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?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 ir-relevant. 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 night-marish. 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. Amer-ica, 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 ca-pricious 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 politi-cal 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 conversa-tion, 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, thought-ful, 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 favoredIBMs. 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 fromM?laga 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 fi-ery snake twisting and turning its way through Torremolinos, Mijas, Fuengirola, Marbella, Estepona, PuertoDuquesa, and on toLa Linea and the Rock. Headlights from cars and trucks flickered constantly on the M?laga-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 PuertoDuquesa, lies the wine-growing district of south Andalusia, producing not the sher-ries 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 clus-ter of small villages, almost hamlets, where live the people who till the slopes and tend the vines.

In one of them,Alc?ntara del Rio, the men were com-ing 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 singlecantina for a glass and a chance to talk.

Alc?ntaradel 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 pre-ferred 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 depend-ing 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?Se?or,? but Antonio, as he bustled over with a carafe of wine and a glass, was more familiar.

? Muy bueno, amigo.? Va bien　

? Hola, Tonio,?said thebig maneasily.? Si, va bien.?

He turned as a burst of music came from the televisionset mounted above the bar. It was the evening news onTVE and the men fell silent to catch the day?s headlines. The newscaster came first, describing briefly the departure from Moscow of President Cormackde los Estados Unidos. The image switched to Vnukovo, and the U.S. President moved in front of the microphone and began to speak. The Spanish TV had no subtitles but a voice-over translation into Spanish instead. The men in the bar listened intently. As John Cormack finished and held out his hand to Gorbachev, the cam-era (it was the BBC crew, covering for all the European stations) panned over the cheering airport workers, then the Militiamen, then the KGB troops. The Spanish newscaster came back on the screen. Antonio turned to the tall man.

? Es un buen hombre, Se?or Cormack,?he said, smil-ing broadly and clapping the tall man on the back in congrat-ulation, as if his customer had some part-ownership of the man from the White House.

? Si.?The tall man nodded thoughtfully.? Es un buen hombre.?

?

Cyrus V.Miller had not been born to his present riches. He had come from poor farming stock in Colorado and, as a boy, had seen his father?s dirt farm bought out by a mining company and devastated by its machinery. Resolving that if one could not beat them one ought to join them, the youth had worked his way through the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, emerging in 1933 with a degree and the clothes he wore. During his studies he had become fascinated more by oil than by rocks and headed south for Texas. It was still the days of the wildcatters, when leases were unfettered by envi-ronmental impact statements and ecological worries.

In 1936 he had spotted a cheap lease relinquished by Texaco, and calculated they had been digging in the wrong place. He persuaded a tool pusher with his own rig to join him, and sweet-talked a bank into taking the farm-in rights against a loan. The oil field supply house took more rights for the rest of the equipment he needed, and three months later the well came in?big. He bought out the tool pusher, leased his own rigs, and acquired other leases. With the out-break of war in 1941 they all went on stream with maximum production and he was rich. But he wanted more, and just as he had seen the coming war in 1939, he spotted something in 1944 that aroused his interest. A Britisher called Frank Whittle had invented an airplane engine with no propeller and potentially enormous power. He wondered what fuel it used.

In 1945 he discovered that Boeing/Lockheed had acquired the rights to Whittle?s jet engine, and its fuel was not high-octane gasoline at all, but a low-grade kerosene. Sink-ing most of his funds into a down-market low-technology re-finery in California, he approached Boeing/Lockheed, who coincidentally were becoming tired of the condescending ar-rogance of the major oil companies in their quest for the new fuel. Miller offered them his refinery, and together they de-veloped the new Aviation Turbine Fuel?AVTUR. Miller?s low-tech refinery was just the asset to produce AVTUR, and as the first samples came off the production line the Korean War started. With the Sabre jet fighters taking on the Chi-nese MiGs, the jet age had arrived. Pan-Global went into orbit and Miller returned to Texas.

