The Last Oracle: A Climate Fiction Thriller (Sam Jardine Crime Thrillers Book 3)

by Christopher Hepworth

  Sam watched as Cantara ran over to hug her sister.

  Rania looked over her sister’s shoulder at Sam. ‘Your chief designer had the foresight to let us know you were heading here,’ she said to him. ‘Wait here for a minute and I’ll be back for you.’ The minister of internal security strapped her sister into the harness and signalled her colleague to winch them up. The five surrounding Rapid Deployment Forces attack helicopters continued their orgy of death as Cantara and Rania were winched to safety on board the helicopter.

  Sam stared into the distance at the approaching khamsin and saw the flash of a surface-to-air missile explode from a rocket launcher two kilometres away. The FN-6 Chinese-built missile streaked towards Rania’s hovering Apache helicopter. Its infrared guidance system latched onto the heat of the helicopter’s engine and accelerated towards its target. As the missile homed in, Rania leaned out of the doorway and fired an anti-SAM flare at an angle parallel to the flightpath of the incoming missile. As she did so, the pilot dropped the helicopter like a stone in an attempt to get below the missile’s minimum cruising altitude. Sam dived for the sand as the underbelly of the helicopter almost decapitated him. He turned his head and saw the missile veer away and chase the flare into the distance. Rania threw a rope to Sam from two metres above his head.

  ‘Quick, Sam. Grab the rope and hang on!’ Rania yelled from above. ‘We can’t survive a second missile attack.’

  Sam looped the rope around his waist and tied a rudimentary clove-hitch knot at his belly. He signalled with this thumb and held on as the helicopter lifted him off the ground.

  * * *

  Jamal cursed as the FN-6 surface-to-air missile skimmed centimetres over the rotor blades of the hovering Apache. It had been his battalion’s last chance to strike back before the onrushing khamsin engulfed his reserve in its scything winds. The men around him were already digging themselves into foxholes in the sand, and covering their bodies with tarpaulins to sit out the storm. He watched in frustration as the dictator’s helicopters continued to butcher his two hundred front-line fighters. A group of four of his most trusted men sank to their knees in front of the oncoming helicopters and begged for their lives. But the government troops offered no mercy as they murdered his loyal fighters from the air. The four supine men twitched like puppets on a string as they were riddled with bullets.

  ‘Let me take a shot at the oilman beneath the helicopter.’

  It was the sniper Jack had saved from execution after the battle of Raqqa in Syria. His name was Khan and he had proved to be a loyal recruit to the cause, as well as a brilliant soldier and a lethal shot.

  ‘You should dig yourself in to save yourself from the khamsin, my friend,’ Jamal replied. ‘The range is too long and the wind is already too fierce. You cannot hit him from here.’ To emphasise his point, Jamal lay in a small foxhole and covered his head with his keffiyeh.

  ‘I would be happy to die in the attempt,’ Khan replied.

  ‘Then may God guide your bullet.’

  Khan lay flat on the sand and rested the long barrel of his rifle on a large rock. He aimed at the figure who was tying the rope around his waist below the helicopter. Khan adjusted his telescopic sights to allow for the two-kilometre distance and took a deep breath. He knew his bullet would fly straight and true, for it was one of Zahir’s exquisite Russian-made rounds he had taken the night before. Khan watched as the oilman was lifted from the ground, exhaled slowly, and pulled the trigger. He grunted with pride and satisfaction as the man caught the full force of his bullet. The body jerked, and then slumped like a rag doll on the rope. The knot around the inert man’s belly unravelled and he fell five metres into the soft sand below like a sack of meat, hidden from view by the strange mushroom-shaped rock formation.

  Khan turned to address his commander but the full fury of the khamsin hit him like an express train and tore the flesh from his bones like an industrial sanding machine. He tried to scream but his open mouth filled with sand and suffocated him before he could experience further agony.

  * * *

  Cantara leaned out of the doorway of the Apache helicopter and watched in horror as Sam’s body thumped onto the soft sand below.

