And the Meek Shall Inherit (Harbinger of Change Book 2) Read online

  * * *

  It was another wonderful day in one of the most luscious places on earth, Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley, where money grew out of the ground in abundance. Luis watched another plane leave for Columbia and he wondered, where the fuck is Octavio? Garcia saw him leave with some unknown whore and apparently he’s fallen into her pussy. This is crazy. Octavio knows better than this, as he knew that he was needed here.

  Luis was looking down the very runway from which he just saw the plane take off when he saw a burro come out of the wooded area and head for the runway. “Alto,” he shouted to all his men getting ready to leave, and pointed to the mule. Then he saw it wasn’t just a mule, it was a mule pack. His men quickly ran down and brought them back where he observed that each of them was adorned with blankets that had names embroidered on them.

  * * *

  For Yuri Verchenko, it started as any other day had deep in the Urals under Mt. Yamantu. There he worked in an underground complex too big (called Magic Mountain by the U.S.) to accurately be described in reasonable amount of time. He’d never come close to seeing it all in a year. The complex existed to ensure the survival of these men and others, post Nuclear War. It could withstand a direct hit of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.

  Comrade Verchenko was sitting at his workstation when a light lit up that could not have been anything good, and he hit his Com line button quickly. “Commander Delov, I think you need to come here right away.” His division, being one of the most secretive in the world, rarely even had a bad sensor problem, as the maintenance was so meticulous. He had a boring job and it had better be because if he had action, then there was no more going home after his term ended here, as home most likely wouldn’t exist anymore. Commander Delov approached the board and proclaimed, “That can’t be right, where is it located?”

  “The GPS says Peru.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  Or was it? thought Yuri. No one had heard from those outposts in nearly twenty years. Maybe the rumor that one of the RA-115s was for sale in North Africa was true after all. That meant a deep cover agent and his bomb defected from their American target and was sold to the highest bidder. Or at the very least, the bomb had been unplugged long enough for the battery to wear down and activate the locator beacon. For whatever reason, it was in Peru now.

  America believed this could happen and it was the reason for the “Wildfire Protocol” they enacted, basically ensuring no Middle Eastern country would try to buy these weapons. But this wasn’t the Middle East and neither America nor Russia had South American protocols of the nuclear variety that didn’t have six layers of dust on them. No, this was an “all new” development of the worst kind. “It’s Unit Seventeen,” Verchenko said, “and its station was Philadelphia.”

  That’s all they needed to know to do their jobs and no more. Currently, their job was to send this information up the ladder immediately, and if they believed in God, now would be a good time to pray. Delov was on the phone to one of his superiors reporting the activation when Verchenko interrupted, “Comrade Sir, the GPS locator beacon just went out.”

  * * *

  The first was Ernesto, then Isabella, then Marlon, then Roberto, then Jorge, then Jasmine, then Julio, and finally José and Delores. The last mule had an additional blanket covering the name on its embroidered blanket. It also carried another load, an odd-looking canister that was covered in green canvas and weighed about a hundred pounds. It looked like a cocaine processor.

  Luis barked the order to remove the canister and set it aside as he wanted to see the name that was on the concealed blanket. Why did these names seem so familiar? Once the load was removed and put down, they pulled the first blanket off. The under blanket revealed a series of instamatic shots of Octavio in different phases of death, strapped to a chair to his last minutes on earth. It looked like ants were attacking him.

  There were also the words, “La proxima,” written on the sidesaddle, and Luis suddenly looked at the canister with great fear. Suddenly he had a bad feeling about this. He yelled to his men, “Corrán! Es una bomba!” Luis turned to run but it was too late. In the blink of an eye he was vaporized, as were all his men.

  Felipe watched from afar, as Pablo had given him some special glasses and told him the safe distance from which to watch. Following Pablo’s advice, he found a nice hill about thirty miles away in the next valley. Of course he soon realized that wasn’t going to work, and fortunately Pablo knew him well enough to know he would want to be closer, so he told him the absolute closest he could get. Pablo warned him, “Get closer than twenty miles and you’re foolish.”

