02
Pretty much everyone in the world knew that Russia’s only real concern in the region was control of the pipeline. It was a thorn in the side of every admedistration in the world, I was sure, that we hadn’t completely rid ourselves of the decidedly environmentally unaware oil economy. Fossil fuels
✦ ✦ ✦
<list:item>
<i: produce carbon dioxide.>
<i: produce heat.>
<i: pollute the land and the atmosphere.>
<i: are all-around nasty stuff.>
</list>
✦ ✦ ✦
Unclean, unsafe, uncool.
Still, there were classic engines around that wouldn’t run without oil, and products made from oil. Compared to a hundred years earlier when the world had been in the grip of the black gold, oil had lost much of its allure, though it still clung to a vital position in the global market.
As Dubai had become an economic center thanks to the performance of the oil sector, Baghdad had vaulted to its current status as an economic powerhouse on the shoulders of the medical conglomerates. As the saying goes, trust in Allah, but be sure to tie up your camel. The Middle East had gone through a chaotic period of runaway fundamentalism before emerging into a more practical, tie-up-your-camel age. The smarter governments in the region had already begun uprooting their stakes in oil.
The old-style government of Russia remained the largest single system among the clustered admedistrations that controlled Eurasia, though this hadn’t kept the admedistrations from roundly criticizing their oversized neighbor’s policies when it came to control of the oil pipeline. Not a few admedistration commissioners had wondered openly why Geneva Convention forces had been pulled in to help Russia enforce its claims of ownership.
Russia, the nation, wanted war with Chechnya. Russia, the collection of admedistrations, each wanted to save the Chechens from their own unhealthy ways, and they each had different ideas as to how best to achieve their goal. This meant that Uwe was dealing with far more than just armed Chechen groups, the Chechen government, and the Russian government. There were over a hundred different admedistrations within Russia, and all of them had something to say, and all of them said it to him. Russia, eager to generate international support, had invited the Helix Inspection Agency in to investigate, whereupon they found that the Chechen people were not living sufficiently lifeist, healthy lives, which gave Russia a sufficient pretext to call in the Geneva Convention troops.
Oddly enough, for the last several days Uwe’s work had been relatively tranquil. The mass suicides and the declaration and the possible second coming of the Maelstrom had kept the people who were responsible for sending him multi-gigabyte reports detailing their specific demands busy—either killing someone or hiding in their houses or summer cottages.
“Uwe? Duty calls.”
The Helix Inspection Agency office within the Chechnya Armistice Monitoring Group camp had been built in the ruins of an old city hall. I pressed my finger to the door to give my ID and let myself in. Uwe was asleep at his desk amid a mountain of printouts.
“Wakey, wakey,” I said, giving him a slap on the back.
He blinked and looked befuddled for a second before his WatchMe kicked in and stimulated him to full alert mode. “Oh, hey, Tuan. Heard you were coming from Prime. She didn’t deign to tell me why, though.”
“Quite the office you got here. Isn’t all this paper a fire hazard?”
“Meh. ThingList + NoTime = WhyClean?”
“Another victim of ThingList, huh? That seems to be going around.”
Uwe shrugged his shoulders and cleared a teetering pile of papers from his desk onto the floor with a sigh.
“Have you been briefed on my current strategic action?”
Uwe raised an eyebrow. “Strategic action? I heard you were leading a one-woman idiot brigade, Miss Senior Inspector Tuan Kirie.”
“Well let’s make it two idiots then. I need your help.”
“Let me guess. This has something to do with the six thousand suicides and the enforced murder dictate,” Uwe said, though his expression told me that he really didn’t know why I was here.
“That’s right. You’re familiar with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front?”
“Very. I arrange police protection for their negotiations—we’ve had a few with them already. Been trying to get them to agree to a lifestyle survey. They’re one of Russia’s top worries, but those of us wearing this symbol have to at least pretend to be neutral parties.” He tapped the entwined serpents around the staff on his shirt.
“What makes them a top worry?”
“They’re real good at moving around through the mountains. Guerrilla warfare at its finest. With all the cliffs and ravines up there, you can’t even get a WarDog or WarDoll into play, so surrogate combat is completely out. Russia’s been hiring every military resource supplier they can find to hit them where it hurts…and every single one has come running back down the mountain with their tails between their legs. What they really need is an elite squad—which the Russian national army has, but they’re very reluctant to put actual soldiers into combat situations. I mean, hey, they might die for real. Not very popular with the folks back home. We spend all this tax money on robots, so why do you go sending people in to die? That sort of thing. It’s a waste of human resources, and all that.”
So Russia had gotten her fingers burned by the Freedom Front, and most of their people were probably in Moscow and St. Petersburg anyway, trying to keep the recent chaos in check. This meant that troops would be light on the ground out here on the front lines. I couldn’t have picked a better time to contact the resistance.
“You still have an open channel with the Freedom Front?” I asked, suddenly recalling Vashlov’s face as he said those words with his dying breaths.
“’Course. That’s my job, after all.”
“I need to get in contact with them. Right now.”
Uwe’s eyes went from narrow with suspicion to wide open. Boy he’s easy to read.
“You kidding? It’s way too dangerous. Whenever we hold negotiations we have to set a meeting place days in advance and arrange for contracted security. It’s not something that can happen right now or even forty-eight hours from now.”
“I don’t need protection. I have something to give to one of the leaders of the front. Something very, very small. I don’t even have to meet them in person, just get it to someone who can get it to them. Don’t tell me you can’t even do that?”
Uwe scrunched down into his gelatin seat and began tapping one finger on his chin. My guess was he was worried less about how to pull off my request and more about whether or not I was worth the trouble.
“Know what Stauffenberg told me?” I said. It wasn’t really my style, but if there was ever a time to pull rank, now was it. “She said the fate of the world was resting on my shoulders.”
“For real?”
“Feel free to call her up on your HeadPhone.”
“No thanks. I spend enough time trying to avoid her calls as it is.”
Uwe turned to look me straight in the eye and smiled. I detected a glimmer of irony. “This must be pretty serious for you to go pulling the Os Cara card.”
“People are dying all over the world right now, and a lot more will be soon. If that’s not serious enough, I don’t know what is.”
Uwe stretched in his chair and laughed out loud. The sound echoed off the walls of the spacious room. “No, no. I’m surprised you are serious about this, Tuan. I know your profile. I’ve heard the stories. Don’t tell me you give a shit about what’s going on in the world. You have some personal connection to this, don’t you? That, and the thing with your dad—sorry about that, by the way. You don’t strike me as the vengeful type, so I’m going to say you’re after something. A little revenge on the side would just sweeten the deal. Look, I’m not one to point fingers. I’m here in this camp half for the booze and the smokes myself. As are the guys we got from your Niger operation. You’re not the only one who wandered out here to get out of the kindness compactor and found themselves somehow responsible for the well-being of the whole fucking world.”
I was shocked, a little, to find that there were others of like mind outside of the crew I had cultivated at my old post.
“You’re working for yourself. Admit that, and I’ll do what I can to help you.”
I sighed, though to tell the truth I wasn’t unhappy. I was starting to like this guy. “You might say it’s a private affair.”
“Private, eh? Sexy. I approve.” Uwe’s lips curled into a smile and his hand went to one ear to make a call. “Call the kid from the Fawn, will you? I doubt they have much business these days anyway. Right. Later.”