“Jesus. Pumped backwards. I don’t believe it.” He wound his hand vigorously around, asking the tool pusher to increase the flow. The tool pusher raised a stubby finger and waved it like an inverted pendulum.
The cook translated unnecessarily. “He say, not possible.”
“Fuck it! OK. Tell him the rig has to displace. Now. Quickly. Twelve barrels a minute.”
The tool pusher looked baffled. “He say, how much fast?”
“Twelve barrels a minute.” Terry held up fingers for twelve. “OK. Does he understand?”
“Oh yes. He understand good.” The tool pusher seemed to have caught some of the urgency and positively bustled up to the rig floor. He roused the driller out of the dog-house and started to blow the electric horn to summon the rig-hands from their hideaways. The Virgin and Terry climbed slowly after him. When they got to the floor, the driller was trying to spin the valve on his mud manifold, to open the line to the well. It was stuck. Then a large roustabout appeared with a sledge hammer and started to pound on the valve wheel. The cast iron wheel splintered under the punishment.
“Oh, Jesus, I can’t watch,” moaned Terry, and they moved to the furthest corner of the floor. Two Westerners and the cook presiding over the beginnings of a disaster. Some floor hands had appeared and, arguing amongst themselves, they set about opening the valve with a pipe-wrench. It took two of them swinging on the pipe-wrench to get it started. The Virgin stepped out to open the MacAllans’ valve allowing them to pump into the well and then joined the crowd at the driller’s panel. The toolpusher had taken over and was slowly winding up one of the mud-pumps. The Virgin ran to the railing and waved to Rene to stop pumping as the rig pumps took over. He checked his watch. The whole performance had taken over twenty-five minutes.
Rene puffed up the stairs and they met in the dog-house to look at the situation.
“How much did you get away?” asked Terry.
“Ninety-seven barrels.”
“OK. What’s the timing, Greg?”
The Virgin was working on his pocket calculator and writing results on the edge of an old Romanian newspaper. “886 barrels to displace. Less 97 comes out at 789 barrels left. We started mixing three hours and eight minutes ago, that’s 188 minutes. Thickening time on the lead cement was five hours fifty, that’s 350 minutes, so we’ve got 162 minutes left. How much has he pumped so far?”
“Christ - he won’t know. He’s only been pumping five minutes and you’ll never pick that up by dipping tanks. Say 50 barrels; should be on the safe side.”
“OK. We’ve got 739 barrels to pump at 12 barrels a minute - 63 minutes. Heaps of time. If he slows down a bit after 55 minutes, no worries.”
Terry led the cook outside to explain the plan to the driller. The driller had no watch so he left his own on the top of the panel. The floor was empty again; even the tool-pusher had disappeared. The cook would have left as well but Terry sat him in a corner of the dog-house with a newspaper and told him he would have to stay until the plug bumped. They sat staring dopily at the electric fire.
The cement was falling inside the casing under its own weight, displacing the lighter mud that was outside the casing. It was like the school physics experiment, pouring mercury into one side of a U-tube filled with water. It would keep falling until the level of liquid cement was about the same inside and outside the casing. Then the mud-pump would start doing some real work as it lifted the column of heavy cement on the outside of the casing by pumping lighter mud down the inside. The pump pressure gauge on the driller’s panel would start to climb slowly as the mud forced down the level of cement inside the casing, and lifted the level of the cement outside.
Everyone was waiting for the top plug to bump. It would arrive at the bottom of the casing and seal against the float collar. The mud-pump would be unable to force any more mud into the casing, and the pressure would increase sharply. Then they would bleed off the pump pressure and check that the float equipment was working - the check valves in the casing shoe and collar that prevent the liquid cement surging back into the casing. End of job, and everyone could go for a coffee.
For the moment, they had nothing to do but wait. It should be another quarter of an hour or so before the driller’s pressure gauge started its slow climb. Rene left to check on the boys cleaning up the cement units. From where The Virgin sat, he could look out across the floor, past the cement head to the stands of drill-pipe racked vertically in the derrick. Silver rain caught by the derrick lights swept past the blackness of the pipe.
