The Icarus Prediction: Betting it all has its price (13 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Tbilisi, Georgia

Shamil Basayev paced nervously, slamming his fist into this palm. He would order coffee from one of his minions, then reject it once it was brewed. He checked the screen of the satellite phone twice a minute. Some of the men went for walks to escape the frustration, but Elbruk Matsil stayed put, never free of Vaslav’s omnipresent eye.

“Is that coffee not ready yet?” bellowed Basayev.

“Da, Commander. It is ready,” replied the cook.

“Then why did you not tell me?”

“I did, Commander.”

“Do not contradict me! I will have your—” The phone chirped and Basayev froze. Then he leaped for it and greedily read the message that said, EGGS HAVE BEEN DELIVERED.

Basayev howled in delight. “Lemontov, you devil! You have done it! Now only a few hours remain and our dreams will be realized!”

Elbruk looked on in total befuddlement. He still had no clue what this was all about.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Stavropol Krai Province, Russia

Irgut Ergodan was facing an exhausting day. The cattle and sheep farmer had been up half the night dealing with a difficult calving, but he’d finally gotten the critter delivered. Then he’d watched as it stood up on wobbly legs and took its first suckle of mother’s milk. But now he had to start a long day of labor on the farm after a sleepless night. He hated that, for he was no longer a young man.

The first hint of the dawn’s early light was barely discernible in the east. He would go back to his hovel of a farmhouse and wash up, have some breakfast, and then get on with the day’s chores. First order of business was to move his herd of sheep from one section of his land to another. He rotated them on quartiles of the farm to allow the grass to regrow after being grazed by the livestock. He had an outstanding sheep dog who was smarter than the itinerants he employed from time to time, and that would ease the burden of the task.

The pipeline that bisected his land had actually saved him the cost of a new fence to section his grazing land, but it was a barrier. The government had built a shoddy earthen ramp to allow the sheep to traverse from one side of the farm to the other, but Irgut had had to improve it himself so it could take continued traffic. He still chafed at how the government had built it without as much as a “how do you do” before construction began. They had paid him a pittance for the easement across his land despite the billions of rubles Moscow harvested from the pipeline—billions that went into the pockets of the oligarchs.

They said Stalin was dead, but Irgut wasn’t so sure.

*

The shift supervisor at CPC Pumping Station No. 2 approached the front gate in his antiquated Lada sedan. Still barely awake, he was looking forward to his first cup of tea when he pulled to a stop and noticed that gate was open. He shook his head and uttered a tut-tut under his breath. Procedure called for the gate to be secured at all times. Somebody got lazy and forgot to relock it. He drove through and then stopped and got out to do the right thing. He looked around and couldn’t find the padlock until he saw it on the ground in the bright moonlight. He picked it up and noticed the shackle had been cut. He wondered who had done such a thing.

He drove the Lada to the parking area, then got out and walked toward the admin building. In the dim light, he noticed a figure laying on the concrete outside the entrance. He halted, then slowly approached. There was a pool of liquid beside the body, which he came to realize was blood. He looked closer and recognized the face with eyes frozen open.

“Borisov?” he said numbly as he gazed as his coworkers motionless body.

Seized by shock, he didn’t know what to do. Then he decided he’d better get the hell out of there.

*

Irgut was plodding along from the barn to the farmhouse, which was built on a hill overlooking the pastureland, when the digital counter inside the pig travelling through the pipeline reached 00:00:00 from its four-hour countdown. At that point, it triggered the primer connected to the filament line trailing twenty-two miles behind it—all the way to the clasp on the launch tube hatch at the pumping station. This filament line was not for catching fish. It was a new iteration of detonation cord made of crystallized pentaerythritol tetranitrate (think nitroglycerine on a string), a clever brand of munitions manufactured by the Czech company VCHZ Synthesia, the same people who brought you the Semtex plastique used in the Lockerbie bombing.

The primer in the pig fired, and the cord detonated at a rate of 8,700 meters per second, creating a white-hot fulmination that ruptured the pipeline and ignited the oil within.

Irgut was looking toward the dawn when the earth erupted with a
BARRRUUMMMPPP!
Flames shot into the air and created a compression shock wave that slammed Irgut to the ground with a stupefying impact. He looked up and saw a river of fire race across the landscape from horizon to horizon, as if a fissure had ripped the earth apart, and the gates of hell had opened.

Panicked sheep and cattle scattered in all directions as the orange inferno made the sky bright as daylight, and Irgut’s wife stumbled out of their farmhouse, babbling about Armageddon.

Gaping at the river of fire that traversed the earth as far as he could see, Irgut wondered if she might be right.

*

The supervisor had just turned to run back to his Lada when a
WHAM!
sent a concussion wave across the parking lot, followed by a giant orange mushroom cloud erupting in the place where the pumping station had been.

Dazed from being thrown to the concrete, the supervisor looked up in horror to see and feel the heat as fire and debris poured out of the pumping station like lava from Vesuvius.

