The room darkened and the inevitable PowerPoint image came up: a map of the Tanzanian coast and the Indian Ocean's western edge. “Gentlemen, ladies, let us go straight to the point,” said Matenga. “You have no doubt heard rumors and media reports about our new deepwater drilling project. We have confirmed the presence of a very large oil deposit in Tanzanian territorial waters, far beneath our existing offshore fields. I will not trouble you with the fine details of the geology, but as you see, it underlies a great deal of sea floor.” A black elongated blob appeared on the map, nearly a third the length of the Tanzanian coast and vaguely parallel to it. “The field is a little less than three hundred kilometers long and between thirty and fifty kilometers wide. Of course there is much more work to be done to find out for certain, but our initial estimate is that it will yield more than eleven billion barrels of crude oil.”
7 March 2029: The Presidential Palace, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The Honorable Elijah Mkembe, President of the United Republic of Tanzania, rose from behind his desk, extended a hand. “Thank you for coming, Ambassador.”
“Thank you, your excellency.” Jun Yinshao was a professional, no question; his handshake and fractional bow communicated the perfect blend of friendliness and deference, a polite fiction Mkembe appreciated. The president knew all too well how completely his survival and that of his nation depended on its Asian patron. The presidential office around them was paneled and furnished in dark native wood, and the chandeliers overhead were ornamented with local gold, but all the electronics were Chinese; so was the glass case on one side of the room with a rock from the Moon, brought back after the successful Chinese lunar landing in 2025; and so was the antique scroll painting, a gift from an earlier ambassador, on the other side: a quaint fifteenth-century ink painting of an elephant, an edgy reminder of just how long China had cultivated an interest in East Africa.
“Permit me also to congratulate you on the latest oil discovery,” said Jun then. “I was filled in on yesterday's briefing. Eleven billion barrels—that is astonishing.”
“If the estimates are correct,” Mkembe said. “We will see.”
“Of course. Even a smaller find will be excellent news.”
“True.”
Jun considered him for a long moment. “I gather from your tone, your excellency, that you don't consider it excellent news.”
Mkembe allowed a nod. “Very good. You will forgive an old man's worries, I hope. I am concerned that there may be trouble over this new find. If it had been more modest—well, that belongs to the land of might-have-beens, but I seem to recall something one of your philosophers said: ‘Too much success is not an advantage.’”
“Lao Tsu,” said Jun, smiling in response to the reference. “Yes.”
“Thus my desire to meet with you privately, as soon as possible.”
“Of course.” Jun paused, then: “I'm sure you know that my government is well aware of the potential for trouble from—foreign powers.”
Mkembe chuckled. “May we be frank, Ambassador, and say it out loud? The Americans.”
“As you wish.” Again the fractional bow, conceding. “I will be sure to communicate your concerns to my superiors, and to our intelligence agencies.”
Mkembe kept his face calm with an effort. Chinese diplomats never said anything by accident; he'd learned that decades ago and used it to his advantage more than once, sensing some shift in Beijing's mood long before his political rivals got wind of it. An issue that didn't matter in Chinese eyes got referred to “my government” or “my superiors.” A reference to the huge but highly secretive Chinese intelligence community was another matter. That meant—Mkembe was sure of it—that the danger he sensed was real.
7 March 2029: The Durban hotel, Dar es Salaam
“It is a delicate line that we walk here,” said the Assistant Minister of Energy, and leaned back in his chair. The table between them had the remains of a very good dinner on it, and the latest of several rounds of whiskey. All of it was on McGaffney's tab, and worth it at twice the price. He'd done a standard interview at TPC headquarters earlier in the day, guessed that the man might have more to say after hours and off the record, and suggested a meal. Whether it was McGaffney's reputation or something else entirely, the assistant minister had taken the bait.
“I believe you know Africa quite well, Mr. McGaffney,” said the assistant minister. “You have perhaps been to Nigeria?”
“Couple of times,” McGaffney answered.
“A very sad situation. Oil companies from Europe and America moved in, developed the country's oil resources, saw to it that nearly all the profits went back home with them, and spent just enough in bribes to officials to make sure nothing would be done about it. Today the oil is gone, the country is bankrupt and falling apart, and the officials who took those bribes? Those who are still alive, and they are not many, are in hiding abroad.”
“You don't want that to happen here.”
“It must not happen here. So far, it has not happened here. It is a good thing, I think, that we did not make this latest find until now.” The assistant minister leaned forward. “A great many of us here in Tanzania have been looking north, toward the Persian Gulf. We watch billions upon billions of renminbi flow into those nations because they have control of their own oil production. No one talks about a resource curse there. We see this and we ask ourselves, why should we not do the same thing here in Africa? Now, perhaps, we can.”
“Because of China,” McGaffney said.
The assistant minister said nothing for a long moment, and sipped some whiskey. Then: “Since this is off the record, I will be frank with you. The Chinese are not here out of charity. We have much that they want, though oil of course heads the list, and they have many things we need very badly. So we bargain. With the Americans—as you say, you have been to Nigeria, and perhaps other places where the oil is controlled by the Americans. How many of them have prospered? So we deal with the Chinese, we get the things we need, and perhaps one day we will be a wealthy nation and no longer a poor one.
