Oil

by Jeff Nesbit

  It would not be an easy task. The disagreement that had split into the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam after the Prophet Muhammad’s death had lasted for centuries. This Mahdi’s direct lineage to the Ahl al-Bayt, the family of the Prophet Muhammad, and his service or direct lineage to the family and descendants of Abu Bakr would be critical to his legitimacy.

  Recently, Ahmadian and his chief of staff had taken a highly secretive—and dangerous—trip to Iraq to meet with Shi’a warriors in service to Iran’s leadership. These warriors were careful not to make their presence known to the US military forces that continued to occupy Iraq. But they were loyal to Ahmadian and the cause.

  Iran had carefully planted the belief that the US had taken control of Iraq for one simple reason. They’d plundered Iraq’s oil wealth. For this reason, there was a growing conviction among the Shi’a faithful in Iraq that it was only a matter of time before Iran would move and take control of Iraq as they had Lebanon, Syria, and other proxies.

  Ahmadian knew the Americans would never truly leave Iraq—not since they’d allowed three of their largest oil companies to secure the vast reserves in the country for development. The world might have wondered why the US invaded Iraq, but Ahmadian suffered no such delusions. America had seized Iraq’s oil reserves and turned them over to the Western oil companies.

  Today was a great day. It was Tuesday, the day of great vision. Ahmadian had set in motion a great event at the mosque on the outskirts of Qom. They were, at long last, going to dedicate the cornerstone of the newly renovated blue-tiled mosque in Jamkaran.

  Tens of thousands of pilgrims would be there to offer their prayers to the hidden imam and drop their thoughts down the well there.

  “Let us go,” Ahmadian said to his driver, who’d been waiting patiently for Iran’s president to leave the city.

  “We must hurry,” the driver said.

  “Yes, we must,” Ahmadian said. “I wish to get there in time to speak this evening to the people who will be gathered at the mosque. How long will the drive to Qom take us?”

  “Less than an hour,” the driver said. “It is an easy drive south of the city.”

  “Good,” Ahmadian said. “Then I will have plenty of time to prepare my remarks.”

  32

  The Oval Office

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  DJ made sure he didn’t leave Anshel Gould’s side. He’d been around the White House long enough to know that he could worm his way into almost any meeting—provided he stayed close to the blunt chief of staff.

  Dr. Gould was an interesting guy. He kept two offices—one in the West Wing in the traditional chief of staff’s office. But he also kept a much smaller office, away from the Oval Office, near the president’s unofficial, private office.

  President Camara spent much of his time in this smaller office, away from the ceremonial Oval Office. For this reason, Dr. Gould saw the president much more than the rest of the White House staff. Proximity to power was a curious thing.

  DJ admired this about Dr. Gould. He’d watched and learned. So when Dr. Gould was on the move, DJ knew enough to stay by his side.

  And Anshel Gould was on the move. DJ was hard-pressed just to keep pace with the chief of staff as he made his way from the East Wing briefing room to the Oval Office.

  “There’s no such thing, is there?” DJ asked Dr. Gould as they hustled through the corridors.

  “As?”

  “As a Twelfth Imam,” DJ said. “It’s a joke, right? What we just heard from Dr. Wright?”

  Dr. Gould sighed but kept walking at a clipped pace. “I wish. That would make it so much easier.”

  “But some person who’s been in…what was that word?”

  “Occultation,” Dr. Gould said.

  “Which means what exactly?”

  Gould glanced over at DJ with a smile. Of all the White House aides, he felt most comfortable with DJ. The two of them could speak in code, or directly, or in jest. It didn’t much matter. Gould knew he could let his guard down with DJ—almost. The kid could be trusted.

  “You’ve heard of those stories about Ted Williams?”

  “The baseball player who had his head cryogenically frozen?”

  “Yeah, that Ted Williams.”

  DJ got it right off. There were times Gould and he didn’t even need to finish complete thoughts. “So occultation would be like that—bringing a body back to life from some sort of a deep freeze?”

