Bill Johnson was shivering, his knees were shaking and he wanted to throw up.
He had been waiting there in the dark, in the darkest part of the hallway, for just one more person to walk inside his house so that he could kill them. It had been more than an hour since everything got quiet. He was in a daze.
It was as if it all had been a nightmare. But then he slowly looked around and came out of his stupor with a snap. The smells of his living hell hit him hard. He looked around and saw Sally asleep against the wall. Bill crawled over and woke her.
“The kids!”
They both crawled to the strong room door and pounded. Bobby yelled some muffled complaints.
Bill opened the door and Bobby took one look at his father — covered in blood, bits of Mexi-meat and shit — and Bobby screamed.
“It’s okay Bobby, its okay — Go pack your stuff, we’re leaving” Bill said.
“Where’s Samantha?” Sally asked.
“Where’s Samantha?” She asked again.
“Where’s Samantha?”
Bobby answered “She went back outside to get her doll”
Bill and Sally both looked at each other and ran toward the patio door.
The eighth human lump by the fence.
The eighth one, the familiar one, the one that had made Bill shudder, was Samantha. Her body was black and little whiffs of smoke still came from her body. But there was something else wrong besides the horror before him. And it took him some time to realize that it was really true. She was headless. One of the Mexicans had slit her throat — and had done it so hard that he had cut her entire head off.
Bill froze. A lifetime’s tragedy and horror was before him. There in the swimming pool floating as if it was a nice summer day was his daughter’s head. Her blond ponytails floating out from her face — a face frozen in a scream of agony, terror and death.
Sally fainted.
Bill carried Sally back into the house and put her on the couch in the living room.
He checked the telephone and there was still a dial tone — the 911 panic alarm must have sent the call to the Sheriff. But no Sheriff had come to their aid — there was no help — no nothing. Those bastards! They knew his family had been attacked and they were just waiting for the Mexicans to finish the job.
In deep thought, he put the telephone down and started walking toward the kitchen to get a coke. As he turned the corner all of the smells of the night’s horror hit him in the face like a hammer. He wretched and fell back against the wall.
Then he remembered the “Mexi-scum” on the stair landing and the “Mexi-fish” on top of the bookcase in the south facing bedroom. He walked over to the low cupboard in the rec room and found the roll of plastic sheeting he’d used to cover furniture when he repainted the ceiling. And he found a roll of duct tape.
These dead bodies were perfect disease carriers. Mexico had invaded his home. Everything from PCP — a virulent form of tuberculosis — to open skin lesions of Karposi’s Sarcoma to full blown AIDS and even Leprosy was festering right there inside his house. If he touched them or even breathed the air near them he might face the consequences. If he left them inside the house they were time bombs — and would eventually — and literally — explode and blast more poisons all over his home.
He trotted up the stairs to the landing, used the sheet of plastic as a glove and grabbed the Mexican by the shirt. This guy was heavy. Bill rolled him in the plastic and taped the ends of the roll, then dragged him back up the stairs and tossed the carcass out the shattered window.
Bill then spread plastic sheeting on the floor by the bookcase and tugged at the Mexican lying above. The body plopped off the bookcase and onto the plastic with a heavy thud. Bill wrapped the Mexican in the sheeting, taped it tightly, and then dragged him across the carpet, lifted him off the floor and pushed this lump out the window.
The problem to solve now was sterilization.
Bill walked down the stairs, picked up a flashlight and walked through the patio door. Outside, the smell of death was everywhere. It smelled like some kind of barbecue — where the meal had been burned pork chops, blood sausage and human intestine. He walked westward around the house to the large pool and garden supplies cabinet by the fence.
He suddenly had a very bad flash of “Oh shit … Did I really?”
He trotted to the northern edge of the fence and put the flashlight beam on his Hummer parked in the gravel parking area. Yes, it was toast. The thing was a charred hulk of quickly rusting steel. The Lexan windows had melted and dribbled down the Hummer’s doors. The tires were not just flat — they were still burning.
The Johnson family wasn’t going anywhere tonight. No telling what level of terror might be lurking out there in the bushes. The Johnsons certainly weren’t going to walk five miles to the main road and try and flag down a car. Shit, the way they all looked some rancher driving down the road in his pickup might panic and shoot them.
Morning would indeed come.
He walked back to the pool cabinet and put on a pair of leather work gloves and the old bug-spray respirator. He then poured two gallons of liquid pool chlorine into Sally’s green plastic garden sprayer tank and carried the tank back into the house.
