The Trembling Earth Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

We landed on the Clinch County runway shortly after midnight. The strip was illuminated by strings of flickering oil bombs, the kind used to mark hazards on highway work, and as soon as the plane had touched down they were extinguished. In spite of our late arrival, I was awakened as usual at 4:30 and after breakfast was taken to the headquarters section of the barracks. I had never been there before.

In an inner office, a tall Negro wearing jeans and a faded work shirt was sitting behind a desk. He introduced himself as Ahmed 4, and asked me to sit down. An aide brought coffee, and we talked.

Ahmed told me that he was the commander of the installation, the big farm, and all training procedures. That the Purvis Lumber Company, whose façade shielded the operation, was a legitimate, profit-making business, operating under corporate franchise in Georgia, and that it was entirely Negro-owned. There were, he said, seventeen other such guerrilla training centers in the South, all of them with Negro-owned covers. They operated out of sight of highways, and had nothing in their topography which would appear unusual from aerial surveillance. The farming operations and tree farms all showed a profit

In addition, all these properties, located in five southern states, were in counties where the Negro population was preponderant.

Ahmed 4 was a nervous man, but controlled. His face was thin, his features clean-cut, and I judged that he had a large admixture of white blood. From the way he spoke, with no difficulty in forming his sentences, and no grammatical errors, I knew he was not only literate but probably educated at the graduate level.

He said that recruiting for the eighteen training centers was carried on in Vietnam, at military detachment centers in the U.S., and in every major American prison, both north and south. Volunteers were carefully screened, and weirdos and candidates on body drugs refused. Homos, however, were not excluded unless they were too obvious. Ahmed commented that as a group they were mean bastards, and would try anything.

Recruits, he said, were never brought to the guerrilla training centers in public transportation. They came by private car, or plane. No records, as such, were kept anywhere. There was no roster of names in any center, no background notes, no proficiency records. These things could be introduced into evidence.

The few records they kept were filed by numbers alone. Each recruit was first trained, then offered employment for a minimum of four years at four hundred dollars a month, if he could cut the mustard.

The Purvis Lumber Company, the legitimate cover for the Clinch County installation, had held several Job Corps training contracts, and hundreds of its graduates had been placed in mills and woodworking plants all over the South. Like many others, he admitted, Purvis had not received any new contracts from the Nixon Administration, but were appealing the cut-back on the grounds that Purvis, as Negro-owned and operated, was unusually qualified.

The thought of all those sleeper agents Ahmed had planted in private industry was a trifle frightening.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.