Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  “Go ahead,’ Ian said. “Start it up again.”

  Kendall’s choppy gaze shifted among bunkers, artillery pieces, with audible instructions telling him exactly where to turn. All this information could be blown up, analyzed in military laboratories, in a way that any one man could not have possibly done on his own. Thanks to the implant and Julia’s surgical expertise. She was struck with a sense of pride in what she had made possible, more real than any exercise or white paper after looking through Kendall’s eyes.

  Kendall evaded detection throughout this reconnaissance, but just as he was almost back to his tent, an alarm went up throughout the camp. Someone had detected the incoming transmissions to the implants, Julia knew. The chase was on.

  Markov told her to pause the footage. “That’s it, then. That’s all we have.”

  “Did you see something?” Julia asked, “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I,” Ian said, sounding puzzled. “I mean, I understand some of the pieces. I was sent to spy out the engineers, gather technical knowledge. They sent Kendall to gather intel about the Blackwing contractors, their numbers, their forces. Am I right?”

  “Sure looks that way,” Markov said. “They needed visual confirmation of what they were seeing from satellites and predator drones. What was in the tents? How much was camouflaged to look like something else?”

  “But why?” Julia asked. “Just a recon mission, like you told us?”

  “There’s no such thing as a dry run when you’ve got resources of this magnitude.”

  “So why did they care about this particular camp?” Julia asked.

  “Hold up a sec,” Ian said. “We’ll get there, but I want Markov to back up for a minute.”

  “Go ahead,” Markov said.

  “First, I can’t figure out why Blackwing is so heavily armed. Those resources go way beyond maintaining a robust defensive posture. And from our side, you say the CIA needed to know Blackwing’s military capabilities. Why? I can’t see how that would be useful unless someone were planning to…”

  “Exactly.” Markov said. “That’s it. That explains everything. I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  Ian shook his head. “There’s no way we could pull that off, not with what we just saw. It’s one thing to call in a gunship, but SOCOM can’t send in ground forces. It would take a battalion, maybe two, with air support, to take that camp.”

  “Wouldn’t that basically start a war?” Julia asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Ian said. “It would amount to an invasion. Both the Chinese and the Namibians would go nuts.”

  “They went nuts anyway,” Markov said. “Even with the cover story of a rogue agent. You, I mean.”

  “A full-scale attack would go way beyond that.”

  “Unless,” Markov said, “it wasn’t the Americans planning the attack.”

  This quieted Julia and Ian for a moment. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it.

  “You mean the Namibians,” Ian said at last. “The regular army.”

  “Right. American intelligence, American air power. Namibian ground forces.”

  “They’d attack a camp in their own country?” Julia said. “But why? Aren’t the Chinese and their mercenaries here by permission of the government?”

  “And this is the why of the matter,” Markov said. “Let’s go back to what you saw, Ian.”

  Ian shrugged. “Just a couple of guys chatting about mining operations.”

  “About an oil field,” Markov corrected. “A really, really big oil field. What the industry calls an elephant.”

  “I don’t know much about oil,” Ian said, “but I know there’s a lot of that stuff in Africa.”

  Julia had read about the scramble for oil across Africa. It was one of the few major places still left to discover and exploit large resources and all the big players were involved.

  “Why this field?” she asked. “There’s oil all over Africa.”

  “Not in Namibia, not until now. And this field is different,” Markov said. He reached for the mouse and a few clicks later revealed several slices from a 3-dimensional seismic image. “This is data that was retrieved from a hard drive off a scientist’s computer at ChinaOne Petroleum. These images were obtained by one of our agents in Beijing.”

  “What does it mean?” Julia asked.

  “The primary technique for oil exploration these days is using something called passive seismic.”

  “Seismic? I thought that was used for measuring earthquakes.”

