Nitchak Khan sat up and wiped the snow out of his face and beard. “Praise be to God,” he muttered, astonished that no limbs were broken, and he looked around at the others. They were also picking themselves up, Scot helpless with laughter at Jean-Luc who was also unhurt but still lying on his back letting out a paroxysm of French invective. Nasiri had ended up almost headfirst into a snowdrift and Scot, still laughing, went to help him. He, too, was just a little battered but no damage.
“Hey, you lot up there,” someone was shouting from the crowd below. It was Effer Jordon. “What about the bleeding race? It’s not over yet!”
“Come on, Scot—come on, Jean-Luc, for crissake!”
Scot forgot Nasiri and started to run for the winning post fifty yards away but he slipped and fell in the heavy snow, lurched up and slipped again, feet leaden. Jean-Luc reeled up and charged in pursuit, closely followed by Nasiri and Nitchak Khan. The cheers of the crowd redoubled as the men fought through the snow, falling, scrambling, getting up and falling again, the going very rough, aches forgotten. Scot was still slightly in the lead, now Nitchak Khan, now Jean-Luc, now Nasiri—mechanic Fowler Joines, red in the face, urging them on, the villagers as excited.
Ten yards to go. The old Khan was three feet in the lead when he tripped and sprawled face forward. Scot took the lead, Nasiri almost beside him, Jean-Luc just inches behind. They were all at a laboring, faltering, stumbling walk, dragging their boots up out of the heavy snow, then there was a mighty cheer as Nitchak Khan began to scuttle forward on all fours the last few yards, Jean-Luc and Scot made one last desperate headlong dive for the line, and they all collapsed in a heap amid cheers and countercheers.
“Scot won…”
“No, it was Jean-Luc…”
“No, it was old Nitchak…”
When he had collected his breath, Jean-Luc said, “As there is no clear opinion and even our revered mullah is not sure, I, Jean-Luc, declare Nitchak Khan the winner by a nostril.” There were cheers and even more as he added, “And as the losers lost so bravely, I award them with another of Tom’s bottles of whisky which I will commandeer to be shared by all expats at sundown!”
Everyone shook hands with everyone. Nitchak Khan agreed to another challenge match next month and, as he honored the law and did not drink, he haggled voraciously but sold the whisky he had won to Jean-Luc at half its value. Everyone cheered again, then someone shouted a warning.
Northward, far up in the mountains, a red signal flare was falling into the valley. The silence was sudden. The flare vanished. Then another arced up and outward to fall again: SOS Urgent.
“CASEVAC,” Jean-Luc said, squinting into the distance. “Must be Rig Rosa or Rig Bellissima.”
“I’m on my way.” Scot Gavallan hurried off.
“I’ll come with you,” Jean-Luc said. “We’ll take a 212 and make it a check ride for you.”
In minutes they were airborne. Rig Rosa was one of the rigs they had acquired from the old Guerney contract, Bellissima one of their regulars. All eleven rigs in this area had been developed by an Italian company for IranOil, and though all were radio linked with Zagros Three, the connection was not always solid because of the mountains and scatter effect. Flares were a substitute.
The 212 climbed steadily, passing through ten thousand feet, snow-locked valleys sparkled in the sunshine, their operational ceiling seventeen thousand, depending on their load. Now Rig Rosa was ahead in a clearing on a small plateau at eleven thousand four hundred seventy. Just a few trailers for housing, and sheds scattered haphazardly around the tall derrick. And a helipad.
“Rig Rosa, this is Jean-Luc. Do you read?” He waited patiently.
“Loud and clear, Jean-Luc!” It was the happy voice of Mimmo Sera, the “company man”—the highest rank on the site, an engineer in charge of all operations. “What you got for us, eh?”
“Niente, Mimmo! We saw a red flare and we’re just checking.”
“Madonna, CASEVAC? It wasn’t us.” At once Scot broke off his approach, banked, and went on to the new heading, climbing farther into the mountain range. “Bellissima?”
“We’re going to check.”
“Let us know, eh? We haven’t been in contact since the storm came. What’s the latest news?”
“The last we heard was two days ago: the BBC said the Immortals at Doshan Tappeh had put down a rebellion of air force cadets and civilians. We haven’t heard from our Tehran HQ or anyone. If we do I’ll radio you.”
