Gifts of the Future Ch. 09

Bob Clark retired from the CIA as soon as he could. He had become increasingly angry with some of the activities he'd learned the organization had been backing over the years. He knew he had to get out when he learned what they'd orchestrated and were involved in between arms sales to Iran and supplying the Contra rebels in fighting the Nicaragua Sandanistan government. He applied for retirement, turned in his badge and lambasted the sub-director, telling him there was going to be hell to pay when these activities came to light and that they'd better get out of it soon! And he made sure that happened when it was apparent the CIA was not cleaning up their act...

The U.S. intelligence community was feeling rather proud of themselves when a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI resulted in the halt of stolen technology from the U.S. by the Soviet Union through a network of KGB spies that had been operating since the early 70's. In 1981, the President of France had provided the U.S. government with proof of the USSR's activities from an ex-KGB "Directorate T" general and engineer who had defected and said he was disclosing the information in the interests of "goodwill."

The CIA immediately came up with a plan to thwart the Soviets and, through cooperation with the FBI and U.S. manufacturers, started supplying the Russians with faulty technological products. Some of the products supplied were used on a new Soviet natural gas pipeline, which they were beginning to make quite a profit on by providing natural gas to parts of Eastern Europe.

Those faulty products included bad turbine parts and software that had been programmed to push the pipeline beyond its capabilities. The result was a huge explosion in June in the middle of the Siberian wilderness that was witnessed only by American satellites. But it was enough of a blow to set in motion the complete downfall of the Russian economy and would eventually lead to the end of the Cold War...

Gas prices in the U.S. had been slowly declining and the whole country was, once again, complacent with following the status quo. Megan was keeping tabs on what was going on with the Synthetic Fuels Corp., but they were not very forthcoming with their findings. She also learned the only businesses taking advantage of that government-funded program were the American oil companies! How could they be trusted to come up with alternative fuels?!!! She knew it was only a matter of time before that government ruse was abandoned...

Megan and Yosef talked by phone occasionally, but he didn't have anything to report. He was worried that the radicals were keeping their ultimate goal even more secretive because of all the media attention in that region of the world from recent outbreaks of violence. There were attacks in Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood... Syria had finally had enough and launched a massive bombing on the village of Hama in February where the Brotherhood had led a major insurrection.

Then Megan's producer made her concentrate most of her stories on the Falklands War for a while but allowed her to turn her attention back to the Middle East when conflicts broke out in June between Israel and Lebanon because of attacks launched on Israel by the PLO from inside Lebanon. On September 18, 1982, she was startled to hear of some horrific events from one of the crews of her news show that had traveled to Lebanon to cover the war...

They called to tell her that Lebanese Christian militia forces had invaded two Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut and massacred hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of suspected PLO militants as well as civilians. To make matters worse, they were aided by the Israeli Defense Force in violation of existing treaties that had stated Israeli forces were to stay out of West Beirut.

And this was perpetrated in retaliation for the recent massacres of Lebanese Christians by Palestinians and the assassination of the Lebanese president-elect, Bachir Geymayel, who had rejected signing a peace treaty with Israel supposedly because of developing relations with Syria, a country still militarily hostile with Israel. And the person who confessed to planting the bomb at Geymayel's headquarters turned out to be a Syrian intelligence agent...

Megan plopped down onto a chair after the phone call, shaking her head, as feelings of confusion and shock washed over her. She realized Yosef was right... most Muslims couldn't seem to achieve peace amongst themselves, even to try to defeat a common enemy! That might be the only aspect that would keep them from turning the full force of their hatred toward the U.S. ... If all of Islam were to ever unite toward that one purpose... How would they ever be able to combat such hatred?!!

She was startled out of her fearful thoughts when her young son walked over to her, climbed on her lap and stared at her with his deep aqua eyes and said softly, "So sad, Mommie... so dark..." She was horrified to realize that he'd been listening to her phone conversation. Then he leaned against her, laying his head on her shoulder and asked, "Why did this happen on my birthday?"

