The Man of Six Million Dollars
Dozens of floodlights wrapped the entire mine in a blaze bright enough to turn night into day.
···Thunk! ···Thunk! ···Thunk!
The rhythmic tremor rolling through the earth traveled up through my soles and into my knees, making them shake.
I pushed open the steel door of the site office and tightened the chin strap of my hard hat.
Wishville.
Just before the California Gold Rush of 1849, rumors had spread that a gold vein had been found in the East as well.
Speculators had swarmed in like hornets, and for a few years this patch of land on the far western edge of Massachusetts had really produced a fair amount of gold.
The name Wishville—meaning a place that grants wishes—had been coined back then, too.
But the vein ran dry in only a year or two, and all that remained were the ruins of the shafts and the smelter.
Over the next half century, the town slowly died.
It had seemed to come back to life for a while in the sixties as a cheap industrial warehouse district, but with the oil shock at the end of the seventies, the factories shut down one after another.
The owners fled in the dead of night, and everything inside the warehouses was simply left behind.
Abandoned as a ghost town, this place was now breathing again—more than a hundred years later, in this moment in 1992.
KA-BOOM! Thunk! Ratatatatatat······!
In the black Massachusetts night, only this place kept roaring without rest, spewing the shriek of drills, the heat of engines, and the dust clouds raised by blasting.
The acrid stink of diesel and the metallic tang of iron stabbed at my nose, but I drew the air in deeper instead.
Feels like I’ve stepped into the age of industry.
I headed toward the source of the tremor that had made the earth shudder.
Jaw Crusher.
The sound of a giant steel jaw chewing through rock grew closer.
Two enormous steel plates stood face-to-face, crushing the boulders that fell between them like an alligator’s jaws.
It had been bought for a pittance from a bankrupt mining company, but it was doing its job beautifully.
Dump trucks lined up in front of the hulking primary crusher.
White exhaust belched from their stacks and drifted through the floodlight beams while their tires ground the dirt underfoot, the noise never letting up for a second.
Twenty-four-hour operation. Machines that never stopped.
And with every passing minute that those machines kept turning, my assets swelled exponentially.
As if to prove it, shouts from the workers and the blare of machinery echoed everywhere across the site.
I passed the jaw crusher and headed toward the ore-processing plant.
It was time to see for myself how the rough rock we mined became something as enduring as gold.
The first stage was crushing.
No matter how many times I watched boulders the size of houses being swallowed between the steel jaws of the jaw crusher, it never got old.
···Crunch! ···Krrk! ···Krashashashashashashashash!
With a scream like something being torn apart alive, the rock shattered into gravel no bigger than a fist and spilled onto the conveyor belt, only to vanish immediately into the huge cylinder of the second-stage grinder, the ball mill.
To explain a ball mill in simple terms······ imagine putting thousands of steel balls into a giant drum-style washing machine and spinning it around.
When the steel cylinder, three meters in diameter and five meters long, rotated, the steel balls inside crashed and surged together, grinding the gravel into powder as fine as flour.
···Rumble! ···Clang! ···Clang! ···Clang! ···Clang! ···Clang!
The heavy ringing of steel balls colliding with one another echoed from inside the drum, and once the crushing was done, the powdered ore mixed with water and flowed on to the next stage.
The second stage was concentration.
The finely ground ore slurry flowed onto the shaking table with the water.
Just as the name suggested, a shaking table was a sloped plate that vibrated in tiny, precise motions.
It was a device that separated gold from rock dust by exploiting differences in specific gravity.
As the table trembled from side to side, the heavier gold particles were nudged upward along the incline while the lighter rock dust washed downward.
Long ago, people panning for placer gold in riverbeds had used the same principle; the difference was that I was doing it with machines, and with ruthless precision.
Before long, a bright yellow band emerged through the black sand.
Gold Line.
I stood at the edge of the table and watched that yellow stripe for a long time.
In a normal gold mine, this is where you’d have to go through a complicated chemical process like cyanidation.
