Chapter 45

Phones were scarce in East Germany and in Cuba, too, so letters were sent to all people eligible to emigrate. Times and dates were to be set later, stating where and when, voice communications could be made. Part of the agreement allowed a group of communication trucks free access to the families of the East Germans. They would get a chance to see and talk on the satellite phone to the new Cuban immigrants.

Those wanting to leave had to stay till all the others arrived. I knew that if I let them go, they would say how bad it was here and get the other prospective immigrants to try to stay under Communism.

Two of the people asked to immigrate were Sonia's dad and brother. In this case, it was not a voluntary arrangement. From what Sonia said, the boy would have to be forcibly sent here by the government that brainwashed him.

An unexpected benefit was that this relieved some pressure on East Berlin and East Germany itself. The Berlin Wall was not constructed yet and even though many left the east by stealth, there was less friction. I had written some books about what I thought was happening. They sold fairly well. Some discussed the future of Communism and what it did for the world. Here I had to be careful, for what would really happen now would not be the same as what I knew from history.

The book was not sold in the USSR for obvious reasons but I knew many copies were brought in and studied by those who knew of the books' existence.

The people of Cuba were of mixed feelings about the matter of East German immigrants. The new people didn't speak Spanish and had actually been an invading army. I tempered this idea with another one that would show what the newcomers could bring to the island. That was one of the reasons that the East Germans had gone out and worked so hard with their Cuban neighbours.

The matter of collaboration in the space venture was readily accepted and the Russians even asked for more drawings and technical data. This could be a critical juncture in time and I simply gave truthful answers to what they asked. I even added more data that they had not thought or hoped to get. If we were going to have a willing partner, the Russians needed to know that I was going to be fair with them.

I gave the Ambassador a large number of satellite phones, so that communications could be possible. This actually made me laugh because the Soviets would not be able to monitor the calls without someone being close, or having a live microphone nearby.

On the last of April, I asked Helen to stop taking her birth control pills. There was a time of rejoicing after the shock. It made all the girls very horny. This time there was nothing I had to do the next morning and just enjoyed myself till my strength gave out at three in the morning.

Morning came very early and I had to get back to my duties as a husband and potential father. Noon was the time we had to quit and we enjoyed a large meal to restore our strengths.

We had not stayed in Cuba all this time but the majority of our work could be done with the satellite phone and a video camera.

Our Harrier was very famous when films of its action were shown all over the world, including the Soviet Union. When a person thought high tech, they thought of our plane. After the battle for Cuba, though, it gained even more notoriety.

The Black Hawk and the Huey had gained even more fame for what they were able to accomplish. However, the real overall winner was the Apache. I had even used those names and the American army took possession of some and kept the same nomenclature. The weapons systems, airframe and engines had to be contracted out because of the very high demand.

The Challenger, too, had gained a fanatical following and it looked like all the tanks facing Russia would eventually be changed to our product. All these products were expensive to run, so I made simulators to train the operators at a fraction of the cost of a real vehicle. All the work going into this would be used for games in the near future but I wanted to keep the killing out of that equation. Space invaders were my principal opponents, apart from the elements.

A new Presidential election was coming up and Vice President John Sparkman wanted to move up the ladder to the top when President Stevenson had to step down. I had used a lot of money to look into the problems that would arise if John Kennedy were elected. He was a charismatic figure with a lot of money behind him. His flaws and the strength of the mob were too well known to me and I did my best to make sure he was not even nominated for the party's choice as a presidential candidate.

Sparkman was from Alabama. As such, he had the feelings of his state when he was a senator. I had talked to him and his party at length many times, to warn them of the race riots that were sure to erupt without some safety valves. He had listened well, although I could see that he had his own innate biases but worked to overcome them. He had done everything within his power to help all the minorities and I had commended him to his party many times. The integration laws had been easily passed and some in the minorities had been promoted to responsible positions. I made sure his party and area of government was given all the credit due to them.

