“It’s truly amazing.”
“This is one of the largest commercial shipyards in the world, Mr. Fairchild. We have nine graving docks spread across seventy-two billion square meters – equal to about seven hundred football fields in your country,” he said. “We have spent close to $1 trillion developing this plant to ensure that it produces the highest quality vessels as efficiently as possible.”
“Holy cow,” Robert said as he struggled to process the numbers Mr. Him was reciting.
“Yes,” Mr. Him agreed solemnly. “It is indeed a sacred place. Shipbuilding is the crown jewel of the Korean economy and Regal Shipbuilding is among the best shipyards there are,” he said.
“It is very impressive,” Robert agreed.
“And yet some people come here to tell me there are too many shipyards,” Mr. Him said thoughtfully. “They tell me I should reduce my capacity. But I ask you this: did your Barack Obama, who I admire very much by the way, close General Motors when they were having some trouble?” he asked rhetorically.
“He bailed them out,” Robert said.
“Correct. President Obama provided critical assistance to a critical industry at a time when they needed it. But what is the alternative – for me to tell my 13,000 workers who provide for more than 15,000 children that they are fired, just because the shipping markets do not happen to be strong at a particular moment in time?”
“Of course not,” Robert said.
“Am I supposed to force my community to shut down the schools, hospitals and everything else that relies on the revenue of this shipyard just because the shipping markets are weak?”
“No.”
“And the truth is, Mr. Fairchild, that while there are always too many shipyards and there always will be, there are still not enough shipyards that are capable of building very large, very complicated, very high quality vessels. We can. We deliver a beautiful, new, well-built ship every four days,” Mr. Him said.
“Every four days?” Robert asked.
“When the shipping market is strong, yes,” Mr. Him said.
“How about when it’s weak?” he asked.
“When the shipping market is weak we still build the ships, but it is like an orphanage around here,” Mr. Him said. “The new babies are lying around everywhere because nobody wants to take the new babies home to start losing money every day; they want to wait as long as they can; sometimes they never come.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Robert said. The exhausted, dehydrated, hungry and emotionally-drained Robert Fairchild felt like he might actually weep from the metaphor of ships as abandoned children.
When he turned to hide his moist eyes from the Korean, he was paralyzed by what he saw in the 2,000-foot-long graving dock. He didn’t need to be a shipping expert to know that the unusual raised deck could only belong to one type of vessel – an LNG carrier.
“Stop the car!” Robert shrieked.
“I agree,” Mr. Him said. “We have had a nice tour, but let’s return to the office and have a cup of tea.”
“Stop the car now!” he yelled again.
The moment Robert Fairchild screamed for the second time, the startled driver slammed on the breaks causing the black Equus wagon to skid across the sand-covered asphalt. Before the vehicle had even come to a complete stop Robert bailed out and tumbled to the ground. He’d scrambled to his feet, pausing only momentarily to inspect the blood seeping through the new hole in the knee of his suit pants. He sprinted the twenty-five yards that separated him from the fence where the road gave way to a one-hundred-foot drop into the graving dock.
As Robert Fairchild stared down into the vast canyon, it took him a moment to see the fifty men scurrying around the vessel in matching grey uniforms and the dozen plumes of smoke rising from welding arcs. As he gazed at the mammoth, partially-constructed machine, Robert experienced the same rapture that King Arthur might have felt when he first laid eyes on another famous vessel – the Holy Grail. The semi-assembled ship below him might not have been as significant to humanity as the chalice that Jesus Christ shared during the Last Supper, but gaining control of the LNG ships held the key to Robert Fairchild’s own salvation.
“I’ll take that one!” Robert boomed when Mr. Him finally joined him at the edge of the canyon. “I want the LNG Carrier,” Robert said.
“I am afraid this is not possible,” Mr. Him said.
“Oh yes it is,” Robert replied.
“Oh no its not,” Mr. Him countered. “She is not available to you,” Mr. Him said. “She is going home with someone else.”
