class not replete with dummies, double-majoring in geology and business. He’d followed up the first sheet of parchment with a Harvard MBA, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, this one in geology as well, and so Samuel Price Sherman could not only talk rocks with the explorers but finance with his board members, and that was one of the reasons why Atlantic Richfield stock was as healthy as any oil issue in the known world. His face was lined by a lot of low sun and field grit, and his belly swollen by a lot of beers with the roughnecks out in many godforsaken places, plus hot dogs and other junk food preferred by the men who drifted into such employment. Winston was surprised that Sam didn’t smoke, too. Then he spotted the box on the man’s desk. Cigars. Probably good ones. Sherman could afford the best, but he still had the Ivy League manners not to light up in front of a guest who might be offended by the blue cloud they generated.
Atlantic Richfield’s home office was elsewhere, but as with most major corporations, it didn’t hurt to have a set of offices in Washington, the better to influence members of Congress with the occasional lavish party. Sherman’s personal office was in a corner on the top floor, and plush enough, with a thick beige carpet. The desk was either mahogany or well-seasoned oak, polished like glass, and probably cost more than his secretary made in a year or two.
“So, how do you like working for the government, George?”
“It’s really a fun change of pace. Now I can play with all the things I used to bitch about—so, I guess I’ve kinda given up my right to bitch.”
“That is a major sacrifice, buddy,” Sherman replied with a laugh. “It’s kinda like going over to the enemy, isn’t it?”
“Well, sometimes you gotta pay back, Sam, and making policy the right way can be diverting.”
“Well, I have no complaints with what you guys are doing. The economy seems to like it. Anyway,” Sherman sat up in his comfortable chair. It was time to change subjects. Sam’s time was valuable, too, as he wanted his guest to appreciate. “You didn’t come here for small talk. What can I do for you, Mr. Secretary?”
“Russia.”
Sherman’s eyes changed a little, as they might when the last card was laid in a high-stakes game of stud. “What about it?”
“You have a high-powered exploration team working with the Russians ... they find anything nice?”
“George, that’s sensitive stuff you’re asking. If you were still running Columbus, this would constitute insider-trading information stuff. Hell, I can’t buy any more of our stock now, based on this stuff.”
“Does that mean you’d like to?” TRADER asked with a smile.
“Well, it’ll be public soon enough anyway. Yeah, George. Looks like we’ve found the biggest goddamned oil field ever, bigger ’n the Persian Gulf, bigger ’n Mexico, damned sight bigger than Prudhoe Bay and Western Canada combined. I’m talking big, billions and billions of barrels of what looks like the very best light-sweet crude, just sitting there and waiting for us to pump it out of the tundra. It’s a field we’ll measure in years of production, not just barrels.”
“Bigger than the P.G.?”
Sherman nodded. “By a factor of forty percent, and that’s a very conservative number. The only beef is where it is. Getting that crude out is going to be a mother-humper—to get started, anyway. We’re talking twenty billion dollars just for the pipeline. It’ll make Alaska look like a kindergarten project, but it’ll be worth it.”
“And your end of it?” the Secretary of the Treasury asked.
That question generated a frown. “We’re negotiating that now. The Russians seem to want to pay us a flat consulting fee, like a billion dollars a year—they’re talking a lot less than that now, but you know how the hog-tradin’ works at this stage, right? They say a couple of hundred million, but they mean a billion a year, for seven to ten years, I’d imagine. And that isn’t bad for what we’d have to do for the money, but I want a minimum of five percent of the find, and that’s not at all an unreasonable request on our part. They have some good people in the geology business, but nobody in the world can sniff out oil in ice like my people can, and they’ve got a lot to learn about how to exploit something like this. We’ve been there and done