B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (10 page)

“But
what if they see what they’re up against and combine their forces for a massive
attack, sir? They may even be doing that at this moment? Why would this Admiral
Halsey call off that attack?”

“Who
knows? But you are probably correct, Captain Lieutenant. Do you like how that new
title sounds, Rodenko? Well let me tell you something…You could be very much
more than that in due course. We all could. With the power we have at our fingertips
we can be real men of war now, not mere pawns in the game. We can re-write
history, and put our names in those books where Fedorov always had his nose
buried. We have only to make that choice, and then figure how to use the power we
have to achieve the most decisive result.”

“It
sounds like you’ve been thinking about this, sir.”

“That
I have, Rodenko… That I have, and I’ll tell you what’s going to happen here. They
are going to regroup and come back at us in force next time, and I’m going to
meet that attack with equal force. Understand?”

Rodenko
looked down for a moment, then he met the Captain’s eyes. “Are you speaking of nuclear
weapons now, sir?”

“There
are five tactical warheads aboard this ship.
Orlan
has three, and
Admiral
Golovko
has one. As acting Fleet Tactical Commander I was informed of this by
Admiral Volsky before we left port. That’s nine warheads under our control at
the moment. With those we could be very persuasive, wouldn’t you say? They could
make for the worst nine days the allies could ever possibly imagine. That’s
what they did to Japan in the world we left behind at Severomorsk. They hit
Hiroshima—a black day for Japan indeed. But when that wasn’t enough they hit
Nagasaki before the message got through. Fedorov tells me that never happened
in the world we returned to at Vladivostok, so in one sense our actions, my
actions, may have spared a great many lives. But we have nine warheads,
Rodenko—nine days of hell on earth at our disposal if we have to send a message
of our own.”

“Nine
days falling…” said Rodenko, his voice somewhat forlorn and distant.

“I
beg your pardon?”

“Satan
fell for nine days when he was cast out of heaven, at least insofar as Dante and
Milton told the story. He fell one day through each of the nine circles of hell.
It was required reading at the university before I came to the navy.”

Karpov
smiled. “Nine days falling…I like that. The only question I have now is this: who
is taking that ride to hell? Will it be us or the Americans?”

Part IV

Quantum
Sleepers

“This
war is not necessary.
We are truly sleepwalking through history.

—Senator Robert Byrd

“Anyone can
escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream,

the butcher’s and
the poet's equal there.”

—Emile M. Cioran

Chapter 10

Ben
Flack sat in the crowded rear compartment of
the helo, staring out the window at platform
Medusa
. He had spent the
last year and a half sweating the drilling and production operations there,
supervising new rigs and equipment installations, pouring over lateral drilling
schemes with the engineers, listening to complaints from the wildcatters,
mudmen, down hole drillers, pump station crews, and the worst that the Boyz at
corporate HQ back in Bollinger Canyon could throw at him. The Kashagan
superfield was Chevron’s last and biggest play in the great game, and now it
looked like it was over, at least for the foreseeable future. Now the world
belonged to men like those crammed into the compartment with him.

They
sat there, in two rows, dressed out in black and charcoal cammo fatigues and cinder
dark berets. Their jackets were bulging with ammo clips, and other accouterments
of war, and each one carried an automatic weapon. Some had heavier equipment
that Flack imagined useful against tanks or APCs, small hand held blowpipes
with satchels of lethal sabot armor piercing rounds.

The
world was theirs now. The fight had passed from men like Ben Flack to the Sergeants
and Corporals in these dark uniforms. Rumors had it that the Russians rolled
over the northern border into Kazakhstan early that morning with elements of
their 58th Army. It was a tough outfit dating back to the Second World War when
it had once been named the Third Tank Army. The NKVD fleshed out the rank and
file of several divisions back then, and was responsible for security and order
in the restive provinces that were now modern day Chechnya and Azerbaijan. It
was blooded in two wars there against the Chechens, and again in the incursion
into Ossetia and Georgia in 2008.

