Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“We’re more or less on course,” said Wili. “I mean, we hold the mountains, and those are mountains, right?”

Karl looked and indeed they were. Somehow the Battlegroup Von Drehle had crept to the horizon dead ahead, a blue blur turning green as the sun rose, revealing a frozen sea of rolling landform, random and clotted, hill on hill, all carpeted in high pine.

This meant they were approaching their own zone of operations, where they knew the land and where the lines were soft and they could negotiate the front and get back to their comfortable palace in Stanislav for a few days of drunken recreation after this mission and before the next one.

“We’re pressing our luck in the truck,” said Wili. “Another few kilometers and we should dump it and get out on foot by night. We can rest tomorrow and cross between the lines tomorrow night.”

“An excellent plan,” said Karl. “I’m glad I thought it up.”

“It’s my plan,” said Wili. “I’m the clever one, remember? But go ahead, take credit for it. You always do.”

Platinum was mined mostly—but not entirely—in South Africa, where it was controlled by a corporation called AngloAmerican Platinum, AMPLATS. It was a dense precious metal, the metal of kings and conquerors, even if it lacked the sexy glow of gold and no one ever made a movie in which its dust drove Humphrey Bogart insane. It was mined north of Johannesburg in the Bushveld Igneous complex, then shipped to AMPLATS headquarters in Jo’burg for refinement, processing, and further distribution. The jewelry it yielded was, like so many things rich people adore, exquisite and dull. It had other uses, which was primarily why it was so aggressively traded. It was a staple of the catalytic converters used in American automobiles, where most of its production went; it was used in electronics, in turbine engines, in oxygen sensors, and in cancer treatment. It also had certain catalytic functions useful in production of certain widely applied compounds that were useful in the manufacture of other compounds, and on and on. Its advantage, also a disadvantage, on the world market was that it was highly liquid (and thus highly volatile), which made it a compact form of wealth to exchange for goods and services; second, being ubiquitous, it was considered banal and uninteresting so that it was not much tracked by various market monitors, including intelligence agencies, as were gold and blood diamonds and cash.

Gershon quickly made himself an expert on its mining, marketing, and usefulness, as well as its history, culture, and reputation. He saw that, like the world as a whole, recession had bitten deeply into the industry, with the giant AMPLATS in the process of cutting jobs, against the wishes of certain powerful South African labor unions, and much trouble was ahead, lowering the value even more. On the plus side, the Russians (the second largest producers) and the South Africans were looking into the possibility of starting a kind of regulation board and exchange, to bring discipline and steady pricing to the unruly business, which was swell but didn’t help the current downward trend.

Gershon saw that the peak he had detected was indeed anomalous, given the economic climate. In other weeks, maybe not. But in this week, unusual. So he ran his finding against market averages in other markets and confirmed his thesis: an unusually large amount of industrial-grade platinum had been purchased on a certain day in the last month, that was what the market was telling him. Demand drove up cost, the law of the universe. For one day, someone went a little platinum-crazy, gobble gobble hungry bird, and on that day the COMEX market showed gains of a little over half a percent, not much… but enough to demand scrutiny.

Within a few days Gershon had learned from something called the Precious Metals Industry Reporter, an expensive, exclusive wire service he was able to penetrate, that an entity called Nordyne GmbH, new to the precious-metals market and headquartered in Switzerland, had indeed bought over ten thousand troy ounces of platinum from AMPLATS. What was Nordyne, and what did it need all that platinum for?

It turned out that Nordyne didn’t exist before it bought and paid (promptly) for its platinum. It had a website of exquisite beauty and zero information, fronted by one of those logos that are high on style and brilliantly devoid of content. Looking carefully at it, Gershon noted two graceful lines running parallel to each other in the right half of an oval, the other half filled with the company’s motto, which was:

He examined the lines more closely. They resolved themselves in left profiles of generic humans, earnestly (and, he had to admit, brilliantly) scrubbed of distinguishing tribal or ethnic features. Two humans facing the future, what could be more harmless?

Then there was the name. Disambiguated, it meant “northern power,” another meaningless post-industrial trope. Typically corporate, typically opaque, designed not to express but to enable, in the way of letting any potential client project onto the image of a bright future faced squarely behind considerable power.

It also contained links, “Our Philosophy,” “Our Staff,” “Our History,” and “FAQs”; none of them worked. No business publication had covered its founding, which was, for the record, in Lausanne as opposed to Genève, where most of the big, swaggering, sharkish multinational corporations were headquartered. It boasted no staff; there was no preening CEO to pose for business-style photography of plump rich men in suits with smiles showing yellowed teeth. It was registered only as a trademark but not as a corporation, and its stock, if it existed, was privately held. It seemed to have no assets except the money it paid via a Swiss bank. Gershon sniffed the air, as he always did when his hunting instinct was aroused, and he leaned forward to the screen before him and focused his entire thought process on the mystery of Nordyne’s platinum.

He thought, he thought, he thought. If the bad boys of Hezbollah were trying to pick up a small tac nuke, they’d need a great deal of up-front dough, but assembling it out of gold, diamonds, bearer’s bonds, and other forms of wealth might set off alarms all through the intelligence community, and sooner rather than later they’d have a drone-fired Hellfire up their asses. Platinum’s utility, liquidity, and lack of glamour might do the trick, for many reasons. Move the physical stuff to a holding vault and deliver ownership certificates, easily carried, to a middleman, and somehow whoever was selling—Chechen rebels, big players in the game, corrupt or ideological Chinese military, money-hungry Pakis, demented Hindus from the overpopulated subcontinent, maybe even a money-grubbing rump group of ex–South African military—might be able to put a big egg in their basket for scrambling Tel Aviv into fissionable ruin. That was one thesis, but only the most obvious. It had too many flaws. Everybody watched nukes, and it would be hard to move one without every satellite in the heavens sending a flash-coded message to home base. The movement of the weapon—delivery, security, transpo, storage, deployment, tactical initiation—would be intensely fraught, interception-accessible any place along the route, and after all, that was what drones were for. You went anywhere with a tac nuke and you got Hellfire and it was a bad day with temperatures ranging in the ten thousands at blast epicenter. It might not even be American or a Hellfire, as all the players in the nuke game had a vested interest in keeping newbies away from the table.