The sudden and intense interest that Mr. Him had received toward the fifteen LNG ships his yard was building was both flattering and troubling to the seasoned shipbuilding executive. He was flattered because the ships were his brainchild. After growing weary of building small, standard ships he had convinced his Board of Directors to license the proprietary technology required to build state-of-the-art LNG carriers.
LNG wasn’t a big market at the time and he had selected it because he figured the ships’ complexity would eliminate fierce competition from aggressive Chinese shipyards – which would provide him with more pricing power. He also assumed that a serious, long-term industrial business like LNG would attract the sort of serious, long-term shipping companies that were willing to invest a huge amount of capital for a long period of time – when most shipping speculators were after exactly the opposite.
Mr. Him had been wrong on both counts.
More than a dozen shipyards had followed him into the LNG market which meant that he now competed for every order. His yard still won most of the desirable contracts, but the competition had compressed his margins to dangerously low levels. The long-term owners he’d been expecting to serve hadn’t behaved as expected either. Even the most serious shipping man of them all, Cornelius Juhl, proved incapable of resisting the temptation of selling the ships for a massive profit a few months earlier; shipping behavior, as it turned out, was the same as human behavior.
“But I want her,” Robert said, “and her sisters, too.”
“Those ladies are spoken for and that is the end of the discussion,” Mr. Him said sternly as he dried the sweat from his forehead. “I do, however, have some very good news for you.”
“What’s that?” Robert asked.
“The good news is that I just so happen to have some very nice post-Panamax container vessels that a German bank has given me full authority to sell on behalf of a bankrupt KG fund,” Mr. Him said. “Come on, let’s jump back into the car and I’ll show them to you.”
“I don’t want post-Panamax container vessels,” Robert said. “I don’t even know how wide the new Panama Canal will be.”
“Good point,” Mr. Him agreed. “Then perhaps I can interest you in a pair of very nice LR1 tankers? These ships will be very profitable just as soon as the Reliance refinery gets up and running in Jamnagar and the stem size and ton miles increase for refined products.”
“I don’t want those either,” Robert repeated like a picky child refusing food.
“How about a self-trailing hopper dredger?” Mr. Him asked hopefully as he recalled the vessel that an Indian company had abandoned two years earlier.
“A what?”
“It is like a seagoing vacuum cleaner. It is a very useful machine now that climate change is affecting the coastline, especially in your part of the world.”
“I don’t want a seagoing vacuum cleaner.”
“How about a shallow-water accommodation rig for four hundred men?” Mr. Him asked. “A group of Norwegians ordered the vessel with money from the bond market but now they don’t have the cash to make the final payment. I can make you a very nice deal on that one if you tow her out of here by the end of the month. It would make for a smashing hotel in New York Harbor.”
“I don’t want an accommodation rig or anything else from your island of misfit ships,” Robert said. “I want the LNG carriers!
”
“But-they-are-not-for-sale,” the Korean said slowly, his controlled, reserved demeanor offering no indication what-so-ever of the total frustration he felt regarding this situation.
As Robert perseverated over his demand, he watched the group of men who had been working on the bow of the LNG vessel begin dismantling a tower of blue scaffolding. When the orange nylon safety curtain drifted slowly to the ground, Robert squinted to read the partially obscured white letters.
“I want the…” Robert paused as he attempted to read the name, “Hispanic. I want the Hispanic!”
“She is called the Hispaniola, Mr. Fairchild, the workers haven’t quite finished putting her name on. And she is not for sale. I don’t know how else to explain this to you.”
“Did you just say Hispaniola?” Robert asked incredulously as he realized he’d stumbled across another reference to Treasure Island.
Yet another wave of homesickness washed over Robert. He had only been away from home for a week but it felt like he’d been gone for a lifetime. While perpetual international travel was one of the great things about working in the shipping industry it was one of the sacrifices as well; he had seen a lot, but he had missed so much.
