* * *
The few remaining government troops who had not been slaughtered by the rebel counter attack were rounded up like sheep and led to the ruins of Raqqa town square. They were forced to kneel in front of their captors. Some prayed for a merciful death while others cried for the loved ones they knew they would never see again. It was agreed the honour of executing the captives should be bestowed on Jack Jardine, whom they referred to as ‘Zahir’, meaning ‘victorious’. The kneeling captives stared in disbelief at the fresh-faced Englishman who had been the main cause of their defeat.
Jack walked along the line of kneeling soldiers until he spotted the man he had been looking for. The government soldier glared at Jack in defiance. The two had played a sniper’s game of cat and mouse for a month and the soldier had almost caught Jack with his bullets on two occasions. Jack stretched out his hand and pulled the man from his knees.
‘Join us, my brother,’ Jack said to the man. The enemy soldier looked confused until Jamal translated his words into Arabic. The soldier said nothing for a few seconds and then nodded. One by one the captives stood and offered their loyalty to the rebel battalion.
The rebel soldiers took up the chant ‘Zahir! Zahir! Zahir!’ to salute their victory while thrusting their rifles towards the sky and firing off a dozen rounds. Jack felt awkward at the rebels’ display of affection and looked at the ground near his combat boots. Jamal took Jack’s arm and steered him towards the bombed-out ruins of a grocer’s shop where they could not be overheard. He looked straight into Jack’s eyes.
‘You have proved yourself a man, my friend, but Allah has a far greater test for us now. We must return to Egypt with our army of battle-tested warriors and liberate the country from the vile dictatorship that oppresses the true believers. Our struggle may take years of brutal combat, but we can start by attacking their distant factories, their oilfields and their tourist temples upon whose money they depend. When the government weakens, the Brotherhood will rise once more. Are you with me, Zahir?’ he said, using Jack’s Islamic name.
Jack looked back to the crowd in the town square where they were still chanting his name. He felt appreciated and respected. They did not judge him for his mental illness, his acute shyness or his lack of education. The only thing that mattered to them was the unerring accuracy of his sniper’s bullets and his courage in battle. He looked at Jamal, and nodded.
* * *
Cantara sat in the passenger seat of the Land Rover while Sam drove mile after mile across the unchanging scenery of the Sahara Desert. They had decided to head back to Luxor, which was still two days’ drive from their present position. She had one foot propped on the dashboard and was attempting to paint her toenails with bright red nail polish. Her face was a mask of concentration as she applied a layer of polish to her middle toenail. The Land Rover hit a small rut in the desert sand and the little brush smeared red liquid across her adjacent toe.
‘You did that deliberately,’ accused Cantara. Her voice was stern but her eyes gleamed with humour.
‘It’s hardly my fault! You can’t expect me to keep my eyes on the track while you are flashing your legs like that,’ replied Sam.
‘How long to the next wadi?’
‘Three hours, maybe four. It will be our last night under canvas before we hit the big smoke,’ Sam remarked.
‘Don’t think for a minute you will be sharing my tent,’ Cantara replied, although her tone suggested she might be open to negotiation.
‘I’ve done my research and discovered the nearest talent and diversity manager is Julie Gascoigne, who is taking her holidays in Morocco this summer. That’s four days’ drive without a break. I think we should be able to get away with a minor indiscretion.’
‘No, she’s in Tunis and that’s only three hours by plane,’ Cantara countered, as she wiped away the surplus nail polish with a cotton ball soaked in a foul-smelling liquid.
‘It’s amazing what can be achieved in three hours if you put your mind to it.’
Cantara threw a fresh cotton ball at Sam and stared out of the window at a pile of rocks and twisted metal in the distance. ‘Where’s your great grandfather’s satchel?’
‘Behind your seat. Why?’
‘No reason.’ Cantara unclipped her seatbelt and turned around in her seat. She located the old brown leather bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers, then leafed through half a dozen yellowing pages until she found the one she was looking for. Stephen Jardine had made a sketch of the well he had drilled while looking for the Nefertari Shale. She studied the drawing and then read the faded notes Sam’s great grandfather had written about the surrounding terrain. ‘You might want to go back and have a look at that rock formation we passed about five minutes ago,’ she said.
