The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [82]
"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