The Gold Coast

20

So that very night Jim finds himself tracking with Arthur through the network of little streets on the east side of the City Mall, in Garden Grove. They turn down Lewis Street, which is a tunnel-like alley through the underlevel, walled on both sides by warehouse loading docks, all of them closed in the late evening. Arthur turns his headlights off and on three times as they turn into a ten-car parking lot between two warehouses. Parked in this cubbyhole is a station wagon. Four men standing by it, a black a white and two Latinos, jump to the back of the station wagon as Arthur and Jim slide into the lot. They lift out some small but apparently heavy plastic boxes, put them in the backseat of Arthur’s car. With a few muttered words and a quick wave he’s out into the alley again, tracking toward the freeway.

“That’s the usual method,” he says matter-of-factly. “The idea is to keep hold of this stuff for as short a time as possible. No one has it for more than a couple of hours, and it’s constantly on the move.”

And no more than an hour after that, Jim finds himself crawling on his belly up the dry bed of the Santa Ana River, scraping over sand, gravel, rocks, plastic shards, styrofoam frag ments, bits of metal, and pools of mud. He’s dressed in a head-to-foot commando suit Arthur has provided out of one of the four boxes. This suit, as Arthur explained, is completely covert. It holds Jim’s body heat in, so that he gives out no IR signal; one layer is made of filaboy-37, Dow Chemical and Plessey’s latest stealth material, a honeycomb-structured synthetic resin whose irregular molecules not only distort but “eat” radar waves; and it’s a flat bland color called chameleon, very difficult to see.

Jim peers out through eyepieces that have some kind of head’s-up display, green and violet visuals from covert low-frequency sensors giving him a fairly good view of the night world, though the colors are out of a bad drug hallucination. And he can’t see Arthur at all. The suit’s sauna effect is intense, he’s soaked with sweat.

They get up to climb the east side of the riverbed. Jim is cooking. The world looks as if it’s under very turbid green and violet water. “Thus they crossed the Lake of Fire…” Oh, it is weird, weird.

Here on the Newport Beach side, occupying the site of an old oil field now gone dry, is the physical plant of Parnell Airspace Corporation: fully lit (each light a white-green magnesium flare in Jim’s bizarre field of vision), surrounded by a high fence that is electrically defended so conspicuously that the barbed wire on top can only be for decoration, or nostalgia—a symbol, like the mark of a brand over a modern cattle factory.

Jim bumps into Arthur, crouches beside him, puts down the box that he’s been carrying or pushing along with him. It’s heavy. The buildings of the Parnell complex are still some three or four hundred yards away, dark masses on a green plain of concrete, which is dotted here and there by lavender cars.

Arthur crawls up to the fence and gently hangs on it what looks like a tennis racket without a handle. The frame adheres to the fence, and the wire mesh of the fence caught inside the frame falls away. The frame is now giving out the proper response to the fence’s sensors, convincing them that no hole exists—so Arthur has explained to Jim as they prepared for their raid.

“Where do you get all this stuff?” Jim asked at the time.

“We have our suppliers,” Arthur said. “This is the crucial item here, the solvent missile.…”

Now he shuffles back to Jim and they quickly set up a missile launcher, with the missile already in it. They nail the base of it into the ground. It’s got a covert laser targeter, and all in all it’s the latest in microarmament: it looks like a Fourth of July skyrocket, or a kid’s toy. When they fire it, it will shoot through the new hole in the fence and behave like a little cruise missile, following its laser clothesline into the door of Parnell’s physical plant; impact will penetrate the door and release a gas containing degrading enzymes and chemical solvents, mostly a potent mix called Styx-90, another Dow product; and all the plastic, filaboy, reinforced carbon, graphite, epoxy resin, and kevlar reached by the gas will be reduced to dust, or screwed up in some less dramatic way. And Parnell, primary contractor for the third layer of the ballistic missile defense architecture, currently trying to make satellite mirror stations covert or semicovert, will have the bulk of its ground stock handed to it on a plate. Turned into dust and odd lumps on the floor.

Aiming the device is simple though a bit risky, as it makes them semicovert for that instant that the laser targeting is happening. Arthur does it, and they crawl down the fence fifty yards and repeat the whole operation, aiming at another building’s door.

Now comes the hard part. The missiles have secondary manual starters, in case radio signals happen to be jammed or responded to with some kind of return fire. Arthur has judged either possibility to be all too likely, so they are using the manual starters, which are buttons at the end of cords connected to the minimissiles. The cords are about a hundred yards long. So Jim crawls backwards through the sage and the trash as far away as the cord lets him, and Arthur does the same from the first missile. They angle toward each other, but Jim can’t see Arthur when he comes to the end of his cord. In the suits they’re completely invisible to each other.

Arthur has anticipated this difficulty, however. He’s given Jim one end of an ordinary length of string, and now Jim feels three tugs on it. They’re ready to go. When he gets three more hard tugs he pushes the button on the firing cord, drops both cord and string, and starts running.

It really is a very simple business.

Hitting the button is like turning on all the alarm systems in the world at once; there’s a wail of sirens and glare of supplementary floodlights back on the Parnell lot. There’s no way of knowing exactly what the missiles did—not a chance of hearing any small crunches that they might have made on impact—but judging by the response, something sure happened.

Jim finds himself flying down the riverbed, crouched over so far that he’s in danger of smacking his nose with his knees, and leading Arthur by a good distance. They reach Arthur’s car, which he parked in the rivermouth beach parking lot; they jump in and track out of there, toward Newport Beach. The commando suits are stripped off in a panic hurry. They track into traffic, Arthur gets in the slow lane and tosses the suits out the window when they pass over Balboa Marina. Off the bridge and into the water. At that point they become two citizens out on the road, nothing to connect them to the buildings full of weapons-become-slag back on the old oil field.

They both smell strongly of sweat, it’s like the spa’s weight room in Arthur’s car. The towels Arthur brought along are damp before they’re through drying off, and they struggle back into street clothes still sticky and hot. Jim’s hands shake, he can hardly button the buttons on his shirt. He feels a little sick.

Arthur laughs. “Well, that’s that. Intelligence estimates we got about ninety million dollars of space weaponry. They’ll find the missile stands, but that won’t tell them anything.” Suffused with energy that is still welling up in him, he sticks his head out the window, shouts “Keep—the sky—clean!”

Jim laughs wildly, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline of their run downriver courses through him—one of the most powerful drugs he’s ever felt. The best stimulant in the world. “That was great. Great. I actually—did something.”

He stops, thinks about that. “I’ve actually done something. You know”—he hesitates, it sounds silly—“I feel like this is the first time in my life that I’ve actually done something.”

Arthur nods, stares at him with raptor intensity. “I know just what you mean when you say that. And that’s what resistance can do for you. You feel you’re in a system so big and so well entrenched that nothing at all could bring it down. Certainly nothing you can do individually will make the slightest bit of difference. But if you hold to that conviction and do nothing, then it’s self-fulfilling—you create the very condition you perceive.

“But take that very first step!” He laughs wildly. “Take that first step, perform an act of resistance of even the smallest kind, and suddenly your perception changes. Reality changes. You see it can be done. It might take time, but—” He laughs again. “Yeah! You bet it can be done! Let’s go celebrate your first act.” He hits the dashboard, hard. “Here’s to resistance!”

“To resistance.”