Except that the procession wasn’t quite endless. It would end when the money stopped, because the sailors had to be paid, the debt on the tanker serviced, and most of all, the oil had to be bought. And it wasn’t just one tanker. There were quite a few of them on the China run. A satellite focused on just that one segment of the world’s oil trade would have seen them from a distance, looking like cars on a highway going to and from the same two points continuously. And like cars, they didn’t have to go merely between those two places. There were other ports at which to load oil, and others at which to offload it, and to the crews of the tankers, the places of origin and destination didn’t really matter very much, because almost all of their time was spent at sea, and the sea was always the same. Nor did it matter to the owners of the tankers, or the agents who did the chartering. What mattered was that they got paid for their time.
For this charter, the money had been wire-transferred from one account to another, and so the crew stood at their posts watching the loading process—monitoring it mainly by watching various dials and gauges; you couldn’t see the oil going through the pipes, after all. Various crew members were on the beach to see to the victualing of their ship, and to visit the chandlers to get books and magazines to read, videocassette movies, and drink to go with the food, plus whatever consumable supplies had been used up on the inbound trip. A few crewmen looked for women whose charms might be rented, but that was an iffy business in Iran. None of them knew or thought very much about who paid for their services. Their job was to operate the ship safely and efficiently. The ship’s officers mainly had their wives along, for whom the voyages were extended, if rather boring, pleasure cruises: Every modern tanker had a swimming pool and a deck for tanning, plus satellite TV for news and entertainment. And none of them particularly cared where the ship went, because for the women shopping was shopping, and any new port had its special charms.
This particular tanker, the World Progress, was chartered out of London, and had five more Shanghai runs scheduled until the charter ran out. The charter was paid, however, on a per-voyage basis, and the funds for this trip had been wired only seven days before. That was hardly a matter of concern for the owners or the ship’s agent. After all, they were dealing with a nation-state, whose credit tended to be good. In due course, the loading was completed. A computerized system told the ship’s first officer that the ship’s trim was correct, and he so notified the master, who then told the chief engineer to wind up the ship’s gas-turbine engines. This engine type made things easy, and in less than five minutes, the ship’s power plant was fully ready for sea. Twenty minutes after that, powerful harbor tugs eased the ship away from the loading dock. This evolution is the most demanding for a tanker’s crew, because only in confined waters is the risk of collision and serious damage quite so real. But within two hours, the tanker was under way under her own power, heading for the narrows at Bandar Abbas, and then the open sea.
“Yes, Qian,” Premier Xu said tiredly. “Proceed.” “Comrades, at our last meeting I warned you of a potential problem of no small proportions. That problem is with us now, and it is growing larger.”
“Are we running out of money, Qian?” Zhang Han San asked, with a barely concealed smirk. The answer amused him even more,
“Yes, Zhang, we are.”
“How can a nation run out of money?” the senior Politburo member demanded.
“The same way a factory worker can, by spending more than he has. Another way is to offend his boss and lose his job. We have done both,” Qian replied evenly.
“What ‘boss’ do we have?” Zhang inquired, with a disarming and eerie gentleness.
“Comrades, that is what we call trade. We sell our goods to others in return for money, and we use that money to purchase goods from those others. Since we are not peasants from ancient times bartering a pig for a sheep, we must use money, which is the means of international exchange. Our trade with America has generated an annual surplus on the order of seventy billion American dollars.”
“Generous of the foreign devils,” Premier Xu observed to Zhang sotto voce.
“Which we have almost entirely spent for various items, largely for our colleagues in the People’s Liberation Army of late. Most of these are long-term purchase items for which advance payment was necessary, as is normal in the international arms business. To this, we must add oil and wheat. There are other things which are important to our economy, but we will concentrate on these for the moment.” Qian looked around the table for approval. He got it, though Marshal Luo Cong, Defense Minister, and commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army— and lord of the PLA’s sizable industrial empire—was now looking on with a gimlet eye. The expenditures of his personal empire had been singled out, and that was not calculated to please him.
“Comrades,” Qian continued, “we now face the loss of much, perhaps most, of that trade surplus with America, and other foreign countries as well. You see these?” He held up a fistful of telexes and e-mail printouts. “These are cancellations of commercial business orders and funds transfers. Let me clarify. These are billions of lost dollars, money which in some cases we have already spent—but money we will never have because we have angered those with whom we do business.”
“Do you tell me that they have such power over us? Rubbish!” another member observed.
“Comrade, they have the power to buy our trade goods for cash, or not buy them for cash. If they choose not to buy them, we do not get the money we need to spend for Marshal Luo’s expensive toys.” He used that word deliberately. It was time to explain the facts of life to these people, and a slap across the face was sure to get their attention. “Now, let us consider wheat. We use wheat to make bread and noodles. If you have no wheat, you have no noodles.
“Our country does not grow enough wheat to feed our people. We know this. We have too many mouths to feed. In a few months, the great producing countries, America, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and so forth, they will all have wheat to sell—but with what shall we buy it? Marshal Luo, your army needs oil to refine into diesel fuel and jet fuel, does it not? We need the same things for our diesel trains, and our airlines. But we cannot produce all the oil we need for our domestic needs, and so we must buy it from the Persian Gulf and elsewhere—again, with what shall we buy it?”
“So, sell our trade goods to someone else?” a member asked, with rather surprising innocence, Qian thought.
“Who else might there be, comrade? There is only one America. We have also offended all of Europe. Whom does that leave? Australia? They are allied to Europe and America. Japan? They also sell to America, and they will move to replace our lost markets, not to buy from us. South America, perhaps? Those are all Christian countries, and we just killed a senior Christian churchman, didn’t we? Moreover, in their ethical world, he died heroically. We have not just killed. We have created a holy martyr to their faith!
“Comrades, we have deliberately structured our industry base to sell to the American market. To sell elsewhere, we would first have to determine what they need that we can make, and then enter the market. You don’t just show up with a boatload of products and exchange it for cash on the dock! It takes time and patience to become a force in such a market. Comrades, we have cast away the work of decades. The money we are losing will not come back for years, and until then, we must learn to live our national life differently.”
“What are you saying?” Zhang shot back.
“I am saying that the People’s Republic faces economic ruin because two of our policemen killed those two meddling churchmen.”
“That is not possible!”
“It is not possible, Zhang? If you offend the man who gives you money, then he will give you no more. Can you understand that? We’ve gone far out of our way to offend America, and then we offended all of Europe as well. We have made ourselves outcasts—they call us barbarians because of that unhappy incident at the hospital. I do not defend them, but I must tell you what they say and think. And as long as they say those things and think those things, it is we who will pay for the error.”