SinoRail Headqurters, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China, 10 October 1928
"You know," said the general-turned-board member, "When I was a kid, my friend Martin and I tried to dig a hole to China in his backyard in Irvine. We got about ten feet deep before his mother found out."
"I fail to see how this is relevant, Chen."
"It's a funny story. And oddly relevant, seeing that we're literally digging a tunnel to China."
"And it is a project you gladly supported, thanks to the new plasma tunnel boring system."
"Hey, I never said it wouldn't work. I just think it's funny." And in fairness, it was pretty funny to him. Especially when Mrs. Li found out about it. "Which brings me to our progress report."
"Ah, yes," said Chairman Cheng. "How close are they to finishing?"
"Oh, they just finished."
"The next section?"
"No. The entire tunnel to the mainland."
"That's it?"
"…Yes? Oh, and we're also under-budget for this phase."
"That's to be expected," Secretary Hua answered, "You yourself said it would be cheap."
"Yeah, well, you know how Nanjing will help with resources for key infrastructure and economic projects?" Hua nodded. "Well it turns out Kuosheng NPP's upgrade and expansion means they have more power than we knew what to do with, so we managed to do this on the cheap."
"Impressive. So, where does that leave us?"
"Reinforcement, track-laying, and things like wiring and inspections. They won't get any cheaper, but it's a lot faster than digging a tunnel to the mainland."
"And they're already starting, yes?" Chen nodded. "Estimates?"
The engineer-turned-executive shrugged. "End of the year, tops."
Wuhan, Hubei, Republic of China, 5 November 1928
"Mama," Huang Wen shouted as he ran indoors, "I'm home, Mama!"
"You're early," Huang Bao greeted, before picking up her youngest son. "How was class today?"
"It was fun!" her son told her, with all the enthusiasm that only a small child could have. "We learned about the Qing and the Revolution today!"
"Is that so?" Bao sighed, before shaking her head. "And how was practice?"
"Not too bad. Coach wouldn't let me pitch, but he lets Kai do it, and he's worse than me!"
"Isn't Kai his son?" Wen nodded, and his mother shook her head again. "Ah, I see why."
"It's not too bad. I still get to hit. Which reminds me: Can we take the metro to the park?"
"Are you done with your homework?"
"Yup!"
"Then yes, I don't see why not." The station is only a few minute's walk. "What has you so excited?"
"I wanna spend time with you, Mama," the boy told her. "Plus, it's not like we can walk there."
"You and I have walked to the park before, Wen."
"Yeah, I know. Metro's better."
Then it hit her.
"You just want to go ride the metro again, don't you?"
"…Yes."
Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 20 November 1928
"Well," Jaime Salazar sighed as he got down from the crane. "Good to be done with that."
When he thought about it, this was a pretty far cry from the port, only a decade ago.
Back then, he and the rest of the ILA workers here were unloading breakbulk cargo by hand and fighting to unionize.
Ten years, a few strikes, and at least one injured Pinkerton later, and he and the rest of his crew were making good pay and operating cranes to pull these containers off of ships then load them onto trains.
It was the best kind of arrangement. The bosses loved the increased efficiency, while the union workers enjoyed the lower-intensity work and not losing their jobs to automation after the retraining.
Jaime could still remember the day when the Chinese guys spoke to them in surprisingly-good English and started training them.
Sure, the fact that he was carrying tonnes of cargo in a container with only a few panes of glass between him and a hundred foot drop scared the living daylights out of him, but Jaime would take that over moving any more breakbulk cargo.
The pay and conditions were a hell of a lot better, but the fact he didn't have chronic knee pain at 35 was what really sold him on the whole modernization thing.
That, and the air conditioning.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1 December 1928
"I tell you," Leonard Haywood said to his brother, "If there's one thing I didn't really get about those Uptimers, it's how a lot of them don't like highways too much."
"Tell me about it," his brother Charlie chuckled. "And we're Black! You try telling a white person that bulldozing an entire neighborhood full of Black people to build a highway is racist, and the best-case scenario is they don't believe you."
"Well, to be fair, it wasn't always because of race. It's also because it's easier to bulldoze a poor guy's house."
"Lucky us. Honestly, I'm just happy this place is still standing right now, after what happened in that Lost History. Christ."
"Yeah, well, it's not like the Klan's the ones making us sit at the back of the bus these days, so we have that."
"You know they have buses for people like us, right? And not those piece of crap excuses they use for 'Separate But Equal.' Actual quality buses around the community."
"Nah, it's the principle of it all, Charlie. We can have all the money in the world, but folks'll still find a reason to think they're better than us. Just look at the Chinese."
"That's a funny one, Lenny," his brother sighed, "The strongest and richest nation in the world, and Bob Lee Ewell'll still find some excuse to think he's better than 'em."
"Not like Bob Lee Ewell has that much going for him. First, God sends an entire island full of Asians from the future back in time, then China becomes the world's most-powerful nation. And now there are churches popping up all over the place about how 'God's not going to discriminate in Heaven, so why should we discriminate on Earth?' What's a guy like him supposed to do?"
