ECLIPSE (10 page)

“That makes no sense to me.”

“Start with the law. Under British law, natural resources belong to the state. That’s the system in Luandia. The land you walk on may be rich in oil, but the government owns it.” Martel’s smile was bleak. “That’s why Karama wanted to be president. Our president makes four hundred thousand dollars a year; for Karama that’s fifteen minutes of income from institutionalized corruption.

“Because the state owns the oil, Karama forces companies like PGL to give sixty percent of all oil revenue to the government. That means three things. First, the government is free to ignore its people—with multibillions
in oil revenues, they don’t need to collect taxes or build schools or hospitals or roads. Second, kleptocrats like Karama can steal tens of millions every year to help keep themselves in power.” Martel leaned forward, looking at Pierce intently. “Third—and for your purposes the most important—the world needs Karama’s oil too much to criticize his corruption and brutality.”

“That may have been true,” Pierce countered. “But Bobby’s gotten the attention of the U.N. and a raft of human rights groups.”

Martel shook his head. “Perhaps. But September 11 focused the world’s voracity for oil on the Luandian Delta. The industrialized world uses ninety million barrels a day. In ten years that figure will reach a hundred twenty; in thirty years, some experts think, the world may run out of oil altogether.”

Pierce was mildly astonished. “Can that be right?”

“Conceivably. In the last fifteen years, Americans’ demands for SUVs and McMansions has raised our consumption by twenty-five percent. And in ten more years India and China will import more oil than the U.S. and Japan combined.” Martel’s eyes glinted with chilly amusement. “So everybody needs to corner the market—the U.S., the Europeans, India, Japan, and, most venal, the Chinese. But God put most of the world’s reserves in some of the world’s worst places: Russia, Venezuela, and the Middle East—”

“Made
that
worse, didn’t we.”

Martel gave a short laugh. “We’ve become vulnerable everywhere there’s oil. The Venezuelans hate us. The Gulf of Mexico is subject to hurricanes. Aside from our disaster in Iraq, the Middle East is shadowed by bin Laden, Sunni-Shiite rivalries, and the threat of a nuclear Iran empowering terrorists. And we’ve got no real program to wean us from foreign oil.

“In other words, we’ve become the equivalent of a crack-addicted whore, ready to turn tricks for anyone who can give us a fix. Including Savior Karama.” Martel’s tone was grim. “Karama’s sitting on some of the best oil in the world—light sweet crude, plentiful and easy to refine. In the minds of many of our geopolitical strategists, Luandia’s the make-good on the neocon fiasco in Iraq. Within ten years, they project, a quarter of our oil will be Luandian. The problem is that the Europeans, Indians, and Chinese need it as much as we do.”

The cacophony of diners had reached its peak, Pierce noticed, and
more customers awaited tables. After he and Martel paused to order dinner, he said, “So it’s Karama’s oil, and everyone wants it.”

“True. But our problem’s even more complicated than that. Instability in Luandia could throw us into a recession.” Martel spoke in a clipped, emphatic tone. “The competition between oil gluttons means there’s no spare capacity—any interruption in supply causes the world price per barrel to spike. In the last ten years the price has risen four hundred percent; September 11 plus Iraq drove it from thirty bucks to seventy. Now a hundred dollars per barrel is the floor, and the vultures who speculate on oil futures are betting that it will keep going higher.”

A sudden thought struck Pierce. “What happened to the price when PGL shut down Asariland after those oil workers were murdered?”

Martel smiled grimly. “Up six bucks a barrel. If I were speculating in oil prices, and had known about those murders in advance, I’d have made a killing.” At once the smile vanished. “No matter who did it, the murder of PGL employees is a very serious matter. In the minds of our security strategists, we need all the Luandian oil we can get, and PGL is central to maintaining our national defense.”

“PGL is not performing a public service,” Pierce objected. “They’re making billions.”

“Granted. But the delta’s already violent and unstable. It’s become easier for the State Department to get volunteers for Iraq, and now the execs from oil companies are hiding out in compounds. Karama won’t allow PGL to hire its own Blackwater for protection, which means it has to pay Karama’s army. Never mind that officers like Okimbo are murderers in uniform. PGL’s got ninety oil fields, eighty flow stations, and four thousand miles of above-ground pipeline to protect from the armed militias who tap the company’s pipelines and kidnap its people. Now there’s been these murders. The new neocon nightmare is a wave of violence that drives PetroGlobal out of Luandia altogether.”