“Eh, radio! Jean-Luc, we’ll need another dozen loads of six-inch pipe and the usual of cement starting tomorrow. Okay?”
“Bien sûr!” Jean-Luc was delighted with the extra business and the opportunity to prove they were better than Guerney. “How’s it going?”
“We’ve drilled to eight thousand feet and everything looks like another bonanza. I want to run the well next Monday, if possible. Can you order up Schlumberger for me?” Schlumberger was the worldwide firm that manufactured and supplied down-hole tools that sampled and electronically measured, with vast accuracy, oil-bearing capabilities and qualities of the various strata, tools to guide the drilling bits, tools to fish up broken bits, tools to perforate, by explosion, the steel casings of the hole to allow oil to flow into the pipe—along with the experts to work them. Very expensive but totally necessary. “To run a well” was the last job before cementing the steel casing in place and bringing the well on stream.
“Wherever they are, Mimmo, we’ll bring them Monday—Khomeini willing!”
“Mamma mia, tell Nasiri we have to have them.”
Reception was fading rapidly.
“No problem. I’ll call you on the way back.” Jean-Luc glanced out of the cockpit. They were passing over a ridge, still climbing, the engines beginning to labor. “Merde, I’m hungry,” he said, and stretched in his seat. “I feel like I’ve been massaged with a pneumatic drill—but that was a great race!”
“You know, Jean-Luc, you were at the line a second before Nitchak Khan. Easily.”
“Of course, but we French are magnanimous, diplomatique, and very practical. I knew he’d sell us back our whisky for half price; if he’d been declared the loser, it would have cost us a fortune.” Jean-Luc beamed. “But if it hadn’t been for that mogul, I would not have hesitated—I would have won easily.”
Scot smiled and said nothing, breathing easily, but conscious of his breathing. Above twelve thousand, according to regulations, pilots should be on oxygen if they were to stay up for more than half an hour. They carried none and never, yet, had any of the pilots felt any discomfort other than a headache or two, though it took a week or so to get acclimatized to living at seventy-five hundred feet. It was harder for the riggers at Bellissima.
Their own stopovers at Bellissima were usually very short. Just lumber up with maximum payload, inside or out, of 4,000 pounds. Pipes, pumps, diesel, winches, generators, chemicals, food, trailers, tanks, men, mud—the all-purpose name for the liquid that was pumped into the drill hole to remove waste, to keep the bit lubricated, in due course to tame the oil or gas, and without which deep drilling was impossible. Then lumber out, light, or with a full load of men or equipment for repair or replacement.
We’re just a jumped-up delivery van, Scot thought, his eyes scanning the skies, instruments, and all around. Yes, but how grand to be flying and not driving. Below, the crags were quite close, the tree line long since passed. They mounted the last ridge. Now they could see the rig.
“Bellissima, this is Jean-Luc. Do you read?”
Rig Bellissima was the highest of the chain, exactly at twelve thousand four hundred fifty feet above sea level. The base was perched on a ledge just below the crest. The other side of the ledge the mountain fell away seven thousand feet, almost sheer, into a valley ten miles wide and thirty miles long, a vast gash in the surface of the earth.
“Bellissima, this is Jean-Luc. Do you read?”
Again no answer. Jean-Luc switched channels. “Zagros Three, do you
read?”
“Loud and clear, Captain,” came the immediate answer of their Iranian base radio op Aliwari. “Excellency Nasiri’s beside me.”
“Stand by on this frequency. The CASEVAC’s at Bellissima, but we’ve no radio contact. We’re going in to land.”
“Roger. Standing by.”
As always at Bellissima, Scot was awed at the vastness of the earth’s convulsion that had caused the valley. And, like all who visited this rig, again he wondered at the enormity of the gamble, labor, and wealth necessary to find the oil field, select the site, erect the rig, then to drill the thousands of feet to make the wells profitable. But they were, immensely so, as was this whole area with its huge oil and gas deposits trapped in limestone cones between seventy-five hundred and eleven thousand feet below the surface. And then the further huge investment and more gambling to connect this field to the pipeline that straddled the Zagros Mountains, joining the refineries at Isfahan in the center of Iran to those at Abadan on the Gulf—another extraordinary engineering feat of the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now nationalized and renamed IranOil. “Stolen, Scot, laddie, stolen’s the correct word,” his father had told him many times.
