Shock Wave dp-13

by Clive Cussler

  Strouser did not relish his meeting with the diamond maverick. They had known each other since they were children. The close association between the Strousers and the Dorsetts had lasted well over a century, until Arthur cut off any future dealings with Strouser & Sons. The break was not amicable. Dorsett coldly ordered his attorneys to inform Gabe Strouser that his family’s services were no longer required. The axe fell, not with a personal confrontation but over the telephone. It was an insult that badly stung Strouser, and he never forgave Dorsett.

  To save his family’s venerable old firm, Strouser had switched his allegiance to the cartel in South Africa, eventually moving his company headquarters from Sydney to New York. In time he rose to become a respected director of the board. Because the cartel was barred from doing business in the United States due to national antitrust laws, they operated behind the coattails of the respected diamond merchants of Strouser & Sons, who acted as their American arm.

  He would not be here now if the other board directors had not panicked at the rumors of Dorsett Consolidated Mining’s threat to bury the market in an avalanche of stones at sharply discounted prices. They had to act decisively and fast if they were to avert a disaster. A deeply scrupulous man, Strouser was the only cartel member the board of directors could trust to persuade Dorsett not to shatter the established price levels of the market.

  Arthur Dorsett stepped forward and shook Strouser’s hand vigorously. “It’s been a long time, Gabe, too long.”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Arthur.” Strouser’s tone was patronizing, but with an indelible tinge of aversion. “As I recall, your attorneys ordered me never to contact you again.”

  Dorsett shrugged indifferently. “Water under the bridge. Let’s forget it happened and talk old times over lunch.” He motioned to a table, set under an arbor shielded by bulletproof glass, with a magnificent view of Sydney’s harbor.

  The complete opposite of the crude, earthy mining tycoon, Strouser was a strikingly attractive man in his early sixties. With a thick head of well-groomed silver hair, a narrow face with high cheekbones and finely shaped nose that would be the envy of most Hollywood movie actors, he was trim and athletically built with evenly tanned skin, several centimeters shorter than the hulking Dorsett, he had dazzling white teeth and a friendly mouth. He gazed at Dorsett through the blue-green eyes of a cat ready to spring away from the attack of a neighbor’s dog.

  His suit was beautifully cut of the finest wool, conservative but with a few subtle touches that made him look fashionably up-to-date. The tie was expensive silk, the shoes custom-made Italian and polished just short of a mirror shine. His cuff links, contrary to what people expected, were not diamonds but made from opals.

  He was mildly surprised at the friendly reception. Dorsett seemed to be playing a character in a bad play. Strouser had expected an uncomfortable confrontation. He certainly had not anticipated being indulged. He no sooner sat down than Dorsett motioned to a waiter, who lifted a bottle of champagne from a sterling-silver ice bucket and poured Strouser’s glass. He noted with some amusement that Dorsett simply drank from a bottle of Castlemaine beer.

  “When the cartel’s high muck-a-mucks said they were sending a representative to Australia for talks,” said Dorsett, “it never occurred to me they would send you.”

  “Because of our former long-standing association, the directors thought I could read your mind. So they asked me to inquire about a rumor circulating within the trade that you are about to sell stones cheaply in an effort to corner the market. Not industrial-grade diamonds, mind you, but quality gem stones.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “You head an empire of thousands, Arthur. Leaks from disgruntled employees are a way of life.”

  “I’ll have my security people launch an investigation. I don’t cotton to traitors, not on my payroll.”

  “If what we hear has substance, the diamond market is facing a profound crisis,” explained Strouser. “My mission is to make you a substantial offer to keep your stones out of circulation.”

  “There is no scarcity of diamonds, Gabe, there never was. You know you can’t buy me. A dozen cartels couldn’t keep my stones out of circulation.”

  “You’ve been foolish for operating outside the Central Selling Organization, Arthur. You’ve lost millions by not cooperating.”

  “A long-term investment is about to pay enormous dividends,” Dorsett said irrefutably.