‘What rock formation?’
‘You men are all the same. Once the conversation turns to sex, your brains are incapable of processing any other information.’
‘It was you who was talking about sex,’ said Sam. ‘Why do you want me to look at a rock?’
‘We’ve been driving for five hours solid. I need a lady’s break. And while we’re at it, we should check out the rock.’
‘You’ve only ever looked at the notes once. The rocks we just passed could not be the same ones described in the drawings.’
‘That’s a direct order, soldier.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Sam said with exaggerated respect. He indicated right so the following Land Rovers knew he was about to leave the track. He swung around in a wide arc and headed into the dunes, keeping the wheels straight, the revs high and the speed low to avoid becoming bogged in the soft, shifting sand while the following vehicles stopped on the track ready to help if he became stuck.
Cantara grabbed the two-way radio and spoke to Bradshaw. ‘Tom, this is Cantara. Over.’
‘This is Tom. Go ahead, Cantara,’ came the crackly reply.
‘We’re checking an unusual rock formation about three kilometres to our south-west. Please bring your equipment and follow our trail. Over.’
‘Copy that. I’ll ask Charlie and Delta to remain at their current location. See you at the rocks. Over and out.’
Sam drove in the direction indicated by Cantara until he picked up the sight of a rock formation that resembled the profile of an old woman wearing a large bonnet. On the far side of the rock, half-buried in the sand, was a tangled and rusting heap of metal rods and frames that reminded Sam of a children’s old-fashioned climbing frame. Sam circled the site in his Land Rover until he picked out the most solid ground on which to park. He leapt out of the car and ran towards the unusual rock. Sam noticed a depression in the ground, but there was no well. He checked out the metal girders and struts but could find no clue about their origin. He noticed Cantara was poking at a large number of regular-shaped rocks that could once have been the wall of a well.
‘Watch out for snakes,’ Sam warned.
They were interrupted by the sound of the second Land Rover coming over a small dune towards them. They covered their noses and mouths with their keffiyehs as the dust and sand swirled around them. Tom Bradshaw parked next to the first Land Rover and sprang out of the car.
‘Straight from the history books,’ said the young geology graduate. ‘It’s an old test well. I would go so far as to say this was a Simplex rod line pumping jack.’
‘How old would you say it is?’ Sam asked, intrigued.
‘It’s hard to say. This is turn of the twentieth-century technology for sure. It pre-dates the nodding donkey but in regions like this, they could have been using older pumping systems decades after they stopped using them in the US. There should be some form of power plant, but if there was one, it’s been removed.’ He saw Cantara struggling to move a large rock. ‘Hey, Cantara. Don’t go too near the depression. You could drop through the sand into the old well, where you would meet many of the desert’s more unpleasant life forms.’
Cantara turned over the rock and examined it intently.
&n
bsp; Bradshaw ran his index finger along one of the half-buried rods. ‘There was some kind of explosion in the well. The framework is twisted and you can still see the scorch marks on the rod.’
‘Makes sense.’ Sam told Bradshaw the story of his great grandfather’s primitive attempts at fracking and his injury sustained in the explosion.
Cantara stood and beckoned Sam to her rock. She pointed at some faint lines that had been carved into the rock by a sharp object.
‘What does it say?’ Sam asked.
‘It says “SJ, October 1915”.’
‘Stephen Jardine?’ Bradshaw asked.
‘Possibly,’ replied Sam, trying to remain calm.
‘The graffiti on the other side of the rock is way older,’ said Cantara.
Sam lifted the rock and turned it over before placing it back again. It was covered in beautiful ancient hieroglyphics and it was obvious the rock was once part of a much bigger whole. Sam stared at one section on which was depicted a graceful female figure with a lion’s head wearing a solar crown, and felt a strange tingle of excitement as he recalled seeing the same symbol on the pendant around the slim neck of Sienna Daingerfield.
