Last Light (7 page)

CHAPTER 12

11.55 p.m. GMT
Whitehall, London

‘Those figures have to be incorrect, surely?’ he said looking around at the men and women sitting at the table with him. ‘Surely?’ he asked again.

‘I’m sorry, those are the figures, that’s our best approximation. ’

The Prime Minister looked down at his legal pad. He had scribbled only a few hasty notes, but the last three words he had written down were the ones he found most disturbing.

Two weeks’ reserves.

‘Two weeks? That’s
all
we have in our strategic reserves?’

‘Our
strategic
reserves actually only contain about a week’s worth of oil at normal everyday consumption rates,’ replied Malcolm Jones, the Prime Minister’s Strategic Advisor, and confidant.

‘However, within the distribution chain throughout the country, terminals, depots, petrol stations, there’s perhaps another week’s worth of supply at the normal consumption rate. If we locked down any further selling of petrol, right across the country, right now we would have a reserve that might last our armed forces and key government installations six to nine months.’

The Prime Minister stared silently at him for a moment before finally responding.

‘You’re telling me that in order to supply the army and the government with the oil it needs to keep operating for the next few months, we’d have to suck every corner petrol station dry?’

Malcolm nodded, ‘Until, of course, normality returns and shipments of crude from the Gulf resume.’

‘And the week’s worth of oil in our strategic reserves?’

‘If restricted only to the armed forces and government agencies, ’ the civil servant replied, ‘we could perhaps make it last three or four months.’

The Prime Minister jotted that down on his pad and then looked up at the assembled members of his personal staff. He had his Principal Private Secretary, his Director of Communications, Malcolm, his Chief Advisor on Strategy and Malcolm’s assistant. These were the people he worked with daily, these were the small band of colleagues he trusted. None of them were party members, none of them politicians, none of them secretly jostling for his job. He’d long ago learned that his smartest and most effective decision-making was done here, in this office, with these people, and not around the long mahogany table with his cabinet. The cabinet meetings were where policy was
announced
, not
decided
.

‘So,’ he began calmly, ‘how the hell did we let ourselves get so bloody exposed?’

He directed that towards Malcolm. ‘How did we let this happen? ’

Malcolm stirred uneasily, but retained that dignified calm that seemed to stay with him always. ‘We’ve not been able to buy in enough surplus oil to maintain, let alone build up, our reserves. In fact, we’ve not been able to do that for the last few years,’ he replied. ‘It’s been a gradual process of attrition, Charles. It’s not that we let it happen, we’ve had no choice.’

The Prime Minister nodded.

‘And we’re not the only ones,’ added Malcolm. ‘The increasing demand for oil from China and India, combined with Iraq being a damned basket-case and Iran’s continued oil embargo; all of that has made it difficult for
anyone
to build up a surplus. We’re all over a barrel.’

‘What about the Americans? Can they help us out?’

Malcolm shrugged. ‘They have significant reserves, but whether they’ll share it with us, I’m not sure.’

The Prime Minister cast a glance across the table towards his Private Secretary. ‘Well then let’s ask. It’s the least they can do after all the support we’ve been giving them since . . . well, since 9/11.’

His secretary scribbled that action point down.

‘So, what do we do right now?’

Malcolm nodded to his assistant, Jane. She consulted some papers she had brought along to the meeting. ‘There’s a trickle of oil coming in from other smaller oil producers; Nigeria, Qatar, Mexico, Norway . . .’

‘What about Venezuela?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘I know their preferred client is China, but surely during this temporary crisis they’ll negotiate some short arrangement with us? I mean they’ll screw us on price, but surely . . .’

‘Prime Minister, this came in an hour ago,’ said Jane. She read from an intelligence bulletin. ‘An explosion at the Paraguaná refinery, Venezuela. Fires still burning, damage yet to be assessed, casualties unknown.’

‘Venezuela has loads of crude,’ Malcolm cut in, ‘loads of it. And yeah . . . they might well have been happy to cover our short-term problems, but it’s heavy. It’s not fit for purpose until it’s been through a refinery specifically configured to deal with that particular blend. And Paraguaná was it.’