  “Then it’s true?” Strouser asked casually. “You’ve been stockpiling for the day when you could turn a fast profit.”

  Dorsett looked at him and smiled, showing his yellowed teeth. “Of course it’s true. All except for the part about a fast profit.”

  “I’ll give you credit, Arthur, you’re candid.”

  “I have nothing to hide, not now.”

  “You cannot continue to go your own way as if the network didn’t exist. Everybody loses.”

  “Easy for you and your pals at the cartel to say when you hold monopolistic control over world diamond production.”

  “Why exploit the market on a whim?” said Strouser, “Why systematically cut each other’s throat? Why disrupt a stable and prosperous industry?”

  Dorsett held up a hand to interrupt. He nodded to the waiter, who served a lobster salad from a cart. Then he stared at Strouser steadily.

  “I am not operating on a whim. I have over a hundred metric tons of diamonds stored in warehouses around the world, with another ten tons ready to ship from my mines as we speak. A few days from now, when fifty percent of them are cut and faceted, I intend to sell them through the House of Dorsett retail stores at ten dollars a carat, on average. The rough stones, I’ll sell to dealers at fifty cents a carat. When I’m finished, the market will tumble and diamonds will lose their luster as a luxury and an investment.”

  Strouser was stunned. His earlier impression was that Dorsett’s marketing strategy was for a temporary dip in prices to make a quick profit. Now he saw the enormity of the grand design. “You’ll impoverish thousands of retailers and wholesalers, yourself included. What can you possibly gain by putting a rope around your neck and kicking over the stool?”

  Dorsett ignored his salad, swilled his beer and gestured for another before continuing. “I’m sitting where the cartel has sat for a hundred years. They control eighty percent of the world’s diamond market. I control eighty percent of the world’s colored gemstone market.”

  Strouser felt as if he were teetering on a trapeze. “I had no idea you owned so many colored gemstone mines.”

  “Neither does anyone else. You’re the first outside my family to know. It was a long and tedious process, involving dozens of interlocking corporations. I bought into every one of the major colored stone producing mines in the world. After I orchestrate the demise of diamond values, I plan to move colored stones into the limelight at discounted prices, thereby spiraling the demand. Then I slowly raise the retail price, take the profits and expand.”

  “You always were a snatch and trash artist, Arthur. But even you can’t destroy what took a century to build.”

  “Unlike the cartel, I don’t plan to suppress competition at the retail level. My stores will compete fairly.”

  “You are making a fight nobody can win. Before you can collapse the diamond market, the cartel will break you. We’ll use every international financial and political maneuver ever devised to stop you in your tracks.”

  “You’re blowin’ in the wind, mate,” Dorsett came back heatedly. “Gone are the days when buyers have to grovel in your high-and-mighty selling offices in London and Johannesburg. Gone are the days of licking boots to be a registered buyer who has to take what you offer him. No more sneaking through back streets to bypass your well-oiled machinery to purchase uncut stones. No more will international police and your hired security organizations fight sham battles with people you label criminals because they engage in your artificially created myth of smuggling and selling on what your l
ittle playmates have concocted as the great and terrible illicit diamond market. No more restrictions to create an enormous demand. You’ve brainwashed governments into passing laws that confine diamond traffic to your channels and your channels only. Laws that forbid a man or woman from legitimately selling a rough stone they found in their own backyard. Now, at long last, the illusion of diamonds as a valued object is only days away from being pronounced dead.”

  “You cannot outspend us,” said Strouser, fighting to remain calm. “We think nothing of spending hundreds of millions to advertise and promote the romance of diamonds.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve considered that and planned for it?” Dorsett laughed. “I’ll match your advertising campaign budget with my own, pushing the chameleon quality of colored gemstones. You’ll promote the sale of a single diamond for an engagement ring, while I’ll promote the spectrum, a world of fashion touched by colored jewelry. My campaign is based around the theme ‘Color her with love.’ But that’s only the half of it, Gabe. I also plan to educate the great unwashed public about the true rarity, of colored gemstones versus the cheap, overabundant supply of diamonds. The end result is that I will significantly shift the buyer’s attitude away from diamonds.”

