by Jeff Nesbit
“Yes, assuming we should find something at the northern end of the Dead Sea.”
Abe leaned back in his chair. It creaked and groaned. “You do know that Israel is a terrible place to drill for oil, don’t you? This isn’t Iran. No one’s ever had even a whiff of anything like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. You’re likely throwing money down the proverbial rat hole.”
The man didn’t take the bait. “As I said, we have what we need. And we know what we’re getting into. We’re here for the long haul. We’ve pledged a firm partnership with INOC on this…and other matters.”
“That’s good, because no one’s likely to get rich drilling for oil around here.” Abe cocked his head toward the paperwork sitting on top of the oil register, loosely covering the electrical tape that kept the binder together. “So I have only one additional question. You mention in here that you might also be doing some work out in the Negev. Can you give me an idea of what you might be looking for exactly?”
The man stood to leave. “As I said, we’ve pledged to be a good partner to INOC. They’ve asked us for some exploratory help in the Negev. We won’t be digging, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not sure what I’m asking—though I have heard rumors that someone has stepped forward to help INOC make the pipe that runs from Ashkelon to Eilat two-way in order to allow oil to flow north to south and then out to China and the Far East,” Abe said. “It was just a question.”
“And when we have an answer,” the man replied, ignoring the first part of the obvious question, “I’m fairly certain you’ll be one of the first people to hear it.”
Abe stared hard at him. After a minute, his gaze softened, as if he realized any further questions would be pointless. No answers would be forthcoming. “Fair enough. But if you do happen across anything interesting, you’ll be sure to pay me a visit again and let me know?”
“Absolutely,” the man said in earnest. “Should we find anything interesting, you can be assured that I will be back to see you.”
“The Dead Sea is a curious place, isn’t it?”
The man didn’t answer this question either. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch.” He nodded politely.
“That would be nice.” Abe closed the tattered oil register. “We don’t get many visitors around here.”
02
Somewhere off the southern coast of Yemen
“In range,” Captain Samuel Bingham radioed to Vice Admiral Asher Truxton, who was listening in from a radio post at the US naval base in Manama, Bahrain, hundreds of miles away.
“What do you see?” Truxton asked.
There was a brief pause. “There are motorboats on one side,” Bingham answered. “The BPX is dead in the water. Our guys said they can see some activity on the decks.”
“Any sign of the BPX sailors?”
“Not that we can see, but we’ll know more when we get closer,” Bingham said.
Vice Admiral Asher Truxton—fresh off his successful defense of the Strait of Hormuz during the brief conflict with Iran—was troubled. It was hard to imagine that pirates could threaten big ships like the BPX Limited in open waters on the high seas. But that seemed to be the case.
“Can you take control?” Truxton asked.
Samuel Bingham, captain of the USS John McCain, had read the reports. He knew what the BPX Limited meant to the pirates that roamed the high seas off Somalia and Yemen. It was worth more than a ransom—its oil cargo was like black gold for the new breed of terrorism that was beginning to destabilize nation-states.
“I believe so,” Bingham radioed back. “The men are preparing to board.”
“So what do you make of the brief broadcast we got last night, right about when the pirates would have been coming aboard?”
“About the crew shutting down the engines and then locking themselves inside the engine room?”
“Yes,” Truxton said. “Do you buy it?”
“Actually, ever since the Russians freed that crew from one of their own tankers, I do,” Bingham answered. “We’ve been told that they’re training sailors on board to do more of that. The owners are moving away from hiring private security forces and opting to get their sailors out of the way of the pirates.”
“So you could board the ship?”
“Yes, Admiral, we could. I’d like permission to go in full force,” Bingham said.
Truxton didn’t hesitate. “You have it.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll report back as soon as I have news.”
The BPX Limited was an ugly ship. There were no visible markings and certainly nothing that might attract attention. So many heavy coats of paint had been applied over the years that it was nearly impossible to determine its original color. The BPX Limited’s engines always churned loudly and unimpressively when it sailed through the seas one hundred miles or so from the coastline of Yemen.
But to the sailors aboard a mother ship recently launched from the Somali town of Harardhere, Bingham knew the BPX Limited was a beautiful sight to behold. The ship might be ugly, but the light crude it carried was more wondrous than anything they could imagine. The oil was easily worth $50 million, even on the black market.
The Harardhere pirate group had their orders, and they were relatively straightforward. Take the ship by force, secure the unarmed sailors aboard in the cargo hold, and move the ship away from the waters off the coasts of Yemen and Somalia as quickly as possible.
This particular group of pirates had shifted its tactics in recent months, since pirating had become big business around the world. Gone were the days of targeting small passenger ships and extracting ransoms. Now the Harardhere pirates and several others had their sights on oil tankers and commercial ships. There was a market for their contents.
Yes, both the EU and the United States Navy patrolled the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, but they weren’t fast enough to catch pirates using mother ships and motorboats. What’s more, countries near Yemen and Somalia had grown weary of the chase and the efforts to lock pirates up. Some of the countries had already told the EU and the US that they would accept no more pirates.
