With a certain sadistic satisfaction it pleased the enemy to allow three or four junior officers without submarine experience to maintain the pretext that she was still in United States hands. The sharp frustration of fighting men in being forced to pretend on powerless watches, on the deck of an impotent ship which had cost the United States multiple millions to construct, afforded amusement to the commander assigned by the enemy to control and oversee the former United States defense facility. Americans, he knew, were basically inept, granting that they had a flair for technology and had had the extraordinary good fortune to be able to put men on the moon before anyone else. A precious lot of good it would do them now.
The Magsaysay was the first of a new, ultra-advanced series which had proven too much even for the people who had designed and built her; the shakedown sea tests had turned up a multitude of problems which it would have taken six months to put in order if the Americans had been left alone to do the job by themselves. They would fix her all right, but they would put her in shape to join the already mighty fleet that had helped to bring about their swift downfall.
As soon as the Magsaysay was finally ready she would be sailed away to her new destiny, but not before she had been renamed. And the new name she would be given would not please the Americans, not one little bit.
At shortly after eight-thirty on a Monday morning, while low-lying fog still obscured much of the local area, a workman who clearly disliked his assignment applied for a pass at the main gate. His qualifications as a technician were limited, but he possessed sufficient ability to do the electrical repair and modification work for which he had been recruited from one of the suppliers of the Magsaysciy’s equipment. He was precisely the type and kind of man the new chief of security for the naval facility wanted — resentful, but frightened enough to obey orders without question to save his own skin; capable of doing the work expected of him, but not advanced enough to do any dangerous improvising. He was kept waiting an hour and a half while he was checked out and his background verified. After that he was made to strip to the skin and both his person and clothing were thoroughly searched.
When the routine had been completed he was assigned a number, given a biting two-minute lecture on the penalty for the slightest infraction of the rules and shown the muzzle of a gun, in order that he would be fully impressed with what he was being told. He grew red and cringed at the same time, which was the psychologically desirable reaction; the security chief who had watched the process through a one-way mirror signaled that he was to be admitted. By phone the chief of the guards on board the Magsaysay was told to expect him.
Obviously uncomfortable, the middle-aged man started out to find the ship, inquired twice for directions, and at last located her berth. He crossed the brow onto her deck and was intercepted by a lieutenant junior grade, who had the mock position of being the Officer of the Day.
“Who are you?” the OD demanded. He was fighting his own private war; whatever they did to him, and to the ship under his feet, he was an officer of the United States Navy and he was damn well going to show every enemy son-of-a-bitch who might be watching how such a man conducted himself.
The workman dug his credentials out of his pocket and showed them. “Summers,” he said.
The lieutenant scanned the pass and the letter of authorization, wondering to himself as he did so how an American, any American, could so lower himself as to help the enemy take over the property of the United States government. “All right,” he said, with cold contempt.
“How do I get in?” Summers asked. The lieutenant pointed toward the hatch, not wanting to speak unless he had to.
Summers took the direction without comment, put the papers away, and then painfully climbed down through the indicated opening.
Operation Low Blow had begun.
In his cell at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, Erskine Wattles, black ultramilitant, was desperately impatient. He had fought and fought hard for this day and he was anxious for his reward.
The people who had now taken over the country had to know who he was and where he was to be found. He had met with them or their representatives on many occasions; they had given him much encouragement and some money. They had also promised him, in a rather vague manner, that if he helped in certain directions, he would rise to a position of great power and importance. Power had been the magic word; he had savored it and hung onto it, and dreamed of the day when he would be mighty in the land.
To symbolize the new power that would be his he rose to his feet and looked about his narrow cell with the feeling that he was a great man whose very thoughts would burst the walls that held him captive. He strode the two or three steps permitted him by the stones and the bar$, then turned and strode the other way, trying to ignore the blood-boiling frustration of the limited space at his disposal. In the upper bunk he saw the inert back of his cellmate, an unimaginative rapist who had gotten horny and dragged a thirteen-year-old girl across a state line. He was stupid, and despite the fact that he was black, Wattles hated him.
He did not want to take hold of the bars to feel his own strength, because to do that would be to acknowledge their existence and the fact that they held him prisoner. He would not be kept in prison; every minute of his time was vitally important to his future plans. And for every bit of time that he was held back, those who had put him here would pay with their life’s blood when he became dictator.
No one but a black man could run the country, and he knew that he had been chosen. He was the leader; he had proven that the first time he had organized a celebration in honor of the anniversary of the death of the black traitor to his people, Martin Luther King. He had made a speech that had rocked the whole nation that day, and they surely knew who he was after that.
With the Weathermen he had helped to lead the attack on the colleges and universities; he alone had closed a campus of the University of California for weeks and had kept hundreds of advanced degree candidates from graduating. At the time of his proposed induction into the armed forces he had provoked and led a riot which had put more than thirty people into the hospital, a lot of them pigs. He loved that word — pigs — he had shouted it, screamed it, made it synonymous in the minds of most of the black people for any kind of policeman or any member of the armed forces.
He had been in all of the big ones — the Watts riot, the Chicago Democratic convention, the peace marches, the campus blow-offs. The only man who had been ahead of him, and that was because he was a big name singer, was Orberg. But Orberg had never had the nerve in court to leap onto the bench and punch a federal judge’s face with his thumbs out and hard enough to blind him permanently in one eye. He and he alone had been able to do that. And every sick pig in the country had been afraid of the name of Wattles that day and they were still afraid. Because he was coming out now and when he hit the street, the whole world was going to be his.
His sharp lawyer, a Jew named Wolpert, had gotten him out on bail for another appeal. Wolpert had pleaded that his client had been under the effect of drugs, to which he had been addicted for years, and therefore was a sick man. Because his lawyer had told him to, he, Erskine Wattles, had hung his head and playacted, and had gotten out on bail that a lot of protesters had put up because he was their great hero.