“This is really bad stuff. I hope I can seal off the vapors or it’s gonna drive us right out of the house.”
He sprayed the upstairs bookcase, walls and carpet where the Mexi-fish had exploded. He then taped plastic sheeting over the bookcase and walls and over the carpeted floor. The chlorine smell was getting past the respirator a little bit and his eyes started to water.
“This chlorine should kill anything these scum could have brought into the house.” He said to himself — hoping that it was actually true.
Bill then attacked the stairway landing and hosed it down with chlorine and covered the entire area with plastic sheeting. The tape didn’t seal the plastic to the carpet very well but he used enough plastic to cover the landing, the walls and much of the stairway.
Bill sprayed the entire kitchen — from the ceiling down to the floor — and then just sealed the room off at the hallway with plastic sheeting and long strips of duct tape. The kitchen mess was just more than he could deal with — there was no place to tape the plastic. Everything seemed to be covered in bloody, shitty, body-mess.
Bill removed the respirator and was almost afraid to take a normal breath. But the plastic sheeting seemed to do the job — if he didn’t walk near the plastic he couldn’t even smell the chlorine.
He then went back up stairs and carefully removed all photos of Samantha from all the rooms and put them into her bedroom. He then slipped the blue blanket from her bed went to the hall and taped her bedroom door shut.
Bill then went outside and wrapped his daughter’s body in the soft blue blanket from her bed. He then stood there by the pool and tried to figure out how he was going to get her head out of the pool. He just stood there and gazed at her face. He realized that there was no way he could do this and see her face. He went back inside and got two large bath towels and then returned to the pool and tossed each towel out onto the pool so that they covered her head.
He took the green netted pool skimmer and skimmed his daughter’s head off the surface of the pool. Just holding the weight of her head in the pool skimmer was enough to make him feel faint and he staggered away from the pool — dragging the skimmer with him. After a few seconds of nausea he recovered enough to hold her head in his hands and wrap it with the towels and then put it inside the blue blanket. He then carried the beautiful, pastel blue package to the east side of the house.
Bill Johnson walked back inside and closed the door. Bobby was asleep on the floor. He put Bobby on the couch next to his mother. He picked up a hard wooden chair, carried it to the window and sat down.
All he could do was look out into the darkness with the shotgun in his hands and wait for another wave of Mexicans to attack.
He sat there in the silence of the hallway — waiting for the slightest creak or bump or scrape from outside. That singular event was all the warning he would need to move into position and fight off the next wave of Mexican butchers.
Slowly, he drifted.
Slowly his body slumped in the hard wooden chair and he began to think of his past and then he started to drift even more — to drift off into a sea of memories of other terrors in other times and other places.
He remembered driving into Berlin — through the fifteen lanes of Stazi border police. The city — for all of its focus as the showpiece of West Germany — was actually a drab expanse of low buildings. Certainly, these buildings were far more brightly lit than their eastern competition and had none of the east’s forty plus year old bullet holes in their walls but they were still drab, grey, and cold.
He remembered driving through Check Point Charley and into East Germany. Just three blocks to the north of this famous checkpoint was the East German version of Paris’ Ritz Hotel — East Germany’s Berlin Grand Hotel. It sits at the corner of the block, its front pedestrian-door is right at the south east corner of the building. If you enter there you face the hotel’s grand staircase.
He pulled into the intersection and turned west and into the hotel’s turn-out fifty feet down the street. Bill got out of the car, handed the keys of his car to the attendant and walked through the hotel’s main livery doors of polished brass and then moved to the left — to the check-in counter to the left of the Concierge’s desk. The registration clerk was fluent in five languages and behind her he could see the hotel’s expansive communications facilities for handling the faxes, telexes, telegrams and telephone messages of the visiting-diplomat guests of the German Democratic Republic. His room was ready for him and so he collected his key and turned and walked up the hotel’s grand staircase to the mezzanine. The bar was always open. He had a Pilsener and then took the elevator to his room on the fourth floor.
His room was to the east of the elevator doors — and faced Alexander Platz — the plaza which was renowned as being the center — the heart — of all of East Germany. Movies had been made about it.
His room had hand polished brass fittings on its walnut door — and even a private electric door bell. There were miniature roses growing in little pots at each window. The room was spacious and sumptuous — with a goose down comforter and firm head roll — some guests preferred a head roll to a pillow. Each room was fully equipped — even to a hotel provided umbrella.
