Slippery charts

The 57 per cent fall in international oil prices in just six months since July 2014 has not just confounded the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), but knocked the bottom out of the plotted rationale of thrillers like this one.

In this latest Robert Ludlum novel, Paul Garrison creates a scenario where everyone (from the mandarins of a state-owned Chinese petroleum company and the son of a deposed Libyan dictator to an African war lord and the director of an American MNC) is conniving and competing to exploit the untapped onshore and offshore oil reserves of Somalia, rated by the Foreign Policy journal as the world’s second-worst failed state in 2014.

With crude prices plummeting to almost six-year lows in six months from July 2014, and with the slump being particularly pronounced since November when OPEC met and decided not to cut production, the effort required to first take over a failed state and then exploit the oil reserves would no longer be financially viable.

However, at the time when this book was being penned in the days of crude prices going up and up, Garrison may have allowed his imagination to soar while creating unsavoury failed-state characters of the stereotyped kind that readers of American thrillers are familiar with.

And so, the Somali war lord Fat Boy Gutaale gets his compatriot pirate Maxammed (nicknamed Mad Max) to hijack at sea the superyacht Tarantula and its passengers, including the beautiful Italian countess Allegra, whose suave husband Kingsman Helms is the director-in-charge of the petroleum division of the American Synergy Corporation (ASC), the world’s biggest oil company in Ludlum fiction-land.

Helms offers Paul Janson of Catspaw Associates a 10-million dollar fee to rescue his wife. And Janson and his trusted aide Paula Kincaid take on the case even though they have no illusions about ASC’s propensity to fish in troubled waters off the coast of failed states with vast, untapped reserves of oil.

A 10-million dollar fee can go a long way in a failed state, but Janson plays it doubly safe by hiring US-based Somalians like the drug-peddler Ahmed from Minnesota and the Minneapolis college student Isse who, despite his liberal arts studies on an American campus, is inspired by the online jihadi sermons of the Mogadishu-based preacher Abdullah-al-Amriki, a character presumably based on the late Anwar-al-Awlaki, the first US citizen to be targeted and killed by a US-military drone for motivating Yemeni youths to join al-Qaeda.

With pirates in the Somali sea and al-Shabaab jihadi terrorists on land, Janson undertakes the mission-impossible of rescuing Allegra, whose kith and kin have links with the Camorra mafia in Naples. The only good guys seem to be Janson and Kincaid and a seaplane-pilot,  Kirpal Singh, who is bipolar and gets as high as a kite when he is off his medication.

“You know you’re in a war zone when there’s never a beautiful place to sit,” Janson quips to Kincaid apropos an abandoned fish-drying plant that had recently housed an al-Shabaab training camp in interior Somalia.

You know you’re in a Ludlum novel when the only time the good guys get to sit in peace is at the end of the book when all the bad guys have been taken out, including Fat Boy Gutaale, Mad Max and Abdullah-al-Amriki, not to mention the unfortunate Isse who is persuaded to swallow a condom stuffed with PETN powder so that he can do his bit as a human bomb while being welcomed into the presidential palace in Mogadishu. The president of Somalia is saved, thanks to the always-alert Janson in a world where only the paranoid survive.

Oil’s well that ends well until the next Ludlum-Janson novel. It is almost 14 years since Ludlum passed away, but the Janson series is being continued by Garrison. This has become a trend of sorts in American and English thriller-fiction. It is 15 months since Tom Clancy passed away, but his geo-political thrillers and characters like President Jack Ryan are being kept alive by Mark Greaney in books like Full Force And Effect.

The latest horse-racing thrillers by the late Dick Francis are now being penned by his son Felix Francis (like in the novel Damage). It is 39 years since Agatha Christie died, but Hercule Poirot has been brought back to life in The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah.

“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away,” General Douglas MacArthur said in his farewell speech to the US Congress on April 19, 1951. Old thriller writers die, but they never fade away.