  So he found the right place where he could see the valley floor, yet easily be able to drop back down the mountain away from the blast. The men he hired to take the mules were paid to do so at their own risk. Of course he just told them to get out of the valley fast, he didn’t say why. They took the money and he hoped they got out, but didn’t really care either way. The flash was stunning! The shock wave was next, then the infamous mushroom cloud. How could anyone give up the chance to see such a wonderful sight?

  Felipe felt himself swell with pride. Some thought so little of him, especially his drunken Papa who left him on the streets at the age of eight years old. “Go, worthless one, make your own way and stop living off me.” That was the last time he saw his padre until the day he suffocated him with a pillow in the nursing home. Not all of the Benitez family was put out on the streets and one day Felipe saw a sibling who told him of their father’s whereabouts. As the last seconds of his life were ending in terrifying fashion, Felipe and his Padre locked eyes, and he asked him, “Who is the worthless one now, old man?”

  Pablo said the bomb would only be about six Kilotons or about half the Jap bombs. He said it was enough to poison their ground too, so no more growing for a while. “A few hundred years or so,” Pablo said with a chuckle before Felipe left. Felipe watched the cloud come back down and start to spread its death out like a horrid fog that brought more than visibility problems to the region. He took a deep breath and marveled at his accomplishment. It was done, and it was beautiful!

  * * *

  The President was sitting in a photo session with the winner of the National Spelling Bee and thank God no one asked him to repeat her name. She was of Indian descent and it was a tough one. He saw the look of consternation on Kim’s face as she entered the room and knew it must be bad news. He wrapped it up, saying his good-byes and final congratulations to the young lady with the difficult name. As soon as they cleared out, Kim was on him.

  “There’s been a nuclear explosion in Peru!”

  “What?!” President Caulfield blurted, not expecting that one.

  “It was low yield and no suspects or groups are claiming it.”

  “Was it a reactor?”

  “No, it happened in the Huallaga Valley,” Kim said.

  Suddenly the secret service agents arrived to whisk Lawrence off to the command center under the east wing, so their conversation continued on the move."

  “That's an odd place to bomb.” Unless you wanted to corner the market on cocaine was Lawrence’s first thought. “What are Eric’s people saying, Kim?”

  “They say it looks like about the right yield to be one of the reputed missing Russian suitcase nukes.”

  That stopped her boss, “Why Peru, Kim?”

  “I don’t know, Sir. For once, I’m without any prior indicators to call this. Whatever it is, it’s a total blind-side. Not just for them, but for us, too.”

  “What’s the casualty report?”

  “We don’t know, but it wasn’t as if it went off in Manhattan. It’s a pretty sparsely populated place.”

  Lawrence had an ability to impart his whole premise into a single sentence for this young woman, as he could literally say one sentence and she could write down on a piece of paper his next series of thoughts or hell, even a book. That’s why her last sentence was as sobering as any he’d ever heard stat
ed in his life, “What if it was Manhattan, Kim?”

  She realized that if they prove this to be a Soviet weapon, then it stood to reason that their chatty defector was telling the chilling truth. Where this act fit into that truth the lab guys would soon tell them. No matter what, this changed a lot of thinking and certainly justified the harshness of the Wildfire Protocol. The President looked at his young and talented Chief of Staff with renewed appreciation, “Okay, well then, you just gave yourself your own next mission, Kim. We need to know who owned that bomb and why it was set off in Peru.”

  She walked away and had a feeling of safety from the man, as he was no “good ol’ boy,” as they loved to call him. Laurence Caulfield actually had a very tactical mind, ignorant monikers aside.