He must have been dozing when the driller came in. He was pointing his finger up and saying something to the cook. “He say, the pump is going up. He say you come and look.”
“OK,” said Terry, swinging his feet down from the bench. “I guess it should be - Christ!”
There was a metallic clap of thunder from outside and the floor leapt as if from a giant hammer blow. An unseen force seemed to catch the driller between the shoulder blades as he stood in the doorway and slammed him across the room into the opposite wall. Then everything happened too fast. There was mud everywhere, bursting through the doorway, jetting in every direction. They were covered instantly. As he tried to shelter from the tide, The Virgin found himself looking at the fire. It flashed blue and the lights went out. The walls of the metal room were drumming and shuddering fiercely. Outside they could hear the sounds of a freight train collision. His mind caught the fatal ringing sound of falling drill-pipe. Oh God, the derrick’s going over, was the first thing that came to him. I must stay in the dog-house. The ringing of falling drill-pipe was continuing but the dog-house floor was not tilting. A heavy vibration was shaking the walls and the overwhelming noise deafened him, but they were not falling.
The deluge of mud continued. Squinting through his fingers, he could make out the grey of the doorway through the spray. Some-one was on the floor, flat on his stomach, trying to wriggle out. He could make out the shape of the driller huddled at the foot of the wall where he had fallen. The figure on the floor was Terry, fighting his way out below a solid column of mud that was battering its way in and exploding on the opposite wall. He disappeared and an instant later the mud stopped, and with it the noise. It was completely quiet outside. He could hear the wind blow.
It took him a few moments to understand what he saw on the rig floor. Most of the drill-pipe was still standing in the derrick where it should be. Swaying from the shock and sometimes ringing together, but safe. Only two stands had jumped from the fingers of the monkey board a hundred feet above the floor and they were leaning drunkenly against the other side of the derrick. The cement head had gone. The casing stuck up from the rotary, naked. It was full of mud that was slopping from side to side and occasionally bubbling up with trapped air. The float equipment’s holding, was the thought that sprang into The Virgin’s mind, the mud’s not flowing back.
Terry was standing at the driller’s panel, covered in thin mud and his hair awry. “Well, I guess we bumped the plug,” he said.
The Virgin sat alone in Terry’s shack, drinking a coffee and feeling warm in borrowed shirt and jeans. He had conflicting feelings inside him. Glad to be alive and safe, and with a good job in the ground, he was still furious at the gross incompetence that had nearly blown him away.
Terry and Rene came in. “So - what’s the news?” The Virgin asked.
“Pretty good, I’d say,” said Rene. “TAMCO have just bought one 13-3/8” cement head, three straight joints of treating pipe and two Chiksan swivels.”
“How’s the driller?”
Terry shrugged. “Idiots like that are always alright. He’s walking around. His back’s OK but he’s got two beautiful black eyes where he hit the wall. The cook shat himself, so he’s too embarrassed to talk with anyone. You know, that goddamn driller was bumping the plug and he didn’t even shut the pump down? 5700 psi we got to before she blew. I thought he was trying to tell us the pressure was starting to build. God knows what rate they were dis
placing at, but it sure wasn’t twelve barrels a minute.”
“Yeah. I was watching,” Rene was smiling. “The cement head took off like a rocket on a string. It bounced off the drill-pipe and whipped round on the safety cable. It’s made a great crater in the vee-dore. If it hadn’t been tied down, it was heading straight for us. Just like a rocket. I’ve got it all on the DAC. Edgar’s making an extra copy for Terry right now.”
“How about the job?” asked The Virgin. “We got it all away?”
Terry laughed. “We sure as hell bumped the plug. That wasn’t no flash set. No, we’ll know for sure when we run in to drill out, but I bet you it’s good. Tool-pusher doesn’t know how much we pumped, of course. I should have been standing over them while they strapped the tanks, I suppose. Goddamn RomDril. They’re cheap, but cheap is dangerous in this business.”
