AMERICA ONE (3 page)

The explosion was hot and it hurt badly. Time slowed and any movement seemed to be happening in slow motion. He felt the seat beneath him lift him up and toss him around like a roller coaster.

The Humvee’s left front tire had detonated the IED, and Lieutenant Noble was lucky that he was sitting in the right-hand rear seat; his upper body was protected by the prisoner who was between him and the explosion. He felt like the whole vehicle was airborne for a few seconds. His legs suddenly hurt like hell. Just before he felt and heard the vehicle crash down on its roof, he thought how ironic it was that he had helped disarm hundreds of these roadside bombs; and then one got him. Then, peace, as his head hit the roof, knocking him out.

VIN was suddenly back in the car repair shop he had attacked with his men in the town. He watched in shock as the men he had shot suddenly come alive over and over again. They rose from the bloody floor, pointed their fingers and laughed at him. They laughed hard and loud, until his befuddled brain realized that their laughing sounded like a beep and not a human laugh. A beeping monitor, something he had heard before, sometime a long time ago, in an intensive ward of a hospital.

The beeping sounds he heard around him, three different ones, slowly brought him back to consciousness. He tried to move, but he was pinned in the bed. The light on the other side of his closed eyelids was extremely bright; he tried to open one eye slightly and peek outside. Somebody must have noticed his eye twitch as he heard a female voice.

“Captain, I think he’s coming around.”

“Lieutenant Noble, can you hear me? Move a finger, or try and nod if you can hear me,” added a second female voice.

He tried to open an eye, but it was too heavy. So he tried to move an arm. That also felt too heavy, so he tried to move the smallest part of his body he could think of, a pinky finger, and that got a response.

“Well done,” he heard the second voice say. “Now move your pinky finger on your other hand for me.” He tried hard and he felt it move.

“Well done, soldier! I’m going to put you back to sleep. Just relax, you are on R&R,” was all he heard until the building with the laughing dead men returned to taunt him.

The Private Space Race

Ryan Richmond was a successful man in his early forties. At 17, he started his first business, a mail-order company, with a $1,500 loan from his father, a car salesman, after convincing him that his idea was a good one. He grew up in a strict family, his father a quiet, but successful salesman, his mother a new computer software designer, and the real brains of the marriage.

Both parents were quiet thinkers and Ryan grew up to be the same. He learned always to be extremely polite, say “yes sir”, “no ma’am”, and tell people only what was necessary. His father often stated that the only way to sell a car was to say one word—yes—to everything the customer asked.

His parents, tall and slim and both over six feet, spent most weekends at home enjoying their free time reading books and weekly magazines. This gave Ryan the opportunity to read his space engineering and computer magazines.

One weekend, he saw an advertisement for bright red lady’s underwear in one of his computer magazines. It was actually the first time he had ever seen a scantily dressed pretty girl. The pictures depicted smiling half-naked ladies strutting around in their underwear. For the first time in his life his business mind began operating. What girls could refuse to look so nice underneath their dresses? And his first business deal broke the surface of his non-stop mind.

It was quite a shock when Ryan asked his father for a loan for his first business venture, sexy ladies underwear of all things. But after seeing the interesting underwear in the magazine Ryan showed him, he smiled wishing he had found the same opportunity when he was a kid.

Ryan sold the sexy lady’s underwear advertised by a British-based company through their own small catalog. Every piece of lingerie, small panties and bikini bottoms, was in Ferrari red, as the company called it. After Ryan did the math and realized that bulk orders of fifty sets of the same item had a price reduction of seventy percent, he doubled the price and sold cheap. He also made a few cents on shipping and handling, setting up a UPS account.

The young man enjoyed his first business. Who wouldn’t? It wasn’t that he was a pervert, or loved seeing scantily dressed women. The business was colorful, exciting, and it seemed the ladies loved his wares. He wasn’t really a ladies’ man. He had very little interest in the opposite sex. Even at eighteen, he just considered them to be nice, pretty, very interesting individuals to talk to, and he was sure one would just arrive out of the blue one day and want to be married. Ryan was uneducated in the opposite sex department.

After his third Valentine’s Day, having added a second line of edible chocolate underwear, he was doing tens of thousands of dollars of business each week, and was offered $200,000 for the business by his largest customer, the owner of a local hotel chain. By then he had graduated from high school and had started in his first year of an engineering degree at the university closest to his home, so that he could study and run his company.

A slender young man with brown hair, brown eyes and fair skin, Ryan was tall, at two inches over six feet. The glasses he always wore were thick, and made him look studious. At nineteen, and having already repaid the initial loan to his father a couple of times over just to show his gratitude, he had $200,000 in the bank.

During his first year at the university he often sat in on lectures by visiting scientists from around the world. One of these scientists, a 29-year-old Russian man named Boris, was one of the young, fresh brains who had worked for the Russian Space Authority. Unfortunately he was now unemployed, as he had lost just his job a few months earlier. Ryan enjoyed talking to this man.

Boris had been brought over by the university to lecture on Russian space travel and ideas for the future. He was extremely educated in the field of space travel, and after listening to his third lecture by this man, Ryan asked Boris if he could afford to employ him to discuss his own future designs.

Boris was desperate to live in the U.S., and readily agreed if Ryan could arrange a Visa so he could stay. Boris also told Ryan of two other young men worth hiring, both single, and who would do anything to get to the U.S. They would all work for peanuts.

Several weeks later, with legitimate three-year HB-1 work permits, the three Russian scientists flew into JFK.