The pirates of Somalia also benefited from their relationship to al Shabab, the terrorist organization that had long tried to overthrow the government of Somalia. While the deals were three and four times removed from the high-seas drama, the pirates discovered that someone, somewhere, was buying the oil from tankers such as this.
And that funding, in return, set al Shabab up to be a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. Big money tended to do that. It allowed al Shabab to export its own notions of jihad to other parts of the world.
It was hard to imagine, but three tankers nearly the same size as the BPX Limited—and their oil cargo—had simply vanished from the Arabian Sea in the past six months. Their crews were later found alive, wandering in either Yemen or Somalia. That’s why Truxton had chosen to redeploy a dozen Reapers from Afghanistan and Iraq for duty in the seas south of Yemen and Somalia. The pirates knew nothing of these drones, which at least gave the US Navy some sort of an edge.
The Reapers were all-seeing, with infrared “eyes,” and could fly for up to eighteen hours at a time. Their cameras could look down on suspected pirates from fifty thousand feet up, making them virtually invisible to the pirate mother ships that launched from Harardhere and Hobyo. The drones also could scan large areas for activity, so they were ideal in the vast waters where the pirates operated.
The trick, of course, was to spot a hijacking in progress and get there in time to find the pirates still aboard. Convincing his superiors at the joint chiefs to redeploy so many Reapers away from Afghanistan had been a tough sell for Truxton, but the change in pirate tactics to go after oil tankers had finally convinced the Pentagon leadership that more was going on than simple ransom hijackings. The pirates were beginning to fund terrorism, and that got the attention of the top brass at the Pentagon.
One of the Reapers had picked up a mother ship out of Harardhere two d
ays ago. And just a day earlier, it had made the connection between the BPX Limited and the mother ship. So Truxton had quickly deployed the USS McCain to intercept both.
The firefight was intense, but brief. Captain Bingham could see it from the deck of the McCain. The pirates had opened fire immediately. They were well armed but no match for the American navy. Two of the pirates died in the gun battle. Another dozen, immediately arrested, were being detained aboard the McCain.
Once the BPX had been secured and swept, Captain Bingham came aboard the oil tanker. They’d guessed right. There were no BPX sailors to be found. They were either dead and tossed off the ship—or safely locked away.
Minutes later, one of his men shouted over the radio that the BPX sailors had been found, alive and well, inside the engine room. A minute later, other forces that had simultaneously boarded the Harardhere pirate mother ship also reported back.
“All clear here,” said one of the sailors under Bingham’s command. “But…”
“Yes?” Bingham asked.
“Well, we found things here in the hold of the ship that don’t make any sense.”
“Just report it, sailor,” Bingham said patiently. “We’ll make sense of it later.”
“We found boxes and boxes of white flags.”
“White flags?”
“Yes, hundreds of them. All new—piles and piles in boxes.”
“That’s certainly interesting,” Bingham mused.
“And we found other things. Maps of an overland route from al Hudaydah to Mecca.”
“Mecca, in Saudi Arabia?”
“Yes, sir. It appears to largely follow the coast. And there’s one other thing.”
Bingham smiled. “I can only imagine.”
“There’s a cache of weapons on one side of the hold,” the sailor reported. “But they’re useless.”
“Because?”
“They’re only a bunch of double-edged swords. Worthless in a fight. No one’s fought with swords like these in a hundred years. I can’t imagine what they’re for, or why they’re here.”
“I can’t either. But there’s a logical reason for everything—and someone will make sense of this, I’ll hazard.”
“Flags, swords, and a route to Mecca? That makes sense?”
“It certainly makes sense to someone,” Bingham answered.
03
Beersheba, Israel
It was hard to tell the friends from the enemies. That was what any casual observer noticed in Beersheba since the uneasy peace between Iran and Israel had remade the world. So many different nationalities visited on a daily basis now that it was nearly impossible to recognize the city known informally as the capital of the bleak, forbidding Negev desert.
But one thing was certain. The old wars were back in Beersheba, which had served twice on the front lines of war in the twentieth century. Many of the city’s residents who’d migrated there since the Israeli Defense Forces had taken it from the Arabs in 1948 wondered if their city would soon become a symbol of war for a third time—or a harbinger for lasting peace in the troubled region.
It was odd to Dr. Elizabeth Thompson to see such a large US presence in Israel. She’d grown accustomed to seeing military in the refugee camps and places she frequented in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Jordan. But it had been a long time since she’d seen US military personnel operating so visibly in the region. It was a bit jarring.
Israel had been adamant about one thing as the peace talks between the leadership of the Palestine authorities, the US, and Israel had begun. There were no “blue helmet” peacekeeping forces in the Negev. They’d insisted that only the US military be allowed to move earth in and around Beersheba. Countries that wanted to send troops to the Negev to help the Americans had to equip their soldiers in the uniforms of the country’s origin and operate under US military command.
“Dr. Thompson, you’re back so soon?” asked an American soldier at a checkpoint ten miles or so south of Beersheba. He moved close to her jeep to inspect her papers.