  * * *

  When a bomb blows up and people die, the Newsies have a field day with it, but it always blows over; happens every day all over the world. When a nuclear bomb blows up, however, all circuits explode everywhere! No one felt this more than Harpreet Singh. It seemed everyone in South America picked up his or her phone the minute that bomb went off.

  The low yield caused minimal interference for neighboring countries, but the fact it was nuclear had everyone freaking out and usage went way beyond capacity for the first time ever. Harpreet had been working for the last twenty hours straight. He was trying to run the back up through the other proximal satellites, but his company was two launches away from having a system in place that could withstand this kind of overload.

  He was doing the best he could when suddenly there was a hiccup. A noticeable wave came through the system, and then it happened, his phone started talking. So did all the phones under Tanjotti’s umbrella, as well as every other device linked to all the communications companies Pablo had acquired. Not just the phone systems, there was an avatar of a sheep in a Franciscan Monk’s robes on every video monitor as well. The voice was everywhere!

  * * *

  Vlad Korzinin was enjoying the rewards of his newfound fortune on the French Riviera when the news broke and he could already hear the rumblings from back home. It won’t be taken lightly that their most “ambitious and secretive program ever” had been compromised. Or that one of their highly trained agents of death defected into the night—and not to a country, but to a cause, and the cause was money.

  It’ll also have them terrified that the U.S. will find out that the bomb came from their own plutonium. GRU defector Stanislav Lunev already told them that these nukes were sitting on targets “within” U.S. borders, but they didn’t want to believe the truth. Even if the Americans had no idea where that bomb came from, the boys from under the mountain did.

  Soon enough the U.S. will know the origins of the plutonium and Mother Russia will finally have to come out and admit they don’t know where all their bombs were. Truth is, they’re not supposed to. These were deep cover missions and there was to be no communicating back once the agents were in place. The bombs themselves would do that when the time came.

  The problem with owning a nuclear device, Vlad found out, was you just couldn’t simply sell it to the first interested party. First of all, the minute the Americans realized the threat of these things, thanks to Russia’s chatty defector, they enacted the “Wildfire Protocol.” This was their insurance policy, that if a nuclear device was detonated on American soil, whether on purpose or by accident, about forty targets in Russia and the Middle East were going to be glowing for a very long time. So it did no good to sell it to someone that was going to start World War III; then he’d never be able to enjoy his money.

  That’s when Vlad met “the boy.” Well, the face said boy, but the eyes said something else altogether and the bank account said he was all man! He was still is not one hundred percent sure how the boy found him. Vlad had orchestrated a meeting, as someone approached one his intermediaries and the wheels turned. A meeting was set up that Vlad was supposed to attend. Instead it was a set-up, as he was not there. Instead he was watching from a vantage point not far away.

  His security team waited in vain as the meeting never happened. The next morning he awoke, poured his cup of timer-generated coffee and went out on the balcony to take in the view. Sitting there was a young man. He looked harmless enough, but Vlad was on the fourth floor of the hotel, and there was no fire escape, which could only mean the boy had gained access to the room while he was sleeping. The troubling part of that was his door had security measures, the kind that made a bang when disturbed. Vlad didn’t want to look as lost as he felt, so he put on his poker face, sat down, and said, “Hello.”

  Vlad never led the negotiations, and as he reflects, he didn’t even think there were negotiations. To this day, I don’t even know how the kid found me. Why do I keep referring to him as a kid? He just nuked Peru . . .

  The kid, Pablo, told him what this was really all about and his conviction was what got him the bomb. No one was going to start WWIII over a bunch of drug lords dying. Hell, the history books might even find favor in this action, you never know. Just then, his phone made a funny noise and then started talking. It sounded just like the very man/boy he was just thinking of . . .

  * * *

  The cucumbers were especially good in the salad tonight. Sandy Burroughs watched the TV as he ate dinner and was astonished at what he was watching. A low yield nuclear device had been set off in Peru and it had the effect of hitting a beehive with a tennis racket.

