The Nine: Anker

By CJ Santon

Enter into a blue-green new world of adventure, lasting friendships, loves and the transformation of nine young people into super responsible parents, leaders and inconspicuous owners of some of the biggest companies on the planet, organized to take on the mighty rich financial and arms manufacturing cabals ruining Earth's biodiversity with their greed.

You will eventually meet all nine group members, as in benign obscurity, they manage to acquire control of the world's largest conglomeration of shipbuilding, shipping, international banking, transportation, tv and media companies, and the production and retailing of all manner of products including food, medical, health, fashion and cosmetics while gathering the world's biggest cash reserve. You will follow them as they gradually gather the planet's giant holdings of ruined rainforest and farmlands, nurturing them back to health. But most important, will be their creation of thousands of centers to feed and educate starving underprivileged children and young, nourishing them through the schools' superior environmental and humanitarian curriculum, in time themselves becoming leaders of a new respectful, ecofriendly and humane future world.

We are introduced to the group's chosen strong leader, young Anker Banner-Brahe's early life and loves in Denmark, North America, the US Virgin Islands and Italy. His meeting with Jason the giant Danish-speaking islander from St. Thomas, bringing Anker an inheritance he cannot refuse. And we follow Anker's friendship with the first members of his group of nine: English Lord James Bythesea, the Chinese genius Jimmy Huang, the giant Ainu ninja warrior Pony, and also from the island of Hokkaido, the lethal Ninjutsu sensei Ishi who becomes such an important influence on the nine young friends.

We are with the four first group members through one of the Virgin Island's worst hurricanes and observe their efforts at saving as many islanders as possible. Finally, we join them during their first meeting on small island south of St. Thomas with some strange humanoid visitors from space wishing to lead their future by readying them to take on the fight against a coming humanitarian apocalypse which could end in an all-destroying third world war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638812937

Book preview

The Nine

Anker

CJ Santon

Copyright © 2022 CJ Santon

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

Originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-63881-292-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-604-0 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-63881-293-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

Denmark, 2024

1946–47

Jason

The Caribbean

Ishi

St. Thomas and Jason’s Aunt Mary

The Inheritance and Sad Farewell to Jason

Nina and North America

James and South to Jason on St. Thomas

Pony

Ike and Space Trip

Back to Europe

Hundested and Apprenticeship

Positano and Katarina

Preface

I will not be offended if you skip this very long preface and go straight to chapter one on page thirteen.

Although diagnosed with prostate cancer, Gleason score 5, and metastasized four places in my bones could be considered lousy news, I was lucky. There is no cancer in any other organs, and the rest can be kept down by a special cannabis cure that is working wonders and has reduced my PSA count from a huge three hundred to zero or undetectable in under eighteen months. Having just waved farewell to eighty-three, however, cancer gives a different slant to whatever time you have left on this planet.

After achieving most of what was on my bucket list, I have been putting off one important item: a major writing project. This for the simple reason that I never considered myself good enough to complete the intended somewhat-complicated story. As a yacht and ship builder since 1958, I might know my boats; but as a writer, I am seriously intellectually challenged, with no academic or literary background and none of those handy friends, editors, and advisers most authors list by the score, who would probably all agree that I should have stayed with boats instead of stepping on their turf, since I am obviously not very good at writing something sufficiently academic to merit printing.

Nevertheless, I simply have to get some things off my chest that have bothered me all these years about the way we are screwing up any kind of tolerable future for our descendants on this planet. And it is not that oh my god, CO2 is driving the world’s climate over the edge and we are all gonna die syndrome we are constantly being fed by UN’s IPCC, the EU, NASA, NOAH, and the news media that I am worried about. It is more the unabated growing stupidity of our corrupt and power-polluted dictatorial political leaders and their continuing offensive unbalanced dispensing of Earth’s wealth, as if it was theirs to distribute for their own political expedience.

What really scare me though are the major cartels and their abovementioned lackeys’ plans for a tighter grip on the planet’s population by transforming our world for sustainable development as proclaimed in the UN’s 2015 First Organized Summit Document with all its pious platitudes, arguing for a utopian and bogus democratic human rights, centrally controlled world. All of it aided by politically correct but slanted scaremongering spewed by the media to a frightened and confused public, resulting in constant growing military buildups, making the military industrial complex richer beyond what is fathomable, to the huge ongoing disadvantage of the rest of the world.