Scot Gavallan smiled to himself, thinking about his father, feeling a warm glow. I’m bloody lucky to have him, he thought. I still miss Mother but I’m glad she died. Terrible for a lovely, active woman to become a helpless, chair-ridden, palsied shell, still with her mind intact even at the end, the best mother a guy could have. Rotten luck, her death, particularly for Dad. But I’m glad he remarried, Maureen’s super, and Dad’s super and I’ve a smashing life and the future’s rosy—plenty of flying, plenty of birds and in a couple of years I’ll get married: how about Tess? His heart picked up a beat. Bloody nuisance Linbar’s her uncle and she his favorite niece, but bloody lucky I don’t have anything to do with him, she’s only eighteen so there’s plenty of time…
“Which way will you land, mon vieux?” came through his earphones.
“From the west,” he said, collecting himself.
“Good.” Jean-Luc was peering ahead. No sign of life. The site was heavily covered with snow, almost buried. Only the helipad was cleared. Threads of smoke came up from the trailer huts. “Ah! There!”
They saw the tiny figure of a man, bundled up, standing near the helipad and waving his arms. “Who is it?”
“I think it’s Pietro.” Scot was concentrating on the landing. At this height and because of the position on the ledge there were sudden gusts, turbulences, and whirlwinds within them—no room for mistakes. He came in over the abyss, the eddies rocking them, then corrected beautifully as he swooped over the land and touched down.
“Good.” Jean-Luc turned his attention back to the bundled-up man he now recognized as Pietro Fieri, one of the “tool pushers,” next in importance to the company man. They saw him motion with his hand across his throat, the sign to cut engines, indicating the CASEVAC was not an immediate takeoff situation. Jean-Luc beckoned the man to his side window and opened it. “What’s up, Pietro?” he shouted over the engines.
“Guineppa is sick,” Pietro shouted back—Mario Guineppa was the company man—and thumped the left side of his chest. “We think it may be his heart. And that’s not all. Look there!” He pointed aloft. Jean-Luc and Scot craned to see better but could not see what was agitating him.
Jean-Luc unbuckled and got out. The cold hit him and he winced, his eyes watering in the eddies caused by the rotors, his dark glasses helping only a little. Then he saw the problem, and his stomach twisted nastily. A few hundred feet above and almost directly over the camp, just under the crest, was an enormous overhang of snow and ice. “Madonna!”
“If that goes, it’ll avalanche the whole mountainside and maybe take us and everything into the valley along with it!” Pietro’s face was bluish in the cold. He was thickset and very strong with a dark grizzled beard, his eyes brown and keen but squinting now against the wind. “Guineppa wants to confer with you. Come to his trailer, eh?”
“And that?” Jean-Luc jerked a thumb upward.
“If it goes, it goes,” Pietro said with a laugh, his teeth white against the darkness of his oil-stained parka. “Come on!” He ducked away from the rotors and trudged away. “Come on!”
Uneasily Jean-Luc gauged the overhang. It could be there for weeks, or fall any second. Above the crest the sky was peerless, but little warmth came from the afternoon sun. “Stay here, Scot, keep her idling,” he called out, then followed Pietro awkwardly, the snow very deep.
Mario Guineppa’s two-room trailer was warm and untidy, charts on the walls, oil-stained clothes, heavy gloves, and hard hats on pegs with an oilman’s paraphernalia scattered about the office/living room. He was in the bedroom, lying on his bed fully dressed but for his boots, a big tall man of forty-five with an imposing nose, normally ruddy and weathered, but now pallid, a curious bluish tinge to his lips. The tool pusher from the other shift, Enrico Banastasio, was with him—a small, dark man with dark eyes and thin face.
“Ah, Jean-Luc! Good to see you,” Guineppa said wearily.
“And you, mon ami.” Very concerned, Jean-Luc unzipped his flying jacket and sat beside the bed. Guineppa had been in charge of Bellissima for two years—twelve hours on, twelve off, two months on site, two off—and had brought in three major producing wells here with space to drill another four. “It’s the hospital in Shiraz for you.”