“Furthermore, we are the only shipyard in the world that can build an LNG vessel like this one,” Mr. Him said. “We have the exclusive license on the necessary technology and because we have so many large graving docks we will deliver six of them to the owner in a few weeks.”
“How much are they?” Robert asked.
“Based on what’s happening in the charter market,” Mr. Him said, “these ships are probably worth close to $200 million each.”
“Fine, I’ll give you $200 million each,” Robert said, as though he were committing to the last of the cookies on a bakery tray and not $3 billion worth of high-specification gas tankers.
Mr. Him’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Robert Fairchild. The acrid shipyard air was now momentarily silent but for the creak of a colossal crane loading steel plates in the distance and a sandblaster performing a “haircut and shave” on the hull of a ship in dry dock for her periodic hull cleaning.
“I admire your persistence, Mr. Fairchild, but the company that originally placed the order for those ships only recently sold them to a new owner who apparently has a very specific use for them,” Mr. Him said. “Therefore, they are not for sale.”
“Then I’ll pay $250 million each,” Robert interrupted and the words plunged into Mr. Him like a dagger; at that price the new owner would make a $750 million profit and he hadn’t even fully paid for the vessels yet. This was how people really made easy money in shipping: flipping ships under construction.
“If you are really willing to offer that much money, I suggest that you approach the owner of the ships directly,” Mr. Him said clinically “Because I want nothing to do with it.”
“With pleasure,” Robert said with the punch-drunk smile of an exhausted man who believes he is close to rest.
Robert Fairchild had spent the last six days circling the world, from New York to Athens to Copenhagen to London to Korea via Dubai, trying to find out who owned the LNG carriers. As he neared the end of his Homeric odyssey, he felt himself becoming philosophical.
During the course of the past week, he had witnessed some of the key drivers of global shipping markets; he’d experienced a small family owner in Greece, a large one in Denmark and a major charterer in America. He had seen a veteran shipbroker at work and pitched an investor hungry for risk. He had witnessed a cartel of leading lenders exhibit grace under pressure and gotten to know the manager of a world-class shipyard. He’d even had the pleasure of meeting Prasanth in the engine room of the Viking Alexandra. The truth was that to really understand the forces that affected international shipping, you had to understand what motivated everyone in the marketplace.
But all that was history now. Judging from the pensive look on Mr. Him’s face, Robert estimated he was no more than sixty seconds away from finally discovering the truth – a truth he believed would finally set him free.
Chapter 27
The Channel Islands
Like most beautiful and strategically located islands, the Channel Islands have been the prize for many fights over the centuries. The last remnant of the medieval Duchy of Normandy, the tiny archipelago has been battled over by naval forces, Aragonese mercenaries, Vikings, Calvinists, Louis XIV, Reformers and Royalists whose Castle Cornet in St. Peter Port was the last stronghold to finally capitulate in 1651. Even Adolf Hitler had taken an interest in the place, fortifying the castle to secure it as a tactical lynchpin in the North Atlantic. The Channel Islands also have a rich history of piracy dating back to the seventeenth century. Their proximity to mainland Europe made the islands an ideal spot for privateering. Today, thanks to favorable tax regulations, the Channel Islands are a safe harbor for international hedge funds, trusts and shipping companies.
When Robert Fairchild regained consciousness in a pitch-black room twenty-four hours after leaving Korea he was lost in time and space.
As his perennially pampered body struggled to adjust to life in the shipping business – having entered his fifth time zone in as many days – he wondered if he had suffered a stroke or some other insidious neurological malady. He opened and closed his eyes as slowly as a butterfly at rest and stared into the infinite darkness unable to ascertain where in the world he was – or even remember that it was his fortieth birthday.
He took a deep breath and allowed his mind to drift, hoping it would bump into something and it quickly did – the memory of sitting next to Aphrodite in the Captain’s Escalade. Using that as his reference point, Robert began to retrace the steps that had led to his present and still unknown location.
