The Story of Owen Read Online Free PDF Page A

ribbon around his wrist.
    â€œOrders from Siobhan,” Owen said. “Unless you want to be Pearson.”
    Alex looked at me for a moment. “Not a bit.”
    I looked at the map we’d made, spread out along the canal in a thin line. Owen was the closest to Port Said, the last survivingship in the inadvertent convoy, and Sadie used her turn to sic all five dragons on him. I would be upset if he died, I realized, but it was far more convenient for him to sink behind us than it was for the dragons to pick a target that would block our path to Suez.
    â€œReinforce the front of the line,” I said to my blue-ribboned troops. They hesitated, looking at Owen. “Now!”
    They moved to the front of the room and used their turns to shepherd the ships down the canal in a more or less orderly fashion, though we did lose two more tankers, with all hands, in the process. With their help, turn by turn, the oil ships started to reach Suez and the relative safety of open water.
    â€œA little help, Mr. Pearson?” Owen said. His boat had taken significant damage. His detail card kept it moving forward, though at a limping pace. Sadie was merciless in keeping the dragons on him, and he couldn’t hang on much longer. I checked my card again and remembered that my tanker was one of the old Egyptian models, and sparsely crewed. It was my turn and my call.
    â€œI’m abandoning ship,” I announced. “And lighting the oil on fire.”
    Everyone looked at me like I was insane, and perhaps I was. The dragons flinched; everyone knew that no matter what else a dragon was doing, it would follow the smell of burning oil for kilometers. I’d just made myself the biggest target in the Middle East. Mr. Huffman waved them on, and they all came to circle me.
    â€œDo we have to?” asked Sadie, knowing that her turn was about to be wasted on something that was tactically unsound.
    â€œYou do,” Mr. Huffman said. “Dragons can’t think, and thank goodness for that.”
    â€œIt’s your turn,” I said to Owen. “You have to get around me while the dragons are distracted, before the fire spreads.”
    â€œWhere are your lifeboats?” he asked.
    â€œUpriver,” I told him. “I’m not stupid.”
    â€œYou just lit yourself on fire in the middle of the biggest dragon battle since Vimy Ridge,” he pointed out, but he moved past me and stopped to pick up the life boats. “I don’t really think you’re in a position to say things like that.”
    â€œSo now what?” asked Sadie, from the center of the dragons who flocked around my burning tanker.
    â€œWhat do dragons usually do when they’re fighting over oil?” Mr. Huffman asked.
    Sadie sighed. They would turn on one another. “Good job, Siobhan,” she said. Then she paused. “Wait, if Pearson’s dead, who writes the Oil Watch code?”
    â€œEveryone, take a seat somewhere,” Mr. Huffman said. He was holding the meter stick in both hands and swinging it back and forth like a golf club. By the time we were settled, it was in his left hand, and he was scratching his head with it. “Pearson was a great man, I am not gainsaying that, but do you really thing that he was the only person on earth who was capable of codifying the Oil Watch? If Pearson had died, it would be called the Hammarskjöld Oil Watch, after the other man who helped Pearson write it.”
    â€œBut Pearson didn’t die,” I said. “I did. This was just an exercise to see what we would make of a similar scenario. If it had been the actual battle, I wouldn’t have been able to light my tanker on fire and Owen’s would have gone down. I would have made it to Suez and written the articles, and the Pearson Oil Watch would still become the front line in the international defense of oil.”
    â€œExactly,” Mr. Huffman said. “These are models, thought