Land of Promise (11 page)

The new road turned off to the west, 13.5 kilometers south of Liwan. It first followed a broad valley alongside a large stream. Good news: Only five kilometers of the planned road transited steep terrain and would require switchbacks.

Scouting the best route for the new road up into the Lorionetom Mountains (later called the East Range by settlers) took two exhausting weeks. Most of their hiking along the intended grade was done in the early morning or early evening to avoid the heat of the day. Rather than flagging the route in the traditional manner with hundreds of thin stakes, Owiti Toure decided to use sparsely positioned strips of optic orange flagging tape tied to bushes and trees, relying mainly on GPS waypoints. Toure had a good instinct for judging the percentage of road grades. His chosen route took some graceful turns and minimized the number of culverts that had to be emplaced.

Although the straight-line distance from the junction was just 16 kilometers (ten miles), the final road route was nearly 22 ½ kilometers (14 miles) long, with the steepest stretches of the road at a 6% grade.

Toure dubbed the new route the Sangre De Cristo Road, and the name stuck. Before the next rainy season, the disturbed earth on both sides of the road were heavily seeded with red Mexican Hat Flowers, so the name became truly fitting. Each rainy season, the red streak of the floral carpet running up into the mountains could be seen for miles.

Once the road summited the plateau and was punched all the way through to a large leveled turn-around area near the lip of the Tannhäuser Gate, Evan Riley’s crew shuttled up most of the road building equipment. The next day they began laying out a grid of roads, with three long primary parallel streets and 16 cross streets. For the rest of the dry season, the road crew hauled and spread countless loads of gravel to ready the roads for the upcoming rains.

Choosing a name for the new town created a lively debate. It was finally settled by Mark Mtume, who offered the name Solus Christus -- “In Christ Alone.” This was in honor of one of the five solas of Reformed theology.

Mtume insisted that the three main parallel boulevards be named Akins, Pilcher, and Landstuth. Some of the cross streets were later named Riley, Toure, Akwon, Heston, Mtume, and Rhee.

Within a month there were dozens of temporary dwellings in place, all fifth-wheel trailers and trailers. Fifth-wheel trailers were available in large numbers because after the Oil Price Shock of 2042, the market for RVs and fifth-wheel trailers in the United States and Canada collapsed. Some of these unsold fifth-wheel trailers were exported to the Third World for use as resort housing. Nearly everyone who could afford to do so planned to build underground houses, to take advantage of the pleasant 22-degree Celsius (72F) ambient ground temperature in the region. Although some power would be required to run dehumidifiers and lighting, there would be
no
air conditioning required, eliminating the biggest power draw for houses in the region. Underground houses were also easier to secure from burglary, highly resistant to small arms fire, and inherently resistant to bush fires. Alan Pilcher called them “The ultimate win-win in architecture.”

Caron Caves Construction (CCC), the underground construction contractors from Michigan, brought a large supply of EP357, a rubbery sheet plastic. They also imported fan and dehumidifier systems that went by the name THOMAS, which stood for Temperature, Humidity, Oxygen Management Automation System. These included audible carbon monoxide and low oxygen alarms. In recognition of the large number of poisonous spiders, centipedes, wasps, and snakes in the region, air intake screens were considered a must. To make the systems resistant to attacks by rifle fire and grenades, their pipes always included at least one S-turn and a stout large-mesh screen at the mid-point of each length of air intake pipes. Typically, these were four-inch diameter pipes. To make them fire resistant, all above-ground pipe sections were Schedule 40 steel pipe. The Ilemis soon found that the EP357 sheeting could also be employed as a liner for livestock ponds, so the sheeting was used in enormous quantities.

Underground houses in the Ilemi were built in two basic styles: true excavated underground houses and aboveground/underground or “mound” houses. The former was used in mountainous regions, and the latter was used on plains. The mound houses were usually reinforced concrete structures (either rectangular or monolithic dome) that were built above grade and then covered with soil to a depth of at least 1.5 meters. A soil depth of two meters was considered standard, since the surface soil temperature averaged 30.5 Celsius (87F), but the temperature from two meters to 50 meters was uniformly 22 Celsius (72F) year-round. The cover soil was most easily emplaced with the SoilShooter that CCC brought with them from the States.

