Prologue

As the end of the twenty-first century drew near, the world was markedly different from the beginning of the century. An economic crash that began in the USA plunged the entire world into a depression from which it, and especially the USA, was still slowly recovering.

Used to influencing the economy to hide the desperate economic situation that really existed in America, in 2028, numerous legislators met secretly with the supposedly blind trusts investing their money. They wanted to make sure their portfolios were able to benefit from their manipulation of the economy. The number of people involved grew quickly, eventually involving nearly every legislator and the president. The conspiracy grew to include both the previous president and cabinet members.

When Laos asked Lucky Jim II to start an operation there, he had plenty of experienced people to set it up. When he began setting up in an area of 6,400 square kilometers in the mountainous Luang Prabang Province, Jim had to send far more armed security forces than he had for Cuba or North Korea. His security forces had to fight off multiple attempts by the drug lords who grew and transported opium and its derivatives in and through the area. Fortunately, Jim’s danger sense had let them know where and when the attacks would occur, and they were easily able to defeat the attackers.

The area granted to him by the government included access to a major river to provide water. The mountainous Luang Prabang Province included numerous small mountain valleys with fertile soil for agriculture, and undeveloped deposits of coal and copper.

A large number of Hmong people, an oppressed minority in Laos, lived in the area. Many other Hmong had fled to Thailand during the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Some had been forcibly returned to Laos by Thailand, but many others continued to move around in Thailand, voluntarily living a subsistence level life just to avoid repatriation. Even before The Lucky J Laos was fully operational, many of the Hmong left Thailand to live and work on it. Fortunately, the natives in the area already grew lots of food on the mountainous land and had eagerly helped guide the efforts to establish the Laotian Lucky J.

Several times the Lucky J troops, assisted by newly trained and armed Hmong recruits, had to repel groups still trying to attack the Hmong, even the government’s troops. The attackers finally gave up, possibly because they never got close enough to cause trouble. More likely, it was due to the heavy losses inflicted upon them each time, especially to the Hmong-haters. Regardless, attacks by both the drug dealers and those persecuting the Hmong finally ended after three years.

Jim’s people surveyed and explored the area to determine the best locations to build housing and outbuildings for equipment and livestock. They also surveyed for roads, and the best places to build terraces on the slopes for growing rice and other crops. Finally, they decided where to build their greenhouses.

Jim’s luck continued in Laos. During the surveys, they found a lucrative alluvial deposit of gold in one stream and an alluvial sapphire deposit in another and traced both deposits back to their sources. For the next four decades, those deposits yielded vast quantities of gold and sapphires, providing jobs and capital.

At both sites, mining the shallow alluvial deposits led to the discovery, and mining of, deeper, ancient alluvial deposits beneath two nearby streams. The sapphires they recovered were mostly green, blue, and yellow although they found occasional star sapphires and rubies, which are really just red sapphires.

The mountainous terrain provided sites to erect first dozens, and eventually hundreds of windmills, and the Lucky J became one of the biggest providers of electricity in northern Laos.

Even before everything in Laos was complete, the Cambodian government offered Jim an even larger tract of land, albeit one with no known mineral resources. The flatter, lower land in Cambodia quickly began producing massive crops of rice, surpassing even the Lucky J in Cuba.

In addition to growing rice, they added many of the crops they grew successfully in Cuba, building greenhouses on land that wouldn’t flood during the annual monsoonal rains from June to November. The land grant included twenty kilometers of dry-season shoreline of the Tonlé Sap.

The Tonlé Sap is a large inland freshwater lake that provides water for much of the rice grown in Cambodia, as well as most of the fish that the Cambodian people eat. During the dry season, the lake is a bit smaller than Long Island, New York. During the monsoon season, the lake swells, inundating a large section of central Cambodia while depositing silt, functioning much like the Nile River in Egypt.

