Blood Oil

by James Phelan

  “They’ve got their culprits,” Rollins said. “Textbook case for the cops and politicians—this was the work of delta militants. No witnesses otherwise. We’re the only Western journalists to have access here. This site will be cleared of rubbish by next week and a new building built. They’ve got it down to a fine art around here.”

  Fox was still scanning the streets. A couple of no-nonsense guys in mismatched fatigues approached Gammaldi and waved him away from the building. New Kevlar vests, Steyr TMP submachine guns, no visible ID.

  “They oil company security?” Fox asked.

  “Yeah, Blackwater types,” Javens said, returning the stare of one of them. “Over five thousand of them in the delta regions, mostly out of control, beyond whatever laws there are to be upheld in this country.”

  “Russians,” Gammaldi said as he joined his friends. “It’s always fucking Russians.”

  “They’re the latest crowd to Nigeria, following some new deals with Moscow over oil exploration,” Javens said. “Their security forces are setting new standards when it comes to bad house guests. Shot up a platoon of state police in Lagos last week.”

  Fox’s mind was elsewhere, still looking around the street, searching for that something that just wasn’t right. His scanning gaze fell across the other buildings—and it finally clicked.

  “You know, as reporters we’re pretty good at taking notes of what we see,” Fox said, looking up and down the street. “But my time in Special Forces taught me to take notice of something else: what we don’t see.”

  Fox turned to the three men, who listened intently.

  “Like what is missing from a scene,” he said. “Civilians in a town, normal behaviours among a population, that kind of thing.”

  “Not many civilians here,” Rollins said. “It’s a Saturday, for starters.”

  “And a lot of the Westerners are either hunkered down in their residential compounds or leaving the country,” Javens added.

  “Take a look at the surrounding buildings, the street lamps and power poles on this side of the street,” Fox continued.

  “And?” Gammaldi asked, scanning the area, trying to imagine what it was that he could not see.

  “Cameras,” Fox said. “No CCTV of the attack? No security cameras directed at the target building?”

  “Nothing’s been released, but there should be coverage from somewhere—every modern building here has to have them for insurance purposes,” Javens said, pointing to cameras on other buildings further down the road.

  Fox inspected a building two down from the oil building. It was a perfect vantage point for camera surveillance. Sure enough, three metres up from street level there was a bare wire coming out of the wall and an empty mount. Another scene like this one across the road.

  “Both cameras have been removed,” Fox said. “Perhaps some time before the attack?”

  “Now why would the militants go to those lengths to go undetected?” Gammaldi asked, as Rollins’s cell phone chimed.

  “Surely the act of removing those would be more noticeable than parking a van out the front of the building?”

  “Al, contact the insurance company and see if they have anything,” Fox said.

  Rollins listened to his cell phone and hung up within five seconds.

  “We have to motor,” he said, and made towards the Range Rover as he spoke. “Our meeting is on in twenty minutes, south delta region.”

  37

  SITUATION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE

  “We’ve got the list down to eleven staff here at the White House med unit who knew about POTUS’s condition from his last medical,” Secret Service SAC O’Keeffe said. “That was just on two months ago—the longest lead time of all those who knew of his scheduled surgery.”

  McCorkell and the rest of the National Security Council sat around the conference table. The wall-mounted screens showed several real-time images of the LOOP and the pumping stations at the shore, smoke rising from each.

  “That’s more than long enough to fix a timeline,” McCorkell said. He started nodding and tapped the table as if to help bring his thoughts out. “That medical was scheduled for the day after the sub incident in New York. We had to push it back, postpone the medical, remember? Then they found the cancer…”

  “Bill, could there be a connection to the New York thing?” the VP asked.

  “The Euro power group?” McCorkell said. “No, these oil prices are hurting them as much as us. This is a totally different story. This is someone who wants to harm the global economy as much as take a swipe at us. The past two weeks we have a similar MO in three attacks. Saudi, Qatar, and now here. This is a well-planned piece of terror.”

  “So let’s squeeze that medical team,” Peter Larter, Secretary of Defense, said to O’Keeffe. “Phone records, bank accounts, travel, relationships, everything.”

  “One of them might be talkative at home,” McCorkell added to Larter’s comment. “Maybe their place is bugged?”

  “We’re on to it,” O’Keeffe said. “At this moment Secret Service and FBI agents are heading teams backed up by the DC police in knocking on or down doors of all White House medical staff.”

  “Mr McCorkell, internal line two,” an aide said.

  “Yep?” McCorkell said into the phone. His secretary reminded him of a meeting due now in the Roosevelt Room. It was the final draft of the African NIEs for his consideration prior to publication within the intel community and to the Hill.

  “Thanks—tell them I’ll have to reschedule for a couple of days’ time.”

  “I’m sorry—the NIE editor and Deputy Director of the CIA said they have some critical intel pertaining to a current situation.”

  McCorkell instinctively looked to where the President usually sat at the table—currently occupied by Jackson. He winced slightly, then decided it was worth the five minutes it would take to figure out what was up.

  “I’ll be right up,” McCorkell said.

