Blackmail Earth

Chapter 6





On Capitol Hill, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was holding an emergency meeting with James Crossett, the director of the CIA. His tense visage was matched by the lockjaw expressions on the faces of two assistant directors who flanked him in the highly secure hearing room. Laptops sat open before all three men. Crossett snapped his screen shut before resuming his testimony:

“When we talk about the bombing in the Maldives, what’s most important, from our standpoint, is that it’s a stark example of the impact of climate change on national security. Yes, it was a tragic terrorist attack; but it was also the most powerful warning yet that even a stable Muslim nation can experience brutal national security effects from global warming.” In a softer voice that caused several senators to lean forward, Crossett added, “And don’t forget that the Maldives isn’t far from Diego Garcia.” The United States’ closest naval base to Afghanistan.

“These Maldivians, they aren’t screaming about global warming,” insisted the rotund, bespectacled chair of the committee. “It’s a simple power struggle. They want what they don’t have.”

Crossett rubbed his chin. “Mr. Chairman, there’s a power struggle because the country is in a growing state of panic over the ocean rising all around them—much faster than the U.N. said. We’re hearing from our agents in situ that Muslims are loudly blaming our ‘decadent’ lifestyle for the impending loss of their country. They’re building on stilts, senators. Stilts.” The CIA chief eyed them all. “They’re raising seawalls, and now they’re announcing plans to barge dirt from one island to another to try to save themselves. Climate change is not theory to them. It is day-to-day reality throughout the archipelago. We’ve got to get our heads straight on this: Climate change is an increasingly serious national security issue for all nations. We will not be spared.”

“The Muslims sell most of the oil.” With a histrionic flourish, the committee chair whipped off his tortoiseshell glasses. “They’re the ones emptying our pockets. It’s the height of hypocrisy for them to blame us for whatever lifestyle we choose to have. I’m not going to apologize to those buggers for anything.”

“The leaders of the oil-rich nations are draining our treasury, that’s true,” the director rubbed his chin for the second time in a minute, “but let’s acknowledge what we also all know to be true: The people of the Mideast petro states view their leaders as corrupt despots—and for good reason. The ferment in Islamic nations is as much about corruption, and the poverty it produces, as it is about radical reinterpretations of the Koran. Those factors are all linked. I’m sure I don’t need to add that the Maldives doesn’t produce a single drop of petroleum.”

“No, just panicky reactions from your analysts.” The octogenarian chair sat back, twirled his glasses, and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a grin. “So you’re saying that you want to take analysts away from hunting for Al Qaeda and put them on The March of the Penguins?” His barely suppressed smile exploded into laughter. Most of the committee joined in. Freshman Senator Jess Becker of Vermont waited for the mood to settle before glancing at the CIA chief.

“The Agency’s assessment is backed up by military intelligence.” The Senate’s youngest and newest member turned to his colleagues. “They’re reporting that Al Qaeda operatives in the Maldives are doing everything they can to drum up resentment by claiming that the U.S. is trying to drive them into the sea. This is no laughing matter.”

The CIA director offered the brush-cut Becker the slightest nod. The chair responded by saying, “Calm down, ’cause we got bigger fish to fry with the Pakis and Afghans.”

* * *

Senator Gayle Higgens had perfected the Texas swagger, no easy task for a gimp-kneed, sixty-six-year-old woman who carried more extra poundage than the purveyors of red ink in congressional budget committees. She used a tightly wrapped pink umbrella with a titanium tip as a walking stick, and carried herself with such aplomb that constituents had been known to burst into applause when she paraded past. Might have been the hat, too: big, broad-brimmed, and every bit as colorful as its wearer.

She entered United States Energy Institute headquarters on K Street, a thoroughfare long home to lobbyists, think tanks, and advocacy groups of all stripes. None had a more prestigious address—or reigned as powerfully—as USEI with its oil- and coal-money muscle. Higgens swept into the lobby like she owned the place, pointed her umbrella walking stick at a spry woman with an armful of reports and said, “Round ’em up, Edie, we’ve got to powwow in teepee number one. Giddyap.”