  ‘Sam, Sam — Nooo!’ she yelled in despair. A dozen stray bullets thudded into the underside of the helicopter and the thunderous rolling mass of the khamsin surged ever closer.

  The pilot yelled over his shoulder at Rania. ‘We have to go now, Ma’am. We’re sitting ducks.’

  ‘You can’t leave Sam lying there, Rania. You have to land the helicopter and pick him up,’ said Cantara as tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Rania wrapped her arms around her younger sister to comfort her. ‘He’s dead, Cantara. We will return to collect his body when it’s safe.’ Rania nodded to the pilot and the Apache soared upwards and over the low-lying rocky hills to the north to join the other helicopters that were heading back to the Rapid Deployment Forces base to the south of Cairo.

  CHAPTER 19

  Upernavik Icefjord, North Greenland

  ‘How many gallons of fracking fluid do we have ready, Chad?’ Crawford asked his senior engineer.

  Chad Bolger pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. ‘Just over a million. It’s the new formula sent over from The Woodlands. The previous fluid couldn’t operate in these temperatures.’

  ‘So the eggheads finally figured out the correct antifreeze ratio?’

  ‘Yep. They had to quadruple the volume of ethylene glycol to hydrochloric acid to stop it from freezing over at night.’

  ‘Are the recycling tanks operational?’ Crawford did not like the idea of over a thousand tonnes of antifreeze seeping into the ice shelf beneath their feet. Despite his bravado with the oil workers, the strange plumbing-like noises at night were stretching his nerves to the limit.

  ‘Unfortunately not. They sent the wrong transfer hoses with the Byron-Jackson booster pump. They’re as brittle as frozen turds in these sub-zero temperatures. When we unrolled the first hose, it had more cracks than a New York sidewalk.’

  ‘Jesus, Chad! How long’s it gonna take to get the replacements?’ Crawford slapped his forehead in frustration. This was their last opportunity to complete a successful frack on the Greenland ice shelf.

  ‘Kathryn Lee from procurement told me there’s an eight-week lead time for the proper hoses. That’s why they took a gamble with the stuff they sent.’

  ‘When’s Jardine back from Egypt? At least he knew how order the right frickin’ hoses.’

  ‘Where have you been, Chuck? Jardine took a terrorist bullet in the Sahara Desert. He’s dead – along with five of his geologists. They’re still searching for his body.’

  ‘That’s too bad, but I can’t say I’ll be shedding too many tears. So how do we fix this antifreeze issue, Chad? Rex phones me on the satellite every night to ask about the frack. The roughnecks think Rex Daingerfield and I are having phone sex.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Bolger. ‘Look, just leave the fracking fluid in the rocks beneath the ground. It’s no big deal. It isn’t going to come back out any time soon and no-one will be any the wiser. When we’re done, we cap off the well, antifreeze and all. End of story.’

  Crawford slapped Bolger on the shoulder. ‘Good man. We can do this, Chad. I’ve had my doubts recently, but today we’re gonna pump a ton of oil.’

  * * *

  Crawford started the countdown in the temperature-controlled cabin. He had to shout above the noise of Foo Fighter’s ‘Times Like These’ that reverberated from the stereo bolted to the wall. Six burly men stared into their computers checking the volumes, pressures and acidic balances in the feeder trucks were in order. Crawford stared out of the cabin’s porthole-sized windows at the massive trucks that were feeding chemicals into the eight large mixing trailers. Each trailer fed a single four-inch pipe that led to the top of a mountain of valves on the fracking rig.

  ‘Any leaks detected, boys?’ he yelled at the assembled workers.
>
  ‘Nope, boss,’ one replied.

  ‘Sweet as, Chuck,’ replied another.

  ‘Sand guys, are you ready to rock ’n’ roll?’

  ‘Go for it, boss,’ came the reply.

  ‘Blenders?

  ‘Yep. All good, Chuck.’

