The Gold Coast

33

Next time Arthur comes by, Jim decides to take the direct approach.

“We have another strike planned,” says Arthur.

And Jim replies, “Listen, Arthur, I want to know more about who you are, who we are. Who exactly we’re working for and what the long-range goals are! I mean, the way it is now, I don’t really know.”

Arthur stares at him, and Jim swallows nervously, thinking that he may have gone too far somehow. But then Arthur laughs. “Does it really matter? I mean, do you want a name? An organization to pledge allegiance to?”

Jim shrugs, and Arthur laughs again. “Kind of old-fashioned, right? The truth is that it’s more complicated than you probably think, in that there is more than one so-called group doing all this. In fact, we’re stimulating a lot of the action indirectly. It’s getting so that half of the attacks you hear about are not actually our doing. And it seems to be snowballing.”

“But what about us, Arthur. You. Who supplies you, who are you working for?”

Arthur regards him seriously. “I don’t want to give you anybody’s name, Jim. If you can’t work with me on that basis, you can’t. I’m a socialist and a pacifist. Admittedly my pacificism has changed in nature since I’ve decided to join the resistance against the weapons industry. But like I told you, the methods I tried before—talking to people, writing, lobbying, joining protests and sit-ins—none of them had any tangible impact. So, while I was doing that I met all sorts of socialists. You wouldn’t think any existed anymore in America.”

“I would,” Jim says.

Arthur shrugs. “Maybe. It’s almost a lost concept, that individuals shouldn’t be able to profit from common property such as land or water. But some of us still believe in it and work for it. There could be a combination of the best of both systems—a democratic socialism, that gave individuals the necessary freedoms and only prohibited the grossest sorts of profiteering. Everyone has a right to adequate food, water, shelter and clothing!” Frustration twists Arthur’s face into the intense mask Jim remembers from their poster raid on SCP. “It’s not that radical a vision—it could be achieved by votes, by an evolutionary shift in the law of the land. It doesn’t have to be accomplished by violent revolution! But…”

“But it doesn’t happen,” Jim prompts him.

“That’s right. It doesn’t happen. But do you know what to do about it? No. None of us do. But now, after everything else, I’m convinced that unless the plan includes active, physical resistance, it isn’t going to work. It’s like the defense industry is the British before the revolution—they control us in the same way—and we’re the small landowners in Virginia and Massachusetts, determined to take our lives into our own hands again. We being a group of Americans who are determined to fight the military-industrial complex on every front. There are lobbying groups in Washington, there are newsheets and videos and posters, and now there’s an active arm, dedicated to physical resistance that hurts nothing but weaponry. Since there’s so much public about this group, it’s absolutely necessary to keep the active arm of it secret. So. I know a couple of people—just a couple—who supply me with the equipment, and the intelligence necessary to carry out the operations. That’s all I really know. We don’t have a name. But you can tell by the public statements, really, who we’re a part of.”

Jim nods.

Arthur watches him closely. “So. Is it okay?”

“Yeah,” Jim says, convinced. “Yeah, it is. I was worried by how little I really knew. But I understand, now.”

“Just think of it as you and me,” Arthur suggests. “A personal campaign. That’s what it all comes down to in the end, anyway. Not the name of the organization that you belong to. Just people doing what they believe in.”

“True.”

And so that night they track into the warren of streets behind the City Mall, to the little parking lot between the warehouses at Lewis and Greentree. There they flash their headlights three times and meet the same four men and their station wagon full of boxes, and the four men help them load the boxes into Arthur’s car. Their leader pulls Arthur aside for a brief muttered conversation.

And then they track into the Anaheim Hills, putting on another pair of stealth suits as they take the Newport and Riverside freeways north. Once off the freeway they track up to the edge of a tiny park in an applex, one dotted with long-neglected slides and swings and benches. They crawl to the edge of the park, where a small slope of grass overlooks the Santa Ana Canyon. Below them and across the freeway-filled gorge, on a knoll, sprawls the big manufacturing plant of Northrop. And in the northeast corner of the expanse of buildings, all lit by blazing xenon lights, with a perimeter fence that is swept by roving searchlights, are the three long warehouselike buildings that hold the production facilities for the third tier, midcourse layer of the ballistic missile defense—that is to say, space-based chemical lasers, which will be transported to Vandenberg and hauled up into orbit. The “High Fire” system.

Quickly they hammer four little missile stands into the grass, and Arthur aims them at four doors in these buildings. This is the dangerous moment, the semicovert moment, and if the defenses are sensitive enough…

Arthur, Jim has time to think, is connected up with some excellent intelligence sources: he knows the right buildings, the correct doors, he knows the buildings will be empty, the night security forces elsewhere in the complex… Such information must be top secret in the companies involved, so that the espionage involved in getting hold of it must be sophisticated indeed.

Missiles set and targeted, they trail the ignition cords across the tiny park, back toward Arthur’s car. Buttons pushed, run to the car, track away, tear the suits off, dump them down a storm drain. No sign at all of pursuit; in fact, they can’t even tell what the missiles might have done, because they’re on the other side of the hill now, getting onto the Riverside Freeway with all the rest of the cars. They never even heard a siren this time, because the little condo park was over a mile from the Northrop complex. It really is very simple. But one can assume that the little missiles have followed the laser light directly to their targets, and have dissolved the materials in the plant susceptible to the solvents in the payloads.…

Despite the ease of the attack, Jim’s heart is racing, and he and Arthur shake hands and pound the dash with the same sharp exhilaration that they felt in the first raid against Parnell. Jim becomes more certain than ever that he is only really alive, really living a meaningful life, when he is doing this work. “Here’s to resistance!” he cries again. He has a slogan now.