by Gareth Flood
24
California
Deep within a large and dark forest in northern California, a hundred very powerful and very drunk, out of shape men, were running around campfires like college kids.
It was the annual meeting of the “Elite Burning Crew”. Once a year, at an anointed time, a very secretive club all met to build their network, get thoroughly hammered on alcohol and eventually burn a huge straw effigy - usually of the leading Democrat of the time.
You had to be invited into the society and for that - you had to be born and raised in the right places. With the decline over time of the Freemasons and the Illuminati, this was the only unofficial club left.
Around one particular blazing fire in a very specific clearing, seven robed figures were discussing what would happen in major world affairs.
Roscoe Y. Ickes was sitting on a rock, looking deeply into a crystal tumbler of Hennessy.
Chris Calhoun, head of the CIA, was standing next to him and using Ickes’ shoulder as a support pole.
The other men present were: Randy Schweinburger, US Secretary of State, Bob Wecksler, head of the New York Stock Exchange, Dick Bullock-Boyle, the President’s college roommate and head of a manufacturing consortium that secretly controlled anything manufactured in America or allowed to be imported and Chuck Shloer, CEO of one of the planets largest software companies. Chuck was also head of the ‘Creative Industries Body’, which oversaw the export of American culture in the form of films, television and software games to the rest of the world.
Calhoun watched Randy Schweinburger start to dance around the fire and play tag with Bob Wecksler. Dick Bullock-Boyle and Chuck Shloer, two more captains of American industry soon joined in the frivolity.
Chris Calhoun’s jacket beeped and he fished out his cellular phone. He punched in a code and his brow furrowed as he read the message on the screen:
22:00 Update: No new developments in Europe on Mitchell case – Intel drying up from Oil Companies.
‘Hey guys!’ yelled Calhoun as he put the phone away, ‘We need to talk.”
‘About what?’ asked Bob Wecksler, ‘the rumours in the brotherhood of who is going to be the next President?’
‘No.’ Calhoun said, ‘about this European situation. A lot of weird stuff has been happening over there since someone knocked off Hoot Mitchell. We’re getting frozen out a bit on what is going from the new guy – this Warren Tarrant.’
‘Where’s he from anyhow?’ Randy Schweinburger asked, slightly slurring his words.
‘Some kinda European, think he’s a Limey bastard’ Roscoe Y. Ickes said, ‘not an American, for sure.’
‘Damn Europeans!’ exclaimed Dick Bullock-Boyle, as he violently hurled a bottle he was holding into the far off trees. A short, sharp yelp was heard from the direction the bottle had flown in. ‘Sorry buddy.’ Bullock-Boyle yelled into the sky.
Bullock-Boyle staggered up to the other men, as they all came together in a group.
‘I’m still pissed off those damn Europeans left me out of the Algeria deal back in the nineties. That’s gratitude for you.’ Bullock-Boyle said, almost yelling, ‘The US armed forces not only saves their stupid old buildings for future generations of tourists, but also rebuilds a load more of ‘em through the Marshall Plan and they later freeze us out.’
‘Well,’ said Bob Wecksler as he also joined the group, ‘my Grandmother was English and wouldn’t speak to me for being American, as she said I kept her on War rations and Spam-’
‘Spam?’ cut in Ickes, ‘Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout boy? They didn’t have email back then.’
‘Uh, no, think of all the leftover bits of cow reduced to fit in a can - you have spam.’
‘Ewww!’ Ickes’ face screwed up in disgust. ‘Filthy rotten mouth Limeys.’ he leant forward and spat into the fire.
‘Anyway,’ continued Wecksler, ‘can’t remember where I was going with that now…something about eating spam and wartime debt...nope it’s gone…thanks Roscoe.’ Wecksler’s eyes defocused into a drunken middle distance stare as his body reached a higher level of inebriation.
Secretary of State Schweinburger sighed nostalgically, ‘Yes. We did damn well out of that war.’ his eyes misted up, ‘Ah, the days when we could do very well out of the rest of the world with no questions asked. Gosh, I miss those days.’
‘Exactly.’ exclaimed Bullock-Boyle, snapping everyone back to the present. ‘Look at the attitude and freezing out we get now. Ungrateful Limeys. The French are worse, the Spanish a disaster in laziness and all the rest fall under the category of “Germanics”. The whole place is a basket case.’
‘Alright.’ Calhoun said, with firmness in his voice, ‘getting back to the current situation. The President has asked me to put men on this Mitchell thing and this Tarrant guy. Good thing too, there are bombs going off all over the place relating to this company.’
‘Huh.’ jerked Ickes, ‘I put one of my boys onto it too.’
‘Not that psycho from the Alabama swamps?’ Calhoun asked.
Ickes gave a double thumbs up.
‘Damnit Roscoe!’ all the men chorused.
‘I told him to be real quiet like.’ Ickes said.
‘He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’ Calhoun yelled, ‘I can’t have him running around under the feet of seasoned field agents.’
Bullock-Boyle burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny, Dick?’ Calhoun asked.
‘You don’t think the manufacturing interests of America would not be looking into this too. We need our cheap oil to keep flowing baby.’ Bullock-Boyle replied.
