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6
Porto Grande
At one time
the port might have been considered large, particularly to the slavers heading west from Africa who came here to lay in fresh water and supplies. Situated on the island of Sao Vincente, on the wide arc of an old volcanic crater called Mindelo, the port was the reason the Cape Verde Islands thrived in earlier days. But now it would seem small by modern standards, a backwater waystation still drawing modest trans Atlantic traffic. The two small quays on the port were enough to accommodate three or four commercial ships at one time, and the captain of the Argos had radioed ahead to be certain his berthing would be available that night.
There were only two other ships in port that day, the Kristina Regina, a 4300 ton cruise ship of
Finnish registry with a maximum capacity of perhaps 350 people, and the Holland Americas Line Rotterdam, a much bigger cruise ship that was slated to depart three hours before Argos made port, taking most of the tourist traffic with it. That was just the way Captain Iverson preferred his visits: quiet night berthings, on low traffic days, where the sleek lines of his vessel would not draw much attention from either locals or tourists.
He preferred things quiet and unobtrusive because that was the way his company exec preferred them—no
fuss, no bother, just a quick in and out, with a few deliveries to the corporate offices that had been established here some months ago, things that would be delivered verbally, so as not to leave any trail on
paper, or within the digital airwaves that could be intercepted by curious ears. Security was a primary concern in the global environment today, and Fairchild & Company took it very seriously.
Fairchild was a small independent oil company owned by the doughty lady who gave it her name. Elena Fairchild
was aboard tonight, riding in the flagship of her small trading fleet and dining in the executive cabin where she was entertaining a very special guest. So fuss and bother were certainly not on the menu tonight, and
Iverson had taken precautions to be certain everything would go smoothly. He knew the captain of the Rotterdam, and had radioed ahead to be certain she would slip away from the islands by 18:00 hours.
“Giving me the bums rush, James?” the voice had come back. “Well, we’ll be underway
by 17:00 hours, if I can be satisfied that I’ve all my eggs in the basket.” Rotterdam was a massive ship, nearly 60,000 tons, and with five decks of passengers to look after. “Not
much action on the island tonight, however, so I don’t foresee any problems—over.”
“Great,” said Iverson. “Then if you run her up to twenty knots for half an hour you’ll
scoot merrily out to sea, well before we break your horizon—and I’ve a case of Pinot Noir for you that I’m sure will add a bit of sparkle to your table—over.”
“Ah, Jimmy, twenty knots it is, my friend. You can drop it on the sky deck! I’ll have
crew out waiting. Shall we say 21:00 hours—over?”
“We’ll be there,” said Iverson. “Over and Out.” Then he turned to his second in
command, and inquired about the schedule that evening. “When is that helo due in from Dakkar?”
“Very soon, sir. Radar has a contact inbound now, about 200 miles out.” Commander Dean was all
business, a lean, young officer that Iverson had plucked from the US Coast guard after his first tour of duty. Dean had been listening to the radio call with amusement. “Shall I have a package prepared,
sir?”
“Right you are, Commander.” Said Iverson. “Nice and quiet, mind you. Just tell the pilot
that Fairchild wants a delivery made. And tell him to be timely about it.”
“Aye, Aye, sir.”
“I’d better get down to my cabin to dress.” Captain Iverson would be meeting the inbound
guest, and escorting him to the Fairchild dining hall.
“Black mess jacket with tails?” Commander Dean inquired casually.
“Not tonight,” said Iverson. “It will be white with black bow tie. Fairchild still thinks
it’s summer, even though it’s nigh on to year’s end. Tropical waters have this effect on her, eh?”
“And what the lady wants…” Dean began.
Iverson’s smile was enough of an answer as he left.
“Captain off the bridge,” the boatswain called.
“Right you are,” said Iverson, returning a salute as he went.
Some time later he has cleaned up and donned his dress whites, complete with gold braid work on the cap. He
loved the uniform, the cut of the waistcoat, the crisp contrast of the badges and insignia with their solid bright colors. For formal occasions, his captain’s bars moved from their usual position on the sleeve
to shoulder boards, to be just a bit less obtrusive while dining. It was a way of smoothing out the marshal tones, adding a bit of civility to the job from time to time. But, no matter how he dressed, he
remained a military man underneath, just as his ship remained a dangerous and highly effective fighting vessel, no matter how her lines had been smoothed in the overhaul.
He was Captain of the Argos, Gaelic for the “Watcher,” and his charge was a fleet of seven
big company tankers that worked routes from the African coast and back to their home ports at Terminal 11 in Barrow, and Milford Haven. Fairchild Enterprises did a healthy business bringing fuel to the UK, and it
was getting healthier all the time. Elena Fairchild was a meticulous master, and after a company tanker had been caught in the middle of a running gunfight between Ivory Coast pirates and the Nigerian coast Guard,
she had decided that 30,000 tons of very expensive crude oil needed a little looking after. While all her ships were double hulled MARPOL tankers, a few armor piercing rounds in the wrong place could make for some
very unpleasant sailing. She wanted protection, particularly since she strained to acquire her largest tankship, the Princess Royal, with three times the capacity of any other vessel in her fleet. Things
Elena Fairchild wanted, were usually delivered in short order—with gold ribbons in the bargain.
The delivery that had fulfilled this particular desire, one for safe passage on seas that were becoming ever
more dangerous in a world scraping for every drop of oil it could find, had been the Argos. That was not her original name, but in spite of the fact that most seamen thought it bad luck to ever rename a ship,
Iverson was not superstitious. The sleek lines of his newly fitted ship had been designed by Russian naval architects in the late 1960s, and when first launched as the Kirov, she was the bane of Western naval
planners for decades. The ship was renamed once before, designated Admiral Ushakov much later in her history. Perhaps the accident with her nuclear reactors had been the fate she was doomed to suffer for that transgression, thought Iverson. Laid up in 1990 and removed from active service, the proud vessel languished while the Russians haggled over how to find the money to refit her. In the end, it was decided to scrap her, and scavenge the equipment for other cruisers of the same class.
