Mansour chuckled and took a sip of cognac. “I always forget that with you, my dear Ripley, I must speak in words of one syllable, preferably less. Look at it this way: the seventeen missing-presumed-dead scientists elaborated a strategy for the Russians based on their knowledge of geography, meteorology, geology, economics, medicine, psychology, and any number of other disciplines of which they were superior practitioners. We can assume that, having co-opted their talents, the Russians will follow the strategy they outlined. That strategy is based on geopolitical, medical, psychological, economic realities. Those realities are well known by others in the various fields. Perhaps fifty, even a hundred, other top scientists would be required to duplicate the experience and expertise of the vanished seventeen, but they could duplicate it.
“The Siberian lignite fires, which the seventeen suggested as the opening play in the game with the world as jackpot, would produce certain foreseen results. These results would force the free world to respond. The number of possible responses is limited. Some are more plausible and effective, and less expensive and provocative of a nuclear exchange-which both powers will strive to avoid-than others. The free world will, therefore, respond in one of a limited number of ways. That stimulus, in turn, will cause the Russians to react. The numbers of possible Soviet reactions, too, are limited.
“In the months the seventeen scientists spent in El Centro, they must have created many clever scenarios and ploys. The ploys available to both sides can be arranged in a tree of probability, depending on such factors as time, cost, season, resources and forces involved, and so on. While that tree cannot be duplicated precisely, its general outlines are dependent on realities of the resources available to each side. Therefore, we can construct a tree very similar to that which is already in the possession Of the Russians, the one whose limbs are to furnish the firewood that, when set alight, will consume us all. Once we know what they are up to, where the next branching will take the battle, we can anticipate their actions and thwart them.”
Forte and Red Cloud, for the first time that evening, were silent. Yussef Mansour’s idea would not, perhaps, win the war. But at least it was an intelligent beginning, and they had no place else to start.
Forte smiled. “Sounds good. All we have to do now is find out who are the leaders in the fields the seventeen represented, get them all in one spot-by main force, if necessary-and put the heat on them to do in two weeks what the seventeen did in three months.”
Mansour laughed and shook his head. “I thought you knew me better, Rip. You should know by now that I rarely discuss an action until it has already been taken. My staff has located sixty-two eminent scholars in the fields represented by the seventeen. At this moment they are on their way-at a total cost that would give you a heart attack-to a retreat formerly owned by the Dutch Reformed Church, some miles up the coast at Saldanha. We’ll be leaving for Saldanha in the morning, to give them their brief.”
“You’re a wonder, Joe,” said Forte admiringly.
“That, or a goddamned liar,” said Jennifer Red Cloud. “You said that the dos Santos letter arrived just before dinner. If that’s so, you couldn’t possibly have had time to locate those ‘sixty-two eminent scholars’ and make an arrangement with them.”
Joe Mansour shrugged. “Goddamned, maybe, but liar -no. You see, this letter did arrive just before dinner. It’s a copy of one I received ten hours earlier, directly from President Traynor’s secretary, who costs me more in finder’s fees than I sometimes think she’s worth.”
24. MELTDOWN
10 AUGUST 2009
A statistician at the U.S. Meteorological Service noticed it first-and assumed the computer had gone haywire. He punched in the figures on another machine. The result was the same.
He reached for the telephone.
Ten minutes later the president’s chief of staff, J. Jerrold Hatfield, picked up his phone and listened to the figures from the secretary of the interior. He was not only unimpressed but quite uninterested. “Listen, Virgil, I’ve got better things to do than listen to a goddamned weather report. So what if ‘the earth’s mean temperature has risen three-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit during the past fourteen days’? What do you expect me to do-give away all my winter clothes?”
Virgil English told him he’d had worse ideas in his time, because this was only the beginning. The mean temperature of the earth was ascending rapidly. A month hence it would be seven-tenths degrees higher than average.
Hatfield simmered. “So I’ll turn up my air conditioning. It’s Foggy Bottom in August, isn’t it? What the hell did you expect?”
English explained, in short sentences comprehensible to a politician whose knowledge of finer points of the language had come from listening to breakfast cereal commercials, the implications of that rise in temperature. As he spoke, Hatfield’s choler faded to pallor. When English finished, Hatfield put down the telephone in a daze and walked unsteadily to the Oval Office, next to his own.
“I have summoned you here today to discuss an alarming, perhaps catastrophic development,” said Turn-bull to the thirteen men. They were the same he had met in conference just two weeks before, when the fate of Ripley Forte had been announced, with two significant additions: the President of the Republic of Texas, the Honorable Thomas Traynor, and the president’s scientific adviser, Dr. Sid Bussek. “What I have to say is too important to soften with platitudes, so I’ll come right to the point: the Russians have screwed us good-and no kiss.”
Groans were mixed with sighs of resignation. The Russian shaft had become so much a part of the official scene of late that some members were suggesting that they rename the Washington Monument.
“We thought-hoped, at least-that when we threw Ripley Forte to the Russian sharks they’d bank the Siberian fires. That’s all it was: a hope-and one very good man lost to us. Then we consoled ourselves with the thought that the cloud of soot that’s clogging every air conditioner in the country and causing detergent sales to boom was building up over the Atlantic, and a good deal of it was drifting right back to Russia. We figured that that unpleasant consequence would at last make them listen to reason, since they’ll soon be breathing in almost as much pollution as we are. Well, gentlemen, I have the distressing duty to inform you that we have underestimated the Russians for the thousand-and-first time. They’re putting the heat on us-literally. Those fires have raised the average world temperature three-tenths of a degree since they were first ignited. By this time next month, the temperature will be seven-tenths of a degree above the world mean.”
One glance around the table separated the sheep from the goats. Those with scientific training blanched, the politicians tried to look wise. Explanations were in order. “Tell ’em the cheery news, Sid,” President Turn-bull said to his scientific adviser.
Dr. Bussek stood. He was the youngest man in the room, a shambling, earnest jack-of-all-sciences whose long stringy hair was less a reflection of current style than of a sixteen-hour-a-day work schedule. “In brief, gentlemen, the increase in ambient temperature will, if the wanning trend continues, melt the polar ice caps. There is one hell of a lot of water contained in the ice caps. Though Arctic ice and the ice sheet covering Greenland to a depth of up to two miles constitute a relatively small percentage of the world’s total, it will melt first because of the blanket of soot over the northern hemisphere.
“However, if those fires are not extinguished, and the temperature continues to climb, the atmospheric heat will slop over the equator into the southern hemisphere, and then the Antarctic ice cap will begin to melt. As Vice-President Castle reminded us in a historic speech a few years ago, the Antarctic ice cap contains more than ninety percent of the world’s fresh water-fresh water equivalent to the flow of the Mississippi for 46,000 years.”
“Are you telling us, Dr. Bussek,” rumbled President Traynor, seated at Turnbull’s right, “that Triple Eye’s Antarctic iceberg deliveries are endangered, that our fresh water supply is about to be cut?”
“On the contrary, sir. It is about to be increased, a thousandfold. Not to the shores of the Republic of Texas, however, but to the shores of the world. The process is not exactly straightforward, I should warn you. In the Antarctic, if the Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves broke apart because of warming, their buttressing effect on the pinned ice shelves would vanish and large sections of the below-sea-level grounded ice sheet would surge into the Weddell and Ross seas, raising sea levels by as much as sixteen and a half feet.”
The Senate Majority Leader, who was from Massachusetts, chuckled. “That’ll give New Orleans a good bath. Some say it needs it.”