Land of Promise (15 page)

It was also decided that all roads would be Right-Hand Drive, much to the consternation of ex-South Africans, ex-Brits, ex-Kenyans, and Kenyan visitors. But since neighboring Ethiopia and South Sudan both used right-hand drive roads, this made the most sense. After all, it was only a 440 kilometer drive to Juba, but 740 kilometers to Nairobi. In the long term there was would be far more vehicular traffic expected from South Sudan than Kenya.

Evan Riley created the reminder signs on the Kibish Road, right at the Kenyan border. The humorous series of signs warned: “Wait…” “Wait…” “Wait…” “Now! Switch to Right-Hand Travel!” Another reminder sign was posted at the IRDF border checkpoint, just 200 meters deeper into Ilemi territory.

The Akinses and Alan Pilcher both had fifth-wheel trailers at Solus Christus, but their travel schedules kept them at various cities around the globe for most of the first two years following the Declaration of Independence.

Fuel for vehicles in the Ilemi was provided primarily by hydrogen fuel cells, but many short-range runabouts and ATVs used nanowire lithium batteries. There were also some vehicles that ran on compressed natural gas (GNC) and a few ran on gasoline, despite the chronically high price. Many military vehicles still ran on diesel, as did most heavy equipment such as cargo trucks, dump trucks, excavators, and road graders.

Refilling permanently installed hydrogen fuel cells for passenger cars and light trucks was agonizingly slow -- typically around 30 minutes. Therefore, aside from busses and other large vehicles, most second generation and later hydrogen–powered vehicles used modular removable fuel cells. Then followed many years of competing designs around the world, with removable fuel cells in a dizzying variety of sizes and with no fully standardized connectors. In the mid-2030s a formal standard was finally adopted with just two sizes and all with the same connectors: the “H-Can,” which was about the size of a traditional five gallon/20-liter “Jerry Can” gas can, and the smaller “Half-Can.” An H-Can weighed about 30 kg, while a Half-Can weighed about 18 kg. Most passenger cars and light trucks were equipped with four H-Cans or six Half-Cans. An unlimited exchange policy was patterned after the ubiquitous Blue Rhino propane cylinders in the US, and in fact one of the most popular brands sold was the HydroRhino that had a promotional logo of a blimp being piloted by a rhinoceros.

While Mtume and his staff concentrated on making contacts with wealthy seekers of second passports, Alan’s focus was on refugees who had already experienced persecution. And meanwhile, Rick and Meital sought out sources of military surplus weapons, ammunition, vehicles, night vision gear, radars, ladars, and lidars.

To facilitate their global travel, Alan traveled to Uganda and applied for a Ugandan passport, by virtue of his birth there. To supplement his diplomatic passport, Alan also had two extra non-diplomatic Ilemi passports made: one in his full name (Alan Oakes Pilcher), and one that was truncated to just his first and middle names (Alan Oakes).

Hearing about this, Rick and Meital were inspired to immediately do likewise, creating a stack of “vanilla” (non-diplomatic) Ilemi passports in the names Richard Luke Akins, Richard Luke, Richard Luke Citizen, Kathe Meital Akins, Kathe Meital, Kathe Meital Landstuth, Kathe Landstuth Akins, and Meital Landstuth. They could also travel under Rick’s original U.S. passport, his Scottish passport, Meital’s original Israeli passport in the name of Kathe Meital Landstuth, and Meital’s EU passport, which was also in the name Kathe Meital Landstuth. Once they had the whole stack of passports assembled, Rick declared, “We’ve got more identities than Jason Bourne.”

“Who?” Meital asked.

Rick chuckled and said, “Oh, just a character from some old movies, back around the turn of the Century.”

One of the first refugee settlers in Solus Christus was Dr. Sami Demirci, a physicist from Ankara, Turkey. He was one of the world’s foremost experts on particle beam technology and directed energy weapons (DEWs). He had been a professor at Ankara University and a consultant to particle beam weapon development programs in Italy, Russia, and Germany.

The Christian minority in Turkey was only 2% of the population. Many of them began to flee starting in the early 2030s. Demirci was the only Christian in the Physics Department at Ankara University, and it was only because of his stature in the scientific community that he was protected from overt persecution until the late 2040s. But when his car was firebombed while parked in the staff parking lot on Tandoğan Street, he decided it was time to leave Turkey permanently. He brought his wife, two teenage sons, and his mother-law with him. Demirci first relocated to Italy, under his Turkish passport, on a one-year visa. He became a Visiting Professor at The National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research (
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
or INFN). Most of his work was at
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
(LNGS), an INFN particle physics laboratory, situated at the foot of (and beneath) Gran Sasso mountain, about 120 kilometers from Rome.

