John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

“Nine days falling…” said Rodenko, his voice somewhat forlorn and distant.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Satan fell for nine days when he was cast out of heaven, at least insofar as Dante and Milton told the story. He fell one day through each of the nine circles of hell. It was required reading at the university before I came to the navy.”

Karpov smiled. “Nine days falling… I like that. The only question I have now is this: who is taking that ride to hell? Will it be us or the Americans?”

BenFlack sat in the crowded rear compartment of the helo, staring out the window at platform Medusa . He had spent the last year and a half sweating the drilling and production operations there, supervising new rigs and equipment installations, pouring over lateral drilling schemes with the engineers, listening to complaints from the wildcatters, mudmen, down hole drillers, pump station crews, and the worst that the Boyz at corporate HQ back in Bollinger Canyon could throw at him. The Kashagan superfield was Chevron’s last and biggest play in the great game, and now it looked like it was over, at least for the foreseeable future. Now the world belonged to men like those crammed into the compartment with him.

They sat there, in two rows, dressed out in black and charcoal cammo fatigues and cinder dark berets. Their jackets were bulging with ammo clips, and other accouterments of war, and each one carried an automatic weapon. Some had heavier equipment that Flack imagined useful against tanks or APCs, small hand held blowpipes with satchels of lethal sabot armor piercing rounds.

The world was theirs now. The fight had passed from men like Ben Flack to the Sergeants and Corporals in these dark uniforms. Rumors had it that the Russians rolled over the northern border into Kazakhstan early that morning with elements of their 58th Army. It was a tough outfit dating back to the Second World War when it had once been named the Third Tank Army. The NKVD fleshed out the rank and file of several divisions back then, and was responsible for security and order in the restive provinces that were now modern day Chechnya and Azerbaijan. It was blooded in two wars there against the Chechens, and again in the incursion into Ossetia and Georgia in 2008.

The Russians had crossed in force, with the whole of the 19th Motor Rifle Division supported by the 67th Anti-Aircraft rocket Brigade, the 1128th Anti-Tank Regiment, the fast moving helicopters of the 487th Regiment and the 11th Engineers. They were joined by the 7th Air Assault Mountain Division out of the major Russian port at Novorossiysk, with regiments based in that location and in Stavropol. The 108th Guards Cossack ‘Kuban’ Regiment was leading the assault, swarming over the border in dark helicopters flanked by sleek Mi-24 attack choppers. They were now sweeping down the Black Sea coast towards the same terminals the Fairchild tankers had used to secure their oil cargos. What they could not accomplish at sea or in the skies they would accomplish on land, and this time NATO had nothing there to stop them. The whole region was their back yard, and they would soon have a stranglehold on all the oil and gas.

Flack had worried about security, fretted over KAZPOL, haggled with Mercs like the men he was riding with now, but all that was over. It was going to take a major operation on the ground to dislodge the Russians now—something on the scale of the Persian Gulf wars that bridged the 20th and 21st centuries with such fire and violence. He knew back then that it was all going to burn one day. All of it.

Flack was close enough to the pilot’s cabin to listen in on the radio feed being monitored and it did not sound good. The Russians were hitting hard in typical fashion. There had been a heavy rain of artillery all along the border before the skies blackened with helicopters and aircraft high overhead to cover the operation. Against this the Kazakh Army had initially moved the 35th Air-Mobile brigade as a blocking force to give them time to muster additional forces from the reserve motor rifle brigades assigned to various military districts of the sprawling nation. But the Russians were moving fast, engaging and then bypassing the blocking forces and quickly securing the oil rich Tengiz and Kashagan superfields by airborne envelopment.

The X-3s of Fairchild Inc. had slipped away with only hours to spare, and now they were flying low over the Caspian on the approach to British Petroleum facilities in Baku. Flack gave his sidekick Ed Murdoch a wan glance. “Looks like we’re out of a job Mudman,” he said dejectedly. “We kept bellyaching for military support out here, and now look at it. From what I’ve heard on that radio the Russians are raising hell at Kashagan. The folks back home are in for a real surprise now.”

“What? You mean the damn Russians are just taking the place over?”

“Sure sounds like it to me.”

“How can they do that, Flackie? All that equipment—all those rigs—that’s Chevron property. Where’s the damn Army when you need ‘em?”

“Yeah, where was KAZPOL when we ever needed them? It’s the same old story, Eddie. The Banks will cover their bets on the equipment and operations, but they never stop to think about security. It was easy enough to get the Army and Navy to stand a watch in the Persian Gulf, right? They had lots of bad guys there like Saddam and the Ayatollah. Now that Ghawar has run drier than a bone and the action moved up here, we’ve got nothing in the area to stop the Russians. They’ll take the whole place, lock, stock and oil barrel. That new platform we sweat to get moved up from Baku—the Russkies will own it by nightfall. That along with Medusa and all the others. Wait until corporate HQ realizes what happened. The game is finally over here.”

“You mean we ain’t comin’ back?”

“Take a look around, Mudman! See these guys in black here with the assault rifles? They were all that was between us and an early grave. The shit has hit the fan, my friend! Persian Gulf is shut down by the Iranians, and missiles are raining down all over the region. Gulf of Mexico is a real mess after Thunder Horse went down, and I heard that the Russians did that deliberately with a submarine. All Hurricane Victor did was spread the oil from the spill out, nice and thick. It’ll be months before they can get operations there back to normal—if ever. They shut down the BTC pipeline, and my bet is that they’ll cut the Trans-Georgia line to the Black Sea coast within 24 hours. All we have now is our rigs in the Niger Delta.”

“Well shit, Flackie. Where in God’s name are we going to get the flow to keep all those cars running on the freeways back home? Friggin’ frackin’?”

“Fracking? We sure as hell won’t get it from the Bakken Oil Shales, or that bullshit operation at Eagle Ford Texas. Media served up a crock of shit to the public and made it seem like we could squeeze oil out of shale indefinitely, and they could all rest easy and keep shopping at Wal-Mart. What a load of bull that was. My guess is that right about now the lines at the gas stations are starting to look pretty darn long. They’ll do the odd-even thing for a while, and talk more bullshit with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but that won’t last out the year without regular deliveries. That’s what these guys are all about.” Flack thumbed at one of the dour faced sergeants in the nine man squad they were riding with.