The old Admiral was sold to a Norwegian firm contracting to do the cleanup on the reactor, and disposal of the
spent fuel rods, a project costing some $52 million US dollars. After the attack on her tanker, Elena Fairchild went looking for a fighting ship to set her mind at ease. She paid the Norwegian scrappers for the
still seaworthy hull, and had the ship towed to her company facilities at Port Erin on the Isle of Man. There it was converted to the sleek new vessel that Iverson captained now, renamed the Argos,
another transgression. He wondered what the price would be for that one day, and hoped the ship would not be asked to pay while he stood the watch.
But Argos was a ship fully capable of taking care of herself. Iverson was standing on the deck of one of the most dangerous battlecruisers ever to sail the high seas, and that thought always put just a bit more starch in his collar. All the old Russian armament that had made the ship so deadly had been removed, of course, but Fairchild Enterprises was a well diversified company. One of her subsidiary ventures was an arms manufacturing operation servicing the Royal Navy. Argos was therefore fitted out with a company modified, and vastly upgraded, version of the Sea Dart air defense system, advanced radars, and two 4.5” Mark 8 guns, well disguised and fully retractable below the fore and aft deck on a clever hydraulic lift system. She even had sophisticated sonar equipment, anti torpedo defense systems and, for some serious longer range punch, Fairchild had pressed a new ship-to-ship missile prototype into sea trials on the Argos shortly after her maiden voyage. It was a sea borne version of the deadly Russian Sunburn missile, a sea skimmer that would close on targets at well over mach 2.5.
Largely gutted and completely rebuilt above the waterline, the ship now housed corporate offices at sea, and with lavishly appointed executive cabins, a full dining room, library, data center and hanger space for three helos. To round things off, Ms. Fairchild insisted on a small company of her very own security men, all ex-military types sworn to their new posts in a secret ritual that none would ever openly discuss. This 120 man contingent sailed with the ship at all times, and they were outfitted with a small flotilla of fast boats for offshore and riverine service. Dressed always in commando black, the men were formidable presence when deployed on any security mission requiring their particular talents.
As he stepped out on the aft helo deck Iverson noted that he was a good match for his ship, where a liberal
use of naval white now covered her newly tapered lines. The more military colors, blues, grays, hazard schemes and dazzle paint, were not to be her dress code, ever again. Argos was wearing dress whites in the service of Elena Fairchild now, and she would have to mind her manners in the bargain, just like the captain and crew. But a ship never really could change her true temperament, no matter how she was rigged. Iverson could still feel the raw strength of the metal under his feet, the surging power her new engines were capable of, and he knew, more than any other, just how indelicate his vessel could be if it ever came to a brawl on the high seas in the service of the company—which was why Argos had been built in the first place.
It was a dangerous world out there, on both land and sea now that the long discussion of Hubbert’s Peak
had finally resolved itself into an ever more serious decline in oil production figures. Peak oil was a reality that was self-evident now. All the world’s major fields were in decline, Gawahr in Saudi
Arabia, Burgon in Kuwait, Cantarell in Mexico, the Russian fields administered by Lukos, the Caspian Basin, and forget the North Sea. Britain, once a net exporter of oil, was now slowly starting to feel like Japan,
relying more and more on imports.
The Royal Navy ain’t what she used to be, Iverson thought. The sun had long since set on the British
Empire as well—it was setting, in fact, on the American Empire at this very moment, though you couldn’t get a neocon worth his salt to admit that. This is why small producers and shippers like
Fairchild were becoming more and more important in the service to the Crown. They filled and guarded the oil tankers, and brought the energy home to a still gluttonous society that was just starting to catch a
glimmer of the truth about the world’s energy situation.
Now there was finally talk of alternative energy systems like wind and solar, even nuclear power again. It was
going to be some long while before we could do much of anything about all that, and that little interval, a period writer James Kunstler called “The Long Emergency,” would see a great deal of strife play
out. Havoc would be more to the point, thought Iverson.
But for now, decked out in his dress whites, Iverson had more pleasant things to consider. It was nigh on four
bells, eighteen hundred hours, six PM, well into the mid watch. The Rotterdam was long gone, its captain probably still thinking about that case of Pinot Noir. The Argos had slipped into the harbor for it’s brief visit and the helo from Dakkar was ready to land. His guest would be waiting, the dining hall would be receiving soon, and he thought he had better get moving.
7
Bunker Bust
The phone jangled
him awake, and Ben Flack swore under his breath as he fumbled for the handset on his desk. He had dozed off on the night watch again, unable to quell the numbing fatigue that seemed to sap away his strength and clarity of mind. The hours of scheduling, number crunching, and report generation were punctuated by a rising tide of rumors and ever more threatening news coming out of Port Harcourt. The militants were on the move again in the Niger delta, and they were going to make his life miserable. He picked up the receiver and lodged it in the crook of his shoulder as he groped for his coffee mug.
“Flack,” he said dully, still half drugged with sleep.
“Ben? We’ve got another problem,” came a voice. It was Wade Hanson, his Crowley
representative supervising the rig set. Flack looked at his watch, mentally calculating where the rig should be by now, a full 24 hours after the move was started by the American Salvor and her escort of tugs.
“They taking pot shots at you again?” There had been two separate incidents already, rifle fire
from the thick mangrove swamps along the river’s edge. Thankfully no one had been hurt, though one of the Invader class tugs would be needing a new paint job and side window pane after the operation was
complete.
“Haven’t you heard yet?” The voice on the line was more urgent. “They hit the pipeline again.”
That was just what he needed now, thought Flack, another pipeline explosion, with all the bad press, not to
mention the cleanup. “Another bunker bust?” he asked. The constant pipeline bunkering by smugglers often caused minor explosions and fires along the line. They were a nuisance, like the smugglers
themselves, but seldom fatal to his flow chart numbers.