Cyanidation dissolves gold by soaking the ore in a sodium cyanide solution, allowing even microscopic particles to be extracted efficiently, but it comes with the nasty problem of toxic wastewater treatment and environmental regulation.
But Wishville’s ore was different.
The grade was so high and the gold particles so coarse that physical impact alone was enough to separate them.
It was like soft gray cheese studded densely with hard gold walnuts, and all I had to do was gently crumble the cheese and pick the walnuts out one by one.
That meant no chemical reagents for cyanidation, no wastewater treatment, and no environmental compliance costs.
That was the secret behind the absurd profit margin.
Now the final stage was smelting.
From here on, I’ll have to steel myself a little.
I stepped into the smelter building.
The moment I opened the door, a wave of scorching heat slammed into my face.
Beads of sweat instantly gathered on my forehead.
Three enormous furnaces stood in a row inside the smelter, and in front of each one, workers in heat-resistant suits moved busily about.
The concentrated gold dust inside graphite crucibles was enduring heat of 1,064 degrees Celsius as it turned liquid.
Wobble—wobble—wobble—wobble—wobble—wobble—
The color of the molten metal changed by the second.
At first it was a dark, almost blood-red glow, then as the temperature climbed it shifted to orange, and finally to a blinding white-yellow brilliance.
As I stepped closer, radiant heat prickled my skin, and the surface of the molten pool undulated slowly, like boiling honey, thick and heavy with viscosity.
Casting was in full swing.
One worker lifted a graphite mold with long tongs and brought it in front of the furnace.
Two workers coordinated their movements and tipped the crucible, sending a red-tinged stream of golden liquid slowly pouring into the rectangular mold.
···Grrrrrrrk!
The honey-thick molten gold filled the corners of the mold without leaving a single gap.
What had begun as a glaring white-yellow slowly turned orange, then settled into a clear, bright yellow.
The red-gold liquid shimmered and stabbed at my eyes.
I stood in front of the furnace and watched it ripple for a long time.
No matter how many times I saw this, I never got tired of it.
Then I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“Welcome, boss!”
When I turned around, Armstrong was standing there in sweat-soaked work clothes.
His face was smeared with grease and dust, but his expression was full of energy.
“Perfect timing. We just finished preparing the molds.”
“You’ve done well, Team Leader. How’s the yield today?”
Armstrong grinned and handed me a clipboard.
“Don’t even get me started. We’ve got the machines running hard enough to make them scream. We’re barely keeping up with the output. We’re over projections by more than fifteen percent. At this rate, we’ll clear two hundred gold bars by the end of the month without breaking a sweat.”
“Excellent.”
I looked over the faces of the people working inside the smelter.
The worker carrying mold frames in front of the furnaces, the worker checking the temperature of the cooling basin, the safety supervisor shouting through a megaphone—every one of them was drenched in sweat, but none of them looked exhausted. They were moving with energy.
“Is anyone worn out? And the shifts are running exactly by the book?”
“Worn out? Thanks to the special incentive you promised, they’re all working like their lives depend on it. If I told them to go home, they’d refuse.”
“Money’s important, but safety comes first. If fatigue piles up, accidents happen. Make sure no one gets hurt.”
“Understood. Honestly······ you really are different, boss.”
“How am I different? I just said what should’ve been obvious.”
“That’s exactly it. No one else bothers to say the obvious.”
Armstrong gave a wry smile.
“At my last company, if an accident happened, they blamed the workers and called it a day. They ignored old equipment and overwork. But you······”
“The place runs well because of you, Team Leader. I should be the one thanking you.”
Then one by one, the laborers working nearby began to notice me and gather around.
Someone shouted first.
“Mr. Lee is here!”
The workers paused what they were doing and started clapping.
“Boss! The safety gear you promised last time really came in! Thank you!”
“My boy’s getting to go to college, boss! Without this job, it would’ve been impossible!”
“We love you, Mr. Lee!”
Their faces were smeared with sweat and grime, but their expressions were full of respect and trust.
I nodded at those people, transformed so completely from the first time I’d met them.
“You’re all working hard! Let’s keep it safe!”
