And at the far end of the table, with the secretary quietly behind his shoulder waiting to continue with the minutes of the meeting, sat the least convinced board member of all. Charles — never Charlie — Lee’s eyes were long, dark and narrow, as befitted a man who had cut his teeth in the frantic markets of Hong Kong, but his face had none of the roundness of common Chinese ancestry. On the contrary, it was fine and thin with high, sharp cheekbones and a broad, domed forehead. When he spoke, his inevitably quiet voice coupled an American twang with an English drawl in a manner which whispered of an extremely broad education.
They had been lucky to get him, for he was a very high flyer indeed and a man of awesome business acumen. He had come to them for a whole series of reasons reaching — inevitably, given his background — back into the mists of time. He claimed Manchu blood. His face and form supported that claim. He was the only son of one of the founding families of Hong Kong. The generations before him had amassed and lost great fortunes. His father, starting with next to nothing after the war, had done much to re-establish those fortunes without moving the basis of his business out of the sight of Kowloon harbour. This was apt enough, for he had been a shipping man.
Although he had little education himself, Charles’s father had realised its importance and had invested much of his new fortune in educating his only offspring. After education at Winchester, Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics, Charles had returned to spend the eighties extending the family business. But, like many men of his generation in Hong Kong, he had fallen foul of the Chinese government. His name had been mentioned by several student leaders caught in Tiananmen Square and the new mandarins in Beijing suddenly realised what an effort he and some others had been making to win over the next generation of Chinese officialdom, the generation that would be ruling Hong Kong when the colony returned to Chinese control in 1997. It had not occurred to the Chinese government until then that anyone could be so arrogant as to foment unrest, infect young minds, finance nascent political parties, all in an attempt to control the government itself and the power of a money market that they had hoped to control themselves. It came as a shock. It was seen as an outrage. It had so nearly worked, too. Consequently, it had been borne forcefully upon him that as soon as Hong Kong became Chinese again, Charles Lee and his company would cease to exist. So he had come west to work, to wait and to watch.
He was even more careful than Sir William, the man whose executive power he had assumed. It was paper power in Charles’s case but none the less real for that, and the Hong Kong Chinese executive knew this very well. All the stock of the company was held in this room. Originally it had been held by Sir William’s family, by himself, his wife and his two daughters. Lady Heritage’s portion had gone in equal shares to Rowena and Robin on her death, but some of Rowena’s had gone to Richard on their marriage and he had held on to it during their stormy relationship and during the years of estrangement which followed her death. Now he held some of Robin’s too, for he had married the little sister ten years ago and his second marriage had been everything the first had not.
Only Sir William held more stock in the business; only he wielded more power when push came to shove. But the family had agreed that the company could only survive if the power of ownership deferred to the power of senior company executives such as Helen and Charles. Richard had never seen this as any constraint. Until now.
‘Look,’ he began again, ‘it’s a once in a lifetime chance. We have the interest, the political and financial backing ready to go. It looks as though it can be done and there are suddenly a lot of people all over the world who want to see it done. If it is done, then a whole new door opens. If anyone proves that pulling an iceberg to a desert and delivering fresh water to drought-stricken areas is actually feasible then we suddenly have a whole new industry, a new shipping industry. It’ll be like oil transport in the seventies, the sky will be the limit, and if we get in now we’ll be holding all the chips. You must see that.’
Charles Lee shook his head. ‘I see us committing more than half of our entire fleet to one venture which has incalculable risks and uncertain rewards. I see winter closing in while you try to move this thing through the North Atlantic. I see you arriving off the Gulf of Mexico at the height of the hurricane season. I see you pulling a lump of ice across the equator into high summer where it will be very hot indeed and watching it all just melt away. I see problems of contract, payment and command structures. I see problems rearranging tanker schedules at this end and I see no final destination at the other end. I see no one in their right mind at the United Nations actually wanting to get involved with this when they have properly assessed the financial and political risks and dangers. But most of all I see no one in their right mind offering us any insurance cover whatsoever and without that, this is a dead issue.’
‘We can’t just stand still and catch our breath,’ Richard shot back. ‘We compete or we die, and we’ve got to keep looking for new markets. The oil market’s collapsed. The leisure market will take off when the recovery does. If the recovery does. The waste disposal market’s dead slow to stop. Atropos is fully employed but it’s a blessing Clotho’s in dry dock, because we couldn’t make much use of her until the British government make up their minds about Thorp and Sellafield and the whole question of reprocessing. The whole question of fast breeder nuclear reactors. The whole nuclear question itself, come to that. The only possible area of expansion is Russia. How’s that coming, Helen?’
‘Slowly. The government in Moscow’s still in trouble. The republics are dragging their feet. They don’t want fast breeder reactors either, not after Chernobyl and Tomsk Seven. And of course the whole point of reprocessing like British Nuclear Fuel propose at Thorp is that you extract the elements needed in fast breeders. And to make matters worse, the Russians don’t really want to part with the nuclear weapons Yeltsin and Bush agreed must be decommissioned. Some republics even see their nuclear arsenals and expertise as their only short-term chance of earning foreign currency. And the really dangerous stuff, the stuff they don’t want and only an outfit like ours could handle properly, still doesn’t come our way because they just shove it onto container ships and dump it on Novaya Zemlya — though of course they swear they don’t do that any more and the Americans would probably cut off all their aid if there was any real proof. All in all, it’s slow, hard work. And you know the Russians. One minute you’ve got a contract, the next…’ She gave one of her expressive Gallic shrugs.
Richard sprang into the attack. ‘So, retrenchment isn’t as risk-free as you seem to think, Charles. That iceberg may well represent a real chance. A genuine business deal. With a responsible, reasonable, reliable, rich client. Look at it. Look at what happens in Africa when the drought sets in. Look at Somalia! Don’t you think the UN and the US and all the other countries and organisations trying to police the world realise how much cheaper it would be to avert a war instead of trying to contain one? And this is a real chance to do just that. Sure there are risks. Yes, there will be problems, dangers even. One man is dead already, God help us. More might die. Yes. But think of the benefits if it all works. For the world as a whole! For us!’