Chapter 83 : That Time I Built a Power Company in South America (2)

TL: Skye

The outskirts of Austin, Texas, USA, the CEO's office at Perfect Solar headquarters.

The room was choked with cigarette smoke, and in the middle of it sat the CEO, James Miller, who hadn't so much as washed in days, glaring with hollow eyes at the phone lying on his desk.

Tssssss.

"Hahh."

He ground the cigarette out, then lit another one.

'We have to win this bid, no matter what it takes.'

That was how desperately he needed the San Marcos project.

How much time passed like that?

Briiing-!

When the phone shattered the silence, CEO James Miller snatched it up like a bolt of lightning.

"Yeah, it's me. How'd it go?"

The instant he heard the voice on the other end of the line, James's eyes went wide as saucers.

"Are you serious? We... we got it?! Got it. Good work."

He hung up with trembling hands and stared blankly into space.

When he stepped outside, the executives and staff who'd been waiting looked at him, swallowing hard.

"S-Sir? Don't tell me..."

"We got it."

James clenched his fist and roared.

"We won it! The San Marcos project, it's ours!"

"Woooohooooo!"

A cheer erupted loud enough to lift the roof off the building.

The vice president and the managing director threw their arms around each other and bounced up and down, and someone, overcome with emotion, flung a stack of documents into the air.

And no wonder.

The company's technology was top-tier, but it had been on a downward spiral, shoved aside by the flood of cheap Chinese imports.

The factory was running at less than half its peak capacity, and they'd already been through several rounds of layoffs.

America is a country where firing people is easy.

If things kept on like this, the staff would have to keep clearing out their desks, one after another.

In that situation, they'd gambled on diverting a shipment bound for Ghana, and the gamble had paid off perfectly.

"We're saved! We're finally saved!"

James shouted, wiping the tears streaming down his face.

"Pack it up! We're going to sign the contract!"

A few days later, the San Marcos Presidential Palace.

Cold sweat ran down James Miller's spine as he made his way to the reception room.

'So this is... the palace of that iron-blooded dictator.'

While preparing for this bid, James had researched San Marcos top to bottom.

Naturally, he'd studied everything about Yu-jin in exhaustive detail, and the more he learned, the more it astonished him.

Yu-jin Choi, the iron-blooded leader who had crushed a civil war that dragged on for decades, rounded up every last gang, and shipped them off to forced-labor camps.

The man who had purged the corrupt officials and built a new order in blood, effectively the last dictator left in South America after Maduro was hauled away.

The mere thought of meeting such a notorious figure was enough to put even James, who fancied himself a genuine Texas tough guy, on edge.

And sure enough.

Ka-chunk.

Passing through the front gate of the Presidential Palace, he couldn't help but stare wide-eyed.

The guards were carrying M4 carbines, the standard-issue rifle of the U.S. military, and that was just the start: when he lifted his head, a 20mm anti-aircraft gun sat on the palace roof, its black muzzle trained on the sky.

On top of that, in one corner of the garden, beneath a camouflage net, the barrel of an enormous tank and the rotor of an attack helicopter glinted.

'This is insane.'

The crushing pressure of standing in the middle of a battlefield.

James gulped dryly without meaning to.

A fear washed over him that one wrong word might land him in serious trouble.

"This way, Mr. Miller."

Guided by Anna, the Protocol Secretary, he went inside, and then a massive door swung open.

Bracing himself at the thought of meeting a dictator, James stepped in with a rigid expression.

"Welcome."

And yet.

'Huh?'

The man who rose from the sofa to greet him looked nothing like the image he'd built up.

That the man was clean-cut, he'd already known.

He'd held a summit with the U.S. president, and his photos were floating around the internet at that very moment.

It was just, the impression was different.

How to put it...

Rather than a dictator who'd purged countless people, he gave off the air of a sharp Silicon Valley engineer or a Wall Street fund manager.

But James didn't let his guard down.

'Can't judge a man by his face.'

Just look at history.

Hadn't a young Stalin, a young Hitler, looked like nothing more than a shy literary type or an aspiring painter?

The cruelty hidden behind an ordinary face. That was the kind that was all the more terrifying.

To this very man, Yu-jin extended a hand with a gentle smile.

"A pleasure to meet you. I'm Choi Yu-jin, President of San Marcos."

"P-Perfect Solar CEO James Miller! Thank you for giving us this opportunity."

James answered in a booming voice, like a private snapping to attention, and clasped his hand.

"Opportunity? You won it because Perfect Solar is simply that good."

Yu-jin offered him a cup of tea and asked, feigning surprise.

"By the way, you put down six months for the construction period? Is that physically possible?"

"Yes! It is!"

James explained with a grave expression.

"We had a shipment headed for Ghana, in Africa. It was right before loading, but the moment we saw the San Marcos tender, we stopped the shipment and tore up the contract."

"The contract?"

"Yes. Even if it meant paying a penalty, we decided to commit everything to San Marcos. Since we moved the panels to the Port of Tampa Bay, we can have them here as early as tomorrow!"

Yu-jin raised his teacup to hide the corners of his mouth curling up.

'Jackpot.'

He'd expected a year, ten months if they were quick.

And now six months.

Wasn't that just another way of saying his retirement was coming that much sooner?

'Yeah, the ones who are gonna make it just make it.'

Yu-jin regarded James with an utterly satisfied expression.

"Impressive. That kind of decisiveness, I like it a great deal. I'll be expecting big things."