“Don’t worry, boss! We’ll do our best!”
When one of the workers shouted, laughter broke out around him.
Armstrong pointed toward one side of the smelter with a satisfied look on his face.
“Come this way. I’ll show you the ones born today.”
The place he led me to was a temporary vault behind the smelter.
A massive steel door opened.
Cool, calm air—the complete opposite of the smelter’s blistering heat—filled the vault.
Rows of gold bars stacked neatly on the shelves glowed under the lights with a heavy golden brilliance.
I stepped into the vault.
The shelves were arranged in three tiers, and on each tier the gold bars stood in orderly ranks.
I picked up one of the bars.
Heavy.
The pleasant weight ran up my forearm and into my shoulder.
It was a 12.4-kilogram mass pressing gently into my palm, announcing its existence.
Stamped clearly on the surface was the engraving: Lee Energy.
I raised the bar to eye level and examined the surface closely.
The metal, caught by the light, shone smooth and bright.
This was on a completely different level from the numbers that lived only on a monitor screen, from money that existed only as entries in a ledger.
That’s why it makes the perfect collateral.
Most gold miners, once they make bars, sell them straight away.
They hand over the physical metal through the London bullion market or the New York commodity exchange and take dollars in return.
But that approach has a fatal limitation.
Once you sell the gold, that’s the end of it.
What if the price shoots up afterward?
And besides, I was a regressor.
I knew all too well that gold prices would continue climbing in the years ahead.
The dollars you took into your hand vanished the moment you spent them, and even if gold rose later, that profit would belong to someone else.
So I planned to take a different approach.
As of 1992, major American banks would lend seventy-five to eighty percent of a gold bar’s market value against the physical bullion as collateral.
One gold bar was worth about $140,000.
With a collateral loan, I could get more than $100,000 in cash per bar.
Then I’d use that cash to buy other assets.
For the record, crude oil could serve as excellent physical collateral too.
If I pledged the crude flowing out of an oil field, another line of credit would open up.
Collateral loans, leverage, reinvestment, and then more collateral loans.
Spin that cycle a few times, and I could grow assets worth hundreds, thousands, even tens of millions of times my starting capital.
And most importantly, no matter what I did, the gold bars would still remain mine.
Armstrong said quietly from beside me, “There are forty-seven gold bars stored in the vault right now. By tomorrow, we’ll be over sixty.”
He pointed to the devices installed by the vault door.
“The vault has a double-lock system and armed security on duty twenty-four hours a day. The key can only be used when the chairman is on site. Every entry is logged, too. Not a single bar can leave without an authorization form stamped by you, boss.”
“Is the security for the smelting process itself airtight?”
“Absolutely! Everyone has to pass through a metal detector before clocking out, and after their shower they can only leave in the exit uniforms we issue. No one gets into the smelting zone unless I’ve personally selected them.”
Armstrong shook the clipboard.
“We also cross-check the ore input and gold output every single day. If there’s even a one-gram discrepancy, an immediate investigation is launched. And we’ve installed the latest CCTV system as well. Everything is being recorded on VHS tape. The footage gets overwritten every thirty days, but if anything goes wrong in that window, we’ll know right away. We compare the ore going in and the finished output day after day.”
I set the gold bar back on the shelf.
The bars already in the vault were worth more than six million dollars.
And that number was growing every day.
······.
I slowly looked around the vault.
The gold bars lined up on the shelves, the wooden crates waiting to be packed, and the production board hanging on the wall.
Everything was running smoothly.
But I had no intention of stopping here.
······Let’s see.
Before I closed the vault door, I tried to stretch my thoughts outward.
The Wishville project was not just a gold mine.
It was a business model that had been fully tested and proven.
The heart of this success was regulatory circumvention.
By invoking the Grandfather Clause and inheriting previously approved rights, I’d skipped the modern, suffocating layers of environmental impact assessments and resident consent procedures.
If I’d gone the proper route, permits alone would have taken at least three to ten years.
During that time, capital would have been tied up, competitors would have moved in, and the market conditions would have changed.
