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The Enemy Within
| Author: | L. Ron Hubbard |
| Publisher: |
Galaxy Press, 2004 New Era, 1987 Bridge Publications, 1986 |
| Series: | Mission Earth: Book 3 |
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1. The Invaders Plan |
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| Book Type: | Novel |
| Genre: | Science-Fiction |
| Sub-Genre Tags: | Alien Invasion Galactic Empire Space Opera |
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Synopsis
Soltan Gris, you're cunning and crafty Voltarian narrator has seen it all and now he tells all--in The Enemy Within. Is it Satire? Or something far more sinister?
In a web of espionage, intrigue, and betrayal, even Voltarian Royal Combat Engineer Jettero Heller doesn't know whom he can trust. Gris has formed a secret alliance with a dirty DC politician, a ruthless billionaire industrialist, and a mysterious media madman. Their mission: terminate Jettero Heller.
Beset by double-crossing body doubles and backstabbing identity shifters, Heller discovers that the most dangerous battle of all is about to begin against The Enemy Within.
Excerpt
PART TWENTY
To My Lord Turn, Justiciary of the Royal Courts and Prison, Government City, Planet Voltar, Voltar Confederacy
Your Lordship, Sir!
I, Soltan Gris, Grade Eleven, General Services Officer, former Secondary Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy (Long Live His Majesty Cling the Lofty and All of His Most Noble Lords), hereby with great humility and respect submit the third volume of my confession regarding MISSION EARTH.
I realize that Your Esteemed Lordship has many things to do here at the Royal Prison that are more important than reading the listing of my crimes against the State. However, if Your Most Noble Lordship has read my earlier accounts, I am sure that you will agree they show beyond doubt that I was merely following orders.
I don't mean to imply that I am innocent and thereby should be released from the cell that Your Magnificent Lordship has generously provided! No, that decision was most wise and the details contained herein will prove me out.
True, there is a certain injustice that I am in prison and Jettero Heller is still at large as a wanted criminal. However, I have every confidence that the combined police forces of Voltar will find and arrest him. Whatever they do to him, it would never approximate what I would exact for revenge.
Perhaps my confession will at least provide a clue as to his behavior. However, I must warn you that Fleet Officer Heller is unpredictable. I know better than anyone. The bugs implanted in him allowed me to secretly eavesdrop on everything he saw and heard. Without his knowing it, I monitored everything that he did and I can assure you: Heller is dangerous!
For a Royal combat engineer, his assignment was simple. All he had to do was go to Earth (we know it as Blito-P3) and quietly introduce a few advances into their backward technology so the planet would still be inhabitable by the time Voltar invaded it in another century. It didn't matter that he didn't know the whole mission was a ruse. Lombar Hisst as the head of the Apparatus had fooled the Grand Council into sending a mission rather than a costly preemptive strike. That would have destroyed Hisst's major resource in his plan to become Emperor--the deadly Earth drugs that we were secretly shipping from our base in Afyon, Turkey.
My task seemed equally simple. All I had to do was accompany Heller to Earth and make sure his mission failed. Hisst was very emphatic about that point. Before we left Voltar, he told me that he had assigned one of his assassins to secretly follow me to ensure that I followed orders.
So I took Heller to the Apparatus base in Afyon. I made sure that he didn't see or hear anything that would tip him off that we were sending heroin and a drug called "speed" back to Voltar. He never knew that Hisst planned to use drugs to control the Voltarian government and the riffraff the way it was done on Blito-P3. From Afyon, I sent Heller to the United States.
It should have been a nice, simple, quiet mission. He should have landed, been stopped and that was that. Oh, no! Not Heller! Explosions, shootings, car chases, cops, FBI agents.
Who finally picks him up? A Mafia family! On top of that, they are antidrug and are run by a six-foot-plus amazon, Babe Corleone. What did Heller do? He bumped off Babe's competition! So where does he end up living? In a sumptuous suite in the Gracious Palms, a Corleone whorehouse filled with beautiful women across from the United Nations! And what does he buy? A Cadillac as big as a yacht and an old, beat-up New York taxicab!
And who could have predicted that Heller would go out of his way to save the life of that miserable wretch, Izzy Epstein? Not only is Epstein an anarchist but he has the audacity to dislike the IRS! If that is not enough, Heller gives Epstein ten thousand dollars and hires him on as some sort of corporate advisor.
Does any of Heller's behavior make sense? He came to Blito-P3 to handle planetary pollution, not diplomats, whores, Mafia, FBI and the IRS!
The only person who saw through Heller was Miss Simmons. Dear, wonderful Miss Simmons. When Heller enrolled at Empire University and said he wanted to major in nuclear science, she locked her anti-nuclear-war sights on him. Her determination to flunk Heller out of school gave me boundless joy. She scheduled Heller's classes at the same day and hour so he couldn't possibly attend them all.
Typical of Heller, he cheated to get around it. He hired Bang-Bang, an ex-Marine explosives expert for the Corleones, to stand in at his college military class. Then, operating from a "command post" on the campus, Bang-Bang "mined" Heller's classes with tape recorders so Heller could later simply speed-listen to the lectures. Diabolical!
I would have been happy to have Heller killed right there and then and be done with it. But typical of his cheating ways, he sabotaged that idea. Heller was sending reports back to Royal Astrographer Tars Roke and using a platen code. Until I got that platen and was able to forge Heller's reports to make it appear that everything was okay, I couldn't kill him. That just goes to show how underhanded he really is!
I had to get that platen. I ordered Raht and Terb, two Apparatus agents who work out of our New York office, to report to me in Afyon. I would have them get that platen and then I could kill Heller and get on to more important business like the arrival of Utanc, the authentic Turkish dancing girl I had bought.
I also had a new hospital built in Afyon to introduce a little technology myself. The Voltarian cellologist I had brought, Prahd Bittlestiffender, could give gangsters a new face and fingerprints. At a hundred thousand a head, it was certainly a more profitable enterprise than cleaning up the atmosphere.
As Raht and Terb were about to arrive and Heller's days were numbered, I decided to check in on him. I pulled up the viewscreen and turned it on.
Copyright © 1986 by L. Ron Hubbard
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