Higgens had become a parody of herself, but she didn’t give a damn what the Washington mandarins thought. Part of her appeal was her complete indifference to decorum. It had worked with Texas voters for more than two decades, and it had landed her a high, seven-figure “appreciation” from the very industry that she’d represented so ably in the Senate. The revolving door of government and politics had landed her in this unapologetically opulent, marble-floored building designed entirely along classical Greek lines: symmetrical and perfectly proportional right down to the Ionic columns that graced both sides of the vaulted lobby. It reeked of riches, the enduring power of fossil fuels.

“And you,” she pointed the gleaming titanium tip at a male intern who could have moonlighted as a model, “a club sandwich with mayo. Some joker got me one last week that was drier than a Texas pee pot.”

This is going to be fun, Higgens mused to herself. Even though she’d always said—often very loudly—that patience was a “vastly overrated virtue,” persistence had now paid off: Geoengineering would give oil and coal a new lease on life. Many new leases, she thought merrily.

The senator took her place at the head of a conference table, club sandwich in easy reach, wholly unselfconscious about eating while her staff settled into their seats and she chatted up an aide about his newborn son. Higgens had a superb politician’s gifts of empathy and curiosity; in her case, both were genuine. People liked her, even people who abhorred her politics. The perfect voice for USEI.

She smiled at the staffers assembled around the table. Twelve of them. My disciples, she thought without a smidgeon of seriousness or sanctimony.

“Okay, boys and girls, life’s going to change around here. Y’all are fired.”

She relished their shocked silence, but only for a moment. “Ease up, for chrissakes. Can’t y’all tell when an old cowgirl’s ringin’ your bell? We are in bidness, folks, like never before. The White House has signed on to ge-o-en-gin-eer-ing, all six lu-cra-tive syllables. No leaks about this to the media. You hear me? No leaks.” She broke into laughter. “’Cept to the usual suspects. Now, I want updated reports on all of the following. Ready?”

She took another bite of her sandwich, loving the smooth mayo spreading over her tongue. That cute little intern’s got a future. Then she wheeled on a young man directly to her left, rangy as a fence post on her Abilene ranch, which she hadn’t seen in two years. “You’ve been looking at sequestration of CO2.” Pumping carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs, coal mines, saline aquifers, and the like to prevent it from entering the atmosphere. “Keep at it. Give me the latest costs, which—” She put up her hand to shush the fellow. “I know they’re enormous. The risks?” Raising a question no one at the table was now foolish enough to try to answer. “Comme ci, comme ça. But probably on the safer side. Give me footnotes, too, to show we did our homework. I want it by Friday. You may leave,” she said to the rangy one. All of them knew that meant: “Get to work.”

“You two.” She waved the turkey-stuffed sandwich at a middle-aged man and a younger woman rumored to have posted a video of themselves on the Net having blindfolded sex in the office. “I want you to give me the postmortem on filtering CO2 from air. That’s DOA but I want to be able to say ‘Big bucks and big problems,’ so dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Go.” They left. To work, she hoped.

Higgens gave a sigh that might have been rooted in longing or nostalgia, then tapped the table with a fingernail as pink as her umbrella. Her gaze had landed on another edible youngster, as she thought of the twenty-somethings. “Charles,” spoken as another, more maternal woman might offer the name of a long-lost son, “you get mineral carbonation.” Turning CO2 to stone. “List the advantages, say that it’s not too risky for the faint of heart, but make sure that you point out that the engineering challenges are a killer. And Charles,” she mewed again, “make this sink like a … stone. It’s a time waster, and what’s time?”

“Money,” he answered to her beaming approval.