"Join the other church that says that the island full of Chinese people getting sent back in time is a 'Work of Satan' to send a bunch of 'Godless Sodomites' back to corrupt our people."
"Oh. Right."
"Yeah…"
"I like the first group, more."
"Most people do, Lenny."
"Thank God for that."
Bogota, Gran Colombia, 20 December 1928
Getting the point across was hard enough, but Juan Valdez had to do it for both the Panamanian and the Gran Colombian delegations now.
They both wanted to build roads and railways. To be fair, so did he, but at least he knew why it was a terrible idea.
"For the last time," he groaned, "Building railways and roadways in the Darien Gap is not viable."
"The concerns of the indigenous populations have been-"
"This isn't about them," Valdez interrupted, "The Darien Gap is not only mountainous and heavily-forested, but building a crossing there would likely lead to a transmission of foot-and-mouth disease in Central American cattle."
"So you're saying it's impractical to build in the Darien Gap," one of the Colombians asked, and Valdez nodded. "Would a bridge around it be more-practical?"
"If we had the funding, yes. But the 1929 budget released by both of your governments does not have enough for even a quarter of the cost. Not to mention that we lack the technological expertise."
What went without saying was that the Chinese probably did have the expertise, but the latter wasn't too-interested in that.
No, they were more-interested in expanding the canal.
"So," asked one of the Panamanians, "What is practical?"
"Honestly? Ferries."
The Gran Colombians looked at the Panamanians, who looked back at the Gran Colombians.
Eventually, the Minister of Transportation looked around and spoke for all of them.
"I suppose it could work. Do we have the budget for that?"
"We do," Valdez promised, before breathing a sigh of relief.
At least now they will stop bothering me about the Darien Gap.
Cape Town, Republic of South Africa, 7 January 1929
Thembo looked at the map in his office, and it made enough sense. "Cape to Cairo" wasn't a new concept, and at least this time it wouldn't be for colonial means. How could it, when the British, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, and Belgians were all gone.
Well, not all of them. "Reconciliation" had made sure that those who opposed colonialism (or at least wouldn't run off into the bush to bring it back like those Rhodesians) could stay. The promise of some guaranteed representation was also there, along with constitutional promises.
Not that it mattered too much when so many white people had fled. While he knew full well that the new Majority-Rule government wouldn't go and "Take Your Land and Lives" like the propaganda told the white South Africans would happen if the Accord arrived, the fact that the Accord had arrived and had announced an end to Minority Rule sent thousands into a panic as they fled to the coast and the bush.
The ones fleeing for the coast were easy enough to deal with. If his studies in Taipei were anything to go by, it was a bad idea to force people to stay in your country if they wanted to get out as quickly as possible.
Even if their concerns never happened. On a large-scale, anyways.
No, the main problem had been all the white people who ran inland, not for the coast. Rather than run for their lives aboard Red Cross ships, these types decided to create "Redoubts" and harass occupation forces on the frontier.
Which was how they ended up here, with a population that was motivated, but for lack of a better term, uneducated. Sure, your average South African wanted to "Bring Africa Forward," as the slogans went, but at the same time, most people just didn't have the skills or education to run a government.
There were those like his brother Gadla, who would be the next generation of administrators. And for the most part, they eagerly took to their studies.
But it would be almost a decade before they could enter the Civil Service, which meant people like him who did have the necessary skills and education would have to do the work of half a dozen men.
This was how he ended up in charge of the South African delegation for the "Pan-African Railway Project," as they called it. "Cape to Cairo" had a nice ring to it, but the colonial legacy was something they were trying to avoid whenever possible.
A new name to an old plan. Which, I have to admit, is a fairly good plan, even if it was basically designed to pillage Africa of its resources.
I guess that's what makes the difference. When they do it, it's imperialist, colonialist exploitation... mostly because it would be. When we do it, it's looking towards a brighter, cooperative, and prosperous future.
That is what happens when your massive infrastructure projects are designed around maintaining an empire for the next thousand years. Not doing that is benevolent by default.
But that was enough about the implications of the project, and Thembo knew it. So he put one file down and pulled up another titled, Survey Reports For The Pan-African Railway.
It seemed simple enough. The surveys showed that construction would be fairly-straightforward, with few (if any) tunnels and standard-gauge as the selected gauge. The Nanjing Accord would provide the materials, machines, and training in exchange for resource contracts for fixed periods.
Now, Thembo (thankfully) didn't have to handle resource extraction. That was some other poor highly-qualified-yet-overworked bureaucrat to deal with. All he knew was that there were resources in Africa that the Accord needed for their technology, and the Accord would pay good money for them.
Factor that in, along with the Airborne flying around and wiping out any "Holdouts," as the colonial loyalists were called, and construction would be fairly simple, with different segments being constructed simultaneously with the help of radio and GPS communications.
