WebNovels

Chapter 26 - Chapter 26: Afterparty

Alice's Point of View

Cigar smoke, thick and pungent, assaulted her nostrils, reminding Alice of a time she'd rather forget. She was weak then, a toy, little better than property. Those men loved cigars.

"You want one, Mr. Math?" Aaron Hacker offered her boyfriend a smoke. 

"No thanks, I kiss my girlfriend with this mouth," he demurred. 

Alex was nothing like those men! 

"Suit yourself." Hacker took his refusal with good grace. 

They'd rented out a bar after he and Alex finished filming the podcast. The place had a nautical theme, as you might expect of a bar in a town with a Navy base. Her eyes scanned the room, finding fish, anchors, tridents, and other paraphernalia of the sea bedecking the walls.

"Your Alice is a lovely girl," Hacker said. The compliment seemed genuine. She bit back a vicious retort. Alice didn't want anyone but Alex looking at her. 

No, no, remember the mission, she reminded herself. 

"A man with good taste," Alex replied, putting an arm around her possessively. 

Fear not, my love. No one could ever take me from you. 

Even so, she considered Aaron Hacker. He was a man, and therefore untrustworthy. From what she could observe from across their table, the guy wasn't particularly interested in her. There were none of the tells, the lingering glances, the eyes drawn to her breasts, the need to refocus the conversation on her. She was just arm candy tonight, beneath the notice of such a powerful man.

In fact, Candidate Hacker seemed more interested in her boyfriend, if she was any judge of human behavior. That ability had kept her alive so far, so Alice supposed she was right. The notion filled her with dread, even though impressing Hacker was their priority.

"Seriously, man, do you have any other ideas? That stuff on the podcast was gold, but if you want to get into the weeds on policy, I'm up for it, at least until we've had too many drinks."

Alex sipped his beer to buy time. His body language was pretty obvious to her. She leaned on her boyfriend subtly, trying to encourage him. 

We've come this far, baby. Now is your chance to close the deal!

"Um, school discipline reform, maybe?" he offered uncertainly. "Detention should be abolished, at least. My main problem with school is just how much of it is wasting time."

Hacker immediately challenged him. "What would you replace it with? Paddling? That shit won't fly in 2024, as much as I'd like it to. These ipad kids are bad as fuck and could use a spanking, but parents would freak and I'm not a dictator, yet." He laughed at his own joke, if it was a joke.

"Have a hard-ass male teacher quarterdeck their ass like a drill instructor." Alex made the "knife hand" gesture he had shown her before. It meant punishment and even in this friendly atmosphere it was vaguely threatening. "You remember getting slayed in boot camp? The drill would start a stop watch then give you hell for five minutes. There's no reason we couldn't do something like that. Five minutes of getting smoked would shut up a disruptive student, no problem."

"Yes, yes," Hacker nodded in understanding. "There should be at least one hard-ass male teacher in every school. That kind of discipline will get them ready for military training. I was also thinking about bringing back presidential fitness standards. If we're feeding them better food we should be exercising them too. Turn PE into PT; build an obstacle course in every school, could even sponsor rifle-shooting as a varsity sport. We're going to need a lot of soldiers."

Finally, the real Hacker was showing himself. He wasn't exactly shy about his beliefs, but the man wasn't brazen enough to begin conversations with, "hi, I want to invade Canada and steal their oil! A bunch of other countries too! Vote for me and I promise lots and lots of war!"

Alice felt Alex tense beside her. "I hope you know that's not all we're going to need," he said seriously.

"Of course not. Harriet Clayton has barely funded the military. We've been in a sorry state since the GWOT ended." The GWOT meant the "War on Terror", Alice knew. The two men were using military slang and acronyms pretty casually and she was sometimes having trouble following along. "I've heard some units barely have an ammo budget to train with, and a good number of our ships and planes have been stuck in maintenance for years, totally undeployable. Readiness is low everywhere. It'll take a few years of rebuilding before we have a military we can actually use."