“Worse than that,” said Hanson. “They hit the line across the Opobu Channel.
Pretty good rip, from what I hear. I just got word myself on the radio.”
“Yeah, they fired on some of our guys out on the Cawthorne Channel yesterday. It’s the same old bullshit.”
“This may be something more, Ben. The violence is spreading. Word is they cleared out a village
before they blew line, but they still pulled at least eight bodies out after the blast. They used dynamite this time. This wasn’t some two bit bunkering that went bad. These guys mean business. They’re
burning villages up river, Agbao-kwani, Asarama-Andoni, Ama-Lagos. MOPOL stopped them at Peterside, but they’ll just go somewhere else.”
“So what else is new,” said Flak. “You still on schedule?”
“We’re starting our set now. Bottom looks good and we’ll be lowering the barge in a few
hours. Should have that puppy floated out from under your baby by six PM. That is if we don’t get any more trouble from the militants. Anyone starts shooting at us and I’m pulling my people out.. Home
office got wind of that pipeline blow and gave me an earful.”
“Shit,” Flack swore audibly this time. “Look, Wade, I need that rig set tight. You hang in
there, will ya? These guys get a hair up their ass for two or three days and then go home again. This business will all blow over and we’ll get things moving again on the numbers. But I need that rig set, you
hear me?”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Hanson. “But you may have more on your hands here
than my problems. That was a bad blow on the Opobu Channel. Engineers don’t think they can keep the fields up with that kind of pressure leakage.”
Another phone was ringing, pulling at Flack’s anxious attention. “Let me worry about the
channel,” he said quickly. “Look, I’ll see if I can get MOPOL out your way in case things get hot. You just set that rig, OK?”
“I’ll call you in six hours.”
“Right.” Flack reached for the other phone, relieved to still its insistent ring. It was more bad
news. Hanson had been right on target. The field engineers were shutting down Opobo Channel, as well as the adjacent Diebu Creek and Nun River fields, all in an effort to suppress the pipeline fire. He leaned
heavily on his desk and pulled up a production chart on his monitor. Forget his 20,000 barrel shortfall now. The three fields involved were going to cause an additional loss of 170,000 barrels per day of crude
production. The migraine he had been fighting off for days now was ripening. He could just hear the calls that would soon be coming in from Bollinger Canyon, not to mention Merrill Lynch, Societe General, Bank of
America, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and God knows who else. These were the money men who had heavy investments in the Nigerian Delta, with big plans for a new LNG
facility at the important Tinto Brass Terminal on the coast.
With crude production down, and subject to heavy refinery bottlenecks, the multi-nationals had been shifting
more and more investment to LNG, hoping to lever that fuel source in to help feed the home heating markets in the states. But LNG sites were a hundred times more volatile than facilities handling crude. He imagined
the chaos that would ensue from a major LNG tank explosion, and his headache throbbed to a new level of intensity.
Mudman came on watch a minute later, scratching his stomach and yawning away sleep. “What’s all the noise?”
“Opobu Channel is down.” Flack gave him the news.
“Christ, Nun River too? This sounds bad, Bennie.”
“No shit.”
“Well what about that rig set?”
“It’s still on schedule. But Hanson says the violence is spreading. Better tell the rig boss to break out his sidearm.”
“Sidearm? A lot of good that will do us if the locals want to play patty cake out this way.
Where’s MOPOL? I thought they were going to tamp this shit down.”
“They’re good for nothing idiots,” said Flack, his frustration evident. “This crap may
get out of hand this time, Mudman. We may need a little more help than MOPOL can provide. I’m going to see about getting some Mercs out here—off the record of course. Maybe some muscle from Blackwater
would even the odds for us a bit, or the Timmermann Group. You tell the rig boss like I said.”
“You got it.” Mudman mimicked the firing of a pistol, blew the imaginary smoke from his index
finger, and slouched off to the operations deck to pass on the word.
Flack settled into his chair, staring at the sheaf of production numbers he was about to fax to the Bollinger
Boys. He scratched his head with a shrug, and penciled in a notation at the top of the first page. “Data assumes no facility damage, and relies on normal field flows. See news feed attached.”
The news feed was the one intangible thing in Flack’s world. He could handle everything they did at sea,
and below ground where the rigs were working. It was that annoying news feed, those “events above the ground” as his colleagues called them, that always posed the real problem. His Fax might buy him
about twenty four hours, which was just the time he would need to get that rig set and see Crowley’s tugs safely out to sea again. The Bollinger Boys would Google up the news on the pipeline explosion, and
then wait for his next report. In the meantime, he thought, he had better get a call in to Timmermann and his merry band of mercenaries.
There was a strange feeling in the air now, an uneasy pre-dawn quiet that was about to ignite. There were
pipelines all over the delta; fragile collection points, flow stations, rigs, and well sites. And it was all sitting on a lot of flammable oil, with bands of hit and run militants sniping, burning and making ever
more threatening statements in the local news outlets.
The statements soon coalesced into an organized resistance called the “Movement for the Emancipation of
the Niger Delta,” or MEND. The group was stiffened by a thin leadership structure, mainly working to funnel arms and cash into local dissident groups at first, but eventually creating something more
homogenous, giving it a banner and public voice in the media as well. Their stated aim was to totally destroy Nigeria’s capacity to export oil, and to that end they had already walked a quarter of the mile.
Exports were down sharply as MEND tactics became more sophisticated each year.
The raids were more frequent, lightning quick speed boat attacks by well armed men wearing red bandanas and
black scarves to mask their faces. There were thousands of men like this available in the poverty stricken Delta Region, all easy hires for a day, a week, a single operation or more extended campaign. They filtered
down from the general chaos in the desolate northern regions of the country, where roving bands the locals called ‘Gober Men’ haunted the parched landscape.