“Scoot. Now you, Prince Harry,” she said, smiling, to a junior researcher who shared the royal’s first name, cherubic well-scrubbed looks, and upswept ginger hair. “You get to tackle clouds and space mirrors. I know, Prince Harry,” as if he actually had the cojones to object, “it’s another defensive move, but if we don’t line up all our duckies, how can we possibly gun them down? So explain how we could increase the number of clouds to reflect sunlight back into space using those automated boats that fire mist into the air, or whatever the devil they shoot up there, and then explain why it’ll cost a fortune. Be creative. Also, knock down that kook’s ideas for sending thousands of mirrors into space to reflect the sun. That really will cost billions and basically hand China the keys to the treasury.” They nodded. “Oh, wait, we’ve already done that, haven’t we?” She hee-hawed.

“You, you, and you.” Higgens polished off the last of her sandwich and licked her fingertips before turning to three Ph.D.s in chemical engineering. “I want y’all to get an update on that report you did six months ago on blowing up sulfates in the stratosphere.” She liked this idea a lot. Kind of like setting off volcanoes in the sky to cloud the Earth, block the sun, and reduce temperatures in a hurry. Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head …

Sulfates were salts that contained a charged group of sulfur and oxygen atoms, SO4, the basic constituent of sulfuric acid. Using sulfates as aerosols could cool the climate in two basic ways: by having the sulfates attach to particles of solid matter, such as dust, or by having them attach to existing aerosol particles, such as clouds. However, this cooling would not neatly cancel out the effects of greenhouse warming. As Higgens knew, it could actually make the situation more complex, because the cooling and greenhouse effects would likely occur in different—and not always desirable—places. For instance, the aerosol impacts would be focused mostly over industrialized areas of the Northern Hemisphere, while the warming impacts would be greatest over the subtropical oceans and deserts—where island nations like the Maldives were facing complete submersion into the ocean. That would mean the loss of all the life-forms and ecosystems that made those lands their home. The result? The world would see dramatic changes in regional weather patterns in the future, not just increases in temperature. Ouch!

And if sulfates cooled the planet too much or too fast, there might be an ice age. Big ouch.

On the plus side, firing up sulfates would mean partnering with the Department of Defense to put thousands of rockets to good use, instead of letting them molder in their silos. USEI and DOD always made a powerful one-two punch. But much as Higgens relished the prospect of calling her friends at missile maker Lockheed Martin, her enthusiasm for turning sulfur particles into fireworks was purely provisional: She knew better than to expect a White House buy-in for bombs in any first-stage effort.

“Now, Turtles,” Higgens’s moniker for an unfortunate-looking older Pakistani man whose elongated head appeared ready to dip into his torso at the slightest hint of danger, “here’s your chance to move up the food chain. Show me how sweet it is.” A credible Jackie Gleason that meant nothing to Turtles, who’d grown up in Lahore, or to most of the people left at the table, who were too young to have ever bothered with The Honeymooners. “You get to present the option of fertilizing the ocean with iron oxide.” Iron oxide in seawater helped absorb CO2 by facilitating the growth of algae. “Go hard on cost, which is low, and light on risk, which some of our critics might claim is high. Besides, plankton everywhere will thank us. When do I want this report, Turtles?”

“Friday.”

“The rest of you,” Higgens threw them a wicked grin, “are going to keep working on that special project on the Maldives. Is the tanker on the move?”

“Yes, right on schedule,” answered a red-haired sprite who looked sixteen, but was on her third year of working toward a doctorate in international relations and, surprisingly, had taken leadership on this issue from her two older male compatriots.

Higgens hadn’t mentioned to the White House task force that USEI already had launched a private geoengineering project with the cooperation of the highest echelons of the Maldivian government: What was the point in appearing presumptuous? But with the White House now moving forward, it was hard to see how anyone could raise objections that might have been hurled at the institute even a week ago. Hell’s bells, there wasn’t even a single international law preventing a nation from dumping half a million tons of iron oxide into the sea. They could make an algae bloom big as Australia, if they wanted to. Scary, when Higgens considered how irresponsible parties could make a unilateral decision to fundamentally alter the Earth’s climate. It was enough to make even her shiver.

“How many days away from the Maldives is our tanker?”

“Three days,” the sprite said.

“You guys are good. Now, do you have Maldivians ready to put a local face on the project once that tanker sails into their waters?”

