One evening, a month after he had become a saved Christian, Chuck called Ava’s cell phone number. He told her earnestly, “I do know where I stand with God now, Ava. I had always reckoned that if God took care of His business, and I took care of mine, we’d be all right. But I get it now. John’s gospel is about God coming to us and saving us. The fact is, I thought I had it together, but I was flat wrong. I kept reading and got to Paul. I realized I was dead—absolutely dead in my sins! God showed me that I needed Him. Christ died for my sins so that I could live with Him. I can’t ignore that! He’s given me real life.”
He could hear Ava weeping. She said, “Thank you, Lord, for this answer to prayer.”
Casuarina, Northern Australia—December, the Year Before the Crunch
Chuck’s Jeep had nearly 187,000 miles on the odometer. The vehicle’s left-hand steering arrangement was a constant source of amusement. With amazing regularity, someone from the oil company would attempt to jump in as a passenger, on the driver’s side. This would be met with comments like “What, are you chauffeuring today, sir?” Even better was when Burroughs brought his brindled Great Dane with them on their fossicking trips. Chuck would sit behind the wheel in the left front seat, the dog would sit in the right front seat, and Burroughs and Drake would sit in the back. They loved seeing the expressions on the faces of the motorists in approaching cars, because to them it looked as if the dog was driving.
When they had begun working for Nolan, both men were in their early thirties, divorced, and recovering alcoholics. Chuck did his best to keep them away from beer. His main weapon was his ice chest, which he constantly kept full of their favorite soft drinks. For Drake, it was Bundaberg Ginger Beer, and for Burroughs it was Solo brand lemon soda.
For himself, Chuck usually carried ice-cold water in a pair of Coleman wide-mouthed backpacking water bottles that were so well worn and battered that their markings had been completely rubbed off. He found that avoiding sugary sodas was best for maintaining his desired body weight. But on particularly hot days, he liked to have a Schweppes Passiona. He tried to keep a couple of those—or the Kirks brand Pasito equivalent—in the bottom of the ice chest, but he often found they had been filched by his men.
Chuck Nolan’s employer, AOGC, had begun focusing on true rank-wildcat exploration in recent years and had started an aggressive seismic exploration program to find areas for future drilling. (A “rank” wildcat venture was exploration of a long distance from existing wellheads.) Chuck did most of his prospecting work in the Bonaparte Basin and Daly Basin, south of Darwin, or in the McArthur Basin, east of Darwin. Occasionally, he would work as far south as the Birrindudu Basin, but it was a long drive into hot and dry country, and he dreaded every trip there.
Chuck particularly liked the exploration style of AOGC in that they relied upon conventional 2-D seismic data, which required far less manpower and “men on the ground” than the large, manpower-intensive 3-D surveys he previously led back in the United States.
While some of the other seismic prospecting crews transported enormously heavy 58,000-pound peak force seismic vibrators, he preferred to work with his explosives team. Depending on the terrain, this work was less time consuming and required only a small crew and, as Nolan claimed, gave a stronger and higher-resolution image of the underlying formations. He often said: “My idea of the perfect day of fossicking is to get in and get out fast, make things go boom, and leave big dust clouds. I like to start early and get home early.”
Typically, he would go on preliminary surveys by himself or with just one assistant to survey the terrain and to lay out future seismic surveys, recording GPS coordinates along the way. Another crew would methodically drill the shot holes, in patterns of up to thirty-six bores. That same crew would also lay out the thousands of feet of cable and geophone jugs, to receive the reflected energy from each shot.
After the crew had finished, Chuck’s team would return to the completed shot holes, set up their recording instruments, and carefully lower the large Geoprime dBX explosive charges into the holes. The company had started out using gelignite, but in more recent years, partly because of environmental regulations, they had switched to Geoprime dBX, a high explosive that was specially tailored for seismic acquisition. The explosive was made by Dyno Nobel. The Geoprime dBX variant they used was packaged in thirty-four-inch-long bright yellow plastic cases that were five inches in diameter. The cases were threaded at the end, so multiple charge cases could be combined by simply screwing them together, to provide a detonation of the desired force.
Just before the detonation they would “roll tape” while igniting the charges—although in the modern context, this meant high-resolution digital recording rather than the magnetic tape equipment of years ago. Later, this recorded digital data would be painstakingly processed by AOGC’s “boffins” into 2-D seismic sections or data volume of the earth’s underlying structure, which would then be analyzed by the company to assess the economic potential of hydrocarbons in the area. In addition to oil and natural gas, the company also searched for coal and coal bed methane gas. As Nolan frequently told folks, the process was similar to a medical ultrasound, which creates an image of the internal human body. In fact, ultrasound technology was based upon oil field seismic technology.
Chuck was often called in to help with the interpretation of the data. The boffins tended to work hacker hours, wandering into the office as late as two P.M. and staying as late as midnight. To Chuck, who liked to start work at six A.M. and be home by three thirty P.M. on his office days, the disparity in hours was frustrating.