  Crawford seized a microphone and flicked it on. The Foo Fighters reverberated across the Upernavik rig before his voice cut in. ‘Everyone in position, please. We are ready to frack.’

  Outside the cabin the senior driller, dressed like a polar bear, walked over to the rig. Driving snow partially obscured him from view. He displayed a heavy steel sphere the size of a table tennis ball for Crawford to see and waited for his acknowledgement.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Crawford boomed over the microphone. ‘And five… four… three… two… one. Commence frack.’ A muted cheer echoed inside the control trailer.

  Outside the cabin, the senior driller opened an aperture in the well top and placed the steel sphere inside. He cranked a blue handle and the fracking liquid poured from the mixing trailers into the well pipe. The polar bear-sized senior driller jogged back from the well as the pressure in the pipes climbed to ten thousand pounds per square inch.

  Crawford looked over the shoulder of one of the workers at a computer screen as the pressurised fracking liquid blasted against the shale rock four kilometres beneath their feet. He imagined the tiny splinters appearing in the oil-bearing rocks and microscopic quantities of oil escaping from billions of tiny holes in the rock down the lines of fracture towards the well pipes.

  ‘We have ten thousand pounds of pressure,’ muttered the oil worker as he read the numbers on his screen.

  ‘Okay. Stabilise the pressure,’ Crawford said in a calm, reassuring voice.

  The worker punched a few keys and sat back in his chair.

  ‘Good man,’ Crawford said as he moved to a second screen. ‘How’s the acidic ratio?’

  ‘Fine, boss,’ the second worker said.

  ‘Fuckin’ A!’ Crawford slapped the table and allowed himself a rare smile. It had been four long months of frustration and delays. He imagined the oil making its way to the top of the well and out into the large storage tank that had been constructed for the project. He would be the first man to pull oil in commercial quantities from the Greenland ice shelf and he would prove the legions of doubters wrong. He would never have to buy himself a beer in Dakota again. He might even be able to start his own fracking business far away from the mind-numbing cold of Greenland.

  ‘Um, pressure’s still a bit high!’ said the worker to his right.

  ‘Okay, adjust the relief valve on trailer number one,’ Crawford said, like a man in total control.

  ‘Roger that,’ the worker said, and twisted a dial on his console. He stared at the digital read out. ‘It’s still a touch high. I might close valves one and two to be safe.’ He punched the two buttons that corresponded with the appropriate pressure valves.

  ‘It might be the valve mechanism,’ said Crawford. ‘They’ve been sticking periodically. The fucking gaskets deteriorate so quickly in these temperatures. Just to be safe, close off three and four as well.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ A few keys were tapped on the computer, then, ‘Still rising. We’re up to twelve thousand pounds per square inch.’

  ‘Fuck it!’ Crawford slapped the table once more, but this time in frustration. ‘We can’t take a trick on this sodding well. We’ll give it one more minute to see if we can normalise the pressure and then we abort for the day. We’ll have to strip the valves and check the gaskets.’

  ‘Thirteen... fourteen... fifteen thousand pounds of pressure... Boss?’

  ‘Yep, close it down. Goddamn it!’ Crawford grasped the microphone. ‘The frack is ended for the day. Close down all systems. Go through the appropriate safety protocol and meet me in the command trailer in half an hour.’

  ‘Sixteen thousand pounds... Seventeen.’

  The trailer vibrated and the ground rumbled. The sound of wrenching metal and gurgling liquids resonated throughout the site.

  ‘Holy shit. That didn’t sound too good,’ the technician said.

  The top of the rig exploded and fracking mixture spurted hundreds of metres in the air. It took twelve seconds for the noxious liquid and metal girders to come raining back to earth. A mixture of sand, water, and fifteen separate chemicals showered the trucks and trailers for two full minutes before the cocktail of chemicals emptied and the pressure dropped to normal. Crawford picked himself up off the floor and looked out of the porthole window. The entire drilling site looked like the aftermath of a Mount Etna eruption.

