Christopher Reich - The First Billion

“Maybe you’re right,” he conceded. “I’m just lousy at that kind of thing. It’s easier to hire a man than to kick him out on his tail.”

“Oh, but if the world were a fair place,” said Byrnes, bowing an imaginary violin.

“Get out of here,” said Gavallan. “Come on, cut it out. You look really stupid doing that.”

He knew his ideas about an employer’s duty were old-fashioned, but he stuck with them nonetheless. His father had worked on the cutting line at Martinez Meats in Harlingen, Texas, for forty years. Forty years hacking the hindquarter off a flayed steer’s carcass, eight hours a day, five days a week, in a fluorescent-lit factory that breathed blood and sweated ambition, where temperatures routinely soared to a hundred degrees during the six-month summer. The Martinez family might not splurge on luxuries like air-conditioning and they certainly didn’t pay much. (Gus Gavallan’s weekly salary of $338 came tucked in a wax-paper envelope delivered Monday mornings at nine o’clock sharp, so that the younger men wouldn’t drink their paycheck over the weekend.) But neither did they fire their staff. In those forty years, Martinez Meats never let go a single man or woman except for absence, tardiness, or public inebriation, and his father’s devotion to the Martinez family was nearly religious.

Black Jet had barely been in business nine years and Gavallan had already fired, let go, laid off, made redundant—however you wanted to put it—over a hundred men and women, including the latest casualties, Carroll Manzini’s tech-team of banking superstars, twenty-six strong. The thought pained him. He wanted to believe that the bond between a man and his employer went beyond business to family. It was a social contract that exchanged loyalty and service for welfare and security. Maybe he was foolish. Maybe at seventeen thousand dollars a year you had a right to that kind of paternalistic relationship. At half a million bucks plus bonus you were on your own.

Byrnes laid a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Toughen up, kid,” he said. “Look at you. Your chin’s falling into your neck, your ass is dragging, and God knows you need a haircut. And that whining… Christ, you sound like a dooly crying during Hell Week. The Gavallan I knew was a rock. You didn’t say a goddamn word that day up at Alamogordo. Not before, during, or after. A fuckin’ rock, man.”

“Easy to be a rock when you’re border trash that doesn’t know any better,” retorted Gavallan, but already he was smiling, feeling a little better. He was remembering the day in Alamogordo. August 2, 1986. Lead-in-Fighter Training.

The weather had been perfect, hot and mostly clear, with only a few thunderheads to keep away from. The two of them were up in a T-38 jet trainer, Byrnes already a combat-tested pilot, the instructor, and Gavallan his student. After an hour of practicing basic fighter maneuvers, the two were heading in for landing, making plans to rendezvous at the O-club for a few beers and a steak after debrief. Then—Bam!—without warning, the jet’s turbine engine had exploded, severing the hydraulic main, ripping off a chunk of the tail, and sending the plane into wild, uncontrollable gyrations at four hundred knots. One second they were flying level, the next they were pitching wildly, rolling and yawing, the burnt scrub of New Mexico changing places with the powder blue sky with sickening frequency.

Standing in his office, Gavallan jolted. Sixteen years after the fact, he could hear the whine of the disintegrating engine, the whoosh of the violated air as it battered the jet. Mostly, he recalled the adrenaline rush, the iron fingers grasping his heart and crushing it mercilessly.

“Everything’s copacetic,” had come Byrnes’s voice, calm as a Sunday morning. “Just let me take care of this fire and we’ll be jim-dandy to land.” And in the same unbothered delivery, he’d begun ticking off the measures to regain control of the plane—depress rudder, bring up left aileron, release the stick to let the nose find its way down.

But strapped into the front seat, Gavallan knew damn well everything was not copacetic. His eyes were glued to the altimeter, watching it tick down from four thousand feet at a hundred feet a second. He could feel the G forces increasing, driving him deeper into his seat, nailing his arms to his side. As he counted the seconds until they augered in, his hands automatically reached for the side of his seat, searching for the ejection handles. But when he found them, he immediately let them go. It was an act of betrayal. Of disbelief. No, it was worse. It was a pilot’s cardinal sin: the acknowledgment of his own fallibility.

The altimeter spun merrily counterclockwise, passing eight hundred feet, seven hundred, six… The plane came out of its death spiral, the nose pointed straight down toward the arid landscape. Gripped with a quiet terror, he waited for the nose to rise. A series of prayers stumbled from his lips. When that failed him, he swore silently. Come on, you son of a bitch. Come up. Just a little, you mutha, just a little!

Slowly, the plane righted itself. The nose inched up, the wings leveled to the horizon. And as the ground zipped beneath their wings close enough to slap a longhorn’s rump, Byrnes chuckled, as if the whole escapade had been engineered for Gavallan’s amusement.

“What’d I tell you, rookie?” he asked.

After landing, the two accomplished their postflight inspection of the debilitated aircraft. A four-by-four-foot section of crumpled metal dangled from the tail, secured by an aluminum thread no wider around than a pencil. Viewing the damage, neither Byrnes nor Gavallan commented. They simply exchanged glances and shrugged their shoulders. That night, “everything’s copacetic” entered lore, meaning, of course, just the opposite—that nothing could be more screwed up.

“Okay, okay. I get the message,” said Gavallan, walking to his chair and sitting down. “Slap me around a little if I start feeling sorry for myself again.”

“Yes sir. You’re the boss.”

Gavallan eyed Byrnes suspiciously. Sometimes he wasn’t so sure. “Look, the pictures of Mercury’s network operations center are fakes. I know that company inside and out. The only question is what we’re going to do about it.”

“You’ve talked to Kirov?”

“He called me a few minutes ago. He was livid. Said the comments were nonsense. A ploy to drive down the offering price. He hinted it might be political. He wasn’t sure, yet.”

“Political? Come off it. If there’s one thing I can tell you about the Private Eye-PO, it’s that he’s as American as apple pie. Still glad you crawled into bed with the enemy?”

“Kirov’s hardly the enemy. We checked him out backwards and forwards. Even Kroll gave him a clean bill of health. No ties to the mafiya, no indentures to the government, no evidence of corruption or criminal activity. Konstantin Kirov’s the first—”

“Stop right there,” blurted Byrnes. “I know what you’re going to say. He’s ‘the first truly Western businessman.’ The Financial Times said that, right? ‘The patron saint of the second Russian perestroika.’ Remember, Jett, I read the prospectus, too.”

Gavallan shook his head. Byrnes would always be an unrepentant cold warrior. “You know, Graf, you missed your calling. You should start up a new chapter of America Firsters. Bring isolationism back into vogue.”

“Okay, okay,” said Byrnes, lifting his hands palm up. “He’s a wild card, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Well, he’s our wild card, so you better get used to him. If the Mercury IPO goes well, we’ll be doing business with Kirov for a decade. We’re already talking a secondary offering in a year, and he’s asked us to scout some acquisition targets for him. Mercury’s a gusher waiting to be tapped, and we’re darned lucky they chose us to do the drilling. He asked me if I wanted him to send over his jet to bring me to Moscow. He wants to personally show me the premises. He’s worried about how the market’s taking it.”