  Strouser rose to his feet and threw his napkin on the table. “You’re a menace that will destroy thousands of I people and their livelihood,” he said uncompromisingly.

  “You must be prevented from disrupting the market.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Dorsett, showing his teeth. “Climb aboard. Switch your allegiance from diamonds to colored stones. Get smart, Gabe. Color is the wave of the future in the jewelry market.”

  Strouser fought to control the anger that was seething to the surface. “My family have been diamond merchants for ten generations. I live and breathe diamonds. I will not be the one to turn my back on tradition. You have dirty hands, Arthur, even if they are well manicured. I will personally fight you up and down the line until you are no longer a factor in the market.”

  “Any fight comes too late,” Dorsett said coldly.

  “Once colored gemstones take over the market, the diamond craze will disappear overnight.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “What do you intend to do when you leave here?”

  “Alert the board of directors of what you have up your sleeve so they can plan an immediate course of action to knock the wind out of your scheme before it can be realized. It’s not too late to stop you.”

  Dorsett remained sitting and looked up at Strouser. “I don’t think so.”

  Strouser missed his meaning and turned to leave. “Since you won’t listen to reason, I have nothing more to say. Good day to you, Arthur.”

  “Before you leave, Gabe, I have a present for you.”

  “I want nothing from you!” Strouser snapped angrily.

  “This, you will appreciate.” Dorsett laughed uncharitably. “On second thought, perhaps you won’t.” He motioned with one hand. “Now, Boudicca, now.”

  In one swift motion, the big woman suddenly appeared behind Strouser and pinned his arms to his sides. The diamond merchant instinctively struggled for a minute, then relaxed, staring dazedly at Dorsett.

  “What is the meaning of this? I demand that you unhand me.”

  Dorsett looked at Strouser and spread his hands disarmingly. “You neglected to eat your lunch, Gabe. I can’t allow you to leave hungry. You might get the idea that I’m inhospitable.”

  “You’re crazy if you think you can intimidate me.”

  “I’m not going to intimidate you,” Dorsett said with sadistic amusement. “I’m going to feed you.”

  Strouser looked lost. He shook his head in disgust and began an unequal struggle to break free of Boudicca’s embrace.

  At a nod of Dorsett’s head, Boudicca manhandled Strouser back to the table, grasped him under the chin with one hand and bent his head backward, face up. Then Dorsett produced a large plastic funnel and stuffed the lower end between Strouser’s lips and teeth. The expression in the diamond merchant’s eyes transformed from rage to shock to bulging terror. His muffled cries were ignored as Boudicca tightened her hold around him.

  “Ready, Daddy,” she said, leering in cruel anticipation.

  “Since you live and breathe diamonds, my old friend, you can eat them too,” said Dorsett as he lifted a small canister shaped like a teapot that had been sitting on the table and began pouring a stream of flawless D-grade, one-carat diamonds down Strouser’s throat while using one hand to pinch the nostrils of his victim shut. Strouser thrashed wildly, his legs kicking in the air, but his arms were locked as tightly as if he were trapped by a python.

  Out of sheer terror, Strouser tried desperately to swallow the stones, but there were too many. Soon his throat could hold no more and his body’s convulsions became less frantic as he choked for air and quickly suffocated.

  The glaze of death froze his open eyes into an unseeing stare as the glittering stones slowly spilled from the corners of his mouth, rattled across the table and fell to the floor.

  Two days off the sea and everyone felt as if raised from the dead. York’s campsite was tidied up and every article and object inventoried. Maeve refused to go in the hut even after they buried Rodney York in a small ravine that was partially filled with sand. A tentlike shelter was built from the old Dacron sails found inside the hut, and they settled down to the day-to-day routine of existence.