“Is that likely?”

“It’s possible.” Martel took another sip of Meursault. “Suppose Luandia goes off-line. The price of oil could shoot up twenty-five dollars a barrel, helping to trigger a worldwide recession. Suddenly our military, which runs on oil, will have to pay for gas instead of troops. Less fortunate Americans can’t drive a car; retirees on fixed incomes can’t heat their homes; more companies can’t sell their products overseas. Freight haulers raise prices; their
customers transport fewer goods to fewer buyers. Pretty soon the stock market crashes, wiping out the baby boomers’ retirement plans. In the bleakest scenario, our recession becomes the economic version of nuclear winter.”

“All because of Luandia,” Pierce said in a skeptical tone.

“Sometimes our worst fears turn real. Imagine a shutdown in Luandia at the same time Al Qaeda sets off a WMD in Saudi Arabia.” Martel’s voice softened. “My point is that there are people at the Defense Department, the NSA,
and
my former agency for whom Karama equals stability equals supply.”

Dinner arrived—poached lobster for Martel, rare ahi tuna for Pierce. “There
are
Americans in Luandia who could help you,” Martel added. “Our ambassador, Grayson Caraway, has good contacts and good judgment. There’s also an ex-colleague of mine, Dave Rubin, who gives strategic advice to multinationals trying to navigate the Luandian murk. I’ll put you in touch with both.”

Thanking him, Pierce decided to let Martel enjoy his meal without interrogation. At its end, Martel ordered Armagnac for both of them. Though he swirled his snifter before sipping, savoring its aroma, his look of abstraction suggested that his thoughts were elsewhere. “There’s something more,” he said at length. “Did you know that Karama and Okari once were friends?”

Pierce was startled. “That’s hard to imagine.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true. A few of my former colleagues speculate that the two had some sort of corrupt relationship, followed by a falling out, and that Okari is either more or less than he seems.”

Pierce put down his snifter. “From what Marissa describes, the events in Goro suggest more than a ‘falling out.’”

Martel shrugged. “I don’t know Okari. But neither, I expect, do you—after all, you haven’t seen him for twelve years. For all you know, he’s capable of murder.” His tone became philosophical. “Luandia’s a hard environment, Damon. The absence of moral restraint can warp people in terrible ways. In that sense corruption and murder arise from the same conditions—no one has to account for what they do.” He paused to drain his Armagnac. “The age-old question is whether men refrain from evil out of a higher morality, or only when they fear the consequences. Luandia supports the skeptics’ answer.”

F
LYING INTO
P
ORT
G
EORGE AS NIGHT FELL
, P
IERCE GAZED OUT AT THE
twilit maze of creeks at the heart of the Luandian Delta.

Somewhere in this web of palms and mangroves and polluted water was Asariland and Bobby Okari’s ruined village; concealed throughout were the armed militia that preyed on PGL. As the skies darkened, the flames of a hundred gas flares appeared like torches, turning the maze into a surreal replica of Dante’s inferno. In the distance appeared the lights of Port George.

Shuddering, the plane swooped toward the runway. The woman beside him gasped; the lights of the descending plane captured the rusted skeleton of an airliner that had crashed several years before. “Maintenance error,” Martel had told him wryly. “They left it there as a metaphor for the country.” Pierce was almost glad to land.

An hour later he had passed through a customs station guarded by armed Luandian soldiers and into the chaos of a cavernous but shabby airport where Africans pushed in all directions. In the press of bodies and babel of dialects, a bulky man grasped the handle of Pierce’s suitcase and offered a ride in English so rapid that Pierce found it less comprehensible than threatening. Wrenching back the suitcase, Pierce said,
“No,”
and kept weaving through the crowd, absorbing the strangeness of being a white man surrounded by blacks in such an alien place. A quick glance at a newspaper rack revealed the headline “Three Killed in Cult Attack.”

As someone grabbed his arm, Pierce started. The firm grip belonged to
a short, intense-looking man in his early thirties wearing a blue sport shirt and gold-rimmed glasses. Perceiving Pierce’s anxiety, he looked both impatient and amused. “I’m Atiku Bara,” he said, “Bobby’s lawyer. Keep moving.”

