“Ah,” he replied. “The slow roll.”
“The slow roll,” she acknowledged.
Marsten paused, judging his timing. “By the way, Steiner arrived last night.”
An eager look flashed across L.J.’s face. Just as quickly it was gone. “Did he bring it?”
“It’s in my safe.”
“And Steiner?”
Marsten walked over to the safe hidden in the wall. He held his right hand against the palm-print scanner. “Safely ensconced in the Parke Royale with two ladies of his choice.” The safe door clicked and swung open. Marsten extracted two CD-ROM disks. His hands shook slightly as he inserted the disks into the small but powerful computer tucked away in the credenza behind his chair. The keyboard rolled out from a slot in his desk, and he typed a command. He turned ninety degrees to face what looked like a painting by Constable hanging on the wall. The picture on the high-definition plasma display smoothly transformed from a bucolic landscape into an image familiar to anyone in the oil industry: the seismic reflection cross-section of the geological structure of Saudi Arabia’s Safaniyah field, the world’s largest offshore oil field.
In theory, seismic mapping was easy to understand. Prospectors fired a small pyrotechnic charge to send an acoustic signal into sedimentary rock sections beneath the earth’s surface. Using a string of geophones, a special type of seismograph, they measured the time taken by the waves to travel from the explosion into the earth and then bounce back to the geophones, anywhere from one-thousandth of a second to six seconds later. The data were recorded on a magnetic tape and later processed through a computer to determine the subsurface geological formations. Long experience had taught what formations might hold oil and, equally important, those that didn’t. While it wasn’t insurance, it was the next best thing.
“All very familiar, yes?” Marsten said.
“I wish we had the concession,” L.J. allowed.
A sad look crossed Marsten’s face. “Not very likely in this day and age.” He tapped a command on the keyboard. The image on the screen split, and a second seismic reflection cross-section appeared. “Here is an area where Steiner recently shot seismic using the traditional methods. Nothing here to interest us, yes?”
She nodded. “A total waste of time and money to drill.”
Again his fingers danced on the keyboard. “Here he surveyed the same area using his new Seismic Double Reflection technique that allowed him to probe deeper than ever before—and voilà! we have…” The second image on the screen metamorphosed into a seismic map very similar to that of the Safaniyah field.
L.J. gasped. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“It does.” Nothing betrayed the emotion Marsten felt. “You are looking at what may be the largest elephant of all time.” In oil-industry lingo an “elephant” is a giant oil field. “But it’s deep. Very deep.”
Raw emotion coursed through Lee Justine Ellis like a huge earthquake leaving severe aftershocks in its wake. For a moment she was so overwhelmed that words escaped her. Then the one demon deep inside that she had never been able to control came out of its hidden lair. She wanted the elephant. It had to be hers, no matter what the cost or what she had to do. It was a need so overpowering, so central to what she was, that it could not be denied without destroying her. “How big?” she finally managed to ask.
“Bigger than Saudi Arabia.”
She looked at Marsten in shock as her demon raged in demand. Saudi Arabia possessed one-third of the world’s known oil reserves. “Where?”
Marsten shook his head. “Steiner won’t say.”
Nothing betrayed the emotions tearing at her. “Really? As I recall, we’re paying the bills.”
“He seems oblivious to that minor detail.” L.J. considered her next move. “Who knows about this?”
“As of now, three of us. You, me, and Steiner.”
She fixed Marsten with a hard look. “Keep it that way.”
Lloyd Marsten understood perfectly.
The Pentagon
The summons came after lunch, much earlier than Stuart had expected. He stood up in his cramped cubicle and carefully adjusted his tie and uniform coat. His boss, Colonel Roger Priestly, was an obsessive compulsive and a stickler on dress and appearance. Lately there had been an epidemic of pant cuffs being altered a fraction of an inch to conform to regulation length.
It gives him something to do,
Stuart thought. He heaved an inner sigh of resignation and walked resolutely to the colonel’s office.
My first day back from leave, and it’s already hit the fan
, he told himself silently. For a moment he wished he were back on
Temptress
in Miami. But just as quickly the image vanished. That was all behind him.
