PART FOUR
1
Tbilisi, Georgia
Saturday, 30 April
My sleep was broken by an announcement from the flight deck I didn’t understand a word of, and the plane began its descent. I looked out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the city, but the cloud cover was too low and it was still pitch dark. Baby-G told me it was nearly 5.30 a.m. I just loved red-eye flights, they really set you up for a good day out.
I dug around in the seat pocket for the printouts I’d done at the internet café in Istanbul. I’d had a day to kill after Charlie had left the city, and I always tried to find out as much as I could about any alien environment I was about to go into. Apart from anything else, if I had to get out quick time, I’d need all the help I could get.
I tended to hit the CIA’s world report website for facts and figures, and backpacker chat-rooms for real-time information; it paid to get the view from both ends of the food chain. If I needed more, I’d log on to Google.
The Russian Federation, referred to in the local press as ‘the aggressive neighbour’, loomed over Georgia to the north, and the two weren’t exactly cosying up at the moment. Since the fall of communism, Georgia, always a predominantly Christian country, had become an independent state, very pro-West, very pro-Bush. Pro-Bush meant anti-Putin, whichever way you looked at it, and that definitely put the main man at the Kremlin’s nose out of joint.
What pissed him off even more was the fact that America and the UK had already given millions of dollars in arms and equipment to the Georgian military. It was the last thing he wanted happening in his backyard – which was why he hadn’t pulled out his troops, armour and artillery, which were officially still there as ‘peacekeepers’.
To the east lay Azerbaijan, one of the countries lucky enough to have a shoreline bordering the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Despite being Muslim, it too was backed big-time by the US, for reasons that weren’t hard to see. The BTC pipeline, built by a consortium headed by BP and on the brink of coming on-line, stretched a thousand miles from Baku and passed just south of Tbilisi as it made its way through Georgia towards the Mediterranean coast.
To the south-west was Armenia, a country I’d always reckoned must be completely devoid of any men between the ages of twenty and forty. They were all busy elsewhere, running drugs, prostitution and extortion in every city in the West, as well as every other racket that used to be Mafia copyright until these guys muscled in.
Also to the south-west lay the all-important Turkey, feeling pretty pleased with itself these days for owning the business end of the pipeline at Cheyhan, where fleets of supertankers would soon be waiting to ferry enough of the black stuff to keep the 4x4s of the UK and the east coast of America on the road for the foreseeable future. It probably felt very secure, too; the huge US air base at Incirlik was right on its doorstep.
A million barrels of oil a day were going to start pouring through the three-foot-six-inch-wide pipe some time in 2005. It would take six months to travel the thousand miles – not that Turkey would care. They knew they were now such a pivotal part of the process as far as the US and UK were concerned, that fully fledged membership of the EU was all but guaranteed, however reluctant the French and Dutch might be. Those EU-style number plates were much more than just optimism.
The Caspian Basin had often been at the centre of international attention. Back in the nineteenth century, when Tsarist Russia was having a bit of handbags with the British Empire, Kipling called the fight for oil the Great Game. Two hundred years later, the game was still very much on, but with a whole lot more players.
Everyone wanted a piece of the action. Russia had built a pipeline to the Black Sea coast. China was getting stuck in too. Some of the largest untapped energy reserves on the planet – an estimated 200 billion barrels – lay beneath the Caspian, and since the collapse of the Soviet empire it was very much up for grabs.
The US had military advisers in Georgia to train the army. The Brits were doing their bit by supplying equipment, transport and logistics and the whole effort was called the Partnership for Peace programme – in theory rebuilding Georgia’s post-communist army, but in practice training them to protect the ‘energy corridor’. The threat of sabotage by Islamic militants and ethnic separatists was constant. Whenever the boys were taking time off from harvesting their poppy crop, it would make an irresistible target.
The funniest thing I read was that the Russians had gone and built a base alongside each of the US ones, so the two sides just sat there eyeballing each other. So peace and harmony was not exactly the name of the game, particularly when you bore in mind that the Georgian government was rated one of the top ten most corrupt institutions on the planet. It all added up to a possible big-time f*ck-up for Disco Charlie, which was very much why I was here.
The plane touched down and I rescued my carry-on from the overhead locker. Most of the other passengers seemed to be men, either large Turks in raincoats, liberating their packs of Marlboro, ready to light up as soon as they were inside, or locals dressed from head to toe in black. The only pair of jeans in sight was mine, bought cheap in the market, along with a jumper with a nice nylon sheen to it that was even scarier than Charlie’s.
I pulled up the collar of my bomber jacket and followed the other punters across the rain-lashed tarmac to the Soviet regime’s idea of a state-of-the-art terminal building, a mausoleum of concrete and glass. In the bad old days it would have been adorned with more than a few stirring portraits of the local-boy-done-good, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Or, as he preferred to be known, Uncle Joe Stalin.