I am not a conspiracy freak, but hearing every president from Regan to Obama continuously proclaiming the New World Order idiocy has made me put on my thinking cap and got me started on this story. A one-world government with its universal declaration of equality and human rights may sound tantalizing to many, but to me, it sounds more like these organizations grabbing of total control for all the wrong reasons using all the right justifiable platitudes. We humans are so completely different and some of us so completely evil that a centrally controlled New World Order is asinine utopia. In any case, the military cartels would never allow it. With no military threads or conflicts, how would they continue to exist? However, if that experiment is something we have to go through next, then our fellow humans should know how unlikely it is to succeed and how much damage it is bound to leave behind. Another huge mess, headed by the UN, EU, and other power-hungry growing organizations for our descendants to clean up after us. As if they didn’t have enough already.

Most of all, through my travels and work in so many parts of the world, I am disgusted by the continued destruction of our planet’s biodiversity and natural habitats, resulting in a faster-growing list of insect and animal species we humans bring to extinction, not to mention the pollution we are leaving in the sea, on land, and in the air for our children and grandchildren to clean up after us. Let’s face it, most of the political leaders in our so-called developed world are a lazy, overabundance-cuddled, sick group of xenophobes and bigots repeating zombie platitudes ad infinitum, while the rest of the world is just too witless or uneducated to know any better than, through illegal poaching, bringing more and more endangered species to extinction and leaving growing shit-piles of plastics and poisonous waste behind, while cheerfully ruining what is left of our natural habitats.

Can someone explain why we haven’t been using the packaging material invented in Sweden some forty-five years ago, which is completely biodegradable and harmless to the environment, or why we ignore the fact that equatorial governments are allowing areas of virgin rain forest the size of sixty football fields to be ruined every minute of the day till there is no rain forest left? To poor farmers and palm oil producers, the cleared land is unsustainable after three to four growing seasons while rehabilitating the forests will take hundreds of years.

While millions of children will die from malnutrition or outright starvation, and those lucky enough to receive just one square meal a day will most likely never receive proper education, populations in the poorest parts of the world will double and poverty spread like wildfire over the next twenty-five to thirty years. Current food production will be unable to meet growing demands as we are nearing the tipping point of what this planet can sustain. Hunger will force whole populations to move north into the developed world countries, completely choking any chance of sustainable long-term aid and support.

On the subject of economy, it is common knowledge that less than 2 percent of the global population grows obscenely rich at a much faster rate than the worldwide GDP average. Today they control such a major part of Earth’s entire wealth and power that it is causing growing chasms of inequality with no motivation for fair redistribution on the horizon. This is resulting in an inexorable drift toward a future society of patrimonial capitalism or oligarchy aided by brainwashed politicians. While I absolutely abhor forced Marxist or Communist wealth distribution, things on this front must change fast on a voluntary basis or the sound of violent militant demonstrations will be heard worldwide.

Meanwhile, educational and cultural levels are lowering at a shocking rate in spite of, or maybe because of, social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, leaving libraries empty (when do we begin burning books in the streets or in furnaces for energy?). All of it has gradually resulted in a world populated by narcissistic, reality-escaping, game-playing, smartphone- and computer-addicted zombies with increasingly questionable morals and serious social skill issues. Few people look back in history, to the destruction of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations, to realize and understand it is currently repeating itself, maybe in another form than in the past, but still heading for that fast implosion of what is left of humanitarian democracy and cultural civilization.

Unless we do something to turn this development one hundred and eighty degrees now, our planet will probably continue to exist, also in some other form, but certainly without much habitat or many humans. All this will more than likely come about from the world’s current crazy and seriously corrupt leaders’ desperate interest in prolonging periods of unrest and fear in the population in order to maintain totalitarian control. They are simply too stupid to consider the repercussions to themselves resulting in growing decimation of biodiversity and humanity, following a final vicious runaway war, fought locally in the streets of most cities of the world against jihadist terrorists and other religious fanatic combatants, or from a lethal and more sophisticated pandemic hitting a still-unprepared population, or a combination of both.

