Milkshake (8 page)

“Not if we control that source of production completely and
we don’t transport across any other sovereign border.”

By now the Senators were shuffling in their seats. Some were
glancing up at the clock.

“Gentlemen, there is a country, friendly towards the United
States, which is perfect. Isolated, and with no other significant
land mass between it and us. Furthermore, one of its prime
industries for years has been dairy production. It is a democratic
country, about the size of the United Kingdom, but with a
population just twice the size of Manhattan’s.”

They stared blankly.

“I propose that we utilize the resources of New Zealand in
order to produce enough of this modified milk to satisfy the
demands of eighty-five percent of this country’s fuel requirements
by the year 2015.”

A ricochet of twenty different questions fired at the
President and Senator Elmerstein simultaneously. The bait had been
taken.

It was clear by the President’s attendance at this meeting
that he backed this audacious plan. However, he left it to Senator
Elmerstein to fill in the details. Before he had a chance, Senator
McCluskey, a prominent Irish-American, interjected. “But, Mr.
President, last time I looked, New Zealand was a loyal part of the
British Commonwealth. Heck, they share a monarch. The Brits would
never condone such a thing. It would mean the end of NATO; it would
cause uproar in the UN Security Council. I’m sorry, but count me
out. I can see it now. There’ll be US Marines pitched against the
Household Cavalry. Jesus, sir, you may as well declare war on the
Queen herself.”

The President merely smiled his urbane, indulgent smile. He
could always rely on Paddy McCluskey not to mince his
words.

“Senator McCluskey, gentlemen, let me
reassure you …. let me reassure every single person in this room
this morning that what I am proposing will be for the benefit of
not only the economies of both New Zealand and the United Sates,
but for the greater good of the whole world. Let me further
reassure you that not a single shot will be fired, not one
uniformed American serviceman will land in New Zealand during the
course of this operation as part of any invasion force either
overtly or covertly, and not one New Zealander will even have the
slightest suspicion that his country’s good fortune in securing a
multi-billion dollar deal to supply what they will believe to be a
home-grown technological breakthrough was actually instigated,
controlled and manipulated by us in the first place, and will
continue to be so throughout the lifetime of the fuel production
program.”

The President aimed his smile around the room once again.
Paddy McCluskey nodded and smiled back. He had been placated.
“Gentlemen, I have another pressing engagement. I shall leave you
in the capable hands of our esteemed colleague.” With that, the
door behind him opened, the committee stood once more, and he was
gone.

Elmerstein got straight to the point, as usual. “Our intention
is to infiltrate the economic and political system of New Zealand
at every level, using perfectly ordinary members of the public. As
the President has already said, there will be no military
intervention and minimal use of professional intelligence staff.
Within five years, people sympathetic to our intentions will own or
control the means by which the fuel can be produced, and through
both overt and subliminal persuasion, we will be pumping bio-fuel
across the Pacific and into California within twelve
years.”

“We’re gonna run a pipeline across the Pacific?”

“Absolutely. It’s perfectly possible from an engineering
point of view. It’s also safer and cheaper than using tankers and
allows us full control in terms of supply. No more shortages caused
by political unrest, weather, mechanical failure, terrorism or
maintenance downtime.”

A number of senators were scribbling notes, and whispered
discussions were taking place at a number of points around the
table.

“How do we fund this?”

“How are we gonna get these New Zealanders to agree to all
this?”

“How do we know this fuel works?”

“Fuel from milk? Never heard of it!”

“Who is the President of New Zealand anyway?”

The questions grew into an excited cacophony. Elmerstein took
this as subdued enthusiasm. He had them. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, all
in good time. I will be making an appointment to see each and every
one of you separately over the course of the next few weeks to
discuss your department’s role in more detail, but the key thing at
this stage is that you know only what role your own staff will be
playing. Let me just say this to you. The key to the success of
this whole plan is that there is no plan. The theory model
indicates each Department must work in isolation, only implementing
its assigned tasks. In this way, there remains a natural fluidity,
an evolution if you will. Things seep out. A minor act by one
Department will have an effect in another which may influence
someone in, say Illinois, or Japan, or Germany, hopefully a great
many people. But these people will not recognize the source or even
the influence itself.”

Elmerstein began to encircle the table. He was in his element.
“Let me give you an example. You will all be aware that I was
involved in many of the decisions made around our space program in
the seventies and eighties. Who can remember our original Strategic
Defense Initiative announced by President Reagan in
1983?”

The sudden direct question startled the assembled politicians
and there were a few mumbles and nods.

Senator Duggan spoke for them. “You mean the star wars program
Elm?”

“No, Star Wars was a movie about a galaxy far, far away. But
it’s what SDI became known as, right? But does anyone remember how?
Who in this room thinks we can trace the origins of the nickname of
our multi-billion dollar sub-orbital missile system back to one
man? And I don’t mean George Lucas. Well, we can. Because the term
was coined by a Doctor Bowman who worked on the project from 1977
until it was made public by the President in 1983. Bowman realized
that such a controversial plan would need to capture the American
public’s imagination in order to receive its unquestioning backing,
so he decided that we should borrow from the most popular movie
franchise at the time, capture the youth of America. And we
did.”

