Chapter 9

(This will be shown as chapter 9 on SOL due to combination of some chapters)-->CHAPTER 12

The European cruise liner had made the transit from Dardanelles up through into the rougher waters of the English Channel and finally made port in Marseilles, France on a cold, foggy morning that made Lady Patricia shiver as she stood motionless at the rail of the deserted deck.

She could hear the shouts of the crew members readying the ship for berthing at the deep water pier and saw the huddled lumps of waiting workers standing there with cups of something probably hot in their gloved hands.

Patricia knew she should return to her cabin and get the Serbian shawl that she generally wore on mornings like this but she wanted to get a look-see at the dock in order to reassure herself there were no unwanted authorities just waiting to spring a trap on her because of some silly prior dispute.

She knew for a fact that the French Police were none too enthused about her ventures onto French Territory ever since that misunderstanding in Nice that had left a pair of French Cops bleeding out on the cobblestones that lined the main drag much to the despair of countless females flaunting their goodies in high-heels of impossible altitudes.

Her bags were all packed and she had already taken a shower knowing it might be some time before she could get shut of the landing scene and rent a car for transit down to the vicinity of the Chunnel entrance on the Continent side that also housed the migrant refugee population waiting to get across the Channel to the UK and a chance at a better life.

She knew that a lot of them would be disappointed in that goal and wind up in one of the European members of the EU with a lot less opportunity and a less welcoming attitude by both the authorities and the common people that were less than enthusiastic about the watering down of their traditional culture and National sense of identity with centuries of images of the past.

The individual former individualistic member states were still clinging to their roots in a way that undermined the concept of a single purpose to European thought and the ideal of a Global Economy that had no borders and no preference for either language or culture or the color of one’s skin.

To some extent that battle had already been waged and lost in the UK with the majority deciding to go it alone and keep their culture to themselves as long as possible. The powers that be understood the need to recognize certainty that the odds of eventual withering away of the wrong-thinking populace that looked to the past would eventually fail. There was no doubt that the future of any society that no longer considered individualism a virtue to be valued by one and all would whittle away the remaining locales of true democracy like falling dominoes of a ridiculed past.

Right now, Lady Patricia was heading to Ground Zero of the European struggle in the migratory confrontation. She knew that the forces for evil lurked at the gates of Chunnel passage and that illegal transit was a daily occurrence with many of their former enemies attempting to get inside the walls of separation between two systems that were heading on a collision course.

First, she had to touch base with a few old friends in a certain section of Marseilles to get a weapon and some ammo for a dangerous trip into the center of the enemy camp and a mission to root out some bad people from the shelter of the transient infrastructure that camped illegally on French soil with complete surrender by the authorities. She knew from recent history that surrender was a way of life with the French and that they needed a few generations to get away from that sort of thinking to become more than a shadow of their former glory.

It seemed so ironic to her that the only ones that seemed to be oblivious to the dangers were the Americans and to some extent the Canadians and the Australians. The fact that they were all mostly English speaking countries might be a coincidence but she tended to think that it was all a connected scenario that had its roots in Judeo-Christian heritage and traced right back to the Magna Carta with the guidance of rightness over wrongs of evil intent.

One of the Marseilles contacts was actually a Mossad agent undercover, but she was fully aware of that fact even though the local former “black market” bedfellows didn’t have a clue of his dual nature.

The small coffee shop was like all the others. The scent of the freshly brewed coffee mingled in with the smell of pipe smoke from the old farmers up early for the market and the American cigarettes that so many of the middle-aged customers had to have for waking up in the morning especially when the air was so brisk and chilly. The war against tobacco was never really a popular one with the older folks who had spent years of addiction and were unlikely to quit “cold turkey” like one reads about in silly stories in magazines and false news in the newspapers just to make folks feel guilty about being a dirty cigarette smoker and dirtying up honest folks air.

Patricia was an inveterate smoker.

She had started at an early age and she equated her cigarette smoking to her fascination with all the other vices including her most addicted one that depended on constant contact with long thick shafts of manly flesh to drive away her urges for nocturnal exercise in the horizontal position.

Since Lady Patricia was more than marginally stunning in a short skirt and high heels, she never encountered any problem in finding suitable applicants to fill the bill wherever she roamed on the globe no matter how backward and lacking in social graces.