Because of the large demand for construction, a number of contractors from South Sudan crews came to the Ilemi to construct clones of the CCC underground houses, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Those that dug sufficiently deep gravel-filled French Drains and that used EP357 material worked fine. But the companies that cut corners often built houses that leaked in the rainy season, leading to costly excavation for re-sealing.

Power for the new community was initially supplied by “Big Red,” a dual 175-KW Canadian-made mobile generator in a bright red 28-foot-long skid-mounted enclosure. The system, which used dual Isuzu engines and carried 4,700 liters of onboard fuel, burned a whopping 30 liters of diesel per hour. They soon purchased a pair of above-ground auxiliary 10,000-gallon Fireguard double-wall fuel tanks made by a company called Envirosafe.

A 7,400-foot-long airfield was soon added, with an additional 2,600 feet reserved for eventual lengthening. The runway was cut all of the way to the lip of the canyon, allowing heavily laden planes a margin of safety when they took off toward the Tannhäuser Gate. The airstrip ran roughly southeast to northwest. The west end was at 1,564 meters of elevation and the east end was at 1,551 meters, with a substantial dip in the middle. Initially the strip had some other mild bumps and dips, but these were later smoothed out. But the overall large 20-meter dip in the middle third of the strip was never completely leveled, leaving the runway forever looking high at both ends.

Riley’s crew soon cut a taxiway and ramp area large enough to accommodate TAT’s three IL-76s. A hangar large enough to fit even one of the planes would have to wait. The area initially graded for the apron, control tower, and hangar site was 1,500 feet long and 600 feet deep.

As the first rainy season began, the dirt airstrip and ramp were re-graded and then overlaid with military surplus pieced steel planking (PSP). Huge stacks of PSP left over from the Ebola DRC relief effort was found in Dodoma, Tanzania, at just a bit more than the price of scrap steel; hauling all of these PSP panels to Solus Christus cost almost as much as the panels themselves.

The Tulloch Field runway nearly bisected the Mtume Plateau, and since it ended at the sharp lip of the plateau there was no way to drive around the west end of it. So the runway essentially divided the plateau for future development. There were plans to eventually construct a tunnel beneath the runway, but in the short term, drivers just looked both ways and then cut across the field.

Most of the city was built on the north side of the runway. The south side, or “military side,” of the airport and beyond was primarily military installations, including hangars, earth-sheltered aircraft revetments, a GCI radar, an underground fuel farm, and hardened ordnance magazines that were half-buried with 1.5 meters of soil bermed over their top. Beyond those was a 1,000-meter rifle and machinegun range. Anything larger was fired from a hilltop dubbed Artillery Hill at 1,609 meters of elevation at the south end of the canyon rim. This hilltop later became an artillery and air defense site for the IRDF. Between this hill and the west end of the runway there was a mostly level field intended for the infrequent military parade and special-occasion gatherings. Most notably, the parade field would be used to seat crowds for Independence Day fireworks.

Another hilltop at the north end of the canyon rim was initially dubbed North Point but later re-named Demirci Point. Its summit was at 1,617 meters.

To minimize the noise in town, the Big Red generator was located at the east end of the runway. From most homes, it could only be faintly heard when there was a wind from the east. Initially, there was an almost comical array of insulated power cables strung on the ground alongside roads, with shallow trenches dug for each road crossing.

The facilities at Tulloch Field were spartan in its early days. The airfield had appropriated some surplus 2020s variant of an aerostat dirigible as a low-cost way to increase air control visibility and provide a birds-eye view for military application. Its control tower was an old 20
^th
century AN/TSQ-216 Remote Landing Site Tower (RLST) bought from a Ugandan scrap metal dealer and mounted on the back of a 2.5-ton truck with an open cab. After having its yellowed windows replaced with fresh Plexiglas, and after some new radios and a new air conditioner were installed, this pop-up control tower was ready for service.

