Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

“Nothing, thanks.”

  It was the first time he’d been in Warner’s apartment. It was minimalist, almost Spartan, with very little to give it that lived-in feeling. There was no artwork on the walls, no military mementos, no personal touches at all. A few beige leather couches and chairs in the living room, a gas fireplace, a wall-sized flat-screen television. No DVDs, only a few books in a small bookcase. It was the room of a man who had lived in barracks all his life and kept all his possessions in a duffel bag, ready to move in five minutes.

  There was a pair of large gun safes. The doors of one of them were standing open, and he saw rifles, shotguns, and handguns, all looking well cared for. He didn’t know a lot about guns, but he knew some of them were military weapons that he wasn’t sure were actually legal. But that was none of his business.

  “I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t remember a lot about yesterday, beyond a certain point,” the colonel said. “I do have the distinct impression that I ended up saying a lot more than I should have.” He grimaced. “I’ve spent my whole life keeping my lip zipped. I’m pretty good at it. But you’ve had me talking on this project of yours…about things that I’m authorized to talk about, mind you.” He stopped, and shrugged. “I guess I got in the habit of talking to you. Things got out of hand.”

  “I got the impression that you were pretty shaken up,” Dave said.

  “You can say that again. Before yesterday, I was just getting rumors. You’ve noticed the stock market lately?”

  “It would be hard not to. Up, down, up again. Mostly down.”

  “Driven by oil prices, and futures,” Warner said. “Oil’s over two-fifty a barrel, and still rising with no end in sight. The big investors are getting worried. Especially now that they’re getting wind of some of the rumors I’ve been hearing for the last couple of weeks.”

  “Frankly, Colonel, that’s what makes that story you told me yesterday kind of hard to swallow. How could all this be happening and nobody knows anything about it?”

  Colonel Warner picked up part of the disassembled pistol lying on the table. He began running a cleaning rag through the barrel. He sighed, and looked at Dave.

  “Obviously people know about it. But as soon as the shit started to come down in Saudi, they clamped a national security lid on it as tight as any I’ve ever seen. In the first week the secretary of state paid a visit to Riyadh, and so did the leaders of the oil-producing countries in the region. I don’t have any idea what they decided to do about it. But the top people at Saudi Aramco were sworn to secrecy, and told they could be arrested and have a major extraordinary rendition put on their ass, flown off to some shit-hole country where they could be shot without a trial. Saudi Aramco, if you didn’t know, is the state-owned oil company. It’s the most profitable company in the world. They own Ghawar, the biggest oil field in the world, and Safaniyah, the biggest offshore field, in the northern Persian Gulf. Plus dozens of smaller fields. They produce 15 million barrels of crude every day.

  “Or, let’s say they used to.”

  He moved his chair to sit behind his computer installation and gestured Dave over to sit beside him.

  “Here’s Google Earth looking down at the Ghawar field,” the colonel said. Dave leaned forward, trying to figure it out. Warner moved the cursor around quickly.

  “Lots of sand. Not much to see unless you know what you’re looking for. You can pick out roads here, and here. The big black squares are towns for oil workers. These black dots are wellheads. Thousands of them. Here’s a pipeline.

  “But look at the date. Google is great, but it’s not current. Now, let me show you what that same area looked like yesterday.”

  He moved to another keyboard, another twenty-four-inch flat screen. He typed quickly. A password window popped up.

  “I’ll have to ask you to look away for a minute,” Warner said. “This is classified satellite data from the National Reconnaissance Office. I’m still authorized. Technically, I shouldn’t let you see these images, but I don’t know any other way to prove to you that you have to leave this stuff alone. You don’t want to play with these boys, believe me.”

  The password box turned red, and they saw the message:

  YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO DOWNLOAD THIS DATA

  NRO DIRECTIVE 98

  “Damn it,” the colonel fumed. “I got on yesterday. Let me try another…”

  He entered another URL, got a password request, and typed something in as Dave looked away. Warner leaned back with his arms folded.