“They’re recruiting in Malé even as we speak.”

This kid’s a gem. “I know I’m about as subtle as my grandpappy’s old hickory stick, but I love this iron oxide option. It’s cheap and it’s so visual, and it’ll make us look as green as Gore. We’ll cool the planet and the glaciers will stop melting, the seas will stop swelling, and we’ll be heroes with a solution as environmentally pure as the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

“Which hates geoengineering,” the institute’s media strategist said, lean as the tie he stroked nervously.

“Let them be the haters,” Senator Higgens said. “Remember our new slogan? ‘On the side of life. Naturally.’ Live it.”

“There’s a problem with terrorism there,” the media strategist said, abandoning his tie.

“They call that terrorism? Pikers. Besides, we won’t be there, strictly speaking. We’ll be at sea, working to make the world a better place. And I’ll bet you enchiladas to empanadas that the government keeps doing exactly what we want it to. They’re holding cabinet meetings underwater, for crying out loud. They’re desperate, poor. Perfect. We’re bringing them a pilot project to solve their ills. They’ll probably canonize us.”

“I just want to make absolutely sure,” the media strategist said, “that they’re not going to get skittish about the video: We’re going to get it from start to finish, right?”

“Does a horse poop? Is Billy Graham still dead? ’Course we’re going to get the video. Otherwise, what’s the point? Hey, I can already hear the string section we’ll use in the ads that we’ll get out of this. We’ll use that new guy the ad agency found, the one with that really sweet voice. I love the way he says ‘USEI: On the side of life. Naturally.’ I swear, I get excited every time I hear it. Don’t you? Come on, y’all say it to me, right now. Get over here and whisper it in my ears: ‘On the side of life. Naturally.’” The pink fingernail beckoned them.

Her staff, including the upstart sprite, stared at her, panic plastered all over their frozen features; then Higgens laughed harder than ever. “You young ’uns,” she managed to say between guffaws, “y’all are so serious.”

* * *

Dafoe called Jenna as she deplaned at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Seconds earlier, Jenna had received a text from Nicci: The network’s investigative reporter had been dispatched to the Maldives and wanted Jenna to call him ASAP. When the phone rang, for a moment Jenna thought it was the reporter. Then she spotted Dafoe’s number and her breath caught. Smiling to herself, she pushed the button to accept the call.

“How was Washington?” Dafoe asked.

“Hold on.” Jenna waved to attract the attention of a network driver she recognized. He rushed up, took her overnight bag, and led her to a black Ford Fusion, a hybrid that she’d had stipulated in her last contract. She thanked him with a nod, settled into the backseat, and fastened the safety belt. “There, I’m set,” she said to Dafoe. “I met the president, but that wasn’t the high point of my day.”

“Really? What was the high point?”

“Are you kidding? This call.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“Well, maybe it’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s mostly true. How are you?”

“Crazy day. I’m just coming up for—”

“Crazy? How can you have a crazy day on an organic dairy farm?”

“Forensia didn’t show up for work. First time in six years. She’s never been sick, and she didn’t even call.”

“Is she okay?”

“I’m not sure. She got in touch about twenty minutes ago, full of apologies, but when I asked what happened, she wouldn’t say. I didn’t want to press her—she sounded a little shaky to me—but everybody’s entitled to a day off without having to explain themselves.”

“Sounds mysterious.”

“It is mysterious. And it’s totally unlike her.”

“Maybe the rumors are true, then,” Jenna said.

“What rumors?”

“About that GreenSpirit woman being in your ’hood. Half the reporters in the country are trying to track her down. Maybe that’s why Forensia’s getting all mysterious on you.”

“Nah,” Dafoe said, and Jenna could picture him shaking his head. “I think it’s a personal crisis of some kind. She’s got a crazy mom. Or Sang-mi might be having problems with her parents. She’s five months pregnant.”

“She must be barely showing; I sure didn’t notice.” The cab was entering the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Garbagey air, smog everywhere.

“Me, neither. Anyway, Sang-mi’s pregnancy is the reason her family defected. If you’re a single Korean woman, you do not get pregnant and have a child.”

