The Loudest Salute in American History
The president’s office at Salmon Pink Bird Eater Company.
The leather chair gave a faint creak as I leaned back.
Outside the window, a steady mechanical hum rolled on.
Whirr—whirr—whirr—
A yellow crane slowly swung an H-beam through the air while workers in hard hats flashed hand signals at one another and hurried about below. Welders sent blue sparks flying without pause. As long as wages were paid on time, a protest site could be turned into a worksite in the blink of an eye.
I turned my eyes to the thick stack of legal documents on my desk.
Spread across the top was an official bankruptcy court document, stamped with a vivid red seal.
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- Assets to be sold: all assets of Salmon Pink Bird Eater Company
- Buyer: Lee Energy, LLC
- Approved sale price: $2,847,000
- Assumption of liabilities: none (clean sale)
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That single sheet of paper, bearing the bankruptcy court’s seal, had severed tens of millions of dollars in debt the previous management had left festering behind them.
No matter how loudly the creditors screamed outside, I owed them not a single cent.
A sale of assets under Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code.
...But the workers’ wages still had to be paid properly. If I wanted the company running, that was nonnegotiable.
The suit-wearing bastards who had called themselves owners and managers could be cut loose without a second thought.
But the laborers in work clothes had to be protected, no matter what.
When you looked at it that way, who the real owner of this company was became painfully obvious.
I had carved away the rotten flesh and taken only the good meat left behind.
What’s more, the back wages I paid the workers would be treated as an ordinary business expense.
Black money earned by pumping unauthorized crude could be laundered into legitimate payroll costs, and with the promissory notes later notarized by Vito and Soren, I’d even get a tax deduction out of it. It was, in every sense, a profitable acquisition.
Now then, let’s see what equipment this company actually owns.
I picked up the next set of papers.
The asset inventory of Salmon Pink Bird Eater Company.
In a bankruptcy liquidation, these things might have been treated like scrap metal, but to me—someone who needed to extract underground resources—they were the most important items on the entire list.
...Bargain-auction junk always hides treasure in plain sight.
It was like buying pearl oysters in bulk with ordinary shellfish and dumping them onto the market at seafood prices.
And I had the ability to pick the pearl oysters out from among the ordinary shells.
And inside a pearl oyster, naturally, there was a pearl worth more than the shell itself.
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[ITEM 1] Multi-Purpose Rotary Table Rig
- Model: National 110-UE (specially modified)
- Maximum drilling depth: 3,000 m
- Bit compatibility: 17.5" / 12.25" / 8.5"
- Special note: fitted with diamond bit for semi-drilling granite
- Book value: $890,000
- Estimated market value: $1,500,000 (24-month lead time for new order)
[ITEM 2] Skilled Human Resources
- Chief Engineer: James Armstrong (32 years of experience)
- Drilling Team Leader: Robert Chen (28 years of experience)
- Exploration Team Leader: Michael Torres (25 years of experience)
- Technical staff: 47 people (average experience: 18 years)
- Labor-cost asset value: $2,100,000/year
[ITEM 3] Mineral Mining License Rights
- Issuing authority: Texas Railroad Commission
- Date of issue: April 12, 1923
- Applicable clause: Grandfather Clause (vested rights recognition)
- Exemptions: modern environmental impact assessments, local resident consent procedures
- Estimated value: $500,000 (3+ years required to obtain new permit)
[ITEM 4] Deep Earth Scan Patent
- Patent No.: US 4,817,062
- Technical summary: precise subsurface structural analysis based on acoustic waves and vibration
- Effective depth: up to 2,000 m
- Accuracy: 97.3% (based on granite geology)
- License value: $750,000
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I had gathered up every last piece of heavy equipment that had been tied up in liens, hidden away in warehouses, or abandoned in the field to weather the wind and rain.
To be honest, if I waited until the market recovered and then sold off just the equipment sitting here, I could easily recover the purchase price of the company itself.