Memories came back slowly. He remembered sitting at the harbor-side restaurant called Jimmy the Fish in Mikrolimano and touring the maritime morgue packed with dying aquatic life. He remembered the Swiss Air flight through Zurich and wandering the idyllic streets of Copenhagen the following morning. He remembered the story of the Great Dane’s rescue ship and visiting the Baltic Exchange and having lunch at Harry’s Bar with Sir Nicholas Eaton-Hardy. He remembered being assaulted by Alistair Gooding.
Guilt-tainted details started coming at him fast as Robert stared into the inky darkness; he remembered Mr. Him giving him an endless tour of the shipyard and then claiming not to know the identity of the new owner of the LNG vessels. He remembered storming out of Mr. Him’s office and pretending to leave the premises but in fact aggressively barging into the accounting department three floors down where he demanded to know the origin of the recent wire transfers associated with the LNG carrier named Hispaniola.
Even in his foggy and fragile frame of mind, Robert could clearly remember the expression of terror on Mrs. Park’s face just before the trembling bookkeeper finally divulged the name, “Fjord Bank.” And he would never forget the moment when she surrendered the name of the British banker who had signed the wire transfer – Mr. James Hawkins.
Robert remembered the long flight to Paris via Mumbai followed by a heart-pounding race through the sprawling Charles De Gaulle airport the previous night to catch his connection. He remembered being fortuitously offered the last seat on the last flight of the evening, an old Air France turbo prop, which hadn’t touched down until well after midnight.
As Robert Fairchild lay in bed and massaged his temples he could visualize the old white Peugeot taxi rumbling under the light of a full moon, careening alongside paddocks and pastures, dairy farms and ancient stone walls before finally delivering him to his present location: a harbor-front suite at The Old Government House Hotel on the Channel Island of Guernsey.
He was momentarily relieved to know his location on the planet, but he was not particularly happy about the state of his life or the fruitlessness of his odyssey. At least the ordeal was almost over and he was closer to home and on the beautiful little island of Guernsey, a place he had
always wanted to go.
Ten years earlier he and Grace had been snowbound for three days on Martha’s Vineyard in a rented house with just one movie that someone left behind – a creepy film noir starring Nicole Kidman called The Others that was filmed in the Channel Islands. He remembered once telling Grace that the Channel Islands were one of the places he wanted to visit before he died, but she seemed not to have heard him.
Robert untangled himself from the starched white bed sheets, switched on an oversized lamp and walked over to the sliding glass doors on the opposite side of the enormous hotel room. Excited to experience his first impression of an island he’d always dreamed of visiting, Robert dramatically pulled apart the heavy floral drapes to take in the view from the terrace – but instead he saw nothing.
He didn’t see the picturesque, Colonial clam-shell shaped harbor of St. Peter Port or the fleet of ferries shuttling people and cargo between France and England. He didn’t see the ochre ramparts of famous Castle Cornet or the crystalline blue waters of the North Atlantic. What Robert Fairchild saw instead was a heavy blanket of fog that closely mirrored his own mental state.
For the first time in a week, checking his BlackBerry for a menacing text message with a fiery-faced emoticon from Coco Jacobsen, counting down the days until Robert’s demise, was not his first conscious act. Instead he was totally focused on getting in touch with Grace to make sure she and Oliver were okay. But when Robert dialed her mobile number it buzzed with an unusually heavy European-sounding ring before going into her perky, ten-year-old voicemail greeting.
Robert knew Grace was in New York because Oliver had school that week, but between the twelve-hour time difference in Korea and his spending most of the previous week living on airplanes, he hadn’t been able to reach her by telephone since he left London four days earlier. He tried her number three more times with the same unsatisfying result before giving up.
Fighting his natural inclination to panic about the welfare of his wife and only child, Robert took a cold shower and pulled on the rumpled grey suit – a second skin he was ready to shed. He swilled a pair of $14 skim lattes served on a silver tray from room service and headed downstairs to finish his quest once and for all.
Viking Raid Page 24