“They defected? From the North?”

“I thought I’d told you that. Her father was a member of the North Korean mission to the U.N., which means, basically, he was a spy. Then Sang-mi got pregnant by—get this—her white, Pagan boyfriend. There was no way her father’s career could have survived that. It might even have cost him his life.” He took an audible breath. “Please don’t mention any of this to your colleagues. Forensia says Sang-mi’s father has been getting debriefed by the CIA for three months.”

“This can’t have been easy on any of the family.”

“Yeah. About a week ago she moved in with Forensia.”

“Who’s getting all secretive on you now,” Jenna said.

Approaching Midtown. Still hot and sticky in the city, even though the ten-day countdown to the November fourth election had begun. Jenna found it strange to see leaves of all colors still clinging to the trees. Nature going visibly wacko.

“Can you make it up this weekend?” Dafoe asked.

“Can you see me smiling? I’d love to.”

“I made an appointment,” he added softly.

“For what?”

“To get tested.”

“We’re pulling up to the building. How about if I call you later tonight?”

“Not too late: I’m a farmer.”

“I’m on The Morning Show, remember? Late is seven o’clock.”

“I miss you,” he said.

Jenna was still smiling. She thanked the driver and hopped out, then unloaded her bag and headed into the building. As she dialed the network’s investigative reporter, her smile disappeared. And though sworn to silence, she planned on Googling Sang-mi’s father as soon as she could.

* * *

Rafan eyed the island from the barge’s pilothouse, which stood about fifteen feet above the wide, flat-bottomed vessel, giving him one of the higher perches enjoyed by anyone for a thousand square miles. He thought it proper, as the self-ordained Minister of Dirt, to oversee the arrival of the barge and front loader on the bedraggled island of Dhiggaru. According to a real minister—of the Environment—there was plenty of dirt on its northern end and few residents to object to its removal.

“Binoculars?” he asked the captain, a short man with a staved-in face. Rafan wanted to survey his new territory.

Wordlessly, the captain handed over a chipped, dented pair that looked like they’d survived hand-to-hand combat in the South Pacific during World War II. But they focused well enough to reveal two people, one in the robes of a religious leader, standing in the shade of the palm trees. They must have caught some glare from the field glasses because they looked up in alarm. That seemed odd—given the distance, Rafan could see nothing amiss, and hearing them wasn’t possible. Guilt? Over what, he wondered, then chuckled softly because it reminded him of the guilt he felt over the kiss that he’d shared with Senada yesterday.

They’d been talking about Basheera, about the way his quiet sister used to suddenly burst into loud laughter over some absurdity of modern Muslim life. Then Senada touched him, as she had so sweetly in the past. Her fingertips had drifted down his shirt so slowly, revealing her desire. He’d caught her hand and pulled her close, once more committing himself to a kiss and all that it might mean for a single man and a married, religious woman, whose fisherman husband often arrived home unannounced.

Rafan raised the binoculars for another lazy look at Dhiggaru and saw the man who was not in robes retreating into a palm grove that bordered the beach. And here I am, Rafan thought, coming to take their dirt, to present them with an order of confiscation.

Up till now, he hadn’t expected any serious resistance: They weren’t demanding that anyone leave Dhiggaru. But maybe that’s why those two were there, to watch for the barge. It was a small country, and word traveled fast. “Do not worry. They will not kidnap you and chop off your head,” the Minister of the Environment laughed.

For taking their dirt? Rafan wasn’t so sure, not after the bombing.

The captain nudged the barge’s broad bow against the shoreline, raising a creak of protest from the snub-nosed hull and a rattle from the chains securing the front loader to the centerline. Three laborers began to unshackle the heavy earthmover.

Rafan eased around them and stepped down the ramp, smelling the sweet rot of dead fish washed up along the shoreline.

The robed man waited a few feet away. Rafan introduced himself, but the young, bearded cleric made no effort to take his hand. Instead, he spoke his own name slowly, as some men do when they believe they are worthy of note, while peering intensely at the visitor through rimless glasses. Rafan avoided the cleric’s dark eyes by looking past him.

