He had spent the last year and a half sweating the drilling and production operations there, supervising new rigs and equipment installations, pouring over lateral drilling schemes with the engineers, listening to complaints from the wildcatters, mudmen, down hole drillers, pump station crews, and the worst that the Boyz at corporate HQ back in Bollinger Canyon could throw at him. The Kashagan superfield was Chevron’s last and biggest play in the great game, and now it looked like it was over, at least for the foreseeable future. Now the world belonged to men like those crammed into the compartment with him. They sat there, in two rows, dressed out in black and charcoal cammo fatigues and cinder dark berets. Their jackets were bulging with ammo clips, and other accouterments of war, and each one carried an automatic weapon. Some had heavier equipment that Flack imagined useful against tanks or APCs, small hand held blowpipes with satchels of lethal sabot armor piercing rounds. The world was theirs now.
