Viking Raid

by Matthew McCleery

  “I will have to talk to the owner of Viking Tankers, Coco Jacobsen.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” Rocky asked. “I just offered to pay you $900 million over five years. It sounds to me like you don’t have much juice at the company. Are you sure you’re really the CEO?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But I thought you said that gives you the authority to enter into a five-year charter agreement,” Rocky said.

  “Technically, I do, but…”

  “Good deals don’t hang around for long,” Rocky said. “I am offering these charters firm for reply right now. You have just sixty seconds to make up your mind and after that I will call another shipowner.”

  “Sixty seconds? You can’t be serious,” Robert asked, but the Texan didn’t reply. He just asked someone named Brittany to bring him a skim latte.

  Robert turned around and stared lovingly at the stately sea captain’s house. Looking at the elegant edifice and its finely carved architectural details, he thought about how much his family would enjoy living in it. He also rationalized that the charters to ARC might help him raise the $500 million that Coco had been demanding on a daily basis for the past three months. Lord knows he had tried everything else.

  In an effort to placate the Norwegian’s desperate and mysterious need for half a billion dollars, Robert had scoured the capital markets like a pig in search of Périgord truffles. He had hunted in the austere Hamburg KG houses, rooted around in the Norwegian bond market and been sniffed over in the khaki-colored offices of thirty-four private equity funds perched high above midtown Manhattan.

  He had sat with a white-shoe investment bank on Park Avenue and a boiler room in Bayonne where he had discussed everything from IPOs to SPACS, convertible bonds to preferred shares to private placements. He had met with “unregulated” banks, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, credit wrappers, offshore insurance companies, onshore insurance companies, residual value guarantors, a Sharia-sheik in Dubai and a “crowd funding” geek in San Francisco.

  His quixotic quest for capital had even led him to look into creating a late night infomercial named “Owner Ship” on which he would dress-up in a rented captain’s uniform with epaulets and hawk faux antique share certificates in Viking Tankers to insomniac investors with a longing for the sea.

  But the intimate examination of fifty shades of ship finance had yielded a singular reply: “Sure, Mr. Fairchild, we’d be happy to give you money just as long as Viking Tankers has profitable, long-term charters on his ships with a financially solid counterparty.”

  The lack of time charters had always been the deal breaker when it came to raising equity and now he had the solution right in front of him. The world famous CEO of an investment grade American oil company was apparently willing to take the ten vessels at a good rate for a long-term. It was a miracle, Robert decided, and it was undoubtedly the third and final sign that he and Grace were meant to buy the Captain Fisher house.

  Robert knew Coco would hate the idea of chartering-out the ships, but he figured he could deal with his objections later. In the final moments, the thing that gave Robert the courage to accept Rocky DuBois’ offer were the words of advice that Coco shared with him a year earlier.

  “Listen carefully to me, Robert, and remember my words,” Coco had said. “Teach them to your little boy some day when he is ready; there will always be many good reasons not to do things in life but people who achieve great things are the ones who believe in themselves and find reasons to do things, even when sometimes they do things that are not so smart.”

  Robert knew it was now or never. Like most people involved in the shipping business, he might get only one good cyclical opportunity in his career to place a big bet – and deep down he believed this was probably it. It was time to play his hunches like real shipowners did. It was time to use his gut instincts. Due diligence and decision-by-committee be damned!

  “Congratulations, Mr. Rocky DuBois,” Robert said. “You’ve got yourself a fleet.”

  Chapter 8

  Daniel Keith (D.K.) Ludwig

  D.K. Ludwig (1897-1992) was a self-made U.S. shipping magnate who had the distinction of being ranked #1 on the first Forbes 400 Richest Americans list published in 1982. Ludwig’s first venture into shipping was at the age of 9, when he salvaged a 26-foot boat. He left school at the end of eighth grade to work in various shipping related jobs, directly learning such trades as machinist, marine engineer, and ship handler. In Port Arthur, he sold supplies to sailing ships and steamers. At 19, Ludwig established himself in the shipping business when he began transporting molasses around the Great Lakes. In the 1930s, he developed a novel approach to financing further expansion, by borrowing the construction cost of tankers and using pre-agreed charters as collateral. In 1971, the low-profile Ludwig used a significant portion of his fortune to establish the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

  Robert Fairchild slurped creamy clam chowder from a thick ceramic mug at the Black Dog Tavern and reflected on the reckless acts he had just committed.

