Chapter 8

By the end of the month, we’d made a huge dent in the cartels’ smuggling operations, especially since they were losing their expensive smuggling ships faster than they could replace them. We’d captured or sunk over a hundred drug-laden ships. In the Caribbean, we’d also made serious progress in eliminating the number of pirate vessels. The last two weeks, we’d only had one reported attack as compared to six the first week and five the second.

General Weisch was beside himself and called us frequently to congratulate us. He even delivered six of the newest UAVs, the Avenger-5, fully equipped with an engine designed to burn 200-proof alcohol.

The UAVs made it easier for the two supercomputers to scan their areas. We flew each one over part of the area and fed the results to the computers. Arriving on target, even on a different planet, was easy as they flew through a portal to reach their assigned area and returned the same way to refuel.

The final drone was flown over our plateau on Gleffen, searching for any remaining predators. Our patrols had eliminated most of them, and concertina wire, walls, and gates, at each primary access to the plateau was now preventing more from arriving.

We finally got a handle on the ships in the Pacific and were able to begin raids on the headquarters of the largest of the remaining drug cartels. The raid on the first house was over almost as soon as it started. The guards and other occupants were all dropped with silenced shots through a portal.

By now, our truth serum was being produced and sped up the interrogation process. After each raid, it took nearly an hour just to empty bank accounts and gather up the cash, jewels, and other valuables around the house. Explosives, ammunition, and weapons were taken, but automatic rifles were donated to the military to share with the Nobles Group and the Texas Militia. We already had more than we could ever use.

When I saw the room-sized vault, I commented that I wished we could take it. That was when I learned that Sheila could take it. All we had to do was shut off all power to the vault. I didn’t have a spot chosen for it, so we just left it inside one of our numerous empty warehouses in Sanctuary. The vault was already half-full of money, gems, and gold. We left the door slightly ajar.

When we were done, we sent the wives and kids of the cartel honchos off in their cars with enough money to survive for a year. Once they were safely away, the house was demolished using C-4, as were the cartel’s drug labs and storage areas, and any ships waiting to be loaded. We even found more C-4 in what appeared to be an annex of their armory. Blasting caps, fuse, timers, and radio-controlled detonators were in yet another shed. That night, we stacked the bodies of the head guy and his top lieutenants like cordwood on the sidewalk outside of a police station in the nearest big city.

Then we did another raid before going home. Before I crashed for the night, I asked Sheila about moving the safe. “I thought everything had to be mobile to go through the portal.”

“For your new portals, that’s true. However, I have the ability to judge how much of the substrate to take. With the vault, I generally took less than a thirty-second of an inch of the concrete below it. Most of that will fall off when I move it to its final location,” she explained.

“So, we could steal any remaining Chinese supercomputers that we find instead of destroying them?” I queried.

“As long as all power, including backup power to them is off, yes,” she replied.

“Please let me know where the four most powerful computers that the Chinese have are located and the size of each so we can make sure we have a place ready for them when we steal them,” I requested.

“The information is printing in your study,” she replied a second later.

“Just how much can you do at the same time?” I asked.

“I am capable of performing several complicated tasks at the same time. My computing power is more than a thousand times that of one of your planet’s newest supercomputers. Even when scanning for vessels carrying drugs and weapons, I only use fraction of my computational capability. However, the scans take time because I need to locate each target and perform a search of the entire vessel to determine what it’s carrying.

“Even during the raids last night, I was continuing to gather and compile information on the remaining gangs in Florida and Georgia. I was unable to search for them, or to continue searching ships off the Pacific coast because my portal was at the raids, but I was still able to gather information from the internet and compile and analyze it.”

It was nearly dawn before I crawled into bed and was after dawn before Amy and Vickie let me go to sleep.

Lunchtime saw me finally rolling out of bed. As I ate, I called the girls to find out where they were. They had heard about the new safe and were inside it, literally knee-deep in cash. They had lots of help, too. Twenty other women were with them, wives of the troops that had helped in the raid. The safe was pretty crowded with most of the women sitting on folding lawn chairs in the warehouse, stacking money on tables, preparing to run it through money sorting and counting machines. I had no idea that we even had money-counting machines, but there were twenty of the buggers operating, sounding a lot like twenty card dealers shuffling decks of cards.

“Having fun?” I asked and was immediately inundated with several women exclaiming at the same time how much money there was in the safe. Well, how much had been in the safe. Most of it was now bundled and packed neatly in banker’s boxes.

“How did you get the safe here?” Amy asked.

“Sheila,” was my one-word reply, and then I explained what she’d just told me.

For the next month, there was a change in building priorities in Sanctuary. Clean rooms large enough to accommodate more supercomputers were built, complete with enough power, light, and cooling to keep the computers and the people who worked on them happy. The promise of more supercomputers necessitated the addition of more wind turbines. Currently, we were generating enough electricity to accommodate several new computers, but I preferred having a large surplus of generating capacity.

The number of computer techs I’d hired had more than tripled as the big companies continued to lay off workers. The number of our troops had increased, too. Most of the increase was via references from our existing troops, and not the returning troops sent by the DoD. The DoD’s returning troops were stuck with guard duty in Refuge and were told nothing about the portals.

They’d heard the name Sanctuary mentioned as a large community we were building outside the US and I’m sure they wondered about the semis driving into our remaining warehouse and driving back out sometime later with a different, empty, trailer. The warehouse was always guarded and was located inside a chain-link fence to keep people out. Trucks and people going into the warehouse had to enter through the lone security gate. At the warehouse, the trucks had to drive into the front half of the warehouse first. The doors closed behind them automatically before the inner door revealing the portal opened. The warehouse with the vaults had been moved to Sanctuary, next door to the warehouse with the portal.

