Handley is unusual in combining all of these qualities into one person (that's why he's the boss of the Lan Tao Island operation), but the qualities are as common as tattoos and Tevas around the tables of Papa Doc's. The crews of the cable barges tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: ship's masters who also know how to dive using various types of breathing rigs or who can slam out a report on their laptops, embed a few digital images in it, and email it to the other side of the world over a satellite phone, then pick up a welding torch and go to work on the barge. If these people didn't know what they were doing, there's a good chance they would be dead by now or would have screwed up a cable lay somewhere and washed out of the industry.
Most of the ones here work on what amounts to a freelance basis, either on their own or as part of small firms. Handley, for example, is Director of Technical Services for the ITR Corporation, which, among other functions, serves as a sort of talent agency for cable-layers, matching supply of expertise to demand and facilitating contracts. Most of the divers are freelancers, hired temporarily by companies that likewise move from one job to another. The business is as close to being a pure meritocracy as anything ever gets in the real world, and it's only because these guys know they are good that they have the confidence to call themselves cable trash.
It was not always thus. Until very recently, cable-laying talent was monopolized by the clubs. This worked just fine when every cable was a club cable, created by monopolies for monopolies. In the last couple of years, however, two changes have occurred at once: FLAG, the first major privately financed cable, came along; and at the same time, many experienced cable layers began to go into business for themselves, either because of voluntary retirement or downsizing. There clearly is a synergy between these two trends.
The roster of FLAG's Tong Fuk cable lay contains around 44 people, half of whom are crew members on either the cable barge Elbe or the accompanying tug Ocean East. The rest of them are here representing various contractors involved in the project. It would be safe to assume that at least that many are working on the APCN side for a grand total of around 100.
The size of the fraternity of cable layers is estimated by Handley to be less than 500, and the number is not increasing. A majority work full time for one of the clubs. Perhaps a couple of hundred of them are freelancers, though this fraction gives every indication of rising as the club employees resign and go to work as contractors, frequently doing the same work for the same company. "No one can afford to hire these folks for long periods of time," Handley says. But their pay is not exceptionally high: benefits, per diem, and expenses plus a daily rate - but a day might be anything from 0 to 24 hours of work. For a diver the rate might be $200 per day; for the master of a barge, tug, or beach $300; and for the experts running the show and repping for contractors or customers it's in the range of $300 to $400.
The arrival of a shore-landing operation at a place like Lan Tao Island must look something like this to the locals: suddenly, it is difficult to obtain hotel rooms because a plethora of small, unheard-of offshore corporations have blocked out a couple of dozen rooms for a couple hundred nights. Sunburned Anglos begin to arrive, wearing T-shirts and carrying luggage emblazoned with the logos of Alcatel, AT&T, or Cable & Wireless. They fly in from all points of the compass, speaking in Southern drawls or Australian twangs or Scottish burrs and sometimes bringing their wives or girlfriends, not infrequently Thai or Filipina. The least important of them has a laptop and a cell phone, but most have more advanced stuff like portable printers, GPS units, and that ultimate personal communications device, the satellite telephone, which works anywhere on the planet, even in the middle of the ocean, by beaming the call straight up to a satellite.
Sample conversation at Papa Doc's:
Envious hacker tourist: "How much does one of those satellite phones cost, anyway?"
Leathery, veteran cable layer: "Who gives a shit?"
Within a day or two, the cable layers have established an official haunt: preferably a place equipped with a dartboard and a few other amenities very close to the waterfront so they can keep an eye on incoming traffic. There they can get a bite to eat or a drink and pay for it on the spot so that when their satellite phones ring or when a tugboat chugs into the bay, they can immediately dash off to work. These men work and play at completely erratic and unpredictable hours. They wear shorts and sandals and T-shirts and frequently sport tattoos and hence could easily be mistaken, at a glance, for vacationing sailors. But if you can get someone to turn down the volume on the jukebox, you can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal. Their conversation is filled with references to places like Tunisia, Diego Garcia, the North Sea, Porthcurno, and Penang.
One day a barge appears off the cove, and there is a lot of fussing around with floats, lots of divers in the water. A backhoe digs a trench in the cobble beach. A long skinny black thing is wrestled ashore. Working almost naked in the tropical heat, the men bolt segmented pipes around it and then bury it. It is never again to be seen by human eyes. Suddenly, all of these men pay their bills and vanish. Not long afterward, the phone service gets a hell of a lot better.
On land, the tools of cable laying are the tools of civil engineers: backhoes, shovels, cranes. The job is a matter of digging a ditch, laying duct, planting manholes. The complications are sometimes geographical but mostly political. In deep water, where the majority of FLAG is located, the work is done by cable ships and has more in common with space exploration than with any terrestrial activity. These two realms could hardly be more different, and yet the transition between them - the shore landing - is completely distinct from both.
Shallow water is the most perilous part of a cable's route. Extra precautions must be taken in the transition from deep water to the beach, and these precautions get more extreme as the water gets more shallow. Between 1,000 and 3,000 meters, the cable has a single layer of armor wires (steel rods about as thick as a pencil) around it. In less than 1,000 meters of water, it has a second layer of armor around the first. In the final approach to the shoreline, this double-armored cable is contained within a massive shell of articulated cast-iron pipe, which in turn is buried under up to a meter of sand.
The articulated pipe comes in sections half a meter long, which have to be manually fit around the cable and bolted together. Each section of pipe interlocks with the ones on either end of it. The coupling is designed to bend a certain amount so that the cable can be snaked around any obstructions to its destination: the beach manhole. It will bend only so much, however, so that the cable's minimum radius of curvature will not be violated.
At the sandy beach this manual work was done out in the surf by a team of English freelance divers based out of Hong Kong. At the cobble beach, it was done in a trench by a bikini-underwear-clad Frenchman with a New Zealand passport living in Singapore, working in Hong Kong, with a Singaporean wife of Chinese descent. Drenched with sweat and rain and seawater, he wrestles with the cast-iron pipe sections in a cobblestone ditch, bolting them patiently together. A Chinese man in a suit picks his way across the cobbles toward him, carrying an oversized umbrella emblazoned with the logo of a prominent stock brokerage, followed by a minion. Although this is all happening in China, this is the first Chinese person who has appeared on the beach in a couple of days. He is an executive from the phone company, coming to inspect the work. After a stiff exchange of pleasantries with the other cable layers on the beach, he goes to the brink of the trench and begins bossing around the man with the half-pipes, who, knowing what's good for him, just keeps his mouth shut while maintaining a certain bearing and dignity beside which the executive's suit and umbrella seem pathetic and vain.