Leukemia? Oleg dismissed it with a flick of his hand. “Such a trifle.” He’d take care of the leukemia later. Give Galina girl some money. He had a good fund-raising idea that would not cut into Ambient Air Capture profits.
No, not car wash. What, you think this is America? Need books for school kids? Car wash. Need blankets for squeegee people? Car wash.
But Oleg’s fund-raising idea did have lots of liquids and—Who knows? — maybe some bright red spots.
And then, after taking care of the leukemia money, he would accept Galina’s apology for working for Papa Plutocrat and helping Dmitri. Little brother who’s bigger than a horse does not need help. Great life. Hookers and indoor waterslide. For a man with a broken brain, doesn’t get better.
But right now Oleg needed to get up to his plush penthouse with a skylight in the living room and another one high above his bed with special heating systems to vaporize the snow so he could see the night sky burning with stars that spoke to him in ways he could never quite put into words. His poetic side that wanted to dance with the stars. The real stars, not those losers on bad TV for potato-faced people without satellite or even the crappy Russian version of Netflix.
When he needed ultimate encryption there was only one safe bet: home sweet home. He thought it and sang it as he drove into the underground garage and waited all of three seconds for the elevator before darting up to the lobby.
Argh! The cripple. Yes, it was bad to call the wheelchair-bound neighbor a “cripple,” but the cripple was a nasty fuck. And there he was, holding the hand of his crippled girlfriend, both of them wheeling around Moscow like they belonged everywhere. Slowing down everyone. Waiting for the damn elevator. Just getting them on was like loading nuclear pellets. First, she went, doing a six-point turn until she faced out. Then he got on; with even less room to maneuver, he needed a ten-point turn. By then the doors were boing-boinging off his chair. But each of them never seemed to notice because they were always busy flashing big toothy smiles at everyone except him.
But he didn’t dare rush ahead and close the elevator doors on them. He’d done that last month and they’d filed a complaint with the co-op board, which threatened to force him to sell and leave.
“If you’re not careful,” he’d warned the board in his most cunning voice, “I’ll buy the building and send all of you packing. Cripples first.” Ha-ha-ha. That had shut them up.
But now he was paying the price of his impatience because he couldn’t push past them when he really needed to. Too many witnesses getting mail, smoking, talking, watching, and waiting to see what the “Penthouse Prick” would do. That was what a crone on the co-op board had nicknamed him — and it stuck.
Oleg took the stairs, panting after two flights. Then he had a better idea. He burst through the next stairwell doorway and raced to the elevator, pushing the up button.
Ding.
And there they were, just as he figured, staring at him. No toothy smiles now. He pushed the button for the very next floor.
The doors closed.
Ding. They opened.
“Here, cripple girlfriend. You first,” he said, giving her a good shove.
“And now your turn, Wheel Beast.”
“No!” the cripple bellowed. “It’s not our floor.”
“I know, but better — no witnesses,” he added as he pressed a button and closed the doors.
In seconds he rose to the top floor and stepped into his penthouse, to which only he had the key. Then he rushed to his bank of computers to bring up hacker #1.
Click-click-click. Then more clicks. Lots of clicks.
“Okay, hooked up,” he said to himself. “So tell me,” keyboarding to #1, “what do you think ‘or else’ means?”
Don’t disappoint me, thought Oleg. I want to talk to someone about this most magnificent target in all of world history.
“WAIS,” was Numero Uno’s total answer.
But it made Oleg hug himself because Uno was spot-on: West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
“You are right!” he keyboarded back.
“Pure genius,” Uno replied. “Theoretically unstable,” he added.
“Theoretically?” Oleg guffawed so hard he almost fell off his Aeron.
A renowned geologist had called the massive WAIS an “awakened giant” that could reach a “tipping point”—not a metaphor, for once — and crash into the ocean. Bombing it would create the biggest kerplunk in history and raise sea levels by 3.3 meters (eleven feet, Americans!).
If the Arctic, with all its gas and oil, was the prize — and it most certainly was — Oleg thought Antarctica, with its deliriously unstable ice sheet at the bottom of the world, would soon provide the punishment for all those other countries that had, once again, underestimated Russian resolve.
Other than Holland, of course, the nation that would be hammered hardest would be the United States, where 40 percent of the people lived right on or near the coast. And even though the seas would rise almost everywhere, they would be 25 percent higher on America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts because as ice melted from the nuclear blast — and vast chunks were dislodged by the explosion — the planet’s spin would begin to change, which would shift the focus of the earth’s gravitational field farther north. That would pile up seas higher on the coasts of North America. The process was already underway. Thanks to climate change, Antarctica had one of the fastest warming rates in the world. The continent had actually shrunk by 125 cubic kilometers every year since the beginning of the decade. But a nuclear blast would make global warming’s impact seem puny by comparison.
When Oleg had first learned about America taking it on the chin, he thought it was too good to be true. But what was even better was that Russia didn’t have a single city in the top-fifteen list of those most in danger of sea-level rise.
All through Russian history its leaders had worried about ports. Never enough ports. All the time it was ports-ports-ports and the fear of being landlocked. That was a big reason for taking Crimea from those ingrate Ukrainians—Bad as black men in Flint. Maybe related even—to keep the Port of Sevastopol firmly in Russian control for the Black Sea Fleet.
But when the seas rose, Russia would be nice and cozy. For the imperialist western powers and the inscrutable Chinese? Disaster. Russia’s great destiny, sought for centuries, would come to completion in the hands of Oleg Dernov.
Just a single warhead on a Trident II would be dozens of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, and the Tridents with multiple warheads would most certainly drop the entire ice sheet into the ocean in seconds. So Oleg was understandably overjoyed to have someone, at last, to chat with about this triumph. An enthusiast, no less, much like himself.
“So let’s do it,” Uno wrote.
“Patience, patience,” Oleg wrote back. Even if PP was correct that it was a greatly overrated virtue.
“Must target very carefully,” Oleg typed. “Shave off portions of WAIS. Show them we’re serious. Raise sea level a foot or two.” Good-bye Miami, Amsterdam, good-bye parts of London, New York, Boston, and other cities too numerous to name.