It was only nine o’clock when he drove off location. He would visit Barani. He felt the need for some home comfort. He would beg some food and real Polish flash in a hot, steamy kitchen. Almost like the real world.
- 13 -
He had little important work waiting when he reached the office next day. The cement job had finished, and it would be at least four weeks before the rig was ready for the next one. Rene was on the rig doing all the clearing up and getting the tickets signed, so The Virgin should have been getting on with selling something new. Except that it was Saturday when TAMCO did not work, and even Harris in Almadi was inclined to get in late and leave early at lunch time. The main business of the day would be the Hash that afternoon.
The girls were waiting for him at the foot of their tower. They scrambled into the car and immediately lit their cigarettes. That was the trade-off. Love me, love my cigarettes. And nurses were the ones who spent their days watching victims dying from lung cancer and heart disease. Never mind, he thought, it’s no use fighting some-one else’s addictions. Years of living in Third World countries had taken the spirit out of his fight for clean air. Picking a minor gap between the on-coming cars, he squeezed into the bedlam that was Sabah’s evening rush hour.
This week the Hash was running at Holey Rock, a stretch of open, stony ground named for the large limestone slab with a hole in it that had been turned up on edge near the road. It was twenty minutes away, quite far enough on a winter’s day. The Virgin jockeyed his way through the traffic and headed out of town on the airport road.
Danka had some news. “I know where burnt soldiers come from.”
“What?”
“You remember. Those soldiers that come to hospital the day Captain Zella tries to rape Evelina. The ones that make too much trouble. They come from camp behind tannery.”
That made The Virgin’s new persona sit up and listen. The tannery was another piece of socialist idiocy. A purpose built factory designed in the West and staffed by a tight group of Poles, turning Tabrizi hides into passable leather. Right next to the plant another Government factory employed Egyptian women to make the leather jackets that were so popular with the Security forces. The product was fine; the difficulty lay in what could be done with it. Priced in official dinars it was far too expensive for export or selling to local shops. And after every young policeman had received his glamorous black leather jacket, the only market left was the friends of friends who got their jackets for nothing through the back door.
The Virgin knew there was an Army base behind the tannery; that was why the tannery gate security was so strict and so few outsiders visited. He had been there only once - some-one’s name-day party - and found the Poles were a more or less happy bunch considering their confinement. They were housed in ramshackle cabins in the corner of the tannery grounds. A tiny East European enclave where they were discreetly permitted to indulge in their two passions - distilling large quantities of high quality flash, and then drinking it.
“So what were the soldiers doing to get burnt like that?”
“This I do not know. There are some new Russians there; they have come only one month before. You will ask them”
“Russians? In the Army camp? I thought they’d all been thrown out years ago.”
“These are private Russians. Not official ones. There are two of them, one professor and one more. Is not normal, but they come to Polish people to be friends and to talk to normal people. You know, Polish people hate Russians, but here everyone is very friends. Stupid, no?”
“No. Not at all. I can imagine they must be going nuts if they only have themselves and Tabrizis to talk to. You have to be an Arab to fit into the society here. But I’m surprised the Army lets them visit the tannery. I thought everyone would be locked up tight, especially foreigners.”
“To start it was not possible; they were locked up completely. And then the two men say they like to go home again, and so now they can visit. They have made a special gate in the wall. Anytime they like to visit tannery the door is opened for them, and when they go back they ring the bell and the Army lets them go in again. But they cannot leave tannery. That is not possible.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I go to a party and stay at night with my friend there. I did not want to speak with Russians, but they are OK. They say they want to come to church with us. You are surprised? Russians going to Catholic church? I am not surprised. Now Communist Party is finished, everyone is Christian. Only they don’t know nothing about Mass and church in Russia. So going to Catholic church is no problem. They know nothing about that also.”