"I'll see it through even if it kills me!"

That was when it happened.

Knock, knock-

The reception room door opened, and a middle-aged man with a briefcase walked in.

"Your Excellency, my apologies for the delay. I was out inspecting the site..."

"Not at all. You were working, after all."

Yu-jin welcomed him warmly and turned to introduce him to James.

"Ah, CEO James. Say hello. This is Aman, Senior Secretary for Commerce, the man in overall charge of this project."

Aman extended his hand with a weighty expression.

"A pleasure. I'm Aman. I look forward to working with you."

"I'm James. The pleasure's mine!"

The two men's hands clasped.

"If there's anything you need, just ask Senior Secretary Aman. He'll be able to handle just about anything. In San Marcos, a Senior Secretary is no different from a cabinet minister in any other country."

"I-Is that so? Thank you very much."

At the news that a man of ministerial rank would be looking after things personally, James lit up.

It meant San Marcos, too, was giving this everything they had.

"Now that you've met your point of contact, shall we sign the contract?"

And so Yu-jin signed the contract for a two-billion-dollar solar power plant.

*

Before the ink on the contract was even dry, a convoy of massive container trucks stretched out across a plain some 150 kilometers from Libertad.

Perfect Solar's panels, flown in from Texas, U.S.A., had arrived.

And behind them came the engineers, the civil engineering team, and several thousand local San Marcos laborers.

Atop the site office container.

Perfect Solar's James Miller, a cowboy hat pulled on to shield him from the fierce San Marcos sun, looked down with a face full of worry.

"...I'm not sure this is going to work out."

What worried him wasn't a technical problem.

It was a clause in the contract.

[For simple assembly and transport work, local San Marcos labor shall be hired first.]

It was a clause Yu-jin had pushed hard for on the day of signing, driven by a determination to create jobs by any means necessary.

Caught up in the elation of winning the bid, James had nodded along without thinking, but the trouble was that, in his experience, South American workers were the furthest thing from a fast-paced operation.

Napping because it was siesta culture, taking a break because it was hot, taking a break because it was raining...

Back when he'd first joined Perfect Solar and started working, that very thing had driven him to the brink more times than he could count.

Above all. This job had to be finished within six months. A single day's delay and they'd be paying a penalty.

"William, come over here a second."

James picked up the phone and called over the site manager, who'd been checking on the laborers climbing down from the trucks.

"Yes, Mr. Miller."

When William arrived and acknowledged him, James gave him an earnest, hard-eyed warning.

"This job lives or dies on managing the laborers. They'll slack off the second they get a chance, so watch them like a hawk."

"Ah, yes... understood."

A strangely reluctant look on his face.

"What? Is something the matter?"

"Honestly, I'm not sure it'll go well. As you know, the culture here is just... like that..."

"Even if it won't, we have to make it happen, no matter what. Labor's cheap here anyway, so tempt them with money, or feed them well and push them that way. Just, never, ever resort to heavy-handed methods. The people of San Marcos are no joke."

"Understood."

But in the end, instructions like these turned out to be completely unnecessary.

"Sir! Sir!"

"What is it?"

"It's... I think it'd be quicker if you saw it for yourself."

"?"

Tilting his head, James followed the site manager down to the work area.

And when he reached the site, James...

"What the..."

...was met with a sight he never could have imagined.

"Run! Team 3! Bring more panels!"

"Swap the drill battery! Don't stop for even a second!"

"Raaaaaagh!"

Thousands of laborers were charging around like madmen, like StarCraft Marines juiced up on stimpacks.

Heavy solar panels were being hauled on their backs, and not a single one of them was walking.

It had even reached the bizarre point where the mid-level managers were begging them to slow down before someone got hurt.

James grabbed one of the laborers as he ran past.

The man had been running so hard he was practically bathing in his own sweat.

"Hey. Why the rush? You're getting paid by the day either way."

At James's question, the laborer's eyes went wide as he answered.

"There's no time!"

"What?"

"His Excellency is waiting! He promised we'd see the light within six months. We can't break His Excellency's promise by dragging our feet!"

"No, but you can still take it eas..."

"Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to work!"

A moment later, James grabbed hold of another laborer and asked.

Unlike the last one, this was a weathered, well-aged man with a full beard.

"Why are the workers going this far?"

"What else would it be? To repay the grace His Excellency showed us, that's why."

"Grace?"

"Three years back, my boy couldn't so much as set foot in a school. Work all day, and you'd barely scrape together enough to fill your belly. But then His Excellency came, and everything changed. He put our children in school, fed us until our bellies were full. After grace like that, how is a man supposed to slack off, I ask you."

"......"

James was at a loss for words.

The site manager beside him shook his head in amazement.

"You see what I mean? Those people are out of their minds. I had to physically sit them down when they tried to work straight through their lunch break."

What's more, the laborers worked at night, too.

By the original plan, they should have stopped work and pulled out, but searchlights bright as broad daylight blazed across the site.

The laborers had requested the night shifts of their own accord.

"Heave-ho! Heave-ho!"

The chant ringing out through the darkness was as solemn as a military march.

James watched the scene from a distance and lit a cigarette. His hand trembled faintly.

"San Marcos really was a terrifying country..."

He'd heard the dictator ruled through fear, but this was on another level entirely.

Not fear, but reverence: a voluntary obedience born of awe.

That night, James had no choice but to drift off to sleep with his whole body shaking.

*****

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