Following McDade’s distress call, a secure extraction was promptly initiated. Within an hour, the now-fugitive billionaire was wheels up out of Reagan Airport. For the first time in almost eighteen hours, he was able to breathe.
The MDi 737 climbed through four thousand feet, the lights of the Capitol sliding away below them.
“So… where we go?”
The man asking was Kasiniia Mikolai Sakharov, McDade’s chief scientist. Also a close friend and partner in so many of their business ventures. Sakharov loved the sciences, and McDade Industries gave him unparalleled opportunities to explore his passion.
“Sealandz,” McDade answered. “Indonesia, then Sealandz.”
“Zoolander? I thought was a film.” Sakharov was buckling his seat belt, still feeling a little disorganised by the rush to get out of Dodge.
“I said Sealandz, not Zoolander.”
“Da, I know it. Silly name. That place you built on top of a seamount. Your own little country, no?”
Sakharov was referring to a platform with foundations built into the seafloor of a seamount south of the Cocos Islands. Its name deliberately echoed Sealand, the micronation established on an offshore North Sea platform. Sealandz, however, lay in international waters in the Indian Ocean.
The press had dismissed it as the vanity of a rich man with nothing better to do. That was far from the truth, and his present predicament vindicated its construction.
With a growing portfolio of oil, gas and coal projects globally, McDade knew he was “on the nose” with his political enemies. His frequent posts on the newly liberated X platform had made him a target. The Capitol Hill chaos was everything they needed to put him in jail.
Right now, the press had a photograph of him making what looked like a Nazi salute at the Stop the Steal rally, then running from the explosion at the Federal Apartments. McDade was not unprepared for this eventuality.
He had moved a rig and permanently located it deep in international waters, establishing an ambiguous sovereignty. No one could touch him there—or so he believed.
Sealandz was anchored to a seamount 617 kilometres west-south-west of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, outside Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone. It occupied a legal grey area, theoretically able to assert a form of self-government but still subject to the complexities of maritime law and the geopolitical interests of the world’s powers.
McDade’s foresight had, for the moment, saved him from a vengeful justice and intelligence system. But he and Sakharov had no inkling of the events they had set in motion. They had unwittingly been dealt a hand played by a force emanating from the beginning of time.
The clock was ticking: 1,406 days.