Security would have to be enhanced, but it was nothing the Defence Force and AFRICOM couldn't handle.
50 Kilometers outside Bulawayo, Provisional Republic of Zambia, 25 January 1929
"Equipment check," Lei whispered to his men. It was standard procedure at this point, and the joint force of Africans and Chinese knew to keep their gear in working order. So the hand signs were mostly a formality at this point. "Good."
It was a simple mission, one that they had rehearsed half a dozen times and completed half a dozen times that.
Somebody would get a tip. It didn't really matter how they got it, be it a drone operator, a spy, or a local who just saw something and called the local tip line. After that, they'd send a drone over the area to scout it out and confirm the tip. Most of them were just seeing things or false positives that still needed to be checked out.
In all likelihood, the Holdouts were repeatedly calling in useless tips to either flood the channels or set ambushes, but they still needed to be investigated. If anything, the attempted ambushes were the easiest, what with the Special Forces' technology advantage.
This would not be one of those nights. Instead, they'd be attacking a "Redoubt," as the settlements were called. To put it in layman's terms, they were communities of predominantly-white colonial troops who refused to recognize the new Majority-Rule government. Now, people were well-within their rights to settle on otherwise-unclaimed land as they pleased, and the white population was no exception to the rule.
The problem was that many of them were former colonial troops who had run off into the bush with their weapons, rather than surrender. This, plus the fact that they had launched several "Terror Raids" against the local governments and took potshots at construction crews meant that they had to be dealt with, sooner or later.
The governments of Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Africa, Tanzania, Congo, Kenya, Namibia, and Uganda decided on "Sooner," rather than "Later," requesting support from the Nanjing Accord. Sure, they had their own Defense Forces, but these men simply didn't have the training to handle counter-insurgency warfare.
Well, at least they didn't, before units like Chinese Airborne Special Services Company (ASSC), the Korean Special Missions Group (SMG), the Japanese Special Forces Group (SFG), Russia's Spetsnaz, and Ottoman Maroon Berets were redeployed into the region to from Africa Command (AFRICOM). Their mission: To deal with these Holdouts and train their local counterparts.
The Africans were decent enough soldiers. What they lacked in training and equipment they made up for in morale, idealism, and knowledge of the local terrain, and the former two would be rectified in short order. They were no ASSC, but they could hold their own without AFRICOM holding their hands.
The Holdouts, for their part, were better talkers than they were fighters. While yes, they had assault rifles, grenades, and even a few rocket launchers, they were still outmanned, outgunned, and most importantly, unable to see in the dark.
That, of all things, had been the greatest advantage for AFRICOM. Sure, they were better-trained than the Holdouts, not to mention better-equipped. Assault rifles were all well and good, but it wasn't as if the European Alliance had that many optics or suppressors, let alone handheld radios and Night-Vision Goggles (NVGs).
No, the Special Forces owned the night, and they would strike fear in the hearts of the Holdouts wherever they went.
"Black Ghosts," was what the Holdouts would call them, though Lei doubted the Holdouts knew how fitting it was, given Pu Songling's work, Liaozhai zhiyi. Though in fairness, he didn't expect a bunch of racists camping out in the middle of nowhere in Africa to know about centuries-old Chinese literature that had never been published in English.
But that was enough ruminating on... well, everything else besides the mission at hand. They had a Redoubt to take down, and he'd rather they didn't have to call in an airstrike this time. Sure, they could do that, but the fact remained that these Redoubts also doubled as communities, with women and children living among the men.
Women and children who would shoot back at them, if given the chance.
He didn't like it. Former child soldier he may have been, he, unsurprisingly, didn't like the idea of shooting at children. Even if they were shooting back at him.
That was why they would do it this way, with suppressors, NVGs, and the cover of darkness on their side.
He gave the signal and his men started crawling their way forward as a drone flew silently overhead. It was unfair, but he'd take every advantage he could get to keep his men alive for the next mission. The fact that they (probably) would not have to deal with women and children shooting at them was an added bonus.
"Immortal 1-6," one of the snipers radioed in with a South-African accent. "Sentries at your 12. Fifty meters. Permission to engage."
"Interrogative: How many?"
"Two, Colonel."
"You're clear to engage," Lei growled into the mic. Sure enough, he could see two bodies in front of him collapse. "Sentries neutralized. Good shooting."
"Copy, 1-6. No visible threats on the way to the perimeter. 7-1 out."
"We're going through the front door?" Captain Zhou whispered to him, "That's a first."
"Who said anything about the front?" Lei muttered, before pulling out his pliers and moving towards the barbed wire fence. "We'll cut through here, then hit them from the side. Teams 2, 3, and 4 are in position, so we'll clear the Redoubt from all sides before meeting in the middle."
Zhou nodded. After all, this was what Lei trained them for, and this was what they trained the Zambians. If everything went according to plan, they'd go in slowly, just as they liked it.
After all, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
