Singer thought for a moment. “Okay, there’s a place about forty miles east of you. The pilot who first took me to the Devil’s Oasis told me about it. I can’t remember its name but you’ll see it on a map. It’s a ghost town now but there’s an airstrip. I’ll call the pilot in Kinshasa and have him take off at first light. Take one of the trucks and wait for him there. He should arrive sometime before noon.”

“Thanks, Danny. That’ll be perfect.”

Singer cut the connection. He knew better than to try to fall back asleep. Years of careful planning were coming together. How much easier it would have been if he hadn’t given so much of his fortune away after forcing Merrick to buy him out. He could have simply paid for what he needed outright and negated the necessity of so many difficult steps.

But as he stood leaning against a pole watching the oil field’s hellish glow he knew that the difficulty of this operation also made its success that much sweeter. There was no substitute for hard work. And maybe that was why he had given away most of his billions. They had come too easily. He and Merrick were barely into their twenties when they patented their coal scrubbers. Sure, there had been a lot of long hours to perfect the system, but nothing like the lifetime needed to understand and appreciate that much wealth and success.

Because he had had to work so hard to put this operation together he could savor it that much more. The sacrifices, hardship, and privation made his ultimate victory more precious than all the money he’d accumulated in his previous life. And that it was all for the good of mankind made it even better.

He wondered, and not for the first time, how many lives he would save once the world woke up to the reality of global warming. The number ran into the tens of millions, but sometimes he thought that maybe he was really saving all of humanity and that in the future historians would look back and define this year and this storm as the one that made people see the light and stop the wanton destruction of the planet.

He wondered what someone would call such a person. The only word that came to mind was messiah. While he didn’t care for the religious overtones, believing all religions to be myths, he admitted it was the best fit.

“Messiah,” he whispered aloud. “They’ll never know I saved them but I am their messiah.”