Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

He glanced at his watch. Half past four. He pressed a switch on his desk console and across the room a teak panel glided silently sideways to reveal a 26-inch color TV screen. He selected the CNN news channel and caught the headline story of the day.

Air Force One hung over the touchdown area at Andrews Base outside Washington, seemingly suspended in the sky until its seeking wheels gently found the waiting tarmac and it was back on American soil. As it slowed and then turned to taxi back toward the airport buildings, the image was replaced by the face of the gabbling newscaster relating again the story of the presidential speech just before the departure from Moscow twelve hours earlier.

As if to prove the newscaster’s narration, the CNN production team, with ten minutes to wait until the Boeing came to rest, rescreened the speech President Cormack had made in Russian, with English-language subtitles, the shots of the roaring and cheering airport workers and Militiamen and the image of Mikhail Gorbachev embracing the American leader in an emotional bear hug. Cyrus Miller’s fog-gray eyes did not blink, hiding even in the privacy of his office his hatred for the New England patrician who had unexpectedly stormed into the lead and the presidency twelve months earlier and was now moving further toward detente with Russia than even Reagan had dared to do. As President Cormack appeared in the doorway of Air Force One and the strains of “Hail to the Chief” struck up, Miller contemptuously hit the off button.

“Commie-loving bastard,” he growled, and returned to Dixon ’s report.

In fact, the twenty-year deadline for oil run-out by all but ten of the world’s forty-one producers is irrelevant. The price hikes will start in ten years or less. A recent Harvard University report predicted a price in excess of $50 a barrel (in 1989 dollars) before 1999 as against $16 a barrel today. The report was suppressed, but erred on the side of optimism. The prospect of the effect on the American public of such prices is nightmarish. What will Americans do when told to pay $2 a gallon for gasoline? How will farmers react when told they cannot feed their hogs or harvest their grain or even heat their houses through the bitter winters? We are facing social revolution here.

Even if Washington should authorize a massive revitalization of the U.S. oil-producing effort, we still have only five years of reserves at existing consumption levels. Europe is in even worse shape; apart from tiny Norway (one of the ten countries with thirty-plus years of reserves, but based on very small offshore production) Europe has three years of reserves. The countries of the Pacific Basin rely entirely on imported oil and have huge hard-currency surpluses. The result? Mexico, Venezuela, and Libya apart, we shall all be looking to the same source of supply: the six producers of the Middle East.

Iran, Iraq, Abu Dhabi, and the Neutral Zone have oil, but two are bigger than the rest of the eight put together: Saudi Arabia and neighboring Kuwait -and Saudi will be the key to OPEC. Today, producing 1.3 billion barrels a year, and with over a hundred years (170 billion barrels a day) of reserves, Saudi Arabia will control the world’s oil price, and control America.

At predicted oil-price rises, America will by 1995 have an import bill of $450 million a day-all payable to Saudi Arabia and her adjunct Kuwait. Which means the Middle East suppliers will probably own the very U.S. industries whose needs they are supplying. America, despite her advancement, technology, living standard, and military might, will be economically, financially, strategically, and thus politically dependent on a small, backward, semi-nomadic, corrupt, and capricious nation that she cannot control.

Cyrus Miller closed the report, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. If anyone had had the nerve to tell him to his face that he stemmed from the ultra-right in American political thought, he would have denied it with vehemence. Though a traditional Republican voter, he had never taken much interest in politics in his seventy-seven years except as they affected the oil industry. His political party, so far as he was concerned, was patriotism. Miller loved his adopted state of Texas and his country of birth with an intensity that sometimes seemed to choke him.

What he failed to realize was that it was an America much of his own devising, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of traditional values and raw chauvinism. Not, he assured the Almighty during his several-times-daily prayers, that he had anything against Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, or nigras-did he not employ eight Spanish-speaking maids in the mansion at his ranch in the hill country outside Austin, not to mention several blacks in the gardens?-so long as they knew and kept their place.

He stared at the ceiling and tried to think of a name. The name of a man whom he had met about two years back at an oil convention in Dallas, a man who told him he lived and worked in Saudi Arabia. They’d had only a short conversation, but the man had impressed him. He could see him in his mind’s eye; at just under six feet a mite shorter than Miller, compact, taut like a tensed spring, quiet, watchful, thoughtful, a man with enormous experience of the Middle East. He had walked with a limp, leaning on a silver-topped cane, and he had something to do with computers. The more he thought, the more Miller remembered. They had discussed computers, the merits of his Honeywells, and the man had favored IBMs. After several minutes Miller called in another member of his research staff and dictated his recollections.

“Find out who he is,” he commanded.

It was already dark on the southern coast of Spain, the coast they call the Costa del Sol. Although well out of the tourist season, the whole coast from Málaga the hundred miles to Gibraltar was lit by a glittering chain of lights, which from the mountains behind the coast would have looked like a fiery snake twisting and turning its way through Torremolinos, Mijas, Fuengirola, Marbella, Estepona, Puerto Duquesa, and on to La Linea and the Rock. Headlights from cars and trucks flickered constantly on the Málaga-Cadiz highway running along the flatland between the hills and the beaches. In the mountains behind the coast near the western end, between Estepona and Puerto Duquesa, lies the winegrowing district of south Andalusia, producing not the sherries of Jerez to the west but a rich, strong red wine. The center of this area is the small town of Manilva, just five miles inland from the coast but already having a panoramic view of the sea to the south. Manilva is surrounded by a cluster of small villages, almost hamlets, where live the people who till the slopes and tend the vines.

In one of them, Alcántara del Rio, the men were coming home from the fields, tired and aching after a long day’s work. The grape harvest was long home, but the vines had to be pruned and set back before the coming winter and the work was hard on the back and shoulders. So, before going to their scattered homes, most of the men stopped by the village’s single cantina for a glass and a chance to talk.

Alcántara del Rio boasted little but peace and quiet. It had a small white-painted church presided over by an old priest as decrepit as his incumbency, serving out his time saying mass for the women and children while regretting that the male members of his flock on a Sunday morning preferred the bar. The children went to school in Manilva. Apart from four dozen whitewashed cottages, there was just the Bar Antonio, now thronged with vineyard workers. Some worked for cooperatives based miles away; others owned their plots, worked hard, and made a modest living depending on the crop and the price offered by the buyers in the cities.

The tall man came in last, nodded a greeting to the others, and took his habitual chair in the corner. He was taller by several inches than the others, rangy, in his mid-forties, with a craggy face and humorous eyes. Some of the peasants called him “Señor,” but Antonio, as he bustled over with a carafe of wine and a glass, was more familiar.