  The U.S. was on its highest alert level since 9/11 while American government officials were trying to understand who did this to Peru. It had been two years since the boy got into James’s vault and Sandy’d been waiting for the next phase. Could this be it? Wasn’t the group that killed Pablo’s family from Peru? Oh shit, they were! His TV suddenly wiggled and a voice came on attached to a video avatar. It was an avatar of a sheep in Jesuit clothing. It was holding a Bible and looked very judgmental.

  Its eyes were very accusatory as it spoke,

  “Brothers and Sisters of the Planet, this message won’t reach everyone live, so please feel free to spread it. We are the people with no name. What happened today was not an act of violence against the people of Peru. What happened today was the action of us against one of the worst organizations to have ever walked on the Earth. The Shimmering Way terrorist organization was poisoning kids worldwide to put money in their pockets and promote their cause.

  “Well, no more. They are gone now, and the drugs they sold won’t grow in that ground for a millennia. This action was part message, but it was also part personal revenge for atrocities against us directly. Actually, this action was as the Bible describes, ‘an eye for an eye.’ Only we spoke for everyone, all at once.

  “My detractors will say that innocent lives were lost, and no God sanctions loss of life. My answer is, name a time in history where great sacrifice was needed to stop an out of control lunatic or country and innocent lives were spared?

  “You can’t because it doesn’t exist. Massive change requires the kind of sacrifice we displayed, a sacrifice that is the point to this communication. I will not name our group, as we have no name, and we seek no accolades. We wish to further no agenda other than the one brought to us by God.

  “We are bringing the true Word of God, as He appeared to me, and our organization. We want you all to prepare. There is a great hardship coming and we want you to know that you don’t have to take up arms or be aggressive with your neighbors. You can learn to cooperate through this change. You can learn to start appreciating the natural world and stop focusing on the wrong ideals. Some of you will take this advice for what it is, the Word of God handed to me, and now to you. Some of you won’t.

  “On His Word, I found followers, and together we appropriated and acquired the things we needed to accomplish His ends. Following God’s Divine Plan, it will soon be done. So decide now if you will get on board with His Word or not? The change is coming and you need to be prepared, no nation is going to be safe from the repercussions of God’s Will.
/>   “Peru was just the start, and no, we’re not bringing ‘that’ kind of change to the world, but it will have nearly the same effect. God had intended us to live differently than we have chosen and now it’s time to decide where your loyalties lie. God’s message to you is to slow down, stop hating each other, and return to a simple life as the Meek.

  “He insists I remind the world it is written in His Word that, ‘The Meek shall inherit the Earth.’ It’s the only way people, and He’s asked me to make it happen. We must change. This message will run for the life of this satellite and we truly hope people listen to the words and embrace ‘The Change.’

  “Don’t be fooled by the pundits who will come out of the woodwork against us and what we stand for. We’re not zealots, there really is a God, and He really spoke to me about you. As a people, we go to church, we print Him on our money, we believe in Him without evidence with our ‘leaps of faith,’ and we start wars in his name. Yet the minute someone has a conversation with Him, then they’re considered loco de la cabeza.

  “Well I’m not loco, and I wanted everyone to know that they have the option to choose peace. Remember that this is the Word of God as spoken through me, ‘The Chosen Sheep.’ God’s children need to prepare, for He has cometh. Goodbye and Godspeed.”

  Sandy was flipping out. That was the boy’s voice! What was coming? This was like a movie he couldn’t stop watching. Only it was real life and he had a catbird’s seat to Armageddon! Maybe not though, maybe the people of the Earth will do as he said. Maybe people will cooperate and be kind to each other for once. He took a big bite of salad, still really enjoying the freshly harvested cucumber. The next news was a breaking story about a suicide bomber that killed fifty-seven in Iraq, mostly women and children. He grabbed his napkin and wiped the dressing off the corner of his mouth and thought, or maybe not.