Read Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 for Free Online

surprising Clark again with his grammar.
    “Yes, sir, we have. May I show you?”
    “Certainly.” Corp followed him to the back of the Rover. Chavez pulled out a survey map and some satellite photos obtained from commercial sources.
    “This may be the biggest deposit since the one in Colorado, and the purity is surprising. Right here.” Clark extended a steel pointer and tapped it on the map.
    “Thirty kilometers from where we are sitting...”
    Clark smiled. “You know, as long as I’ve been in this business, it still surprises me how this happens. A couple of billion years ago, a huge bubble of the stuff must have just perked up from the center of the earth.” His lecture was lyrical. He’d had lots of practice, and it helped that Clark read books on geology for recreation, borrowing the nicer phrases for his “pitch.”
    “Anyway,” Ding, said, taking his cue a few minutes later, “the overburden is no problem at all, and we have the location fixed perfectly.”
    “How can you do that?” Corp asked. His country’s maps were products of another and far more casual age.
    “With this, sir.” Ding handed it over.
    “What is it?” the General asked.
    “A GPS locator,” Chavez explained. “It’s how we find our way around, sir. You just push that button there, the rubber one.”
    Corp did just that, then held the large, thin green-plastic box up and watched the readout. First it gave him the exact time, then started to make its fix, showing that it had lock with one, then three, and finally four orbiting Global Positioning System satellites. “Such an amazing device,” he said, though that wasn’t the half of it. By pushing the button he had also sent out a radio signal. It was so easy to forget that they were scarcely a hundred miles from the Indian Ocean, and that beyond the visible horizon might be a ship with a flat deck. A largely empty deck at the moment, because the helicopters that lived there had lifted off an hour earlier and were now sitting at a secure site thirty-five miles to the south.
    Corp took one more look at the GPS locator before handing it back. “What is the rattle?” he asked as Ding took it.
    “Battery pack is loose, sir,” Chavez explained with a smile. It was their only handgun, and not a large one. The General ignored the irrelevancy and turned back to Clark.
    “How much?” he asked simply.
    “Well, determining the exact size of the deposit will require—”
    “Money, Mr. Clark.”
    “Anaconda is prepared to offer you fifty million dollars, sir. We’ll pay that in four payments of twelve and a half million dollars, plus ten percent of the gross profit from the mining operations. The advance fee and the continuing income will be paid in U.S. dollars.”
    “More than that. I know what molybdenum is worth.” He’d checked a copy of The Financial Times on the way in.
    “But it will take two years, closer to three, probably, to commence operations. Then we have to determine the best way to get the ore to the coast. Probably truck, maybe a rail line if the deposit is as big as I think it is. Our up-front costs to develop the operation will be on the order of three hundred million.” Even with the labor costs here, Clark didn’t have to add.
    “I need more money to keep my people happy. You must understand that,” Corp said reasonably. Had he been an honorable man, Clark thought, this could have been an interesting negotiation. Corp wanted the additional up-front money to buy arms in order to reconquer the country that he had once almost owned. The U.N. had displaced him, but not quite thoroughly enough. Relegated to dangerous obscurity in the bush, he had survived the last year by running caq into the cities, such as they were, and he’d made enough from the trade that some thought him to be a danger to the state again, such as it was. With new arms, of course, and control over the country, he would then renegotiate the continuing royalty for the molybdenum. It