And there it was, the gleaming thirteen-year-old black Jaguar his parents had given him for his twenty-first birthday. It had been four years old then, with only 12,000 miles on the clock, having been previously owned by some elderly diplomat friend of his dad’s. Today it still showed only 42,000 on the clock, since Ramshawe took it out of Washington only two or three times a year.
He and Jane usually traveled in her car, a small, unpretentious, but brand-new Dodge Neon, which did thirty-eight miles to the gallon as opposed to the sixteen he got out of the Jaguar. He used the Jaguar mostly for work, gunning it along the highway from the Watergate complex out to Fort Meade every day. He loved the stubby stick shift and the surge of power of the engine, the way it hugged the corners.
And this morning he really put it through a hard training run. On near-deserted, dry roads and a mission of national importance. Jimmy hit ninety miles per hour on the highway and came barreling down the road to the main gates of the NSA like a rally driver, pulling up at the guardhouse with a squeal of well-maintained brakes.
The guard waved him through briskly, smiling cheerfully at the Aussie security officer, who drove like Michael Schumacher and sat at the right hand of the NSA Director himself, the veteran Adm. George Morris.
Jimmy drove straight to the main entrance of the OPS-2B building, with its massive one-way glass walls. Behind these, up on the eighth floor, was the world headquarters of the Admiral. Jimmy took advantage of a privilege he had, but rarely used, and hopped straight out of the Jag and signaled one of the guards to park it.
“Thanks, soldier,” he called cheerfully.
“No trouble, Lieutenant Commander. Gotta put those oil fires out, right?”
Ramshawe grinned. It was unbelievable how news, rumor, and distortion whipped around this place. Here, behind the razor wire, guarded by seven hundred cops and a dozen SWAT teams, the 39,000 staff members knew approximately a hundred times more than anyone in America about what precisely was going on in the world. Jimmy Ramshawe had long suspected each one of the 39,000 personnel briefed at least one person every ten minutes. The Fort Meade grapevine had long vines.
He reached the eighth floor, hurried into his office, and turned on the news. It was 0650, ten minutes before 3 P.M. in Saudi Arabia, and the fires were still raging. The news channel had essentially dealt with the blown loading docks in the big tanker ports and was now starting to concentrate on the inferno at Abqaiq.
No one had yet shone a spotlight on the critical importance of the smashed Pump Station Number One, but CNN had received pictures of the gigantic fire in the middle of the desert, as the gasoline, crude oil, and petrochemical refining towers and storage area continued to blast themselves into the stratosphere. No one, beyond biblical times, had ever seen anything like this before.
The commentator was still concentrating on the possible perpetrators and announcing (guessing) that al- Qaeda was somewhere in the background. But, of course, you couldn’t call up al-Qaeda and check with their press office. And there were numerous other groups of Islamic fundamentalists who might, possibly, have favored the destruction, then the rebuilding, of the world’s richest oil nation.
Indeed Prince Nasir himself, the fifty-year-old Crown Prince, had recently expressed such alarm over the situation in Riyadh that he had granted an interview to the London
He had made further allusion to the fact that whatever else, it had nothing to do with him. But his heart was bleeding for the future of his ancient land. Very definitely. And, as a loyal courtier and a man sympathetic to the plight of his fellow citizens, it pained him to mention these unpleasant truths.
Right now, along with all the world’s media, CNN had not the slightest clue about what was going on. And as their reporters took flying leaps from one conclusion to the next, Lt. Cdr. Jimmy Ramshawe, who was, after all, paid to think not show off his knowledge on the television screen, switched on his big industrial-size computer and delved into his “Hold” file, the one that contained all the little unsolved puzzles that had intrigued him over the past couple of years.
He had no idea what he was looking for. So he just keyed in the word
The activities of France had more or less ceased during December, but nevertheless, Ramshawe had made notes from the observations of his two sources, both of whom had a well-gripped handle on world prices, and both of whom had expressed bewilderment as to why France was so anxious suddenly to acquire new and different oil supplies.
He located a website that elaborated on the Gallic energy anxiety but found little of interest there, save that France imported 1.8 million barrels of oil a day, mostly from Saudi Arabia. And by the look of the morning news, that was about to dry up in the foreseeable future.
“I wonder,” mused Ramshawe, “if everyone in the industrial world is about to have bloody kittens over this, with one exception…” He was thinking of course about the country that had already made other arrangements, and no longer cared whether Saudi Arabia had oil or not.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe logged that as a possibility, but dismissed it on practical grounds as a bit too fanciful.
At 0800 he ordered some coffee and a couple of English muffins. He decided not to call Admiral Morris at 0500 on the West Coast, and elected instead to contact his pal Roger Smythson at the International Petroleum Exchange, in London.
Smythson answered his own phone from his office inside the Exchange, and with admirable British restraint, he told Ramshawe that so far as he could tell, the roof had just fallen in.
“Chaos, old boy,” he said. “Absolute bloody chaos.”
“You mean the buyers are driving the prices up?” said Ramshawe.
“Are you kidding?” replied Smythson. “By the time this place opened, every single person involved in the buying and selling of oil on the international market knew the Saudis were essentially out of the game.
“I mean, Christ, Jimmy! Have you seen the pictures? The loading docks are on fire, the terminals have been blown up, and the main pump station at Abqaiq has been destroyed. Even the manifold complex at Qatif Junction is smashed beyond repair. I’m telling you, whoever did this really knew what they were about.”
“You mean an inside job, perpetrated by Saudis on the entire nation?”
“Well, that’s the way it looks. And you can guess what the panic’s like here. Because, to people working under this roof, the words
“Has it stabilized?” asked Ramshawe.
“Let me check on the screen. No. It’s eighty-six dollars.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“None of us knows that until the Saudis make some kind of a statement. So far, they have not said a thing.”
“What about the King?”
“Not a squeak out of him. And nothing from the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain. No one knows what’s happening, and that makes the market so much worse.”
“Well, there’s not much we can tell you either,” said Ramshawe.
“We were waiting for word from our embassy in Riyadh. But nothing’s come through yet.”
“Hey, there is just one thing,” recalled Smythson. “You remember the last time we spoke — about the French buying up futures?”
“Sure I do.”
“Well, I kept an eye on that. And it was France, definitely. And they bought nothing from Saudi Arabia. But they went in strongly on Abu Dhabi oil, and Bahrain. They bought some from Qatar, and a lot from the Baku field in
