The Negotiator Read Online Free PDF Page A

continue in perpetuity. It won’t.

    (b) It is assumed the Arabs and especially the Saudis will go on buying astronomical quantities of U.S. arms, technology, goods, and services for their own social and defense infrastructure, and thus keep on recycling their petrodollars with us. They won’t. Their infrastructure is virtually complete, they cannot even think of anything else to spend the dollars on, and their recent (1986 and 1988) Tornado fighter deals with Britain have pushed us into second place as arms suppliers.

    (c) It is assumed that the monarchs who rule the Mideastern kingdoms and sultanates are good and loyal allies who would never turn on us and hike the prices back up again, and who will stay in power forever. Their blatant blackmail of America from 1973 through 1985 shows where their hearts lie; and in an area as unstable as the Middle East any regime can fall from power before the end of the week.
     
    Cyrus Miller glared at the paper. He did not like what he read but he knew it was true. As a domestic producer and refiner of crude oil he had suffered cruelly in the previous four years, and no amount of lobbying in Washington by the oil industry had persuaded Congress to grant oil leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Range in Alaska, the country’s most promising discovery prospect for new oil. He loathed Washington.
    He glanced at his watch. Half past four. He pressed a switch on his desk console and across the room a teak panel glided silently sideways to reveal a 26-inch color TV screen. He selected the CNN news channel and caught the headline story of the day.
    Air Force One hung over the touchdown area at Andrews Base outside Washington, seemingly suspended in the sky until its seeking wheels gently found the waiting tarmac and it was back on American soil. As it slowed and then turned to taxi back toward the airport buildings, the image was replaced by the face of the gabbling newscaster relating again the story of the presidential speech just before the departure from Moscow twelve hours earlier.
    As if to prove the newscaster’s narration, the CNN production team, with ten minutes to wait until the Boeing came to rest, rescreened the speech President Cormack had made in Russian, with English-language subtitles, the shots of the roaring and cheering airport workers and Militiamen and the image of Mikhail Gorbachev embracing the American leader in an emotional bear hug. Cyrus Miller’s fog-gray eyes did not blink, hiding even in the privacy of his office his hatred for the New England patrician who had unexpectedly stormed into the lead and the presidency twelve months earlier and was now moving further toward detente with Russia than even Reagan had dared to do. As President Cormack appeared in the doorway of Air Force One and the strains of “Hail to the Chief” struck up, Miller contemptuously hit the off button.
    “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 irrelevant. 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 nightmarish. 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