The
Russians had crossed in force, with the whole of the 19th Motor Rifle Division supported
by the 67th Anti-Aircraft rocket Brigade, the 1128th Anti-Tank Regiment, the
fast moving helicopters of the 487th Regiment and the 11th Engineers. They were
joined by the 7th Air Assault Mountain Division out of the major Russian port
at Novorossiysk, with regiments based in that location and in Stavropol. The
108th Guards Cossack ‘Kuban’ Regiment was leading the assault, swarming over
the border in dark helicopters flanked by sleek Mi-24 attack choppers. They
were now sweeping down the Black Sea coast towards the same terminals the
Fairchild tankers had used to secure their oil cargos. What they could not
accomplish at sea or in the skies they would accomplish on land, and this time
NATO had nothing there to stop them. The whole region was their back yard, and
they would soon have a stranglehold on all the oil and gas.

Flack
had worried about security, fretted over KAZPOL, haggled with Mercs like the men
he was riding with now, but all that was over. It was going to take a major operation
on the ground to dislodge the Russians now—something on the scale of the
Persian Gulf wars that bridged the 20th and 21st centuries with such fire and
violence. He knew back then that it was all going to burn one day. All of it.

Flack
was close enough to the pilot’s cabin to listen in on the radio feed being monitored
and it did not sound good. The Russians were hitting hard in typical fashion.
There had been a heavy rain of artillery all along the border before the skies
blackened with helicopters and aircraft high overhead to cover the operation.
Against this the Kazakh Army had initially moved the 35th Air-Mobile brigade as
a blocking force to give them time to muster additional forces from the reserve
motor rifle brigades assigned to various military districts of the sprawling
nation. But the Russians were moving fast, engaging and then bypassing the
blocking forces and quickly securing the oil rich Tengiz and Kashagan
superfields by airborne envelopment.

The
X-3s of Fairchild Inc. had slipped away with only hours to spare, and now they were
flying low over the Caspian on the approach to British Petroleum facilities in
Baku. Flack gave his sidekick Ed Murdoch a wan glance. “Looks like we’re out of
a job Mudman,” he said dejectedly. “We kept bellyaching for military support
out here, and now look at it. From what I’ve heard on that radio the Russians
are raising hell at Kashagan. The folks back home are in for a real surprise
now.”

“What?
You mean the damn Russians are just taking the place over?”

“Sure
sounds like it to me.”

“How
can they do that, Flackie? All that equipment—all those rigs—that’s Chevron property.
Where’s the damn Army when you need ‘em?”

“Yeah,
where was KAZPOL when we ever needed them? It’s the same old story, Eddie. The Banks
will cover their bets on the equipment and operations, but they never stop to
think about security. It was easy enough to get the Army and Navy to stand a
watch in the Persian Gulf, right? They had lots of bad guys there like Saddam
and the Ayatollah. Now that Ghawar has run drier than a bone and the action
moved up here, we’ve got nothing in the area to stop the Russians. They’ll take
the whole place, lock, stock and oil barrel. That new platform we sweat to get
moved up from Baku—the Russkies will own it by nightfall. That along with
Medusa
and all the others. Wait until corporate HQ realizes what happened. The game is
finally over here.”

“You
mean we ain’t comin’ back?”

“Take
a look around, Mudman! See these guys in black here with the assault rifles? They
were all that was between us and an early grave. The shit has hit the fan, my
friend! Persian Gulf is shut down by the Iranians, and missiles are raining down
all over the region. Gulf of Mexico is a real mess after
Thunder Horse
went
down, and I heard that the Russians did that deliberately with a submarine. All
Hurricane Victor did was spread the oil from the spill out, nice and thick.
It’ll be months before they can get operations there back to normal—if ever.
They shut down the BTC pipeline, and my bet is that they’ll cut the
Trans-Georgia line to the Black Sea coast within 24 hours. All we have now is
our rigs in the Niger Delta.”

“Well
shit, Flackie. Where in God’s name are we going to get the flow to keep all those
cars running on the freeways back home? Friggin’ frackin’?”

“Fracking?
We sure as hell won’t get it from the Bakken Oil Shales, or that bullshit operation
at Eagle Ford Texas. Media served up a crock of shit to the public and made it
seem like we could squeeze oil out of shale indefinitely, and they could all
rest easy and keep shopping at Wal-Mart. What a load of bull that was. My guess
is that right about now the lines at the gas stations are starting to look
pretty darn long. They’ll do the odd-even thing for a while, and talk more
bullshit with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but that won’t last out the year
without regular deliveries. That’s what these guys are all about.” Flack
thumbed at one of the dour faced sergeants in the nine man squad they were
riding with.

“Did
we get enough bunkered in Baku for this Fairchild group?”

