Mike Maden - Drone Command

It was the Texas congresswoman Dolly Waddlington who had been giving him the most hell on the subject of the middle class in the last few weeks. The fiery little Republican was infamous for the safari trophy heads hanging on her office walls, each identified with a brass plaque listing the location and date of her kill. Her favorite was the giant snarling javelina. She claimed to have shot the four-hundred-pound charging pig between the eyes with a .357 Magnum revolver less than three yards away before it might have ripped her to shreds with those big yellow tusks. She named the fearsome beast ISIS.

But it was the political hides she’d skinned over the years on both sides of the aisle that impressed Lane. An unapologetic nationalist, Waddlington had been blistering his ear on the phone for weeks now about the pernicious Chinese trade deficit that ran in the hundreds of billions of dollars year after year. Besides locking out U.S. firms from their markets with unfair regulations, manipulating the yuan-dollar relationship, and their virulent industrial espionage program, it was cheap Chinese labor and bad American tax laws that really fueled the trade disparity. No wonder China’s economy was now the largest in the world.

As a Democrat, Lane bristled at the idea that his party continuously put the interests of multinational corporations over the average American worker, hiding behind the gilded skirts of the big labor unions who themselves should have been fighting against America’s crippling trade deficits with China and the rest of the world. But most of the big union bosses were as corrupt as many of the congressmen he’d worked with on both sides of the aisle. Some of the very biggest corporations making the most obscene profits from cheap overseas labor were the Democrats’ biggest contributors. Historically, the Democratic Party had been the champion of labor, but in the last two decades, the labor they were championing was foreign, particularly Chinese.

Many of the same millionaires and billionaires in his party who complained — rightly — about gross income inequality were partly to blame for the crisis. The middle class was being decimated by so-called free-trade agreements and, worse, the pursuit of profits at the expense of people and the nation. High-tech corporations like HP, Facebook, and Microsoft decried the shortage of American engineering talent, which simply wasn’t true. Lane had seen the numbers. Every year, twenty-five thousand freshly minted American engineering graduates couldn’t find STEM employment. But the high-tech companies kept clamoring for H-1B visas — fast-ticket entry for lower-wage technical talent from abroad — even as they were laying off tens of thousands of high-wage American employees year after year, exporting their jobs to lower-paying foreign labor markets.

Just like the Republicans, too many Democrats gladly signed on to legislation that incentivized job exports and eagerly encouraged unfettered immigration, legal and otherwise. Those two policies alone were enough to decimate the great American middle class and trap the working poor. Lane was proud to be an old-school Kennedy Democrat, the party that used to work hard for working Americans instead of working hard to get reelected. He was determined to right the ship.

Lane took a swig of his beer. The sweet bite of the Revolver’s blood orange peel was a perfect match to his savory grilled cheese.

He thought about his meeting back in the Tank. Something nagged at him. The United States was spending tens of billions of dollars every year preparing for a potential war with China. So why in the hell are we even trading with them? The answer sickened him.

By locating their operations in China for the cheap labor — and in order to avoid the labor regulations that protected American workers — too many American corporations had unintentionally helped fund China’s massive military expansion, including the Wu-14 that now threatened America’s carrier fleet, which, ironically, protected the sea-lanes that enriched those American corporations and their officers in the first place.

Lane was also the proud son of a proud Vietnam veteran. Like most thinking Americans, Lane understood that the values of communism, like those of radical Islam, threatened human rights and freedoms. Tens of millions of Chinese had died under Mao’s reign of terror, and that was no accident. Communism was to Mao what fascism was to Hitler. America would never have traded with Germany after the war if the Germans hadn’t renounced fascism, and yet the Chinese government not only had never renounced communism, but it also still actively promoted and defended it.

It was time to put a stop to all of it.

The Wu-14 situation was the first problem at hand, but that was only a symptom of a much bigger issue. It was clear to him now he had to find a way to completely transform the Sino-American relationship. Either China was a friend or a foe. It couldn’t be both. If he could somehow help Sun push through his reforms, China might become a trusted ally instead of a strategic competitor. But how could he help Sun at a time like this?

The original mission he initiated with Pearce and Myers was to secure the design of the Wu-14. But the mission profile suddenly changed in his mind. If Pearce was going to die, it needed to be for something more significant than just a missile blueprint. Unless the Sino-American relationship changed, the Chinese would inevitably build a more powerful missile in preparation for future conflict anyway.

The path was now clear in his mind. Lane wouldn’t lose the chance to change China and make America more secure in the process. He’d do whatever it took, even if it cost him the presidency. Or worse.

So be it .

The backhoe roared as the caretaker gunned the engine, dropping the last bucket of dirt onto the grave. The air smelled like exhaust fumes in the dimming light. Not very ceremonial, but efficient. Hand digging was too expensive these days and the cold slope was hard and rocky. The caretaker didn’t usually run the backhoe until after the family had already left with the flowers and their friends, but there weren’t any of either at his dad’s gravesite. Troy didn’t have anywhere else to go just yet so he stood around and watched.

A tall man in a gray windowpane sport coat and a cardinal rep tie approached from the bottom of the hill, stopping to the side. He had neatly trimmed silver hair and a mustache to match, with sharp green eyes. He looked like an executive or maybe even a college professor. The man watched the backhoe bucket pound the mound of dirt with a heavy metallic clang. When the backhoe finished, it pulled away, heading clumsily through the weeds for the maintenance shed. The man with the silver hair made the sign of the cross. Noticed Troy watching him. The man nodded curtly, a sign of respect. Turned and left.

Troy had no idea who he was. Not one of the VA doctors, that was for sure. He knew every one of those sons of bitches. They wouldn’t dare show their faces here today. He checked his watch. It was time to keep a promise he’d made to himself.

Fat JoJo sat spread-legged on a stool, hovering over a customer. His thick fingers deftly guided the tattooing needle over the man’s forearm, filling in the details of a flaming skull. Two of JoJo’s men had draped themselves on the torn vinyl waiting seats, thumbing through worn biker mags and smoking cigarettes. They were both heavily tatted — a perk of the job. One was tall and lanky with wild, bushy hair. The other was shorter and broader like a fireplug, his shaved head offset by a scraggly goatee and a silver-skull earring. JoJo’s custom ’66 Chevy 4x4 was parked out front, riding high on its six-inch lifted suspension and thirty-six-inch knobby tires, still midnight black with orange flames raking the hood.