The Grand Hotel had a special place in Berlin’s history and real estate. The grey walls to the west of the hotel were those of the Soviet Trade Mission and not fifty yards further west was the Soviet Embassy itself.
The hotel was adjacent to the center of Soviet power in East Germany, right off of the Unter Den Linden. The dazzling white splendor of Berlin’s Grand Hotel said power.
In the morning he collected his car — a Soviet Volga — and then stocked up on various foodstuffs which would later be given as presents. He then headed east on the Unter den Linden and then south south-east — past the huge Soviet War Memorial built from the granite and marble of Hitler’s Reichstag. His first goal was the road marker saying “Frankfurt On Oder.”
He drove under an overpass of Hitler’s still-used Autobahn and turned left onto the up-sloping onramp and to the east. The concrete paving had the familiar thump, thump, thump of very early concrete highway technology. After less than an hour the grey city of Frankfurt On Oder came into view on his left.
Crossing the Oder River, Bill was aware a sudden change in the quality of the buildings and the people. This was now Poland. One needed a Visa to enter Poland. He didn’t have one. As he approached the immigration control point the Polish border guard eyed Bill’s black Volga very carefully. Bill stopped and proffered his passport. The immigration officer eyed him again and then the Volga.
“Transit?” The immigration officer grunted.
Bill just nodded and casually held his hand out the car window — as if he expected the guard to automatically return his passport. The guard flipped through the passport, found an empty spot and — resting the opened passport against his forearm — pressed his rectangular stamp against a page. Bill accepted his passport, nodded a polite thank you, and moved through the line and onto Polish territory.
Concrete pavement continued for more than two hundred miles — to as far as the Polish city of Poznan. At Poznan the real Poland began. The roads were now just two lanes and packed with trucks from the west — the truck license plates were mostly Dutch with a few FRG trucks — probably from Bremen.
Periodically, drivers coming the other way would flash their headlamps. This meant that there was a speed trap or military checkpoint coming up — time to slow down or dump your contraband.
Mile after mile the farms, the buildings and the people became ever-more of a dirty grey. After seven more hours he reached the treeless capital of Poland — Warshau — Warsaw — a pit of rotting concrete and crumbling streets. It was now ten o’clock at night. He’d been driving for twelve hours straight.
Gas was in short supply in the eastern block. Only the major cities even had gas stations. Most places you bought your gas from the back of a grey-green army tank truck parked behind a bakery — and at twice the official price. Bill pulled into a dimly lit station — it could as easily have doubled as a used car dealership or better yet a scrap yard — and filled his tank and then the six aluminum gas cans he had piled in the trunk. He wasted no time. These were desperate times in the Eastern Block and meeting six thugs in some dark gas station in Warsaw would have the same result as meeting six thugs in New York’s Central Park.
He pulled back onto the main road and headed toward the center of the city and then into a tourist hotel’s parking lot. There, he politely handed the attendant an appropriate sized fist full of zlottys, went back to his car, threw a blanket over his head, and fell asleep.
He remembered awakening at four in the morning. His bones ached. It was cold. It was so cold that his breath had frozen in thin sheets on the inside of the Volga’s windshield. Through the windshield’s thin layer of ice he could see the parking lot attendant gathering wood and then returning to the warmth of his little shack.
Bill opened his thermos and drank some of the still-hot coffee. He broke a Lindt chocolate bar in half and stuffed part of it into his mouth. It was now four-thirty in the morning. His real journey could begin.
Leaving Warsaw he moved east — down residential streets. At this time of the morning these streets were vacant. It was hard for him to believe that this really was the main road from Warsaw to Russia. It seemed as if the Poles had almost rebuilt Warsaw to make it as difficult as possible to drive to the east — as if they were telling you: “You really don’t want to do this!”
In the early morning darkness the road east was a black pit — swallowed up by over-arching trees. Finally, two hours and seventy miles later a sign said Terespol — the name of a Polish river town — the border was now close, very, very close.
He passed by the heavily traveled northern road to Terespol and drove directly to the east — to the edge of the Bug River and Poland’s border with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The Soviet border crossing consisted of a single story sky blue and glass building to the left and what seemed to be several antique New Jersey Turnpike toll booths on the right. Each of the toll booths was a passport control office.