Elizabeth smiled. “I expect you’ll be seeing a lot of me for a while—at least until the hospital is finished.” She handed her papers to the soldier, who glanced at them for only a second, then handed them back. He knew Dr. Thompson. He didn’t need to examine her papers or the logo of her NGO, World Without Borders, on the side of the open-air jeep.
The American military had set up dozens of checkpoints in and around Beersheba, which made it virtually impossible for casual visitors to find their way around the city. It was frustrating. But Israel was allowing the operation—for now—while the peace talks were underway. They’d promised a show of good faith toward the creation of a free Arab state, so they allowed the operation to move forward.
A large transport truck—now empty—rumbled by from the opposite direction. Elizabeth winced as the truck kicked up a storm of dust. She and the soldier both shielded their eyes.
“I’ll be glad when they’ve paved this road,” the soldier said wistfully.
“I’ll bet,” she answered. “But the temporary authority central office said it will be at least six months before they get to things like that. They’ve got a lot of dirt to move first.”
The soldier stepped back from her jeep to allow her to pass through the checkpoint. “You’re probably right. But it sure would make this job more bearable—”
An air siren started up. Elizabeth instinctively looked up and south, toward the massive structures rising above the desert. The new “city” being built quickly by American-led forces was several miles to the east of Beersheba—between the old city and one of two Israeli air bases in the area.
The siren went off many times a day, and it always meant the same thing—another missile launch from somewhere in Gaza. Some of the Hamas forces had not yet fallen in line behind the call to peace from Iran’s leaders.
Elizabeth caught the soldier’s eye, and both watched in silence. Several moments later, a muffled explosion sounded as a missile landed and exploded harmlessly in the desert. Most of the missiles from Gaza either fell short of their targets in and around Beersheba or landed in the open desert.
“You sure you want to head into the compound today, Dr. Thompson?”
“I’m sure.”
“The missiles have been more frequent of late,” the soldier offered.
“I’ll be fine.” She laughed. “I’m a small target, and they never seem to land in the compound anyway.”
“Except when they veer off target.”
“True, but I’ll take my chances.”
“So what brings you back here today?”
She shifted gears in her jeep. “They’re breaking ground for the new pediatric ward at the hospital. I promised I’d be there for it.”
“Got it,” the soldier said. “Be careful.”
“Always. I’ll keep an eye out for those missiles.” She smiled easily.
As she drove toward the hospital under construction east of Beersheba, Elizabeth marveled at how swiftly events were transpiring since Iran, Israel, and the United States had moved the world back from the precipice and toward an uneasy peace.
The Korean peninsula was being transformed since North Korea had agreed to give up its nuclear weapons. The US military presence was rapidly shrinking and would be completely gone from the region in months. It was hard to imagine, but the situation in North Korea seemed to be stabilizing since American president Camara had traveled to Pyongyang and forged an agreement on the tarmac of the airport with its young leader.
Tehran had been true to its own promises. Press reports indicated that the leadership there was willing to negotiate with the Americans in good faith. Very public meetings in several cities had been fruitful and productive.
The hospital east of Beersheba was a good example of the fruits of those talks. Israel, reluctant at first, had finally agreed to a military presence, earth-moving infrastructure, and some permanent construction in and around a new Palestinian refugee camp alrea
dy swelling with new arrivals.
The plan, Elizabeth knew, was to build a small suburb to the east of Beersheba as quickly as possible to accommodate an influx of Palestinian leaders and their families—people who would take over Beersheba as the capital of a new Palestinian state as soon as peace had become permanent and treaties were signed.
It would also give people currently living in Beersheba the time and space to move from the city to somewhere else in Israel—assuming they wanted to move.
Beersheba had been a centerpiece of the proposed Arab state in the original United Nations Partition Plan after World War II—until the Israel Defense Forces settled the issue by taking the city from the Arabs in 1948 and making it a part of Israel.
While it was still being debated, the thought was that Beersheba could become the capital of a new Palestinian state. It would be a real capital city and give the new state a fighting chance of success. The Americans had pledged to build up the infrastructure in and around the city to prepare for the day that such a free, Palestinian state was actually realized.
That concept, though, was proving much harder than anyone could have possibly imagined. Beersheba had once been firmly Arab—until the IDF had defeated Egyptian forces there in 1948 and driven them from the region. Since then, Jews from Arab countries, Ethiopia, and Russia had moved to the city and had no intention of moving until they were ordered to leave by Israel’s government.
People thought the fights over Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank had been bad. The fights that erupted on an almost daily basis over the status of Beersheba in the proposed Palestinian state were much worse.
Elizabeth, though, focused on her own tasks. She’d promised to help create a hospital east of the city, within the compound that was starting to receive Palestinian families from refugee camps throughout the region. She knew many of the families personally through her work at all of the refugee camps. More families arrived at the compound on a daily basis.
What Elizabeth could not predict was what might happen when the compound reached critical mass—when the population of Palestinians had swelled to the point that they outnumbered the people who currently lived in Beersheba. She feared it might turn violent. Was anyone truly prepared for that day? It was something she often pondered.