But I’d leapt over all those risks in one stride, and now I planned to apply the same winning formula to the oil market.
I began organizing the current energy market in my head.
······In August 1990, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait. When the Gulf War broke out, international crude prices shot up to forty dollars a barrel.
Forty percent of Kuwait’s oil fields went up in flames, and the entire Middle East was swallowed by the anxiety of war.
But the war ended in a hundred hours, and the oil-field fires were extinguished faster than anyone had expected.
Right now, crude was drifting sideways around twenty dollars a barrel.
Wall Street analysts were predicting that this range would hold for the foreseeable future.
Saudi Arabia was stubbornly pumping more to protect market share, and OPEC’s production cuts were, as always, creaking at the seams.
But I knew better.
······This is the calm before the storm.
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the red flag came down from the Kremlin.
The Cold War ended, and a new world order began.
After Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour speech, China was accelerating its opening to the market.
Factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai were running around the clock, and hundreds of millions of farmers were flooding into the cities.
India was the same.
After the 1991 foreign-exchange crisis, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh was pushing through market liberalization.
The licensing system was being dismantled, and the gates to foreign investment were being thrown open.
Put the populations of those two countries together, and you got more than two billion people.
What would happen when that vast mass of humanity joined the industrial race?
Factories need electricity to run, and electricity needs fuel to be generated.
Trucks need diesel to move, and ships need heavy oil to sail.
And that wasn’t all—plastics, fertilizer, synthetic fibers, asphalt, tar, wax······ wasn’t modern civilization built on oil?
Once China and India’s explosive growth truly began, demand for crude would soar without limit.
The twenty-dollar oil of today could become fifty, a hundred, maybe even more.
Wall Street analysts still couldn’t see that picture.
Their models had no room for a scenario in which China, with a billion people, and India, with another billion, industrialized at the same time.
But I knew.
I knew when that enormous wave would come, and how high it would rise.
And I was already done preparing to ride it.
The major refiners—the giants like Exxon and Shell—were stable, but that also meant their stock-price upside was limited.
Goliaths with market capitalizations in the tens of billions of dollars rarely doubled or tripled.
But the mid-sized independent oil fields were different.
Scattered across Texas and Oklahoma were oil fields developed in the early 1900s and then left to rot.
After the Spindletop gusher in 1901, an oil boom swept across Texas.
Wells sprang up like weeds in the 1920s.
But then the Great Depression hit, crude collapsed to ten cents a barrel, and one by one those wells shut down because they no longer made economic sense.
They’ve been left untouched ever since.
The reason was simple.
With 1920s technology, only a limited amount of oil could be extracted.
Vertical drilling could only tap part of the reservoir, and once natural pressure dropped, no more oil would rise.
But the technology of the 1990s was different.
Horizontal drilling.
It was a technique where a drill driven deep underground would bend ninety degrees and cut sideways along the oil-bearing layer.
Instead of punching a single point straight down, you were scraping across hundreds of meters horizontally, multiplying output several times over.
Add hydraulic fracturing to that, and the effect became even greater.
A high-pressure mix of water and sand was blasted in to fracture the rock, and the oil seeping into those cracks was then sucked back out.
Oil trapped in deep layers that the technology of the 1920s could never have recovered could now be brought up in full by the technology of the 1990s.
Under Lee Energy, drilling, exploration, and pipeline specialists had already been folded in as subsidiaries.
Skilled personnel and equipment acquired for pennies on the dollar from bankrupt auctions and collapsing stock prices were sitting idle, waiting.
Now it was time to give them a new mission.
I looked at Armstrong and said, “Team Leader, Wishville is on track now. I’ll leave the gold mine and smelter operations to you. I’ll come by from time to time to check the site.”
“Leave it to me, boss. I won’t disappoint you.”
Armstrong nodded hard.
***
The night air brushed coolly across my face.
Under the floodlights, the machines were still running, the trucks were still coming and going, and the workers were still moving with brisk purpose.
I watched the scene for a while, then turned away.
With Wishville’s gold finally on the right track, it was Garden Queens’ oil’s turn now.