The Living Fiction Project: Sixty-one

If the world’s economy had an Achilles heel it is undoubtedly at the Strait of Hormuz. Hardly thirty miles wide, as it bends from the Gulf of Oman into the Persian Gulf, less than a third of the straits are navigable. The great tankers, feeding fully forty percent of the World’s oil, pass through sea lanes six miles wide, pressed between the horn of Oman to the south and Iran to the north, with a series of islands from which they could stage lightning attacks against shipping. When, just twenty-four hours before the President of the United States was to address the American people, two tankers exploded and sank, sealing off the Gulf, Iran was the logical suspect.

The first, a South Korean freighter exploded without warning, just as the first honey-orange sunlight appeared above the Iranian coastline. Listing sharply, the ship caught fire. Billowing black plumes rose thousands of feet into the blue morning sky. Forty minutes later a passing South African ship exploded, the sound turning heads in Dubai and Sharjah forty miles away. The force of the explosion split the seven hundred foot vessel in two. It sank in only six minutes with all forty-two hands, spreading a fiery oil slick over several square miles. On the Korean vessel twelve of the Filipino crew escaped, rescued by the Iranian navy.

Iran had threatened a thousand times before to seal off the Straits and trap American ships. When the second ship exploded, eliminating any possibility of a random accident, the Americans might have unleashed fury upon the Iranians. Certainly they possessed the firepower to leave every Iranian city a smoking heap of rubble, reminiscent of the Allied bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, or Tokyo and Nagoya during the Second World War. But the Iranians appeared just as surprised and befuddled by the attacks as most everyone else. When a Saudi Al Qa’eda-affiliated group claimed responsibility both sides were equally relieved that conflict had been averted, if only for a short time.

It wouldn’t matter who ultimately was responsible. The damage had been done and would resonate through the global economy in untold ways. The world, despite illusions and national hubris, is a fragile place. Gasoline prices would skyrocket to eight Euros per liter in Europe, tipping countries like Belgium, Spain and Italy into bankruptcy and civil unrest. France and Germany’s economies were thrown into chaos, forcing emergency cuts to all but essential services. Bread lines appeared Across England as unemployment would near an average eighteen percent.

The Myanmar junta, long isolated for their brutality and human rights violations, would divert crucial fuel reserves to continue their campaign of cruelty against refugees and rebels. The diversions would cause mass demonstrations and infighting within the military. Street battles would erupt before the first of the year, and by February a new junta “for the people” would be in power.

In the US, right-wingers would criticize the administration, blaming millions of new jobless claims and a stock market in freefall on the failure to immediately seize and defend the Straits. Slowly the message was getting out that conservatives who controlled fully ninety percent of radio talk shows, inundated the internet and book stores with their screeds and who dominated cable television were the mainstream Press, and that their message dominance had not served to do anything but splinter the nation, embarrass it before the world, undermine American influence, plunder its economy and resources and interfere with governance. It would cost them dearly at the polls that November. Not that the American people were satisfied with the Democrats, but at least their policy wasn’t one of belligerence while in power and obstruction while in the minority.

The news from the Gulf fully eclipsed the investigation into Fallahi’s murder, and the full confession by McCullough. His revelations about a possible conspiracy to steer the nation into a new war, and then reap the profits for a new but untested weapon was lost in bureaucratic channels. Eli Germaine, the State Police inspector in Munising called a Press Conference, but all that bothered to show were a couple of local reporters, someone from The Mining Journal, up at Marquette, and a college intern from Democracy Now. The national Press was fixated on the coming war, which they had collectively decided was a fait accompli. All that had been accomplished was that as news spread among police throughout the Midwest, an unspoken support for the fugitives who were now somewhere between Green Bay and Chicago.