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Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1 - Martell’s Hairy Prize

PART ONE - THE PUSH

CHAPTER 2 - A Tale of Teeming Cities

CHAPTER 3 - Iron, Oil, and Wind

CHAPTER 4 - California Browning, Shanghai Drowning

PART TWO - THE PULL

CHAPTER 5 - Two Weddings and a Computer Model

CHAPTER 6 - One if by Land, Two if by Sea

CHAPTER 7 - The Third Wave

CHAPTER 8 - Good-bye Harpoon, Hello Briefcase

PART THREE - ALTERNATE ENDINGS

CHAPTER 9 - The Pentagon Report

CHAPTER 10 - The New North

NOTES

CREDITS

Acknowledgements

INDEX

DUTTON

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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, September 2010

Copyright © 2010 by Laurence C. Smith

All rights reserved

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eISBN: 9781101453162

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For my brilliant, beautiful Abbie,

who is a part of this story

PROLOGUE

Flying into Fort McMurray

My nose was pressed against the rear window glass of a Boeing 747. It was a direct flight from Edmonton to the booming new oil city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the broad belt of boreal forest that girdles the globe through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. The scene below morphed from urban concrete to canary-yellow canola fields, then gradually from fields to a deep shag carpet of evergreen forest jeweled with bogs. The forest was crisscrossed here and there by roads, and patched with clearings, but grew more desolate by the minute. In under an hour, the transformation from urban metropolis to farmland to wilderness was complete.

Then, suddenly, the woods dissolved into gleaming homes, the newest residential subdivision of Fort McMurray. Freshly cut survey lines radiated outward in all directions through the woods. Bulldozers and work crews ground away at roadbeds and building pads, engraving a sort of master blueprint into the landscape