  “Something like that.”

  DJ snorted. “And they had cryogenic chambers a thousand years ago?”

  “No, but they did have glaciers,” Gould said dryly.

  The two laughed as they continued to walk along quickly. “But seriously, how could anyone talk about some Twelfth Imam coming back from whatever you called that…occultation? And how could anyone in their right mind take it seriously?”

  “So you remember Ahmadian’s speech at the United Nations, right?”

  “Where he talked about how he was paving the way for the Twelfth Imam?”

  “Yep,” Gould said. “That speech. He’s the president of Iran. He’s the elected head of one of the world’s emerging regional superpowers. So you tell me. The president of a country that’s about to go hot with nuclear weapons says that he’s ushering in the era of the Twelfth Imam. Then some human being shows up at a mosque south of Tehran who looks, walks, talks, and acts like he’s the occluded Twelfth Imam. And the president of Iran recognizes that person as the Twelfth Imam, what do you call that? Is it real?”

  “Hmm, yeah, good point,” DJ mused. “That’s about as real as anything else you see these days. If Iran’s leadership says this is the guy…”

  “Then it’s the guy,” Gould said. “And if others from the radical, militaristic Sunni factions like al Qaeda hail him as the Mahdi, come to usher in a pan-Islamic era of dominance over the West…”

  “Then we have a Mahdi ruler as well,” DJ said thoughtfully. “So how does that sit with the other Arab countries? There’s no way that Saudi Arabia recognizes that Twelfth Imam.”

  “Not as the Twelfth Imam, no,” Gould said. “But if it’s the Mahdi, and there’s pressure on the Saudis, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, to recognize this new religious figure, well, then I wouldn’t bet against anything right now.”

  “But that’s seriously crazy,” DJ said.

  “Crazier than some guy building ovens during the Second World War so he could exterminate millions of Jews, while the world hardly paid attention? Crazier than that?”

  DJ knew enough not to take the bait on that one. If he’d learned anything about Dr. Gould, it was that he lived his anger at a past injustice against the Jewish people on a daily basis. He was loyal to the United States, but his dedication to Israel’s survival as a constant reminder of the Holocaust was never far from his mind.

  “Okay, not crazier than that,” DJ said. “But I just don’t see how any sane person could possibly think that some religious figure like a Twelfth Imam could stay hidden for a thousand years, and then come back to rule on earth.”

  “If the principalities and powers say that it’s so, DJ, then I can assure you that it’s so,” the chief of staff said firmly. “Sometimes, that’s all it takes. You know better than almost anyone else on this planet that perception is often much greater than reality.”

  Which was true. Propaganda didn’t require truth to work. It merely needed the force of persuasion. A lie well told over and over worked as well as truth—and sometimes even better.

  “True,” DJ said. “But it would be a hard sell to the populations in many of these Arab countries.”

  “Really?” Dr. Gould asked. He didn’t slow down as they took a corner. “Think about our own nation, about the level of willful ignorance that has swept across our country in the past twenty years. We have large parts of our own population who still believe, at a molecular level, in things that were long ago dismissed by science as nothing more than myth
s.”

  “I know, but…”

  “Look around the world,” Dr. Gould said forcefully. “There are millions of people who see video clips from isolated events in America, and they believe those clips to be indicative of American life. They have no basis in reality, yet they stoke populist beliefs in America, the Great Satan. There has been pulp literature for years about the emergence of either the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam.”

  “So when he shows up, then they believe,” DJ said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Something like that,” Dr. Gould answered.

  They turned a final corner and nearly ran into Jennifer Moran and her aide, Katie Devlin, coming into the outer offices from another direction. DJ knew Katie by reputation only. They’d been opposite each other in the press operations during the presidential primaries and had since been involved in inter-agency communications meetings. Katie was a pro, DJ knew.

  Dr. Gould moved quickly to greet the secretary of state. DJ sauntered over to Katie’s side. “You’re here for the briefing with the president?”

