Chapter 14

Friday early morning

We had all checked in and turned in our gear by 0130 hours. “Everyone is off until Saturday morning. Report for PT at 0700 hours Saturday,” Lt. Commander Ferguson barked, eliciting a loud cheer from everyone.

“Before you go, each of the fire team leaders needs to submit a brief overview of your team’s actions tonight. Aside from that, we have video coverage from the grav sleds and everyone’s helmet cams. Anyone who has something they feel should be added should see me immediately after this,” he instructed.

“I’d like to add something,” Cooper spoke up. “Tonight was the first mission I’ve been on where our intel was 100% accurate. Every person was where we were told they’d be. The routes into the ship we were supplied with were right on. I hope the rest of our missions with Jim are similar,” he said.

“Thank you, Cooper, I’ll make sure to add your thoughts to my final report,” Lt. Commander Ferguson replied.

Once I made it home, I stored my sled in the barn and crept into the house an hour after leaving the base. I felt Don checking when he heard me come in. “You’re cold,” Sally squeaked in surprise when I snuggled into bed behind her. “What are you doing home so soon?” she asked groggily a second later when she realized that I was supposed to be at Fort Bragg.

“We completed our mission, and I don’t have to be back until Saturday morning,” I replied.

“Mission? I thought you were still testing,” she said.

“I am, but we had a short mission. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say about it, so I can’t say anything,” I explained.

“It’s probably just as well. I’d still be lying here worrying,” she sighed. “I really like Dijonae,” she whispered even quieter.

“I do too, but it’s always your choice,” I reminded her.

“I know. Her family came over for dinner again tonight. Ashley and Dijonae were both starry-eyed all night. Don and Fred teased each other saying that it looked like they’d be exchanging daughters,” she chuckled.

“Hold me and let me go back to sleep,” she insisted with a yawn to emphasize her demand. I did. I was still excited about the success of our mission and had to work for several minutes to center myself enough to finally calm down and go to sleep.

I got up at 0700 when Sally woke me up for breakfast. I had no sooner sat down at the table than Don came in and turned on the Televid. “Look what was on the news this morning,” he exclaimed excitedly. The screen showed a reporter with a picture of the Pentagon in the background.

“This story is just in,” he began. The time stamp in the bottom corner of the screen showed that this aired live two and a half hours ago.

“Pentagon officials have confirmed a story just released by the White House. Sometime last night, a team of Navy SEALs and a lone civilian contractor led an attack against four goliath tankers off the Atlantic coast of South America. The Chinese had captured the tankers during their occupation of Myanmar. These ships had been modified so that each carried seven of the small submarines used by Nicaraguan rebels last Sunday in the thwarted attack near Port Fourchon.

“Officials say that no U.S. troops were hurt, and that none of the captured crew members of the tankers were injured seriously. ‘We had excellent intel about the layout of the ships and the location of each crewmember when we began the assault,’ Admiral Raymond, overall commander of the navy SEALs commented.

“Along with the four ships, the troops captured thousands of kilograms of gold the rebels used to pay for the submarines and cruise missiles. One of the ships had already stopped in a Caribbean port and loaded farming equipment and tonnes of corn, rice, beans, and wheat. Our analysts believe the grain was purchased as a backup to the steadily declining Chinese harvests. Back to you, Carl.”

“Was that you?” Sally asked excitedly.

“I can neither confirm nor deny any knowledge of what he just reported,” I replied.

“He’s right,” Don interjected. “Unless they give him explicit permission to discuss the missions, he can’t say anything about them before or after they occur.”

“Then how do you know about it?” Aunt Peggy asked.

“I never said that Jim had anything to do with it. I merely commented on the interesting news story this morning,” Don replied with a smug grin.

“You men and your secrets,” Aunt Peggy grumped.

“Hey, there are five women on the team, too,” I reminded them. They’d met everyone when they fed them Monday. “One of them is Helga’s cousin Inga.”

“The report didn’t say if the farm equipment was diesel, alcohol, or electric,” Don commented.

