Shadow War Read Online Free

changing the shape of the world.
    I understood the geopolitical implications of the Libyan operation. I had sat through endless meetings in top floor conference rooms overlooking Houston, discussing the big question: what if the world found out?
    But the circumstances, as I’d arranged them, were airtight. The drilling station had been abandoned for more than two years. The location was remote. The pipeline ran through uninhabited desert or controllable towns. AO, as Apollo was known in the field, even had a long-standing contact inside the port at Zawiyah, where we would load the oil onto tankers, and Zawiyah was truly a city where no questions were asked.
    The light turned green, and I turned past the massive brick hotel onto Rock Creek Parkway, slipping out of the urban environment and into the leafy gully of Washington’s hidden highway.
    The operation was a shit pile, I thought as I passed under arched road bridges reminiscent of Roman aqueducts. It was a box of mismatched puzzle pieces. It should never have fit together. The job had been, by any reasonable estimate, too much to ask.
    But I’d done it.
    Three weeks in-country, and I’d already seized the drilling station, recruited a few hundred local fighters, and set up a desert camp to train them. We had more than enough light arms and “liberated” black market UN Land Cruisers. Thanks to the Tuareg, we had acquired the firepower to equip helicopters and technical. Already, we could defend a hundred miles of pipeline, and it was still two days before the Houston wildcatters arrived—the craziest bastards on planet earth, even worse than the Navy SEALs—and slammed the station into working order. If anything, I was ahead of schedule.
    So where had it gone wrong?
    Not the ground game, I thought, as Rock Creek Parkway bottomed out along the Potomac River. I had gone over every move during my layovers and flights, and my end was clean.
    Was the operation compromised? Did someone in Tripoli or Houston leak to the press? Was a major shareholder concerned?
    But even if a reporter started sniffing around—and I was sure no reporters had, yet—there was nothing to latch on to. I’d drawn my team from the elite forces of a dozen different nations. My indigenous recruits were loyal to tribal strongmen, who knew nothing of the overall operation. My management group, mere figureheads, were the cousins and other assorted confidantes of connected Libyan businessmen, the type of shady characters paid good money to do nothing more than take the fall, if it ever came to that. All financial transactions were layered through them, then routed through the British Virgin Islands, whose banks were more secretive than Switzerland’s. It would be next to impossible to trace anything back to Houston, especially given the cutouts and shell companies I’d created. That was why the Fortune 500 hired Apollo.
    What about the U.S. government? I doubted USG was involved, but I knew one phone call from State or Defense could shut down a company operation anywhere in the world. That’s the power of handing out thirty billion a year in military contracts.
    I downshifted as I passed the Kennedy Center, the giant Kleenex box where I got my opera fix whenever I had the misfortune of being in town, and eased into the bridge traffic. The Washington Monument was behind me, and the Jefferson Memorial off to my left, but the skyscrapers of Arlington, Virginia, rose in front, looming over the low treeline of Roosevelt Island. God, I hated going to Virginia, with its consulting firms and tract mansions and glistening office parks for the military-industrial complex. I distrusted it even now, on a clear morning, at the ass end of rush hour, on a reverse commute, and sure enough, the traffic snarled at the first big bend in U.S. 66. There was only one industry in Washington, and these office jockeys, like everyone here, were policy dependent: consultants,