‘Same goes for the members of the Stock Exchange.’ chimed in Wecksler. ‘We have a fiduciary duty to ensure the status quo of exorbitant profits is maintained.’
‘Oh no.’ Calhoun said. ‘So you’re all telling me that you have all released your own men to get into this thing.’
‘Hell yeah!’ They all chorused and nodded.
‘Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!’ Calhoun’s scream echoed through the surrounding forest.
25
Moscow
Anatoly Kirkov, the Russian Vice President, was cutting his daily swathe through the mid-afternoon Moscow traffic in his departmental limousine.
As he sat in the back and watched the workers flit by his window, looking cold and dirty, he was on the phone assuaging one of his secretive and powerful backers that everything was coming back on plan.
‘I assure, you,’ Kirkov said into the phone, as he leaned forward and took a drink out of the mini bar, ‘the heat is dying down. Demetchev has been slapped down and put back in his box. He has lost half his staff. Yes, yes, I agree, timing could not have been better. He was starting to sniff into some uncomfortable areas.’
He took a sip of mineral water and leant back into his seat.
‘So the heat is going away.’ he continued. ‘And the President still suspects nothing – all he cares about is the impression of the country on the international stage. The man’s obsessed by this, so he is easy to manipulate. I will give another update at the end of the week, okay, excellent. Goodbye.’ Kirkov closed the phone and took a thoughtful sip of his drink as he looked out the window.
Things would be so easy once the bloody office worker is out of the way. he thought. He still found it hard to believe that some desk jockey analyst was running around out there as a dangerous loose end.
Kirkov hated loose ends.
He liked their life spans to rival those of butterflies.
Kirkov was furious when he had first heard that Jonathan Marshall had somehow slipped the Tatar in France. The Tatar’s handler had tried to explain that was due to a weird collection of circumstances that occurred beyond his control. Once Kirkov had calmed down he realised there was no-one else to send - The Tatar was the ultimate killer; this was the first time he had failed to kill on first attempt but he had never not completed a mission. Kirkov had instructed the handler that he wanted a phone call within twenty
four hours that the job had been completed or he could save Kirkov some effort and postage by mailing his own genitalia to the address “Beneath Siberian Tundra”. The response was swift – The Tatar would have them soon.
Kirkov sunk back slightly into his chair.
He felt confident.
The backers were appeased that everything was under control. By and large, things were. He smiled and clicked a button to activate the intercom through to the driver.
‘Take me to my favourite place in the suburbs.’ he said into the intercom speaker by his side.
In the suburbs he would spend the afternoon in a house of pleasure, receiving multiple “relaxations”.
Everything is going to work out. he thought. I am going to be rich beyond my wildest dreams!
26
Madrid
The glaring Spanish sun forced Jonathan’s eyes to squint though the windscreen of the car as the concrete highway flew by in a constant stream of grey.
They were on the outskirts of Madrid and he started directing the car toward the exit signs for the city centre. Jonathan had been to the city a few times before, mostly on a variety of business trips as well as one dodgy stag weekend, so he roughly knew the layout of the place.
Once off the highway, he navigated the clapped out Renault towards the Escobar district – a place where the hotels were of sufficiently low quality that they did not ask for identification if enough cash was proffered to the landlord.
They would be off the Interpol and intelligence grids and untraceable. Unless the people trying to track them already had people working the area looking for them - Jonathan was hoping that was not yet the case, yet he refused to discount anything after recent events.
Nobody other than Captain Pink knew they were in Spain, much less in Madrid. The parties doing the hunting might surmise that after the Mont St. Michel disaster, they would have made a break for the French countryside in an effort to drop from sight. He doubted they would expect them to go to another European capital, where intelligence networks were strong.
The other thing Jonathan felt he and Julie had to do before heading out trying to find people was to change their appearance. He pulled into the first chemist looking store that he saw – a shop that had a bright green neon cross above the door that signified a dispensing chemist.
Dashing down the aisles after having left Julie in the car, he grabbed men and women’s hair dye to turn hair from brown to black. It was while reading the confusing wording on the back of the boxes that he had to confront the reality that he was breaching the limits of his knowledge of spy operations that he had gleaned from a lifetime of novels and films. The best guess in his limited man logic was that going dark was better as it was too prominent to go blond.
Besides, he thought as he made his way to the till, then I would have blond hair and black eyebrows and those people are just freaky.
He also grabbed some scarves for Julie that were on a rack near the counter.
Back in the car, Julie was pleased with the scarves but much less so with the hair dye idea.
‘What the hell is this?’ she said, turning the box of hair dye around in her hands.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘be in disguise and all that – so no-one will recognise us.’
Julie shook her head, ‘you poor, ignorant man.’ she said with a voice of feigned disappointment. She reached over and started stroking his hair. ‘I will help you…and I will change you.’ she said with a face of pity, ‘but this-’ she held the hair dye in front of his face, ‘this will not work and it’s not going to happen.’ she tossed the box of dye into the back seat and folded her arms while looking forward. ‘Now drive on, my good man.’ she said, smiling.