Last year, before Flack’s watch, Shell had to abandon facilities producing over 600,000 barrels per day,
under relentless pressure from MEND guerillas. When the attacks finally quieted down Shell engineers were sent in to reclaim the rigs and platforms, only to find much of the equipment was simply gone. In the area
near the Forcados terminal alone, 435 miles of pipeline disappeared, disassembled by marauding gangs of dissidents, loaded onto barges, offloaded onto Ukrainian transport ships hovering offshore like vultures, and
then delivered to Chinese scrap metal dealers. There was always someone ready to feed on the ruin of another’s misfortune, to turn a quick profit. It was literally a corporate world of dog eating dog.
“This business will get out of hand,” Flack murmured aloud. The Saudis would never leave their
rigs in a situation like this. Here he was about to hire on Mercs for protection that his own company, his own damn government, and all the investment companies, had failed to provide—let alone the fledgling
Nigerian government. They were so busy rousting people out of inner city neighborhoods that there was little muscle in the Nigerian Army to enforce general order in the Delta. Minister Pachiko, the superintendent of
police, set up a group called the Special Task Force on Pipeline Vandalization, but it had done little good. Well, they’ll learn where their bread is buttered in time, just like the folks back home. Things
were tightening up in the Gulf, in the Delta, and they’ve been tight everywhere else for over a year now. Another 170,000 barrels per day off the market would not play well on Wall Street—and Wall Street
had little stomach for more bad news these days.
The next phone call confirmed Flack’s worst misgivings. News was hitting the AP wire hard that morning.
Royal Dutch Shell, the region’s biggest developer, was reporting that the main pipelines serving their “Bonny Light” field were hit again, and now off line. The damage was cascading all through the
delta. Shell was taking over 650,000 barrels of daily production off line!
He squinted out of the foredeck pane and looked into the grey dawn. There was a char of black smoke smudged
across the sky, probably the pipeline fire that the crews were trying to control. While he was out here on his rig running numbers and looking for a few men with guns to safeguard the traffic, the folks back home
were lining up at the shopping malls for the blowout pre-Christmas specials that were sucking in the last of their dollars. Americans would shop until the Chinese workers who made the goods they bought would
drop. They had been down and out with the recession the last few years, but liberal defaults on credit cards had freed up enough cash to keep the wheels turning—at least for those who still had jobs.
Unemployment was “officially” only 10.7%, but Flack, and anyone who could read, knew that the real numbers were closer to double that figure.
Perhaps the old consumer society could keep from choking once again this Christmas. It would die off
altogether soon enough. Maybe not this year, he thought, but they would all learn where their bread was buttered as well—and sooner than even he could imagine.
8
Bad Metaphors
Aaron Brock
had an annoying habit when he typed. He wasn’t sure just how it started, but was suspicious of that odd split keyboard Microsoft introduced years ago. It looked so ultra modern, and touted such ergonomic benefits, that he was one of the very first to find and buy one, for Aaron loved computers, and everything about them. The love affair was an old one, dating back to the very first PC he could get his hands on, the venerable Commodore 64. He had taken the amazing Megahertz ride through successive upgrades, moving from 10 to 33 to 40 to 66 to 90 to 133, and on it went.
Now he was the proud owner of the relatively new “Ranger III” computer system: 6 Gig resident memory, double bay 48-speed DVD drive, 500 Gigs on the hard disk, color laser jet printer, HD flat screen LCD monitor, and a very fast Internet connection. The 4 Gigahertz quad microprocessor was the top of the line for his day. The computer system itself, if not state of the art, was certainly a “state of the marketplace” unit. In two or three years you could buy something better, but not today. Aaron spent long hours with his Ranger and had developed an almost symbiotic relationship with the machine since he first strained his bank account to bring it home.
Given his intellectual bent and native introversion, it was no surprise to find out one day that he had become somewhat of a “hacker”—a devoted and accomplished computer user. He quickly mastered the art of programming and soon mated the computer to virtually every other interest in his life, primarily his writing, a craft he labored at with a real passion these last five years.
Now he sat at the keyboard, annoyed again as always, by the frustrating fact that he just never learned to type correctly. Whenever he typed “the” his dominant right hand was too quick for it’s partner, and he ended up hitting the space bar with his thumb before his left hand could tap the final “e” of the word. The result was “th e” every time he typed the word, and he constantly found himself backspacing to correct the error. A few months later he began to notice the same thing happening with “and,” which became “an d” every time he typed it. And the most annoying of all was his consistent rendering of “ing” as “ign.”
Everything else about the six-fingered hunt and peck typing style he had fallen into was fine, and he could stroke off over 60 words per minute when he really got rolling. The editing afterwards, however, was becoming more and more laborious, because Aaron had a lot to say. He was a fledgling novelist, with stacks of unpublished manuscripts lying about his flat on the upper east side of Portland. Beyond that he maintained two web sites, wherein he voiced his lengthy comments, with blog like regularity, on the entire political and social landscape of the country. Those annoying gaps in his articles and mistyped participles slowed him down considerably, but they would never stop him.
Yet for all his ingrained habits, his typing errors were the least of his worries. It was his editorials that got him into more trouble than anything else. He was decidedly ensconced in the progressive left of the political spectrum, and he let the world know it each month with commentary that was far too long and far to depressing for most net readers to endure. He had a penchant for incisive prose, and took eloquently written stands against the late conservative based Bush government, particularly its foreign policy, which he saw as little more than a resource grab for the world’s dwindling oil and gas supplies.
Dane Kyle, his friend and editor, struggled to reign in his excessive verbosity, and impose a modicum of style on Aaron’s work, but often with some frustration.
“You are not going to use that Titanic thing you e-mailed me last week,” Dane had said during their last phone conference.
