"da Cruz, Daniel - Republic of Texas 02 - Texas on the Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

"What about Ned Raynes?" Gwillam's son by his second wife, Ned was thirty years old, had recently married a stunning young woman of mixed Norwegian, Scots, and Apache parentage, and was one of the cleverest corporate manipulators west of the Mississippi.

"Ned's a charmer, all right," said the elder Forte, "but son or no son, he's a schemer and a crook--must have inherited his stepfather's character. He'd work like hell to make the company a winner just for the satisfaction of stealing it from me the minute its balance sheet was in the black. And if he didn't, that Red Cloud girl would. She's smart and ambitious and as ruthless as old Chief Snake-in-the-Grass. I've left standing instructions to take her tomahawk away before she's allowed into the house."

"Then keep the stock and put him on the payroll, with the strict understanding that he handles the business side and nothing but."

"He wouldn't be interested unless he had a big chunk of the equity, Rip. Besides, who would run the operations, the technical side? The company has all the technology to recover manganese nodules, all the ships and personnel. The company also makes thermal energy units, but that operation is a shambles, and the efficiency of the OTEC equipment itself has to be upgraded to become commercially profitable. And there are 8,615 people in five major divisions to ramrod. No, my boy, I've looked everywhere, but I haven't found the man to tackle a mix like that."

"It's a tough assignment," conceded Ripley. "It looks like you want a man who's smart, flexible, and a whipwielding son of a bitch to shape up an outfit like that. One with the clout to stiff-arm Ned when he tried to horn in on operations. And knowing Ned, he'd try. You need a lean, keen, clean, mean bastard."

Gwillam Forte sipped his brandy, apparently lost in thought. He studied the Remington oil over the mantel, a cowboy on a cayuse chasing a heifer across the prairie. He carefully flicked the ash from his evening Emperador and hummed a little tune. He examined his fake fingernails. He assiduously avoided Ripley Forte's eyes.

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.