"So you're not a complete fool," Alex said challengingly. 

There was a spark in Hacker's eyes that made Alice uneasy. Alex might've had a few too many.

The middle-aged man laughed then took a sip of scotch. "Rumors to the contrary, my friend. I know procurement is fucked. Rebuilding our war industries will take time. Our boys will need ammo, equipment, supplies."

"Why even go this route?" Alex asked. "Why war? Why not do what RRC is doing? Wouldn't that stimulate the economy?"

"Can't have a post-war boom without a war," Hacker said simply, chewing on his cigar. "Rebecca means well," he said affectionately. There was a fond smile on his face. "But her vision is too small."

Alice was surprised at how open Hacker was about his feelings. Did he really love her? Was that why he didn't look at Alice with lust in his eyes? Was he like Alex, a man who really was devoted to one woman? She didn't want Aaron Hacker to have anything in common with her boyfriend, even something good.

"Too small in what way?" Alex asked. 

"Build millions of apartments just like Rebecca is proposing, and then what? People will have cheap rent, but they'll still be sitting on their fat asses watching Netflix and eating Doritos. I want Americans to get off their fat asses and do something! You can feed the body but starve the soul. Look at you and me, we had a purpose. Iraq made me what I am just like Syria made you. We're cheating the next generation by not giving them something to fight for. Only this time, America will actually get something out of the bargain. All the money that was spent on the Iraq war might as well have been flushed down the toilet. We should've taken their oil after all, just like the liberals accused us of doing. Wouldn't an army of conquest be better, more honest?"

Hacker was as charismatic as the devil himself! She could feel the passion, even in this dimly lit, smoke-filled shit hole of a bar. She looked at Alex and prayed he wasn't falling for it.

"Sustaining the kind of force you're talking about won't be a simple matter," her boyfriend doubtfully. "It's not just a matter of money. It's know how."

The man across from them narrowed his eyes. "Explain."

"Manufacturing isn't what you think it is. It's a skilled trade, similar to carpentry. The master carpenter takes his apprentice aside and says, 'see here kid, today we're gonna make cabinets. There's all kinds of tricks to it, knowledge we've accumulated over generations, and today I'm going to pass some of it on to you.' American manufacturing has lost a lot of that knowledge. Figuring it out again will take time, years even. You can't take a kid off the street and make him a master at anything overnight."

"What about automation?" Hacker asked.

Alex shook his head. "The more automated the process, the more vital the human component is. Increasing missile production, for example, would require training a hell of a lot of skilled labor: technicians, experts, people who know specialized machines inside and out across a whole array of disciplines. It's not a tap you can just turn on. Five years, I'm telling you, five years if you start today. You'd have to triple the defense budget to get the per-unit cost down, and earmark huge portions of it for job training, and those jobs would have to have salaries competitive with software or finance to get real talent. It'll be expensive and time-consuming as fuck. The country will go broke doing this, unless you can somehow convince our creditors they'll get paid back once we start looting other countries."

"The buildup might actually help us avoid a war," Hacker pointed out. He drained his scotch and motioned for another. "You can't hide something like this. America starts building up a war economy and the world will panic. Canada will probably fold. The real prizes will be Mexico and especially Venezuela. That's a lot of labor and natural resources, especially oil."

"And if they resist? What happens if it turns into a guerilla war like Iraq?" Alex pressed him. The two guys were damn near shouting at each other! 

"We get rough, no pussy-footing around. Don't worry, the rules of engagement will be loose as hell. The locals will get with the program after a massacre or two."

Massacre! Alex looked just as shocked as she was. "You're really willing to go that far?" he asked softly.

"For greatness? Hell yes. The world map hasn't changed much since 1945. It's fucking boring. I think it's time to write some new history." Hacker extended his hand across the table. "So what do you say, Mr. Math? In or out?"

More Chapters