Читать книгу China Rising - Alexander Scipio - Страница 7

Dallas

Tuesday, 12 March, 21:10 hours GMT (16:10 Local)

Tom Palmer watched as the last of his teams of men and their families boarded the third, and final, chartered China Air 747.

Each aircraft was configured for all First Class seating, with seats that could be laid flat to become beds for the overnight, 13-hour flight. The aircraft held 192 passengers and a full complement of attendants.

Tom’s team included the 87 men and women in his employ, his entire company. Adding their spouses and children made a total of 484 passengers. The first aircraft had loaded and departed LAX fifteen minutes ago. The second now taxied toward the runway. Once he boarded this 747, his company no longer would have a US presence, but would have moved to China, and a very lucrative and family-friendly multi-year agreement. An agreement and opportunity good enough that none of his employees had thought it advisable to reject.

Yes, they’d be leaving America, but as oil workers understood better than most, it had become a global economy staffed by people willing to accept global assignments.

He knew, as did every member of his team, that this was a gamble. But it also was a challenge, the kind his men liked. From what he knew of his men’s families, the women had married these men because they liked the challenges, too, and because they liked the kind of men willing to accept big challenges, to go out into the world head-on, take what it had to give, for better or worse, and move forward.

Tom and his employees and their spouses – the Chinese had understood the psychology of American families, and particularly wives, quite well, it had turned out – had made an escorted trip to a city similar to the one being built for them. “Their” city had not quite yet been completed at the time; now it was.

The city they had visited was the model for theirs. It had excellent proximity to a very good hospital in a quickly-growing urban area. The school was first-rate, and the young teachers all smiling, happy and bilingual. Tom particularly had been impressed with the numbers of books on the shelves. Too many of the classrooms he had seen in America lacked good books – hell, they lacked any books once you got past First Grade where a teacher still read to her students. Maybe. Here the shelves were stocked with excellent books. At least he could tell the titles in English; he assumed the Chinese titles were of similar quality.

The school had excellent sports fields, too: soccer fields, even two baseball diamonds, a Little League-size and a High-School-size, he knew by looking at the basepaths. There were large grassy spaces on which to run and play and be kids, and an indoor gymnasium with a full field house, including basketball courts, handball and racquetball. Outside of school hours, the facilities were available to the families and workers whenever they wished.

Their hosts had put on a presentation at which the teachers introduced themselves, talked intelligently regarding their backgrounds and expectations, including their lesson plans for each year as the students progressed. It was evident that their children would receive a better education here than in the deteriorating public schools at home.

He – and the parents – liked everything they saw and heard.

The nearby city provided high-speed rail connections to Shanghai, Beijing and other Chinese cities, as well as shopping, theaters and other of the quickly-increasing varieties of Western conveniences that the Chinese enjoyed as they modernized, moving to cities from rural farms in the tens of millions over the past few decades.

Tom watched “his” families walk up the jetway, some hesitantly, others not, nearly all with some level of trepidation mixed with eagerness. They were on their way to a new place, a new opportunity, and a new challenge.

As he watched he thought back to that day - only eight weeks ago, he realized - when he first had met the Chinese man next to him.

“Let me get this straight,” Tom had said, intrigued, to the Chinese man across the table.

Sitting in a booth in a small coffee shop in West Texas, just down the road from Tom’s corporate HQ, the two men spoke. They had met 30 minutes earlier at the nondescript headquarters. Tom’s may not have been an impressive building, but his was an impressive record. He saw no reason to spend lots of money on fancy buildings and furnishings. Basically, he didn’t see how it helped him close business, execute contracts or pay his guys for their hard work in far-away places for extended periods, and he liked to pay his guys well. Consequently he had some of the top men and women in his industry working for him, and his record of successful projects far outweighed the occasional inevitable failure along the way.

“You want to hire my company, all of it, for an extended period of time. Years. You want me to bring my guys – and their families – to this location. You want us to develop prospective oil fields where initial research has shown them to be, but which have not yet been proved-up. And you want us not only to develop these fields, but teach your folks how to do our jobs, thereby working ourselves out of a job.” He paused, studying the man across from him. “Have I got that right?

The man nodded. “Working yourselves out of a job only in that particular location. We are quite sure to continue developing new fields. You and your men have perfected new drilling and extraction techniques, techniques far more productive than your competitors, and resulting in much less environmental degradation. With your teams teaching us, the cost of extracting oil will decrease, the price of energy will decrease, and tens of millions of people can advance more quickly. This is a very good thing, yes? That is why we want you.” The man took a sip from his coffee. “And, of course, for reasons that baffle the rest of the world, you are not allowed to use your techniques or men on oil resources here in America. This is unfortunate for America, but certainly fortunate for us, and it also can be for you.”

Tom considered this only briefly, knowing it to be true. Though the new president had talked about opening oil deposits in America, the usual environmental suspects made more noise every day about stopping any new oil extraction in America, a nation with, it was turning out, as much oil in the ground as Saudi Arabia. Why these “environmentalists” refused to see that not drilling under the extremely strict environmental and ecological regulations of America just meant that drilling instead was done where no thought at all was given to the environment – resulting in a totally trashed landscape where oil was drilled in the third world – only to be used in America anyway, with additional ecological damage in the inevitable occasional tanker wreck – continued to baffle him. But these policies were not something he could control, so he did not spend too much time worrying about their idiocy.