The race issue had come up but it was not nearly as bad as my first time. The Vice President had actually walked with the black protestors and he had a special affinity for them now. Some of the rednecks called him a 'nigger lover'. This lost him some votes in the south but gained him many of the black votes. Overall, it was a net loss but it was good to see him as a conciliatory person.

I didn't know who would be running against him in the race for president. There were many candidates but I knew it would not be 'Tricky Dick'. He was still in politics but after the things that had come out about him, he had almost slipped into obscurity.

The mob was still powerful but the administration did its best to boot out any person consorting with them. Laws were passed that made it easier to prosecute the mob and some people in the Attorney General's office did so. My own people, many times, were the ones feeding information to the AG so that prosecutions would be possible. This got me shot at three times and it was the security I had and the kevlar vest that saved me.

A special team found some of the local underworld bosses and I talked to them privately with the benefit of thiopentide. I not only found the guilty people but I found a large mass of evidence that could be used to blackmail each of the people I talked to. In six months I had found a way to talk to many of the bosses.

A messenger dropped off an envelope to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. When the man phoned me a day later, I stated, "When I die, the file you see before you and whatever additional evidence I have gained, will be sent to the Attorney-General's office." The file named those who had ordered the assassination attempts and even those who had pulled the triggers. I would now let Giancana clean up his house before I did it for him. I did not trust this man at all. He killed seemingly for fun and this was the usual way he disposed of anybody in his way.

The Kennedys had used him and then tried to not fulfill their obligations. I had a difficult time when so many people had come under mob influence and tried to get the man nominated for President. My own security was stepped up, because I was now one of the men restricting Giancana's options.

The mob holdings in Cuba could be used as hotels or anything they wanted, as long as it was legal. We seemed to come to an agreement but I knew he and his kind, would continue to try to find a way of doing what they wanted without interference.

My oil companies continued to grow faster than anything else. I was the sole owner of the Athabaska Tar Sands project. This was the largest deposit of petroleum in the world but it was very costly to extract the oil from the rock. Petrosar, my wholly owned company, did just enough during the warm months to keep the claims alive. The oil sands had burnt the fuel it had gathered to extract more from the sand but wasted most of this. We would produce millions of tons of carbon dioxide to get what crude we could extract. I wanted to use a reactor to do this and at least the energy derived would be used in a bus or a home.

Petrosar also developed the first oil platforms and had them manufactured in Japan. With my knowledge of where to look, I was very successful and found many people willing to lend me money. Some of the platforms were in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, Indonesia, the Norwegian Sea, Hibernia, off Newfoundland and many other smaller areas like Libya and Tunisia. Major oil fields of the Arabian-Iranian basin region had not all been found after the Second World War, so I was able to get in and stake my own claims. Venezuela and Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope region of Alaska had my drilling rigs but I did not go all out in producing oil.

The North Apoi oil fields in Nigeria were sold to help finance other ventures, as was the West Pembina field in Alberta and much of the huge Venezuelan finds. The last would be nationalized if I could not prevent it but I wanted to be on the safe side. Cuba had been a very costly venture to keep the world safe. I was still not sure if the confrontation in this time would have ended up the same way.

The Ninian field and the Britannia in the United Kingdom North Sea, the North Scott Reef offshore Australia, Angola, Louisiana, Wyoming and two fields in Sumatra were being now developed. The Port Arguello field offshore of Southern California was being done very safely, as were my other wells, for I didn't want any spills to bring destruction and restrictive laws when good company policies would do the same. The state of California was very progressive and I wanted them to be on my side.

There was so much in China and Russia, especially the huge Tengiz field in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Barents Sea. I could form a partnership with that country's government but at the moment I didn't trust them too much. This might have severe repercussions with the west, if they thought I was helping the Communists with more than a space project.

There were many regions in the Soviet sphere of influence that I could exploit or claim but, I couldn't do so without explaining how I knew. The Soviets, through spies, had found out that I could look down from an orbiting satellite but I did not know if they had found out to what detail yet.

