Reborn in 1950: Shorting the Federal Reserve at the Start

The air in the Pentagon's war room seemed frozen by liquid nitrogen, so silent it was suffocating; even the tireless large ventilation fan seemed to be holding its breath.

General Wilson's hands were still trembling, and the red secure telephone receiver hung on the edge of the table, swaying helplessly like a hanged prisoner.

"General?"

A staff officer cautiously approached, holding a supplementary plan for the Inchon Landing, "The allocation of supplies to the front lines..."

"Mix my ass!"

Wilson whirled around, his eyes bloodshot and menacing, like a bull cornered. He grabbed the elegant coffee cup with the U.S. Army insignia from the table and slammed it against the huge world map on the wall.

"Snapped!"

The porcelain shards shattered, and scalding brown liquid slowly flowed down the bald eagle on the map, a symbol of American authority, like a winding, ugly scar.

"Gone! All gone!"

Wilson braced his hands on the table, veins throbbing in his neck, his voice hoarse as if his throat were filled with sand. "Oak Ridge just reported that the K-25 plant, along with thousands of centrifuges, has completely evaporated! Add to that the Lockheed production line that vanished last night, the Federal Reserve's gold... Gentlemen, this isn't theft, this is stripping us bare!"

The command center erupted in chaos. The generals exchanged bewildered glances, their faces a mixture of absurdity and terror.

"That's impossible! General, that's tens of thousands of tons of equipment, not a few pocket watches!"

An air force major general stood up, his face filled with disbelief. "Unless the Soviets invented a space portal, or aliens want to use our centrifuges to replace the engines of their flying saucers!"

"I hope it's aliens too! At least aliens won't use enriched uranium to bomb our White House!"

Wilson slumped into a chair, unbuttoned his top button, and gasped for breath. "Investigate! Where are the FBI agents? What's the Department of Homeland Security doing? With all this commotion, they haven't even caught a ghost?"

"Reporting, General, FBI Special Agent Smith has arrived."

The guards at the gate shouted loudly.

A middle-aged man in a gray trench coat, with a stern face, strode in. He carried a thin brown paper document bag in his hand, and his eyes were as sharp as a scalpel.

Smith walked up to the round table, and without saluting, simply threw several black and white photographs onto the table.

"General, although it is hard to admit, we may indeed be facing a 'ghost'."

Wilson grabbed the photo.

The first picture shows Lockheed's empty workshop, the second shows the Federal Reserve's bare vault, and the third shows Oak Ridge's concrete floor, which looks like it's been licked by a dog.

"I want the suspect! Not these damn photos of empty spaces!" Wilson roared.

"The suspect is here."

Smith pointed to the last photo.

It was a blurry surveillance photo, with a street corner near New York Harbor in the background. Under the dim streetlights, a figure in a trench coat was walking quickly past, seemingly holding half a half-eaten sandwich in his hand.

"Who is this?"

Shen Jinghong, a double PhD in aerodynamics and mechanical engineering from MIT, is hailed as an "Oriental genius".

Smith spoke quickly, with an undeniable calmness: "We compared the timelines of all the crime scenes. He appeared in New York Harbor at 8 p.m. last night; Lockheed was robbed at 9:30 p.m.; the Federal Reserve issued an alert at 11 p.m. And just this morning, someone saw this figure on a highway in Tennessee."

"That's impossible!"

An aide beside him retorted, "It's over a thousand kilometers from New York to Tennessee. How could he possibly make a round trip in just a few hours? Unless he can fly!"

"That's precisely the most terrifying part."

Smith narrowed his eyes, his fingers tapping lightly on the blurry photo of the figure's back. "How absurd it may sound, but after we checked all the Chinese scientists in New York last night, his was the only one whose whereabouts were completely blank. And..."

He paused for a moment, then dropped a bombshell.

He bought a ticket for the INS President Wilson three days later. Destination: Hong Kong.

Upon hearing the word "Hong Kong," General Wilson's pupils contracted sharply.

Hong Kong is just a stepping stone; everyone knows where the final destination is.

"You mean, this Shen Jinghong, all by himself, emptied half of our industrial system in one night, and is planning to take all that stuff back to that red China?"

Wilson's voice trembled, but this time not from fear, but from a chilling sense of impending loss of dominance.

If those blueprints, those machine tools, and that enriched uranium really ended up in the hands of that awakening Eastern superpower…

"My God, the consequences would be a hundred times worse than if the Soviets had invaded!"

Wilson jumped up, grabbed Smith by the collar, and spat in his face.

"Block it! Block it immediately!"

"I want New York to become an ironclad fortress! Ports, train stations, airports, even bus stations—set up checkpoints everywhere! Every fly trying to leave America must be checked for sex!"

"Especially that Shen Jinghong!"

Wilson's eyes were contorted with rage, as if he wanted to devour someone. "I want to see him alive or dead! We absolutely cannot let him board that ship! Even if we have to nuke New York Harbor, we cannot let him bring back even a single screw to China!"

"yes!"

The entire command center instantly sprang into action, with phones ringing incessantly and countless orders flying in all directions via radio waves.

……

New York, Manhattan streets.

The first rays of morning sunlight pierced through the gaps between the skyscrapers, illuminating the streets. But today's New York lacked its usual hustle and bustle; instead, it was filled with the piercing sirens of police cars and the heavy clatter of military boots.

Military jeeps roared past, and armed military police set up machine guns at the intersection, subjecting every passerby to rigorous checks.

Shen Jinghong sat on a bench by the roadside, holding a newspaper she had just bought. Her hat brim was pulled low, covering most of her face.

He glanced at the military police officers in the distance who were searching the bags of passersby one by one, and a playful smile appeared on his lips.

"The reaction was pretty quick. Looks like those old men at the Pentagon have finally woken up."

He took out a hot dog he had just bought from a roadside stall from his system space, took a bite, and although the taste was just average, he was in a good mood.

"A city-wide lockdown? Should I feel honored by this?"

Shen Jinghong raised his wrist and glanced at the high-precision mechanical watch he had taken from Oppenheimer's laboratory.

It's 9:00 AM now. There are still two and a half days until the "President Wilson" departs.

Logically, he should have found a mouse hole to hide in or tried to sneak out of the city at this point. But the word "hide" simply didn't exist in Shen Jinghong's dictionary.

Since we've already alerted these guys, we might as well make a lasting impression on them.

"We have supplies, we have weapons, and we have money."

Shen Jinghong swallowed the last bite of the hot dog, patted the bread crumbs off his hands, and turned his gaze to the magnificent building with its huge dome a few blocks away.

Columbia University Library.

It contains a vast amount of literature on metallurgy, chemical engineering, ballistics, and even nuclear physics. In this era without the internet, those yellowed papers are the sparks of civilization.

Giving a man a fish is not as good as teaching him how to fish. It's not enough to just bring back the equipment; we need to take with us the generations of knowledge that enabled the creation of that equipment.

"Since you've blocked the road, you don't want me to leave."

Shen Jinghong stood up, pulled down the brim of her hat, and strode towards the temple of knowledge against the flow of panicked people.

"Then in these last moments, I'll turn everything in your heads into Chinese culture too."