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"A people that values its privileges above principles soon loses both."


~~  Dwight D. Eisenhower





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----------- [excerpt from the novel You Belong To Me] -------------


2


Green Can 21, Ambrose Channel, New York Harbor


Ahmed wasn't sentimental about the view, the sight of lower Manhattan rising up out of a gloomy Sunday dawn as the great vessel slipped toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge five miles south of the island's tip.  Yet British and French and German tourists stood clustered at the foredeck taking pictures with their phones, huddling with cups of coffee, the sun just above the horizon to the east. 


His four Japanese companions were still in their staterooms communicating directly with their colleagues in Tokyo, though it was now evening there.  The deal was done, the documents revised and transmitted back and forth among Tokyo, New York, Dubai, and London almost continuously.  As luxurious accommodations went, the RMS Queen Mary 2 was unquestionably fine,





but for physical isolation, its transit across the North Atlantic couldn't be beat.  Once you were heading west from England, beyond helicopter range of the Royal Navy, that was it; the only way off the 1,132-foot ship was to take an endless swim. 


You and your counterparts were stuck there together and so you had better negotiate. 


The fact that they had hit heavy seas added some urgency to the conversation, and when the captain explained in his droll British accent that the ship was equipped with the latest turbine stabilizers fore and aft and that there was no reason for "undue concern," the Japanese bankers became more compliant. 




They were, after all, going to get paid, collectively and individually, so long as a deal went through.  Their Tokyo bank had possessed the foresight in 1986 to buy from the then bankrupt Russian government, for the equivalent of 900 million yen in gold bars, the deepwater drilling rights to a huge quadrant near the Lomonosov Ridge





within the Russian Arctic sector.  It had been a nearly clairvoyant purchase, based on the work of an ancient Japanese climatologist who predicted that the future retreat of polar ice would not only make the region accessible to deepwater mining technologies but also to shipping routes certain to open between Russia and North America, allowing for faster and cheaper trade between those continents. 




By the early years of the twenty-first century, Russia had realized its mistake and had initiated a series of controversial seabed claims into international Arctic waters and had even mounted a scientific expedition that sought to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge was in fact an extension of the Russian landmass -- a laughable notion, but one did not laugh in the faces of the Russians.  The rise of Vladimir Putin





from a slippery KGB bureaucrat to a stone-faced dictator bent on restoring Russia's primacy on the world stage meant that Russia would make further exploitation of the quadrant by any other nation costly, if not impossible. 


With the ongoing weakening of the Japanese economy, the bank decided to cash in the value of the drilling rights when the fluctuating price of oil made them look most valuable. 


The bank didn't have the capital to develop the rights, nor the stomach to fight with Russia for access to the waters, nor with Canada, which had also claimed sovereignty over the region.




Ahmed's job on behalf of his consortium was to get the Japanese bankers to cut their price in half by explaining how few international companies could successfully do business with Putin. 


Translation:  If you don't sell to us, you might not be able to sell to anyone else -- and then where are you, with unhappy shareholders and capital locked up when you need it elsewhere? 


So for the first day of the trip, while the other passengers inspected the lesser Renoirs





for sale or enjoyed seaweed facials in the ship's spa, Ahmed had expounded on the general political weakening of the Russian oil oligarchs, the West's unwillingness to lend to them, the technological problems associated with developing the deepwater crust, including the best risk-management estimates of an ecological disaster, and, not least, the gathering consensus by oil company geologists that other quadrants in the region might be more promising. 




The bankers' English was pretty good, but the conversation slowed at times as the Japanese translators caught up. 


He'd been careful to be deferential to the oldest Japanese executive, Mr. Yamamoto, always waiting for him to enter and exit the room first. 


And by addressing Yamamoto primarily, as a sign of respect. 




In the end the Japanese bankers had come down by thirty-one percent, which was enough, and had thrown in a half-built casino they were financing in Macau, subject to approval by Beijing. 


Ahmed hadn't seen the casino coming, and it was a shrewd move that immediately caught the fancy of his bosses, none of whom knew how difficult it was to run a casino in China, let alone make money from it in an overbuilt, intricately corrupt Macau. 


But no matter, the deal was done, hands shaken, bows exchanged, the translators and secretaries double-checking the language, the papers signed.  The Japanese men had celebrated with a round of champagne late the previous evening, the lights of the New Jersey coastline not yet visible, but Ahmed had not joined them, for he had received some unpleasant news.


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{You Belong To Me, by Colin Harrison.  2017.  Sarah Crichton Books.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  18 West 18th Street, New York  10011.}


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