-Fairfax, Virginia-
-March 1, 1937-
Colonel Cabberay put his gleaming black boots gently upon his practically ancient oak desk. It had probably at one time or another been finished, but that finish was long ago removed or worn away giving it a worn but somewhat charming look. Papers and folders and envelopes were strewn about. The Colonel put a thick cigar into his teeth and bit down taking a few nursing puffs as the flames from his Zippo licked at the other end, charring it slowly and sending traces of brilliant orange along the fibers of tobacco.
Relations with Japan had slowly been cooling and some were beginning to claim that there could very well be war between the United States and Japan. Europe, on the other hand, was warming up dramatically. It was none of the United State's concern, of course, but the gathering maelstrom was evident. War would soon be upon the world, any fool could see that, and the U.S. Military was no body’s fool. So here Ivan sat, smoking a fine Cuban, his heels resting on a bunch of irrelevant data. His treatise on the potential value of paratroopers had apparently turned some heads, and he had landed himself a promotion and a job with a new Top Secret sub division of the military called “Doctrine and Strategy Development.” Two dozen military minds and fifty or so general staff worked in the small office not so far from Richmond, Virginia. Supposedly, because of his nudging, the Douglas Aircraft Company had been put to work on another air transport plane. It was ’37, though, and as the treatise explicitly explained, airborne assaults would be useless without the proper support of a conventional front, an umbrella of air support, and the proper methods of re-supplying the paratroopers behind enemy lines. Building a better air transport was useless, because we needed better fighters, interceptors, and close air support to act in unison with the deployment of troops.
Nevertheless, he had a job to do. With a little bit of effort, Cabberay lifted his heavy feet from the desk and tucked them under it in a slow sweeping arc created by swinging them off the edge of the desk and letting them drop. He rolled a piece of crisp paper into the typewriter and began tikka-ticking away.
(On March 1st, several acts were ushered through Congress after his re-election and new spending for R&D began all over the country.)
-Fennimore, Wisconsin-
-September 14, 1937-
Sven Tiedemand rolled a new tractor tire up the dirt road which stretched for several miles out of the main road leading into town before vanishing behind a hill. It was a surprisingly, unreasonably hot September afternoon, and he perspired furiously. He wore faded jeans with overalls, a simple moss-green shirt, and some old gray boots. The boy was about fifteen, and stood nearly as tall and thin as a stalk of corn. His hair was a sandy brownish color, and his eyes like the blue-green of the ocean. A row of short grass sprouted up in the median of the dirt road, as if to brag about the tires that frequently graced its gravel. Not that the entire road was gravel, you understand. It had once been, before the quarry closed, but now it was just the remains of a fine gravel road. In any case, it served its purpose just as well. He smiled with relief as he finally rounded the hill and saw his small two story house. It was sided with wood, painted white, and looked very quaint. The road gradually gave way to a large grass-free dirt area in front of the barn and house, with a zig-zagging split-rail fence made of oak or cedar. The entire group of buildings was under the shade of a massive Birch tree casting a liberal dose of shade on all of it. Sven was certainly happy to be under it, that’s for certain. Sven’s father, who was an immigrant from Norway and spoke not a single word of English, was busy setting up a swing from the old tire for Sven’s little brothers and sisters. The rows of corn on the right side of the road that had been left to stand had now begin to grow a golden brown color, with strings of brown sprouting from the tops of each ear. In the hilly pastures to the left around which the dirt road flowed grazed a small herd of Holstein Cows. Even now, he could hear the cool brook trickling behind the barn in front of him.
He rolled the tire up to the barn and rested it against the wall. He saw little Karolina already by the stream trying to build a dam out of rocks and sediment, and it was actually pooling up quite nicely for now, even if her work would be washed away by tomorrow. Sven was glad for it, though, and sat down beside her, taking a blue handkerchief from his denim’s pocket and soaking it in the cold water.
“Ufda!” He said playfully at her, bringing the cold cloth to his forehead. She smiled, revealing several missing baby teeth, most notably her two front ones.
“What did you bring me?” She asked.
“Now why would I bring you anything?” Teased Sven, sticking out his tongue. The six year old girl pushed him softly, still grinning. Sven mock fell over, as though a full grown adult had delivered the push.
