Chen Chen had delineated an area in the south of the Eco Science City. A construction team arrived and started to build new buildings.

Nonetheless, unlike the residential and commercial areas, this was planned as an industrial zone.

The industrial zone was about 10 kilometers away from the city and it was next to the nuclear power plant under construction. Several electronics factories and mechanical factories had been built here.

At the same time, Blacklight Biotechnology had signed a purchase order with Air Namibia. Blacklight Biotechnology would rebuild Walvis Bay International Airport, which included extending and widening the original runway and adding three more brand-new runways that would be over 1,800 meters in length and over 40 meters in width.

In addition, the reconstruction project also included the expansion of the fuel depot's capacity and the improvement of the water supply, power supply, and other guaranteed facilities.

After the reconstruction, the aerodrome code of the new Walvis Bay International Airport would be upgraded from the original 3C to 4D. It would also be upgraded from the second-largest official airport in Namibia to the largest airport in the country.

It would only be able to accommodate the coming and going of Tara Strategic Resource's dozens of transport planes after more runways had been built.

With the market established by the previous Tara Company, once the transport aircraft went into operation, they immediately received orders from various countries including Somalia, Congo, the Central African Republic, and Sudan. They were to transport all sorts of supplies to these countries that had been ravaged by wars throughout the year.

In addition, the new Tara Company also dispatched armored vehicles and attack helicopters to those areas in the name of humanitarian a.s.sistance, helping the government in suppressing the rebelling forces. Due to its swift, strict organizational discipline and its supreme combat proficiency, it received unanimous praise from customers all over the world.

The previous Tara Private Security Company had created many legendary records of winning more by using less —

For example, during the civil strife in Sierra Leone, the rebel army “Revolutionary United Front” had attacked fiercely, causing the government forces to retreat steadily. The government had no choice but to sign a two-year contract with Tara Company, which then sent 300 mercenaries to a.s.sist the government forces in combat.

Within a few months, the rebel army was wholly defeated and had to sign a peace agreement with the government army.

On one local battlefield only, Tara Company, with just 60 mercenaries, fought off the one-week a.s.sault of the Sierra Leone rebel army which had more than a thousand troops.

In another case, Tara Company once sent a small mercenary force to Rwanda, managing to subdue the crisis in Rwanda within a few days and easily earned tens of millions of USD.

As another example, after the Angolan government had signed a contract with Tara, the local rebels could not withstand the pressure and had to agree to a negotiation. The Angolan government paid 60 million USD for this and the price paid by Tara at the time was only the deaths of 20 mercenaries.

Tara Company had continually created amazing records not because of the elite skills of the company's mercenaries, but because their opponents were too weak.

In the African Continent, the opponents of Tara Company would be a group of ordinary people without professional training. Among them, there were even some children under the age of ten. These children had barely learned how to shoot before they were sent to the frontlines with a rusty AK-47.

On the other hand, Tara Private Security Company were backed by armored vehicles and attack helicopters, and the mercenaries were also retired special forces who had received good military training. In particular, this group of mercenaries adhered to one principle throughout all their battles —

Never step into a combat area without helicopter fire support.

Today, Chen Chen continued wielding his dominance in terms of equipment. The company's old-fas.h.i.+oned armored vehicles and attack helicopters had been packaged and sold to African governments. The new equipment was the K Boomerang K-17 Infantry Fighting Vehicle imported from the North Sea Continent and the Mi-28N Attack Helicopter.

Even putting aside the performance of these weapons produced in the North Sea Continent, at the very least, they were astonis.h.i.+ngly effective in crus.h.i.+ng the native armies in Africa.

In terms of remuneration, Chen Chen did what the previous company had done. If these countries had no money to pay with, they could use diamonds and various rare metals as a subst.i.tute or even the mining rights of rare metal mines.

This was why Chen Chen had reorganized the company into a strategic resource company with three businesses: mining, air transportation, and security. The mining of these resources was much more valuable than any payment in USD.

To cope with the ma.s.sive market in Africa, Chen Chen even sent out the first batch of 50 Black Knights and before the second batch of three hundred Black Knights was born, he added a third batch of Black Knights, numbering over a thousand.

In the Spire Experimental Base, a clone factory was built.

This factory was like a small building, divided into three floors. Each of these floors could accommodate five hundred life incubators. At this point, dozens of scientific researchers throughout the entire factory were constantly bustling about with the help of machines, looking after these fetus-like newborn clones.

Some time ago, Li Lei and Hannibal's technology had another breakthrough. The use of several growth hormones and a sufficient supply of calcium and protein, at a certain fixed ratio, could accelerate the birth of human clones. They would initially have taken a year to attain an adult body — this was cut short to half a year.

In other words, the 1,300 Black Knight clones here could become Chen Chen's new combat force in only half a year at most.

The reason so many clone fighters were needed was that Chen Chen was in a period of rapid development. Thus, construction and development were needed everywhere.

For example, the underground laboratory was originally built by a private construction team from Mainland China. To keep it a secret, those people were guarded 24 hours a day during the construction period and they were not allowed to communicate with the outside world. The price Chen Chen had to pay was, therefore, three times the usual salary plus multiple appeas.e.m.e.nts.

Money was not the issue. The point was that humans were not machines, after all. During the construction process, there were two instances of information leaks. Fortunately, Little X was monitoring the place, so the information was taken down by Little X as soon as it was posted on the Internet. After that, the ones who had leaked the information naturally ended up disappearing from the face of the earth.

Moreover, the longer the work went on, the lower the efficiency of these construction teams. There were even incidents of panic and strikes, and it took a lot of effort to appease everyone.

After the construction of the underground laboratory was completed, all of them underwent a procedure to erase their memories here.

Although the project succeeded in the end, Chen Chen, who had gone through many twists and turns, understood very well that ordinary construction teams were ultimately unreliable.

Furthermore, this was just an underground experimental base with a small amount of engineering. Would it not be even more troublesome if he wanted to build a larger secret military base in the Antarctic continent in the future?

Therefore, Chen Chen was preparing to establish a construction and engineering team by himself. The employees would be the clones who were always hard-working and who did not need any wages while working at peak efficiency.

With these clones, both the efficiency and the confidentiality of the company would be greatly improved. They could be said to be the cheapest labor force. Even if they were attacked, they could pick up weapons and instantly transform themselves into deadly killing machines.

These were the Black Knights that, in Chen Chen's plan, would become an engineering unit as well as a combat force.