  “Apparently it’s also state of the art in finding oil. But this isn’t a tiny recording machine sitting on a workbench. We’re talking huge arrays of sensors, spread over tens of miles, recording ground movements for weeks at a time. Buried in the noise is the energy from hundreds of micro-tremors, which is reflected off of underground structures. After a lot of hocus pocus and a month with a room full of supercomputers you get something like this. A map of underground oil reserves.”

  Markov pointed to a bright area in the image resembling an overturned bowl. “The size of this structure and, wait a second…” With another click of the mouse he added another layer to the image. “This is the result of a subsequent electomagnetic survey. The fuzzy blue blob over our bowl is a direct indicator of oil. We’re talking really deep reserves.”

  “How deep?” Julia asked.

  “According to a geophysicist we tapped at Los Alamos, it corresponds exactly to what Ian overheard. He recorded a conversation with two engineers claiming that recoverable reserves were thirty-two billion barrels of light, sweet crude. That’s the good stuff. And what’s the price of oil right now?”

  Julia did a back-of-the envelope estimate in her head. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s trillions of dollars,” Markov said. “But that’s not all. There are a lot of big fields around. The Canadians have something even bigger in Alberta, and the Brazilians have discovered some huge offshore deposits recently. But they’re hard to get to, expensive. And the key is flow rate.”

  “How much you can get out at once?” Ian asked.

  “Exactly. Say you’ve got two fields. One is in the Gulf of Mexico, divided into lots of medium sized pockets thousands of feet below the surface. You can get it out with a lot of effort and maybe it costs you sixty bucks a barrel to get up. It comes out at about 200,000 barrels a day.”

  “That’s still a lot of oil,” Julia said.

  “The second is in Saudi Arabia. This is what Ghawar is, the biggest oil field in the world. It costs about three dollars a barrel to get up and it’s so concentrated, so big, and accessible that it has pumped five million barrels of oil a day for decades. That one field is the reason why Saudi Arabia rules the oil world. Which, these days, means that it does whatever the hell it wants.”

  “Is that what we’re talking about here?” Ian asked.

  “This isn’t Ghawar, nothing is. But it might just be the second biggest oil field in the world. It’s big, it’s easy to access, and might pump three million barrels of oil a day within a few years.”

  “That’s enough to turn every Namibian into a multi-millionaire, almost overnight,” Ian said.

  “Or a few Namibians into multi-billionaires,” Markov said. “Or make ChinaOne Petroleum into a beast that could crush Exxon-Mobile and British Petroleum like bugs. Or secure American oil supplies, or…well, just about anything. It’s why the Chinese security is over-the-top paranoid and apparently with good reason.”

  “But why is the CIA involved?” Julia asked. “Are we just trying to scare off the Chinese? Or goad the Namibians into doing it for us?”

  Markov shook his head. “This is nasty business. I didn’t learn about the oil reserves until last week, but somebody knew about this long before I did.” He frowned. “Let’s keep going.”

  Julia started the implant stream again.

  They caught Kendall in the end, and he was soon reunited with Ian, also captured. Dupont and his men
strapped the two men down. It was clear that things were going to go very badly for them. Maybe the C-130 attack had been a mercy.

  “Stop it here,” Ian said. “Just pause it.”

  Julia paused it. She looked at Ian, worried. He was breathing heavily. She rested a hand on his arm. He was trembling. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I can’t watch anymore,” Ian said. His voice sounded pinched, strained. “It’s…it’s too much. I just can’t. I’m losing control…”

  Markov was watching Ian, but he nodded. “Why don’t you go outside and get some air. We’ve got what we need. I just need to see the end, assure myself that you told us everything.”

  Ian nodded, then stepped back. He turned and walked up the stairs to the main floor of the farm house, shut the door behind him.

  “Is he all right?” Julia asked, worried. “Maybe I should—”

  “He’ll be fine,” Markov said. “You look at that guy, he’s cool, collected in battle. Like a machine.”

  “I know. In Utah…” She had to pause to collect her own emotions. “In Utah, when they tried to kill us, he was amazing. No fear, no panic. I was a mess. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but cower in a corner with my hands wrapped around my knees, if he hadn’t been there to steady me.”

