Three Kings

The Italians had been both right and wrong with their report from Giarabub. There was a small detachment from the 7th Royal Horse Artillery that had just arrived atSiwa, the artillery that had been requested by Colonel Fergusson for his attack on Giarabub. He had also requested tanks, but what he would actually get was beyond his wildest imagining. Something was blowing in from the heart of the sandstorm that had bedeviled the area the last 24 hours. Something wholly unexpected even now slipping through a crack in this broken world to arrive at this fateful hour in the lonesome, wild deserts of a forsaken land.

The instant Troyak saw that odd glow in the sky his instincts for battle served him well. “Marines! Battle order!” He shouted, and his men reacted with the same ardor, weapons in hand, with troops fanning out in a wide perimeter forward of the KA-40. One man was setting up an 82mm mortar to the rear, another lowering the auto grenade launcher to its tripod mount. Still others had taken up positions behind any cover they could find, with riflemen darting behind some large rocks while other men with the RPG-30s looked for a depression where they could get a good field of fire on anything advancing on their position.

Popski stood there for a brief moment, eyes puckered, hearing a strange growl coming from the south, out of the heart of the high plateau they were on. There was a sudden, foreboding wind, blowing opposite the direction of the storm, and it gave him a shiver, a cold wind that raised his hackles, as though he were standing at the edge of infinity and about to slip over.

Who could be up here, he wondered? Could the Italians have patrols this far out? Now he clearly heard the sound of advancing vehicles, but they did not sound like anything he had heard before. They were certainly not those jeeps from the Long Range Desert Patrol he had talked about, and the Aussie Cavalry unit had forsaken its light tanks and reorganized in trucks for this deployment.

There was a heavy growl to the engine sound, deep and menacing. Might this be the armor that Fergusson and his Aussie detachment had requested? Perhaps the Desert Rats had managed to get a battalion of tanks fit for duty, but how would they get them here so soon? They would have had to go by rail out past the rocky hill country beyond AlFayum andBirkat Karun. From there they could have taken the long desert road throughAweina andZabu. He had scouted it himself on his last trip out toSiwa, but why would they climb up here? The oasis country was well south and west, in the low depression. Were they lost?

Yet there was no mistaking the sound now. The telltale rattle of tank tracks could be heard above the low growl, and he could see dark shapes emerging from the chilling wind. Something big was out there, something with power behind it, and now instinct compelled him to move, joining the Russian Marines in a desperate search for any cover he could find.

Chapter 26

In the year 2020, with the energy crisis deepening after renewed fighting in the Ukraine had severed natural gas pipelines feeding a hungry Europe, oil prospecting efforts reached a fever pitch. All the world’s great fields had already edged over the top of the oil peak depletion curve and now were in steady decline. The United States had been blasting and squeezing shale oil and gas from the Green River and Bakken shales in the US, but the oil was deep underground, embedded in the rock and difficult and expensive to extract. Aside from the new superfield at Kashagan in the Caspian Basin, there had been little in the way of good old fashioned light sweet crude found for many decades… until the year 2020.

An oil man on a safari road trip fromMersaMatruh toSiwa had stopped and wandered off the desert road in an isolated area at the southern tip of the dreadful Qattara Depression, and he saw something in the rocks there that prompted him to return with a survey team to take another look. British Petroleum soon followed up on his survey by quietly negotiating further exploration rights in the region, promising a cash starved Egypt a substantial royalty on any significant finds. The discovery that would be known as the “Great Sultan of the Desert” would rock the oil world when BP finally announced that they had used new deep lateral drilling techniques to locate a massive field of both oil and gas, with reserves expected to exceed 70 billion barrels, the size and scale of Saudi Arabia’s renowned Ghawar field, now fitfully soaked by water infusion to force out its remaining oil, and in rapid depletion.