“Why not?” said Aaron. “The Titanic is a perfect metaphor for the state we find ourselves in now—a supposedly unsinkable ship, agleam on the icy waters of the world; the socially stratified passengers asleep in their cabins, with the rich on the upper decks and the poor folks down in steerage. They’re all on the same ship, and blissfully ignorant of the danger ahead—”
“Let me guess,” Dane interrupted, “an ice berg you’re going to call Peak Oil.”
“Exactly!” Aaron exulted. “It’s perfect!”
“It’s perfectly absurd.”
“You just hate my extended metaphors, that’s all.”
“No, that’s not it at all,” Dane tried to reason. “Look, it’s not your message I’m quarreling with. Hell, You’re preaching to the choir here, and you know I’m as aware of the energy issues you raise as anyone. It’s just that—“
“Well, what then?”
“Well I’m tired of all this negativity. It’s one thing to point out problems, but you have to get beyond that to solutions if your writing is to have any merit in the long run. Everything you publish has this warning edge to it.”
Aaron sighed, “I’m working through all this in my thinking right now. It’s frustrating! You see, its just like those first moments on the Titanic, right after the bump that a few people heard when the ship first sideswiped the berg.”
“Oh, Lord, you do go on and on with this, don’t you?” The frustration in Dane’s voice was apparent, but Aaron pressed forward.
“Hear me out, Dane. Think of it this way: you’ve been down below decks to see the water topping the bulkheads, and carrying the inrushing flood tide deeper into the ship. You return to the promenade, hear the band playing, see the card players, note the absence of any official announcement of grave peril, the lack of preparation, the crew not beat to quarters and readying the boats, no sign of warning flares aloft, and you are aghast! See what I mean? America is simply not being told that there is real serious trouble ahead. Preserving the status quo is the order of the day. All we get is this non-stop drivel on the TV and the exhortation to keep shopping. What would you do if you came up on the foredeck, knowing what was happening to the ship, and saw this mind numbing ignorance?”
“What would I do? I’d cut that nonsense and just stay with your argument. Big X, right through the paragraph, that’s what I’d do. Come on, Aaron. You can be devastating and truly concise when you want to be, but you burden your prose too much with all this imagery. The reader has to cross this metaphorical bridge to get what you are saying. Thomas Friedman does the same damn thing with his Flat World and Lexus and Olive Tree. He can’t say anything without wrapping it up in these clever little extended metaphors with analogies for ribbon and bad allusions for a bow.”
“Great metaphor!” said Aaron. “See what I mean? Some people just take the world in visually like that. Their internal mental state literally sees the image and ascribes meaning to it with a different part of the brain, like the imagery of a dream.”
“You’re not going to start with this bicameral mind stuff now, are you? My point is this: there’s a place for imagery, and a way to use it effectively—hell, I write poetry, and that language is supercharged with the evocative power of imagery. But when you insert too much of that into your essay style I get the odd feeling I’m reading fiction instead of fact, and that’s not a reaction you want to elicit. You don’t have to lead your reader by the nose like that. Anyone on your web site will be intelligent enough to follow your arguments without the Titanic sinking in the middle of the piece, for God’s sake. So you do a great job of yammering about the damn iceberg—now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well are you going to just stand on the foredeck and ring the warning bell? Hell, if you think this ship is in trouble, and I know you do, then get out there and start lashing the deck chairs together into something that will float!” Dane handed him his own metaphor back again, nicely extended to the place he was trying to move his friend all along. “See what I mean?” he finished. “You’ve got to get beyond the warning phase to a real solution. That takes this whole thing to another level for you and gives you some real credibility.”
“OK, I hear you,” said Aaron. “We’ve been over this before and I promise you I’ll do some editing and make some cuts.” But Aaron found that a daunting thing to do when he wrote. Every time he re-read an article, he ended up typing in a little more here, and a little more there, until the editing session had resulted in adding another 500 words to the piece. This is why, after all was said and done, he desperately needed a mind like Dane Kyle in his corner. It was Dane’s no nonsense approach to style that kept Aaron on an ever evolving path in his writing pastime.
Aaron had an enormous creative drive, good discipline and a lot of very interesting ideas. He was enormously productive, but he knew he tended to get into repetitive ruts at times with his articles, like this Peak Oil thing he was on now. He had an uncanny knack for weaving plot in his novels, though his characterizations were often thin and insubstantial. Still, he devoted himself to his writing in a way that Dane found really admirable, knocking out five fairly readable novels in as many years, which was no small feat. Though he had entered competitions and, surprisingly, won awards for his stories, they brought few sales in the end, and little real recognition as a writer. Aaron knew that Dane was trying to move him along by imposing a bit more discipline and maturity on his writing process, and by exposing him to more modern voices, other ways of thinking about his characters.
He read Aaron’s latest offering and was finally gratified to see that his friend was moving onto some new ground after working through a trilogy of novels where the characters were all loosely based on people in the immediate circle of his life. “At last,” Dane exclaimed, “a novel I’m not in!” He knew if he could get Aaron to think about creating new people for his ever emerging stories, instead of just taking snapshots of his friends, he would help him break through to another level.
“You’ve got to stop watching TV, Aaron. You never get a character in a TV show with any depth, The West Wing, excluded of course. And now that they’ve finally canceled the show I have absolutely no reason to ever turn my television on again. Take that to heart, buddy. And another thing. Stop listening to that silly George Noory show every night! It’s addling your brain. You’re getting as bad as that stock broker friend of yours with that ridiculous Quantum Sleeper bed.”
George Noory was the latest host on the enormously popular “Coast To Coast AM” radio talk show that Art Bell had started years ago. The nightly fare ranged from UFOs to Big Foot, and all the urban legends in between.
“But, Dane,” said Aaron with a laugh. How will I know about the next Asteroid strike, and what will I do if I find a nest of baby Chupacabras under my porch?”
