Maneuvers

9 Days Falling continues with Day III, Scene 13

It's about to be a very bad day aboard the tanker Princess Royal, as the veiled threat revealed during the recent Fairchild negotiations materializes in the Persian Gulf. In part, this scene is meant to show just how easily, and suddenly, the vital oil traffic can be disrupted in the Persian Gulf region, in spite of a heavy US military presence there. And any disruption would have immediate consequences that would be difficult to predict.

The situation that will soon unfold will bring the seafaring enterprise of Elena Fairchild & Company into quick collision with the plot lines featuring Ben Flack on his Nigerian Delta oil platform. Stress in one major market area is usually compensated for by increased production effort in others. When the hurricanes shut down US terminals in recent years, and gasoline prices spiked, European reserves were graciously sent to help keep Americans "happily motoring" as James Howard Kunstler might say. 

But what would happen if two major market areas were to come under stress, where events suddenly impeded normal oil flows to the West? And what would happen if these events occured in tandem with more bad weather in hurricane country here in our own hemisphere? The fragile nature of our present energy system is clearly accented by the simple events depicted here, and it amazes me to this day that our nation is content to rely on this house of cards where our energy future is concerned, as if we could continue on with our present petroleum based model indefinitely.

The main scene index of 9 Days Falling is here

9 Days Falling - Day III

Day III begins with a bad morning for oil man Ben Flack at his Nigerian Delta platform in scene 11 "Delta Blues." Few people know the growing importance of Nigeria in the US energy picture, and they would be surprised to learn that more oil arrived at US terminals from Nigeria than from Saudi Arabia as 2010 began. These next scenes, while continuing two of the major plot lines, also serve to relate key facts in the background concerning the oil industry.

Scene 12 returns to Fairchild & Company aboard their flagship Argos, where we learn more of their dealings and impending operations in "Contracts." Events are about to bring these two plot lines into collision, as the dealings of CEO Elena Fairchild suddenly run in tandem with those of Ben Flack's Nigerian operation.

SCENE LINKS:

Scene 11 ~ Delta Blues
Scene 12 ~ Contracts
9 Days Falling Main Page

BlackDog & Gh0stRAT

From Scene 10 in the ongoing novel 9 Days Falling...

...Images of 9/11 still played in his mind as he considered the situation the country was in now. It was a perfect metaphor for what has happened. JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo were the four great steel beams at the core of our World Trade Center economy. The investment banks like Lehman, Bear Stearns and others were the truss system that was strung between these four great pillars. All the other smaller banks, thrifts, and S&Ls were like the floors of this great financial edifice. Now, when the first subprime airliner struck the system and ripped apart three of the four major investment houses, immolating them in a thousand degree fire of overleveraged securities, Custodian Hank Paulson, ran to congress in a panic and said that if something wasn't done to put out this fire the central core pillars would collapse and the entire building would come crashing down.

    It was therefore decided to do whatever was necessary to prevent any of these four large banks from failing. They were simply deemed "too big" to fail. And what was done was one of the greatest exercises in duplicity, denial, and sleight of hand the financial world has ever seen....

Scene 10 concludes the second day  in our descent, with most of the major plot lines and principle characters now established in the story. BlackDog is a real device, initially named "Big Dog" by the DARPA researchers who created the monster.  In like manner Gh0stRAT is a real virus on the stealthy "GhostNet." Together the two make for a very bad day for attorney Jim Banes.

Please join us for scene 10 here

Link to Main scene index here

9 Days Falling: Scenes 8 and 9

Today's update introduces two additional characters and subplots of the novel. Aaron Brock is an industrious Internet blogger who has been writing critical articles on world events. His bad typing mechanics and propensity to extend metaphors are the least of his real troubles, though he does not know that yet.

      This character could be any of a hundred popular bloggers that may be on your reading list each day. Their incisive commentary and critical thinking have skewered the patently false offerings of the government statistics machine and the main stream media that regurgitates these numbers. (As in today's "announcement" all the BLS job loss numbers for 2009 conveniently overlooked an additional 824,000 more jobs that were lost.)

     The bloggers root out truth with a consistent application of common sense, honesty and considerable analysis. They have taken on the assumptions of the powers that be and largely discredited them in article after article, and they have had a vision and uncanny knack for predicting the inevitable outcome of events that most government politicians, academics, news outlets, and "economists" have failed to see. Aaron Brock is one such voice on the Internet, and his vision and writing will serve as a way of narrating coming events in the future.

In the brief scene 9, "Drilling" takes on a new meaning with the introduction of Ian Thomas, who has been patiently, (and secretly), excavating a tunnel in a remote hamlet in England--but to what end? The fun in this scene is trying to figure out what in the world he is doing, and what this nefarious subplot has to do with the other plot lines of the story. Future scenes will make this more apparent, and show how Mr. Thomas serves to deviously lead us to other important characters down the road.

Here are the Scene Links:

9 Days Falling Project Gateway Page with all scene links

Scene 8  - Bad Metaphors

Scene 9  - Drilling

Enjoy!

Day II - 9 Days Falling

The on-line presentation of John Schettler's near future novel 9 Days Falling continues as the opening scenes of Day II are now on-line. 

Scene 6- Porto Grande begins another major plot line that will weave its way into that begun in Scene 4. Meet the principles of Fairchild & Company, an independent sea faring oil conveyor navigating the ever more turbulent seas of the energy business. This plot line will play out in tandem with that of Ben Flak and the scenes depicting the insurrection underway in Nigeria, and this line continues this morning in scene 7 "Bunker Bust."

The term "bunkering" refers to the Nigerian locals illegally tapping in to Western oil company pipelines to siphon off oil and sell it on the black market. Few U.S. readers will know much about our presence in the Niger delta, where companies like Chevron and many others are drilling away the wealth of the Nigerian nation, while little of the revenue ever goes to help the impoverished people of that nation. Understandably, this has led to more and more dissent, which has taken violent forms in recent years.  All of the incidents depicted in these scenes have a doppelganger of reality darkening their path. I have included numerous "supporting links" to news items and articles  that underpin the story and anchor it in the very real news of the region playing out today. These story lines serve as one of many possible flash points in the ever more stressed energy producing regions of the world.