What he needed was something different. A new kind of weapon-some new power that would break the rules, that would give his cause an edge that would count for something in a world where large-scale violence was relatively rare, but where the warfare of commerce, corporations, and economics was everywhere. A few days earlier, it came to him that an answer might lie in the rich earth at his feet. Sri Lanka was his home, the mother of his people. Perhaps that mother might provide the milk that would make them powerful enough to win, powerful enough to keep the Indians from crushing them, powerful enough to encourage a superpower like America to support them, as they had Kuwait back in 1990.
Not an easy task.
To catch the attention of the United States and focus it on the sufferings of a handful of people on the far side of the globe would take no less than magic. Luckily, he had recently hired a wizard.
West of the Kokkita Bird Sanctuary, Sri Lanka, March 9th, 2016
The foothills of north Sri Lanka are unique in the South Asian region. While most of the Indian subcontinent is among the newest terrain on the globe, these foothills are some of the oldest. Old things are likely to be valuable, and that was why the geologist was here. The contract to survey this area had been both lucrative and timely. Short of money for his children's school tuition, he had jumped at the chance when the Internet inquiries about his availability had reached his home in Perth, Australia. He had immediately said yes.
Before he'd even started packing, he had commissioned a series of one-meter-resolution multi-spectral satellite photographs from the French SPOT Corporation. Running the images through his desktop workstation in Perth, he had found several promising areas to explore. The commission had been explicit. Find rare and valuable mineral deposits, report them to the commissioning agent, accept the fee, and then deny that he had ever visited Sri Lanka. As an enticement to silence, the agent had promised him a tenth-of-a-percent royalty on anything that he found that was developed during his lifetime. With an offer like that, he had gone to extraordinary efforts for his employers. For almost a month, he had run the tires off of his hired Land Rover, looking for some exceptional mineral deposit to report back to them.
Now he was working the last area on his list of possibilities. So far he had found some promising discoveries, but nothing spectacular. A few days earlier, he spotted what might be a major vein of platinum in the side of a mountain, and he had taken several core samples around it to assay when he got home. Today, his chemical "sniffer" was finding samples of rare earth metals; and there seemed to be particularly large concentrations of scandium. What struck him was the purity of the sample he'd collected here-it exceeded anything he had ever heard reported.
In three days, he would return to Perth and start on his analysis and report. He hoped, for the sake of his future royalties, that the platinum find would pan out. Nobody had ever found a significant use for scandium.
National Press Club, Washington, D.C., April 1st, 2016
April Fool's Day is normally a day for pranks and lies, but this day would go down in the history books as a day when new truths were told. Jill Jacobs and the head of the Sandia Labs stood before a packed house of disbelieving science reporters to announce a breakthrough in superconductor technology, which would allow for the development of electric motors thousands of times more compact, powerful, and efficient than any made previously. A patent for the metal formulation had been applied for, and it would be available for commercial license immediately.
Chuckles broke out among the reporters, and there were cracks about cold fusion-until Jill came to the podium and asked everyone to go down to the street below, where she promised to demonstrate the material. Moments later, the assembled press personnel found what appeared to be a completely normal pair of buses painted with the logos of the University of New Mexico and Sandia Labs. After the reporters were all aboard and seated, Jill stepped onto the first bus, the Sandia chief onto the one behind it. A moment later, the buses accelerated smartly away from the curb, silent as ghosts, the typical diesel roar completely absent. In fact, the street noise outside was deafening by comparison. The stunned reporters sat in silence as they rode to the base of the Washington Monument several miles away.
After everyone got out of the buses and filed onto the sidewalk, Jill and the Sandia Labs chief opened the engine compartments to show the press corps a single car battery running an electric motor the size of a beer keg. All told, they informed the reporters, the two buses had consumed less than an amp-hour of power, less than one percent of what was stored in each battery. Even better, the motors, which had been designed from existing models, had cost less than a thousand dollars to build. Most of the reporters dragged out their cell phones then and there to report in, rather than waiting for the buses to return them to the Press Club building.
Headquarters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Near Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, April 3rd, 2016
Today Arjuan Ranatunga's headquarters were located in a gamekeeper's hut, and his table and chair were actually comfortable. Moreover, the news on the data slate before him was like a gift from God himself. For the better part of a week, he'd had the mineral report he'd commissioned, but until now, it had seemed disappointing. It had promised nothing like the riches he had hoped for. But overnight, the news from America had turned the economy of the world upside down. Everyone had gone superconductor-crazy. Oil prices had taken a precipitous drop, and the prices for platinum and scandium had jumped off of the charts. This was hardly surprising. The world's known reserves of scandium could be measured in just a few tons. These would supply a bare handful of the proposed applications for the new superconducting metal formula.
He did not need to be a financial genius to figure out that what had been found in the foothills to the east could make Sri Lanka the superconductor capital of the world. The problem was what India would do when they found out what was sitting in the foothills of Sri Lanka. Once they knew what was there, they would crush both the Tamils and Sinhalese faster than they had nuked the Pakistanis. Even worse, the rest of the world would probably not care, if what he had seen over the Internet on the various news service web pages could be believed. As long as the resource was developed, it didn't matter who was offering it. He had to act quickly if he were to save his people and-ironically-their enemies, the Sinhalese. Taking a deep breath, he tapped out an E-mail message to his Sinhalese counterpart in Colombo.
Indian National Command Bunker, Near the Himalayan Town of Puranpur, April 4th, 2016
Roshan Gandhi was having another in a long string of bad days here in his bunker. The Indian Prime Minister had not seen a ray of sunshine for weeks, and was beginning to wonder if he would ever see sun again. Since the day four months ago when he had authorized the firing of the nuclear-tipped missiles into Pakistan, his fortunes and those of his country had been spiraling out of his control.
Like so many other Indian politicians who shared his name, Gandhi was in no way related to the great man who had led India to independence six decades earlier. It had never seemed to worry the Indian people that the name Gandhi had helped a string of politicians gain power in India over the years. Still, his family did share a political connection with him. Roshan's grand-father had been a follower of the great Gandhi's, and had adopted the name after the assassination in the late 1940s.