The difference between the Nile and the Tonlé Sap is that the floodwaters of the Tonlé Sap don’t come from upstream. Farther downstream, the Tonlé Sap connects to the Mekong River via the short Tonlé Sap River. During the wet season, so much water flows down the Mekong River that it can’t all continue downstream to the sea. The excess flows up the Tonlé Sap River, inundating Cambodia’s central flood basin. During the dry season, the Tonlé Sap averages a little over two meters deep. In the wet season, it can reach fifteen meters deep.

Thus, greenhouses and other buildings had to be far enough away from the Tonlé Sap and on high enough ground that they weren’t flooded.

Once the Lucky J Cambodia had ten thousand hectares of rice under cultivation and had enough housing for everyone who worked for them, they began adding a variety of crops, starting with their greenhouse tomatoes, as well as potatoes, and then common Cambodian crops like cassava and sweet potatoes. Other common crops they began were soybeans and dry beans. They even started growing sugar cane.

Next came an effort to find wild one- to three-year-old rubber trees which they transplanted into groves. After a few years, they began harvesting the sap to make rubber and latex products.

They dug large basins, like stock ponds, along the rivers and streams. The ponds were lined with plastic and then clay to keep the water from seeping into the ground. Those were filled during the next rainy season when water was abundant.

Next, they built catch basins for the frequent rains and channeled the water into below-ground cisterns. Between those and the numerous wells they drilled, they had plenty of water for drinking, livestock, and irrigation.

Then they began three large aquaculture enterprises. The first two, Trey Phtok fish and giant river prawns taken from the Tonlé Sap, were already common table fare for Cambodians. After studying several successful operations already raising Chinese mitten crabs in China and Vietnam, they added those, too.

Since Southeast Asia was one of the world’s largest suppliers of sapphires and rubies, they brought people from their Laotian operation to search for alluvial deposits in the rivers and streams on their property, especially at each site where they dug basins to hold rainwater. They located deposits of exceptionally high-quality sapphires and rubies in one of the streams. Four months later, they located the source and purchased the land.

They raised beef cattle, hogs, and chickens to provide additional protein for the diet of their workers and nearby villagers.

Then Lucky Jim had one of his feelings of danger. It took him a week to realize that it was U.S. currency and stocks giving him the feelings. He sold off his stocks and bonds, converting everything he could into bullion. Using much of the money remaining in his bank accounts, he bought materials needed for his businesses, and stockpiled critical supplies and equipment, as well as canned food and grain that would last at least two years. He also warned Libertyville National Bank.

He only kept enough cash in the bank to continue meeting his huge, worldwide payroll and to provide a cushion in case of an emergency.

It was against this backdrop that an investigative reporter exposed a tip about elected officials in the U.S. government manipulating the economy, as well as how most elected and senior officials benefited financially from it.

When the plot, nicknamed Wall Street Gate by the media, was exposed, the stock market plummeted faster than a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere. It hit lows not seen since the Great Depression and dragged the rest of the world’s stock markets down with it, although not quite as far or as fast. The crash of the U.S. stock market quickly led to a worldwide economic collapse.

In the aftermath of the scandal, nearly every current and retired elected federal official, and numerous current and former cabinet members were convicted of multiple felonies for manipulating the economy to increase their own wealth. Those convictions only included the officials who survived long enough to stand trial. More than half of the involved officials died by their own hand or at the hands of angry citizens who had lost everything. The majority of those who survived long enough to be convicted died shortly after entering prison.

The biggest companies in the country began going bankrupt, starting a domino effect that eventually saw more than 90% of businesses in the country go belly up, including all but a single bank: Libertyville National Bank. With the advance warning Jim had given them, Libertyville Bank quietly sold off most of their loans and bought precious metals and gems, even though they paid a premium for the gold, silver, copper, and platinum coins and bullion at the time. When the depression hit, they were able to pay their depositors with coins made of precious metals that they began minting themselves, instead of using paper currency that seemed to buy less with each passing day, assuming that there was anything available to buy.