‘Well okay then,’ he said, as he nosed the car back into the traffic, ‘go team!’
After cruising the backstreets of Escobar for a while, they drove past a terraced building that had a white flashing “Hotel” sign, above the name “El Rancho.”
What attracted Jonathan was the driveway down the side of the building, which meant it had off street parking.
‘This looks like the kind of place that charges by the hour.’ Julie said, as the car slowed to a stop in car park. Jonathan had to admit that it did look a bit vile from the outside and that was probably going to be the best part of it.
Jonathan reasoned to himself that they were not on a romantic weekend break but a mission to stay alive and find out the truth behind what was happening to them. If the mission was successful it did not so much matter if Julie was upset right now. It was getting dark and he had pretty much driven all day. He felt shattered and just wanted to climb into a bed of any description.
The landlord, as expected, was accommodating to extra Euros being thrust at him. After slicking his hairy paw over his greasy comb over hairstyle, he promised that he had never seen them and they did not have to sign the register or show any documentation.
I will make it up to her later. Jonathan decided as they surveyed the room they had already paid for.
He was able tell from the look of disgust on her face in reception that nothing was going to happen between them tonight either. He knew women were seldom in the mood for love when they were being watched by a fleet of voyeuristic cockroaches. So he’d ordered two twin beds to avoid the embarrassment when they had gotten into the room.
Jonathan was so tired he crawled straight into one of the beds.
‘Try to get some sleep,’ he mumbled at Julie as he pulled the covers up, ‘tomorrow is going to be a big day…need to find these guys…need to talk to them.’ he could feel sleep coming fast.
‘Oh no you don’t.’ Julie said as she climbed into his bed, ‘there’s safety in numbers here in the fight of us against the cockroaches.’
They held each other tightly for a few minutes before both drifting off to sleep in each other’s arms.
27
Siberia
Five hundred million years ago, Siberia in Northern Russia was a very different place. For one thing, it was not part of the landmass of modern Russia at all – it was a shallow sea.
Conditions for life on earth were very different at that time. Most of the living things that existed were basic forms of life that subsisted in the oceans.
The shallow seas were particularly full of organic life. As these primitive life forms died, they sank to the bottom of the sea floor to form an organic-rich shale like layer.
Millennia passed and layer upon layer of sediment covered the organic based shale. The earth’s crust continued to move and in specific areas the tectonic forces applied millions of years of pressure and heat to the buried layer of deceased microscopic animal and plant matter. When this pressure cooking effect reached a temperature of around sixty degrees centigrade, the previously organic matter began transforming into liquid hydrocarbons – crude oil and natural gas.
Once the hydrocarbons formed, gravity pulled them from the place of their birth, through porous rock in the earths crust beneath, to eventually become trapped in pockets by the impenetrable rock in the layers of earth beneath.
The millions of years of sea level changes that occurred across northern Russia ensured that the part of the sea floor that eventually rose up to become Siberia was riddled with oil reservoirs.
The oil sat there, quite peacefully, until the dawn of the hydrocarbon age of man in the late nineteenth century.
Once many cultures had quickly become totally dependent on oil to enable their lifestyles, a contrast developed across Europe and the Middle East.
Western Europe was chockfull of countries rich in technology but poor in oil.
The twentieth century had been about achieving a balance between large markets of demand for oil products (Europe), with a large pool of supply (The Middle East).
Differences in culture and religion had meant the relationship was always going to be rocky at best, with only the bridge of commerce keeping the whole thing going.
At the end that century, howev
er, things had begun to change. The western countries were growing tired of having the energy security of their country always potentially held hostage by this decade’s flavour of dictator or religious fundamentalist. At the same time an old partner of Europe had resurfaced, been accepted back into the international community and appeared ready to do business again – Russia, the country with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.
The problem, which was always the problem in the oil game, was getting the oil easily and cheaply from the source of supply to the source of demand. From the wastelands of Siberia, where the bulk of Russia’s reserves resided, the oil needed take a long trip west.
The current method is to ship it through the “Oil Superhighway” – a constant fleet of tankers taking it through the narrow Bosphorus straits of Istanbul and into the Mediterranean. There is a limit though, to how many tankers you could fit through this small channel and every year a few super tankers inevitably drifted slightly and ploughed into some millionaire’s villa on the waterfront.
To make things quicker and to make the real money, a massive pipeline was needed that ran east to west, one that would be capable of pumping the equivalent of a tanker an hour westwards.
The oil would begin its journey from Siberia, heading west across the northern parts of Russia before dipping down and entering Eastern Europe in Latvia. It would continue southwest, then south southwest, going through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia before finally reaching the Mediterranean coast in Albania. From there the load could be split into tankers to ports all around Europe and even beyond. Tapping off points could be set up in Belarus to plug it straight into existing European pipelines and take it straight west to Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The same thing could be done in Romania to take it to Italy.
Powerful men had been plotting this scenario for decades.
In one of the meeting rooms of the Kremlin in the early 1980’s, a powerful, clandestine and vociferously greedy group had formed to make it a reality. With the fall of the USSR becoming an inevitability, their main ethos behind the fall of Communism was to make a lot of money in the transition.