Every major oil company had a specialized seismic group in their exploration departments, and each company carefully guarded their secrets for advanced imaging and interpretation technology. One of AOGC’s reasons for hiring Chuck was to capitalize on his 2-D interpretation skills. Much like a radiologist interpreting an ultrasound or CT-scan image, Chuck had a particularly keen eye for assessing the hydrocarbon potential from a set of seismic images. Seismic interpretation was as much an art as it was a science.
Aside from Chuck, most of AOGC’s oilfield and survey crews came from bogan backgrounds, although given their high salaries, they were often called CUBs—cashed-up bogans. Chuck found their culture rather interesting. Many bogans, he noticed, had Southern Cross tattoos. The tattoo’s familiar pattern of stars from the Australian flag, however, had become synonymous with racism against the aboriginal population and their deep dislike of immigrants, an attitude Chuck openly disagreed with.
Despite their diverse backgrounds and differing opinions, Chuck got along quite well with the men on his crew. There was plenty of joking and some good-natured teasing, as well as discussions about current events, sports, celebrities, and different brands of cars. Whenever they mocked Chuck for being an American and driving a Jeep, he would crack jokes about popular Holden cars, which were either built in Australia or imported from other countries and sold under the Holden name. He was fond of saying “Holden isn’t a family name, but an acronym that stands for Heap of Lead Doing Essentially Nothing.” During a conversation with a drilling crew foreman, Chuck couldn’t help but ask, “Why do Holdens have heated rear windows?” The foreman, always game for Chuck’s jokes, shot him a questioning look. Chuck paused a beat before answering, “So their owners can keep their hands warm when they’re pushing them.”
9
BARGAIN HUNTING
“It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. . . . A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.”
—George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb”
Casuarina, Northern Territory, Australia—February, the First Year
Chuck began spending most of his weekends with Ava. They had long conversations about a wide range of topics, but mostly about theology and the Christian life.
Just as their relationship was blossoming, however, Ava moved away to begin college at the ANU. They carried on via e-mail and phone calls, but Chuck missed her company. To compensate, Chuck did more reading, attended Bible studies, played his guitars, and went hiking. He would have also liked to do some target shooting and hunting, but the bureaucratic challenges of importing any of his guns from Texas were daunting.
When Chuck Nolan casually mentioned to his fossicking crew that he was interested in buying a rifle, Bruce Drake said, “Well, you’ve got to meet my uncle Thomas. He’s our family’s biggest gun guy. He has a lot of guns, and he’s quite the roo hunter. He was a farm foreman, but he’s retired now.”
Despite Chuck’s immediate interest in meeting Bruce’s uncle, he didn’t see Thomas Drake until a month later. In the interim, he learned, Uncle Thomas had done some thorough background checking on Nolan.
They met face-to-face for the first time at the Casuarina Gun Club rifle range, where Thomas was a member. It was a small club—the sort where each member had a key to the padlock on the gate.
The club had been established just a few years before, as an alternative to the Darwin Clay Target Club, which catered to trap and skeet shooters. There, some of the rifle shooters had felt the deep divide between the shotgun shooters and the rifle shooters. They felt like the rifle shooters were treated as second-class citizens. Even in the Northern Territory, which had a reputation for its casual and nonbureaucratic government, getting the permits and inspections required to establish the new range had taken a frustrating three years.
It was a hot afternoon, and Chuck and Thomas were the only shooters there. For a new club, the facilities were Spartan: Some earthen butts that had been bulldozed at various distances. A dozen shooting benches with posts made of ironbark eucalyptus and their tops and seats cut from plywood. Concrete had not yet been poured, but the forms for the concrete walkways were already under construction. A temporary shade structure covered only four of the benches.
Initially, they spent some time chitchatting as Thomas stapled a pair of targets on the frames at the 200-meter butts and set up his spotting scope. Thomas had brought three rifles with him that day: a Mauser sporter that had been rechambered to .243 Winchester with a heavy bull barrel, a BSA Model 15 .22 rimfire target rifle on a Martini single-shot action, and a Scout-sporterized .303 No. 4 Mk 1 Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) bolt action. It was the latter rifle that Drake had hinted he might be willing to sell.
Their first half hour of shooting was quite deliberate, as Drake shot the Mauser .243 in three-shot groups from a sandbag rest, comparing the accuracy of four different hand-load batches that he’d made, which had slightly different powder charges. Chuck was impressed to see that Thomas had a detailed shooting log book wherein he made notes on the temperature, humidity, and estimated wind speed. After he’d found the most accurate load, he gave Chuck the chance to shoot the rifle. Shooting from the rest, his three-shot group measured less than two inches—larger than Drake’s best group, but still quite respectable.
Next, they shot the .303 caliber SMLE. Drake mentioned that he had inherited it from a relative in New South Wales where registration wasn’t required until after the Port Arthur tragedy. This rifle had been tucked away in the back of a closet and overlooked until after the registration deadline. When Thomas had inherited it, he didn’t have the heart to turn it in. Before they started shooting, Chuck mentioned, “I’ve been doing some research, and I’ve read that there is a particular sequence for loading the ammo into SMLE stripper clips so that the rifle won’t jam.”