“...Let’s see.”
I checked off the items one by one with a pen.
The first thing that caught my eye was the rig.
By securing instantly what would otherwise take two years to arrive if I placed a new order now, I could slash the time needed for digging by an enormous margin.
This thing would go straight into service drilling not only gold mines, but vertical shafts for oil fields as well.
The same went for Armstrong and the technicians out in the vacant lot outside headquarters, throwing off welding sparks.
I had inherited a group of veterans with thirty years of experience, which meant the hands that could turn the blueprint in my head into reality were already in place.
And this old permit issued in 1923 was no less valuable.
Thanks to the Grandfather Clause attached to it, I could skip the tedious modern environmental impact assessment and local consent procedures.
It was issued seventy years ago, back when permit processes were blunt and simple, so it slipped past all of today’s ridiculous regulations.
That was exactly why I had chosen an old company.
If I tried to set up a new mining company now and get permits from scratch?
Submitting environmental assessment forms, holding public hearings with local residents, waiting on EPA approval, enduring state mining bureau reviews, applying for a federal Bureau of Land Management permit... just getting through all of that would take a guaranteed three years, and if my luck was bad, it could drag on for five.
And that was only if the local government and civic groups cooperated; if even one of them decided to make trouble, ten years could disappear in the blink of an eye.
But this company, founded in 1923, had already obtained every permit cleanly before such procedures even existed.
Back then, who was thinking about the environment? If you tried to stop people with gold fever in their eyes by lecturing them about pollution, they’d probably have put a bullet in you before you finished the sentence.
That was a time when you only needed the landowner’s permission and a report filed with the state.
Permits obtained in that era were recognized as vested rights and exempted from all modern regulations.
When the EPA was founded in 1970 and the Environmental Policy Act was passed, mines that were already operating were separately classified as “existing facilities” and excluded from retroactive application.
New competitors would have to wrestle with paperwork for more than three years, but I could start selling ground right now.
In other words, I had bought time—at least three years, and possibly ten.
“Good. The preparations are done.”
Once I finished my analysis, I pressed the intercom button on the desk.
“This is the president’s office. Chief Engineer Armstrong, and the exploration team leaders—could you all come up to the office for a moment?”
A bright reply crackled back through the speaker.
[Roger that! On our way, boss!]
At the same time—
Thud-thud-thud-
I heard footsteps pounding up the steel stairs outside.
Knock, knock.
With a short rap, the office door opened.
Armstrong and the technical team leaders came inside.
There was no trace of the shabby figures I had seen at the protest site a few days earlier.
Clean hard hats, free of grease stains, and work clothes pressed sharp as if they had just been issued.
The tool belts at their waists clinked with metal every time they walked.
Armstrong gave a light bow of his head.
“You called for us, sir. The site cleanup is about eighty percent complete. Equipment inspections are finished too, and the rig maintenance report is right here.”
Neatly organized data and clean charts were laid out at a glance.
“Excellent. You’re moving even faster than I expected. Now we really need to get to work. We’re going to sell off the abandoned mining grounds in Wishville.”
“Wishville? You mean the abandoned tunnel out front?”
Armstrong hesitated for a moment before speaking.
“Sir, I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, especially paying our back wages, but... that place is dead ground.”
“Dead ground?”
“Yes. It was already judged uneconomical fifty years ago and shut down. We’re thrilled just to have jobs, of course, but... if you push forward with that site, you’ll take a heavy loss.”
There was genuine concern in Armstrong’s voice.
He continued in a more technical tone.
“Geologically speaking, the Wishville area is underlain by Precambrian granite bedrock. That granite layer makes hydrothermal mineralization difficult. For a gold vein to form, hydrothermal fluids need to circulate along quartz veins, but the fault structure there was already classified as having ‘no mineralization potential’ in a 1940s USGS survey.”
“I know. And there’s also an aquifer below the 300-meter level.”
