The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [313]
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