“My! But I have such a mean little sister! Please! Don’t hurt me!” He pleaded, producing a penny piece of candy from his pocket – a peppermint stick from the drug store. Karolina’s smile widened and she snatched the piece of candy.
“Thank you!” She said, and she stuck it in her mouth.
-Washington, D.C.-
Jacob Brown twisted the cork remover into the bottle of champagne and pulled a bit. It shot out of the top, flying to some distant part of the room, with a stream of bubbly liquid following it and spilling over the edges as he lowered it to a glass. The depression was still on, of course, but this was a time for celebration! The entire country seemed to be behind their president, and had never been more left.
In a brilliant campaign of radio speeches, Roosevelt had only managed to become more popular than ever when extremists began rabblerousing about the proper interpretation of the constitution. It was difficult to go back to his mind numbing assembly line post after writing material for the leader of a nation, so he would enjoy this dull party for now; and after all, he was lucky to have a job of any kind in the first place.
He had not put his livelihood in danger to go work for nothing as a volunteer for Roosevelt for nothing. He certainly didn’t think of himself as altruistic, indeed, he didn’t believe in altruism. He had done what he did to help out what he saw as a great man, and help jumpstart his own political career while doing it, establishing contacts and getting known. In two years, he would be a senator, and Jacob knew well that before his life was over, he would be president of these United States. Each step was like a move in a chess game, and he knew all the moves that would carry him to victory.
(The New Deal continued to churn out industry all across the nation.)
(Following FDR's radio campaign, the nation leaned more left than it had since the Revolutionary War. Maybe moreso.)
(While still in the midst of the Great Depression, early '36 began to see the light at the end of the tunnel as American began to return to some of the prosperity they had known in the roaring '20s.)
-Tokyo, Japan-
Hojo Kitta entered the Kawasaki Heavy Industries offices dressed in a pebble-blue western-style suit with a white undershirt and an ash-gray tie. Underneath his arm was tucked a lemon-yellow folder with some papers in it and two flaps of brass protruding from a hole in the paper from the other side and folded in opposite directions so as to keep it shut. He waved with the folder to the guard in the little box office and smiled. The smile was returned and he was waved past as the gate lifted. Of course, Hojo didn’t own the black car he was in, and probably wouldn’t even be in use of this one much longer with war breaking out between China and Japan so recently. And now, with the Americans so openly taking the side of the Chinese, Hojo had to act now.
He parked his car among a few others and got out. The slate-colored ocean lapped against the docks and harbor, as birds called overhead. He headed into the main office and smiled and exchanged pleasantries with his colleagues before heading to the construction site of the new Imperial Destroyer. It was still a rough framework, with showers of sparks falling off of it here and there. There were guards stationed at each door. Hojo smiled as he approached them, and then pulled out his silenced pistol and shot them both dead as casually as though he had been swatting a couple of annoying flies.
He fired another shot into each of their skulls to ensure they were not suffering, even though this was utterly unnecessary. Hojo had spectacular aim. He slipped the clip out of the gun and replaced it with a full one, in case more killing had to be done. If it did, though, he will have probably failed his mission. He opened the door and headed into the work area which was swarming with workers – you might think that this would complicated things, but on the contrary, the crowd of chaos allowed him to walk right up to the blueprints, roll them up, tuck them under his arm, and walk away, even making small talk once or twice with the foremen there. The bodies would be discovered only moments after he left, but it was hours before anyone realized Hojo was gone and put the two facts together to realize that he had been a spy all along. By then, of course, Hojo was on a flight to the Philippines where he would get aboard the American ship which would take him and the blueprints he had stolen from Kawasaki and Nissan all the way back to San Francisco.
-Atlanta, Georgia-
The man across the table slid an envelope towards J. Edgar Hoover. For a moment, the director of the FBI looked at the envelope as though it were as alien as a Martian. His thick fingers pressed against the table around the envelope and slid together to force it to bend in the middle so as to create something to grab onto. He moved it to his hip and looked inside, counting the bills. He pursed his lips slightly.