Tom drained his coffee cup, then turned and caught Lila’s eye, raising the cup for a refill. She came over right away, it being a not-busy time in a not-busy diner in a not-busy town, and poured. She looked an offer of more coffee at the Chinese man who shook his head politely. Lila turned away and walked back to her stool behind the lunch counter.

“And for this you will pay my employees a start-up bonus of $100,000 each, and pay my company the going rate – at any given time – plus 1% of the gross revenue as calculated by the number of barrels extracted times the then-current market price, re-calculated bi-monthly.”

The man nodded.

“And you want us to begin as soon as we can; be ready to pack-up and leave within two months.”

Again the man nodded.

Tom asked, “All relocation costs provided at whatever rate I say, including buying my guys’ houses?”

The man nodded.

Tom thought about this as he sipped his coffee. “Well, I guess once you’ve made the decision, the rest is just wasting time, right?”

Again a nod.

“Annual four-week vacations to wherever the workers want to take their families – anywhere in the world – paid for by you?”

Nod.

“Housing will be Western-style?”

Nod.

“Education? Local K-12, in English, and paid tuition at any college in the world the kids can get into?”

“English and Mandarin, Mr. Palmer,” the Chinese man spoke finally. “We want them to be ready for the future, do we not?”

“English and Mandarin.” He thought about that. He nodded. “Classes for the parents and other adults, too?”

Nod.

“And we go on the payroll……”

“As soon as you and I agree on the deal.” He sipped from his cup. “Today, if you like.”

“What if some of the men don’t want to go, or some of the families decide they can’t move, or some of them get there and change their minds?”

“From the point you and I make the deal, everyone will be paid. If anyone decides it is not a good move for them, there will be no questions asked, no return of money; everyone keeps what they have been paid. For those who arrive and decide against staying, they will be paid until they return to America, and we will purchase a home for them wherever in America they decide to live.” He stopped and drank some coffee.

“Mr. Palmer, we want your people to be happy and contented. Happy workers are more productive workers and worth the cost in the long run. Besides,” he finished, “the costs that may be incurred for someone who ultimately changes their mind are so small as to make no sense to quarrel over.”

Tom thought about that for a long sip of coffee and then nodded his head. “Nope, you’re right. They don’t.”

Tom had never been to China. He’d traveled to many places to drill and pump oil, but never China. “What about freedom?” he asked.

The man nodded his head; an expected question.

“I mean, America is pretty free - will we be able to, well, to move about, go where we want if we live there? Buy what we’d like?”

The man nodded again, responding, “You will not find, we do not think, a material difference in your freedoms as workers in remote Chinese territories from your freedoms here or in other locations in which you have worked. We are a very hardworking, people, intent on the freedom to get to our work, to buy what we need. Our Middle Class - the reason we need this additional energy and modernization - is pushing forward to gain access to what they want to buy, what they see in Hollywood movies, or what the young have experienced in schools in America. Our people are becoming more free.”

Tom nodded, thinking as he looked out the window of the diner at the mid-day sky. A cold west-Texas wind gusted across the parking lot. “It gonna be hot there?” he asked, not looking away from the window.

“Hot in the summer. Cold in the winter.”

“When would you like my answer?”

“I think you know your men very well, Mr. Palmer. I would like the answer now. I will accept it as late as noon, tomorrow, and then I must approach my second choice. One who, from all I have heard, is not as good as you and your team.”

Tom nodded again. He put down his coffee cup and looked at the man across the table.

“I normally do my work based on a handshake,” he said. “But I’m asking quite a bit of my people this time. Leaving family, friends, schools.” He looked through the window and down the street again, studying the distance and said, almost in melancholy, “Home.”

He always had liked distance. Their local surroundings were one of the things that kept his company here in what some considered the far end of civilization – the plains of west Texas. He returned his gaze to the Chinese man. “I’ll need a contract.”

The Chinese man turned to the briefcase sitting beside him on the cushioned bench of the booth. Opening it, he removed a short, but simple and complete agreement and passed it to Tom.

Tom studied the pages, reading them through. It took him all his cup of coffee and another. Completed, he looked out the window again, not really seeing the street this time, but men working, his men. Men who had trusted and followed him all over the planet.

In his mind’s eye he saw oil fields his men had drilled and made productive in sand, rock, desert and ice. Envisioning the future and more wells, more of the same hard work, but this time with a good home, good schools run for the benefit of his men and their families. Heck, the men home with their families. Vacations these families probably would not be willing or able to take otherwise. College for all his families’ kids.

Displacement? Yep. Could they handle that? Probably; the oilman’s life was where he worked – that’s what made him an oilman in the 21st Century. It wasn’t as though oil cared about national boundaries.

He looked back at the man across the table for a long moment. The man returned his gaze unblinkingly. Tom nodded and stuck out his hand.

“I’ll need to run this by my team and my lawyers,” he said, nodding at the contract, “but I think it’ll work for us.”

The Chinese man shook the offered hand.

The last man and his wife boarded the aircraft, following their children up the jetway. Tom watched and then looked at the Chinese man, who returned his gaze with a small, almost intimate smile on his face.

Tom raised an eyebrow at the man, who said, “I am glad, we are glad, you and your men and their families have joined us. Seriously, Tom.”

It was the first time in the weeks of close contact that the man had used his Christian name. “I will see you in China,” he said, and put out his hand.

Tom smiled back at him, nodded, and shook his hand. Then he turned and strode up the jetway and onto the airplane.