  “I guess,” Katie said. “I was with Secretary Moran at Dulles, and she grabbed me on the way out the door at Foggy Bottom. So do you know what it’s about?”

  DJ never knew how much he could let on in situations like this. “I think it has something to do with the briefing we just heard from Dr. Wright.”

  “Most likely,” Katie said.

  There was movement at the door. President Camara peeked out, caught Dr. Gould’s eye, and motioned for him to join him in the Oval Office.

  “DJ, come along,” Dr. Gould said without missing a beat.

  Jennifer Moran didn’t wait for an invitation. She simply walked into the office. “Katie?” she called out as she walked in.

  DJ and Katie glanced at each other, smiled quickly, and then joined their bosses in the president’s office. Susan Wright was already there, sitting at one end of the room.

  “So,” President Camara said when they’d taken their seats. “We have quite a few items to go over, I believe.” The president eyed DJ, then Katie. He said nothing directly to them but continued. “First up, you’ve all heard Dr. Wright’s briefing on this notion of the Twelfth Imam?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Gould said. “We’re up to speed.”

  “Good. And while we know it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, there are reports coming out of Saudi intelligence and elsewhere that there’s been a flurry of talk about the reemergence of some powerful religious figure who can consolidate authority across nations.”

  “Mr. President, if I may?” Dr. Wright looked uncomfortable at the end of the couch. “We all know how ridiculous such a notion is, but I must say in all honesty that it isn’t too farfetched to believe that any religious figure granted some measure of authority from Iran’s leadership will be given some level of recognition by at least the masses. Beyond that, it will depend on the reaction from a country like Saudi Arabia.”

  “This Mahdi character, or Twelfth Imam—wouldn’t it require some sort of recognition by the Saudi royal family?” Jennifer Moran interjected. “Doesn’t he rule from Mecca?”

  Dr. Wright nodded. “He does, at least according to the popular legends.”

  “Which would mean that the Saudis would need to recognize his authority there,” Moran continued. “Which hardly seems likely.”

  “Unless there’s chaos in the kingdom, or a military threat that threatens their power,” Dr. Gould said.

  The president stood. “Which is why I’ve asked you here. Frankly, I have no interest whatsoever in this kind of craziness. We have a much greater threat at our doorstep. There’s been a successful terrorist attack against the Saudi Aramco complex. And from our own intelligence reports, it has crippled a great deal of that complex.”

  “The world’s oil markets will go over the cliff within a day or so,” Dr. Wright added.

  “The Saudis are almost certain to retaliate,” the president said. “And if they go after Iran…well, then, we will almost certainly see war erupt overnight in the kingdom.”

  Dr. Gould nodded. “Which means we’ll be forced to choose sides. We either intervene to help Saudi Arabia in a confrontation with Iran, or we keep the peace process intact with Iran and let events play out in the kingdom on their own.”

  The president looked at his advisors. “And you know where I’m likely to end up in that scenario. We must preserve the peace process. There’s too much at stake.”

  “But we can’t choose sides between the Saudis and Iran. Not now,” insisted Dr. Wright.

  “We may not have a choice. If the Arab Spring comes to the kingdom, and the Saudis are forced to deal with a threat inside their borders that threatens their leadership, we will almost certainly have to stand by and watch it happen,” the president said.

  “But there’s more at stake here,” Dr. Wright continued. “If the world oil markets begin to collapse because the Saudis can’t control OPEC, then we will quickly need to find other ways, other methods, of meeting our energy needs.”

  “Precisely,” the president agreed. “That’s the other reason I asked you here. There’s been considerable movement in the past year on two fronts, and both of them are closing in on completion. And, I might add, not a moment too soon.”

  “On the energy front?” Dr. Gould asked.

  “Yes, there,” Camara said. “I’m not sure how much you know of this, but we’ve been working closely with Turkey and a privately held American firm for the past several years on two very ambitious projects near Israel. The first involves a pipeline at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea connecting Ceyhan and Haifa, which—”

  “Mr. President, I thought that was an aborted project,” Dr. Wright interjected. “With Turkey sideways with Israel, I thought they’d put that on hold?”