He nodded, and unbuttoned his jacket so he could tuck the envelope safely away in his inside pocket. Hoover picked up a fountain pen and held it to the paper, trying to look as though he were thinking about the next sentence he was about to write. His door opened again, and he looked up with a smile.
“Ah! Come in, come in!” He said. “How are things proceeding?”
“Mister Hoover, this is most unprecedented! Your organization is supposed to be for purely domestic intelligence matters!” The man said, waving a lemon-yellow folder as though it were an angry letter about Lil’ Hoover’s mischievious behavior and the man was Hoover’s father. Hoover’s smile in reply matched perfectly that scenario, like a cat licking proudly at bloody yellow feathers.
“But how did things go?” Hoover asked anxiously. The military man sighed deeply.
“Several of your agents were killed, but we did recover prototypes, blueprints, and research journals on a wealth of technology, but you’re in deep this time!”
A sharp exhale which was apparently a quiet chuckle, judging by the smirk which accompanied it, sounded from the man.
“You’re the one who told me to purge foreign agents from our soil and organize a counter-espionage effort.” Hoover replied, still smirking.
“Not in those words, I didn’t! And I certainly didn’t mean for you to have men killing citizens of foreign countries on their soil, or stealing sensitive material like this!” The man said, glowering at Hoover. “Do you realize what will happen if Japan or worse, the Soviet Union finds out what we did?! And since we stole something so valuable, you can be sure they will! It will be a miracle if they don’t! You may have just started another World War for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t be so dramatic, they didn’t find out, did they? Even if they did, they won’t have the evidence to justify a war.”
“Japan and Russia?! Germany? Italy? Have you lost your mind? Do you know what Japan declared war on China for?”
“That’s different.” Hoover replied, his smirk returning. “And besides, at least we’ll have some nice new toys to use against them if they do declare war.”
“This is the last straw, Hoover! I’ll see you go down for this, even if I have to go down too. You’re a madman and you should not have this much power! You’ll doom us all!”
“You make it sound as though I were a child playing with his tin soldiers…”
“That’s precisely what you are, Hoover!” The man shouted, his face beet-red. He stormed out of the office.
Hover exhaled slowly, and picked up his phone.
(The massive wave of foreign espionage attempts intercepted at the begining of '37 triggered the government to grant even more power to the already power-drunk Director of the FBI, giving him the ability to not only capture spies within the borders, but control intelligence personel in other countries as well. With a year, and with no small amount of spending, the United States had captured and tried over thirty persons accused of espionage and/or treason, but had infiltrated the country's most prominent rivals and enemies with special focus on Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union all of whom had made more attempts than any other nation against the United States. As a result, stolen technology began to flow into the United States for reverse engineering.)
-Key West, Florida-
Ernest Hemmingway looked up from his newspaper with a grave expression. He had been reading about the Spanish Civil War. It was as surely a battle between fascism and freedom as treading water in the middle of a turbulent sea is a fight for one’s life, yet while Germany and Italy were pouring men and materials into fight on the side of Fascism, only volunteers of their own volition were going over to Spain to help the Republicans. It was a brutal and bloody war in a land he had come to think of as a almost a second home after his visits there. Only the Soviets were giving any real help to the Republicans, and they certainly didn’t protect anyone’s freedom, they merely wanted another communist puppet. Hemmingway sighed deeply.
Hemmingway almost thought that if he weren’t so busy with his work, he might go over and fight in Spain, too. Deep inside, he knew this wasn’t true at all, and it was killing him. His grip on his chair had tightened slowly as he thought about this, and he relaxed it. He shook his head to himself, realizing how much he loathed himself.
The only way he could tolerate his own existence was by pretending that his writing could somehow have an effect on the world, but he was beginning to see through that lie, and his days were starting to become more and more bitter and jaded. Sighing again, as though he hoped this would exhale the dark and angry thoughts within him biting at his soul, he thought he felt a bit of relief, but soon the feeling of a desolate life had returned, and he simply gave up and headed for the gloomy darkness of an unlit bedroom to sleep misery of his pitiful life away.
(Ernest Hemmingway falls into a deep depression after seeing the inevitable victory of Nationalist Spain after only a half of a year of fighting, and another portion of Europe, and what he had come to consider an adopted home, falling to Fascism.)
