Land of Promise by James Wesley Rawles Page A

sit-ups, and ride stationary bikes at the GlobalMAP gym. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, they went for brisk-paced walks (and later, jogs) at Inverleith Park in good weather, or at the St. James Centre indoor shopping mall in bad weather. After the second week, Meital joined them for many of their workouts. She was at the gym so often that many people thought she was a company employee. At Meital’s suggestion, they later added evening Krav Maga martial arts classes at the Meadowbank Sports Centre to their schedule.
    On Tuesday of the third week of their exercise program, Rick and Alan were surprised to see Harry Heston at Inverleith Park. He jogged up to them in a nondescript black jogging suit that had just barely perceptible bulges at the small of his back, obvious to Rick and Alan as a pistol and a magazine pouch.
    Falling into pace alongside them, Heston said, “Gentlemen, I have some very promising news: I’ve spent the last week as a fisher of men. I’ve already secured eight preliminary Letters of Agreement from investors and donors, and I have another dozen LOAs in the works. These are all from Christians, some of them in the corporate world, in half a dozen countries. Most importantly, many of them are involved in construction or communications: road building, monolithic domes, underground construction, well drilling, and so forth. One of the big catches was the CEO of Kim Rhee Photovoltaics and Hydrogen, in Korea. He is matching my stake: a billion NEuros. I’ll get hard copies of the completed LOAs for you in a day or two, and the rest should be available in another week. For now, they are to be kept in strict confidence, and maintained in hard copy only. God bless you, guys.”
    With that, Heston turned off on a side path and resumed a slow running pace. Alan and Rick shared high five palm slaps and grinned. Alan said, “If this truly is God’s will, then all of the pieces will continue to fall into place.”
    They had 19 LOAs in hand eight days later. They were all written generically to “Homeland Partners” with a post office box address in Edinburgh. Judging by the way that some of them were worded, it was apparent that Heston had revealed to at least some of the investors and donors that the plan might involve East Africa.
    Seeing all of these, Rick said, “I didn’t know we had either a name or an address.” The LOAs included:
    1 Billion NEuros for a photovoltaic farm, hydrogen production and storage, and a hydrogen fuel cell facility, from KRPH in Seoul, Korea.
    1 Billion NEuros for a mint and vault storage facility, from Harry Heston personally.
    An open-ended water well and natural gas well drilling agreement with a 400,000 NEuro initial line of credit, from Newton Bores in the Transvaal region of South Africa.
    A road building commitment from Solid Rock Builders (SRB) of Perth, Australia. This agreement extended credit for the construction of 450,000 NEuros’ worth of roads, bridges, water pipelines, and culverts “to be repaid at a later date, by voluntary subscription, by those who benefit from the infrastructure.”
    A gift of 25,000 NEuros worth of Iridium satellite phones and 130,000 NEuros’ worth of pre-paid air time, from IntelliSAT of Florida.
    A commitment from Caron Caves Construction (CCC) in Michigan to provide an underground house building crew, a tracked excavator, forms, moisture barrier materials, and 27 sets of proven construction plans, all “at cost for the first 12 months, and at prevailing rates thereafter.”
    A commitment from Nairobi Concrete of Kenya to start an open-pit limestone mine, build two concrete batch plants, and provide 12 concrete mixer and concrete pumper trucks, within two years.
    MobileWorks of Finland, Limited, promised a network of photovoltaically-powered cell phone/Wi-Fi towers with a 580,000 NEuro line of credit, “to be eventually repaid by mobile subscribers.”
    Monolithic Domes International (MDI) of Texas promised to provide