Peggy Redman, Priestly’s secretary, was sitting at her desk. She was a heavyset African-American in her mid-fifties with short-cropped hair and a flair for finding stylish clothes at sales and outlets. She smiled at him, glad that he was back. The atmosphere in the office was always much more pleasant when he was around. “How was the Caribbean?”
Stuart returned her smile. “You might say we got rained on.”
Peggy looked concerned. “It wasn’t what you expected?”
“We were caught by Hurricane Andrea.”
“That must have been terrible. But welcome back. We missed you.” She waved him into the colonel’s office.
“Lieutenant Colonel Michael Stuart reporting as ordered,” Stuart said, snapping a sharp salute.
Priestly waved his fighter-pilot salute back. It was a cocky blend of informality and arrogance, allowed to the Priestlys of the world but not the likes of Stuart. On the surface Roger “Ramjet” Priestly was a fighter pilot’s pilot—tall, ruggedly good-looking, athletic, articulate, and well sponsored, thanks to a good marriage. The fact that he had never flown combat and avoided cockpit assignments whenever he could hadn’t hurt as he clawed his way up the rank structure. His current assignment to ILSX, Pentagonspeak for Installation Logistics Supply Plans, was a slight detour in his quest for his first star and flag rank.
Priestly had fought for a slot in Contingency Plans, the hotbed of new ideas. But some quirk in the colonels-assignment system, probably because both had “plans” in the title or someone had a sense of humor, had landed him in ILSX. His sponsor had urged him to take the assignment with the promise that once in the Pentagon, he could transfer to Contingency Plans or to the Joint Chiefs. But so far he was stuck in ILSX. Normally ILSX was headed by a veteran supply officer, and thanks to his predecessor, Priestly had inherited a superefficient and well-run organization that needed little tending and less expertise on his part.
Stuart, on the other hand, was nonrated, a ground-pounder without wings on his chest. He was one of the faceless officers, a combination of technician and bureaucrat, who made up the infrastructure of the Air Force and kept it working on a day-to-day basis. Because of officers, NCOs, and airmen like Stuart, planes were fixed, supplies delivered, control towers manned, accounts balanced, buildings painted, computers programmed, telephones repaired, laws enforced, dining halls opened, and the sick cared for.
In Stuart’s particular case, he managed the complex and baffling world of petroleum, oil, and lubricants—or POL for short. His job, in the simplest of terms, was to ensure that JP-A, kerosene-based jet fuel, would always be available, especially in time of war. Michael Eric Stuart would never be in harm’s way or see the inside of an airplane except as a passenger, but what he did was essential to the Air Force mission. His only claim to fame was Air Force Manual 23-110, the sixty-page regulation he authored that detailed how fuels were managed.
Priestly left Stuart standing to keep him off balance and send the message that he was less than happy. He tossed a report onto the desk between them. “What’s this piece of shit?” he asked almost good-naturedly.
Stuart cocked his head and eyed the title through his glasses. “Our input into the Quadrennial Defense Review.”
“And you expect me to sign off on it?”
I’ll be glad to witness your X
, Stuart thought. Wisely, he stifled that thought and said, “I just crunch the numbers.”
“Crunch them again.”
“Will do, sir. But the results will be the same.”
Priestly leaned forward. “The mission of the Air Force is to be able to fight two major theater wars simultaneously.” He tapped the offending report with a forefinger. “Now you’re telling me we can’t do that.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What exactly did you say? Educate me.”
Not possible
, Stuart decided. “I said that we do not have the necessary access to tankerage to guarantee the flow of POL to two major theater wars being fought simultaneously.”
“There’s no way I’m going to tell the committee working on the Quadrennial Defense Review that the Air Force cannot meet its mission.”
Stuart tried to be reasonable. “The operative words, sir, are ‘cannot guarantee the flow.’ There are work-arounds described in Appendix C.”
Priestly kicked back in his chair and steepled his fingers, studying the man in front of him. He sighed. “Stuart, you’re just another thumb-sucking milicrat”—Priestly’s term for a military bureaucrat—“who wants to get down to the third floor.” The third floor of the Pentagon was the “money floor,” where the defense budget was assembled. For the professional bureaucrat it was considered a plum assignment with real power. Stuart wanted to say that he only wanted out the front door—in eighteen months. “It’s too bad,” Priestly continued, “that you can’t see the big picture for the trees. It would help if you had ever strapped on a jet and been on the cutting edge of what the Air Force is all about.” He paused, gathering steam for his favorite lecture about being a can-do Air Force. Stuart braced himself for the tirade. He had heard it before and accepted it as the penultimate act before Priestly sent him back to his cubicle in disgrace.