‘How long will this Paraguaná refinery be out of action then?’

Malcolm shrugged. ‘Who knows? This is all we have on this so far.’

‘Well then what about the Tengiz oilfields in the Caspian? There’s a lot of oil coming out of that area, isn’t there?’

Jane nodded. ‘Yes Prime Minister, we can hope to share some of what’s coming through Georgia, but then so will every other country in Europe. With all the major Gulf producers out of the loop, that’s sixty to seventy per cent of the supply chain gone. We’re all now feeding on the last thirty per cent. With regard to Tengiz oil, we’re right at the end of the supply chain.’

‘You can be sure that our European cousins, along the way, will all want their share,’ added Malcolm.

The Prime Minister looked around the people assembled in the conference room. ‘Then what? What are you telling me? We’re screwed? That we’ve only got the oil that’s sitting in our reserves, depots and petrol stations around the country, and that’s it?’

Jane looked down at her crib sheet again, ‘There’s also a residual drip-feed of oil still coming in from the North Sea.’

‘But not enough to bail us out of this . . . right?’

‘Not even close.’

He looked down again at his legal pad. He’d written nothing there that was going to help him. The only information that stood out on the legal pad were those three words:
two weeks’ reserves
.

‘Okay so we’ve got a big problem with oil. That means for the next couple of weeks no one’s going to be driving. What about power generation? We’re okay on that front, aren’t we?’

‘The good news, Charles, is that we don’t make much power from oil. It’s mostly gas and coal as you know. The bad news is, we import most of our gas and coal,’ said Malcolm.

Jane consulted some notes. ‘Thirty-six per cent of capacity from gas, thirty-eight from coal.’

Charles looked from one to the other, he could see where they were going. ‘And our usual suppliers, Russia, for the gas . . .?’

‘Australia, Colombia, South Africa, Indonesia for the coal,’ responded Jane.

Malcolm looked at him. ‘I imagine they’ll want to hold up on exporting to cover their energy gap.’

‘Shit. What about nuclear?’

‘We produce less than five per cent of our needs from that, right now. You know this yourself, the old stations are mostly being mothballed, and the new ones . . . well they’ve only just started building them. If this had happened in a couple of years’ time—’

Malcolm gestured at Jane to be silent. ‘Charles, this has really caught us on the hop.’

‘So what, if our regular gas and coal suppliers decide to get twitchy, we’re down to five per cent of our normal capacity?’

‘Eight per cent if we count renewables,’ said Jane.

‘Christ.’ Charles loosened his tie. It was getting stuffy in the conference room.

‘We will have to put into place some kind of immediate rationing of power. Whether we share it out on a rota basis, or whether we concentrate it on some nominated areas.’

‘Fan-fucking-tastic,’ he grunted and looked down silently at his legal pad.

‘Charles?’ said Malcolm quietly.

‘What is it?’

‘We have another time-critical decision to make. Our boys in Iraq.’

He was right.

The Americans were pulling most, if not all, of their men out of Iraq and deploying them in Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, overnight. It was already happening. During the day, a lot of damage had been done to the Saudi pipeline network, and many installations had been damaged and destroyed in the rioting. There were still significant oil assets that could be protected if they moved quickly. But that meant a drastically reduced military presence left behind in Iraq; soldiers who would be dangerously exposed.

‘We have to decide what to do with our forces out there,’ prompted Malcolm. ‘And quickly.’

‘And your suggestion?’

‘We have to pull them out. We can’t leave them on their own in Iraq. As soon as the insurgents there realise the Americans have gone . . .’

It didn’t need saying. With US military might focused elsewhere, the seven or eight thousand troops they had committed to regions in the north and the south of Iraq, some of them in small battalion-sized garrisons, would be overrun within days.

‘The decision is whether we help the Americans to guard what’s still intact over there. Or, we pull them out and bring them home,’ said Malcolm. ‘If we leave them there and this crisis lasts much longer . . .’

They could be stranded there.

Charles looked at them. ‘We’re going to want them to come home, aren’t we?’

Malcolm and Jane shot a glance at each other and nodded.