*

In the face of so much death for so long, Arkady Lemontov had become a stoic figure, somewhat numb to the emotions of fear, lust, and laughter. He and his comrades watched the orange ribbon of fire bloom on the western horizon, then race east and out of sight in a heartbeat, creating a sound like a chainsaw in the distance and penetrating Lemontov’s thick veneer.

A deep-throated cheer rose up from his band of misfits. They had endured years of hiding, planning, and penury—but now their dagger had been plunged into the heart of the Russian bear. Lemontov found himself screaming in exultation, clapping his comrades on their backs and hugging little Kordan, the janitor master spy whom he called a hero.

With a sense of sweet victory, he pulled the satellite phone out of the holster and began tapping out a message. Then he plugged the umbilical into the video camera, rewound the tape, and began sending the feed.

*

CPC Pipeline Loading Terminal

Novorossiysk, Russia

The pipeline technician looked up as the alarm in the control room sounded. The lighted icon for pumping station number two had gone dark, indicating it had fallen offline. Other than for scheduled maintenance, this rarely happened because the pipeline and its equipment were relatively new and largely automated, but it did happen.

“Get number two on the phone,” he ordered his deputy. “See what the problem is.”

The deputy nodded and picked up the phone while the technician checked the inventory levels. He wasn’t worried. Most of the tank reservoirs were full, and he could keep the stream of offshore tankers going for four to five days before his supply of crude began to run dry. Usually these unscheduled episodes at the pumping stations were cleared up in hours, if not minutes.

“Uh, sir?” said the deputy.

“Da?” replied the technician.

“I can’t seem to raise pumping station number two.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Al-Jazeera Headquarters

Doha, Qatar

Shamir, a journalist had just come on shift and was sifting through the pecking order of stories for the day. He flipped from one screen to the next, hoping he would find something interesting for the al-Jazeera television network. An innovative idea that was founded and bankrolled by the Emir of Qatar in 1996, al-Jazeera was originally envisioned to be the BBC of the Middle East—i.e., an independent voice covering the issues of the region. Unfortunately, it turned out to be something akin to the Fox News Network for the militant views of the Arab world.

He sat at the desk near the center of the newsroom. Behind him was a glass wall that separated the newsroom from the studio where an on-air anchor was reading copy from the teleprompter.

Shamir was a frustrated young man. Educated in England, he had hoped al-Jazeera would grow into a progressive voice of professional journalists for the region. But it had devolved into a drumbeat of Israel-and America-bashing with an increasing strident voice. And all too often, the network itself seemed to be the topic of news, the latest episode being when a group of female anchors had walked out because management required them to wear headscarves and forbade pantsuits. A giant leap backward. Could an anchorwoman in a
burka
be far behind?

So Shamir was wrestling with the idea of giving up on his homeland and returning to the West to try to carve out a new life. He was scrolling through his e-mails when he came across one with an intriguing subject line: Shamil Basayev Is Not Dead—Russian Pipeline Destroyed.

This piqued his interest, and he opened the e-mail. There was only a link to a secure server. Probably some Israeli hackers pulling al-Jazeera’s chain. That happened all the time. His mouse hovered over the delete button as he thought about deleting it, fearful he would only be importing a virus. But his instinct told him otherwise. The IT department would give him hell if it turned out badly, but he clicked on the link and began watching a grainy video of a bearded man in a peaked cap quoting Mark Twain.

Ninety-eight minutes later, the senior editorial staff of al-Jazeera were crowded into the network’s main conference room, having watched the video for the third time. The deputy managing editor, a wiry combative type named Tallud, spoke up first, saying, “We have to put this on the air right away! We’ll be the first with it. Nothing has shown up on the Internet. We can beat everyone if we act now.”

“But we have no confirmation,” said Shamir. “Yes, the man looks like Basayev and sounds like Basayev. But what if some Israelis are trying to dupe us? The man was supposed to have been dead for years.”

“So how do you explain the pipeline fire?” demanded Tallud. “That looked real enough to me.”

Shamir shrugged. “Could be old stock footage from somewhere. Easy enough to obtain. This might be genuine, but it could be a giant ruse to make us look foolish. We have as many enemies as we have viewers. I should think something would have appeared on the Internet from Russian sources if their pipeline was truly damaged. And the Kremlin swore up and down years ago that they had killed Basayev. They will certainly deny it.”

Tallud was about to rail again when the managing editor cleared his throat, a sign that he’d made his decision.

“As Shamir said, this may be genuine, but we can’t rush it onto the air if this is an elaborate hoax. The Israelis could very well be behind it. Contact our bureau chief in Moscow. Have him get a response from the energy ministry, or even directly from the Kremlin, to confirm there has been damage to this Caspian pipeline. If that can be verified, we go with the story.”

“But it’s Sunday in Moscow!” protested Tallud, reflecting the fact the Arab world was out of sync with most of the planet, in that the Arab weekend fell on Thursday and Friday, and Saturday and Sunday were regular workdays in Qatar. “Trying to get a response from the Russians can take forever on a normal workday. This story will slip through our fingers!”