  As he sat in front of a crackling fire at the Martha’s Vineyard landmark restaurant, his ripped khaki pants and red flannel shirt camouflaging him to look like every other middle-aged preppy working through a hangover, he began to reconstruct the series of events that preceded his billion-dollar rogue trade.

  Robert’s “risk-on” binge didn’t stop with the ten time charters to ARC. He also convinced Grace to let him make an offer on the Captain Fisher house overlooking Edgartown harbor, which was immediately accepted by the three siblings in Boston who’d just inherited the house from their parents. Later that evening, as they enjoyed their anniversary dinner at the Outermost Inn just below the Aquinnah lighthouse, Robert had proposed to Grace that they relocate to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in pursuit of the Holy Grail for young families: a backyard, a garage filled with bicycles, a minivan, sidewalks, a dock, and maybe even the black Labrador retriever that Oliver wanted so badly.

  As a shipping man with clients and colleagues around the world, Robert said, it didn’t really matter where they lived as long as he had a telephone, a valid passport, an internet connection and access to an airport. They both agreed that Oliver would be thrilled by the prospect of living in an old sea captain’s house that had once belonged to a boy named Oliver and may even have been the inspiration for the Admiral Benbow Inn featured so prominently in his favorite novel – Treasure Island.

  Now the buzz of impulsive decision-making had worn off and the hangover of having to confess his crimes to Coco was setting in. Robert felt his chowder-laden stomach flutter as he searched his BlackBerry for the numbers of the Norwegian’s half-dozen mobile telephones. It was with fear in his soul that he dialed one of the numbers and took a deep breath. It was time to come clean.

  “I sure hope you are calling to tell me you’ve found the $500 million!” Coco sang upon answering the phone.

  “Not exactly, Coco,” Robert said and swallowed the sizeable lump in his throat.

  “Ah, then you must be calling to advise me Viking Alexandra has left Philadelphia ahead of schedule,” Coco interrupted. “That is also good news because the tanker party is about to start in the Arabian Gulf and that ship had better not be late! When the market is this strong, every minute matters.”

  It wasn’t as good as hauling in $500 million on Wall Street overnight, but every ship Coco managed to get into position while the market was hot would be worth close to $10 million in voyage revenue.

  “I thought you said every minute mattered when the market was weak,” Robert replied.

  “That is also true!” Coco cried. “But make no mistake, Fairchild, if freight rates have slipped by the time that ship gets back to the AG then the difference is coming from your paycheck!”

  In his tireless pursuit to teach his inexperienced underling the agony and ecstasy of being a tramp shipowner, Coco Jacobsen had indexed Robert’s monthly salary to the
average daily rate that charterers paid for each of his two-million-barrel supertankers. When the spot market was strong Robert made a boatload of money, but most of the time he didn’t – most of the time he, like the ships, was living dangerously close to cash break-even.

  “How could I forget?” Robert muttered.

  “What did you just mumble, Fairchild?”

  As he waited for Robert’s reply, Coco ran his hand across the white canvas shell that protected his helicopter on the deck of the Kon Tiki. He had briefly considered popping down to Mykonos to meet another Greek shipowner friend who might be willing to make up for Coco’s cash shortfall, but he’d quickly decided against it; having one partner was tough but having two would be sheer torture; there were simply too many tough and unsubstantiated decisions to be made in the shipping business every day.

  “Actually, Viking Alexandra was caught-up in the port for some, um, issues,” Robert said, careful not to share the bad news about the refinery no longer accepting crude oil tankers. “But the good news is that she will be sailing tonight and is still on budget according to the voyage calculation.”

  “Ja, but we make money in this business by doing better than the voyage calculation,” Coco said. “And besides, if everything is fine why are you calling me?”