They had a good laugh about that, and Aaron promised to cut at least three paragraphs in his latest article. A few days later, he had managed to wheedle permission to keep his Titanic metaphor. He realized that it was his work, after all, but if Dane had been adamant, he would have cut the whole thing out. That was the measure of respect he had for the man.
Still, as he sat at the keyboard, fighting those awkward typos again, he had just a twinge of guilt that he did not take Dane’s advice to heart more readily, and hoped his friend could put up with him as he worked his way through this phase in his writing. He sighed, and clicked on the button in his web editor to put the revised article draft on-line. He had found, and corrected, three more “an d” errors and their ilk. But he could not know that he had far more to worry about in his writing life than his use, or abuse, of metaphorical prose. For even though he would probably never make the best selling list, he had readers out there in the Ethernet, and a few were taking careful note of virtually every thing he said.
9
Drilling
He had been eighty days
tunneling, working hard in the rain these last few hours to be certain any sound of the digging would be well masked. The rain would also lessen traffic at the site above, which was another advantage, but it made for cold, dank work in the trench below the site. Yet Ian was a man accustomed to the elements, and well suited to the hard labor his project would require. In the end it would pay off handsomely, and the end was well in sight. He had but another eight to ten inches of vertical drilling now, straight up through the hard bottom and into the center of the plot.
This was the hard part of the job, the risky part. He would have to wait out the weather, hoping for a real torrent to mask the noise of the drill. His power cabling would be stretched out for a hundred feet behind him, along sodden wet ground in spite of his effort to lay in a plastic tarp for cover. Here and there, he noted places along the length of the tunnel where water was seeping down from above, finding its way through cracks in the cobbled roadway between his rented cottage and the target site.
If the Duke only knew the trouble and toil he had gone to these last months to secure his prize. Yet he knew the Duke could care less. All he wanted was the ash at the other end of Ian’s drill bit, soon to be laboring up through the last earthen and concrete barrier that separated him from his goal. Who would ever think the moldered remains above would ever be put to any good use beyond the novelty they offered tourists, a bit of history tucked away in a backwater hamlet.
Ian Thomas waited out the moments, squinting at his perfectly timed watch as the second hand swept in its endless round. Thirty seconds more and the clock on St. Martin’s would begin its midnight toll, twelve long notes that would give him a full minute to complete his task. The high speed drill was perfectly positioned, and mounted on a small hydraulic jack that would apply just the right amount of pressure as the bit worked. He had applied the most expensive lubricant he could find for this job, to be sure the bit would not squeak, and he had muffled the drill itself with sound absorbent bale. That, along with the tolling of the clock tower, should be enough to mask the noise.
Ten seconds… Five. He quickly adjusted his face goggles and breathing mask, then switched on the drill holding his breath at the noise it made in spite of all his precautions. It began to cut upward, showering the area in the tunnel below with a chalky powder. In exactly sixty seconds he would switch off and take his measurement. With any luck he would be within half an inch of breakthrough, and the last bit would be done with hand tools. Once the breech had been made he would have to insert his camera probe and document his position. GPS was telling him he was right on target, but one never knew for certain. The restoration work they had done here in the 90s could have changed things. Some idiot workman could have nudged something the wrong way—but the camera would tell him what he wanted to know. Then, if all was well, it would be a simple matter to insert his vacuum tubing and finish the job.
It was only a matter of time now, but he hadn’t counted on the devotion of Mary Perkyn that night, or the gracious accommodation of the Rector at St. Martin’s. It was going to be a very long night. He still had a lot to accomplish, but he was well on his way to success now, and his patience would eventually pay him a handsome dividend.
* * *
The Rector
hastened down the cold stone floor to the east entrance. Who in the world would be out on a night like this? Another poor soul come to beg a warm night out of the rain? No, the knocking at the door had an urgency about it that gave him cause for concern. He hurried past the alcove shrine, forgetting to bless himself at the holy water fount, drawn to the insistent pounding at the door.
“There, there,” he said as he slid back the door bolt. “Hold on a moment, you’ll shake loose the shingles with that racket.”
The door opened with a squeak, and he squinted out into the dark landing, a cold breath of rain on his face. The caller lurched forward, out of the heavy rain, but with an animated fretfulness that pricked an instinct of fear in the Rector. He was startled to see that it was old Mary Perkyn, a regular parishioner, her gray hair twaddle and sodden under what passed for a rain bonnet.
“There now, Mary. What’s gotten into you?”
“Oh Rector, you must come to the chapel at once! Oh, my lord, such a dreadful sound!”
“What’s that you say? Whatever are you talking about, Mary? Here, come in out of the rain and let me close this door or we’ll both likely be blown away with the storm.”
The Rector managed to usher the poor old woman inside, closing the door hard against the intruding weather and pushing the bolt home again for good measure. “Now, Mary,” he began when he had caught his breath. “You come into the sitting room and have a spot of tea. Do you good. Settles the nerves and warms the belly, right? Then you can tell me all about it.”
“Such a dreadful fright I’ve had. A sound, like the wailing of a demon it was, and with all this storming and rain about to make it all the worse. You must go to the chapel and hear for yourself, Rector. I was praying me nightly votives, I was. Then all at once it comes, up from the ground itself, a wailing and gnashing and moaning, all just when the bell tower struck midnight!”
“Devotion aside, Mary, this is no hour to be out in such weather. Did you mean to sleep in the pew? I should think you would have been long at rest in a nice warm bed at home. Which is just where you should be, once I’ve got some tea into you.”
“But Rector—”
“Now, now… do you not hear the rain and wind?” he rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “The lord is wrathful tonight. It was likely nothing more that the wind in the trees you heard, rattling against the headstones in the grave yard.”
Mary listened, but her eyes betrayed her doubt. There was real fear in them, and the Rector knew it would be some time before he could quiet the old woman down. She was getting on in years now, and taken to wandering at all hours like this. It was a shame that she had no relations close by to care for her but, that being the case, he made it his duty to look out for her, one of his long time faithful parishioners.