  To Giordino, the greatest prize was a toolbox. He immediately went to work on the radio and the generator but finally gave up in frustration after nearly six hours of futile labor.

  “Too many parts broken or too badly corroded to repair. After sitting all these years, the batteries are deader than fossilized dinosaur dung. And without a generator to charge them, the radio-telephone, direction-finding set and wireless receiver are useless.”

  “Can replacements be fabricated with what we’ve got lying about?” asked Pitt.

  Giordino shook his head. “General Electric’s chief engineer couldn’t fix that generator, and even if he could, the engine to turn it over is completely shot. There’s a crack in the crankcase. York must not have seen it and run the engine after the oil leaked out, burning the bearings and freezing the pistons. It would take an automotive machine shop to put it back in running order.”

  Pin’s first project as resident handyman was to find three small blocks of wood that were straight grained. These he split from a sideboard on the berth that had served as Rodney York’s final resting place. Next, he made a template of everyone’s forehead just above the eyebrows from the stiff paper jackets of novels he found on York’s bookshelf. He marked the template lines on the edge of the wood blocks and trimmed accordingly, cutting out an arched slot for the nose. Holding the blocks tightly between his knees he gouged and smoothed hollows on the inner curl of the wood. Then he removed the excess outer wood and cut two horizontal slits in the hollowed walls. With oil from a can sitting beside the outboard engine, he stained the thinly curled finished product before cutting two holes in the ends and attaching nylon cord.

  “There you are, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, passing them out. “Colonel Thadeus Pitt’s spectacular sun goggles, from a secret design revealed on the lips of a dying Eskimo just before he rode off across the Arctic Ocean on the back of a polar bear.”

  Maeve adjusted hers over her eyes and tied the cord behind her head. “How clever, they really shut out sun.”

  “Damned clever, those Inuits,” said Giordino peering through the eye slits. “Can you make the slits a tad wider? I feel like I’m staring through a crack under a door.”

  Pitt smiled and handed Giordino his Swiss army knife. “You, may customize your goggles to your personal taste.”

  “Speaking of taste,” Maeve announced beside a small fire she had started with matches from Pitt’s survival kit. “Come and get it. Tonight’s menu is grilled mackerel with cockles I found buried in sand pockets below the tide lin
e.”

  “Just when my stomach got used to eating fish raw,” joked Giordino.

  Maeve dished the steaming fish and cockles onto York’s old plates. “Tomorrow night’s fare, if there is a marksman in our little group, will be something on the wing.”

  “You want us to shoot defenseless little birds?” asked Giordino in mock horror.

  “I counted at least twenty frigate birds, sitting on the rocks,” she said, pointing to the north shore. “If you build a blind, they’ll walk by close enough for you to hit them with your little popgun.”

  “Roasted bird sounds good to my shrinking stomach, I’ll bring back tomorrow night’s supper or you can hang me by the thumbs,” Pitt promised.

  “Can you pull any other tricks out of your hat besides the goggles?” asked Maeve whimsically.

  Pitt lay back on the sand with his hands behind his head. “I’m glad you brought that up. After a strenuous afternoon of intense thought, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that we should move on to a more receptive climate.”

  Maeve gave him a look of utter skepticism. “Move on?” She glanced at Giordino for moral support, but he gave her a you-never-learn look and continued nibbling on his mackerel. “We have two badly damaged boats that can’t sail across a swimming pool. Just what do you suggest we use for our all-expenses-paid cruise to nowhere?”

  “Elementary, my dear Fletcher,” he said expansively. “We build a third boat.”

  “Build a boat,” she said, her voice on the edged laughter.

  Conversely, Giordino’s expression was intense and serious. “You think there’s a Chinaman’s chance of repairing York’s sailboat?”

  “No. The hull is damaged beyond any possibility of repairing with our limited resources. York was an experienced sailor, and he obviously didn’t see any way it could be refloated. But we can, however, utilize the upper deck.”