“Yeah,
we made our quota alright,” Flack shrugged. “But that’s the last feather in my cap
for the foreseeable future, that is until the men with guns sort this business
out. It’s looking like another god-damned world war, Mudman. They’ll fight for
the crude all over the globe, unless they blow themselves to hell first with
nukes.”

Mudman
gave him a wide eyed look. “Nukes?”

“Christ
yes! The Chinese were talking that line in the UN last week. Now they’re out after
Taiwan and there was a big naval battle in the Pacific. One of our aircraft carriers
was damn near sunk! Then that volcano blew its top and things settled down a
bit. But this isn’t over, Mudman. Its only just beginning. Someone’s got a
serious hair up their ass over oil and gas, and that’s where the fighting will
be until they start throwing the ICBMs. I’ll tell you one thing…” Flack looked
over the rim of his wire frame glasses. “It’s going to be one lousy Christmas
shopping season this year. Folks back home are going to be boarding up their
track homes in a matter of weeks and hunkering down.”

“You
a Prepper, Flackie?”

“A
what?”

“A
Prepper—you know, one of those guys with a bunker and stockpiles of food and ammo
waiting for the zombies or Nibiru or some other shit to happen.”

“Nibiru?
That was all baloney. We don’t need zombies or rogue planets to bring it all down,
Mudman. We seem to be doing the job well enough ourselves.”

“Well…
What are we going to do now? What are you gonna do when we get home?”

“Me?
I’m fixin’ to buy one of those new
Quantum Sleepers.
I’ll load the damn thing
up with Snickers Bars, popcorn and a couple cases of beer, and crank up the
music nice and loud.”

“What
the hell’s a
Quantum Sleeper?”

“Haven’t
you seen the ads in the magazines and Internet? It’s a nifty self contained sleeping
chamber, big as a California King if you want to lay out the bucks for one.
Damn things have TV, stereo, Internet, food and water, and they close up tight
as a clam shell—bullet proof too. They even have filters for gas and radiation
contaminates. Yup, that’s what I’ll do if we make it back to the States. I’ll
get me one of those
Quantum Sleepers
, and then the world can go to hell
and I’ll watch it on TV and eat popcorn the whole damn time. It’s what most of
them have been doing over there the last 20 years anyway, so I may as well join
the party.”

“Shit,
Flackie! Sounds like a gilded tomb!”

“Not
too far off the mark, Mudman. They can bury my ass in a titanium lined sleeper,
and that’ll be that. But hey, if you have to check out, you may as well do so in
style, eh?”

“Big
enough to fit in some babes?”

“I
should be so lucky. Nope. I’ll be stuck in there with my wife…Hummm, on second thought
I may just buy one for her too. Then she won’t have to hear me burping through
my beer foam.”

It
was as good a plan as anything else Flack could conceive at that moment, and amazingly,
not too far off the mark for some in the US. The nation had gone into a kind of
holiday weekend shopping mentality. Not since 9/11 or the openings days of the
two Gulf Wars had there been anything quite so riveting on the news crawl.
People were out at the shopping markets and malls stockpiling and panic buying
as if the Chinese were about to mount a full scale invasion at any moment. News
of the battle in the Pacific and the damage to several US Navy ships, including
a big aircraft carrier, had people spooked.

Yup,
thought Flack. The folks back home are going to realize that they are now just hours,
days at best, from the plug being pulled. And everything ran on the juice
coming through that plug. America, land of the free, was about to go dark. The
entire cellophane crackle of people’s lives was about to be suddenly reduced to
a very few simple common denominators: guns, ammo, gold, food, water, shelter.

And
the more he thought about it the more he also realized that he could shorten that
list easily by throwing out the gold. You couldn’t eat it. You might use it to
trade for really useful things in the short run, but in a matter of weeks people
would realize the gold was really useless. It depended on a functioning financial
sector to be redeemed, and the banks wouldn’t survive another month. It depended
on the hope of a future where it would once again be traded into dollars for
that never ending trip to Costco and the shopping malls. It was just a hunk of
rock that primates fancied because it was shiny; nothing more than a
gentlemen’s agreement. It had no inherent value beyond a few industrial applications.
So now it was just guns, ammo, food, water, shelter, or it would be in a matter
of days.

Maybe
Mudman was on to something with this zombie shit he was talking. He was kidding
him earlier, but that
Quantum Sleeper
was sounding better and better every
minute.