“See, Mr. McGaffney, the United States itself was once like Tanzania. It was a colony of Britain, and like any other colony of hers, its farms and forests and mines made money for rich men in London, not for Americans. So the Americans had their revolution, they took their own resources and their own destiny in their hands, and became a great nation; and not so many years later, the British empire was gone and it was the United States and not Britain that had its navy visiting every port and its garrisons all over the world.”
“You think,” said McGaffney, “they've forgotten where they came from?”
“No, no, not at all.” The assistant minister took another sip of his whiskey. “I think they remember it too well. They know that sooner or later some other country will replace them as they replaced the British, and so they see every rising nation as a threat to them. So we walk our delicate line; we deal with the Chinese and try not to offend the Americans; and we hope—I hope—that this new oil discovery will not cause us to lose our balance. Or, shall we say, cause the Americans to lose theirs.”
McGaffney nodded. “And if it does?”
The assistant minister gave his whiskey glass a long morose look, and then downed the contents in a single swallow. “Mr. McGaffney, I pray to God every night without fail that that does not happen.”
TWO
8 March 2029: The White House, Washington DC
The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room: a nice touch, Bill Stedman thought, and very much the new president's style. Flames crackling in the fireplace took the chill off the air, and a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback over on one wall did much the same thing in a slightly more metaphorical sense. After eight years of National Security Council meetings in the Cabinet Room under Abraham Lincoln's morose gaze, the less imposing setting promised well.
Stedman pulled out a chair at the long mahogany table that filled the center of the room. He was nearly the l
ast there, which rankled, or would have if the only one who hadn't arrived yet wasn't the only one who mattered. The Secretaries of State and Energy were bent toward one another over one corner of the table, talking. Stedman didn't interrupt them; he nodded greetings to CIA director Greg Barnett and Admiral Roland Waite, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and shook the hand of Vice President Gurney, then turned to the remaining person there. “Good morning, Ellen.”
Washington gossip had it that Ellen Harbin wanted his job, wanted it badly, and wasn't happy at all that she had to make do with the lesser title of national security adviser. She looked up through her frameless glasses, smiled her bright cold smile. “Good morning, Secretary.”
Stedman sat down, pulled papers out of his briefcase: the latest news from Spain and the Balkans, none of it good. He was less than halfway through the first paper when the door opened and the president came in.
“Oh, sit down, sit down.” Jameson Weed waved them back to their seats. Pushing sixty, he looked barely fifty and still moved like the athlete he'd once been. “Everyone's here? Good. Anything else on the list before this Tanzania thing? Bill?”
“Nothing critical,” Stedman said. “More of the usual from Europe; it can wait.”
“Claire?”
Claire Hayes Hutchinson had broken off her conversation with the Secretary of Energy when Weed entered, and tilted her head to one side; the gesture made her look like an inquisitive bird. “What Bill said. Thank God for quiet Saturdays.”
That got a laugh from several others, and an “Amen!” from Barnett. “Okay,” Weed said, laughing with the rest. “Lloyd, what have you got on this?”
Lloyd Schumacher, the Secretary of Energy, clicked the remote in his hand. A screen came noiselessly down above the fireplace, and the lights dimmed. Another click brought up the first image: a map of East Africa and the western Indian Ocean, with the new oilfield marked off in black. “Not much more than the media. If the Tanzanians are telling the truth, they've found the biggest new oilfield anywhere in a couple of decades. Eleven billion barrels of proven reserves puts it in the supergiant category.”
“Are they telling the truth?” Weed asked.
“Looks like it. They've got their people out leasing every deepwater drilling rig they can get, cash up front.”
Weed nodded. “And the Chinese are all over it.”
“Like ugly on an ape. Tanzania's been in their pocket nearly since independence, and there are CNOOC people all over the place right now—Dodoma and Dar es Salaam, but also out on the drilling platforms.”
“Is it close enough to Kenyan waters—?”
“Not a chance. The north end of the new field is almost two hundred nautical miles from the disputed zone.”
“Kenya wouldn't intervene even if the oil was practically in their pocket,” said the Secretary of State. “That last clash with the Tanzanians isn't something Nairobi wants to repeat.”
“Dammit, we need that oil.” The president stared at the screen for a long moment.
He was right, Stedman knew, and “we” didn't just refer to the United States. Weed had won the White House the previous November with a campaign that focused with laser intensity on getting the US out of its long economic slump. With the once-huge shale oil deposits out West nearly exhausted, winning a bigger share of imported oil was the key to making good on that promise, but that was easier said than done; behind what was left of the polite fiction of a free global market in petroleum, most oil that crossed national borders did so according to political deals between producer countries and those consuming countries strong and wealthy enough to compete. These days, more often than not, the US lost out—and the impact of that reality on Weed's reelection campaign was very much on the minds of everyone in the room.
“There's one option,” said Harbin. “Regime change.”
