The Negotiator (6 page)

It was on that pessimistic but resigned note that the conference ended. The copies of Plan Suvorov were collected and locked in the marshal’s safe, and the generals returned to their postings, prepared to stay silent, to watch and to wait.

Two weeks later Cyrus Miller also found himself in conference, although with a single man, a friend and colleague of many years. He and Melville Scanlon went back to the Korean War, when the young Scanlon was a feisty entrepreneur out of Galveston with his meager assets sunk in a few small tankers.

Miller had had a contract to supply and deliver his new jet fuel to the U.S. Air Force, delivery to be effected to the dockside in Japan where the Navy tankers would take it over and run it to beleaguered South Korea. He gave Scanlon the contract and the man had done wonders, running his rust-buckets around through the Panama Canal, picking up the AVTUR in California, and shipping it across the Pacific. By using the same ships to bring in crude and feedstock from Texas before changing cargoes and heading for Japan, Scanlon had kept his ships in freight all the way and Miller had got ample feedstock to convert into AVTUR. Three tanker crews had gone down in the Pacific but no questions were asked, and both men had made a great deal of money before Miller was eventually obliged to license his know-how to the majors.

Scanlon had gone on to become a bulk petroleum commodity broker and shipper, buying and transporting consignments of crude all over the world, mainly out of the Persian Gulf to America. After 1981, Scanlon had taken a pasting when the Saudis insisted that all their cargoes out of the Gulf should be carried in Arab-flag ships, a policy they were really able to enforce only in the movement of participation crude—i.e., that bit which belonged to the producing country rather than the producing oil company.

But it had been precisely the participation crude that Scanlon had been carrying across to America for the Saudis, and he had been squeezed out, forced to sell or lease his tankers to the Saudis and Kuwaitis at unattractive prices. He had survived, but he had no love for Saudi Arabia. Still, he had some tankers left which plied the route from the Gulf to the United States, mainly carrying Aramco crude, which managed to escape the Arab-flag-only demand.

Miller was standing at his favorite window staring down at the sprawl of Houston beneath him. It gave him a godlike feeling to be so high above the rest of humanity. On the other side of the room Scanlon leaned back in his leather club chair and tapped the Dixon oil report, which he had just finished. Like Miller, he knew that Gulf crude had just hit $20 a barrel.

“I agree with you, old friend. There is no way the U.S. of A. should ever become dependent for its very life on these bastards. What the hell does Washington think it’s up to? They blind up there?”

“There’ll be no help from Washington, Mel,” said Miller calmly. “You want to change things in this life, you better do it yourself. We’ve all learned that the hard way.”

Mel Scanlon produced a handkerchief and mopped his brow. Despite the air conditioning in the office, he always had a tendency to sweat. Unlike Miller he favored the traditional Texan rig—Stetson hat, bolo tie, Navajo tie clasp and belt buckle, and high-heeled boots. The pity was he hardly had the figure of a cattleman, being short and portly; but behind his good-ole-boy image he concealed an astute brain.

“Don’t see how you can change the location of these vast reserves,” he huffed. “The Hasa oil fields are in Saudi Arabia, and that’s a fact.”

“No, not their geographic location. But the political control of them,” said Miller, “and therefore the ability to dictate the price of Saudi and thus world oil.”

“
Political
control? You mean to another bunch of Ay-rabs?”

“No, to us,” said Miller. “To the United States of America. If we’re to survive, we have to control the price of world oil, pegging it at a price we can afford, and that means controlling the government in Riyadh. This nightmare of being at the beck and call of a bunch of goatherds has gone on long enough. It’s got to be changed and Washington won’t do it. But this might.”

He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk, neatly bound between stiff paper covers that bore no label. Scanlon’s face puckered.

“Not another report, Cy,” he protested.

“Read it,” urged Miller. “Improve your mind.”

Scanlon sighed and flicked open the file. The title page read simply:

THE DESTRUCTION AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SA’UD

“Holy shit,” said Scanlon.

“No,” said Miller calmly. “Holy Terror. Read on.”

