The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [42]
"Killed him?"
Sherman nodded. "Yup, blew him away with a bazooka right there on the street—it made CNN, remember?" The TV news network had covered it as a crime story with no further significance except for its dramatic brutality, a story gone and forgotten in a single day.
George Winston vaguely remembered it, and set it aside. "How often you go over there?"
"Not too often, twice this year. Usually hop my G-V over direct out of Reagan or Dallas/Fort Worth. Long flight, but it's a one-hop. No, I haven't seen the new oil field yet. Expect I'll have to in a few months, but I'll try for decent weather. Boy, you don't know what cold means 'til you go that far north in the winter. Thing is, it's dark then, so you're better off waiting 'til summer anyway. But at best you can leave the sticks at home. Ain't no golf a' tall in that part of the world, George."
"So take a rifle and bag yourself a bear, make a nice rug," Winston offered.
"Gave that up. Besides, I got three polar bears. That one is number eight in the Boone and Crockett all-time book," Sherman said, pointing to a photo on the far wall. Sure enough, it showed a hell of a big polar bear. "I've made two kids on that rug," the president of Atlantic Richfield observed, with a sly smile. The pelt in question lay before his bedroom fireplace in Aspen, Colorado, where his wife liked to ski in the winter.
"Why'd you give it up?"
"My kids think there aren't enough polar bears anymore. All that ecology shit they learn in school now."
"Yeah," SecTreas said sympathetically, "and they do make such great rugs."
"Right, well, that rug was threatening some of our workers up at Prudhoe Bay back in … '75, as I recall, and I took him at sixty yards with my .338 Winchester. One shot," the Texan assured his guest. "I suppose nowadays you have to let the bear kill a human bein', and then you're supposed to do is just cage him and transport him to another location so the bear doesn't get too traumatized, right?"
"Sam, I'm Secretary of the Treasury. I leave the birds and bees to EPA. I don't hug trees, not until they turn the wood chips into T -Bills, anyway."
A chuckle: "Sorry, George. I'm always hearing that stuff at home. Maybe it's Disney. All wild animals wear white gloves and talk to each other in good Midwestern Iowa English."
"Cheer up, Sam. At least they're laying off the supertankers out of Valdez now. How much of the eastern Alaska/Western Canada strike is yours?"
"Not quite half, but that'll keep my stockholders in milk and cookies for a long time."
"So, between that one and Siberia, how many options will they give you to exercise?" Sam Sherman got a nice salary, but at his level the way you earned your keep was measured in the number of options in the stock whose value your work had increased, invariably offered you by the board of directors, whose own holdings you inflated in value through your efforts.
A knowing smile, and a raised eyebrow: "A lot, George. Quite a lot."
"Married life agrees with you, Andrea," President Ryan observed with a smile at his Principal Agent. She was dressing better, and there was a definite spring in her step now. He wasn't sure if her skin had a new glow, or maybe her makeup was just different. Jack had learned never to comment on a woman's makeup. He always got it wrong.
"You're not the only one to say that, sir."
"One hesitates to say such things to a grown adult female, especially if you're fashion-bereft, as I am," Jack said, his smile broadening somewhat. His wife, Cathy, still said she had to dress him because his taste was entirely, she said, in his mouth. "But the change is sufficiently marked that even a man such as myself can see it."
"Thank you, Mr. President. Pat is a very good man, even for a Bureau puke."
"What's he doing now?"
"He's up in Philadelphia right now. Director Murray sent him off on a bank robbery, two local cops got killed in