The Ilemi Republic coalesced with surprising speed. An informal agreement with the Kenyan government redirected all “Ilemi Republic” addressed letters through the Nairobi post office to the Ilemi hangar at the Nairobi airport. The hangar became a de facto consulate. A steady stream of donations began to flow in from Christians around the world, mostly via Bitcoin. The main trading partners for the new Republic were Finland, Israel, Kenya, Korea, a few small Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, South Africa, South Sudan, Switzerland, and Uganda. But of these, only Israel, South Africa, and Switzerland were willing to risk selling weapons or military aircraft to the Ilemi Republic -- and not officially. These transactions were all made through middlemen and often categorized as “scrap steel” or “mixed scrap steel and alloy.” Many of these shipments came by air, but many others came by ship through the seaport of Mombasa, Kenya. The latter included some South African-made G5 (towed) and G6 (self-propelled) artillery pieces, ammunition of all descriptions, as well as a wide variety of wheeled APCs, up to and including 27-ton Badger APCs. Less controversial civilian trucks and dual-use military surplus trucks usually came overland, often with long “paperwork” delays at national borders.

Bill Tulloch, his seven contract pilots, four flight engineers, and five assistant “cargo kickers” developed reputations as enthusiastic blockade busters. Each was secretly issued an additional diplomatic passport they could present if they were ever arrested. Tulloch called his passport “the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free Card.” Tulloch also employed a full-time A&P mechanic and two part-timers. But for the first year he relied on avionics contract firms in Nairobi and Tel Aviv for anything that was too electronically complex for his A&P mechanics to handle.

From Tulloch Field it was 1,926 miles to Tel Aviv and 2,151 miles to the airport that served both Pretoria and Johannesburg. These were preferred transit points for TAT flights, because they did not require any landing stops for refueling. The maximum range for an IL-76 with a 50-ton maximum payload was 2,670 miles or 4,300 km. The TAT pilots often flew their planes at close to the maximum weight and, occasionally, just over. However, Tulloch was always a stickler for weight
distribution
calculations. Fully laden IL-76s required 6,000 feet of runway for takeoffs, but only 3,000 feet for landings.

Tulloch Air Transit owned three serviceable Ilyushin Il-76MD jet cargo planes. Two of these old planes were built back in 2012, and the other in 2014. They had first seen service with the Indian Air Force, but since then they had gone through several commercial owners in Southwest Asia and Africa, so their maintenance records were spotty. Tulloch didn’t know the total number of hours on the airframes, and their re-engining histories were also suspect. African aircraft maintenance methods and records were both notoriously poor. But at least the three planes (“Able,” Baker,” and “Charles”) now all had fairly “low hours” Aviadvigatel PS-90 high-bypass engines and updated instrumentation, so they were air-worthy, despite some cosmetic flaws.

Il-76 jets were ideal for Tulloch’s purposes, both because they had sufficient range and because they had been specifically designed to be operable from unpaved runways. And because of their age, they were also quite affordable. There were more than 1,000 of these sturdy four-engined planes built, so spare parts were also fairly common. Tulloch also bought a fourth IL-76 that was just barely flyable and leaking fuel when he ferried it along with a load of three spare PS-90 engines and assorted Ilyushin spare parts from Maputo, Mozambique, to Tulloch Field. On that memorable solo flight, the plane’s instrument panel was mostly gaping holes. He relied on just a handheld GPS, an altimeter, and an artificial horizon that worked only intermittently. The last 85 minutes of flight was made on just three engines. The plane’s cabin pressurization system was also inoperative, so he wore an oxygen mask for the entire flight. This plane, nicknamed “The Cannibal,” became a source of spare parts for his other three planes. Even in the mid-21
^st
century, cannibalization of airframes was still the norm in Africa.