  “We—I should say the United States—interceded through private parties.” Camara paused, taking the temperature of the room. “I think all of us would agree it is in the United States’ interest to assure that there is at least one major oil pipeline connecting Europe and the West that isn’t subject to the turmoil we’re seeing in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Should those countries lose the ability to deliver oil to the West, we’d all be in considerable trouble.”

  “True, but how does Turkey figure?”

  “They’ve completed the pipeline,” Camara said flatly. “They’re ready to go live, at both ends. Oil could flow from the Baku pipeline out of Azerbaijan right now, if we asked.”

  “Through Israel?” Dr. Wright asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, through Israel.”

  “But the pipeline through the Negev…”

  “Is also about to go operational and two-way,” the president explained. “INOC received a massive influx of aid from a private company, Aladdin Oil and Gas…”

  “Aladdin?” Dr. Gould asked.

  “It’s a subsidiary…of an American transnational. Charles Raney is on the board.” Camara waited for that news to sink in.

  “The former vice president?” Dr. Gould asked.

  “Yes, that Charles Raney,” Camara clarified. “They’ve overhauled the pipeline that runs north and south in Israel, and oil could conceivably run from Haifa to the south of Israel, and back again in the other direction toward Europe.”

  “But whose oil?”

  “Israel’s,” Camara said. “At least that’s what the energy secretary tells me. He’s been over to see the Baku pipeline and its connection to the terminus in Ceyhan. He says it’s ready to go online.”

  “That means there’s a new pipeline that isn’t part of any of the Arab states?” Jennifer Moran said, eyes wide.

  “Right,” Camara confirmed. “And there’s one other piece. You’re all aware of the earth-moving the US has been leading in the desert near Beersheba, as part of the peace settlement with Iran?” Heads nodded. The entire world knew of those efforts to create a new capital for a Palestinian homeland. “Well, Aladdin and its parent company have a new ref
ining plant that’s ready to go live on the outskirts.”

  “What sort of refining plant?” Dr. Gould asked.

  “One capable of processing oil they pull up from the Shfela Basin,” Camara said.

  “The massive oil shale reserves southwest of Jerusalem?” Moran frowned. “That’s impossible. There’s no way that works. They don’t have proven technology.”

  “They do have proven technology,” the president said quietly. “At least, so I’ve been told. It’s in the hands of a privately held company. And they’re ready to begin pulling oil from those reserves right now. All it takes is a green light from Israel’s government.”

  “Judah Navon would never go for it,” Moran said.

  Camara paused. “Are you absolutely certain of that? A chance for Israel to be energy independent for the first time in its history? No, more than that—a world oil and gas superpower, with the ability to control energy resources that flow to the West? Are you so certain Prime Minister Navon wouldn’t sign off on that?”

  “But if the plant and the pipeline are controlled by a private American company?” Gould asked.

  “Is that so hard to imagine?” the president said. “Our biggest oil companies now dwarf most countries in terms of the resources and manpower they have at their disposal. But we were helpless during the Gulf oil spill. We had to rely on their money, and their own people, to deal with it.”

  “I guess.” Dr. Gould hardly bothered to mask his feelings. “But I know the first call I’m making once I leave this meeting. I’m more than a bit agitated that my friend at the Mossad didn’t bother to brief me on these developments.”

  “Be gentle with him, Dr. Gould,” the president urged. “If things get out of hand in some of these oil nations, we’re going to need friends.”

  “Good friends,” Dr. Gould said.

  “We’re also going to need some security,” the president added. “I’ve asked Egypt for permission to send a couple of ships up the Suez, so they can be there in the Mediterranean when the Ceyhan pipeline goes live. The joint chiefs have also recommended that we put a few boats at the other end, near the southern terminus of the pipeline through Israel.”