Once they paid off their depositors, the bank transferred the rest of their assets to the Lucky J Meridian for safekeeping. Thousands of bank employees and their families also chose to move there. Some of the bank’s employees were eventually sent to the Lucky J in Cuba, Korea, Laos, or Cambodia.

Aside from businesses belonging to Lucky J Enterprises, all surviving businesses in the country were family owned and operated with no more than a handful of employees.

As the widespread collapse deepened, Jim contacted companies that supplied items he needed. He bought huge quantities of goods and supplies for pennies on the dollar. He also bought neighboring farms, inviting the previous owners to stay and work for him. Buying the farms was difficult at first because the banks that held the loans no longer existed. Eventually, the federal or state governments claimed the land and normally allowed people to continue living where they were.

Even before this happened, many of the local farmers were worried enough about the deteriorating conditions that they wanted the protection of a large and still-viable enterprise like the Lucky J.

Jim had another of his feelings, this one that he would need more armed troops. Many more. He bought up available stockpiles of the various weapons his people were trained with, and then used his many foreign connections to buy arms from international sources. He hired first hundreds, and then thousands of veterans, which took up the majority of his time for several months. As the U.S. slashed the budget of the military and released more and more of their troops, he hired those that didn’t trigger his sense of danger.

He bought or absorbed even more property surrounding the now-expanded Lucky J Meridian and used it to build defensive positions. Trees were cut down and hills bulldozed to leave ten kilometers of flat or nearly flat, although not necessarily level, empty land in front of their defensive positions.

Most of the defensive positions were nothing more than a four-meter-high dirt berm. They built a cinder block retaining wall around the base of more than half the dirt berm to make it harder for someone to reach the top of the berms. In addition, chain link fence and several rows of concertina wire protected the front of the berms.

They had tens of thousands of military grade weapons, and enough ammunition to fight a major war. They had mortars, heavy artillery, and even mobile rocket launchers. They bought anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems from Jim’s contacts in Israel. To complement their fleet of attack helicopters, they bought a dozen fighter jets from Saudi Arabia. Jim had plenty of veterans who had been fighter jockeys.

With most of the U.S. out of business or unemployed, almost no taxes were paid. An interim federal government was set up, comprised of former state legislators, men and women appointed by the governors of each state to replace the former Senators and Congressmen until emergency elections could be held.

Among other worldwide consequences of the collapse was the end of a century of increasingly rapid scientific advancement. From WWII until the collapse, scientific discovery had grown at a pace that, if graphed, would show an increasingly steep parabolic curve. Since the collapse, most of the limited research was concentrated in military or medical fields. Research for consumer products was nonexistent since the demand for consumer goods was about as firm as the muck in the bottom of the swamps and bayous of southern Louisiana.

With the banking system in ruins, non-existent tax revenues, and states incapable of processing unemployment and welfare claims, they faced the daunting task of caring for millions of unemployed workers and their families. The new government followed the example of its predecessor, printing even more money so they could offer the unemployed something.

Unfortunately, by the time they transferred federal workers to the new federal welfare division, the money they had printed to pay unemployment benefits and other social welfare recipients was only worth 20% of what it had been worth when they printed it, not that there was much available to buy. Even food was in short supply.

Pensioners and the unemployed began rioting even before the new federal welfare offices could open. Armed gangs, reminiscent of train and stagecoach robbers from the Old West, intercepted many deliveries of cash intended for the new welfare offices. Grocery stores where the cash might have been spent had been looted, and in many cases burned in anger. During the first year after the stock market collapse, violence escalated until National Guard troops were called in to restore a semblance of peace, at least those troops that answered the call.

When the Lucky J Foundation asked Jim to supply troops to protect Libertyville, Nebraska, and the surrounding agricultural areas, he did.

State governments began seizing crops from farmers, only to meet armed resistance from the farmers. The farmers who died or were imprisoned for their resistance couldn’t plant crops the following year, further reducing the already limited supply of available food.