  “Everybody has the same fear,” Markov said. “And I’m not sure, but it might hit us all with the same strength. It’s just that some people don’t get it full force until later. All that stuff they should have been feeling at the time comes back.” He glanced up the stairs to where Ian had departed. “But Ian’s a tough one. He’ll be fine.”

  They didn’t learn much new from the rest of the data from Kendall’s implant. It was loud and violent. The battle on the ridge seemed to go on forever with ear-splitting gunfire and explosions. Markov occasionally instructed her to skip ahead.

  When they finished, Julia stepped back and rubbed her eyes. Her eyeballs felt like they’d been sitting under a blow drier and her neck and shoulders were stiff. And she was stunned by watching Kendall’s final moments. And guilty, like she’d just watched a snuff film.

  Markov’s jaw clenched. “Someone needs to answer for what happened here. I sent those men on good faith. I gave them the tools they needed, the required intelligence. And I was prepared to back them up. And someone—some traitor—stabbed them in the back.” He turned to Julia with his face red. “Someone is going to answer for this.”

  Julia watched him rant, fascinated. The staid, by-the-books Markov had turned rogue.

  He opened his mouth to say something else, but just then there was a shout from above, a gunshot.

  She turned, afraid, stunned again like she had been in Utah, but Markov was already moving.

  “Lock the door!” he cried. “Do it!”

  The command in his voice snapped her from her stupor. She raced to the top of the stairs and locked it, and not a moment too soon. Someone slammed into the door, tried to force it open. It was a heavy metal door and would hold for the moment. There was a crossbar and she dropped it into place.

  “Help me down here,” Markov shouted. He was at the bank of computers, pulling cards, pushing buttons.

  “What about Ian?”

  “He’s on his own. The others, too. Get down here, Nolan. Now!”

  She obeyed. Markov told her to grab a metal garbage can in the corner and slide it over. It was heavy, but she managed. Voices shouted from the other side of the door and someone slammed something into it.

  The cards on the computers, the disk drives, even the CPUs, slid out of the computer towers. Markov and Julia gutted the computers one by one and dropped their innards into the metal can. He then grabbed some files, some loose papers from a drawer, then dumped them in with the hardware.

  Last, Markov grabbed Julia’s computer, the probe, and his own laptop and dropped them into the bin.

  “No, not that,” she said. “That’s evidence, we have to…”

  Markov shoved her to one side. He reached into a drawer and pulled out what looked like a grenade. He pulled the pin, dropped the thing into the garbage, then reached for the lid. The equipment inside burst into fire and smoke poured into the room. Julia handed Markov the lid and he slammed it over the top.

  The equipment destroyed, Markov turned toward the doorway at the top of the stairs. He used one hand to pull a gun from a shoulder holster under his jacket and the other to push Julia behind him and out of the way.

  Someone banged on the door upstairs, hard, as if with a ram.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “Get down, stay down. If I die, ask to speak with someone from the embassy. You tell them we threatened you, whatever. You were not involved, understand?”

  The hell she was going to do that. Not while Ian was upstairs, in trouble and Markov was down here with a pistol, apparently ready to go down fighting.

  Julia turned to the drawer where Markov had found the incendiary device to burn the hard drives. A stapler, blank paper, pens.

  Wrong drawer.

  She went to the next drawer and there was another of the grenade-like devices. She grabbed it out, held it in her fist with her fingers from the other hand on the pin.

  There was an explosion and the metal doors burst off their hinges. The concussion crashed through the room and Julia almost dropped the grenade.

  “Put down your weapons!” a voice barked from the top of the stairs. Bright lights flashed into the room. “Put them down or we shoot.”

  “What do we do?” Julia whispered.

  But Markov was already putting down his gun. He turned, saw how she’d armed herself and snatched away the grenade and rolled it into a corner without pulling its pin.

  “We’re unarmed,” Markov said. “You can come down.”