“Wind in the trees?” Old Mary gave him a frightful look. “I’ve heard the wind, and sat up many a night at prayers through storms worse then this. Oh, no sir, this was something more. Ungodly it was! The way it wailed after that bell. And now that you mention, it was comin’ from the churchyard. Such a disturbance! I’d know wind in trees, and this was something else altogether.” She crossed herself with a shiver, yet allowed herself to be guided along the hallway and into the sitting room.
“Well now,” the Rector decided to compromise. “If you’ll promise me to sit here and take in a bit of tea, I’ll do you the kindness of having a look at the chapel. It’s more than likely a stray cat in a quarrel, but if it will set you mind at ease, I’ll see that all is well.”
“Would you, Rector? Such a fright it was, chasing a poor old woman from her votives. It would comfort me if you would go and make your blessing. But have a care! I know the wind when I hear it, and I know cats. Something in that churchyard let lose with a howl that was like to disturb the dead!”
The Rector smiled, reassuringly as he sat Mary down near the hearth. “Well, we mustn’t have that,” he said. “Not with such distinguished company resting in the yard.” He was referring, of course, to the grave sites of the Churchill family, for the famous Prime Minister was laid to rest here at St Martin’s, in the hamlet of Bladon, close to his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
“Now you just sit tight, and drink this tea. Fortunate for you I’m even up this night but, as you can see, I was restless with the storm and reading to quiet my mind.” He gestured to a thickly bound copy of Dante. “Talk of wailing and moaning! I was well absorbed in Dante’s Inferno, with the good lord’s harrowing of Hell, when you come to the door in such a fit. Warm yourself now, and if we get a break in the storm I’ll see you safely back to your cottage on the Green.”
“But you’ll not forget the churchyard,” Mary persisted. “It’ll need your blessing for certain, Rector. For what I heard this night had little respect for the dead, no matter how many lordships and ladies may sleep in those graves.”
“In a little while,” the Rector placated her with a calming gesture of his hand. “Looks like the rain may ease a bit after midnight. Then I’ll go and have a look if it will set your mind at ease. After that it’s off home with you. I’ve an early day tomorrow.”
10
BlackDog & Gh0stRAT
BlackDog was working late tonight.
The Boston Dynamics research project, funded by the defense research agency known as DARPA, had been certified for field operations over one year ago. It represented leading edge technology in robotics, with thousands of potential applications. The mechanized quadruped walked on four legs, angled inversely like those of a goat, and it had an uncanny ability to traverse difficult terrain without losing its balance, even on slippery inclines, and while carrying up to 400 pounds of equipment payload. The field applications included battlefield reconnaissance, confined or hazardous space entry, remote guided surveillance, perimeter or facility patrol—the list was endless. And once the model had been sufficiently refined to eliminate the loud buzzing that had been characteristic of the prototypes, even more interesting applications found their way onto the list.
The stealth version of the project was codenamed “BlackDog” and it was this model that was out for a trial run on the rain slick streets of New York—a bipedal job. The mobile control van, a nondescript U-Haul truck, was parked just out of range of the local surveillance camera on 24th street. The rain tarp the operator had thrown over the Dog was enough to make it almost indistinguishable from any other poor soul who might be out on a night like this.
Just down the street, through the vacant lobby of a nondescript brownstone apartment building… just up that short flight of stairs and through the door that would be no obstacle for the Dog at all. Yes, the target waited, completely unaware.
Attorney Jim Banes had hold of some real thunder tonight, never mind Henry Hudson’s Bowlers roiling in the skies above New York. He had come by the information through a friend, who had taken the very great risk of smuggling the data out on a memory key. Now Banes was well absorbed in his work, aghast at what he was reading.
“Good Lord,” he breathed. “We thought nationalizing Fannie and Freddie would be the end of it. They’re just getting started!”
Images of 9/11 still played in his mind as he considered the situation the country was in now. It was a perfect metaphor for what has happened. JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were the four great steel beams at the core of our World Trade Center economy. The investment banks like Lehman, Bear Stearns and others were the truss system that was strung between these four great pillars. All the other smaller banks, thrifts, and S&Ls were like the floors of this great financial edifice. Now, when the first subprime airliner struck the system and ripped apart three of the four major investment houses, immolating them in a thousand degree fire of overleveraged securities, Custodian Hank Paulson, ran to congress in a panic and said that if something wasn't done to put out this fire the central core pillars would collapse and the entire building would come crashing down.
It was therefore decided to do whatever was necessary to prevent any of these four large banks from failing. They were simply deemed "too big" to fail. And what was done was one of the greatest exercises in duplicity, denial, and sleight of hand the financial world has ever seen. Put simply, all the regulations governing how assets were valued and accounted for were suspended or changed so these big banks could value mountains of dead securities, swaps, and CDOs at their nominal issue value instead of current real market value. And it was all quietly swept "off balance sheet." The rest was trucked off to the balance sheet of the Fed, in exchange for big bucks, and the TARP trucks came and went with ready cash from Uncle Sam.
Yet the problem is that the fire from that first calamitous crash was so hot that it seriously weakened the steel in these four big central columns. Their eventual collapse was unavoidable now. The dire condition of the banks could not be denied, or simply explained away with accounting tricks. The beams were sagging, bending, and the truss system strung between them to support the floors is slowly failing. The FDIC firemen have run out of water, he thought. The smoke and ash of insolvency is everywhere, choking the streets of the real economy as "business as usual" is now a thing of the past for our banking system. Credit continues to tighten, foreclosures have reached all time highs, millions of short sales are still pending, and unemployment continues to mount up month after month.
