houses to big 10-story, or more apartment blocks and their populations doubled from month to month.
By the end of 1980, many of these new buildings were up and running—designing and producing electronic prototypes copied from the stolen plans of every company in Silicon Valley. These secret plans came from Microsoft, Apple, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Volkswagen, Siemens, Honda, Toyota and even Grandpa Roebels and Michael’s electronic business in San Diego. Neither of the Roebels knew that the old Chinese man they hired to clean their work spaces at night had a Ph.D. in engineering from Beijing University. He was never allowed into the design area and their top secret laboratory, but he had enough knowledge and training to break any code and get through any security device anywhere in their factory at the San Diego airport when nobody was around. He had been intensively trained in Nanjing.
The Roebels would have been even more surprised if they had visited the main Raytheon production plant after the company was purchased from them and found that the same old Chinese face was still cleaning floors and still totally invisible to the hundreds who worked there every day. Nobody knew if he was even on the payroll!
Nanjing had over four million people living within city walls built well over 500 years ago. Within 100 miles of the city lived another 300,000 rural people in 1979, and by 1981, this number had tripled. Zedong Electronics had become the largest employer in the area in less than two years, employing over 10 percent of the population of Nanjing, as well as another 600,000 people who had been moved in from all over China. Nobody apart from the Board of Directors could see the whole picture, since there were over 38 separate manufacturing buildings, all with bogus company names, all producing different electrical components. And these massive installations were well-placed and hidden over 500 square miles.
U.S. space satellites noticed this rapid growth, but China was starting to grow everywhere, and photos of all of Zedong Electronics’ new manufacturing plants disappeared into different files and nobody thought to look at this massive growth-area any closer.
Wang Chunqiao had designed his master plan well. Even the Chinese powers-that-be were too interested in foreign affairs to notice what was going on in areas other than Beijing. “Buy Quality, Buy Cheap!” was the motto started in December of 1982 as electronics from over 52 manufacturing companies in and around Nanjing hit the Western world with a vengeance. “Best Chinese Quality, Low Chinese Prices” was the second motto started in early 1983.
The electronic world was at first weary of these cheap parts. Nothing of real value had ever come out of China, but with the lowered prices, fewer and fewer international companies could resist. If their competition was buying these new components, then based on price comparison there would be no resulting competition.
Companies by the thousands learned in the early 1980s that these new parts worked as well as any parts manufactured in the rest of the world and were produced at half the price. Nanjing became a busy city, nearly as rapidly as Shanghai, where Zedong Electronics had another 50 large undercover manufacturing plants, again all under different names and all producing different small electronic products.
Within a couple of years, the whole world had entered a new era—the era of all machines running with electronically controlled parts. Gone were the old-fashioned carburetors in cars, trucks, buses, aircraft, ship engines, or military vehicles on land, sea, and air. Millions of old carburetor engines were redesigned and replaced with computerized electronic-control systems. Even some of the smallest car engines could only maintain forward motion with one of these fancy computers added to them that controlled every part of the working engine thousands of times per second. The only remaining engines that stuck to carburetors were small lawn mower engines and low-power generators.
Naturally, outside the immediate area of China, nobody knew of Zedong Electronics. In the west, the use of Chinese electronic products grew and grew. Nothing was said about where they came from. All the buyer could read was “Made in China,” in English as large as the product’s size would allow.
By 1985, children’s toys were hitting the shelves with “Made in China” labels on them. Many Americans were still fearful about communism and anything from a “red” country was not to be purchased. As great as any country is, however, the price was always the winner in the end with shoppers. It took a couple of years, but Zedong Electronics and its many “subsidiaries” grabbed more and more market share. Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and other large American companies started looking at getting complete products “Made in China.”
In 1987, Phase II of Chairman Wang Chunqiao’s operation was launched into the world market. The board room on the 30th floor was again busy, with the same suits in the room. None looked any older, but there was a pervading sense of exhaustion like that shown by workers who are enslaved by their jobs. Paper was not present the room. All the men talked from memory. This time, the screen behind the Chairman’s head was filled with photos of larger gadgets. More modern and smaller cell phones, circuit boards, and even mother boards passed across the screen on the first day. Then came tinier single parts, once again very small in size and something only an electrical engineer could name. Strontium was seen in every diagram and seemed to be a very important part of the overall discussions. Much of the discussion was about the half life of this grey, silvery metal.
For two weeks the men worked, and each day an exotic lunch was served. Alcohol was never seen in the room—only exotic food and drink served buffet style by the same young girls every day. As with the first two-week session six years earlier, each man played a part in the lectures and discussions. It seemed that each man was an equal to the others. The Chairman was the boss; the other 15 men treated him with respect but were not scared to argue a point if there was one to argue.