Each passport booth was narrow and painted yellow. To the front — where one stood to present one’s passport — the booth had been constructed to include a three foot diameter sewer pipe. It was through this pipe that you bent slightly and submitted your passport. Your arm had to reach deeply into the pipe to slide your documents beneath the thick glass window.
The KGB border guard looked at the passport with great suspicion — few Americans would risk entering the Soviet Union by car and especially at this little used border checkpoint which was so far from any amenities.
There was a loud clank and a humming noise and then his passport was returned to him. There were no stamps or other marks showing his entry into the USSR — just a thin piece of green paper slid between the pages.
He then walked over to his car and watched as KGB border guards peered into every corner and shadow of the car’s interior. The hood was opened and the engine’s serial number was checked against the vehicle registration documents. The KGB guard had to scrape crusted Soviet grease off the engine block and peer at the serial number hidden on the underside of an overhang on the block. The car was parked over a six foot deep pit and KGB border guards in mechanic’s overalls stood in the pit and looked up into the car’s dark greasy recesses — looking for contraband of any kind. The only anomaly was the car’s unusually thick radiator — somewhat crudely bolted into place — it was a replacement for the original and it was obvious that it had come from a Soviet tractor.
Since Bill certainly did not own this car he was required to present his certified authorization from the Volga’s owner allowing him to drive it. Without this legal document both he and the Volga would be seized.
With the inspection complete he was given a tiny — maybe an inch on a side — piece of torn paper with three Cyrillic characters on it and told to move forward. Before him now was a massive steel gate that — more than anything anyone can possibly imagine who hasn’t been there — separated one world from another.
Manning the gate was a somewhat crude KGB private who seemed to have mastered only one thing in life — how to spit microscopic globules of nasal mucous. Bill had been watching the cretin for twenty minutes — first there was a good suck through KGB nostrils and then a quick gaze at some nearby target on the ground and then — plink! Then a new target would be discovered — and another and another until two minutes and twenty globules later it was time to collapse his KGB nostrils once again.
The cretin’s job was to move the massive gate — that was about fifty feet across and ten feet high. It had a steel pipe running across its top and bottom — and also at an angle from top left to bottom right. These pipes were painted in alternating red and white stripes. The gate would be slowly opened and then closed for each and every car or truck entering Soviet territory.
As the gate closed behind him Bill’s senses came to maximum alert. Before him now was a wide expanse of concrete — maybe the equivalent of a ten lane freeway — five lanes wide in each direction but with no lane markers. It also had no cars. This road was so unused that it was even covered in spots by as much as two inches of light grey sand. This was the Soviet’s grand boulevard — from the Soviet border to the center of the border city. The only problem was that Soviet planning had simply forgotten to build any cars to use it.
Far to the east he could see cheap, grey, eight story apartment blocks. At the side of the road men and women in cheap clothing were trudging with their backs bent into the cold wind. There were dirty mustard-yellow, bulbous busses spewing clouds of black smoke carrying workers to their jobs. It was now seven in the morning.
Painted on a small sign — which could have easily been missed — were the series of Cyrillic letters for “Minsk” . He swerved to the left through a cut-out in the city’s grand median strip of sand, dirt and weeds, and bumped his Volga onto the Brest-Litovsk-to-Minsk highway.
Bill tried his radio and found several AM and FM stations. Russian FM stations have but five kHz separation instead of America’s ten kHz separation and thus can pack twice as many stations onto their radio dial. He picked an FM station from Brest-Litovsk — it was playing some kind of frenetic music that sounded like balalaikas on amphetamines.
For more than a hundred miles this highway is a model of modern construction. In fact it most resembles segments of some Kansas freeway construction from the late 1950’s.
To the east are the Pripet marshes. Three hundred miles wide and a hundred miles deep. These miles upon miles of swamp, shallow lakes and wet forests made up most of Stalin’s deep defense against Hitler.
The road from Brest-Litovsk to Moscow is about 600 miles — with no gas stations, no restaurants, no garages, no towing services, no hotels, no street lamps, no center lane markers or curb markers, or even road drains. To each side of the road there is just the empty nothingness of the Soviet steppe.
One does not stop on this road for even one minute longer than absolutely necessary. It would be the height of folly to pull over and rest even for twenty minutes. In the best of times it was a hive of various Soviet police. The rest of the time it was walled with men of the Caucasus — waiting for their chance to block the road and then rob and pillage. The run from Brest-Litovsk to Moscow was a run for your life.
The road signs for Minsk became ever larger. The arrows all pointed to the left. He continued onwards — to the north.
