Slow Apocalypse (3 page)

The people who worked there called it Area 52, when they called it anything at all. Officially, it didn’t exist. It was an inside joke, Area 51 being the airbase in the Nevada desert where the aliens from the Roswell UFO crash were allegedly taken. The people who worked there didn’t even know where they were. They were flown in and out on jets with no windows. They worked on projects funded from the unaccountable Black Budget, and the money supply was almost endless. Ask for a new piece of scientific equipment, and it would show up within a week.

Eddie Parker didn’t care where the place was, never even thought of it as Area 52. He simply thought of it as the Lab.

Eddie did not work well with others, never had, and he knew that he would never rise very high in the rat-maze bureaucracy and backstabbing atmosphere of most research establishments. Luckily for him, interacting with his fellow humans was not high on his list of priorities. At least that’s what he told himself, until he met Jenny.

The security people would have preferred keeping the scientists at the Lab all the time. But they had tried long-term sequestration and found that it tended to drive the researchers a little crazy. Since many of them were borderline crazy already, it didn’t take much of a nudge to push them over the edge into uselessness. A certain amount of R&R was needed. Two weeks decompression every three months was deemed about right.

Eddie did not want R&R very much, as it took him away from his toys. But rules were rules. They asked him where he wanted to go
and, picking a name out of the air, he said New York City. He’d never been there.

They put him up in a suite in a fine hotel and he spent most of the first week at his highly secure laptop, communing with the supercomputers back at the Lab. But eventually he did venture out. He took in a movie, ate a hot dog at Nathan’s, but mostly he just walked.

She was good. He would think he had lost her, then spot her wearing a different hat, with her coat reversed. She was there as both bodyguard and watchdog, and it seemed silly to him. He wasn’t going to talk about his work and he wasn’t going to run away. So he approached her and told her he knew what she was doing. She admitted it, and they had coffee together. After that, she stayed by his side. Her name was Jenny.

She was no raving beauty, but she was pretty enough, and smart. He found it easy to talk to her.

Then one evening as she was putting him to bed for the night, she kissed him, and though he was never sure just how it happened, he found himself in bed with her. It was his first time, and she seemed to know it—later, he realized it was probably in his dossier, which she would have memorized—and she was gentle and supportive of his awkwardness. That night, as sleep eluded him, he knew he was in love.

The next day he had to return to the Lab. They parted at the airport with kisses and made plans for their next meeting in three months.

His work suffered for a while, but it was all he really knew, and soon he was back into the project he had left behind. But for the first time he began to entertain notions of a life after the Lab. Perhaps even of quitting the Lab entirely, going to work in the private sector. He tossed ideas around, ideas he planned to share with Jenny when he returned to New York and met her for breakfast at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

They never found enough of her to identify. He stood all day just outside the police lines, inhaling dust and grit, until his new handler gently led him back to the hotel, where he informed them he was ready to return to the Lab. For a few days he hoped for a phone call—
missed my train, the taxi broke down, oh my God, Eddie, when I think of how close I came to being there
…but it never came.

He felt the same frustration all Americans felt in the aftermath of the atrocity.
How do we get our revenge on nineteen dead men?
Killing Osama bin Laden would not be enough. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave him no satisfaction. Gradually he came to focus on the nineteen. Two things about them immediately stood out. All of them were Muslim. And fifteen of them came from Saudi Arabia.

Why are we bombing Iraq? Why aren’t we bombing Saudi Arabia?

He was not the only one who harbored such thoughts about America’s erstwhile ally in the newly declared “War on Terror,” but Eddie happened to be the only person who was equipped, personally, to do something about it.

Someone once said “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Eddie was in no hurry. His field was bacteria, those tiny bits of living material that descended from the very first life to appear on Earth, around 4 billion years ago. It was quite likely that he knew more about bacteria than anyone else alive. It was certain that he knew more about methods of manipulating, cloning, and even creating them than anyone, because no one else in the world had the facilities available to him.

Bacteria are the ultimate survivors, mutating quickly in response to antibiotics, able to thrive at high levels of radioactivity, acidity, and at temperatures up to 270 degrees Fahrenheit.

Eddie had worked on the development of bacteria targeted on oil spills. But in recent years he had been concentrating on ways to use bacteria to recover more oil from proven reserves. The problem was that though there was still oil underground, the easy oil had been pumped already. The days when you could poke a hole in the ground and stand back as the black gold gushed out were long gone. The oil reserves remaining on the planet were increasingly hard to get at. Most of the oil in fields currently producing, including those in Saudi Arabia, could only be recovered by increasingly exotic means.

Eddie had been working on a bacterium that would enable the crude in existing wells to flow more easily, or to naturally increase the underground pressure. It was called the Prometheus Project.

He focused on the largest oil field in the world, the Ghawar, a strip 175 miles long by 20 miles wide, 100 miles due east of Riyadh, in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.

The most common technology for getting the remaining oil out of a field was to inject water into the ground. But when you pump water in, you get some water back, and the percentage of oil to water is called the “water cut.” Fresh wells produced almost 100 percent oil. With older fields, you got back more and more water until it was not worth the cost of injecting it. For some years now, the water cut at the Ghawar fields was on the order of 60 percent, and it would only continue to rise.

The Saudis wanted someone to do something about it. They wanted a magic bug that would turn the more sluggish fractions down in those wells into something that would flow like springwater, if not quite so sparkling.

Eddie told them he was their man. Everyone was hoping for results in a matter of months, but it took years. It was a real challenge, because he had to produce something that showed promise as a crude-oil liquefier while at the same time hiding his work on the real bacterium he had in mind.

This bug would freeze Ghawar solid as a coal seam.

Try pumping
that
, you murderous bastards.

He finally perfected an organism he officially called the Prometheus Strain. It performed to perfection, stripping away enough hydrogen from the crude-oil fractions to produce pressure, and leaving the residue liquid enough to pump.

But he didn’t tell anyone about the culture for a while. He had more work to do. He produced a second culture, Prometheus Two, a variant of the first. It was amazing what a difference a few little genes here and there could make.

When the second culture was ready, he announced that he had found the solution to the depleted-oilfield problem.

He demonstrated Prometheus in the lab, and it performed perfectly. Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi prince sent to witness the demonstration, was impressed. He wanted to try it in the field.

Eddie boarded the windowless plane with Prince bin Sultan and they flew to Washington, where they boarded the prince’s private A-380, a two-story airborne palace with a staff of twenty and only himself and the prince as passengers. Eddie ate a fine meal, and then slept soundly in a large bedroom.

He woke when the plane was descending into Dubai. He saw the gleaming spire of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made structure in the world, and almost empty. He could make out the outlines of the gigantic Palm Jumeirah and the even larger Palm Jebel Ali housing developments, gigantic artificial islands, huge landfills in the shape of palm trees dotted with resort hotels and mansions.

All built not on sand, but on oil. Take away the oil, and those people down below would still be fishing from dhows and traveling on camels. They wouldn’t have much time to raise fanatic young terrorists willing to fly airplanes into buildings. They wouldn’t even have the airfare to get aboard.

The next day, Eddie was taken to the Ghawar field and, with little ceremony, added Jenny Two to the slurry being pumped into the ground.

Two weeks later, the Ghawar field exploded.