  Half a dozen armed men poured down the stairs. They were black. Namibians, she thought, in green uniforms unmarked by any insignia. They shouted at Markov to drop to his knees, which he did. Julia dropped down beside him.

  He turned to Julia. “They’re Namibians, not CIA or Blackwing. Maybe we have a chance.”

  And then two men grabbed him, dragged him to one side. Another man shoved Julia face-first to the cement floor. She heard a grunt and saw a booted leg kicked at Markov.

  “Filthy spy!” one of them shouted.

  A gun barrel pressed against the back of Julia’s head. Nobody was attacking her yet, but a woman taken by enemy forces faces her own special fears that a man would never understand.

  She squinted her eyes shut and prayed it wouldn’t come to that. Meanwhile, it was going very badly for Anton Markov.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Ian was outside when the attack came. One of Markov’s men had come over to ask if he could bum a cigarette. Ian didn’t have one, and wasn’t in the mood to chat, which it turned out was what the guy had in mind.

  He excused himself, then stepped off the porch and into the darkness. The air was cool, the insects out. The smell, more than anything, took him back to that night at the oil camp, when everything went wrong. When Kendall died.

  “Watch your step,” the agent said from the porch to his rear. The man stood near the bug zapper and it cast his face in blue light. “Davis saw a big, nasty-looking snake in that bush just before dark.”

  “Probably a mamba,” Ian said.

  “What’s that? Is it dangerous?”

  “Ja, it’s deadly.”

  He kept walking until he was away from the house and among the tall grass and bushes some thirty, forty meters distant. There was more cover here than in the Kaokoland, more wildlife.

  And in spite of his flippant remark about the mamba, this was a game reserve with leopards, hyena, possibly even lions. It wasn’t particularly safe to be out here alone, but he had a hard time catching his breath. He swirled with emotions: anger, fear, depression. Why had it hit him so hard so suddenly? Was it emotions, stress that triggered the implant?

  His ears picked up the approaching trucks first. S
omething crunched across the gravel from the direction of the dry riverbed, and he saw something black silhouetted against the sky. It was so big he thought it was a rhino or an elephant before his ears recognized the sound of tires.

  More trucks came from the north and south. He turned to sprint back toward the farmhouse, warn the others. He was less than halfway there when shouts sounded from the porch. Two men were struggling on the deck. A gunshot, one fell. And then there were men all around, swarming up and over.

  “Put it down!” a voice shouted.

  Ian hadn’t been armed since Markov took his gun outside the oil camp. And it was too late now. The house was overwhelmed. Trucks encircled the building with lights trained on all sides.

  He crouched behind a bush, peered through. There had to be twenty, thirty men in and around the house, and he could hear trucks moving in the desert behind him. Backup. He couldn’t see if they were Blackwing or Namibians, or even CIA.

  Julia, he thought.

  Markov could take buckshot in the crotch, for all Ian cared, but he had to help Julia.

  But he couldn’t approach the house, not unarmed.

  The trucks were the key. Maybe he could sneak up on one, overwhelm the crew, and then get close to the house and…what? He’d figure out something.

  Ian turned and crept further into the darkness.

  ________

  Malcolm Hathwell, senior partner of Hathwell, Ivie, & Goldberg, met with his partners in a wrap-around suite in a skyscraper that overlooked Wall Street.

  These offices had been remodeled a dozen times, since early financiers built the skyscraper in the 1920s, but Malcolm could still feel the ghosts.

  The infamous Bear Stearns buyout had originated in this room as Malcolm and his partner, Abe Goldberg, brokered a deal between JP Morgan executives and the humiliated Bear executives. It had been a fire sale, with Bear assets sold for pennies on the dollar, and it had only been the first wave of a financial tsunami that had washed over Wall Street. Malcolm had almost lost track of the number of frantic meetings in subsequent months as the titans of Wall Street alternatively tried to limit the damage of and profit by the death throes of Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and many other venerable firms. And every time, Hathwell, Ivie, & Goldberg took their cut.