“Half electric and half alcohol powered,” I replied, understanding that the women would now know what I did last night. They’d know in a few days anyway, once the ships reached Port Fourchon. “There are also a dozen large commercial windmills for generating electricity. We can probably use one here and the rest along the river or wherever we decide to start farming,” I suggested.

“We checked out Tensas Parish yesterday,” Sally said excitedly. “Shonice was right; there’s nothing there but a few people trying to survive through subsistence farming. We commed Don’s contact and he said to make an offer on any or all of the land in the Parish. They’d sell us the entire Parish, minus the nineteen registered homesteads, for five hundred dollars conditional on you installing a water treatment plant, a waste treatment plant, and a rudimentary power grid.

“You or your appointee would be the Parish Manager until the population warranted and could afford some sort of elected Parish government. The state agricultural agent we spoke with has old plat maps that show where farms were and what they raised from the 1800s up until the Welfare Wars. He confirmed that wheat, cotton, corn, and rice all did well there. There are even three large oxbow lakes he says would make a great place to raise catfish commercially.”

“Then I guess I have a call to make, and hopefully we can do some traveling today,” I replied. “By the way, who is Shonice?” I asked.

“My mother,” Dijonae replied.

I called the com number in my com unit, despite the early hour. “Dorothy Shaw,” the woman replied.

“Dorothy, this is Jim Reynolds from Blanc Bayou,” I said.

“Hi, Jim, good to hear from you. I hear that you were busy last night,” she replied excitedly.

“I didn’t really do much beyond providing the reported ‘excellent intel,’” I laughed.

“I was calling to see if it might be possible to visit the Lucky J in Meridian today. I’ve decided to start some corporate agribusiness style farms here in Louisiana and need some suggestions on everything from providing temporary water and waste treatment to using greenhouses efficiently. I’m even hoping they might have a few people they would let me steal from them to oversee everything,” I explained.

“Let me check with them and get back to you,” she replied.

She commed me fifteen minutes later. “They’d love to meet you and to help you,” she said excitedly. How soon can you get there?”

“How about 0830?” I suggested.

“Perfect. They said any time after 8:00 was fine. I’ll let them know that you’ll be there,” she said.

“Who all is going?” I asked the table full of people.

“Bring your women and Dijonae. I’ll go along, too,” Don replied. “Be prepared to take lots of notes,” he warned as eleven women practically jumped up from the table. Juana made sure that it was okay to leave her little ones here and then she was right behind the other women.

Half an hour later, everyone was dressed and ready to go. It took us longer to get the grav sleds out than it took to get to the Lucky J. I’d seen pictures of it in our history books, but most of those centered on the main house. From the air, the view was breathtaking. There were hundreds of square kilometers of greenhouses and the sled’s scanner identified thousands of people already working inside those greenhouses, as well as inside the numerous scattered warehouses, barns, and pastures. Dozens of grain silos punctuated the view like large exclamation marks.

We uncloaked on the four-lane road that ran through the property and turned into the driveway. “May I help you?” the guard at the gate asked.

“I believe we’re expected, Jim Reynolds and party,” I replied.

“May I see some ID?” he asked. I gave him my Louisiana driver’s license and my brand-new military ID. He looked both IDs over and did a double take when he looked at the military ID. Stepping back inside the booth, he commed someone.

“Sorry for the delay. Nobody told me you were coming this morning,” the guard apologized when he came back out.

“We just made the appointment an hour ago,” I explained.

“Follow the driveway right up to the front of the house. Someone will meet you there,” he advised us as he opened the gate.

Someone did, indeed, meet us. A man about my height and about Don’s age came out to meet us. “You must be Jim,” he laughed when he saw me. “Dorothy said that you were a clone of my grandfather,” he explained as he showed me a photo he was holding of Lucky Jim II when he was sixteen.

“Wow, I had no idea,” I said. “All the pictures that I’ve seen of him were when he was older.

“I’m Jim Reynolds III, grandson of Lucky Jim II and Jan. Dorothy said that you wanted to start another large farm and needed suggestions and possibly some technical experts and supervisors,” he said questioningly as he ushered us inside.