  McCorkell raced up the stairs. Fifty-four this year, he was among the healthiest and fittest of men his age in Washington. He exercised every day and although his knees were running out of cartilage faster than he cared to think about he gritted his teeth through it. Tas Wallace was a long-standing training partner. It was a friendship that had weathered many international crises and bore mutual fruit from their labours. Wallace got access and scoops that only the best connected could get, and McCorkell had access to the information coming through Wallace’s GSR reportage from the front lines, his own little quasi-intelligence unit.

  The corridor of the ground floor led around to the Roosevelt Room. He entered through the main door, which stood opposite that of the Oval Office, to find the National Intelligence Estimate African editor and the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency both standing waiting for him. The latter was an unscheduled attendee for this meeting.

  “Bill, thanks for coming,” the DDCIA said. “I know things must be hell downstairs.”

  “Ridley, you’ve got no idea,” McCorkell said, shaking hands with him and then the NIE editor, a senior analyst from the Director of National Intelligence’s office. “Tony.”

  They all sat at one corner of the long conference table.

  “What’s up?” McCorkell asked. “This on the NIEs?”

  “Yes, Bill, and Tony here brought something to my attention. Nigeria,” Ridley said. Despite being the all-knowing DDCIA he had the look of being sucker-punched. Not a good look for someone of his position.

  “You’ve got my full attention for five minutes,” McCorkell said. “What have you got?”

  “It’s what we haven’t got that’s the problem. We’ve currently got nothing of worth in humint on the ground in Nigeria,” Ridley said. “No NOCs, no doubles, nothing other than embassy staff.”

  McCorkell took it in. No human intelligence operators—spies—on the ground in a country that supplied the US with a fifth of their oil.
/>   “How can that be?” McCorkell said.

  “As you know,” Tony began, “this is one of our first NIEs done on Intellipedia—”

  “Spare me,” McCorkell said.

  “We got this via inter-agency users.” Ridley took over. “Highly ranked on Intellipedia as top analysts and field ops. They’ve noticed, and now so have we, that over the past twelve months we’ve got a hole in Africa—a Nigeria-sized hole. We’re just not getting the intel that we used to. It’s dried up to … well, we’ve got nothing.”

  McCorkell scanned the printed notes.

  “Nothing? You needed the Port Harcourt bombing to flag this for you?”

  “That, and, like I said, Intellipedia users all started ringing alarm bells at the same time.”

  McCorkell shook his head. The most populous country in Africa, one of the United States’s most vital oil suppliers, and they had no eyes and ears on the ground?

  “Nigerian Energy Minister Brutus Achebe is offering an alternative to government…” McCorkell said, stopping at a page in the brief. “He’s gonna push for power?”

  “He wants our support,” Ridley said. “He wants to do this peacefully and has extended this olive branch for us to help them along. He says he can bring peace to the delta, and fast. Read that as secure oil production coming back online.”

  “You know POTUS had the Nigerian President in the Oval Office a few months back; they shook hands on a defence pact,” McCorkell said. “Greater oil exploration; more aid; military training. Hell, we are working on headquartering a Navy element of AFRICOM there.”

  “That list goes on, I know,” Ridley said. “This heads-up comes from an ex-agency asset, Steve Mendes. He’s dealing on behalf of Achebe.”

  “And that’s why I’m hearing this from you rather than from the State Department?” McCorkell asked. “He made contact via Langley?”

  “Yep.”

  “Steve Mendes. I vaguely know the name, I think,” McCorkell continued. “You trust him?”

  “I trust that he will do what he sets out to do. His pedigree is Grade-A. His dad got an agency star when killed in East Germany. A young Steve’s first deployment was in Beirut, under the Non-Official Cover of a journalist.” Ridley pushed a personnel file across the timber table. “He went on to work in Iran, came home and did a couple of years training new recruits at The Farm, then NCS operators at The Point. Several years in Afghanistan, then left the agency in ‘04 after helping ramp up our rendition program. Went on to the private sector heading security ops for Russian oil oligarchs and some military hardware guys in Uzbekistan.”

  “And what is he to Achebe?”

  “His principal advisor, been in the country for two years,” Ridley said. “He’s really shaking things up on the local scene, using his Russian security and business contacts to spearhead a new push for oil exploration and using their money to buy out the Western companies that are bugging out from the recent bloodshed.”

  “So he’s behind LUKOIL’s bigger presence there?”

  “Them, among many others.”

  “Tony, what kind of time frame have you got on this transition to power?” McCorkell asked.

  “Conservative guess, end of next week,” the NIE editor replied. “The incumbent president has been losing ground domestically since the scandals around the last election. Achebe brings the twelve northern states that are under Sharia Law due to being the nephew of the Sultan of Sokoto, who’s the highest religious leader of the some seventy-five-million Muslim population.”

  “Where does that leave the seventy-odd-million Nigerian Christians?” McCorkell asked. It was a question neither intelligence man wanted to quickly voice an answer to.

  “Where is the military power residing?” McCorkell continued.