Why has power become so terribly important to people with low IQs? Why could it not be more constructive interests and concerns such as help and compassion for starving children, for fighting animal extinction and dying habitats, or the simple support of just helping save Mother Earth any way possible, to retain what is left of her superb beauty?

Instead, we have to tolerate dictators making asinine decisions in order to stay in power. Look at Russia’s leadership, who, instead of constant aggressive actions toward NATO and the West, should be more concerned about the dangers lurking from the neighbor to the south they share their biggest border with, China. How long does the Russian leadership think their southern neighbor is going to leave that choice bit of real estate Siberia to the north before they figure they have enough military might just to walk in and take it over, ignoring all previous diplomatic agreements like those ignored in the past by Hitler invading Russia after initiating and signing a mutual nonaggression pact?

And here come some more whys. Why does the West accept the constant abuse and dangerous political shenanigans from Turkish and Iranian religious leaders? Why does the world stand by and watch Chinese leadership’s constant military expansion into the ASEAN region or their growing colonization of poor African countries, stripping them of their raw materials without leaving anything behind other than the usual mandatory bribes to some shady government officials? Why does the Chinese presidium sanction hugely growing and highly damaging fishing by giant bottom fishing trawlers stripping the world’s oceans of life? Why is this tolerated, and why is it not constantly attacked by the media so people will see the truth?

In all this misery, however, there are some very smart, dedicated scientists working hard on perfecting technical wonders contrasting the current mindless solar and wind energy craze. Brilliant initiatives such as harnessing magnetic field energy, cold fusion, graphene sodium energy storage, thorium molten salt reactors, hydrogen fuel cells, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain, to mention a few. In spite of ridicule, threats, and even murder, directly or indirectly instigated by the political, financial, and corporate cartels, these technologies will eventually make it possible for once using today’s social media constructively to operate around the cartels, making them obsolete by helping the population rid itself of diatribe-infested media supported power systems while changing to pure clean energy and wealth-supported democratic, liberal grassroot voting systems using blockchain.

Leaning mostly toward Buddhism with its neutral message of love, peace, and respect of nature and all things living, even fellow humans, I have absolutely no religious or racial agenda other than being totally against any form of religious interference in politics or the running of a country. Take Catholicism and its history of wars, destruction and burning, most often women at the stake, or killing nonbelievers in evil and horrendous ways only five hundred years ago. Or today’s Islamic fanatics bombing or mowing down innocent men, women, and children in the streets or beheading their poor victims on live TV, all in the name of these sick extremists’ interpretation of religion. Is that civilization, and must we just stand by and watch these crazy, mad lunatics bring our world back to the dark ages once again? I mean, we’ve been there, done that.

It sickens the heart to realize how incompetence seems to be the most important criterion for landing top political positions in the West, while high IQs, extensive experience, and competence from the private sector are frowned upon. The problem will soon be obvious that today’s leaders will be completely at a loss, exhibiting a total lack of understanding what we are heading for or how to control it as is their want. This lack of comprehension is already highly damaging to the positive future development of the world population, as is regularly proven by their incompetent so-called representation of democracy.

This is why I believe a blockchain-controlled nonpolitical, nonbullshit grassroot democracy-based voting system will eventually win against all the sensationalist scaremongering the media is spewing, which is doing nothing to improve our chances of surviving the coming humanitarian apocalypse. Only by cleansing our world of its current incompetent, power-hungry political leaders while initiating fair distribution of energy and wealth and giving all races, and in particular our women and youth, an equal share in this system of the future will we stop the inevitable collapse of civilization and our environment as we know it.

Of course, if we all planted a tree, it might help the world become a slightly better place. I mean seven billion trees should help us convert an awful lot of CO2. And since that seems to be our most popular current hysteria next to the COVID-19 pandemic, that might be one way to sway the tipping point in a positive direction. Or would it?

