Ripley chuckled. “Getting subtle in your old age, aren’t you, Dad?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“That being the case, I don’t suppose you’d know the pay, either.”
“Six hundred thousand a year,” shot back Gwillam Forte. “That’s to start. More when profits justify it.”
“A free hand?”
“Absolutely.”
“And when the company’s in the black?”
“The stock closed today at 6 3/8. There are five million shares outstanding. I’ll give each of you options–at eight–to buy half the shares, less one which I’ll hold onto to keep peace in the family. Once you boys pull the company out of the red.”
Ripley Forte thought it over. “Did you ever wonder what it’s like to build shopping malls, Dad?” he asked finally.
“Can’t say as I ever did, son.”
“Don’t ask.”
The wind had picked up. Low-lying patches of fog eddied around the iceberg. Now only the tender’s radar could warn them of its imminent capsize. The margin of safety was cut, but what the hell–roping icebergs was no more risky than taking a banker’s word of honor, and besides, the air was cleaner than in lower Manhattan.
After the first ten minutes, the barge and its lassoed prey had slowly accelerated until, forty-five minutes later, they were plowing steadily through the waves at 880 meters per hour, at right angles to the Labrador Current. The mathematics was simple enough: Providing that a berg was small enough–few were larger than a million tons– and that radar detected its approach within seven thousand meters of a downstream drilling rig, there would be ample time to dispatch a propfan sled to rope and tow it away from a collision course with the platform.
Speed and power were the keys.
He hadn’t understood this elemental fact when, in 1998, he had brashly made the winning bid to the Canadian government for the Yellow Rose Oil Field concession. More prudent investors, fearing rogue icebergs such as that which sank the Titanic in 1912, had declined to bid.
Forte planned tugboat intercepts of threatening icebergs as far as sixty kilometers north of his rigs up Iceberg Alley, and to tow them clear. His failure to do so had cost him his fortune and the lives of many good men. Icebergs, poor reflectors of radio waves, had slipped like eels through the radar net with disconcerting regularity. During the first four years ghostly mountains of moving ice had penetrated the radar defenses and sank one pedestal and two jack-up rigs, dragging nearly two hundred men to the bottom. Increasingly in hock to the banks–the rigs cost up to $200 million apiece–Forte in desperation strengthened his line of radar picket craft and tripled the number of oceangoing tugs. No more rigs were lost, but the huge revenue-draining fleet of tugs–idle for the seven iceberg-free months of the year–drove him even closer to bankruptcy.
Five years of incessant struggle and the tragic loss of so many shipmates had aged him, squeezed him dry. By 2003, he felt he had nothing left to give, no expedient left untried. Once again, he sensed, fate was about to push him over the precipice.
Nine years earlier, in 1994, it had seemed that nothing lay ahead but calm seas and smooth sailing. His father had given him, as promised, total control over operations of the new Forte Oceanic Resources. As Gwillam had foreseen, Ripley had driven his scientists, workers, and especially himself like galley slaves to dredge up the treasures of the deep.
The success of Forte Oceanic Resources, Forte argued, depended on developing radical technologies, and the most revolutionary were being discovered and perfected in university laboratories. He packed his bag and went on the road. He returned to Houston with a dozen crack scientists and a single idea: the concentration of mineral salts dissolved in seawater by means of microorganisms. The idea wasn’t exactly new. For years bacteria had been cultivated commercially to break down plastic wastes or to concentrate such toxic substances as dioxin for easier disposal, but the extraction of mineral salts from seawater by means of bacteria had proved a dead end.
Fungi had not. One of Forte’s researchers discovered a soil fungus that gobbled up cadmium in its normal metabolic processes. A genetically engineered mutant did the same for selenium. Starting on this hopeful base, in less than two years his genetic engineers had created fungi that concentrated titanium and monazite–source of thorium and cerium–from seawater. All three elements were extremely valuable. This development ended the United States’s almost total dependence on Russia for titanium, indispensable for the hulls of deep-diving submarines. Even so, these metals constituted a mere fraction of the 40 million tons of dissolved salts worth $35 billion contained in each cubic mile of seawater. Reclamation of these mineral riches, together with mechanized recovery of the abundant phosphorite and manganese nodules from the seabed, put Forte Oceanic Resources in the forefront of American producers of rare metals.