  “God knows what they’re doing in the White House, the Pentagon, all the intelligence offices. They’ve kept a lid on this thing for a few weeks, but you can’t keep it a secret from people on the ground in Saudi. It’s too big. They can see it. There have been leaks—hell, that’s how I got it, somebody told somebody, who told somebody else, who told me.”

  “Somebody at Area 52,” Dave said, without thinking.

  “Area what?” He scowled at Dave, and then the light dawned. “You’ve already been writing about it, you silly son of a bitch. Area 52, that’s rich.”

  “I had to call it something.”

  Warner ran his hand over his bald head, glanced at his computer screen, which was still displaying the hourglass icon, and leaned intently toward Dave.

  “There will be more leaks. This whole thing is going to come out in the next ten to twenty days. God knows what they’ll do then. But you have to deep-six whatever you’ve written about it, because right now, they’re scared, and when these people get scared, they play rough. They’re going to be dead serious about keeping it all top secret until they figure out which way to jump. They will shoot you if they think you know stuff you’re not supposed to know. They’re still thinking of this as a problem to solve, instead of the all-out disaster it’s going to be. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Dave said he did, though he still wasn’t sure the man wasn’t exaggerating, or even if he had the right information. Warner saw his doubt, and sighed.

  “Already some wise guys, the billionaires, the banks, the stock brokerages, have begun to get wind that something’s wrong out in the Saudi desert. The cover story is terrorist sabotage at a few dozen wells, they’ll have it all under control in a few weeks, a month. All those big financial institutions and investors are running scared. They can’t figure out what to buy and what to sell. You noticed, gold is shooting up, oil-company stocks are tanking—”

  The computer screen had caught his eye, and he broke off and turned toward it.

  A THUMBPRINT IS REQUIRED TO ACCESS THIS SITE

  The colonel grinned at him from one side of his face, as if to say, See, I’m still connected. He pressed his thumb to a small scanner. After a second, the dialog box went away and a new screen came up.

  NRO SATELLITE IMAGING

  AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY

  ENTER DATE, ASSET, AND LOCATION

  He typed in yesterday’s date, the satellite designation—Keyhole 13/8—and latitude and longitude numbers. He’d mentioned the Keyhole program in their previous talks when Dave asked him if it was really true that U.S. spy satellites could read a license-plate number or a newspaper from space. He said plates yes, newspapers no, that the Keyhole satellites had optics that could see objects down to ten centimeters.

  “Here we go,” he said. “Ghawar, yesterday.”

  Dave leaned in close and immediately saw that things were different. White streaks now pointed to each of the wellheads.

  “What am I seeing here, Colonel?”

  “The wellheads are on fire. That’s steam you see blowing off to the northeast. Smoke and steam, actually. A lot of them are burning.”

  “I thought crude oil made black smoke when it burned.” Dave was remembering the awful pictures of the burning oil fields of Kuwait when the Iraqi Army set them afire during their retreat at the end of the Gulf War.

  “It does. It’s not the oil that’s burning. That’s still deep underground. But that bug that was supposed to m
ake the crude more liquid, it turned it into thick sludge instead, like I told you. What you see burning is the hydrogen that was liberated when the bug ate the crude. When hydrogen burns, it combines with oxygen to make water.”

  “Okay, you’ve made me a believer.”

  “There’s more. This would be a catastrophe, but I’ve known about this for almost a week. What I saw yesterday, that’s what made me want a drink.” He manipulated the mouse. They zoomed out into space, and began traveling to the north. When they reached the northern Persian Gulf Warner zoomed in again, but not quite as close.

  “Offshore rigs in the Gulf. Most of them are burning. These are over the Safaniyah field.”

  Dave was starting to sweat. It was one thing to hear this ridiculous story over drinks in the Frolic Room, and something else again to see it illustrated before his eyes.

