He couldn’t just sit in Cleveland doing nothing while this cursed strike continued. And he had to get the boy away from the influence of his mother.
He decided he would take the boy with him and look at the young man in Santa Fe that he had read about, the one who had been driven from the Air Force Academy because of his faith. And they would look at other targets. There was a nuclear facility in Illinois he wanted to see, a chemical plant in Colorado that sounded intriguing, and a refinery in western Texas that was particularly attractive.
He told the boy to tell his mother that his company—the company he supposedly worked for—had decided that because he was so smart, they were sending him to a special school in—oh, Chicago. Tell her you might be gone for as long as six months, he said, and be sure to tell her that you will continue to send her what money you earn. The boy did as he was told, and his poor heartbroken mother accepted the story, but he could tell that afterward the boy was upset. When he asked what was troubling him, he said, “My mother was very proud of me when I told her I was being sent to a special school.”
He nodded his head. “I understand,” he said. “I love my mother too.”
The ex-cadet in Santa Fe turned out not to be suitable. He was still working at the movie theater selling popcorn, and he could sense the young man’s bitterness, but when he tried to talk to him, to tell him he had heard about what had happened at the military academy, he could see that he was instantly suspicious. He was just too American. He may have been angry about what had happened to him, but he could tell in just one short conversation that the one in Santa Fe was likely to report him to the police. The Americans may not have been willing to let him fly their warplanes but he was still, for whatever reason, loyal to them. He just couldn’t understand it; didn’t he realize he would never be accepted?
So he and the boy from Cleveland moved on. They visited the other places he wanted to see. The nuclear facility was out of the question. The guards there acted like guards, and it would be difficult to damage the reactor in such a way that a catastrophe could be guaranteed. The refinery in Texas, however, which also used hydrofluoric acid, looked like a … what was that expression he’d heard? Yes, a walk in the park. The security at the Texas plant was even worse than at the refinery in Ohio, and the hydrofluoric acid tanks were within fifty yards of the fence line.
He made the boy call home every few days and tell his mother how well his training was going, and every time, for a few hours afterward, the boy would be depressed.
And every day he looked on the Internet to check on the status of the strike.
It couldn’t last forever.