When he heard about the Ilemi nationhood proclamation, it captured Demirci’s imagination, so he sent a letter to Dr. Mtume. The letter soon ended up in the hands of Rick Akins, and his mention of particle beam weapons jumped out at him. “Yes, yes, yes! Approve this guy and his family on compassionate grounds, right away.”

Demirci specifically asked to buy property on a hill just north of Tulloch Field, so that he could conduct open-air laser and coherent beam research. He put his life savings into building a 3,500 square foot underground monolithic dome house and outfitting it as both living quarters for his family and his laboratory. The design of the dome house was unusual in that it featured a shallow grade ramp rather than the stairs that were typical with most other houses that were being constructed in town. This was in deference to Demirci’s mother-in-law, who was in declining health and was expected to be wheelchair-bound within a few years. The design was also in anticipation of the heavy equipment that would have to be moved into Demirci’s home laboratory.

Demirci’s eldest son was a computer-programming prodigy. With his father’s guidance, he developed software algorithms for a DEW Beam Director that could combine data from multiple radars and lidars for targeting airborne targets.

Just shortly after Demirci’s house was completed and when Tulloch expected the construction mess to be cleaned up, three CONEX containers arrived -- one from Germany and two from Russia. The containers were temporarily parked at the airport for unloading. These, they learned, were filled with the physicist’s test fixtures, large custom-built DC power supplies, and hundreds of large capacitors that were set up in rack-mounted banks. In all, there were more than 4,800 kilograms of high value carbon nanotube electrochemical ultra-capacitors. The capacitor banks each weighed around 200 kilograms, so they had to be moved with a pallet jack and then a forklift.

Because the super-capacitors had some exposed terminals and cable connectors, workers wore heavy rubber electrician’s gloves. As soon as each capacitor bank was rolled out of the CONEXes, “Dr. Sammy” took the safety precaution of resistively shorting out each of them. He explained that the capacitors had been discharged before they had gone into storage, but that they had a tendency to “self-recharge” without being connected to any power source. Nikola Tesla, he said, first documented this phenomenon.

They did so with an old Hangcha off-road electric forklift that they borrowed from TAT.

On the second day of moving the super-capacitor racks, Demirci’s eldest son was driving back down the hill, took one of the S-turns too quickly, and turned the forklift on its side. This both pinned and broke his left leg. Then battery acid began to leak from some of the forklift’s deep cycle cells and drip down onto the young man’s leg. His panicked screams could be heard from the entryways of both Demirci’s house and Rick’s house. It took an agonizing 20 minutes to fetch a floor jack and get the forklift body hoisted off of his leg. In the interim, the acid was neutralized by repeated handfuls of baking soda.

Tulloch had Demirci’s son in the air within minutes of being extracted from under the forklift. He flew him and a paramedic -- a refugee from Pakistan, who had just arrived in Solus Christus two weeks earlier -- in his personal light plane. The aircraft was a carbon fiber composite four-seat utility plane, built in 2037 by Gobosh in the Czech Republic. He had first intended to fly to Lokichoggio, but after he was advised that they lacked the facilities, he immediately turned toward Juba, 440 kilometers west of Solus Christus. The paramedic got an IV line started and gave the young man incremental doses of morphine to lessen his pain. Since he was soon outside of cell phone coverage, by radio Tulloch requested a phone patch to Juba Teaching Hospital (JTH). He urgently asked that they have an ambulance standing by at the Juba International Airport, just northeast of the city.

The 1,200-bed hospital was the best available in South Sudan, and given the sporadic civil wars in the country, its doctors had a lot of experience in handling trauma cases. The hospital was on Unity Avenue, just over two kilometers from the airport.

Since the bone break was a severe crushing injury, the greatest concern was internal bleeding and any possible embolism from a blood clot breaking loose. He was given a dose of an anti-coagulant drug called Fondaparinux.

The doctor explained, “A long bone fracture can release enough fat and other baddies in the bone marrow to travel through the veins and lodge in the lungs. That can block a lung blood vessel and then there could be respiratory complications.”

The forklift accident was a reminder that the Ilemi Republic as a fledgling country was still quite isolated and lacked emergency response organizations. In a way, the accident helped change the development of the Ilemi Republic Defense Force, placing a stronger emphasis on its Medical Corps and instituting the inclusion of medics with every foot and vehicular patrol. There were also medics eventually assigned to each border crossing station at the Immigration Counter at Tulloch Field.