“Was there someone else here? I thought I saw two of you but it was hard to tell because of the sun.” He lowered the brim of his white ball cap to emphasize the blinding light reflecting off the white sand.

Parvez Avila didn’t reply. He looked at the barge and cumbersome front loader. “What are you doing here?”

Rafan told him.

“You do not think that you will get away with this, do you?”

Rafan spotted shadowy movement in the palm grove less than thirty feet away. For the first time, he felt afraid. Most likely the other man was back there—Doing what? Rafan wondered. He decided not to present the order of confiscation. He feared that Parvez Avila would tear it up, and that even a simple act of violence against paper could unleash much deeper anger and resentment.

“You should never have come here,” Avila said. “Never.”

The sun pounded on Rafan’s cap, but all he felt was a coldness deeper than the sea.

“Rafan,” the captain called, “are you ready?”

Rafan waved, signaling that the earthmover should come ashore.

The diesel engine belched a thick black pillow of smoke that enveloped the two men facing each other on the sand, stinging their eyes and filling their noses with the acrid smell of industrial waste.

* * *

Jenna whirled through the revolving door, keeping her cell to her ear, quickly shaking her head as she began to speak: “I can’t give you his name without talking to him; and I doubt very much that I’ll be able to give it to you even then.”

Rick Birk, a codger in his mid-seventies—and the network’s principal investigative reporter for five decades—had landed in Honolulu en route to Malé. He’d called Jenna to try to cajole Rafan’s name and contact information from her. How does he know I know Rafan? was her first thought.

Birk now hardened his tone: “For f*ck’s sake, Jenna, you were sleeping with him.”

How’d he know that? she wondered. The answer came right away: He’s an investigator. “That’s my business, and bringing up personal stuff is out of line.”

“The terrorists could be planning to bomb the network next. Getting me in touch with him could save the lives of everyone we work with.” What a frickin’ James Bond complex. “I already know he works in government.”

“What do the plans of some Islamists have to do with my giving you the name of an old friend? Even if he is in the government?”

“He might know someone who knows someone.”

“I’m sure he knows someone who knows someone, but you’re badgering me, Rick, and I don’t appreciate it one bit.”

“And I don’t appreciate getting stonewalled by a f*cking meteorologist over such a ridiculously simple—”

She hung up on him. Jenna could count on one hand the number of times that she’d hung up on someone. You just didn’t do that when you’d been raised by parents like hers, who’d given her a strong sense of propriety. “F*cking meteorologist”! Even if he was old school, very old school, that was off the charts.

Christ, there he is, calling me back. Leave a message, creep.

As she stopped out of the elevator on the third floor, her friend and producer, Nicci, rushed toward her, short, dark hair flying. “Birk’s in a tizzy. He’s on line one and says he wants to apologize.”

“He can stay on line one till his ear rots off. I’ve got work to do.” In her office, Jenna tossed her overnight bag onto a chair, then turned to the pixie-size Nicci. “They should have sent us to the Maldives, not him. You know that, don’t you? He’ll make a hash of it. It’ll be another one-dimensional story that begins ‘This is the Maldives…’” Jenna offered a fair impersonation of Birk’s typical basso profundo story opening. As creative as a paint-by-number kit.

“We may get a chance,” Nicci said. “The National Review broke a story online half an hour ago: USEI is sending half a million tons of liquid iron oxide to the Maldives in a supertanker. It’s part of some geoengineering project. Everyone’s jumping on the story.”

“USEI?”

“The ship’s been underway for more than a week.”

“They sure played that close to the vest,” Jenna said. “Not a peep about it this morning at the White House.”

“Remember our friend from the Northeast Bureau?”

“Sure.” The up-and-comer.

Nicci smiled. “He wants a sound bite about USEI’s plans, since you’re on the task force that’s considering whether to actually recommend using the technology.”

“I can give him something, as long as it’s just about the technology. I won’t go into any of the task force’s work.”