CHAPTER 15
North Atlantic Ocean, off Greenland
The blue whale drifted along the North Atlantic oceanic conveyor system towards its ancestral feeding ground off the north-west coast of Greenland. This was where the freezing Arctic ice flowing south met the warm tropical waters of the Gulf Stream heading north. It was also the beating heart that pumped the earth’s ocean currents on their six-hundred-year journey around the planet. The whale glided her long, slender body to the surface and exhaled a mighty breath of air from her lungs through her twin blowholes. Five hundred litres of warm, fetid breath rose twelve metres into the air and condensed in the freezing air, forming a spectacular plume of vapour that could be seen for kilometres around.
She was the largest breed of animal that had ever existed. The mighty dinosaurs that roamed the planet millions of years ago were only half her massive bulk. At forty metres long and one hundred and seventy-five tonnes in weight, her battle-scarred body was in the twilight of her life. It was her first trip to the Greenland Sea since her battles with the whaling factory ships half a century before, when the wintry sea teemed with blue whales, humpbacks and right whales. She remembered how she would frolic with the young whales in her pod, and flirt with the amorous males who competed for her attention. She knew no enemies apart from rare packs of opportunistic killer whales, who would pick off the decrepit and sick from their number.
The arrival of the whaling boats with their vicious hooks and nets caused panic among her community, but she could outrun the boats even as she feared the evil nature of their human crew. But then came the massive factory ships with their lethal harpoons and fast engines. And then the relentless butchery of her kind began. The slaughter became so great she feared she was the only one of her species left alive in the Greenland Sea. In desperation, she turned south to seek the comparative safety of the Atlantic Ocean. As she entered her old age, the factory ships dwindled in number and then stopped coming. As the years went on, the number of her species increased and she realised it was safe to return to her old hunting ground in the Greenland Sea. Her remaining desire before she died was to visit the rich, fertile feeding grounds of her younger days.
As she cruised closer, she checked her navigation system against one of the twelve ‘chimneys’ that drove the ocean currents around the planet. The chimneys were enormous whirlpools, twelve kilometres in diameter that siphoned and stirred the warm and salty Gulf Stream waters into the cold depths of the ocean floor three kilometres below. The churning and mixing of the seas caused an up-swell of nutrients from the ocean floor, and led to an abundance of krill upon which she could gorge to replenish her depleted strength after her long journey. The blue whale and her fellow cetaceans depended upon the circulation of the currents for their navigation capability and the world’s ecosystem depended on them to distribute heat from the equator to the poles.
As she approached the largest of the great oceanic chimneys, she realised something was wrong. The abundance of krill she had remembered swirling around the vast whirlpools had been decimated. The once-mighty vortices were collapsing like diseased hearts.
The one-hundred-year old whale let out a long, pitiful cry of despair that resounded throughout the entire Greenland Sea. The sound was picked up by a nearby pod of killer whales, who recognised the sound of an elderly blue whale in distress. The pod turned eastwards in search of a meal that would fill the bellies of millions of scavenging sea creatures for a week.
* * *
White Nile, South Sudan
The Oracle dipped her earthenware pot into the White Nile near the town of Malakal in South Sudan, two and a half thousand kilometres from the Temple of Sekhmet. It was a sacred place known only to the fifty generations of oracles who had served the goddess Sekhmet over the millennia. The journey had taken her over a month and she was at the point of exhaustion. The pot she had carried across the inhospitable terrain was so old, its origins had been lost in the mists of time. Sienna placed the pot on the banks of the river and then checked she was alone before removing a small leather pouch from the canvas bag she carried on her back. She tipped the little blue crystals she had prepared in Egypt into the pot and stirred the mixture with an old wooden ladle until the water resembled a small whirlpool. She watched the water swirl around the pot and uttered incantations in the ancient Egyptian language while raising her green eyes to the heavens, as if imploring the goddess she served to intervene. Sienna knelt by the earthenware vessel and watched the swirling blue water as it slowed almost to a standstill. The blue crystals at the bottom of the pot bubbled and frothed, while at the surface, ripples spread to its extremities. The little whirlpool gathered in strength until water split over the lip of the pot. Once the Oracle was satisfied, she raised the vessel with both hands and carried it back towards the Nile. She raised it above her head and tipped its frothing contents into the mighty river. Then she rested on the banks of the river and slipped her long legs into the cool, refreshing waters of the White Nile. After an hour, Sienna felt the first few drops of unseasonal rain turn into a deluge and spread its life-giving qualities to the parched brown landscape around her.