President Weed turned to face her. Stedman cleared his throat. “In theory, maybe,” he said. “In practice, it's expensive and risky. We could end up with another Iraq or Venezuela way too easily.” He leaned forward. “And sooner or later, the Chinese are going to stand and fight, and eleven billion barrels might give them enough of a reason.”
Harbin gave him a contemptuous look. “They won't dare,” she said. “It's too far for their force projection capacity, anyway. They'll back down the way they did in Gabon.”
The president glanced from one to the other. “It's an option,” he said. “I want a detailed plan on my desk in two weeks.”
10 March 2029: Russell Senate Office Building, Washington DC
Pete Bridgeport stepped into his office and went straight to the wet bar tucked in one corner. Two hefty shots of decent bourbon over ice promised some relief after a bruising afternoon in committee. Drink in hand, he crossed the room to his desk, gave the computer screen a weary look, and reminded himself that delaying just meant that he'd be home even later.
In theory, he knew, he should be pleased with himself. He'd landed the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee with the new year—a dud assignment, or that was its reputation, but he'd done his homework, read up on its history, and knew that a good chairman could turn it into a significant force on the Hill. When the media started claiming in January that the new Army antimissile system wasn't half as good as it was cracked up to be, he'd jumped on the issue, scheduled hearings, and kick-started the process of sorting out which of the claims were true and which were scare stories churned out by rival manufacturers.
Watching the CEO of United Ballistics sweat bullets on the witness stand was a definite pleasure, and seeing news websites chatter about the hearings for two weeks straight offered a different and more practical payoff, one that might matter come election time. Still, trying to pry loose anything useful from a closed circle of Pentagon procurement people and defense industry executives was exhausting work, and it didn't help that two members of the committee came from states that would lose jobs if the program got cancelled. All in all, Bridgeport was glad the hearings were finally over.
He slumped into the leather chair, tapped the trackball to wake the screen, sipped bourbon as another click brought up the news feed his staffers had prepared for him. Most of it was chatter about the big new petroleum discovery in East Africa and the latest word from the civil war in Spain: nothing relevant. He closed the feed, opened his email, filed the messages that could wait, clicked on one from his daughter Melanie—a quick little note updating him on her move to Elgin Field down in Florida, her new position as head of logistics for the fighter wing there, and the latest Air Force gossip—and then on another that might matter.
The sender was a minor Defense Department official he'd known since college, the email ostensibly chatter about the man's kids and their Little League teams, but Bridgeport set down the glass, got up, and crossed to the tall bookcase on the other side of the office. The book he wanted was behind a photo in a silver standup frame: a picture of Melanie, though it could almost have been one of her mother before the cancer sunk its claws into her.
He moved the photo, pulled out an old leather-bound volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and took it back to his desk. Snooper programs these days could break just about any form of data encryption, or so rumor had it, but a code with a completely arbitrary key was another matter. Bridgeport wondered now and then if anybody else in Washington remembered the old trick of using numbers in a text to refer to pages and words in an agreed-on edition of a book; still, it seemed to work. He started flipping through the book, turning baseball scores and kids’ ages into words on a very different subject.
It was a familiar drill. Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution of the United States reserved to Congress the right to declare war, but like many other provisions that inconvenienced the executive branch, that one had been honored in the breach for many decades; the last time Congress declared war on anybody was back in 1941. Since then, American troops had gone charging into action around the world over and over again
without so much as a nod to Congress or the Constitution.
Most members of Congress grumbled about the metastasis of presidential privilege now and then. The smart ones figured out ways to put themselves back into the loop, at least to the extent of finding out what the executive branch was doing in advance of official announcements. Like most of his colleagues, Bridgeport had his own network of informants scattered through the federal bureaucracy, and now and then got tipped off to something that made a difference.
Like this time.
The words on the notepad were: Caesar consideration regime change eastern Africa oil. “Caesar” was Weed, of course, and the meaning of the rest was clear enough. Bridgeport opened the news feed again, read the stories on the Tanzanian find, and then took a good long sip of the bourbon and sat back. Eleven billion barrels of crude oil would make quite a difference to the US economy, he knew—if Weed and the Pentagon could pull it off.
After a long moment, Bridgeport tapped the intercom. “Anne, I need to talk to Justin as soon as he can get free. I've got a project for him.”
“Sure thing,” Anne's voice said. “I'll send him right in.”
“Thanks,” said Bridgeport, and closed the connection.
12 March 2029: The Pentagon, Washington DC
The lights went down in the conference room, and a map of East Africa came up on the screen. “Here's the target,” said the general at the front of the room; a dot of green light from his laser pointer glowed in the middle of the map. “Tanzania—the United Republic of Tanzania, for purists. The official capital's here at Dodoma.” The dot of light touched a city inland, near the center of the country. “The old capital's here at Dar es Salaam.” The dot moved out to the coast. “The Presidential Palace and most of the executive branch are still at Dar, and so's our embassy. The legislature's at Dodoma. In theory, the whole government will be in Dodoma one of these days. In practice—well, this is Africa, so don't hold your breath.
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