Though Pierce complied, his sole reason to trust the man clutching his elbow was that he had named the man Marissa was sending. Bryce Martel’s last injunction echoed in his brain: “Trust no one—not Okari, not even Marissa Brand.”

“This way,” his guide directed sharply.

They rushed through an exit door to a sidewalk crammed with shouting cabbies and double-parked cars and taxis until they reached a beat-up sedan. After opening the passenger door for Pierce, his new guide scurried into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and floored the accelerator. The car lurched into a space in traffic Pierce had not perceived, joining a disorderly scrum of cars and cabs and trucks hurtling toward Port George on what would have been, were any rules obeyed, a two-lane road. “The trick is not to stop,” said Pierce’s supposed escort. “Or be followed. Welcome to Luandia.”

Still apprehensive, Pierce decided he had no choice but to trust this man until he could get his bearings. He hesitated, then asked baldly, “How’s Bobby?”

Bara—if indeed he
was
Bara—glanced at him, his eyes narrowed. “A week after his arrest there are still no charges, at least not formally. Nonetheless his punishment proceeds. They took him to a military compound in Port George. He is often chained, sometimes beaten, fed very little, and forced to shit in a bucket they seldom remove from the cell he shares with rats. Even as his lawyer I cannot see him outside the presence of the butcher Okimbo.”

Beneath his rapid speech—a rhythmic patois that evoked Jamaica—Pierce heard both fatalism and anger. Before Pierce could respond, the headlights in the opposite lane revealed a gap into which Bara accelerated, throwing Pierce back into his seat as they passed a doorless van crowded with Luandians. “A necessity,” Bara said coolly. “There are those who wait by the road for oilmen to kidnap. Driving with a strange white man is not my favorite thing.

“As for Bobby, physically he was never strong. He has suffered greatly. But his spirit remains unbroken. He will not speak of the horrors he endured, only those he saw.”

“According to the government,” Pierce said, “Bobby saw no horrors. All Okimbo’s soldiers did was overcome armed resistance.”

“Yes. From chickens, goats, children, and headless old men. For which our grateful women showered them with sexual favors before dying from the pleasure of it.” Bara’s voice softened. “I’m alive because I came too late to die. I was returning from a trip to England; on the road to Goro that day, I saw a mother and daughter who had managed to escape. They tried to tell me what was happening, though the words came hard. Then they vanished into the forest—perhaps the only witnesses save for Bobby and Marissa. I decided to turn around.”

“Had you expected a massacre?”

“After the traitors abandoned Bobby? Yes.” Eyes fixed on the road, Bara added quietly, “Perhaps I was late on purpose. I did not wish to die.”

He fell silent. Captured by the headlights, Pierce spotted what could have been, had his mind accepted it, a charred corpse protruding from the bushes at the shoulder of the road. As Pierce turned, staring back, the phantom disappeared.

“Yes,” Bara said matter-of-factly. “I saw him driving out.”

The car struck a pothole, lifting Pierce from his seat and shooting a spasm of pain through his spine. “Do you know what happened?”

Bara shrugged his shoulders, both hands still grasping the wheel. “Perhaps he was a robber, perhaps worse. If the would-be victims overwhelm an attacker, they will sometimes beat him to the ground, put a flat tire around his neck, douse the tire in gasoline, and immolate the wrongdoer.” He spoke with weary resignation. “It’s a form of citizen justice—the police do nothing they aren’t paid to do. The rule of law in Luandia is rhetorical.”

“So it seems.”

Bara glanced sideways. “African savagery, a Westerner might say. But before the English came, our communities were self-policing. It was from the British we learned that the police could be tools of violence and repression, indifferent to all crimes but dissent. Our police have simply jacked up the violence and corruption.”

Above the darkened wetlands the scattered lights of Port George appeared closer and brighter. “The police we fear most,” Bara went on, “are those we can’t detect. The state security services are everywhere, spies waiting for us to commit whatever crime Karama chooses to invent. Imagine the forces of law in the hands of someone who can make an
opponent vanish in the middle of the night, or order police to assassinate him and disguise it as a murder-robbery. One can die for taking pictures of something Karama wants to erase from public knowledge. Like the rubble of a village full of mutilated bodies.”