Once inside, I explained about finally accepting my destiny to be the next Lucky Jim. In turn, he told us what his grandfather, Jim II, had told them when they were younger about how difficult it had been for him to accept the label. “Both of your predecessors got to ease into it gradually. It sounds like you’ve had to jump in with both feet,” he sympathized.

“I identify more with the first Lucky Jim in that I was the family hunter while the rest of the family took care of the farming. Since Don got back from China, I’ve also concentrated on being in shape to enlist when I turn eighteen and had no idea what else I wanted to do until two days ago. I realized that the country still doesn’t have enough food, and far too many people need jobs. I can help alleviate both problems at the same time by farming.

“At first, I want to concentrate on cotton to make clothing a bit cheaper and more abundant, as well as growing wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, rice, and sugar cane. Someone told me about a Parish in Louisiana where all but two of the towns were burned down in the Welfare War. The two towns were mostly abandoned, and the buildings were torn down for material to build squatter’s huts. With a population of less than two thousand, there is no city or Parish government. They have no running water, electricity, or waste disposal systems.

“The state government will sell us the entire Parish, minus the nineteen registered homesteads, for five hundred dollars, but we have to build a water treatment plant, a waste treatment plant, and a rudimentary power grid. One thing I hoped you could help us do is find is a contractor like the one your grandfather used when he first started building in Cuba. We’re going to need that level of infrastructure prepared before we can fully exploit the fallow land,” I explained.

“Then you are definitely lucky,” he chuckled. “We still use the same company. Grandsons of the original two contractors run it now. They just finished our latest project in Haiti and planned to take the weekend off. We have some small projects that could keep them busy for a couple of weeks, but I think your project should take precedence,” he commented.

He made a quick call. “Phil, are you two interested in another project like Haiti, but in Louisiana?” he asked.

“How soon can you get to the house? I have someone here who wants to talk to you. I think he wants to start ASAP ... Okay, see you then.”

“They’re interested. They have a pair of grav sleds like yours but without weapons. They’ll be here in an hour and a half,” he said.

“Haiti?” I asked. “I haven’t heard anything about a project there.”

“We’ve tried to keep it quiet,” he explained. “The government here thought we should concentrate on a new project or an expansion here instead of Haiti. I wanted to finish Haiti first, especially since it’s been annexed as another state. My grandfather started work on it right before the Welfare Wars began. He never got around to finishing it and we still had all that land sitting idle.

“Even though it wasn’t finished until last fall, we got a good harvest there. Now that it’s done, and once our first full harvest is in, we’ll be able to add enough food to the supply there to feed everyone on the island, and also provide thousands of jobs. The Lucky J Haiti is almost as big as this one is. In the future, we can even expand it to be as big as what we have in Cuba. Now we just have to find something to do here in the original states to keep the government happy.

“I wonder,” he mused, looking at me. “Until now, we’ve always had a new project to start or else we needed to expand some aspect of what we already had. With Haiti finished, for the first time, we don’t have anything new to start or to expand. I have a feeling that anything new from now on will come from you,” he said as he continued to look at me appraisingly.

He commed someone else. “Hey, Rubio, can you break away and come to the house? There’s someone here that you need to meet,” he said. He finished the call a minute later with a grin on his face.

“He’ll be here in a few minutes. Rubio is one of Ramón’s grandsons, the Ramón who helped run everything for my grandfather. Rubio enjoyed being in charge of our Haiti project from start to finish and I promised him that he could ramrod the next project, whatever it was.”

“Will he want to leave here? It seems that he’s already well established,” I asked.

“I’ll promise him his job back if it doesn’t work out, but I’m pretty sure that you’ll keep him busy enough to make him happy,” he replied.

“I have yet another question,” Jim III said. “Do you plan to use the Lucky J name?”

“I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,” I replied. “I might want to use it at some point.”