Bernanke and his banking friends announced they saved the world but, with each passing month of mounting debt, the situation just got worse. Air traffic controllers say there are other airlines out there heading toward the heart of the financial system. Commercial real estate and Option ARM loans are careening for the perdition of default. Credit card portfolios are equally distressed.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, the Larry Silverstein of the system, has been quietly booking big profits on all the other losses. After all, they took out big insurance policies through AIG, and got paid in full when the fire started, all courtesy of the taxpayers who funded the big AIG bailout. Profits margins are fine at Goldman, though the firm had to hire beefed up security that included bomb sniffing dogs and police barricades at its headquarters before announcing annual profits and bonus payouts the last several years. At least they were fine until this!
The file Banes was reading was an inside memo, apparently penned by an inner circle manager at the Fed. The sweep of planned intervention, with full US Treasury backing, was now enormous. At least three major US banks were now teetering on the edge of total collapse. It was far worse than the round of big failures in 2008 when Washington Mutual sat with $317 billion in total assets, six times the size of the FDIC, and she floundered in wave after wave of Alt-A credit mortgage paper coming back in default. Wachovia was twice her size with $665 billion in assets, and now defunct. But the real concern today was Citibank, a $1.3 trillion dollar institution, bigger than WaMu and Wachovia combined. The hackneyed belief that institutions on this scale were “too big to fail” was about to get another severe test.
The Fed was justifiably worried. Propping up $5 trillion in housing securities and derivatives at Fannie and Freddie had been a bold move, but congress allocated no more than $100 billion per company to bolster capital requirements until the bailout cap was quietly removed on Christmas eve, 2009. If one or more of these large banks went down in the financial firestorm, the chance that the FDIC could find a buyer in the private markets was slim at best. The printing presses at the Fed would have to run 24/7 and the resulting inflation would be staggering.
Banes read, and read, the file ominously encoded as “Endgame 2012.” If the general public had any idea of what was really happening in the shadow financial markets, the dark matter that made up much of the financial universe in investment vehicles as strange, slippery, and sometimes as short lived as quarks and bosons.
Banes read the background notes on the key intelligence section of the file. The trigger to the next wave of defaults and systemic crisis would come from China, or so this file seemed to indicate. The Chinese had been wary of securities trades issued by U.S. dealers for years. After the U.S. went forward with scheduled arms deliveries to Taiwan, China reacted to “punish” America where she was most vulnerable. Asia Times carried the story in February of 2010 and Banes quickly read the quote: “Dollar-denominated risk assets, including asset-backed securities and corporates, are no longer wanted at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), nor at China’s large commercial banks. The Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee. This already has been communicated to American securities dealers, according to market participants with direct knowledge of the events.”
Yet these were merely the outlying squalls of the next storm about to hit the teetering financial markets. China was about to declare all its positions in the dark derivatives trade to be “null and void.” They were planning to ditch all their derivatives contracts, washing their hands of the multi-trillion game forever.
“If this ever became generally known there would be chaos,” Banes said aloud, his mind running on through dangerous squalls as he read. There would be bank runs to make the Great Depression seem mild by comparison. He read on…Bank runs… bread lines… work camps… Kellog Brown & Root building them all over the nation, over sixty sites identified thus far, and more to be built. A secret rail system connecting the major camps, and contracts out for special double decker rail cars, complete with shackles on the walls. Millions of plastic corpse containers stacked up in old corn fields just east of Atlanta and the major airline hub there. It wasn’t a rumor off some crazy site on the web this time, it was straight from the horses mouth, a FEMA report being circulated deep inside the Fed and the Treasury Department itself.
“If this ever became known…”
Banes looked up from his laptop, hearing a strange thump, thump, thump in the hall. Someone was tramping methodically up the stairs from the lobby, and he passed a moment of anxiety as the footsteps seemed to pause just outside his door.
He was being foolish, he chided himself. But he suddenly realized his lap top had been Ethernet wired and connected via fast DSL the whole time he had been reading! It was an oversight he would have never made at the office, but here, at home, and before he had a look at the file itself, he had been lulled by a false sense of security. It was probably nothing, he told himself, but an hour into the file, shocked and dismayed, he knew he was wrong.
Unfortunately, five minutes into the file an embedded virus, Gh0st RAT, had sent out a signal over his Ethernet port and notified certain authorities that the file was open and on display. The IP address followed, and within milliseconds the program had suppressed the anemic local anti-virus watchdog, drilled a hole in the firewall, and was receiving a spider to crawl the document and fingerprint it by keyword analysis.
The alert cam in over GhostNet, a sophisticated cyber espionage network that had been trowling for keywords earlier that evening. While the core of the network targeted hi profile networks related to government, business and media, the malware associated with the snooping software could also spread to soft targets of potential interest—attorneys, Bloggers, reporters—anyone with the brains to realize what was really going on in the world and the means of making that known with any eloquence. A rat had found some cheese, quickly flagging the infected computer and making its owner a new “person of interest” in the space of a few milliseconds. Once the target was determined to be authentic, DARPA was notified and their new toy, BlackDog, was on the move. Human agents would back up the machine if required.
It was 2 AM, the streets were empty and quiet under a moderate rain. There was a thump on the door, accompanied by a whisper quiet hiss, and Banes turned to see a strange shape loom in his foyer. Three seconds later a precision laser had sliced through his brain, and he collapsed, dying quickly with what would appear as a massive stroke in the autopsy, if one would ever be allowed to be authorized.
BlackDog thumped over to the reading desk, it’s high resolution camera searching the scene, noting and removing the memory key. The laser silently sliced into the laptop, frying memory, hard drive, motherboard. The news would carry a story on a nearby lightning strike that supposedly fried a few TVs that nite as well. Then the sleek little machine turned and walked away on its mechanical legs, back down the stairs and out onto the street. Nothing was to be publicly known about Engame 2012. Nothing factual that is. It was to remain just another of the many conspiracy theories bandied about by George Noory and Internet fringe sites like Prisonplanet.com.
And nothing would be revealed by attorney Jim Banes on that score, for Jim Banes was quietly dead.
Thank you for reading... The novel continues with Day III here.
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