For the first few hours there had been few police checkpoints but near Minsk — where the road changed from concrete to thick black tar the GAI — or automotive security — became a regular feature. Every 20 miles another GAI roadblock would hold him up and check his papers.
Out of sight of the GAI he would stop as needed and re-fill his car’s internal gas tank from the cans in the trunk. He never wanted to run out of gas. This was also the only break he had to take a piss.
Single trees turned to hedgerows and then scattered trees slowly became forest. Another two hundred miles and the city of Smolensk passed around him.
The sun fell to the west and filled his rear view mirrors. Slowly, darkness filled the sky like infinitely fine layers of black gauze. The clear night sky held no heat and the deeply penetrating cold of Soviet Russia leaked into the car.
He was now between cities and the radio was nothing but static. All he could hear was the steady rumble of the engine and the gravel-sputtered hiss of his tires running over loose asphalt.
It was impolite to use your headlamps on these roads at night. Most trucks and all of the half dozen cars he passed drove with their lights out. There was no way to know for sure if this was done to save a car’s hard-to-replace headlamps or to confuse those who might be lying in wait someplace down the road — to give a driver a few extra seconds before he was ambushed.
The road suddenly improved in quality. There was a huge cast concrete sign at the side of the road that announced entry into the Moscow Region — what we would call the political district or county — of Moscow. Bill pulled off the road and behind the concrete sign.
To the north he could see a faint glow on the horizon — the not-so-distant lights of Moscow. Moscow has no night life, no neon signs, few street lamps and in the city all cars drive only with their parking lamps on. Any major American city can be seen from fifty miles away — blazing into the night sky. Moscow was only a dim glow on the horizon even from ten miles away.
It was time to look Russian. Bill pulled on a cheap polyester jacket and then added a cap — with a two day growth of beard he looked quite convincing. He made one final check of the trunk for any personal belongings — there were none. He started the car and returned to the highway and then drove on to the north.
After about twenty minutes a huge wrought iron sign loomed out of the trees — it said “MOSCOW” and had an arrow pointing left. He turned left and drove through an underpass — under Moscow’s outer ring road and then — suddenly — the city streets of Moscow were before him.
The outer edges of the city are a maze of cheap high rise concrete apartment blocks. The lack of street lamps turns these streets into black canyons of crime.
His first stop would be at a gas station to top up the Volga’s tank. The gas station consisted of a mud and gravel yard with axle-deep potholes next to each pump. He parked the Volga near one of the pumps but far enough away to clear the hole and then walked to the station’s office — a primitive shack — and told the attendant that he wanted 40 liters of gasoline.
“Sorok litros puhszhahll’sta.”
The attendant took Bills’s rubles and returned change.
While 40 liters might not seem to be much — about ten gallons — it was the maximum purchase allowed.
One did not just hand cash through the window and say give me a hundred rubles worth. In Russia, purchases were in numbers of liters not in numbers of rubles. After topping up the tank he returned to the main road and headed for the center of the city.
At each of Moscow’s major intersections there are steel booths built on stilts and surrounded in glass. Inside each there is a Militia man. His job is to control the sequencing of the traffic lights and to telephone to higher authorities any observations of suspicious characters. The name for one of these booths is “Stahkahn.”
At intersections within three miles of the Kremlin and especially near the western embassies Russian Intelligence agencies have set up observation posts — “visirs” — in second or third floor rooms facing the street. In these observation posts men sit at television monitors or at telescopes connected not to eye pieces but to large ground-glass viewers. Hour after hour the interior of any car stopping at these traffic lights is inspected closely. Communications between posts is by land line not radio.
Since Bill now looked Russian, drove like a Russian and was driving a Russian car he didn’t call attention to himself. If he did have a tail and attempted — successfully or not — to lose his tail or tails it would set off alarms all across the city. His only problem might be avoiding the Militsia — traffic police who would wave their little white battons at you and expect you to stop and pay them dearly for some imagined infraction.
He made for the inner ring road and then turned toward the Kremlin. Red Square was fully illuminated and Lenin’s Tomb was artfully lit — setting it dramatically apart from the Kremlin’s wall. There still is no better comparison between America and Soviet Russia. Russia has as its icon — Lenin’s Tomb. America has its icon — Las Vegas.