‘This is going to be a tough one to ride out. Before this week’s finished, I think we’re going to need to have troops on the streets, Prime Minister,’ Jane added.

‘My God, this has happened so quickly,’ Charles muttered, reaching up unconsciously to undo the top button of his shirt. ‘I got up this morning with nothing more serious to worry about than looking good at an informal sixth form college Q and A.’

The small trusted band before him offered a muted nervous chuckle.

‘And now I’m facing some kind of end-of-days scenario. Shit.’

Malcolm leaned over and patted his shoulder, ‘We’ll get through this.’

He then turned to Jane and nodded. The young woman pulled out a slim folder from beneath her crib sheet. ‘Prime Minister, if I may, we do have some emergency protocols drawn up within the Cassandra Report for this kind of situation,’ she said, opening the folder and flipping forward through pages of text and charts.

Charles nodded. He vaguely recalled an approval being passed during the previous government’s tenure for a committee of experts to discreetly go away and worry about all manner of oil and energy emergency scenarios, and then to write up their findings.

‘This report was compiled three years ago, after the road hauliers’ strike back in 2004. If you recall it was a handful of depots blockaded by less than a hundred or so truck drivers that nearly brought this country to a standstill after only three days.’

‘I know, go on.’

‘There were some recommendations for dealing with an intermediate oil shut-off scenario.’

‘Intermediate?’

‘Intermediate . . . defined as between two and eight weeks.’ Jane cleared her throat before continuing. ‘I’ll cut to the recommendations.’

Jane continued. ‘Action point one: sale of any oil fuel products should cease immediately. Petrol and diesel will then be rationed to key civilian personnel such as doctors or technicians. Point two: food supplies should be rationed. Vendors and distributors of food products should be forced to limit the sales of food products to customers to minimum sustenance levels until a proper rationing card or book system can be put in place—’

‘Christ! Rationing food? At this stage?’

‘Yes sir,’ Jane looked up from the report. ‘The earlier we do that, the better.’

‘I can understand telling people they can’t fill up their cars . . . but—’

‘Charles, think about it,’ Malcolm interrupted. ‘The vast majority of the food we eat in this country comes from abroad. As a matter of fact, we produce only a tiny fraction of what we consume, and even then it tends to be niche food items like . . . I don’t know . . . crap like Marmite, mayonnaise. Your basic food stocks like wheat, grains, root crops, meat - most of those things come from overseas suppliers. We don’t grow that kind of stuff over here any more. With a suspension of oil supplies across the world, one of the very first things to be affected is going to be the transportation of goods . . . food.’

The Prime Minister buried his face in his hands for a moment, trying to massage away the stress-induced migraine he knew was well on its way.

‘So now we also have to worry about a strategic food reserve? ’

‘Which we don’t have, Prime Minister. We have only the food that exists in the domestic distribution chain.’

‘In other words, what’s currently sitting on the shelf in my local supermarket down the road?’

Jane shrugged apologetically, ‘In a manner of speaking . . . yes.’

Malcolm gestured towards the report, ‘Carry on, Jane.’

‘Point three: immediate application of martial law, and a curfew, enforced by armed police and military units deployed in every major city. Point four: cessation of all inter-city travel services—’

Charles raised a hand to stop her. ‘This is over the top. If I get on breakfast TV tomorrow morning and announce measures like these, they’ll be rioting in the streets by lunchtime!’

He got up from the table and walked towards the bay window, pulling it up a few inches to allow a gentle breeze into the room. The window overlooked the modest rear garden of Number 10.

‘This is day one of the crisis . . .
day one
! I can’t dive in with measures like this. It’ll cause more harm than good. And this thing in the Gulf may blow itself out in a few weeks. Okay, so we’ll need to tighten our belts until then, of course, but these action points will come across as a panic reaction.’

Malcolm got up and walked over to the Prime Minister standing by the window staring out at the garden, illuminated by half-a-dozen security floodlights.

‘What if it doesn’t blow itself out in a few weeks? What if this situation escalates? What if we have China and Russia fighting over the Tengiz oil reserves?’ Malcolm gestured towards the report.