The last lecture was a long one. This time, Comrades Zhi Yun and Hu Lee both stood in front of the large screen and pointed to the different objects as they appeared on the screen. Anybody in the Pentagon would have loved to have been a fly on the wall. First, the blueprints of U.S. communication satellites were discussed for over an hour. All the small, intricate parts in the satellites made by Zedong Electronics were shown in red. There must have been at least 30 parts in the entire satellite breakdown. The sizes of each unit ranged from a pinhead to the size of a two-inch pencil. Then, the design of a modern nuclear reactor was shown on the screen.
This small reactor looked like it could have been from a submarine or ship. Over the course of two days, these two men went over many types of computer-controlled weapons, tanks, aircraft, civilian and military vehicle engine-control systems, and ships above and below the waterline. Even underground railway systems were included, and the first was from Washington D.C. They also showed a complete map of the electrical grid of several countries in North America and Europe, many gas lamps sold worldwide, what looked like several types of electrical back-up systems, and dozens of possible top secret information and designs (civilian and military) from different countries. After two weeks of daily work, the room became empty again and the world of electronics moved on as before.
The people of Nanjing who worked for the dozens of plants around the area were paid a basic wage, just enough not to complain, but not enough to live a better quality life than their countrymen. Complaining was not allowed in mod
ern China anyway, and to most people the daily routine was long and boring doing the same thing over and over again.
Several workers, however, started getting horrible sores all over their bodies. These special employees, over 12,000 of them, were paid a better wage and worked in special white suits in sealed laboratories. It seemed that something toxic might be getting through their protection. It wasn’t long before these poor folk were separated from their loved ones and never seen again. So many people died every day all over China that these few became just numbers to the world around them, and family members were compensated well enough that they too said very little.
Chapter 4
Sally Powers
In a small town just outside Savannah, Georgia, Sally Michele Powers was born to Peter and Marci Powers on June 12, 1988. Peter was an insurance salesman, and Marci was a nurse at the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah.
Marci worked in the ICU, and giving birth to her first child there was a plus. She was given 24/7 attention by her colleagues. Peter had access any time he wanted, and Sally came into the world in the birthing room of the hospital to a happy family with lots of smiling faces peering down at her.
By the age of three, Sally already showed a love of motor vehicles. Any ride with her father in the family car was a thrill to her. The wind was an added bonus when she was allowed to have the window closest to her car seat rolled down slightly. It rustled her hair and she would put her young chin forward, close her eyes, and let the wind caress her face.
Life became even better when, on her fourth Christmas, Peter bought a used Mustang convertible for Marci. When Marci put the top down, the wind gave Sally the full force of its power as she sat directly behind the driver’s seat. Screams of ecstasy were often heard by passers-by as they cruised along coastal roads during their days off together, and a lunch at some little restaurant or diner along the coast somewhere was always included at the halfway point of the pleasure.
On her tenth birthday, her father took her out to Hodges Park Airpark in Georgetown for the first time. His insurance company had offered several small year-end prizes for new business in 1997 and Peter had won a couple of them, including an hour-long flight in a private airplane from Hodges Park. One of his managers owned the aircraft and had offered the prize to his team members. There was no way Marci would be caught in a little airplane, but she was still happy to go along for the ride on that sunny summer’s day. Sally could hardly sleep the night before, and it took forever for the sun to slowly rise on the day little Sally would fly for the first time.
As usual the short trip in the Mustang was her special pleasure, but the feeling of leaving the ground in the back seat of the Cessna 182R was heavenly for the small girl. Peter thought that even Marci could hear their daughter’s excited screams as the aircraft swept past and several feet above the shiny mustang sitting a little way off the asphalt runway. There was clunk as the retractable undercarriage came up, and for the next hour over land and sea, the little girl was in heaven. At one point, Peter thought she might put her face through the rear window as hard as she was pressing her face against it.
After the enjoyable flight, both Peter and Sally reluctantly climbed out of the plane, and Sally thanked its owner profusely and apologized for her behavior during takeoff. The smiling man replied that they weren’t the first passengers he had taken up, or the first screams of excitement he had heard. He rather expected some reaction from first timers.
Sally could not stop talking about the flight all the way home, or the rest of the week. It was the best birthday present she had ever had. Could she have another flight for her birthday next year, she asked? An only child, Sally normally got her way. Both parents enjoyed their jobs and life was easy. She got her second flight at eleven and her third flight on her twelfth birthday, this time in Peter’s manager’s newer aircraft, a Cessna 210 Turbo.
The 210 Turbo was a six-seat, single-engine aircraft, and much faster. This time, she sat in the co-pilots seat on the right and Peter sat in the second row of seats. She was even allowed to hold the joystick. Once the pilot had her in level flight at 5,000 feet and her feet on the rudders, the pilot gently let her fly the aircraft in a straight line. Sally did well, listening to his every instruction, and she completed her first turn to the right and then a gentle bank to the left, slowly putting pressure on the rudder pedals as she turned the joystick in the direction she wanted the aircraft to go.
