Countdown: H Hour by Tom Kratman Page A

larger and considerably better funded, than M Day, Inc., if not quite so well armed, conventionally. Minions fed the computer that fed the plasma screen with data ranging from trade routes and volume, through corruption indices, through influence of the intelligentsia, through drought, through the rise in certain communicable diseases, through mass migrations, through per capita wages, taxation, life expectancy, the price of food, through inflation levels and the skyrocketed price of precious metals . . . through . . .
    Suffice to say, if there was a phenomenon or trait of intelligence importance, Prokopchenko’s screen showed it, both individually and in composite form. And in the composite?
    We’re fucked.
    Everything, every indicator, is for a near total collapse of civilization within twenty years. A couple of relatively strong city states might survive the fall. Singapore has a chance. Maybe Panama, which might as well be a city state already. Maybe a couple of dozen others will make it. But every form of organization above the level of a city or, at best, a not too large province, is crumbling under the weight of corruption, deindustrialization, demonetization, breakdown in law, and every man or woman for him or herself. And the only cities I expect to survive are the ones that break away from their larger states soon; those, and the few that have no larger state to suck them dry.
    And, yes, I had my shortsighted part in all that, not that my contributions were decisive and not that it would have made any but the slightest difference if I’d been a model of communist propriety throughout the old empire’s collapse. I doubt if anything I did hastened the fall by five minutes. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” after all. And our tide is going out.
    If I didn’t expect the United States to break up I’d move my family there. But they’ve devolved into two big groups—and a whole bunch of little ones—that hate each other beyond words. Ripe for a breakup, that’s what Panarin said, and though I didn’t believe it then, I believe it now. So he was off by a few years? The essence of the thing he pegged perfectly. Beirut in the 1980s would have been safer than the United States in twenty years.
    So why am I here, vending things that will surely hasten that fall and by rather more than five minutes?
    Because in the days that are certainly coming, when no man can turn to or trust anyone but himself and his close blood relations, solid, material, universally recognized and accepted wealth will be all that will see one’s family through, all that will buy the private armed force to keep unruly strangers away. Well . . . those and a large spot of the Earth’s surface to call one’s very own.
    I can’t save global civilization; no one can. So I have to do the next best thing and save some of it—a larger chunk than this boat—for me and mine.

    “It’s not the biggest yacht in the world,” Janail said doubtfully as the skiff thumped against the Resurrection ’s eighty meter hull.
    Mahmood shook his head, visible now in the brighter light from the ship. “Most of Russia’s nouveau riche went for more ostentation, yes. Prokopchenko, though, is old aristocracy and privilege. He doesn’t need the display. He needs speed, security, a helipad, and a fair amount of computing power. This gives him that.”
    “And you trust him?” Janail asked, not for the first time.
    “Not even remotely.”
    “You’re the one who put me in contact with him,” Janail accused.
    Again Mahmood shook his head. “I trust me. I trust you. I trust him only to put his own interests first. Since we—you—have or will have something he badly wants, I trust that.”
    “Money? From the old man’s ransom?” Janail scowled doubtfully and, again, not for the first time. “He has money. Lot’s more than he can get from us.”
    “He has less than he used to,” Mahmood answered. “Much less. And, of what he has, there is