“Do they know we’re picking up the tab at the Regency?”
“No. But it would have been cheap at ten times the price.”
“Your search for allies is admirable,” Marsten said. “I just hope it isn’t misguided.”
“Change is coming, Lloyd. We can’t stop it. But we can delay. For that we need friends at court.”
“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 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.