He also married. Maybelle was tiny compared to her husband, but it was she who ruled his home and him through thirty years of marriage, and he doted on her. There were no children?she deemed she was too small and delicate to bear children?and he accepted this, happy to grant her any wish she could devise. When she died in 1980 he was totally in-consolable. Then he discovered God. He did not take to or-ganized religion, just God. He began to talk to the Almighty and discovered that the Lord talked back to him, advising him personally on how best he might increase his wealth and serve Texas and the United States. It escaped his attention that the divine advice was always what he wished to hear, and that the Creator happily shared all his own chauvinism, prejudices, and bigotries. He continued as always to avoid the cartoonist?s stereotype of the Texan, preferring to remain a nonsmoker, modest drinker, chaste, conservative in dress and speech, eternally courteous, and one who abominated foul language.

His intercom buzzed softly.

?The man whose name you wanted, Mr. Miller? When you met him he worked for IBM in Saudi Arabia. IBM con-firms it must be the same man. He quit them and is now a free-lance consultant. His name is Easterhouse?Colonel Robert Easterhouse.?

?Find him,? said Miller. ?Send for him. No matter what it costs. Bring him to me.?

Chapter 2

November 1990

MarshalKozlov sat impassively behind his desk and studied the four men who flanked the stem of the T-shaped confer-ence table. All four were reading the Top Secret folders in front of them; all four were men he knew he could trust?had to trust, for his career, and maybe more, was on the line.

To his immediate left was the Deputy Chief of Staff (South), who worked with him here in Moscow but had over-all charge of the southern quarter of the U.S.S.R. with its teeming Moslem republics and its borders with Romania, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Beyond him was the chief of High Command South at Baku, who had flown to Moscow believing he was coming for routine staff conferences. But there was nothing routine about this one. Before coming to Moscow seven years earlier as First Deputy, Kozlov himself had commanded at Baku, and the man who now sat reading Plan Suvorov owed his promotion to Kozlov?sinfluence.

Across from these two sat the other pair, also en-grossed. Nearest to the marshal was a man whose loyalty and involvement would be paramount if Suvorov was ever to succeed: the Deputy Head of the GRU, the Soviet armed forces? intelligence branch. Constantly at loggerheads with its big-ger rival, the KGB, the GRU was responsible for all military intelligence at home and abroad, counterintelligence, and in-ternal security within the armed forces. More important for Plan Suvorov, the GRU controlled the Special Forces, the Spetsnaz, whose involvement at the start of Suvorov?if it ever went ahead?would be crucial. It was the Spetsnaz who in the winter of 1979 had flown into Kabul airport, stormed the presidential palace, assassinated the Afghan president, and installed the Soviet puppet Babrak Karmal, who had promptly issued a back-dated appeal to Soviet forces to enter the country and quell the ?disturbances.?

Kozlov had chosen the Deputy because the head of the GRU was an old KGB man foisted on the General Staff, and no one had any doubt that he constantly scuttled back to his pals in the KGB with any tidbit he could gather to the detri-ment of the High Command. The GRU man had driven across Moscow from the GRU building just north of the Cen-tral Airfield.

Beyond the GRU man sat another, who had come from his headquarters in the northern suburbs and whose men would be vital for Suvorov?the Deputy Commander of the Vozdyshna-Desantnye Voiska or Air Assault Force, the para-troopers of the VDV who would have to drop onto a dozen cities named in Suvorov and secure them for the following air bridge.

There was no need at this point to bring in the Air De-fense of the Homeland, the Voiska PVO, since the U.S.S.R. was not about to be invaded; nor the Strategic Rockets Forces, since rockets would not be necessary. As for Motor/Rifles, Artillery, and Armor, the High Command South had enough for the job.

The GRU man finished the file and looked up. He seemed about to speak but the marshal raised a hand and they both sat silent until the other three had finished. The session had started three hours earlier, when all four had read a shortened version of Kaminsky?s original oil report. The grimness with which they had noted its conclusions and forecasts was underscored by the fact that in the intervening-twelve months several of those forecasts had come true.

There were already cutbacks in oil allocations; some maneuvers had had to be ?rescheduled　canceled? through lack of gasoline. The promised nuclear power plants had not reopened, the Siberian fields were still producing little more than usual, and the Arctic exploration was still a shambles for lack of technology, skilled manpower, and funds. Glasnost and perestroika and press conferences and exhortations from the Politburo were all very well, but mak-ing Russia efficient was going to take a lot more than that.