I now owned two shipbuilding companies in Japan that turned out the drilling rigs I wanted. This was accomplished by actually gaining a slightly larger portion of the electronic companies and they, in turn, had a piece of the shipbuilding action.

The reason for my low pumping volume was to keep the price of petroleum up and to restrict the use of private cars as much as possible. My bullet train was already at work in Japan and Canada. Again, one of my companies was making the machines. This was a major commitment but there was enough local money in Japan to keep the work going without my constant monitoring. Canada, though, was so large that it would be very difficult to make this proposition work.

The United States had the necessary materials and the need but the aircraft industry worked hard to counter my efforts. I, in turn, did as much as I could by getting the price of oil raised, even if it was by taxation. This brought down the ire of every other oil producer and users.

Gasoline in Europe had always been expensive and this made small cars very popular. The same thing was happening in North America. I didn't have any concrete figures but I think the economy was less driven by the automobile than it was previously. With the leverage I had in the major car companies in Japan and North America I made sure that the cars were as light a possible and they would not rust out, because I demanded galvanized metal and plastics be used.

This innovation was fought hard in North America, because they wanted to sell more new cars. It took only three years for the Japanese imports to garner a major portion of the market. I was not shy about putting the blame on the heads of the board members of the seven major car manufacturers. North America balked at the minivan, too but after two years of production in Japan, they eventually saw the light.

Stock prices in the North American manufacturers suffered considerably. I bought some shares when it was low enough. There were a lot of rich people very angry with me for what I had done. Stock went up in a year after galvanized steel was introduced but the anger never left. Sam Giancana got in touch with me one day through a safe intermediary. He told me of a group of Texan millionaires who had put out a contract on me.

I thanked the man and returned the favour. On the satellite phone I said, "You should sell off your holdings in the United States and move out very quickly, for your health. Look for places with no extradition agreement with the United States. I think you have just a bit over a month."

The man gave me credit and left within a week and sold later.

My own team of investigators found one of the millionaires and that was enough to find out all I needed to know. I used the same method that I used on Sam Giancana with great results. For good measure, I expanded a bus manufacturing company to make even more competition for the car companies.

We were all back in Cuba on the first of June. The election would occur in a little over a month. The campaigning, though, had started right after the election was proposed over six months ago.

Things had radically changed since I first came to the island. The Army was only 7,000 soldiers now, a third of what it used to be. Three hundred and sixty of them were former East German soldiers. Their families had come over in record numbers that made the Soviets look very bad. The actual numbers were never mentioned to their faces but everybody knew it.

The necessary trade was done with little fanfare. A small crane lowered a wooden crate onto the deck of an equally small fishing boat. A day later it would come up to a Russian freighter and head back home.

Sonia's father never came. We were given a copy of his death certificate and from Sonia's own memories I thought it was probably true. Her brother Yuri was a different matter. He got off the Aeroflot plane in Havana and hated everybody and everything he saw. For a fifteen year-old this was nothing new. I put him with two young Cubans to learn Spanish.

Sonia was very apologetic about her brother but I said, "Boys that age are like that sometimes. Let him learn to communicate, then I will test him on his social conscience. He will come around.

Helen was now three months pregnant. She glowed with the life within her. Laura had been off the pill for a month and we were trying to get her into a similar condition. Seiko was always quiet but I could all the time see in her eyes the expectation of when she could throw her pills away, too. I was still not sure of Sonia but the bookies had given her more than an even chance of getting pregnant by me soon, too.

The whole family was with me in Cuba, even though it was the hottest months. Mom and dad and the entire family were very happy with us. Aron was fifteen and his hand was always holding Mineko's. I was fairly certain that he would want her for his wife soon. I even started preliminary plans because of the problems I foresaw.

