Target Omega

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Olivia Perry wasn’t surprised by the news she’d just received, but that did nothing to diminish her bitterness. There was simply no defensible reason for what was going to occur at Turtle Bay, yet few were even aware and fewer still seemed to care.

Olivia had been excited when she’d accepted the offer to be an aide to National Security Advisor James Brandt, her former advisor at Stanford. Moving to D.C. and being at the fulcrum of important global developments promised to be exhilarating. Although the move was a significant advancement in her career, her first few months on the job proved to be largely an exercise in mind-numbing tedium.

Her primary charge had been to monitor and analyze Russian commercial transactions and overall economic development for any hints of their strategic ambitions. Old-fashioned Kremlinology had been resurrected due to President Mikhailov’s increasing bellicosity and adventurism.

But she found nothing scintillating there. It appeared that in some respects the Russians were reverting to the disastrous practices of a command economy. Over the last couple of years they’d produced massive quantities of run-of-the-mill electrical equipment, only to have it all sit idly in row upon row of enormous warehouses scattered throughout the vast country. They’d manufactured enough generators to power a medium-size European country, but there was no corresponding market. Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, it seemed, still hadn’t mastered the vagaries of supply and demand.

Moreover, the spike in US natural gas production due to new drilling techniques was depressing Russian economic growth. Hydrocarbons, after all, had been responsible for nearly forty percent of Russian GDP growth over the last decade. But the US natural gas boom was lowering world gas prices and undercutting Russian gas exports to Europe. Gazprom, the mammoth Russian gas company — indeed, the largest in the world — had suspended liquefied natural gas production at the Shtokman field in the Arctic because of plummeting prices. They were now forced to look to burgeoning Asian markets for salvation.

There was something about the Russian economy that bothered Olivia. Something annoying, like the irritating whine of a mosquito flitting about her ear, looking for a place to alight. It kept buzzing whenever she was concentrating on another task. Buzzing to remind her to pay attention. To take a closer look.

Olivia stared gloomily out the window of the Peet’s Coffee near the Old Executive Office Building, where she’d spent most of the day gathering information and preparing analyses for Brandt regarding the positions of various nations on the escalating tensions between Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbors. Earlier in the week, the IDF had conducted strikes on a number of Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon in retaliation for a blizzard of rocket attacks on the Golan Heights over the preceding four days. Although a dozen Israeli civilians had died, the international media became aroused only when one of the IDF’s strikes had resulted in the inadvertent deaths of approximately eight Palestinian civilians whom Hezbollah rocketeers were using as human shields. The familiar pattern of outrage and denunciations followed, beginning, of course, in Tehran and Damascus and concluding in Moscow, Brussels, and Paris.

The buzzing in Olivia’s ear persisted.

The United States was one of the few nations that stood by Israel’s use of force. President Marshall issued a statement of unequivocal support for Israel’s right to defend itself and caused a minor tempest when he demanded the UN investigate possible Hezbollah culpability for the deaths of the civilians.

Of course, the president’s demand went nowhere. In contrast, the draft resolution condemning Israel for the strikes and demanding no further incursions by the IDF into southern Lebanon rapidly picked up support.

Carole Tunney, the US ambassador to the UN, had spent the last two days trying to prevent the resolution from being brought up for a vote of the General Assembly. For a while it appeared the resolution might be tabled, but by midafternoon on Friday, momentum began to shift in favor of the draft.

Olivia was monitoring developments for Brandt from Washington. At approximately one thirty in the afternoon Tunney’s assistant informed Olivia that the UN would indeed vote to condemn Israel. Far worse, the resolution was expected to call for Israel to pull back all forces to its 1967 borders, to be enforced by threat of economic sanctions.

Olivia was disgusted. This was not simply a diplomatic insult to the United States. It had the potential to be a national security debacle for Israel. Requiring Israel to pull back to its 1967 borders would give Israel’s enemies command of the Golan Heights, exposing much of Israel’s population to rocket attacks. Olivia thought it highly unlikely that Israel would comply with the resolution and that an economic boycott would strengthen the hands of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, encouraging them to become even more aggressive and increasing the possibility that Turkey and even Egypt might join the fray. Israel could find itself in the ultimate dilemma: either face possible annihilation or unleash its nukes.

And the buzzing became louder.

Olivia had called Brandt to relay the developments at the UN. Brandt, who was with the president when Olivia called, received the news with his typical reserve. He agreed that the proposed resolution was breathtakingly irresponsible but was fairly confident the United States and Britain would prevail upon Egypt to stand down.

Olivia ordered an iced coffee and pondered what Brandt would recommend to the president if the resolution passed in the next seventy-two hours. She probably knew how his mind worked better than anyone, but despite his orderly and precise thought process, he was sometimes unpredictable — which was when he often came up with his best ideas.

Taking a long sip of coffee, Olivia finally yielded to the buzzing. Despite the urgency of the Middle East crisis, her mind kept returning to the puzzle of the Russian economy. In the midst of an economic downturn, they kept producing commodities no one wanted. It was as if the laws of supply and demand had been suspended. It made no sense, especially with the decline of their energy sector.

The buzzing came to a crescendo and abruptly stopped. The energy sector.

While world energy markets were struggling and energy prices were volatile, something peculiar was going on with Russian energy production. Olivia had first noticed it when scanning some unremarkable satellite surveillance photos of industrial sites. Nothing exotic in the photos, just fuel storage depots, tanker trucks, and pumps. But there were multitudes of them. And that was a problem. An as yet undefinable problem.

Olivia had no idea how big that problem was about to become.