CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
TUESDAY, 1:45 P.M. EST
Russia. Sunday checked his data again and it kept coming back to . . . Russia.
The big question was why. And now Jessica Ryker was going to St. Petersburg. She hadn’t told him more than she would be gone only a few days. While the rest of Purple Cell was digging for leads on the Bear, Sunday’s clear instructions were to keep looking for patterns in the attacks on global oil facilities.
Kuwait, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Algeria. He added the latest attack on the Chinese-operated platform offshore Nigeria when the control room was overrun and the staff all murdered. All sixty-four men. What was the point of killing everyone? Sunday thought as he typed.
In isolation, each incident could be explained. Business disputes. Organized criminal extortion. Local politics. Pirates.
Sunday knew the Nigeria flare-up was being blamed on militants in the Niger Delta. That oil-producing region was a maze of swamps and creeks that had long been a hot spot for armed groups. The trouble had all started as a legitimate complaint against oil pipeline leaks destroying the fishing grounds that local people depended on for a living. When their grievances were ignored, the protests grew over the lack of development. It wasn’t lost on those who actually lived in the Niger Delta that the oil, their oil, was making lots of people rich in London, Dallas, and Lagos. But no one in the Delta. Even the regional capital, Port Harcourt, was shoddy, with potholed roads, unreliable electricity, and a broken water and sewage system. People were pissed off and fed up.
The Niger Delta militants gained notoriety after they began sabotaging pipelines and kidnapping oil workers. Groups started taking celebrity hostages, too, including the Delta state governor’s daughter, the wife of the Port Harcourt Police Commander, and the star goalkeeper of the national soccer team, the Super Eagles. Each was released after a ransom was delivered, but the real payout was the front-page headlines. They justified their actions as fighting for a fair share and bringing attention to their plight.
Like so many rebellions that Sunday had analyzed, legitimate complaints turned to greed. The noble cause gave way to a petty thirst for cash. Militant groups morphed from freedom fighters demanding justice into criminal bands running extortion and smuggling rings. Gang leaders savored interviews on CNN, BBC News, and Al Jazeera, their faces hidden by ski masks, their pleading voices cut over dramatic clips of high-powered speedboats with mounted machine guns racing thorough the creeks. Email blasts sent to reporters around the world claimed attacks were on behalf of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND.
Locals, the Nigerian government, and the CIA all knew MEND was a public relations cover for any and every illicit activity in that part of the world.
But so far, Sunday concluded, attacks in the Delta were consistently for money or notoriety. No one had ever slaughtered a whole team. What would be the point of that? In fact, mass murder would make the oil companies invest more in private security and be less likely to pay future ransoms. The deaths would almost certainly force the Nigerian government to react even more strongly. They’d be obligated to deploy the Joint Task Force, the Nigerian military’s special counterinsurgency unit with a notorious reputation for scorched-earth tactics. The Joint Task Force took no prisoners. And an American engineer, a father of two from Louisiana, was among the dead. This might get the U.S. Congress asking questions, which, Sunday knew, would mean that the Pentagon would be forced to get involved one way or another. Was that the reason Purple Cell was on this project? In anticipation of a U.S. military deployment? To secure oil facilities? No, that didn’t make any sense either, Sunday decided.
Whatever the rationale, Sunday knew that this latest attack on the Chinese platform was a clear escalation. But it made no sense.
Unless it wasn’t the MEND or local militants after all? The brutal tactics were closer to those used by Boko Haram. That radical Islamic group operated mainly in Nigeria’s northeast, far from the oil zone. They slaughtered young men and kidnapped girls as part of a terror campaign to chase away the central government and attempt to create an Islamic caliphate. Boko Haram might wantonly murder dozens of people, but . . . why this? They had never gotten involved in the oil-producing region before. And the Delta was a largely Christian zone, so the chances of expanding a caliphate there were close to zero. The tactics fit, but not the motivation.
Before she left, Jessica had insisted that Sunday try to find a link to Boko Haram. While the Pentagon shied away from getting sucked into the Delta, they were increasingly involved in counterterrorism operations in West Africa. The United States Africa Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany, had even sent a special operations team to Nigeria to help coordinate intelligence-gathering and kinetic operations against Boko Haram. If the extremist threat was spreading from the northeast corner of the country to the oil region in the south, then the U.S. government needed to know about it.
If true, Sunday’s project would no doubt be quickly taken away from Purple Cell. This would go higher than AFRICOM. If Islamic radicals connected to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were now attacking Western oil facilities and killing American citizens, this was a major escalation that would pull in the Joint Chiefs, the Director of National Intelligence, the White House.
Jessica Ryker had been very clear that the Deputy Director wanted no stone unturned on this. If Boko Haram was involved in oil attacks, the CIA needed to know about it first.
The problem was that Sunday had found no such evidence. Nothing whatsoever pointed to Boko Haram.
Sunday’s investigation had, however, found something unusual about this particular platform. It was situated in the middle of the Mega Millennium Field, which had been the subject of an unusually fierce bidding war because it was adjacent to a known geological formation that had already proven to be exceedingly profitable. While it was always in bidders’ interests to hide the true value of an exploration block, it was clear that the Mega Millennium Field was a prized concession. In the end, the Chinese oil giant Sinopec had won after beating out bids from Italian, Russian, Norwegian, and American companies. The local papers were filled with accusations of impropriety, one paper even publishing photos of Chinese workers building a luxury villa on land owned by the energy minister.
Sunday’s alternative theory was simpler: business. What if the attacks were part of a protection racket? Or a scheme to chase away competitors?
Sunday ran a statistical analysis on his database and calculated that Chinese companies like Sinopec and PetroChina had a seventy-two percent higher chance of suffering an attack than companies from other nations. Were the Chinese investing in especially dangerous places? Or were they being specifically targeted? If the latter, by whom? That would take more digging.
As Sunday stared at the data on his screen, he suddenly had another question. What nation was least likely to be attacked? Sunday typed a few keystrokes and the result popped once again onto his screen: Russia.