The Gulf Between Us
Chuck wanted desperately to make this deal happen in Qatar. There were many good reasons for that, but none was better than the fact that seeing this groundbreaking technology advanced and even accelerated by the funding only a wealth pool like the Qataris could resource was the best of them. Everyone thought Chuck was all about making money and a casual observer would be justified in that thought, but someone who bothered to talk about the technology with Chuck would see the passion come through. This hit all the hot buttons needed by the country, the region and the world. Cleaner air, food security, cheap clean energy to replace depleting hydrocarbons, remote energy generation, and all of that contributing to more plentiful clean and accessible water. This was the future. Qataris would be the new tech barons of the world. This would make Qatar the hub of the region as it deserved to be. It was head-spinning as a vision.
The only problem was that suddenly, the Qatar sat squarely in the middle of what was shaping up to be ground zero to the Battle Royale as WrestleMania would call the Saudi/Iranian difference of opinion. Chuck didn’t know all the history of Islam and the reasons why Sunnis and Shiites were at such great odds with one another, but he could read a map and see that the religiously-moderate smaller Gulf States were smack dab in between the two big religious combatants of this rift. In fact, their country, that they had worked so hard to build up in a western image, had a ringside seat for what was shaping up to be The Big One.
Chuck could feel the palpable change in the air. He saw the Pakistani and Punjabi laborers lining up at the port for passage home. These hard-working, self-sacrificing men all had families back home that depended on them for their weekly money transfers. They lived ten to a room on floor mats and ate curry-flavored rice, day and night. They worked twelve-hour days only because the construction companies limited them to that and they worked six days a week because God demanded that. They only went home when their work visas could no longer get extended, but now they were starting to leave on their own.
The other sign in the wind was at the fancy clubs of Dubai, which he hoped over to for the weekends. There was a noticeable absence of the omnipresent tall, lean, Russian women that were usually there for the taking. Chuck was a God-fearing, wife-fearing honorable man, but he always enjoyed the scenery. And now there was none to be seen. Chuck was no fortune-teller and anything but a gloom-and-doom kind of guy, but he could sense the rats leaving the ship, whether it was sinking or just on the verge of being blown into oblivion. What a shame if that happened to this shining beacon of modernity stuck in between two cultures rooted in two very different histories and traditions.
Chuck was from New Jersey and was of an age that made him think a bit more about his future. He and his wife had raised, educated and launched three kids, but that had left them underfunded for a comfortable retirement. He either had to make this new company work (meaning be successful enough to be sold for some sort of decent profit) or he would be using his engineering background doing dog-work for others for a long time. He hated being in that position, but here he was. Shit happens. He just wished it would stop happening now that he had a tiger by the tail. This little company he had joined could change everything, and this Qatar situation had all the requirements to be the stairway to heaven for him. But World War III would get in the way of all that.
Chuck understood very well that he and his deal were not the center of the universe. A big Iranian war was far more destructive than his little quarter-billion-dollar deal (Did he say little? Well, yes, for this region.). But why did this age-old feud need to flare up now? Iran had a three million-man army, with one million of them trained as commandos. That’s a lot of manpower for a traditional war and, this was not going to be about WMD’s. That little ruse had been overplayed in Iraq and wouldn’t work with all the UN monitoring that had taken place until 2017 and Trump pulled out of the Iran deal. This would be more like Afghanistan than Iraq.
Chuck was a Republican. He had been a Republican since Reagan. Bush I was his guy. He vehemently disliked Clinton. He wasn’t crazy about W, but he stayed the course. He was a McCain man for sure and a Romney man. But he was really torn about Trump. No one from the NY Metro area respected Trump. They lived in the ruins of his bad business. But, Hilary was too much for Chuck, so he grimaced, but pulled the Trump lever. Now he wished he’d written in someone…anyone but a Trump.
Chuck knew enough people in the region now that he believed the Sunni/Shiite divide would simmer for years without boiling over. But the Israeli/Trump/Putin/Saudi complex seemed to want a battlefield, or at least an excuse to kick the shit out of Iran. Maybe to get even for Afghanistan, maybe to drive up Russian oil prices, maybe to take the heat off the Israelis so they could take back the West Bank during the scuffle. Who knows. But Chuck knew it was heating up and his counter-parties in Qatar were getting cold feet one day and hot foot the next. All this talk about Iranian terrorists attacking Saudi and Gulf State oil wells made alternative fuels more attractive, just like distributed processing that Chuck’s technology enabled would be so much safer for the country. It was nerve-wracking for Chuck.
Chuck always took a room that looked out at the water. That morning when he woke up, he opened the curtains and saw the morning sun glistening on a massive aircraft carrier out in the Gulf. Even from there he could see the American flag. Damn that Trump! He had heard the news reports that it was coming, but seeing it sitting out there just made him finally realize it was time to go home. He emailed his counter-party and told them he had to go home for personal reasons. He called and booked an economy seat home on Delta…with mileage. Maybe he could find a European company interested in his save-the-world start-up?