A Mr. Sherman, Mr. Secretary,” Winston’s secretary told him over the intercom. “Line three.”
“Hey, Sam,” SecTreas said, as he picked up the phone. “What’s new?”
“Our oil field up north,” the president of Atlantic Richfield replied
“Good news?”
“You might say that. Our field people say the find is about fifty percent bigger than our initial estimates.”
“How solid is that information?”
“About as reliable as one of your T -bills, George. My head field guy is Ernie Beach. He’s as good at finding oil as you used to be playing up on The Street.” Maybe even better, Sam Sherman didn’t add. Winston was known to have something of an ego on the subject of his own worth. The addendum got through anyway.
“So, summarize that for me,” the Secretary of the Treasury commanded.
“So, when this field comes on line, the Russians will be in a position to purchase Saudi Arabia outright, plus Kuwait and maybe half of Iran. It makes east Texas look like a fart in a tornado. It’s huge, George.”
“Hard to get out?”
“It won’t be easy, and it won’t be inexpensive, but from an engineering point of view it’s pretty straightforward. If you want to buy a hot stock, pick a Russian company that makes cold-weather gear. They’re going to be real busy for the next ten years or so,” Sherman advised.
“Okay, and what can you tell me of the implications for Russia in economic terms?”
“Hard to say. It will take eight to twelve years to bring this field fully on line, and the amount of crude this will dump on the market will distort market conditions quite a bit. We haven’t modeled all that out— but it’s going to be huge, like in the neighborhood of one hundred billion dollars per year, current-year dollars, that is.”
“For how long?” Winston could almost hear the shrug that followed.
“Twenty years, maybe more. Our friends in Moscow still want us to sit on this, but word’s perking out in our company, like trying to hide a sunrise, y’know? I give it a month before it breaks out into the news media. Maybe a little longer’n that, but not much.”
“What about the gold strike?”
“Hell, George, they’re not telling me anything about that, but my guy in Moscow says the cat’s gobbled down some kind of canary, or that’s how it appears to him. That will probably depress the world price of gold about five, maybe ten percent, but our models say it’ll rebound before Ivan starts selling the stuff he pulls out of the ground. Our Russian friends— well, their rich uncle just bit the big one and left them the whole estate, y’know?”
“And no adverse effects on us,” Winston thought.
“Hell, no. They’ll have to buy all sorts of hardware from our people, and they’ll need a lot of expertise that only we have, and after that’s over, the world price of oil goes down, and that won’t hurt us either. You know, George, I like the Russians. They’ve been unlucky sonsabitches for a long time, but maybe this’ll change that for ’em.”
“No objections here or next door, Sam,” TRADER assured his friend. “Thanks for the information.”
“Well, you guys still collect my taxes.” You bastards, he didn’t add, but Winston heard it anyway, including the chuckle. “See you around, George.”
“Right, have a good one, Sam, and thanks.” Winston killed one button on his phone, selected another line, and hit his number nine speed-dial line.
“Yeah?” a familiar voice responded. Only ten people had access to this number.
“Jack, it’s George, just had a call from Sam Sherman, Atlantic Richfield.”
“Russia?”
“Yeah. The field is fifty percent bigger than they initially thought. That makes it pretty damned big, biggest oil strike ever, as a matter of fact, bigger than the whole Persian Gulf combined. Getting the oil out will be a little expensive, but Sam says it’s all cookbook stuff— hard, but they know how it’s done, no new technology to invent, just a matter of spending the money— and not even all that much, ’cause labor is a lot cheaper there than it is here. The Russians are going to get rich.”
“How rich?” the President asked.
“On the order of a hundred billion dollars per year once the field is fully on line, and that’s good for twenty years, maybe more.”
Jack had to whistle at that. “Two trillion dollars. That’s real money, George.”
“That’s what we call it on The Street, Mr. President,” Winston agreed. “Sure as hell, that’s real money.”
“And what effect will it have on the Russian economy?”
“It won’t hurt them very much,” SecTreas assured him. “It gets them a ton of hard currency. With that money they can buy the things they’d like to have, and buy the tools to build the things they can make on their own. This will re-industrialize their country, Jack, jump-start them into the new century, assuming they have the brains to make proper use of it and not let it all bug out to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
“How can we help them?” POTUS asked.
“Best answer to that, you and I and two or three others sit down with our Russian counterparts and ask them what they need. If we can get a few of our industrialists to build some plants over there, it won’t hurt, and it’ll damned sure look good on TV.”
“Noted, George. Get me a paper on that by the beginning of next week, and then we’ll see if we can figure out a way to let the Russians know what we know.”
It was the end of another overlong day for Sergey Golovko. Running the SVR was job enough for any man, but he also had to back up Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy, President of the Russian Republic. President Grushavoy had his own collection of ministers, some of them competent, the others selected for their political capital, or merely to deny them to the political opposition. They could still do damage on the inside of Grushavoy’s administration, but less than on the outside. On the inside they had to use small-caliber weapons, lest they be killed by their own shots.
The good news was that the Economics Minister, Vasily Konstantinovich Solomentsev, was intelligent and seemingly honest as well, as rare a combination in the Russian political spectrum as anywhere else in the known world. He had his ambitions— it was a rare minister who did not— but mainly, it seemed, he wanted his nation to prosper, and didn’t want to profit himself all that much. A little self-enrichment was all right with Golovko, just so that a man wasn’t a pig about it. The line, for Sergey Nikolay’ch, was about twenty million euros. More than that was hoggish, but less was understandable. After all, if a minister was successful at helping his country, he or she was entitled to get a proper reward for doing so. The ordinary working people out there wouldn’t mind, if the result was a better life for them, would they? Probably not, the spymaster thought. This wasn’t America, overrun with pointless and counterproductive “ethics” laws. The American President, whom Golovko knew well, had an aphorism that the Russian admired: If you have to write your ethics rules down, you’ve already lost. No fool, that Ryan, once a deadly enemy, and now a good friend, or seemingly so. Golovko had cultivated that friendship by providing help to America in two serious international crises. He’d done it because it had, first of all, been in his nation’s interest, and secondly, because Ryan was a man of honor, and unlikely to forget such favors. It had also amused Golovko, who’d spent most of his adulthood in an agency devoted to the destruction of the West.
But what about himself? Was someone intent on his own destruction? Had someone desired to end his life in a loud and spectacular manner on the paving stones of Dzerzhinskiy Square? The more his mind dwelt on that question, the more frightening it became. Few healthy men could contemplate the end of their lives with equanimity, and Golovko wasn’t one of them. His hands never shook, but he didn’t argue at all with Major Shelepin’s increasingly invasive measures to keep him alive. The car changed every day in color, and sometimes in make, and the routes to his office shared only the starting place— the SVR building was sufficiently large that the daily journey to work had a total of five possible end points. The clever part, which Golovko admired, was that he himself occasionally rode in the front seat of the lead vehicle, while some functionary sat in the back seat of the putative guarded car. Anatoliy was no fool, and even showed the occasional spark of creativity.
But none of that now. Golovko shook his head and opened his last folder of the day, scanning first of all the executive summary— and his mind skidded to an almost instant halt, his hand reaching for a phone and dialing a number.