But the managing editor had spoken.

*

New York City

10 Days to Options Expiration

Jarrod Stryker slept in and finally rolled out as the clock neared 11:00
am
. Scratching his scalp, he reflected on the disappointing evening. How could an intimate dinner with a lingerie model turn so sour? It was sort of like driving a Maserati with sand in the gears.

He looked out the window at the glorious spring day and grudgingly admitted to himself he was still carrying a torch for a woman even a lingerie model couldn’t extinguish. Damn her eyes—which were a radiant emerald green, by the way. It had been six years since Beirut, over a decade since they’d had that one night of distilled rapture—from his point of view at least. And he sensed from hers as well.

Was he
ever
going to be free of Sarah Kashvilli?

So far, it didn’t seem so.

He shook himself out of his funk, threw on his bathrobe, and went to the front door to pick up his Sunday
New York
Times
.

He fired up the coffee pot and toaster, brushed his teeth, and took his brunch out on the terrace overlooking Central Park. Though the major exchanges were closed, he still checked his phone for over-the-counter future trades that took place at night and over the weekend. They served as a bellwether for what would happen when major exchanges opened on Monday. West Texas Intermediate was unchanged, which meant nothing was on the horizon to disrupt his high stakes trade.

He savored going through the
Times
, and it helped purge the tension of the last week. As he read about one foreign hot spot after another, it brought to mind the life he’d left behind. Where would he be now if he hadn’t fallen on his sword for Sarah Kashvilli? Afghanistan? Columbia? Dead? He didn’t want to, but he had to admit part of him missed the life that had been of that world. But that was then. This was now.

The past week had been such a rollercoaster he hadn’t planned anything, so he changed into some jeans and decided to see what the city had to offer on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.

The security desk was manned by an NYU student with an open physics textbook—someone clearly swimming upstream against the surging river of overpriced tuition. Jarrod gave him a wave and exited through the revolving door, then made his way to Central Park.

He never looked up the factoid on how Central Park remained intact on this island of concrete, glass, and steel, but he thought it the primeval soul of the city. Joggers and Frisbee-throwers were out in full force under a sky that was crystal blue. He walked past a hot dog vendor and thought, what the hell, and turned around. He ordered one with all the trimmings and a lemonade. Sitting on a bench, he took a mouthful, knowing it was pure poison but oh,
sooooo
good.

He wandered past the architectural jewel of the Plaza, largely vacant now as the bulk of the hotel had been converted to condos that belonged to out-of-town owners. He was always surprised—and a little disconcerted—by the people he passed, many chatting away on cell phones, because he rarely heard English spoken. Somebody once told him eight hundred distinct languages were spoken in New York City. He didn’t know if that statistic was for real, but it wouldn’t surprise him.

He found himself on Madison Avenue by the imposing Gothic structure of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. By upbringing, he was an Episcopalian—Catholic light, as his Dad used to say. But the family had a laissez-faire attitude toward religion, with church attendance being relegated to Christmas Eve and Easter. He’d never been inside Saint Patrick’s, and since it was midafternoon and between Masses, he walked up the stone steps and entered.

The vaulted ceiling was supported by massive Gothic columns and was awe-inspiring, and the solitary worshippers sprinkled about seemed to be on earth looking at a portal up to heaven.

Duly impressed, he wandered back outside to see a vagrant sitting on the steps. The poor bastard was maybe fifty but looked seventy, with a patina of dried grime on his skin. A set of ethereal eyes looked out blankly, framed by the unkempt hair on his face. His hand held an open baseball cap for any stray offering that might come his way. He held no sign advertising his circumstances. None was needed.

People like this were the standard-issue background noise to a major metropolis like New York, and like any residents, Jarrod had developed the ability to tune them out—much like the omnipresent construction noise one heard during the week. But seeing as it was Sunday, he dropped a twenty in the hat and went on toward Times Square. He checked his Rolex. Maybe there was a late afternoon matinee worth seeing. Maybe that would get his mind off Blackenford for a while.

*

Tbilisi, Georgia

In the wake of the text message and video from Lemontov, the euphoria in the warehouse had slowly given way to impatience, then to frustration, and then to rage. The two TV screens set up on the workbench were tuned to the al-Jazeera satellite channels—one in Arabic and the other in English. Shamil Basayev had remained glued to the screens for hours, only taking his eyes off them to relieve his bladder and upbraid his computer geek.

“Are you certain the link to the server worked properly?” questioned Basayev.

“Da, Commander.”

“And the video was downloaded?”

“I am certain, Commander, almost immediately after the e-mail was opened by the al-Jazeera journalist.”

“Then why are we not seeing it here?” He jabbed at the screens with his finger.

“I have no idea, Commander. Perhaps we should notify the other media.”

Basayev made a sound like a rusty valve opening. “I strike a blow for our brothers and what do they give us in return? Silence! That is what they give us!” He paced some more. Finally, he said, “We wait.”