Ryan formed Astermine, Inc. a space mining research company so that he could have a company to offer the work permits. Astermine, Inc. was based in an unused and empty corner shop a few blocks from the house where he still lived with his parents. There were a few rooms upstairs above the shop, and the happy three scientists moved in and spent a lot of time with Ryan brainstorming about future space travel.

As these men began research projects at Astermine, Inc., Ryan, still in his second year of university studies, started a computer software production company in the garage of his large, newly purchased brownstone closer to the university. Ryan’s clever mother was the instigator of this idea; she understood the direction the new computer industry was heading and what the new industry would need.

Three years later, once the Russians received their Green Cards, Ryan moved Astermine, Inc. and its five employees to California. The team now included a fourth Russian computer genius and an American friend of Ryan’s from university.

Ryan received his own PhD at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in Los Angeles, California two years later. By the time he received his Doctorate, the company was moving into its own newly-constructed building in Silicon Valley. The company had grown to 100 employees, and was projected by Forbes magazine to double its workforce every month for the foreseeable future. His four Russian scientists were still with him and he had purchased a large house close by for him and his team to enjoy life.

A year after he and his company developed into a profitable venture, and was beginning to control a large share of the personal computer market, his mother, who was a fifty-fifty partner in the business, offered him a substantial sum to take over his company. They were making a lot of money and his space hobby, as she called it, took him away from running the computer business. Ryan allowed her to take the reins—for a couple million dollars and a dinner to celebrate.

He then began to look at the new and emerging internet. All the while, Ryan Richmond spent his free time with the Russian team. Not only did they stay with him, they championed the passion he indulged in, drawing and designing crafts to fly into space.

During that same year, he and two university friends raised enough capital to set up an internet search company and went through millions of dollars of his own money, before the new company made its first penny.

At the age of thirty-two, he again was bought out, this time by his two friends, and Ryan decided to explore new ideas. He still hadn’t been in love, but had learned about the female species after his first Russian female scientist arrived from St. Petersburg, Russia to join the team. She was a very pretty Russian blonde who had the largest eyes he had ever seen on a girl. That was not the only part of her anatomy that was large, and Ryan learned the delights a girl could offer.

It lasted all of five years before she decided to return to Russia because her mother was sick, and needed a care taker.

A couple of years before she left, he had increased his team again by employing three of the best European aerospace designers and a couple of knowledgeable scientists in different fields of biology and physics.

After the sale of the Internet search company he was able to employ several of the best brains at NASA to grow his team even more. They had been terminated suddenly and without warning for some political reason, and Ryan now wealthy, scooped them up on a ten-year contract. This move was going to cause him hardship in the future.

Now, he ran Astermine, Inc. from a single, three-story building in Silicon Valley, close to where he and his Russian friends lived. Often, on Saturdays, and when other business was quiet, he held long meetings with his employees, going over new plans, drawings, ideas and costs for each engine-type, fuel-type, part or panel needed for space flight.

A year later he had founded his fourth company; the first Internet bartering company; this generated many more millions when he sold it within twenty-four months, and from this day on he only invested his money into emerging internet companies in early stages of growth.

For the next few years, he used his newly acquired wealth to fund new companies; Google, EBay and PayPal were three of them—and his investments soared.

Ryan had been avidly interested in space exploration ever since he could remember. Even as a small boy, he watched any television show focused on space travel and exploration by small silver rockets, and then large spacecraft which flew at warp speed all over the universe; “Going where no man had gone before!”

As a student at USC, he spent any spare hours auditing lectures in the aerospace department, taking notes and noting the best achievers in the classes. It was not his forte, but it fueled his fantasy for space exploration. Ryan studied the new Space Shuttle Program and attended the first launches in Florida. Very few people knew that his real dream was to one day go into space.

He did not have the physical characteristics of an astronaut. Naturally, he applied for the program, but his less than perfect eyesight automatically eliminated him as a candidate.

Ryan Richmond was a math savant though; spending years calculating how much money he would need to design, build, and finally propel a rocket into space. He was the first to sign up with a new Russian company offering private trips into lower space orbit. His first chance was in 2009 aboard a Russian rocket taking men and supplies to the International Space Station, but a bad cold days before launch had given the opportunity to the next man on the list.

The same happened in 2010, when his second ride was scheduled; once again he had a slight health issue. For some reason he always had a medical situation when it was time to fulfill his dream. Slightly less than half of his payment was politely returned to him, and the company ended its flights into space due to internal financial reasons in Russia. All the while, however, he still had his team working on their own ideas, reading, analyzing and inspecting every piece of information they could get their hands on from other companies in the same field.

Money was no object to Ryan; he would have gladly funded the whole Russian company, but the fact that the company was in Russia was a problem. There were other factors behind the company’s immediate end, and it was nothing a savvy man would get involved in.

Ryan Richmond received payment for the sale of most of his stock in the internet investments; it was a very large amount, over three billion dollars. Because he sold so much over a period of a couple of weeks, the value of the company’s shares actually declined, and needed a month or two to strengthen again.

He sold the shares just as a new international private space race began. A rich and famous fellow in England had begun the race with a demonstration of a flight close to the boundaries of space; not atop a rocket, but lifted by a larger aircraft with a smaller airplane heading spaceward from 50,000 feet and nearing the 100,000 foot altitude mark before returning to land.

Ryan and his team knew as much about the Englishman’s space company as the Englishman. Ryan’s team, now composed of nearly three dozen experts, had thousands of drawings and plans, and were ready to build, faster and better than any other company; especially since the team was enhanced by the addition of two more of NASA’s best engineers who appeared at his design center very soon after the shuttle program ended.

Over the next few weeks he drove out to the Nevada desert in his Audi R8 and looked for a place to setup his next company.