Elmerstein paused and leaned over the table, placing his large
craggy palms face down on the burnished maple. He shot a dramatic
glance, catching the gaze of every man as his eyes swept the room.
“Why was the first space shuttle called 'Enterprise'? I’ll tell you
why. Popular myth has it that it was due to a public campaign to
persuade NASA to begin a dynasty of spaceships that would carry the
name hundreds of years into the future, blurring fact with
television fiction. To boldly go where no man has gone before etc
etc. A romantic notion, which again captured the imagination of a
public actually pretty bored with space travel at that time. So it
was decided to call the first Space Transportation Craft
'Enterprise'. The public thought they had influenced the choice of
name and it became their spacecraft. Anyway, gentlemen, I digress.
Nowadays the corporate guys have gotten hold of the idea, and the
technique they are using is termed, I believe, 'viral marketing'.
It’s just starting to be looked at as a serious marketing tool in
the commercial world but we believe we can also use it to good
effect.”

‘Vile what?”

“Viral marketing, taking a pre-existing social network, say a
group of kids the same age, or members of a particular profession,
and manipulating them to create what is known in the commercial
consumerist world as brand awareness. So an example might be, say
kids in a school yard talking about a new T.V. show, and the next
week more kids tune in. It’s a word of mouth thing.”

“And this is gonna help us invade New
Zealand? We’re gonna do it by word of mouth?”

Senator Elmerstein could not resist a smile at how his own
over-simplification had been taken so literally. “Yes, well kind
of. Over the next few years, we need to make sure we are those kids
in the school yard, sowing the seeds, nurturing the dreams and
aspirations of thousands of people, shaping their perceptions,
allowing us to control, as much as we are able, the kind of men and
women who we need to be in New Zealand in the next ten years. But I
have said enough already. The key to our success is that you each
in turn put in place the strategies I will outline to you
individually over the coming weeks. I know you have many questions,
and I will try to answer them all, but I will do so face-to-face,
one-on-one, at the proper time.” Senator Elmerstein raised himself
from the table slowly, as if to emphasize that the gravity of the
proposal was actually weighing him down. “Thank you for your time,
gentlemen. This meeting is now closed and the detail will, of
course remain confidential and un-minuted as necessity dictates.
God bless America.”

Over the next few weeks during July and August of 1997,
Senator Elmerstein visited each of the Chairs of the twenty one
standing Senate Committees. To each man he gave a dossier and a two
hour explanation of what was expected of his Department over the
next eighteen months to two years. After that time there would be
an update meeting where progress so far, and the next steps
forward, would be discussed.

The dossier each Senate Chair received contained a summary of
the meeting which had taken place at the Whitehouse a few weeks
before. It highlighted the United States’ huge appetite for energy,
and forecast the likelihood of dwindling world oil reserves within
forty years.

It pointed out some startling facts relating to the Military’s
energy consumption to emphasise America’s insatiable thirst for
oil. It was noted that in 25 minutes an F-15 fighter jet burned 625
gallons of fuel, more than an average motorist used in a year. An
aircraft carrier used that much in 7 minutes. In 1989, the US
Military had consumed about 200 million barrels of oil, enough to
run the entire US urban mass transit system for 14
years.

There was a page devoted to a draft speech the President
intended to make to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change
in Kyoto in December that had been written shortly after the Senate
had voted that the United States should not be a signatory to what
was to become known as the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that it
contained no binding targets or timetable for either developing or
developed nations. In the speech, the President called for all
countries to work together to develop existing and new technologies
which would rid the planet of its addiction to oil.

The President would propose international co-operation on the
construction of a vast North Atlantic wave farm, an array of wave
energy converters stretching over 500 square miles, 70 miles off
the North West coast of Scotland. The harnessed energy, it had been
calculated, could supply enough power for the five biggest cities
in Western Europe or, more importantly, the major cities of the US
eastern seaboard.

He proposed international funding for what he had personally
christened the Felin Project, an ambitious plan to construct a ring
of solar panels around the equator - passing through jungles,
deserts and across the oceans - to harness the unlimited power of
the sun at that latitude. Cables radiating out from the belt north
and south would carry the converted power, supplying an estimated
five per cent of the world’s electricity. The final suggestion was
the conversion of vast tracts of agricultural land into fuel
production farms, growing grasses or fast growing trees which could
be converted to fuel. The stumbling block, of course, being this
would mean using land currently in food production.

But the speech was never made. The Senate Committee Chairmen,
one by one, realized that the President was actually blackmailing
them. He was preparing to offer American technology, scientific
knowledge and financial resources to the world for free unless they
backed his plan, the one technology not mentioned in the speech -
bovine caseinate additive.

They read on. Sections specific to their own committee’s terms
of reference had been placed in individual dossiers. There were
paragraphs relating to military and trade relations with New
Zealand and policy suggestions over the next ten years designed to
keep relations between the two countries cool, at least at a
political level.

In the dossier handed to the Chair of the Senate Committee for
Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry was a specific section on the
President’s recommendation that an agreement be reached to allocate
funds for research into the possibility of using crop-related
technology to produce bio-fuel. That was all, no budget allocation,
no further clues as to which university or private company was
currently engaged in research into such a thing. In this way the
agenda remained completely hidden. The individual seeds planted
into each committee would be nurtured by its respective chairman
until slowly, over a number of years, the tree would grow almost
unnoticed, spreading its branches into every facet of American
politics, business and beyond.

Alex Weisner, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, was, as he had anticipated, handed a particularly
weighty dossier. He speed-read the summary of the meeting with the
President fifteen days earlier and was keen, excited almost, to
learn what had been delegated to his team. He was therefore
somewhat taken aback when he opened the dossier to read the first
heading.