  “The President currently has command on the military where he served himself for twenty years. We put their number close on eighty thousand,” Tony said. “There are a few brigades up north that would certainly be favourable to an Achebe government. And possibly a factional force in Lagos. These, with the paramilitary police force that is under Achebe’s control in the protection of oil assets, are numbered at about twenty to twenty-five thousand. But they’re the better-equipped force, better trained and hard-assed operators. Add to that an estimated force of fifty thousand well-armed Islamist militias from the northern states and external insurgents from Chad, Sudan, and probably some ICU terror cells out of Somalia, all hoping that a strong ally in Nigeria will help them in their own native areas of operations. All that, and not to mention five to seven thousand private security contractors in the country, mostly Eastern Bloc. Man for man that private force are worth twenty thousand regular Nigerian Army personnel.”

  McCorkell rapped his fingers on the table, and got up and poured himself a tea from the service tray.

  “Why haven’t we heard of this sooner?”

  “That’s a tough one. Convoluted.”

  “Spitball it.”

  “I came to Ridley with this because it involved NOCs—this dry-up of humint was left out of the NIE that we’re releasing,” the NIE editor said. “But it won’t go unnoticed now that it’s a live online community of users. Already there are discussion threads from users in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, asking where the Nigerian intel is at.”

  “And this slipped through the cracks until now…” McCorkell said. This was exactly the type of thing that Intellipedia was meant to be circumventing. It should have been picked up earlier, but that was another conversation for another day. “If this leaks, we’ve got a bigger problem.”

  “It won’t leak, we’re padding out the online intel from what what we can buy in from allied services,” Ridley replied.

  McCorkell shared a look with him—he knew this seasoned operator was on to this, making the best he could out of the situation. He certainly wasn’t after bad press for his agency, and the results that would lead to all over the world. The fact was, if bad people heard that the CIA had lost its greatest asset—spies in the field—they’d go about their business that much faster as they’d be working with less heed for being caught out.

  “So the million dollar question here is Why don’t we have spooks in Nigeria?” McCorkell asked the DDCIA. “How could this happen?”

  “Three entrenched networks of NOCs”—Ridley pronounced it as ‘knocks’—“were either made over the past four to six months, or killed. We’ve lost twenty-eight valued assets across levels of government, military, police, private sector and the press. Not to mention their networks of informants. All up we’ve probably lost a couple of hundred voices that we’ll never get back. Starting up again takes years, the other side of ten to cast a net as big as we had.”

  “And now all we’ve got to rely on is embassy staff on the ground…” McCorkell said, leaning forward with his forearms on the back of the chair.

  Ridley nodded and Tony cringed.

  “And what is your gut telling you?” McCorkell asked.

  “It’s—it goes against what you’d think.”

  “Try me.”

  “I think Mendes is behind this,” Ridley said. He looked McCorkell square in the eyes in a this is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt way. “He’s proved since leaving the fold that his primary motivation for employment is money. Who else but him would have such an insight to sell out our guys? It’s a national problem, Nigeria only, we’re not losing assets like this anywhere else on the African continent. Steve Mendes sold them out, had them killed or ejected from the country, for his own gain. He doesn’t want us interfering in what will likely be a bloody power shift. Certainly doesn’t want us looking into things too closely.”

  McCorkell looked down at the personnel record again.

  “You really think he’d go that far? That’s a big step, from ‘all-American A-grade field op’ to ‘sell-out gun for hire.’”

  “It’s happened before, Bill.”

  He didn’t need to be told spec
ifics. There were plenty of cases in the CIA’s past that could be rolled out. Double agents. Agents who had sold national secrets. Agents who’d defected. Often enough these were Americans whose loyalty was beyond reproach until the benefit of hindsight played its hand.

  “What are you basing this on?”

  “His personnel file is only half the story,” Ridley said, pointing at the stock-standard agency folder on the table. “He’s got another file that is code-word protected from the DNI’s office.”

  “Kipling?” McCorkell said. The new Director of National Intelligence had only been in the office for three months, sworn in during the same week the President had asked for the Director of CIA’s resignation. The intel community had gone through many shake-ups since 11 September 2001. There were more uniforms in directorial positions now. There was a new department—the Department of Director of National Intelligence—which headed up the updated command structure over the agencies. No longer was the Director of the CIA the head intelligence officer of the country. That fell to the DNI, and some things, well, while designed to maximise inter-agency synergy and minimise conflict, some things just slipped through the bureaucratic spider-web. It didn’t matter how many extra billions they threw at it.

  “It was our old director, Robert Boxcell, who closed the file,” Ridley said. “And I’d like a look.”

  Ridley sat firm. What he was asking for was access to that file to back his hunch. McCorkell had known Ridley for years, and respected his thoughts. This was a DCIA in the making, and not too far off from now.

  “You need Kipling’s okay to access it?”

  Ridley nodded.

  “All right. I’ll speak to him,” McCorkell said. “I’ll call you back when I get another breather from downstairs.”

  “Thanks,” Ridley said.

  “What are the implications for us with such a shift in Nigeria?” McCorkell asked. “How does it look if Achebe comes to power?”