* * *
Upernavik Icefjord, Central Greenland, July
It had been several months since the catastrophic ice slip had destroyed the Upernavik experimental fracking rig. The incident had unnerved Chuck Crawford to the point he had considered quitting his job. He had come within centimetres of meeting a similar gruesome fate as Elrod, but he had outrun the crack in the ice that had chased him like a vengeful serpent. He had torn his groin during his five hundred-metre dash to the safety of the oilmen’s huts. As he had stumbled exhausted into the welcoming warmth of the shelter, he had expected a sympathetic greeting from the hardy oilmen. Instead, they had turned over in their beds and asked him to keep the noise down.
‘Fuck you all!’ he had said as he collapsed onto his bed, which he did not leave for the next twenty-four hours.
As he commissioned the replacement fracking well, Crawford knew he was going to have to break all records to meet the challenging oil quota of fifty-thousand barrels by October. The preliminary results were excellent and was evidenced by the overwhelming stench of methane gas that was spewing from a faulty blowout preventer attached to an eight-inch drilling pipe.
‘Haven’t you fixed the leak yet, Chad?’ Crawford asked the senior engineer. ‘It stinks like a shitter round here.’
Chad Bolger was a bespectacled, rotund man sent out to Upernavik from The Woodlands to fix the raft of technical problems besetting the Daingerfield fracking operations in Greenland. He was a good-natured family man with a can-do attitude. The oilmen saw his arrival as Rex Daingerfield’s last throw of the dice for his Greenland strategy.
‘I phoned the guys in Baffin Island and they said the new valv
e is going to take another week. The new procurement manager at head office stuffed up. She ordered the wrong-sized valve.’
‘Another week? Jesus, Chad. Doesn’t she know we are facing our own little version of Deepwater Horizon here?’
‘Yeah, but if I made too much of a fuss, Rex would hear about the leak and then its “adios, amigos” to our completion bonus.’
‘Smart thinking.’ Crawford slapped Chad on the back. He knew a shrewd operator when he saw one. ‘All I can say is thank Christ the methane’s invisible or we’d be knee deep in bleating environmentalists by now. They’d have a fit if they knew how much gas we were venting.’
‘Yeah. This stuff’s pretty toxic. Ninety-five times worse than carbon dioxide, I hear. I could burn it off, if you like.’
‘No. We don’t want to attract attention. And we don’t want to start another ice quake.’ Crawford shuddered at the prospect of disappearing down an ice hole into a freezing, watery grave.
‘That reminds me,’ said Chad. ‘Randy Howells the safety engineer is still complaining about the stability of the ice sheet. He reckons the whole shelf is like a giant skateboard and could slip into the ocean at any time.’
‘Don’t worry about him. He’s so full of shit. I’ll send him home on the next supply plane.’
‘I ain’t so sure, Chuck. I hear some strange noises at night – like bad plumbing, only a million times scarier.’
‘Not you too, Chad! The ice sheet ain’t gonna melt for another fifty years and by then we’ll be pushing up daisies back home.’ He laughed and slapped the Texan on the shoulder once more.
‘Yeah. I guess,’ replied Chad, sounding unconvinced.
‘Good man. Now from tomorrow, I want you to double the fracking pressure. The faster we pump the crude, the sooner we get out of this hellhole.’
The Last Oracle: A Climate Fiction Thriller (Sam Jardine Crime Thrillers Book 3) Page 11