“Ah, so you already know. That’s right. Even the drainage cost alone would eat up forty percent of the mining cost per ton. With gold currently around $340 an ounce, I’d say the break-even point in Wishville would be over $500 an ounce. And that’s assuming there’s any gold left at all... Honestly, wouldn’t it be better to look into a different promising deposit nearby? We have a few projects we suspended, and if you’re looking at the Carlin Trend in Nevada, the odds would be much better.”
He wasn’t wrong.
It was rational advice from a veteran trying to protect the company’s assets.
But I was a regressor, which meant I knew the future.
There was definitely gold in Wishville’s abandoned mine.
And not just a little.
“That isn’t wrong. Based on publicly available data, that’s how it looks.”
I took out several sheets of paper and tossed them onto the table.
“But what about this? It’s a report I researched and compiled on my own.”
“...?”
Armstrong read through my report with a puzzled expression.
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- Document type: internal geological survey memo (unpublished)
- Estimated date of creation: 1920s
- Author: unknown (presumed geologist affiliated with the company at the time)
- Target area: lower section of Shaft No. 2, Wishville Mine
- Abnormal mineral response in lower strata.
- Additional drilling recommended, but suspended due to insufficient budget.
- Trace signs of promise confirmed in deep samples.
- However, impossible to verify with existing equipment.
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It was a map pointing to a hidden passage somewhere inside the complex cross-section of the abandoned mine district.
Stamped in red, the map showed contour lines and a red X marked at a specific set of coordinates.
“According to this report, promising mineral reactions were detected below Shaft No. 2, an area that couldn’t be reached with the technology of the time. Further exploration was halted because the budget ran out, and it was buried there ever since.”
In 1889, American drilling technology still depended on steam engines.
The maximum drilling depth was only 280 meters.
Below that, groundwater would gush in, and no pump could keep up with the drainage.
But this was 1992, and we had a rotary rig capable of drilling down to 3,000 meters.
What’s more, we also had the latest equipment that could send out sound waves and vibrations to explore underground spaces no person could enter.
“Our ancestors gave up because they didn’t have the equipment, but we’re different, aren’t we?”
“...”
Armstrong’s eyes wavered.
He skimmed quickly over the old figures written on the map and the geological terms no one used anymore.
“This isn’t... just a flyer.”
Armstrong touched the square jaw that split into a cleft chin.
His fingertips traced the seal on the map.
“This seal... it’s the official seal of the Massachusetts Mining Bureau from the 1880s. This is... ha—”
Armstrong and the team leaders under him all lit up, their eyes sparkling.
“This is a treasure hunt, isn’t it? Yes, exactly. It’s a treasure map. Like something left behind by a pirate whose existence you can’t quite prove or disprove...”
“Worth taking on, wouldn’t you say?”
“A man’s romance.”
The romance of a man, now enjoyed on someone else’s dime.
Wasn’t that every office worker’s dream?
But Armstrong remained cautious and considerate.
“It’s certainly enough to stir the blood of any miner, but... it’s risky to trust a document that’s over a hundred years old at face value. The margin of error in surveying back then must have been substantial, and groundwater remains a variable. We should verify it first.”
“That’s why I called you in, chief. We can cross-check it with the Deep Earth Scan equipment we have, can’t we?”
“I’ll do it right away. Right now. We don’t even need overtime pay. I’m sure people will line up for the chance. I’ll verify it while keeping the budget as tight as possible.”
“Come now. Of course you’ll get overtime pay. And you don’t need to worry about the budget at all. I’ve got money. Even if this project fails, it won’t hurt me one bit.”
“Holy moly. What kind of luck did I have to end up working for a boss like you...”
A man’s romance, realized with someone else’s money—and what’s more, with a man who didn’t have to worry about money at all.
With every mental obstacle removed, Armstrong and the work team leaders’ eyes shone brighter than ever.
“Then let’s get going right away.”
“Yessir!”
I would wager that no great general in American history had ever received a salute louder than that.
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