Bill pulled to the right and followed the river road along the Moscow River and parked on the gently sloping cobble stoned parking area just south of St. Basil’s Cathedral — at the southern edge of Red Square. Just across the river and a bit to the west he could see the prim exterior of the British Embassy tastefully decorated in the amber wash of security flood lamps.
A man was drinking vodka under some trees. He was literally hidden in the shadows of the Kremlin wall. The figure put down his vodka bottle and sauntered across the cobble stone pavement and to Bill’s car window.
“Amerikanski?”
“Da”
“Vherre arre hyou frrom?”
“I’m from Fargo, North Dakota!”
“Ah! A place like Novosibirsk!”
The recognition signals had been proffered and accepted. The man from the shadows slowly walked around to the passenger side of the car, opened the door and got in.
“Here are the keys to your replacement vehicle. The papers are in perfect order and are inside it — taped under the driver’s seat. It’s full of gas and there are five gas cans in the trunk. There’s a thermos of coffee, some food from Stockman’s foreign currency store and even a stay-awake pill all on the passenger seat under a woolen sweater.”
Bill was exhausted but put on a pleasant face: “Thanks for the food. I’m really starved.”
Bill exited the car and re-entered on the passenger side. The stranger had already slid over and was starting the engine. The two men were about the same size and were wearing identical shoes, shirt, jacket and hat.
There was no idle talk whatsoever. In fact neither had used their natural voice during the recognition process. Bill had not looked at the man’s face. If either were ever caught it would be quite difficult for either of them to identify the other.
They drove around the city — making certain that they had no tail but not trying to lose one. Bill exited the vehicle at Russia’s memorial arch to their victory over Napoleon. Down the street and parked behind an apartment block was what seemed to be a vehicle identical to his own — even the narrow license plate numbers were the same.
Bill’s trip south was uneventful. He did not eat the food nor did he drink the coffee nor did he take the stay-awake pill. He wanted to stay alive.
Thirty-two hours non-stop driving had now brought him back to the outskirts of Berlin. He determined his bearings by the sight of the East German’s Berlin TV tower — with its tower-top restaurant. Just a mile to the west of the tower was the Berlin Grand Hotel — and sleep.
Finally, he drove west on the Unter den Linden, made a U-turn just before the Brandenburg Gate and then parked the car directly in front of the Komisher Opera and right next to the Soviet Embassy. He locked the car, casually dropped the keys into a bush thirty yards down the street and walked the two blocks to the hotel.
Since he had never checked out it was a simple matter to ask for his key and head for his room. To present a cosmopolitan face to the staff he stopped on the mezanine floor and had a beer at the bar. He wanted to seem simply the well-satisfied customer of some “lady of the night.” He smiled happily to the attendant, drank his beer and headed — finally — to his room.
After a good night’s sleep and a rather expensive buffet breakfast at the hotel’s most informal of three restaurants he checked out and walked across Checkpoint Charley to freedom.
As he crossed the border and into West Berlin, he felt as if a monstrous weight had been lifted from him. He had completed his mission — and had taken no chances of betrayal and winding up poisoned and dead someplace along the Moscow to Brest-Litovsk highway.
And his engine hadn’t quit.
Of course, the engine of his Volga had been quite special. While most Volgas had six cylinders his had only four. The center-most two cylinders had been removed and a Davy Crockett missile warhead had been carefully fitted into the dead space.
The engine had been equipped with specially built crankshaft and camshaft — with the four remaining lobes moved from every 60 degrees to every 90 — so that they allowed the engine to run smoothly on just the outside four remaining cylinders. The interior of the engine’s distributor cap had been carefully machined and rewired to align the interior contacts of the cap with the rotor — and with the active spark plugs. The double thick radiator had been needed to keep the Davy Crockett’s explosives jacket cool.
The thick walls of the Volga engine had protected an even greater secret. Bill had done what no one had ever done before or might ever do again. He had delivered an American tactical nuclear munition into the very heart of the Evil Empire.
Later he would discover that Clinton’s drug gangs had stolen this engine technology and used it to smuggle thousands of fifty-pound loads of cocaine across the Mexican border and then deep into America. They simply created a putty of acetone and cocaine and packed fifty pounds of the liquified drug into the void created by the missing cylinders.
Each trip, each fifty pounds of cocaine was a million dollars. Sucking the drug from the center of the engine was easy — just dilute with more acetone pressure-injected into the void and cocaine syrup would spurt out of the two dead sparkplug holes.
Thus, Clinton sold another of America’s secrets — for a billion dollars in cocaine.