The picture Danka painted sounded frightening. The Virgin wondered if she would ever make the connections. First the burnt soldiers, then the murdered Palestinian scientist, and now two private Russians working in the place the burnt soldiers had come from. He steered her away from the subject.
“So you stayed there with your friend, all night after the party. How naughty! What will the priest say?”
“Boże, Virgin. You are jealous!” She reached over and patted his thigh. “Never mind. I will come and make you happy too. Very soon, I promise.”
God forbid, thought The Virgin, God forbid.
The Hash had gathered at Holey Rock, jumping up and down to keep warm in the sea wind, and ready for the off. Noddy tootled the Hash Horn and away they went, skipping heavily around the limestone rocks and trying not to slip on the red clay between them. The girls made no effort to run. They were content with a short walk, then back to the cars for a cigarette.
They waited nearly an hour before the real Hashers returned, red-faced and boisterous. It was no weather for standing around chatting and soon they were off in convoy to the De Jonge’s camp for the Bash. De Jonge was some kind of Dutch construction outfit, steel fabrication, making jetties, bridges, pipe-work, anything in steel. Their camp was mostly Thai, which made for good cooking, but management was in the hands of a few hardened expats, Dutch and English. The Hash crowded into the bar, half a trailer set up for darts and drinking. De Jonge had got their Thai carpenter to make up a real bar out of used packing case timber, and he had done quite a homely job. He had added a shingled temple roof complete with gold-painted Buddhist curleques. The effect was bizarre, but pleasing. The room soon filled with muddy footed Hashers, all waiting impatiently for the beer to be poured into the insulated urn. It tasted awful, as usual. Nobody brought their best beer to the Hash.
“Hey, Virgin! You in for Christmas?” It was Noddy, clip-board in hand.
“Certainly am. They don’t let me out unless I really kick and scream.”
“Just as well. We’re going to be a bit thin on the ground. Nearly all the Canadians have wangled Christmas at home. New Year as well, most of them. What are you doing for Christmas Day?”
“Hadn’t thought really. I might go down to the desert for Christmas lunch. But you know what we’re like, strictly no booze. They have a football match and then a dry lunch. It’s a bit boring. What are you doing?”
“I’m going round to Forfar Ironworks. Want to come?”
That was a Scots company. A good b
unch, but hard drinkers. They would not do much for Christmas except party, which for them meant standing at the bar until standing became too much effort and some-one dragged them out horizontally. “No. I think I’ll give them a miss. They’re bad enough weekdays, but I keep away at week-ends and holidays. I don’t know how they keep it up. They’ll all be seriously tired and emotional by lunchtime.”
“You know what your trouble is, Virgin? You don’t have any Celtic blood in you. You’re just an English wimp.” The Virgin’s weak head was famous in the Hash.
“You’re right there. Not a drop. Of blood or alcohol. No, I might just go and visit the Filipinos. I expect they’ll have something going and it’s much less damaging to your health.” Noddy shook his head and went in search of other victims.
The Virgin scanned the room, looking for Eytie Joe. He found him in a corner with a plump Serbian girl on his knee. Joe had a good reputation with the local ladies and they chased after him whenever he was free. For the moment, the Serbian girl was in luck. She was enjoying her exalted position and chatting animatedly in blended Slav with a couple of Polish girls. The Virgin squeezed into a seat beside Joe and tried to draw his attention away from his latest toy.
“She’ll keep you warm on a cold night, won’t she?”
“Of course,” said Joe happily. He gave her hips a squeeze that she acknowledged with a wiggle of her ample bottom. “I like them this way. She is the same shape as me.”
This was an exaggeration. She would have to put on a good deal of fat before she could match Joe’s girth.
“Joe, did you know there’s Russians around again?”
“Really? Where?”
“Danka said she’d met a couple up at the tannery. They’re working on the Army base up there. You know the one I mean - it can’t be so far from your place as the crow flies.”
The Accidental Spy Page 16