-March 1, 1937-
Colonel Cabberay put his gleaming black boots gently upon his practically ancient oak desk. It had probably at one time or another been finished, but that finish was long ago removed or worn away giving it a worn but somewhat charming look. Papers and folders and envelopes were strewn about. The Colonel put a thick cigar into his teeth and bit down taking a few nursing puffs as the flames from his Zippo licked at the other end, charring it slowly and sending traces of brilliant orange along the fibers of tobacco.
Relations with Japan had slowly been cooling and some were beginning to claim that there could very well be war between the United States and Japan. Europe, on the other hand, was warming up dramatically. It was none of the United State's concern, of course, but the gathering maelstrom was evident. War would soon be upon the world, any fool could see that, and the U.S. Military was no body’s fool. So here Ivan sat, smoking a fine Cuban, his heels resting on a bunch of irrelevant data. His treatise on the potential value of paratroopers had apparently turned some heads, and he had landed himself a promotion and a job with a new Top Secret sub division of the military called “Doctrine and Strategy Development.” Two dozen military minds and fifty or so general staff worked in the small office not so far from Richmond, Virginia. Supposedly, because of his nudging, the Douglas Aircraft Company had been put to work on another air transport plane. It was ’37, though, and as the treatise explicitly explained, airborne assaults would be useless without the proper support of a conventional front, an umbrella of air support, and the proper methods of re-supplying the paratroopers behind enemy lines. Building a better air transport was useless, because we needed better fighters, interceptors, and close air support to act in unison with the deployment of troops.
Nevertheless, he had a job to do. With a little bit of effort, Cabberay lifted his heavy feet from the desk and tucked them under it in a slow sweeping arc created by swinging them off the edge of the desk and letting them drop. He rolled a piece of crisp paper into the typewriter and began tikka-ticking away.
(On March 1st, several acts were ushered through Congress after his re-election and new spending for R&D began all over the country.)
-Fennimore, Wisconsin-
-September 14, 1937-
Sven Tiedemand rolled a new tractor tire up the dirt road which stretched for several miles out of the main road leading into town before vanishing behind a hill. It was a surprisingly, unreasonably hot September afternoon, and he perspired furiously. He wore faded jeans with overalls, a simple moss-green shirt, and some old gray boots. The boy was about fifteen, and stood nearly as tall and thin as a stalk of corn. His hair was a sandy brownish color, and his eyes like the blue-green of the ocean. A row of short grass sprouted up in the median of the dirt road, as if to brag about the tires that frequently graced its gravel. Not that the entire road was gravel, you understand. It had once been, before the quarry closed, but now it was just the remains of a fine gravel road. In any case, it served its purpose just as well. He smiled with relief as he finally rounded the hill and saw his small two story house. It was sided with wood, painted white, and looked very quaint. The road gradually gave way to a large grass-free dirt area in front of the barn and house, with a zig-zagging split-rail fence made of oak or cedar. The entire group of buildings was under the shade of a massive Birch tree casting a liberal dose of shade on all of it. Sven was certainly happy to be under it, that’s for certain. Sven’s father, who was an immigrant from Norway and spoke not a single word of English, was busy setting up a swing from the old tire for Sven’s little brothers and sisters. The rows of corn on the right side of the road that had been left to stand had now begin to grow a golden brown color, with strings of brown sprouting from the tops of each ear. In the hilly pastures to the left around which the dirt road flowed grazed a small herd of Holstein Cows. Even now, he could hear the cool brook trickling behind the barn in front of him.
He rolled the tire up to the barn and rested it against the wall. He saw little Karolina already by the stream trying to build a dam out of rocks and sediment, and it was actually pooling up quite nicely for now, even if her work would be washed away by tomorrow. Sven was glad for it, though, and sat down beside her, taking a blue handkerchief from his denim’s pocket and soaking it in the cold water.
“Ufda!” He said playfully at her, bringing the cold cloth to his forehead. She smiled, revealing several missing baby teeth, most notably her two front ones.
“What did you bring me?” She asked.
“Now why would I bring you anything?” Teased Sven, sticking out his tongue. The six year old girl pushed him softly, still grinning. Sven mock fell over, as though a full grown adult had delivered the push.