  “Could it…I mean, could it have traveled underground? Could it all be one big field over there? Not one big pool of oil, but moving along a seam in the rocks, or something like that?” He shook his head. “I don’t know enough geology to even ask the right question here, I guess.”

  “And I don’t know enough to give you the right answer. But I don’t think so. I thought of that, and at first I was hoping that might be what’s going on. I mean, if we lost all the Persian Gulf oil, it would wreck the world economy, it would be a disaster bigger than anything the world has seen since the Second World War, but we could adapt, I guess. Conserve fuel, drill in Alaska, offshore in Florida and California. I think even the environmentalists would shut up when they saw just how bad a world without petroleum energy would be. And there’s oil in Russia, Indonesia, Venezuela, Nigeria. But like I said, there’s more.”

  He moved the map again.

  “That’s Iraq. Iran. More fires. See? There, there, and there?”

  Dave saw. Still, it was all in the Middle East. But now the colonel pulled way back, so that they saw all of Asia, and once more they traveled to the northwest.

  “We’re in Russia now. The Khantia-Mansia Autonomous Okrug, east of the Urals, in the Western Siberian Lowlands.” Dave saw a land with a lot of green, laced by a meandering river and pocked with a lot of lakes. The colonel moved the cursor around. “That’s the northern fork of the Ob River. This town is Nizhnevartovsk, here at one of the bends. Sixty below in the winter, ninety-five in the summer. Fifty years ago there wasn’t much there but mosquitoes and reindeer. Then they struck oil, and now it’s the richest town in Russia. North of it is the Samotlor oil field, one of the biggest outside of the Middle East. Take a look.”

  He zoomed in, and it didn’t take long for Dave to see it. The area was laced with white dots and white lines that he assumed were wells and pipelines. Some of them crisscrossed the lakes. It was pretty, actually, and the white streaks blowing southwest from some of the wells would have made it even prettier if he didn’t know what they were.

  “There’s no way those fields are connected. This is twenty-five hundred miles from Saudi Arabia. The damn bug is airborne.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense, according to what you told me. You said the guy wanted to get back at the Saudis for 9/11. Why would he want to have it spread to Iran and Russia?”

  “I don’t think he did want that. I did a little research on bacteria the night before last, and I learned they can mutate pretty fast. God knows how fast a tailored strain like this one can change, but it looks like it doesn’t take long.”

  They were both silent as they looked at the disaster unfolding in central Russia.

  “Do you know anything more?” Dave asked. “Like what became of the guy who did all this?”

  The colonel snorted. “May he rot in hell. No, I don’t, and I’m not going to try to find out. I can guarantee you he’s buried deep and, dead or alive, will never see the light of day again. What I hope is they have him at work on something to stop this bug.”

  “You think he can?”

  “I have no idea.”

  There was a soft ping from the computer that was showing the satellite pictures, and a window popped up.

  YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS THIS SITE

  YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW

  DO NOT TERMINATE THIS SESSION

  Dave was alarmed, but the colonel didn’t seem too concerned. Ignoring the command, he logged off the site by the simple expedient of turning his computer off. He looked at Dave a bit sheepishly.

  “That wasn’t actually my password I used,” he said. “Borrowed it from a friend. Looks like they’re narrowing access, which means they’re even more scared than they were a few days ago.” He paused, and looked thoughtful. “Look, Dave, this might get a little sticky if they can trace this all back to this computer. I don’t think they can, it was routed through two cutoffs, but you never know what new capabilities they’ve got. It might be best if you went on home now. I wouldn’t want to get you involved. In fact, it’s probably best if we don’t meet again. I don’t give a damn about your movie with this going on. I don’t think anybody’s going to give a damn about any movie for a long time. We’re all going to be too busy. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, a lot of plans to make. You should do the same.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Take care of your family. That’s all that counts now.”

  Those were the last words he heard from Colonel Warner.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He was shaking as he got on the Red Line train, and still shaky as he got off in North Hollywood. Seeing the colonel fall again and again. You see things like that in movies all the time, but it looks completely different in real life.