Though she knew almost nothing about the USEI tanker, what Jenna would have most liked to say was that somebody should have stopped the ship before it set sail. She found it hard to believe that any good would come from this voyage.

She Googled Sang-mi’s father. But after quickly scrolling past a spate of stories about his defection, she found little. No updates. No reaction from North Korea. No statements from U.S. officials. And certainly nothing about his wife and pregnant daughter. Jenna could conclude only that he was a small fish in a mighty big diplomatic pond. In other words, if he was a spy, as Dafoe had suggested, the North Korean had cast the perfect profile.

* * *

Parvez returned to the palm grove, where Adnan’s footprints stood out in the shaded sand. As he stared at the outline of his friend’s feet, he saw the astonishing shape of the immediate future. It was such a stunning vision that Parvez found himself holding his breath for several seconds. In those incendiary moments, he knew exactly how he would become the architect of the greatest martyrdom in modern history. Just an hour ago, he’d heard a shortwave radio report about a tanker heading to the Maldives, loaded with iron oxide for a year-long attempt to slowly lower the Earth’s temperature. The BBC said that Maldivian sailors would be hired once the ship arrived in Malé. And Adnan was a fully licensed seaman.

The ground beneath Parvez’s feet trembled, as if the Earth itself were waking to the weight of what would come to pass, but he saw that it was only the front loader taking another savage bite of the earth. More sooty smoke drifted over him, invading the island as surely as the salty water that had stained the floor of Adnan’s house. The man in the white hat probably planned to take away all of Dhiggaru, load by load, till nothing was left. Who can stop me? he might have thought. The island was home to so few: Adnan and his mother, Khulood; and two old fishermen who’d always kept to themselves.

And me. Parvez added himself with a smile. He’d learned so much about resistance and jihad from the religious leaders of Waziristan. They’d fought the Russians, the Americans, the Afghan army, and the Pakistani military. The war against nonbelievers was spreading everywhere. Even in America, Muslim men heard the call for jihad and became true martyrs.

Parvez knew that Allah—who else could inspire such divine greatness?—had shown him what to do. Nothing that Parvez had planned for diamond island could match a martyrdom that would be watched by billions. But he would continue that plan even as he undertook this much greater calling, which would need the help of jihadists from Waziristan. Not many; a few could bring to life the vastness of the vision Allah had granted him. Soon, the religious leaders whom Parvez most admired would know that a humble cleric from the Maldives had proved worthy of their company.

Parvez quickly followed the trail of footprints to Adnan’s house. He found his old friend eating cold rice and fish.

“What is it?” Adnan stood. “You look so happy.”

“I am, my friend. Allah has blessed us with a vision.” Squeezing Adnan’s hand, he told him about the tanker. “You are a seaman. Show them your papers and they will hire you. Then you can wear the vest on board.”

“But they check everyone. I can’t get on board without being searched.”

“You will have help. Jihadists will get you onto the ship, and then you will hold the world’s attention like no one ever has before.”

“What about diamond island? My mother?”

“Yes, I will continue to plan for diamond island, but the tanker will be here soon; and it is coming for you and all that you can give Islam. Paradise truly awaits you.”

Parvez explained that the Americans planned to dribble the liquid fertilizer into the sea over many months, “But you will blow up the tanker. It will fill the sky with flames, and the ocean will turn orange as far as the eye can see. The infidels will pay the highest price for drowning us. I have done research,” he glanced at his iPhone, “and it is simple: If we release all the fertilizer at once, it will make temperatures drop till they freeze in their colder countries. Then they will stop stealing our island.”

Adnan agreed to sign up for tanker duty without the hesitation that he’d shown about bombing diamond island. His eyes brightened when Parvez told him that they would make a video of him and post it on scores of Islamic Web sites. “You, Adnan, you will declare victory for Muslims everywhere.”

Parvez stared at the open ocean, imagining flames and orange floodwaters—the surface of the sea reflecting the holocaust of sky—and knew that martyrdom would greet his friend, and that both of them would be honored the world over.