“My! But I have such a mean little sister! Please! Don’t hurt me!” He pleaded, producing a penny piece of candy from his pocket – a peppermint stick from the drug store. Karolina’s smile widened and she snatched the piece of candy.
“Thank you!” She said, and she stuck it in her mouth.
-Washington, D.C.-
Jacob Brown twisted the cork remover into the bottle of champagne and pulled a bit. It shot out of the top, flying to some distant part of the room, with a stream of bubbly liquid following it and spilling over the edges as he lowered it to a glass. The depression was still on, of course, but this was a time for celebration! The entire country seemed to be behind their president, and had never been more left.
In a brilliant campaign of radio speeches, Roosevelt had only managed to become more popular than ever when extremists began rabblerousing about the proper interpretation of the constitution. It was difficult to go back to his mind numbing assembly line post after writing material for the leader of a nation, so he would enjoy this dull party for now; and after all, he was lucky to have a job of any kind in the first place.
He had not put his livelihood in danger to go work for nothing as a volunteer for Roosevelt for nothing. He certainly didn’t think of himself as altruistic, indeed, he didn’t believe in altruism. He had done what he did to help out what he saw as a great man, and help jumpstart his own political career while doing it, establishing contacts and getting known. In two years, he would be a senator, and Jacob knew well that before his life was over, he would be president of these United States. Each step was like a move in a chess game, and he knew all the moves that would carry him to victory.
(The New Deal continued to churn out industry all across the nation.)
(Following FDR's radio campaign, the nation leaned more left than it had since the Revolutionary War. Maybe moreso.)
(While still in the midst of the Great Depression, early '36 began to see the light at the end of the tunnel as American began to return to some of the prosperity they had known in the roaring '20s.)
-Tokyo, Japan-
Hojo Kitta entered the Kawasaki Heavy Industries offices dressed in a pebble-blue western-style suit with a white undershirt and an ash-gray tie. Underneath his arm was tucked a lemon-yellow folder with some papers in it and two flaps of brass protruding from a hole in the paper from the other side and folded in opposite directions so as to keep it shut. He waved with the folder to the guard in the little box office and smiled. The smile was returned and he was waved past as the gate lifted. Of course, Hojo didn’t own the black car he was in, and probably wouldn’t even be in use of this one much longer with war breaking out between China and Japan so recently. And now, with the Americans so openly taking the side of the Chinese, Hojo had to act now.
He parked his car among a few others and got out. The slate-colored ocean lapped against the docks and harbor, as birds called overhead. He headed into the main office and smiled and exchanged pleasantries with his colleagues before heading to the construction site of the new Imperial Destroyer. It was still a rough framework, with showers of sparks falling off of it here and there. There were guards stationed at each door. Hojo smiled as he approached them, and then pulled out his silenced pistol and shot them both dead as casually as though he had been swatting a couple of annoying flies.
He fired another shot into each of their skulls to ensure they were not suffering, even though this was utterly unnecessary. Hojo had spectacular aim. He slipped the clip out of the gun and replaced it with a full one, in case more killing had to be done. If it did, though, he will have probably failed his mission. He opened the door and headed into the work area which was swarming with workers – you might think that this would complicated things, but on the contrary, the crowd of chaos allowed him to walk right up to the blueprints, roll them up, tuck them under his arm, and walk away, even making small talk once or twice with the foremen there. The bodies would be discovered only moments after he left, but it was hours before anyone realized Hojo was gone and put the two facts together to realize that he had been a spy all along. By then, of course, Hojo was on a flight to the Philippines where he would get aboard the American ship which would take him and the blueprints he had stolen from Kawasaki and Nissan all the way back to San Francisco.
-Atlanta, Georgia-
The man across the table slid an envelope towards J. Edgar Hoover. For a moment, the director of the FBI looked at the envelope as though it were as alien as a Martian. His thick fingers pressed against the table around the envelope and slid together to force it to bend in the middle so as to create something to grab onto. He moved it to his hip and looked inside, counting the bills. He pursed his lips slightly.
