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Page 37.
Scene 15. Anaconda's Moriarty: Project David
 Camelback Corporation headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona was a sun-baked glass cube reinforced with steel, bearing dozens of satellite dishes, microwave cubes, and bristling antennas on its roof.
Camelback was not only the world's largest and most powerful corponation. It gave its name to the world's most powerful consortium of corporate and government agencies, ranging from the CIA and the U.S. military to the halls of Congress and the White House.
At the moment, a broker from Camelback's main rival, Global Anaconda, headquartered in Central Asia, was speaking softly on an intercom in the highly secret offices of Camelback CEO Lane Burning. With Burning sat a table full of representatives of the Camelback Consortium: CEO Burning himself; aides of Congressional oversight committee chairmen Senators Bloviant and Hawgbile; an assistant undersecretary of the Presidential Cabinet; and chargés d'affaires of several western corponations.
The human mind likes things that are binary: night or day, black or white, East or West, good or evil, zeroes and ones, Castor and Pollux. The Cold War was long-ago history, but nothing comparable had risen to replace it. In a spirit of efficiency and simplicity, the human mind still liked to think of West and East. Camelback Consortium was the leader of the vestigial West, while Global Anaconda led the vestigial East. None of this had any racial, religious, cultural—much less national—overtones. If anything, Camelback worked most of its contracts in the former North American and Western European Union, while Anaconda tended to dominate on the rest of the Asian land mass. Brazil, India, and a few other large economies fielded their own versions of Camelback or Anaconda. The rest of the world was fair game.
Today, the super-committee of the Camelback Consortium had been called into special plenary session at the request of Global Anaconda CEO Dr. James Moriarty at his headquarters in Istanbul. Moriarty spoke in a dry, self-confident voice:
"Thank you for convening today. I believe your time will be well spent. I have a proposal to make, on behalf of Global Anaconda. This should be of long-term interest to your consortium and your allies. Are we on top-secret ULTRA, CRYPTO, and BEYOND?”
Aides assured him of it, and he continued.
"As you know, an advanced Chinese sniper rifle was allegedly used recently to assassinate Colonel Osman Rulik, Vice President of the Central Asian Emirates (CAE).
"In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. This is a fiction created by our corporate communications companies to cover the wonderful new technology I am about to offer you today, for the first time in history. I caution you that this is top secret.
"I am all too well aware that the spirit of healthy competition between our two global consortia has often reached regrettable violent and bitter ends. We continue our dialog with your leadership, outside the scope of this teleconference, in order to keep competition civil, legal, and proportional. To this end, as a great leveler, I feel it is imperative that we share this new opportunity with you for the sake of world stability.
"My corporation, Global Anaconda, is now able to field what we call Operation David—a means to assassinate foreign heads of state, corporate leaders, or anyone in fact—with a sniper bullet from outer space. We call it the Orbital Sniper Technology, OST. With it, to our mutual benefit, we make the world safe from the next Hitler, the next Saddam, the next Milosevic—to name just three of the megalomaniacs who regularly rise to become our Caesars, our Napoleons, our Stalins—the list is a long one, and is no more complete than history itself."
Moriarty paused to let that sink in. A babble of voices raced around the long table, until Camelback CEO Lane Burning rapped his small wooden gavel on the table for order.
Global Anaconda’s Moriarty continued: "History goes on, as do its monsters. We call our wonderful new technology Project David, for obvious reasons. With a stone expertly thrown from his leather slingshot, young David was able to kill the invincible enemy fighter, a giant named Goliath, with a single hit to the forehead. Here’s the big news for us all today: Project David is good for business.
"Imagine if the world’s oil-consuming nations in 1990 had been able to kill Saddam Hussein with a single shot from an orbiting sniper rifle. This is my strongest selling point today. Wars cause disruption in economies and politics. No politician wants to ride that tiger, which usually eats those who dare to harness it. Wars usually mean expenditures, distortions of GDP, inflation, and all manner of negative effects—not to mention the kind of publicity no politician likes. I am offering you a way to preempt wars by killing dictators and other Third World megalomaniacs. We can thus do much better about maintaining the stability of markets, which can only be a favorable outcome for the major consortia."
The room bubbled with excited discussion.
"Imagine if Hitler or Mussolini or Tojo could have been stopped by a bullet before they caused the deaths of a hundred million people?"
For the first time, Lane Burning spoke. "Yes, but look at how World War I was started by a sniper bullet."
"I am aware of it," said Moriarty. "It’s part of the briefing videos we sent you. On 28 April 1918, in the provincial city of Sarajevo, in Herzegovina on the Balkan Peninsula, the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was assassinated by a sniper. In fact, the archduke and his wife Sophie were peace advocates on a mission of diplomacy. Through the tangled alliances of the time, soon the German Kaiser was agitating for war, while the Serbs were allied with the Pan-Slavic movement, which was ultimately controlled by the Russian secret service or Okhrana."
Burning heatedly cut in: "The result was a totally unnecessary war, based on the tribal and medieval rivalries of primitive German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and other empires. Manipulated by the usual corporate media, from Hearst to Murdoch, tens of millions of enthusiastic young men marched off to be slaughtered. Ancient generals, as usual fighting the wars of half a century ago, had these young lambs march into withering machine gun fire, and enveloped in clouds of poison gas, in an unthinkable and pointless holocaust."
"Precisely my point," Dr. Moriarty said. "Think of the religious puffery, the political slogans, the patriotic nonsense…”
“Right,” said Burning, “now take another example. The U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1865 was assassinated in one of the most pointless and callous murders in political history. General Lee and President Davis of the Confederacy were seeking peace under the generous terms offered by Lincoln, even while most hawks on the Union side wanted far harsher treatment of the South. In fact, the hawks wanted the kind of crippling reparations that brought Europe from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. The last thing Lee or Davis or any intelligent Southerner wanted was for their most generous advocate to be cut down by a mentally ill thug like John Wilkes Booth."
“Your points are well taken,” Moriarty said. "These are, however, the exceptions.”
“Exceptions! Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan both issued executive orders forbidding the assassination of foreign heads of state, without a full declaration of war."
"The key word," Moriarty said, "is responsibility. Wrong assassinations lead to wrong results. But a perfectly correct, consensual assassination, after a responsible declaration of war, is simply a matter of winning the war by killing one individual. It leads to saving millions of lives by avoiding enormous battles, destruction of property, and loss of lives. You declare war, and you go after one person. This is a serious technology of immense power to either harm or do good. In responsible hands, the Orbital Sniper Technology will cause enhanced world peace and order. My sign of respect and deference for your consortium is that I present it to you as a gesture of peace and universal cooperation."
After a pause, Burning said: "My instinct is to say no. My instinct is not to trust you. However, the possibilities in your technology are so awe inspiring that I think they deserve at least some discussion on our side. That is all I can offer at this point in response to your offer."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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