Houston and Oil

Houston, Texas. Largest metropolis in the southern U.S. City of big dreams and wealth built originally on oil and lots of it. Texas tea: crude oil. Ever since, the sprawling city has been identified with oil. Houston is now considered the energy capital of the world, hosting a critical mass of engineering, geophysical, technical, financial and venture capital resources that go anywhere in the world seeking black gold. The huge refineries surrounding the city comprise the largest refining center in the world.

Also, Houston is identified lately with Enron, the once meteoric energy firm with a boast of an infinite rate of return as the company went increasingly toward a minimal asset base and an ever burgeoning business focused on energy-related commodity trading with a turnover at hyperspeed. The spectacular crash of the firm, to the point where even the local major league baseball stadium had to be renamed, focused media scrutiny on the city as never before.

What would a novel about terrorism in the oil patch be without Houston? Although not the central focus of The Gambit, Houston figures prominently in the narrative, primarily through the person of Charles Sanders, a local CEO of an independent oil company, who is propelled into the national spotlight through his defiant posturing against the terrorist threat to petroleum enterprises in the U.S.

It is post-Enron in Houston. Sanders emerges from a bruising board meeting in Houston where he has been denied significant future wealth, in the form of stock options not being renewed, and almost loses his job to boot. The Board is not happy with corporate performance and, in the current era, cannot keep a blind eye to Sanders' rather slipshod performance. Nevertheless, Sanders hangs on by a whisker.

But the Board will pay a heavy price. Sanders vengefully agrees to a devilish scheme propounded by an anonymous sponsor who lays more money out for Sanders than he could ever imagine. Would the chastened CEO make available the assets of his company for terrorist assault in a planned format? Yes he would, but he would hypocritally avail himself of every opportunity to stoke his ego in the meantime, in publicly scorning the petroleum industry's weak response to terrorism in general and setting up his own firm as a beacon of inspiration. "Come and get us" he dares would-be terrorists as he thunders from the podium at a petroluem conference in Houston.

Why this ruse? It is all part of the script, diverting attention away from Sanders' true role, enabling him to screw the Board to the wall in the meantime, battering the stock price, and then safely retire right before it hits the fan. It's the Board's fault; they ran off the one man capable of challenging the workforce to rise up and meet the threat at hand.

Numerous scenes are depicted in the Bayou City. There is the stormy board meeting at Greenway Plaza. The infamous conference presentation in town, where Sanders makes his name, probably in the Galleria area. Then the televised interview with Janet Tilson, a local news beauty very much on an incline in Houston, later to become his hot number as they parade about town. The ribald cocktail party at the River Oaks Country Club where a number of characters in The Gambit converge. Another character in the novel, Carla Rossi, has her own romance commencing at the party.

Houston is also the scene of the infamous press conference held by Sanders in the wake of the defense of the S.S. Alamo, the massive oil supertanker of Sanders' company, brilliantly rescued from a brazen attack of piracy by its valiant crew. An attack allowed by the Houston CEO in the first place; at least oil prices went up anyway. Sanders' adroit performance earns him the fateful invitation of the President to join him in a campaign swing. But there is downside as well. There is the sniper taking position at the Sanders residence in River Oaks, making a virtual kill on Sanders' daughter, as a warmup to the real thing. It is time for Sanders to go, having served his purpose for his malevolent sponsor.

Oh, what about the terrorist event due to take place in the Houston vicinity? Sanders has gratuitously made available a strategic oil terminal in Pasadena, to the southeast of Houston, for violent decimation, paralyzing gasoline and other fuel deliveries throughout the rest of the U.S. The American administration races to halt the attack, having identified finally the sponsor. That sponsor meets an untimely end before the same befalls Sanders.

But Sanders doesn't escape. And Houston, in the wake of Enron, and the scene of the strutting by the iconic Sanders, will never be the same.

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