I was disturbed at the airport, for there were a lot of children. They were mostly young girls with Helen, Laura, Seiko and now Sonia dolls. Many had voices much like ours saying the various things I thought were needed. What made me apprehensive was that some girls now had an Alex doll that looked and sounded very much like me. I had not okayed the last two dolls but I had only started the company and had let the girls run it the way they wished, along with their other duties for me.

Grandpa just laughed when it was shown to him till I said, "They are going to make a cantankerous doll of you, too."

"They wouldn't dare," he said as he glared at the girls. They just giggled like schoolgirls and smiled at him.

In the next few days I found Aron and Yuri talking. They were roughly the same age and Aron could speak Russian with some difficulty. He had resented Mineko at first but Yuri had no way of excluding her. She did make Yuri feel a bit better when she spoke to him in his own language, even if it was worse than Aron's.

I went back on the air to talk to the Cuban people. Even the hamlets now had television. It was fed from the satellites above. I explained that the various candidates would be given free time to explain their positions. I also explained about more debates where certain points were attacked or defended. This, I promised, would be fun for the audience but hell for the participants. The audience had been told many times to not go with who looked nicer, or who spoke better, or the worst: one who promised more. They had to see behind the words.

A large contingent of foreign observers came to the island a week before the election at my invitation. They would ensure, along with the army, that nothing happened to the ballot boxes before the votes were counted. So far, there had been very little political violence and I wanted to keep it that way.

The Soviet Union was well represented, as was the west. One man pulled me aside a few days before he had to go to his assigned position with a Briton.

"Mr Kramer, I am here to ask you about the shipment you made to us not long ago. It was much different from what we had sent you."

I had to laugh because I took the bombs off their ship and they were hardly given to me. "I remember it well. Were the instructions and spare parts not understood?"

"Oh, the manual and parts were well understood. We just wanted to know why we had been given this particular unit."

"The unit in question, or a similar one, could have fallen into unfriendly hands or even one controlled by a rogue element of your country. I want to protect my world along with other like-minded people. A terrorist could take a bomb and try to detonate it. My electronic device only allows part of the explosives to go off and ruin the bomb. It is very complex but that was the intention. There are no tricks. I just want to keep the accidents down and possibly thwart some terrorists."

"You seem to know a great deal about these types of secrets, Mr Kramer. Are you now making similar devices for the West?"

"Not yet. Theirs will be similar but not the same. You are free to make any change you like to the mechanism but I will not mention what I have given your people unless forced."

"That is very understandable. My country sent me to gather more information about our common project."

I knew this was coming. "I think it best to talk in the United Nations with all the countries affected. All that is required is that your country is ready to fulfill its obligations. The meeting will basically be a fait accompli and the west cannot exclude you from future dialogue."

The voting took all day. We now had a gigantic database of every adult Cuban. When a voter came up, his name was stricken from the sheet and his face and fingerprints compared to what was on file. Some had tried to vote twice but were picked up by the local police. There were no threats that I heard of and with the amount of publicity the vote had, everybody would come to have their choice counted. We had a surprisingly high turnout, which made me feel good that I had got the message across. Fraud, as in ballot boxes being stuffed, was negated by the ballots being printed in Japan and given out only just before the vote.

The former East Germans got their vote because of their special circumstance. Both sides tried to woo their vote but I had no idea how they had cast them.

I had gained a Cuban citizenship along with my Canadian one. The newspapers printed photographs of me many times as I filled out the small 'x' after many, many names.

That night there was partying everywhere, except for our foreign guests as they independently tabulated the ballots with an impartial group of officials. This was an exacting task, for security had to be very thorough to let all parties know that no cheating would happen. It still took two days to count all of the choices. There was no disclosure by area, of who had won or was ahead which spoiled much of the excitement.

The new president was Emilio Garcia. He was one of the many people who had to flee the island when Batista came to power. Fidel Castro was now the new Attorney General with far reaching powers. He was a lawyer to begin with and this had helped him get the job. I did not state too many of my own preferences in public but he was one of the ones I thought should get this post.