Future change to a compassionate liberal grassroot democracy will obviously have to be enforced and maintained by locally appointed groups of guardians of freedom and against any old political, military, or financial cartel’s attempt at unbalancing the state of equal chance, by moving hard, fast, and even deadly against terrorism or any form of organized greed, murder, and evil. And this without being burdened by the West’s self-satisfied, hypocritical interpretation of democracy where nonaccountable national and international political power is given to any person coming in from the street, provided he or she can collect a few thousand signatures. A system that we try imposing worldwide in spite of it failing us so utterly through greedy misinterpretation and dishonesty by the current 2 percent and their lackeys literally running the world today.

On the subject of sustainability, we are quickly closing in on the tipping point where reversal will no longer be possible. Truths are being kept from us, vital to our future existence on this planet. Luckily, we are seeing a growing group of truth seekers coming out of the woodwork with some scary statistics and some facts that are much worse than the climate hysteria we are being fed by the cartels, in order to avert our attention away from dangers far greater, approaching fast, not averted by just planting a tree or using a bike.

But realizing that just going on about my personal take on the present seemingly irreversible me, me, me narcissistic attitude will be far too boring for anyone with an average reader’s attention span, I decided writing a science-fiction adventure story about nine old friends, their lives, and sixty years’ experiences through history’s most radically changing times and what they could do about the current imbalances given their combined technological brilliance and financial clout, with help from their somewhat-unusual friends.

Finally, since this is supposed to be a kind of what if story, I am giving myself quite a bit of artistic license, for which I will not apologize. Instead, I shall go and plant a tree.

1

Denmark, 2024

It was a typical blustery cold and wet Danish autumn night that met the three Islamic terrorists who had come to kill the old man. Sat in front of a battery of infrared security monitors in the library of his beautiful five-hundred-year-old red brick manor, he followed the progress of the two suicide bombers as they slowly moved through the estate, down the valley meadow toward him, with their observer watching safely from the southern forested ridge. This had been an ongoing cat-and-mouse game that had lasted for years now, but the old man was getting tired of it, so tonight, after receiving the warning from his trusted Ibadi Muslim friends from Oman, of the coming terrorists, it would end here one way or another, and he was prepared.

His twelve-year-old Rottweiler resting on her blanket in front of the blazing fire in the library fireplace was moaning in her sleep. The love between the two was deep, and her death tonight would be a sad loss, but she was now so riddled and pained by cancer he couldn’t prolong her suffering any longer, and in any case would have to ask the vet to put her down within days.

He called quietly to her. Groaning she slowly got to her feet and went to put her head on his lap. With tears dripping onto that beautiful large head, the affection in his voice she understood looking up at him with natural trust in her large brown eyes. She was huge even for her breed, and their friendship had been absolute, but he needed one last service from her this night, which would be fatal.

While scratching her in all her favorite places, he quietly instructed her, touching his back a couple of times for demonstration, before letting her out through one of the library’s doors to the park; he said a sad goodbye to the black shadow silently disappearing into the darkness. Returning to the monitors after closing the old steel shutters but leaving the windows open, he watched the progress of the two suicide bombers and checked on the whereabouts of his trusted Chinese friend Yao Wai Fu, partner and group member for more than fifty years, who was slowly and silently closing in on the northern ridge and the observer. There were now five red figures on his monitors.

The two incredibly stupid brainwashed young Arabs stinking of fear and unwashed bodies while moving on the promise of seventeen young virgins and a better life in their paradise, each harnessed with enough C-4 to pulverize anything within a two hundred yard’s radius, had their thumbs taped to hair-fine triggers. Since Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong, there has been nothing to beat so-called jihadist Islamists at brutality and mass murder; and this would probably continue to build up a world of deadly street fighting throughout cities with growing Islamic populations.

But back to the immediate conflict where the observer up on the ridge was the real culprit. Mustafa Al Jafari, a Shia and a mass murderer of many names and a mixture of much conflicting information, but all of it bad. As a eunuch, by act of earlier Sunni perdition, Mustafa couldn’t freeze his balls off but was not enjoying a typical Danish autumn. Had he not been offered such an inordinate large sum for the murder of the old man here and now, he would have waited to meet up with him in warmer climes. This had after all been an ongoing fight between the two archenemies for such a long time now, started in Lebanon so many years ago. Mustafa needed to ensure that the two gullible, brainwashed idiots got close enough to the manor and the target to do the job before flying back to his secluded and heavily guarded villa and growing bank accounts in Switzerland. Meanwhile, he had prepared for the cold with thermal clothing and a woolly pair of earmuffs. These he would shortly regret using.