People had no idea what to do with unprocessed wheat, oats, corn, and other grains, and had no way to grind them even if they’d known what to do with them. Some farms had been overrun by starving hordes and the crops had been ruined. Starving people tried picking fruits and vegetables long before they were ripe. In their frantic search for food, others tore up acres of crops that could have continued to produce food.

By the end of the second year, starvation was rampant. Many people had hoarded food, only to learn that it spoiled. Millions of people died in the ensuing violence as those with goods and property fought valiantly to keep them. Those who had nothing, and nothing to lose, fought to take it away.

When the National Guard tried to access the Lucky J, they were denied entry. Jim warned them that they’d need more troops than the Mississippi National Guard had available to force their way in. The Lucky J demonstrated their determination by firing an air to ground missile from one of their helicopters. The explosion created a large crater right in front of one of the six tanks the National Guard had brought.

“What you are attempting to do is illegal, regardless of your motives. We will not allow you to steal what is legally and rightfully ours. The next time you trespass on my property, we won’t fire a warning shot. Should you fire at us from beyond our property, we will respond in kind, and will annihilate any troops and equipment that we feel threatens us,” he warned them.

Jim used his old idea of a balloon-based observation post, although one much more advanced than his original concept. Raising dozens of tethered weather balloons to five hundred meters, they were able to see almost fifty kilometers, weather and visibility permitting. When a National Guard jet shot down one of the balloons, they shot down the jet. That was the last trouble they had from the National Guard.

The showdown near Libertyville in Nebraska was much less dramatic, in part because they had heard what happened in Mississippi. In addition, there was a lot more land devoted to agriculture in Nebraska.

The Lucky J took in thousands of orphans and widows. Children went to school six mornings a week and were expected to learn. Those who disrupted class were kicked out of school and put to work, regardless of their age. The school day was from 8 to noon each day. Before school, the schoolkids ate breakfast and then performed age-appropriate farm jobs, the same jobs Jim and other farm kids around the country had done when they were that age.

Widows and single women were warned that they, like everyone else, would work eight to ten hours a day, six days a week, farming. They would have to deal with household chores in their off hours.

Day care and after-school supervision was provided for young children. Widows and single women had four months to become a first, second, or third wife to one of the men. That had been a suggestion from Jim’s wives and the wives of his top workers after the single women began trying to entice married men away from their current wives. Rather than continuing to fight it, other already-married women looked at the successful example Jim’s wives had set and decided to try families with multiple wives.

Jim made sure all new people understood that there were no free handouts. EVERYONE worked six days a week. Once they proved themselves capable workers, many of the new people were transferred to Lucky Js in Cuba, Korea, Laos, or Cambodia to expand operations there.

The population of the U.S. dropped to less than 140 million before things stabilized. Note that I didn’t say recovered. The states finally sent National Guard troops to protect predominantly agricultural areas, as well as the farmers who had managed to survive. At Jim’s suggestion, the Federal government began an apprentice program to train more farmers, a program that was surprisingly successful despite the government’s involvement. Apprentices received two years of hands-on training before the government turned them loose on their own--sort of.

After successfully completing two years, the apprentices received farmland near their mentor. The mentor agreed to continue checking on them for an additional five years. In return, the mentor received free land from the government for each successful apprentice he turned out, as well as a supply of new apprentices to replace those who had successfully completed their two-year apprenticeship.

The mentors and apprentices received the necessary farming equipment and supplies like irrigation equipment and tractors. The government had seized the equipment from closed businesses and abandoned farms and began trading equipment for food.

After five years of successfully growing and harvesting crops or raising livestock, the apprentices received a conditional title to the land they’d been given. They had to continue farming it to keep it and couldn’t sell it.

Since the majority of apprentice farmers were male, a further inducement was added. They were allowed a second wife after five successful years of farming or ranching. Any single apprentices quickly learned that single women were eager to marry a farmer. Being a farmer was the best guarantee that the women and their children would have food available and a roof over their heads. Women who would have previously been trophy wives of wealthy businessmen or sports and movie stars now sought successful farmers as mates.