By 1998, Ripley’s energy and organizational skills, the fruits of his researchers’ imagination, and Ned Raynes’ financial acumen had turned the failing company around. Meanwhile, Russia’s bloodless conquest of Europe, Asia, and South America between 1989 and 1993 had slowly choked off the flow of strategic minerals to the United States. As national stockpiles of metals dwindled in the mid-1990s, the price of minerals extracted from the sea by Forte Oceanic Resources skyrocketed. FOR was on its way.
But Ripley Forte wouldn’t be along for the ride. On July 7, 1998, Captain Gwillam Forte went down with the U.S.S. Texas in the Houston Ship Channel, taking along to the bottom an entire Soviet fleet in what would be recorded as one of the most bizarre, lopsided, and ultimately satisfying fleet actions in history. In the aftermath, the State of Texas went its own way as the Republic of Texas, Gwillam Forte was enshrined in the Texas pantheon along with Stephen Austin and Sam Houston, and his vast estate was divided among his numerous ex-wives and their progeny. Ripley’s portion was $37 million in securities and real estate and very near half of FOR’s 5,000,001 shares. Near–and yet so far.
Driven by the pathological ambition of Jennifer Red Cloud, Ned Raynes quickly bought out the fractional shareholdings of his half-siblings, giving him a 6/7-share majority of voting stock, which he exercised by immediately reorganizing the privately held company. Before Ripley knew what was afoot, Ned had sold FOR’s assets to a new company, Raynes Oceanic Resources, Ned Raynes, president, for $10 million. Ripley’s 2,500,000.14286 shares came to $5,000001.35. Since the real assets of the company in four years had increased in value sixfold to more than $200 million, not to mention the tremendous profits that were just beginning to roll in, Ripley Forte computed that he had been diddled out of a round $100 million.
Up there somewhere, his father must have been laughing his head off. Here was Ripley Forte, thirty-seven years old, an accomplished hands-on engineer, yet so devoid of business sense that he’d been taken in by a crude stratagem that he should have anticipated years before.
Since then, to destroy the man, his wife, and his company had become the consuming ambition of Ripley Forte’s life.
The Canadian offshore concession, an area of 7,223 square kilometers on the Grand Banks, would be Forte’s bastion, from which he would engage Raynes Oceanic Resources and batter it into a smoking ruin. Exploratory drillings had indicated the field held reserves of 3.5 billion barrels of sweet crude with gravities averaging 27 API, on a par with the best of Indonesia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, the latter two now in Russian hands. Because the Russians were holding back exports to cripple their capitalist enemy, U.S. production could barely keep pace with domestic demand and prices were steadily rising. If only Forte could solve the problem of the deadly icebergs, he would ride the wave of booming oil prices to riches beyond the dreams of even a Jennifer Red Cloud. And with those riches, he would crush his foes, and ROR would roar no more.
Between Forte and his goal were the icebergs that calved from Greenland’s glaciers at the rate of ten thousand to
twelve thousand a year–about the same number, oddly enough, produced by the vastly larger Antarctic glaciers, although Greenland’s icebergs were mere ice cubes by comparison. Small though they might be, most were big enough to smash and sink the biggest ship afloat or uproot the sturdiest pedestal oil rig like a weed.
The solution to the iceberg dilemma came to him one day as he chugged northward at eighteen knots aboard a tug in pursuit of a 20,000-tonner, an hour’s sailing away. What a waste of time, he mused. A scaled-up bayou buggy–that flat-bottomed skiff powered by a light-aircraft engine and used by hunters in the Everglades– would have made the trip in fifteen minutes. Heavier, bigger, with a mighty power plant… More speed and more power meant faster response, fewer vessels, fewer crew, less overhead, fewer debts.