Megan wrapped her arms around him and leaned her cheek against his forehead. "I don't know, sweetie. But you don't need to think about such darkness and hatred... I don't want you facing that yet. You only need to see everything that's good and wonderful about our world! So, just put anything you heard Mommie talking about out of your mind... we're going to have a great time at our birthday party at Granddaddy Charles and Grandma Didi's house this afternoon. OK?!!!" she stated happily as she lifted her head to smile down at him.

She swallowed a lump in her throat. The sadness in his eyes was slower to fade than it should've been for a four-year old boy. But then she watched the sparkle return as he ran around playing with Tommy and J.J. at the birthday pool party with all their family and friends to celebrate both Charlie and Megan's 24th birthdays 5 days earlier as well as Jonathan's 4th birthday.

Everyone was so glad that Brad, Barbie and Tommy had been able to make a quick trip out from Houston to be at the party, but they had to return the next day. They stayed the night at Megan and Jonnie's house, and spent the evening visiting with some of their friends and siblings. Didi and Jay dropped in for a little while with J.J., as well as Charlie, Lily and little Jasmine, and Rickie and Karen also came by.

They reminisced about their wonderful childhoods while Jay and Karen listened and laughed with them. Didi would glance at her husband occasionally when she felt his gut tighten with sadness... knowing he was recalling his unhappy youth. Then he would take a deep breath and release his pain as he exhaled and returned her soft smile.

Their conversation turned to all the unrest and violence that seemed to be increasing around the world... and they turned their eyes toward the boys playing on the other side of the family room. Most of them worried what their children would be facing when they got to be their age...

Later that night, Rickie and Karen Estevez held each other tightly as they made love, both of them wondering if they wanted to risk bringing a child into a world that seemed to be teetering on the brink of being destroyed by hatred. Karen had stopped taking her birth control pills a few months earlier and, on the advice of her doctor, she and Rickie had been using condoms before attempting to conceive in order to let any potential ill effects of the pills work out of her system.

It bothered Karen that her work on military weapons systems kept her reminded that what she was doing was a necessary evil in order to protect the world against radical hate-mongers. But she was heartened by the fact that her husband was a good soul who did his damnedest to protect civilians from dangerous situations. He was constantly reminding her that their jobs were very similar... they both worked toward protecting people and they both wanted to see the world survive...

So why should they worry what their children might face when they grew up? If they wanted the world to survive, then it would take more good souls in order to accomplish that...

Karen slid her hands down her husband's sexy back to his hips and gripped him gently, pushing him off of her as she said softly, "Pull out for a moment, my love."

Rickie lifted up and looked down into his lovely wife's emerald eyes, frowning in confusion as he backed away from inside her. Then he smiled slowly when he felt her hands gripping his shaft and rolling the condom off of him.

Karen tossed the condom off the side of the bed with one hand as she guided her husband's thick cock inside her again, smiling as he groaned sensually, enjoying the feel of her tight flesh welcoming his without that annoying layer of latex separating them any longer. She wrapped herself around him and relished his deep moans of pleasure and satisfaction, knowing he'd not gotten nearly as much enjoyment from their fucking while he'd worn the damn "cock socks" as he'd called them!

She moved her body with his, wanting to feel every deep stroke of his awesome cock inside her... but it was time... She held him tightly and whispered in his ear, "Don't hold back, my love... I want you to come inside me... fill me with your seed! I want to have your baby... my body is ready and it's time... Ohhhh, yes... that's it, baby... harder!!! I'm gonna come, too!!! Ohhhh, yes, yess, yesss!!!" she moaned as she felt his cock pulsing inside her as her flesh throbbed.

They both laughed softly when Rickie reached into their nightstand drawer and pulled out the last of the condoms and joyously tossed them into the trashcan. Rickie and Karen made love several more times that night. By the end of October, Karen knew she was pregnant and everyone was overjoyed when they announced it at Thanksgiving. It was one of the few pieces of good news the group had received that year...

For the remainder of the year, everyone did their best to ignore what was going wrong in the rest of the world as they began to realize that they had enough things to worry about in their own country...