Islam:
The religion of Islam was established through the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed around A.D. 622 and today encompasses between 800 million and 1 billion people. Unlike Christianity it has no consecrated priests; its religious leaders are laymen respected for their moral or intellectual qualities. The doctrines of Mohammed are laid down in the Koran.

Sects:
Ninety percent of Moslems are of the Sunni (orthodox) branch. The most important minority is the Shi’ah (partisan) sect. The crucial difference is that the Sunnis follow the recorded statements of the Prophet, known as the Hadith (traditions), while the Shi’ites follow and accord divine infallibility to whoever is their current leader, or Imam. The strongholds of Shi’ism are Iran (93 percent) and Iraq (55 percent). Six percent of Saudi Arabians are Shi’ites, a persecuted, hate-filled minority whose leader is in hiding and who work mainly around the Hasa oil fields.

Fundamentalism:
While Sunni fundamentalists
do
exist, the true home of fundamentalism is within the Shi’ah sect. This sect-within-a-sect predicates absolute adherence to the Koran as interpreted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who has not been replaced.

Hezb Allah:
Within Iran, the true and ultimate fundamentalist creed is contained within the army of fanatics who style themselves the Party of God, or Hezb Allah. Elsewhere, fundamentalists operate under different names, but for the purposes of this report, Hezb Allah will do.

Aims and Creeds:
The basic philosophy is that
all
of Islam should be brought back to, and eventually all the world brought to, the submission to the will of Allah interpreted by and demanded by Khomeini. On that road there are a number of prerequisites, three of which are of interest: All existing Moslem governments are illegitimate because they are not founded on unconditional submission to Allah—i.e., Khomeini; any coexistence between Hezb Allah and a secular Moslem government is inconceivable; it is the divine duty of Hezb Allah to punish with death all wrongdoers against Islam throughout the world, but especially heretics within Islam.

Methods:
The Hezb Allah has long decreed that in accomplishing this last aim there shall be no mercy, no compassion, no pity, no restraint, and no flinching—even to the point of self-martyrdom. They call this Holy Terror.

Proposal:
To inspire, rally, activate, organize, and assist the Shi’ah zealots to massacre the six hundred leading and controlling members of the House of Sa’ud, thus destroying the dynasty and with it the government in Riyadh, which would then be replaced by a princeling prepared to accept an ongoing American military occupation of the Hasa fields and peg the price of crude at a level “suggested” by the U.S.A.

“Who the hell wrote this?” asked Scanlon as he put down the report, of which he had read only the first half.

“A man I’ve been using as a consultant these past twelve months,” said Miller. “Do you want to meet him?”

“He’s here?”

“Outside. He arrived ten minutes ago.”

“Sure,” said Scanlon. “Let’s take a look at this maniac.”

“In a moment,” said Miller.

The Cormack family, long before Professor John Cormack left academe to enter politics as a congressman from the state of Connecticut, had always had a summer vacation home on the island of Nantucket. He had come there first as a young teacher with his new bride thirty years earlier, before Nantucket became fashionable like Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, and had been entranced by the clean-air simplicity of life there.

Lying due east of Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast, Nantucket then had its traditional fishing village, its Indian burial ground, its bracing winds and golden beaches, a few vacation homes, and not much else. Land was available and the young couple had scrimped and saved to purchase a four-acre plot at Shawkemo, along the strand from Children’s Beach and on the edge of the near-landlocked lagoon called simply the Harbor. There John Cormack had built his frame house, clad in overlapping weathered-gray boards, with wooden shingles on the roof and rough-hewn furniture, hooked rugs, and patchwork quilts inside.

Later there was more money, and improvements were made and some extensions added. When he first came to the White House and said he wished to spend his vacations at Nantucket, a minor hurricane descended on the old home. Experts arrived from Washington, looked in horror at the lack of space, the lack of security, of communications. ... They came back and said yes, Mr. President, that would be fine; they would just have to build quarters for a hundred Secret Service men, fix a helicopter pad, several cottages for visitors, secretaries, and household staff—there was no way Myra Cormack could continue to make the beds herself—oh, and maybe a satellite dish or two for the communications people. ... President Cormack had called the whole thing off.

Then, that November, he had taken a gamble with the man from Moscow, inviting Mikhail Gorbachev up to Nantucket for a long weekend. And the Russian had loved it.