  “Can’t I just call to say ‘hello,’” Robert said.

  “No one calls a shipowner just to say hello,” Coco said. “People call shipowners when they want money or when there is a problem; so which is it, Fairchild – problem or money?”

  “Neither,” Robert said, even though knew it really both.

  “You’re lying,” Coco said.

  “We need to talk,” Robert said.

  “Then talk.”

  “No,” Robert said spontaneously as he shook his head back and forth and stared into the orange flames dancing in the stone hearth.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is a conversation we need to have face-to-face,” Robert said. He had called Coco to confess his sins but he realized there was simply no way he could be persuasive enough over the transatlantic telephone line to overcome his boss’s inevitable objections.

  “Ah,” Coco sang with amusement. “Let me guess; my little American Boy Scout has decided to raise the $500 million from Tony Soprano and now you are afraid to talk on an unsecure mobile phone line, is that it?”

  “I am definitely afraid,” Robert conceded.

  “Fear is good,” Coco said. “Fear means you are alive. Fear means you are pushing yourself by taking some chances. I am proud of you.”

  “We’ll see about that after we speak,” Robert said. “When can we meet?”

  “Ja, but I am still on Kon Tiki near Chios,” Coco said. “Although my work here appears to be finished.”

  Robert had no idea why, or with whom, his cagey boss had been spending so much time on the fabled Aegean island of Chios but his curiosity was agonizing.

  “No problem,” Robert said as he glanced down at his watch. “I’ll be there the day after tomorrow.”

  “I am working on a transaction that doesn’t concern you,” Coco said.

  “But I’m the CEO of Viking Tankers,” Robert countered.

  Coco chuckled and said, “That’s funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Come on, Robert,” Coco said. “CEO is just the title we gave you when you did the roadshow for the junk bond deal so that the Americans would take you seriously. Alexandra made me give you that title, but we all know that it doesn’t actually mean anything.”

  Robert closed his eyes and shook his head; this was going to be bad -really bad.

  “Would you like to meet in the Oslo office instead?” Robert asked.

  “I can’t,” Coco wailed. “If I spend one more day in Norway during this calendar year it will cost me $50 million in unpaid taxes.”

  “But I thought Wade Waters came up with a legal strategy that allows you to spend more time in Oslo,” Robert said.

  “He did, but he’s not quite ready to test it out,” Coco said.

  “How about New York?” Robert asked.

  “Nope,” Coco said. “I’m still on the naughty boy list with the FBI; I can’t clear U.S. customs until the matter is resolved.”

  “That’s right,” Robert said. He had always followed the theory of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” when it came to Coco’s travel restrictions.

  “Don’t you see what’s happening here, Robert?” Coco pleaded. “Between laws and taxes I am running out of places to go. Once all the countries connect their computers, I might never be able to get off this yacht ever! I will be like an astronaut stranded in outer space! I will be like Major Tom!”

  “There are worse places to be confined than the Kon Tiki,” Robert said.

  “Confinement is confinement,” Coco replied.

  “Tell you what, let’s just meet in London,” Robert suggested calmly; it was a common refrain in the international shipping industry.

  “Yes, London is still safe,” Coco said as his dark mood suddenly turned bright. “I will meet you in London tomorrow evening to hear this fabulous news you are going to tell me.”

  I never said the news was fabulous, Robert thought, but instead he said, “Fantastic!”

  Although Coco would not normally have jumped onto his Gulfstream just to hear whatever balderdash Fairchild felt the need to ventilate, his work on Chios appeared to be finished. The Norwegian was desperate for something that would cheer him up. Even though he was on the brink of completing the biggest deal of his lifetime and that his fleet of supertankers was about to corner the supertanker market, he didn’t feel particularly happy. Although Coco had come to possess more assets during his rags-to-riches lifetime than many sovereign nations, the two things Coco wanted most of all were still outside his grasp – Alexandra Meriwether and a family.

