B00DSDUWIQ EBOK Page 9

  “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.

  Chapter 11

  The alarm woke Robert Wagner promptly at 7:30 AM, the digital numbers seeming to flick on the radio, merging the last fleeting strands of a dream with the voice of the announcer. He lolled for a moment in the plush warmth of his Tempur-Pedic memory foam mattress, hearing that dollar days were almost over at his local Ford dealer. He had to hurry so he would not miss out on the biggest savings event of the year, a blockbuster 1.9% APR and $2000 factory cash back after signing!

  He opened his eyes, seeing the familiar pale blue glow of the interior light above him. He was still nestled in the enclosed space of his bedtime cocoon—the Quantum Sleeper he had installed last fall when the terror alert level reached Orange again. It was a special bed, with an outer shell that closed overhead like the roof of a convertible car and created an environment that was completely safe and secure from the outside world. The titanium frame and polycarbonate siding of the outer shell was finished off with finely lacquered wood. Once sealed, however, it created an impregnable refuge, air-tight, water-tight, and with every comfort a person could desire to sustain them through the night, or a long, lazy morning should they care to linger in the protective shell before rising for the day.

  The Quantum Sleeper had a console that activated a flat screen plasma television on the upper roof, so he could watch HDTV or DVD movies while he rested in bed. The interior lighting and temperature could be completely controlled, and the air was filtered and conditioned so well that the unit was entirely safe from bio-threats, noxious gas, smoke or any other airborne threat—and that included dust, pollen, animal dander, mold, bacteria, and even airborne viruses! H1N1 would find no refuge here. He had been astonished to learn that the air inside his home could be up to fifty times more polluted than the air outside. It just made good sense to know that he could rest all night in a safe and filtered environment like his Quantum Sleeper.

  Beyond this, the twin storage tanks hidden behind the headboard held up to three days of cool, pristine water, with hot and cold taps accessible on the panel behind his pillow where a little splash sink could be pulled out from the headboard. A small microwave oven was also installed there, along with an all band radio, CD/MP3 player with stereo speakers, and cabinet space for snack food and reading materials. There were even emergency side compartments in the unit that could hold additional food, water, medical supplies and anything else deemed an urgent necessity. And the whole unit was backed up with a reserve battery that would last a full eight hours if the power ever failed.

  And one day it would fail…soon…

  Robert rolled over, unwilling to move
from the satiny warmth of his pillows and blankets, noticing that his wife, Liz, has already opened her side of the unit and slipped out to start her morning. The mechanism of the outer shell was so whisper quiet that he had not even stirred when the other side of Sleeper had opened and closed. He considered having breakfast alone in the Sleeper that morning. There were still three breakfast entrees in the unit’s refrigerator. He could pop one in to the microwave, activate the automated coffee maker, and have scrambled eggs, French toast, hash browns, milk, juice, or anything else he desired. He thought the better of it, wanting a nice hot shower now more than food. Besides, he was going to have to restock the sleeper soon. The world was going to hell.

  Rob stretched, reaching up reluctantly to press a small silver button on the top of the enclosure, and waiting while the Quantum Sleeper opened, the top arching up and back, folding itself as it did to fit snugly at the baseboard of the bed when fully opened. He stumbled out of bed, scratching listlessly as he made his way over the thick wool carpeting to the marble tiled bathroom. The air was fresh and sweet with the scent of Fresh Burst, jasmine and lemon. It was a medley of odors meant to evoke the pristine fragrance of a summer morning, or at least that is what the label on the scent dispenser unit promised.

  Rod stripped off his silk boxer shorts, pausing to admire his hard, lean body in the mirror. His smooth, nearly hairless chest was strong and well contoured, tapering down to a six-pack abdomen that he worked hard on to keep well cut. He turned, admiring the round firmness of his buttocks and the tanned flanks of his thighs. The workout in the gym yesterday seemed to have done him some good. He was following the patented Slim in Six program, where he gained the entire benefit of a full six month workout program in only six weeks. He had seen the ad on TV a few months back, and had been following the easy, programmed weight loss system, complete with aerobic exercise, power yoga, Pilates toning moves and, best of all, he had not paid three thousand dollars for guided training and diet counseling, or even three hundred dollars—even though he would have expected to pay much more anywhere else. No, not Robert. He was too smart for that. By calling right away when he saw the TV ad, he was able to totally reshape his body, complete with a free six day maintenance plan and step by step guidebook, for only three easy payments of $19.95. And he had obtained three special bonuses at no extra charge in the deal—all sent to him by rush delivery.