  * * *

  Eighty kilometres to the west of the fracking site, the Greenland ice sheet rumbled and shook. A fissure the size of Loch Ness appeared in the ice, and an area of ice comparable to the Highlands of Scotland tore itself from the main shelf. It slipped towards the Upernavik Icefjord, which was the birthing place of twenty per cent of the icebergs in the North Atlantic Ocean. So big was the new iceberg, it jammed against the bottom of the fjord’s basin and wedged against the surrounding mountains. The sheer weight of the ice mass shattered the iceberg into a thousand sections, each the size of Ben Nevis, and out towards the ocean. The Greenland continent, freed of such mass, rose several centimetres from the surrounding sea. So loud was the sound of the tearing ice, it was heard six hundred kilometres away by Inuit fisherman in Kivitoo, off the coast of Baffin Island in Canada.

  One particular iceberg was so massive, it was unable pass through the Upernavik Icefjord. It was larger than the surrounding mountains and it wedged solidly against the base of the fjord and jammed up against the sides of the inlet until it formed a massive plug one and a half kilometres high, blocking all further progress of ice and meltwater along the natural ice highway. It was the first meltwater dam of such magnitude to form since Lake Agassiz had unleashed floods of biblical proportions eight and a half thousand years ago when Noah had built his ark.

  LAUNCH BONUSES

  Thank you so much for ordering a copy of my new book 'The Last Oracle'.

  As promised here are your Launch bonuses:

  The Sleepwalker Legacy

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  If for any reason you couldn't download the bonuses, please send me an email and let me know.

  My email is chris@christopherhepworth.com

  Many thanks for your support.

  Christopher Hepworth

  CHAPTER 20

  The little room in which Sam awoke was reminiscent of a pharaonic burial chamber. The thick walls had been chiselled from solid rock and were covered in a layer of white plaster. Elaborate gilded paintings adorned the walls and depicted ancient bronze age battles and scenes from The Book of the Dead. The room had an arched ceiling that was painted with scenes from an even earlier prehistoric age, when lush green savannah and flowing rivers covered the Sahara. Hippos and giraffe were depicted grazing along wide, fast-flowing rivers and small unclothed children splashed along the river banks. The scenes had a child-like innocence to them, as if the artist was attempting to convey life was simple and the bounties of nature plentiful.

  Sam tried to sit up in his comfortable cot, but winced as bolts of pain shot through broken ribs. He looked at his rib cage and saw a thick, blood-soaked padding strapped to his side and realised the bullet must have passed within centimetres of his vital organs. He grasped the stone cup that was on the table beside his cot and gulped down the refreshing milky liquid, then lay still a few minutes as the sedative powers of the medication took the edge off his pain.

  Sam pulled back the sheepskin blankets and gently rolled sideways out of the cot. He had
no memory of how he had got into the room and had no idea where he was. He was dressed in nothing but a simple loin cloth, but a white linen kilt-like shenti and tunic were folded on a low chair next to his bed. Sam walked to the chair, clutching at his ribs, and put on the ancient but fresh-smelling linen garments. He fixed the shenti and tunic in place with a leather belt and slipped his feet into the sandals that were on the polished stone floor near the low chair.

  He walked out of the chamber and into a vast underground cavern that resembled a natural cathedral. Light shone in from a skylight that had been cut through several metres of solid rock. In the centre of the cavern was a crystal-clear pool fed from an underground spring. The cavern was a vast hollow within a natural rock formation and colourful stalactites hung from the roof, twelve metres above his head. Sam realised he was in the same underground temple Sienna had described to him when they had met at her flat in London. He noticed the four elaborate granite columns she had mentioned and the massive oak door that he presumed led to the inner sanctum. Sam recognised the image of the goddess Sekhmet on the doors and the extraordinary likeness she bore to Sienna. Sekhmet radiated beauty beyond that of any mortal female and yet she had vengeful, feline features. Sam was mesmerised. In her left hand, Sekhmet held aloft the severed head of a bearded man and in her right hand, she carried a bloodied sword.