His KGB heavies had been as distraught as the Secret Service men, but both leaders were adamant. The two men, wrapped against the knifing wind off Nantucket Sound (the Russian had brought a sable fur
shapka
for the American), took long walks along the beaches while KGB and Secret Service men plodded after them, others hid in the sere grass and muttered into communicators, a helicopter clawed its way through the winds above them, and a Coast Guard cutter pitched and plunged offshore.

No one tried to kill anybody. The two men strolled into Nantucket town unannounced and the fishermen at Straight Wharf showed them their fresh-caught lobsters and scallops. Gorbachev admired the catch and twinkled and beamed, and then they had a beer together at a dockside bar and walked back to Shawkemo, looking side by side like a bulldog and a stork.

At night, after steamed lobsters in the frame house, the defense experts from each side joined them and the interpreters, and they worked out the last points of principle and drafted their communiqué.

On Tuesday the press was allowed in—there had always been a token force pooling pictures and words, for after all this
was
America, but on Tuesday the massed battalions arrived. At noon the two men emerged onto the wooden veranda and the President read the communiqué. It announced the firm intention to put before the Central Committee and the Senate a wide-ranging and radical agreement to cut back conventional forces across the board and across the world. There were still some verification problems to be ironed out, a job for the technicians, and the specific details of what types of weaponry and how much were to be decommissioned, mothballed, scrapped, or aborted would be announced later. President Cormack spoke of peace with honor, peace with security, and peace with good will. Secretary Gorbachev nodded vigorously as the translation came through. No one mentioned then, though the press did later and at great length, that with the U.S. budget deficit, the Soviet economic chaos, and a looming oil crisis, neither superpower could finally afford a continuing arms race.

Two thousand miles away in Houston, Cyrus V. Miller switched off the television and stared at Scanlon.

“That man is going to strip us naked,” he said with quiet venom. “That man is dangerous. That man is a traitor.”

He recovered himself and strode to the desk intercom.

“Louise, would you send in Colonel Easterhouse now, please.”

Someone once said: All men dream, but they are most dangerous who dream with their eyes open. Colonel Robert Easterhouse sat in the elegant reception room atop the Pan-Global Building and stared at the window and the panoramic view of Houston. But his pale-blue eyes saw the vaulted sky and ocher sands of the Nejd and he dreamed of controlling the income from the Hasa oil fields for the benefit of America and all mankind.

Born in 1945, he was three when his father accepted a teaching job at the American University in Beirut. The Lebanese capital had been a paradise in those days, elegant, cosmopolitan, rich, and safe. He had attended an Arab school for a while, had French and Arab playmates; by the time the family returned to Idaho he was thirteen and trilingual in English, French, and Arabic.

Back in America the youth had found his schoolmates shallow, frivolous, and stunningly ignorant, obsessed by rock ‘n’ roll and a young singer called Presley. They mocked his tales of swaying cedars, Crusader forts, and the plumes of the Druse campfires drifting through the Chouf mountain passes. So he was driven to books, and none more than
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
by Lawrence of Arabia. At eighteen, forsaking college and the girls back home, he volunteered for the 82nd Airborne. He was still at boot camp when Kennedy died.

For ten years he had been a paratrooper, with three tours in Vietnam, coming out with the last forces in 1973. Men can acquire fast promotion when casualties are high and he was the 82nd’s youngest colonel when he was crippled, not in war but in a stupid accident. It had been a training drop in the desert; the DZ was supposed to be flat and sandy, the winds a breeze at five knots. As usual the brass had got it wrong. The wind was thirty-plus at ground level; the men were smashed into rocks and gullies. Three dead, twenty-seven injured.

The X-ray plates later showed the bones in Easterhouse’s left leg like a box of matches scattered on black velvet. He watched the embarrassing scuttle of the last U.S. forces out of the embassy in Saigon—Bunker’s bunker, as he knew it from the Tet offensive—on a hospital TV in 1975. While in the hospital he chanced on a book about computers and realized that these machines were the road to power: a way to correct the madnesses of the world and bring order and sanity to chaos and anarchy, if properly used.