  “But I am warning you, Fairchild,” Coco said, “this had better be something really good, or else…”

  Chapter 9

  Malcom McLean

  With only a high school education, Malcom McLean (1913-2001) pumped gas at a service station and saved enough money by 1934 to buy a second-hand truck for $120. From that beginning, with his single pickup truck, he built it into the second-largest trucking company in the U.S., with 1770 trucks and 32 terminals. McLean Trucking became the first trucking company in the nation to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1956, McLean developed the metal shipping container, which replaced the traditional break bulk method of handling dry goods and revolutionized the transport of goods and cargo worldwide. McLean secured a bank loan for $500 million and in 1956 bought two World War II T-2 tankers, which he converted to carry containers on and under deck. McLean’s company, Sea-Land Services, Inc., was sold to A.P. Moller of Denmark in 2006.

  Twenty minutes after the G-5 touched down at Biggin Hill airport, a triple-black Maybach with the license plate “VIKING” was cruising slowly up a snow-covered Dover Street in Mayfair. Before the luxurious land yacht had come to a complete stop beneath the fluttering Union Jack suspended from the illuminated façade of Browns Hotel, Coco Jacobsen sprang from the back seat.

  The Norwegian bounded up the hotel’s stone steps, burst through the double doors and strode purposefully down the long, black-and-white tiled hallway. He didn’t stop until he’d arrived in the taproom where he had agreed to rendezvous with Robert Fairchild. The towering tanker tycoon still had no idea why his Ivy League lackey had summoned him from sunny Greece to freezing London but as a naturally optimistic shipowner, he assumed something great must be about to happen.

  As he shook the unseasonable snow from his raven hair, Coco appeared not to notice that the multicultural occupants of The Donovan Bar were studying him like he was an exotic animal. Representing the handful of nationalities that had colonized Mayfair real estate, the ultra-wealthy French, Arabs, Chinese, Indians and Russians were puzzled by Coco’s chestnut skin, intrigued by his rock
-star length hair and curious that his powerful six-foot-six-inch frame was swaddled in that boyish Norwegian business uniform of Levis, a blue button-down shirt and a blazer blooming with a lime green pocket square – a gift from Anwar Sadat to commemorate their first deal together. But what really captured their attention, more than their inability to determine which ethnic group he belonged to, was the man’s energy; it was a force that filled the bar as completely as the smell of wood smoke and the sound of Cole Porter.

  Once they had adjusted to the dimness, Coco’s pale blue eyes moved across the room like a searchlight. They moved over the antique brass sconces, the walls packed tight with black-and-white Terence Donovan photographs, the magnificent stained-glass window behind the bar and the curvilinear chairs on which lounged a species of stateless souls seen in most of the five-star restaurants and hotels of London, New York, Paris and Hong Kong.

  The oil tanker czar had nearly exhausted his search of the taproom when he spotted Robert Fairchild reclining in the “Naughty Corner” – a banquette nook on the far side of the room named in honor of Mr. Donovan’s nude photographs which decorated its walls. Coco was momentarily puzzled to see Fairchild sitting next to his single largest lender, Alistair Gooding from Allied Bank of England. And while the shipping tycoon would normally have been furious to find his CEO fraternizing with his financier sans chaperone, Coco didn’t care; he was just too excited to hear Fairchild’s fabulous news.

  The moment Robert and Alistair noticed that the towering Norwegian was staring at them the two grown men jumped to their feet and began waving him over. They were as nervous as schoolboys eager to please a favorite teacher.

  “Thanks so much for coming up from Greece,” Robert said enthusiastically after Coco had crossed the room in a few long strides and stopped abruptly in front of them. “How was your trip?”

  Without uttering a word, Coco shot his cuffs and crossed his powerful arms across his chest – a maneuver that revealed one of his sixty-five pairs of sterling silver ship propeller cufflinks. Coco had taken possession of cufflinks (along with one hundred and seventy-five ascots, several hundred engraved silver pens and twenty-two supertankers) after his hostile takeover of a courtly two-hundred-year-old Norwegian tanker company called Knut Shipping. “Ja, I paid $300 million for Knut’s man jewelry and I got the VLCCs for free,” Coco said when he leaked the story to TradeWinds.