Unfortunately, the telephone rang before Stuart could escape. The colonel answered it with a curt “Priestly.” He listened for a few moments and stared at Stuart. “This is the first I’ve heard about it, sir. I assure you—” His faced flushed as the caller cut him off. The colonel was not used to being on the receiving end of a harangue. Then, “Yes, sir. I’ll check into it.” He carefully dropped the phone into its cradle. An image of a monk handling a holy relic that delivered ecclesiastical messages directly from God flashed in Stuart’s mind.
Priestly took a deep breath. “That was my boss, Brigadier General Castleman. What exactly in God’s name were you doing in Cuba?” Before Stuart could answer, Priestly shifted into overdrive. “Your security clearance prohibits you going there, and you should’ve reported you were in contact with a hostile foreign power. By not reporting that contact, you took all my options off the table. I have no recourse but to ask for an Article 32 investigation leading to court-martial.”
“Sir, I tried to tell you, but—”
Priestly held up a hand and interrupted him. “Air off, Stuart. I don’t want to hear any lame-ass excuses.” He glared at the lieutenant colonel. “But how in the hell did Castleman learn about it?”
“Because I reported it, as required, when I signed in from leave this morning. It was early, you weren’t here yet, so I left a memo for the record on your e-mail.”
Priestly shook his head. “That’s a load of bullshit, and you know it.”
“It’s a matter of record, sir. And there are mitigating circumstances, which are outlined in the memo. It’s all in your computer.”
Priestly shook his head in wonder, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He tapped the offending document lying on his desk. “First this report and now Cuba. What’s got into you?”
Good question,
Stuart thought. He was standing up to Priestly, when not too long ago he would have been running for cover.
Priestly made his decision. “I’m sidelining you until I can get to the bottom of this. Report to the Administration Section and make yourself available for whatever shit detail they have. They’re always hollering for help.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“Dismissed,” Priestly muttered. Stuart snapped a salute and, without waiting for it to be returned, spun around to leave. “You’re on the edge,” Priestly said, stopping him. “One more screw-up and I’ll push you over. You can kiss your retirement good-bye. Think about it.”
I am thinking about it,
Stuart thought.
The Pentagon is aptly named for its five sides, five concentric rings of offices, five floors, and the five-acre center courtyard that has been called Ground Zero. The inhabitants of the Puzzle Palace, or Fort Fumble, as it is sometimes known, don’t think it’s funny, because it was a commonly accepted fact that in the heyday of the Cold War, the Soviets had fed the center coordinates of the courtyard into at least five ICBMs. This was not attributed to a Russian sense of humor but to the reliability, or lack of it, of their missiles and warheads.
“Big” is the adjective that best describes the Pentagon, and with over 6.5 million square feet, it’s easy to get lost. If the casual visitor should see a man in uniform talking to a pretty civilian employee, it’s not because he’s trying to score but because he’s lost. Yet everyone will think he’s hitting on her, which even in this day of political correctness is much better than appearing to be asking for directions, a major violation of the male ethic. When the $1.2 billion renovation that was started in 1993 is completed in 2006, the added 200,000 square feet of office space will only make the situation worse.
But in spite of its size and idiosyncrasies, the occasional scandal about contracting and budgeting, the personal ambitions stalking its offices, and the egos that define the command corridors, the Pentagon is an efficient place, and the taxpayers get good value for their money. For the next two days Stuart worked in an administrative limbo, making it even more efficient, shuffling the never-ending flow of paperwork that flooded the Air Force. “Paperwork” was really a misnomer, since most of the Air Force’s business was conducted on computers. But the devilish machines had not streamlined the military’s penchant for documentation. In fact, they’d only made it worse. Consequently the first file Stuart opened contained over thirty unanswered queries, letters, and one inventory form to be filled out and dutifully forwarded. He went to work on the inventory, the most time-consuming project.