On the ground, her father’s manager stated that she had flown well and that she should look into flying in a few years’ time. He explained that she was a natural at controlling a three-dimensional machine in the air. Sally had actually flown the plane for over ten minutes, unbeknownst to her. Once he had realized that she was rather good at what she was doing, he had let go of the controls several minutes earlier than he had actually told her that she was in control. Even Peter had watched when the pilot indicated with a tilt of his head that his hands and feet were actually off the controls and that the little girl, sitting as straight as a ramrod and peering through the front window, was in total control of their destinies.
Marci was pretty upset when she heard that her daughter had actually flown the 210, but eased off on her husband when she saw Sally’s excited demeanor. She had never seen her little girl as happy and content as she saw her that evening over dinner. Sally smiled a dreamy smile and had a happy glow on her face throughout the meal, most probably lost in her own little world of flying.
It took the 12-year old at least a week to come back down to earth and get on with the everyday things in life. The feel of the aircraft stayed with her longer, and her nights were full of dreams of flying all over the sky and taking long trips all over the world.
A few months before her thirteenth birthday, Peter’s manager was posted to a higher position back at the head office and Sally’s father was promoted to the manager’s position. Feeling a little more comfortable with a larger monthly income under his belt, he paid for an hour’s lesson for his daughter’s birthday at the flying school at the same airport. Sally was thrilled. The school’s Cessna was an old 172, but that didn’t matter. Within the hour, she had flown half of the time and had completed one take off and nearly completed a landing. She had come in a little steep and needed the instructor to correct and level the plane for final touchdown, but it was bliss and the worst part of the lesson for Sally was that it came to an end.
“But I nearly landed it, Daddy,” she exclaimed in the car on their way home. “I’m sure that if I could get another hour, I could fly it all by myself.”
“I understand, Sal,” as her Dad always called her. “You can’t fly solo until you are 16 and that is three years away. You can get your private pilot’s license at 17 and you can go even higher after that. It doesn’t seem too good an idea to fly too much now since you must wait a few more years before the training will become worthwhile. I suggest that you start some sort of business at school and see if you can make enough money to do a couple of hours a year until you’re a little older.” Her father’s words sunk in.
For days, Sally studied typical business ideas for young girls, from lemonade stands to washing cars. Most of them didn’t sound too exciting or promising, and the many negatives stood out for nearly all of them. One, however, did bear fruit and it came from her mother’s hospital.
A few weeks after her last flight, she visited Marci at work after school on a late Friday afternoon. Her mother normally organized hospital ward and office inventory on Fridays, and Sally often went in to help her. This particular Friday, they were chatting over a cup of tea when a few nurses gathered around a lady who had come in the front door. The lady was elderly and Sally had seen her once or twice before.
“I have your dress scarves,” the older lady told the nurses, walking in with the aid of a walking stick. She walked up to a chair in the hallway, leaned her stick against it, put her handbag on the chair and started fiddling around in a large plastic bag she had bought with her.
“Mandy, here is your short pink one. Beth, I have the double-length blue thick wool one you wanted, and Sister Marci, I have the promised striped one for your daughter. Oh, there’s young Sally Powers in person. Hi, Sally. Oh dear! I hope your mother’s present to you is not a birthday surprise or something important!”
“Don’t fret, Mrs. Masterson,” replied Sally’s mother. “It was just an idea for her for winter, for school. She needs one and winter will be on its way in a couple of months.” Marci accepted the scarf and wrapped the thick, long yellow and green striped scarf around her daughter’s neck. “Now I will be able to see you when you fly over us in any old open aircraft you might get your hands on, just like Snoopy used to wear in Charlie Brown,” laughed Marci.
“Wow, Mom. It’s beautiful.” Sally modeled the scarf to the smiling ladies now looking at her. “Mrs. Masterson, you sure make pretty scarves.”
“It suits you, Sally,” complimented one of the nurses. “It brings out your red hair.”
“Thank you,” replied the old lady. “These are the last I will be making, and the only reason I took up knitting again was to thank you girls for making my long stay here bearable. Three months is a long time you know and it would have been even longer without your friendship.”
Thank you’s were exchanged by all the girls, each giving the smiling old lady a hug before leaving. Marci was paged over the intercom and she made excuses to leave.
“Sally, why don’t you chat with Mrs. Masterson for awhile. I’ll see what this is all about and be back shortly. Why don’t you two have a cup of tea in the cafeteria?” Sally and the older woman moved over to the cafeteria and ordered two teas and two slices of the tasty looking cake sitting on the counter. The lady behind the counter knew Sally and knew to put any orders on her mother’s tab.