*********

The year 1983 didn't start off very well for Jonnie North. He was plagued by doubt in his abilities. He was having trouble trying to identify the exact personality profile of a killer who'd been leaving the bodies of strangled young men along the roadways of Southern California since the early 1970's. The FBI had originally thought they'd caught the killer in 1980 when they arrested a man after a tip from one of his victims who'd survived.

He was put under surveillance and then arrested when he attempted to assault a teenaged boy, but when he confessed, he claimed to have been killing only since 1979... and when more bodies kept turning up after his arrest, police and FBI knew they were dealing with more than just one sick bastard.

Jonnie was spending the majority of his time going through the files and sorting out the victims of the man they had in custody so he could try again to get a clearer picture of the sick bastard... or bastards... that were still out there! He felt so frustrated that he was dealing in such an inexact science and forensic technology was not yet advanced enough to help him get that clearer picture.

It was only by sheer coincidence in May that a California Highway Patrol officer pulled a man over in Mission Viejo on suspected drunk driving and found the strangled body of a young Marine in the front seat. Jonnie was relatively certain they'd found the other sick bastard... at least he hoped he was the only other one. But he began to wonder about that when some of the forensic evidence pointed to the involvement of at least one other person. Jonnie sometimes hated his job...

Just like Megan sometimes hated hers... The violence in Lebanon was getting worse. In April, the U.S. embassy in Beruit was bombed, killing 63 people. The perpetrators claimed to be a group calling themselves the Islamic Jihad Organization... but no one had ever heard of them before. Intelligence gathered on that organization seemed to indicate that it was an arm of an emerging Lebanese Islamic paramilitary group called Hezbollah. It was believed they orchestrated the bombing in retaliation for U.S. involvement in the Lebanese Civil War.

And it was no surprise to Megan to learn that this group had been inspired by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, it was believed that Hezbollah had been organized and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Megan's nerves tingled to see such cooperation among Muslims from two different countries until she realized it was because they were all Shiites... Even so, it still made her nervous.

In May, an effort was made to end the hostilities when Lebanon, Israel and the U.S. signed an agreement outlining Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, but unfortunately, it didn't happen fast enough. In October, bombs exploded in the U. S. and French Marine barracks in West Beirut killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers and dozens of French paratroopers and other civilians... It seemed the radicals would not give up until all Israeli and other foreign troops were completely out of Lebanon.

At least one interesting and progressive event happened in the U.S. In June of 1983, Brad, Barbie and Tommy had gone to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of STS-7, Space ShuttleChallenger, carrying the first American woman into space, Sally Ride. Brad and Tommy had been enthralled while watching the huge main fuel tank flanked by the SRB's rocketing the shuttle out of the earth's atmosphere and into the lower reaches of space to orbit the planet...

Just after that, the young family traveled to L.A. to congratulate their friends, Rickie and Karen, on the birth of their daughter and to welcome the newest member of their group, Sophia Dawn Estevez! She'd been named for her grandmothers, and Rickie was hoping she would be like her Mama and live up to her name... Sophia meant "wisdom."

And they were celebrating with Jay and Didi and everyone else because both Brad and Jay had recently been promoted to the ranks of Captain! Barbie and Didi were making their husbands laugh, responding to their every request by saluting and purring sexily, "Aye, Aye, Captain!"

Brad and Jay had told each other they should take advantage of their wives' apparent sexual responses to their newly gained positions of authority. Later that night when crawling into their beds, they had both growled at their wives, "Get over here and fuck me, you sexy woman! That's an order!" Both of the women had happily followed their husbands' orders...

After October, the rest of the year seemed to pass a little more peacefully as everyone continued with their lives. Robbie Seldon and Crystal North had graduated in May with honors from USC with degrees in Political Science and both had been accepted to the Stanford Law School. Crystal was planning to pursue environmental law and Robbie was going to concentrate on international law. He figured if he wasn't able to get into politics because he was too honest, then perhaps he could become a diplomat...

They wanted to live together while attending law school, so Robbie had proposed to Crystal in June. They had asked Jonnie and Megan if they would mind sharing their anniversary with them and were planning a Christmas Eve wedding since the Norths had happily agreed...