The brutal Scandinavian winds swishing through leafless trees made it impossible for the two young suicide candidates to detect any sound from the black Rottweiler approaching fast from behind. It was such a shock to one of them when the huge black shadow landed on his back, he involuntarily pressed his thumb down hard on his trigger, not hitting the ground before the terrifying blast from his C-4 load instantly detonated his sidekicks bomb as well resulting in everything evaporating into microns, leaving a large crater in the field some one thousand meters from the manor where a few shuttered but opened windows cracked and the vibration shook lose some brick and mortar but otherwise left little damage.

Up on the forested ridge on his knees, Mustafa heard only one explosion. He was waiting for the second one as it had been prearranged that the bombers would separate, with one of them holding back in order to move onto the target if the first had not done the job. Again because of the wind and particularly the earmuffs, he was not aware of the presence closing in behind him until suddenly feeling an ice-cold band around his neck tightening with a final click as it locked into place, immediately followed by an almighty jolt from a high-powered cattle prod, his earmuffs were roughly removed with a voice very close saying, I wouldn’t move a muscle if I were you. This titanium collar around your neck can’t be removed and has two built-in syringes. One will put you to sleep instantly. The other is lethal, and I hold the remote to administrate which one it is going to be. Now you will get off your knees and turn around real slow with your hands on your head. I will frisk you for weapons, and you will remember that in my left hand I hold the remote. If you should make the stupid mistake of moving a muscle the wrong way while we do this, I will put you to instant sleep from which you will eventually wake up with the most excruciating headache.

Turning slowly while a strong lamp, placed on the ground, was switched on, Mustafa found himself face-to-face with the largest, most frightening oriental person he had ever seen. Clad in a black turtleneck and black formal suit, he is showing a most impressive highly trained body on top of which is an evil smiling face with merciless obsidian eyes, the scary part, shining in the torchlight. After a thorough search and removal of the usual sneaky weapons brought freely into the country as there were no longer any border controls between EU members, the oriental, after placing the torch in Mustafa’s hand, and stepping back continues, Happy to inform you that your latest murder attempt, with the exception of your two, poor stooges, failed utterly, and right now my boss would like to see you pronto down by the stables, so if you wouldn’t mind, lead the way heading for the lights, and I will follow with the remote and my cattle prod. And do not even try thinking about any funny business as my finger is on the sleep mode which works within two seconds. The oriental continued while pushing him toward the lights just switching on down by the stables.

Off they went at a goodly pace although somewhat reluctantly by Mustafa, occasionally having to receive a jolt from the cattle prod by the huge oriental who seemed to be in a hurry. Circling the large messy crater caused by the C-4 explosions while approaching the stables behind the manor, Mustafa noticed an increasing whiff of the horrible stench of pig’s manure with every step they got closer.

As they turned the corner of one of the stables, strong lights illuminated three main items. Inside one of the pigsties, there had been dug a large hole in the ground. An identical one could be found next to a yellow JCB excavator a fair distance away in the adjoining field both illuminated by strong spotlights. But the most horrible sight was the huge slaughtered Danish boar opened up with its intestines removed resting on its back on top of a stainless abattoir table with all the good internal fats of such a fine animal showing clearly in the direct spotlight.

Mustafa, close to puking and almost passing out with rage and revulsion, failed to notice the brisk arrival of the very tall and slender, white-haired old man, his long-sought enemy and longtime target for extermination. There was a short, quiet pause while the two adversaries exchanged hard looks, before words were spoken.

The old man opened the conversation by quickly coming to the point. "Mr. Jafari, I’m not going to beat about the bush here. You are presently spending the last moments of your miserable life on this earth, and where you are headed is entirely up to you. You have two choices: you can either be sown into the farm’s best breeding boar, Charley here, who has come to the end of his useful life. That being your choice, we would ensure that your head was turned toward his backside with