Only our original guards worked the security gate for the portal warehouse and patrolled around that warehouse.

During the month when we were building new rooms for the computers, our raids continued. During the day, we raided ships in the Caribbean and Pacific, and targeted vehicles moving north through Mexico carrying narcotics, mainly semis. Airplanes carrying drugs ended up having mechanical issues, like flying through a portal and into the side of a mountain in South America. We did keep two of the nicer planes, one turboprop and one business jet, not that we had a lot of use for them. Our fleet of tractor/trailer rigs seemed to grow daily as we hijacked the newer rigs. The extra tractors let us hire even more drivers, most of whom had driven rigs owned by a big company.

At night, our troops raided homes, labs, warehouses, and businesses belonging to drug cartels, as well as locations in the States used by gangs that we caught when they tried to collect the drugs or weapons that were being delivered.

Selling drugs and weapons had definitely been a lucrative business for the cartels and the gangs. I couldn’t believe that I’d been worried about the raids not paying for themselves. We even began selling most of the weapons we confiscated. Larry got a list of foreign governments we were allowed to sell weapons to, and we were quickly sending cargo containers filled with crates of new weapons to Tampa for shipment overseas.

Aside from paying the expenses for the raids, we confiscated enough that I ordered four geopscale supercomputers from LKAB, to the tune of twelve billion dollars. LKAB appreciated the business as it kept them from having to lay people off. They even hired several people that their competitors had laid off so they could finish them sooner than two years. I’d already promised to order four more if they finished these quickly.

When the first four clean rooms were ready, I had the crews start four more. I had no immediate plans for them but preferred having them ready for us. If nothing else, we’d eventually need them for the new LKAB computers I’d ordered.

Then we scheduled more raids in China. I’d done a lot of research and surveillance myself and learned some remarkable things.

Late the morning of the raid, three teams were ready to go. The first team made sure the back-up generators at the two computer facilities wouldn’t work. The second team tripped three major power outages in Beijing, about five minutes apart. Those outages triggered a cascading power failure that darkened almost the entire city.

The first team then sabotaged the emergency interior lighting at the computer facility after most of the employees at the two facilities had evacuated the buildings, and then completely shut off all power lines to the building.

The raid was almost anticlimactic. Sheila was able to transport all four supercomputers to Sanctuary in less than half an hour. She told us that all four had tracking devices in them. Somehow, I didn’t think the Chinese would be able to track them to Gleffen.

Once the computers were gone, and while others prepared the explosive charges to level the building, I took advantage of the power outage and made three additional raids. The first two were on two of China’s gold storage vaults that I’d found. Each vault held five hundred metric tons of gold ingots, about forty cubic yards in each. At least they held that before I got there. They were empty afterward.

My final raid of the day was on another secure vault, one I’d come across while looking for embarrassing or incriminating information on the Chinese government. Inside the vault I had found row upon row of sturdy metal shelving units, each holding fifty metal briefcases, the kind you see in the movies handcuffed to someone’s wrist.

I gasped when I saw the contents; each case held a thousand US Treasury Bonds valued at from ten thousand to one hundred thousand dollars each. The hundred-thousand-dollar bonds had been issued in the last few years as the government desperately tried to raise enough money to stave off a collapse. It seemed to take forever as I tried to search each one, finding that the contents of each case were worth between ten million and one hundred million dollars.

I had Sheila descend on the vault and take everything, even the shelving. It ended up inside the same Gleffen warehouse that now housed the Chinese gold.

Larry met me with a huge grin when I finished. “Holy shit, man. Where the hell did you find all that gold?” he gasped.

“The same people we took the four supercomputers from. Just a different location,” I replied with a grin.

“They are going to be majorly pissed when they find out,” he laughed. “Are you suddenly getting gold fever?” he asked with a touch of concern in his voice.

“Not if you define gold fever as an irrational craving for more and more gold. I think a better definition of what I have is a survival instinct. The gold is just a means to an end. I need enough money to buy what we need here to transport to Sanctuary. What we need there keeps growing as the population grows. We originally started with less than two hundred people, mostly construction and security people and their families. Now we have more than eight thousand, including our computer techs, farmers, the people who make wagons, and the blacksmiths. The number of construction people necessary to build housing for all those people has risen, as has the number of security people to protect everyone. Now we have pilots for the UAVs and people to install, operate, and maintain the wind turbines. Hell, we’ve even got a cell phone system and an internet on Gleffen, and the list keeps growing,” I explained.

“But you usually bring back gold, not platinum or silver,” he replied.

“We have some platinum that we’ve confiscated on raids against the gangs and cartels. I just brought back the gold from China because I didn’t find a vault filled with platinum ingots. Either would be preferable to silver as the value for a pound of gold or platinum is much greater than a pound of silver. Silver only sells for a bit more than ten percent of what gold sells for.

“Still, what we salvaged from the old Spanish ships from the western hemisphere usually had far more silver than gold. There was even a little platinum, but not much. We eagerly confiscate jewels and pearls, just like I did from the Spanish ships.”

Twenty-six days later, after flying into the local airport, General Weisch flew here aboard one of our helicopters. No, I don’t know when or where we got the helicopters and don’t care enough to ask. I’m sure they came from a drug raid. Larry had to have known the General was arriving since he had one of our helicopter pilots ready to ferry the general here from the local airport. Usually, two choppers stay in Refuge and the rest at the airport.

“That’s quite a collection of aircraft you have,” the General commented, gesturing back towards the airport, which was a bit over twenty miles away. Aside from the twin-engine turboprop plane and the business jet, we’d picked up two Bell passenger helicopters, a recently refurbished Russian transport helicopter, and a Russian attack helicopter.