“That’s not important, first there’s the overhang. Jean-Luc, I wa—”
“We evacuate and leave that stronzo to the Hands of God,” Banastasio said. “Mamma mia, Enrico,” Guineppa said irritably, “I tell you again I think we can give God a hand—with Jean-Luc’s help. Pietro agrees. Eh, Pietro?”
“Yes,” Pietro said from the doorway, a toothpick in his mouth. “Jean-Luc, I was brought up in Aosta in the Italian Alps so I know mountains and avalanches and I th—”
“Sì, e sei pazzo.” Yes, and you’re crazy, Banastasio said curtly.
“Nel tuo culo.” In your ass. Pietro casually made an obscene gesture. “With your help Jean-Luc, it’s easy to shift that stronzo.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jean-Luc asked.
Guineppa said, “Take Pietro and fly up over the crest to a place he’ll show you on the north face. He’ll drop a stick of dynamite into the snow from there and that’ll avalanche the danger away from us.”
Pietro beamed. “Just like that and the overhang will vanish.”
Banastasio said even more angrily, his English American-accented, “For crissake, I tell you again it’s too goddamn risky. We should evacuate first—then if you must, try your dynamite.”
Guineppa’s face screwed up as a spasm of pain went through him. One hand went to his chest. “If we evacuate we have to close everything down an—”
“So? So we close down. So what? If you don’t care about your own life, think of the rest of us. I say we evacuate pronto. Then dynamite. Jean-Luc, isn’t it safer?”
“Of course it’s safer,” Jean-Luc replied carefully, not wanting to agitate the older man. “Pietro, you say you know avalanches. How long will that hold?”
“My nose says it will go soon. Very soon. There are cracks below. Perhaps tomorrow, even tonight. I know where to blow her—and be very safe.” Pietro looked at Banastasio. “I can do it whatever this stronzo thinks.”
Banastasio got up. “Jean-Luc, me and my shift’re evacuating. Pronto. Whatever is decided.” He left.
Guineppa shifted in his cot. “Jean-Luc, take Pietro aloft. Now.”
“First, we’ll evacuate everyone to Rig Rosa, you first,” Jean-Luc said crisply, “then dynamite. If it works you’re back in business, if not there’s enough temporary space at Rig Rosa for you.”
“Not first, last…there’s no need to evacuate.”
Jean-Luc hardly heard him. He was estimating numbers of men to move. Each of the two shifts contained nine men—tool pusher, assistant, mudman, who monitored the mud and decided on
its chemical constituents and weight, driller, who looked after the drilling, motorman, responsible for all winches, pumps, and so on, and four roustabouts to attach or unhook the pipes and drills, “You’ve seven Iranian cooks and laborers?”
“Yes. But I tell you it’s not necessary to evacuate,” Guineppa said exhaustedly.
“Safer, mon vieux.” Jean-Luc turned to Pietro. “Tell everyone to travel light and be fast.”
Pietro glanced down at Guineppa. “Yes or no?”
Disgustedly, Guineppa nodded, the effort tiring him. “Ask for a volunteer crew to stay. If no one will, Mother of God, close down.”
Pietro was clearly disappointed. Still picking his teeth, he went out. Guineppa shifted in the cot again, trying to get more comfortable, and began to curse. He seemed more frail than before.
Jean-Luc said quietly, “It’s better to evacuate, Mario.”
“Pietro is wise and clever but that porco misero, Banastasio, he’s fart up to his nostrils, always trouble, and it was his fault the radio was smashed, I know it!”
“What?”
“It was smashed on his shift. Now we need a new one, do you have a spare?”
“No, but I’ll see if I can get you one. Is it reparable? Perhaps one of our mechanics c—”
“Banastasio said he slipped and fell on it, but I heard he hit it with a hammer when it wouldn’t work… Mamma mia!” Guineppa winced and clutched his chest and began to curse again.
“How long have you been having pains?”
“Since two days. Today has been the worst. That stronzo Banastasio!” Guineppa muttered. “But what can you expect, it runs in his family. Eh! His family are half-American, no? I heard the American side has mafioso connections.”
Jean-Luc smiled to himself, not believing it, half listening to the tirade. He knew that they hated each other—Guineppa, the Portuguese-Roman patrician, and Banastasio, Sicilian-American peasant. But that’s not so surprising, he thought, locked up here, twelve hours on, twelve off, day after day, month after month, however good the pay.
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