He nodded, and unbuttoned his jacket so he could tuck the envelope safely away in his inside pocket. Hoover picked up a fountain pen and held it to the paper, trying to look as though he were thinking about the next sentence he was about to write. His door opened again, and he looked up with a smile.
“Ah! Come in, come in!” He said. “How are things proceeding?”
“Mister Hoover, this is most unprecedented! Your organization is supposed to be for purely domestic intelligence matters!” The man said, waving a lemon-yellow folder as though it were an angry letter about Lil’ Hoover’s mischievious behavior and the man was Hoover’s father. Hoover’s smile in reply matched perfectly that scenario, like a cat licking proudly at bloody yellow feathers.
“But how did things go?” Hoover asked anxiously. The military man sighed deeply.
“Several of your agents were killed, but we did recover prototypes, blueprints, and research journals on a wealth of technology, but you’re in deep this time!”
A sharp exhale which was apparently a quiet chuckle, judging by the smirk which accompanied it, sounded from the man.
“You’re the one who told me to purge foreign agents from our soil and organize a counter-espionage effort.” Hoover replied, still smirking.
“Not in those words, I didn’t! And I certainly didn’t mean for you to have men killing citizens of foreign countries on their soil, or stealing sensitive material like this!” The man said, glowering at Hoover. “Do you realize what will happen if Japan or worse, the Soviet Union finds out what we did?! And since we stole something so valuable, you can be sure they will! It will be a miracle if they don’t! You may have just started another World War for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t be so dramatic, they didn’t find out, did they? Even if they did, they won’t have the evidence to justify a war.”
“Japan and Russia?! Germany? Italy? Have you lost your mind? Do you know what Japan declared war on China for?”
“That’s different.” Hoover replied, his smirk returning. “And besides, at least we’ll have some nice new toys to use against them if they do declare war.”
“This is the last straw, Hoover! I’ll see you go down for this, even if I have to go down too. You’re a madman and you should not have this much power! You’ll doom us all!”
“You make it sound as though I were a child playing with his tin soldiers…”
“That’s precisely what you are, Hoover!” The man shouted, his face beet-red. He stormed out of the office.
Hover exhaled slowly, and picked up his phone.
(The massive wave of foreign espionage attempts intercepted at the begining of '37 triggered the government to grant even more power to the already power-drunk Director of the FBI, giving him the ability to not only capture spies within the borders, but control intelligence personel in other countries as well. With a year, and with no small amount of spending, the United States had captured and tried over thirty persons accused of espionage and/or treason, but had infiltrated the country's most prominent rivals and enemies with special focus on Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union all of whom had made more attempts than any other nation against the United States. As a result, stolen technology began to flow into the United States for reverse engineering.)
-Key West, Florida-
Ernest Hemmingway looked up from his newspaper with a grave expression. He had been reading about the Spanish Civil War. It was as surely a battle between fascism and freedom as treading water in the middle of a turbulent sea is a fight for one’s life, yet while Germany and Italy were pouring men and materials into fight on the side of Fascism, only volunteers of their own volition were going over to Spain to help the Republicans. It was a brutal and bloody war in a land he had come to think of as a almost a second home after his visits there. Only the Soviets were giving any real help to the Republicans, and they certainly didn’t protect anyone’s freedom, they merely wanted another communist puppet. Hemmingway sighed deeply.
Hemmingway almost thought that if he weren’t so busy with his work, he might go over and fight in Spain, too. Deep inside, he knew this wasn’t true at all, and it was killing him. His grip on his chair had tightened slowly as he thought about this, and he relaxed it. He shook his head to himself, realizing how much he loathed himself.
The only way he could tolerate his own existence was by pretending that his writing could somehow have an effect on the world, but he was beginning to see through that lie, and his days were starting to become more and more bitter and jaded. Sighing again, as though he hoped this would exhale the dark and angry thoughts within him biting at his soul, he thought he felt a bit of relief, but soon the feeling of a desolate life had returned, and he simply gave up and headed for the gloomy darkness of an unlit bedroom to sleep misery of his pitiful life away.
(Ernest Hemmingway falls into a deep depression after seeing the inevitable victory of Nationalist Spain after only a half of a year of fighting, and another portion of Europe, and what he had come to consider an adopted home, falling to Fascism.)