As conversations around national security, international power shifts, and volatile markets grow louder, Crude by Mike Bond steps right into that atmosphere. The story begins with a jarring nuclear warning that quickly exposes the interconnected pressures shaping global conflict and media response.

A nationwide emergency alert signals the beginning of a crisis spiraling toward nuclear confrontation. U.S.–Russia tensions escalate, and Ross Bullock, the CEO of Rawhide Energy, takes a risk by speaking out. He warns journalists that the administration’s actions could launch the world into disaster. Instead of amplifying the message, the media tears it apart, creating a political storm that twists his intentions. When one of Rawhide’s South China Sea platforms is completely destroyed — with hundreds of lives lost — everything shifts. The timing raises questions about who benefits from chaos. Moving between global power centers and high-stakes institutions, Crude channels military tension, political heat, and financial instability into a present-day thriller where one broadcast sends shockwaves across the world.

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Excerpt

Blood In The Water

The shark hit so hard he thought it was a ship keel out of the deep, its gritty hide rasping his thigh and its huge tail ripping a dive fin off his foot. He yanked a repellant tube from his divepack, fumbled and lost it, couldn’t see it in his headlamp, faced the shark but it wasn’t there, was above him, to the left, below, grinning jaws.

He dove, grabbing for the repellant, watching the shark. It attacked, feinted and dodged, the biggest tiger shark he’d ever seen. His hand bumped the repellant, knocking it away. He grasped for it, trying to circle to face the shark, to stay upright despite the missing fin. Don’t panic.

The shark dove, then rose toward him, teeth glinting in his headlamp. His wrist grazed the repellant, driving it lower. He snapped on his Orca torch, looked around frantically for Two, but the other diver wasn’t there.

Don’t panic.

He sank deeper. His face touched the tube. He grabbed and squeezed it, repellant blinding his mask. The shark circled once, slid into the depths.

The repellant faded. He coughed, realized he had spit out his mouthpiece. He shoved it in, gurgled water, coughed and spit it out. His legs and feet were still there. The shark had just nicked him, tested him. Maybe it had smelled blood from when he’d torn his knee climbing out of the sub.

Or blood from someone else?

Where was Two?

The shark darted beneath him. He wanted to shine his torch at it, but that might attract it, anger it. He pulled in his legs and yanked out a second tube. Black repellant spurted out.

Don’t panic.

One tube left. The rebreather thundered with his panting. Larger and larger, the shark nosed toward him through clouds of repellant, crunching its jaws.

He ripped off his divepack, the rebreather hissing, and smashed the shark’s snout. It dove, tail slamming him sideways, swung round and began to circle him, closer and closer.

Don’t panic.

Faster the shark circled. With only one fin he couldn’t keep up; it would get him. He fired the last repellant.

It clouded the water and he couldn’t see the shark, only felt the crush of water as it smashed past, couldn’t hear over his own frantic gasps. Choking and crying, he shoved his arms back through the divepack straps, tugged up his legs against his body.

Beyond his torch light the watery darkness expanded forever. Without Two, how could he finish? Should he return to the sub? Maybe Two was already there, had abandoned the mission because of the shark? There’d been no message from the sub.

The water grew colder, darker; he was sinking too deep. The repellant was gone. With tiger sharks, he remembered, when there’s one, there’s many.

His watch showed 38 feet. He couldn’t see the shark. Fish schooled past, fusiliers or jacks.
01:52, the watch said. One hour left. If one diver didn’t reach the platform, the other had to do it alone. He turned to 347 degrees and began to swim, slowly kicking the one fin.

Above him the black waves glinted with light. He ached to go up, but the shark would attack if he rose to the top like a dying fish. He swam toward the light till it brightened the wavetops, then surfaced quickly to check his approach.

Before him, a wide platform of brilliant lights towered ten stories into the night, a glittering city on pylons over the waves, its gas flare blazing across the black sky.

A school of barracuda shot like missiles beneath him. He checked his watch: 02:03. He sank back into the gloom and swam northeast toward a huge metal strut descending into the sea. His first position – the southeast corner pylon.

In the oily rushing darkness there was no sign of Two. For an instant, he wondered who Two was – on missions like this you never knew the others’ names, you just had numbers.

Waves roiled round the pylon, greasy and oil-turbid, slamming him against the barnacles and clams on the steel. Bounced back and forth, he tried to set his course northwest at 320 degrees and almost swam into another strut of the pylon, so big it took him half a minute to go around it.

Fish struck his face – butterflies and angels and little trash feeders drawn to his headlamp.

The platform’s light dissolved down through the oily water. 02:19. He sank below it, watching for the shark, for sea snakes and scorpion fish.

At the platform’s center, a huge cluster of four pipes descended straight down. They roared with the gas rushing up them toward the platform above.

Easy part now. He touched a pipe, then yanked back his hand. That gas comes out of the earth at boiling point. And a burn attracts sharks just like blood.

He was losing it, too worried about the shark, about Two. Don’t panic.

Above him, waves lashed the pylons, fell back on themselves and raveled on. Oil streaked the surface, distorting the light from the platform’s flare. How strange, he thought, to bore into the earth.

Suck life from the past. And burn it in the sky.

He dove down the pipes to fifty feet, where a great steel ring clamped the four pipes together. The bolts on each flange were big as his head. He unslung the divepack and took out a heavy package.

It was solid, malleable, crescent-shaped, as long as his forearm. He pinned it into place under the lower flange, near one of the four hot pipes.

He placed a second charge against the upper flange. Unrolling the coil of wire that linked them to two other charges from his pack, he swam a third of the way around the pipes till the wire grew taut, and fitted the two other charges above and below the flange.

On the unrolled wire midway between the two pairs of charges was a water-sealed box like a soap dish that he tucked under the flange. He ran his finger and thumb along each wire; there were no kinks, no cuts.

02:47 – ahead of schedule, despite the shark. Even without Two. When his watch hit 02:55, he pushed a two-inch button on the right side of the water-sealed box, then swam up to twenty feet below surface and southward from the platform, rechecking his watch often for depth and direction. He craved to shine down his torch to check for the shark, but that would only attract it.

Don’t panic.

You can do this in your sleep. In seven minutes you’ll be back in the sub. F* Two.

Far below, a huge shape crossed the deep. No, he begged. Please no. He lit the torch. The shape undulated onward, trailing phosphorescence. A giant squid.

But now he’d turned on his torch.

About the Author

Mike Bond is the author of nearly a dozen bestselling novels and an ecologist, war and human rights journalist, award-winning poet, and international energy expert. His work spans more than thirty countries across seven continents, often drawn from firsthand experiences in remote, dangerous, and war-torn regions. His novels are praised worldwide for their intricate plots, vivid settings, and explosive pacing. His reporting has covered wars, revolutions, terrorism, and major environmental crises.

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