“What we’ve done is add a location designator after each Lucky J name, like when Phil said he’d meet us at the Lucky J Meridian. We have the Lucky J Cuba, the Lucky J Korea, the Lucky J Laos, the Lucky J Cambodia, and now the Lucky J Haiti,” he explained.

“That sounds like a good idea,” I replied.

He gave us a quick tour of the house while we waited for Rubio to arrive. It was odd walking through a house that I’d read about in history books, as well as seeing where so many events actually occurred. Since we had first entered the house, I could almost feel the lingering presence of Lucky Jim II. Knowing that I was walking through hallways that he had walked through and was sitting in rooms where he had worked and talked finally began to increase my excitement about being the next Lucky Jim.

When we were shown the infamous downstairs study, I knew even before Jim III told us which desk had been Lucky Jim’s. “Impressive, you went right to his desk,” Jim III commented.

Just touching the old wooden desk that Jim had used sent chills through me. I sat in the chair and closed my eyes, drinking in the ambience of the room and the house.

When I opened my eyes several seconds later, there were tears in them, although I was happy and smiling. All the misgivings I had about being Lucky Jim III had disappeared in those few seconds. I still felt awed by what my two namesakes had accomplished. But I also knew that whether I accomplished as much as they did or not, whatever I accomplished would help people. Lucky Jim II’s grandson, Jim III, gave me a knowing smile.

“My grandfather had a similar reaction when he visited the homestead where the first Lucky Jim grew up,” he said.

I also knew that I had to find a desk like this one for my own office once the house extension was finished. I intended to use it frequently in the same fashion that Lucky Jim II had used his desk in the early mornings. Jim’s wife had joined us by then. After meeting her, she took the girls on a detailed tour of the farm.

Rubio finally arrived and we went back to the living room. Jim III explained to him that I was the new Lucky Jim.

“Really?” he asked, looking at me critically.

“Dorothy Shaw assured me that he is. Besides, I could see his reaction when he sat at grandfather’s old desk. Something like that is hard to fake. In addition, the military is using him. He led that raid on the tankers last night. His commanding officer is another of my cousins and he’s quite convinced, as well.

“Lt. Commander Ferguson is a cousin of yours?” I asked, surprised.

“First cousins, actually. His grandmother was Charlotte,” he replied. “There are also numerous descendants of the first Lucky Jim in Congress and the Pentagon. Even the Acting President is one of his descendants,” he explained proudly.

“You should plan on attending the annual reunion this year if you can,” he suggested. “It’s July 1 - 5 every year at the Libertyville University stadium in Nebraska. Most people have to submit a documented pedigree the first time they attend if they aren’t already registered with the Trust. After that, the Trust knows who they are. I don’t think you’ll need to submit a pedigree, though,” he laughed.

“Half the people who attend are politicians, upper echelon military officers, upper management and officers of businesses owned by the Trust, or businessmen hoping to network with the aforementioned groups. The other half of the people who attend are common, garden variety folk. They’re the more fun group to hang out with. They’re attending to celebrate their heritage, not advertise it or exploit it.

“Anyway,” he said, turning back to Rubio, “Jim wants to start building a large agricultural empire in Louisiana and called to ask if we could help him. I suggested you because I promised that you could be in charge of the next project. I have a feeling that, now that he’s Lucky Jim, any new projects will be his. You’re welcome to stay here, but I doubt that we’ll have any major new projects. Also, if you go and it doesn’t work out, you know that you’ll always be welcome back here.”

Turning back to me, Jim grinned. “Technically, Rubio’s part of the family, too. Many of the kids and grandkids of the people who lived and worked here intermarried so it’s one big, usually happy family.”

“What do you have planned?” Rubio asked me.

“It’s more an idea than a plan right now, I’m afraid,” I replied. “I only accepted that I was Lucky Jim a week ago. For the last three years, my focus has been on getting into shape so I could join the Marine Raiders right before I was drafted. It was only two days ago when I decided that I wanted to start large-scale farming in Louisiana to help feed everyone and to provide jobs for people who need them.”

I told him about my revelation to my family at dinner Wednesday, and about the suggestions everyone made.