  He sat there in the Escalade, sweating, trying to come up with a plan. What he wanted to do was go get Addison, and find Karen wherever she was. Gather his family together and get the hell out of town.

  Could they connect him with Colonel Warner? Had he left a fingerprint? He was glad now that he had refused the coffee.

  He started the Escalade, and headed up and over Laurel Canyon.

  He lived on Mockingbird Drive, right on the extreme western edge of the expensive part of Hollywood, in the hills. In fact, he was so close to the Beverly Hills Trousdale Estates that he could stand on his back patio and throw a baseball over the city line. That baseball would land at the bottom of a ravine, and on property worth about twice as much per square foot as his because of the Beverly Hills address.

  The neighborhood didn’t have a formal name, but his family always called it Birdland, a name Addison came up with when they moved there, when she was five. Some of the streets around them were Thrush, Kinglet, Robin, Swallow, Oriole, Thrasher, and Skylark. The house was very near Blue Jay Way, where George Harrison once lived, though actually getting there involved over a mile of driving through the spaghetti maze of streets in the canyons.

  He found himself looking for helicopters as he climbed Doheny Drive. When he got to Mockingbird he turned cautiously, all his senses on alert. There were no military vehicles parked near the house, no soldiers with black uniforms and rifles. He turned into the driveway, activated the electric gate, drove through, turned off the engine, and listened to the silence. After a while he got out and cautiously entered the house.

  Built in 1972, the house had five bedrooms, six and a half baths. Five thousand square feet in two stories, and that was not counting the guesthouse. Four-car garage, swimming pool, and something not many houses up in the hills had: almost a quarter acre of lawn. The southern end was a large deck that ran to the edge of a forty-five-degree downslope covered in ice plant to hold the soil in place. The whole thing was white, boxy, and modern, with a lot of glass walls facing south and no windows at all facing the street, which was standard practice for people living in the hills.

  It was way too much house for the three of them. Dave had grown to hate it in the last few years. It was an albatross around his neck. He had paid what seemed an insane amount for it at the time, then watched as his investment doubled, then almost tripled
, then fell over the edge with the popping of the housing bubble. If he sold it, he would walk away with a few thousand dollars.

  His office was the guesthouse. The top floor was used for storage. The bottom floor was one large room with a galley kitchen, a gas fireplace, the obligatory media center, and a large conference table. When he was flying high in the situation comedy business they would often hold story conferences at that table.

  The south wall, like the south wall of the main house, was all glass. The view ranged from Hancock Park to Mar Vista, with Century City, the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, Baldwin Hills, and of course downtown Beverly Hills in between. At night he could see the long lines of headlights and taillights on the I-10 and the 405, and the planes lining up to land at LAX. It was a killer view, and he had arranged the series of long oak tables he used for a desk to face it. He sat down in his chair and powered up one of the three computers on the desk. He brought up the views from the three street-side security cameras.

  All was still quiet on Mockingbird Drive.

  He saved his treatment onto a flash drive. Then he shredded it, and files of his interviews with Colonel Warner. There was nothing he could do about the bank records of the checks he had written to him. And who was he kidding? If those people thought he had seen data he shouldn’t have seen, there was a waterboard or a bullet somewhere out there with his name on it.

  Once more he went back over the events of the last two days in his mind. Was there any other possible interpretation than what Colonel Warner had shown him? Up until that morning Dave had been leaning toward the theory that he had simply been spinning a tall tale, or maybe exaggerating some rumors he had picked up from some of his friends still in government. How was it possible that something of that magnitude was going on, spreading around the globe, and it wasn’t all over CNN? Was that plausible?

  Well, maybe just. Keeping the secret in the Arabian desert would be the easiest. Nobody lived out there except oil workers, and they could be sequestered. The visible evidence—the smoke during the day and the flames at night—reminding him of the biblical pillars that guided the Israelites—could be explained as accidents or sabotage, for a while.