Drake nodded. “Ah, so you have been doing your studies, have you? I’ve heard that you’re a man with close attention to detail. You’re right about that. Since these cartridges are rimmed, you have to be careful that they go into the chargers just like this.”
With Chuck watching carefully, Thomas dexterously loaded a stripper clip. He did it in a way so that, as the cartridges were sequentially pushed out of the magazine by the bolt, the cartridge rims wouldn’t get tangled up.
Chuck liked the rifle. It had a butter-smooth action and it had been partially sporterized with a good-quality forward “scout” style scope mount and a Schmidt & Bender long eye relief scope that was worth almost as much as the rifle itself. The rifle’s 10-round magazine, which could be rapidly reloaded with 5-round stripper clips (or “chargers” in the British Commonwealth shooting lexicon) was a nice plus. He would have preferred a more modern SMLE chambered in 7.62 NATO, but those were quite scarce.
Chuck noticed that the ammo they were using was the later vintage noncorrosively primed ammunition made in Greece in the 1970s, with an HXP head stamp. He would have given anything for some more-recently manufactured American-made Federal brand .303 British soft-tip hunting ammunition. Having once used that ammunition, he had been able to put two-round groups from a cold barrel into the same hole on paper at one hundred yards, from a well-cleaned, cut and recrowned barrel. He had even read that in the early 1980s, the American Olin-Winchester plant had produced modern military ball (FMJ) .303 British under contract for the U.S. government, to be sent to the Afghans fighting the Soviets at that time.
The rifle was a No. 4 Mk 1 model and was stamped ROF(F)—which indicated that it had been manufactured by the Royal Ordnance Factory at Fazakerly, England. As was typical of sporters, the forward portion of the handguard wood had been removed, and the remaining handguard tapered and rounded at the tip. Seeing this made Chuck cringe, as he hated to see original military rifles altered. However, he was glad to see that the sporterizing had at least been done neatly and that the scope mount and scope had been expertly installed.
Chuck shot five rounds through the SMLE rifle. With the high magnification spotting scope, he could see that all five shots had hit in a five-inch radius. This was good accuracy for two hundred yards—at least for a SMLE.
“That’s a fair grouping for that rifle when using surplus ammo. I think it suits you. Would you like to buy it?” Thomas asked.
Chuck smiled and said, “Yes, I like the idea of owning an American-designed rifle.”
“What? Lee-Enfields are British.”
Chuck shook his head and said politely, “Actually, the SMLE was a design refined in England by the Enfield arsenal, but the original designer was James Paris Lee, who was born in Scotland and raised in Canada, but he moved to the States in the 1850s. He was a naturalized American citizen, and that’s where he became a gun designer.”
“Oh.”
Chuck asked hesitantly, “Is it registered?”
Thomas snorted derisively and said, “Nah. Do you realize there are more unregistered guns than there are registered ones in this country? After the Port Arthur muck-up, us Aussies got wise and either started building hiding places in our walls or sharpened our spades.”
Chuck raised an eyebrow, and asked with a wry grin, “Some midnight gardening, eh?”
Drake laughed. “Too right.”
Chuck tested the rifle’s magazine release, popping the magazine in and out twice, and said, “You know, a Texan without a rifle is like an Englishman without an umbrella.”
Drake chuckled and gave him one last scrutinizing stare. “Okay, Chuck. Here’s what’s what: For five hundred dollars Australian, I’ll give you that rifle with the scope and sling that are on it now, and I’ll include eighty rounds of that Greek .303 ball.”
Chuck thrust his hand forward for a handshake, and half shouted, “We have a deal.”
Later that day, after thoroughly cleaning the rifle, Chuck did a Bing web search to find a ballistic “drop table” for .303 ball cartridges, calculated from two hundred to twelve hundred yards. After all, the .303 British cartridge was considered underpowered by modern standards (starting its drop even before two hundred yards), although the bullet’s relatively large grain weight still made the round accurate as well as a heavy hitter within six hundred yards. He pri
nted a copy, trimmed it with scissors, and neatly taped it to the left side of the rifle stock, just forward of the magazine. While some gun collectors found this practice unsightly, Chuck was strongly in favor of practicality over style. He wanted to have a quick reference to the rifle’s ballistic characteristics handy at all times.
The same evening he began searching for dead space in his cottage. He needed a hiding place for the SMLE and its ammo and accessories. Tapping on the thin veneer paneling on the partition between his bedroom and the combination living room/kitchen, he discovered a hollow sound. Rather than the FIBEROCK plasterboard that had been used on the inside of the exterior walls, he found that this partition had been shoddily constructed. The paneling had simply been nailed to bare studs using small brads. He found one panel above the built-in dresser that would be the right size to hold the SMLE and accessories. This panel was three feet wide by four feet tall. On the reverse side of the wall in the living room, there was an electrical outlet, but since it was in the corner of his intended cache section, he didn’t anticipate that it would be a problem.
The next morning, Chuck drove to the shopping mall in Casuarina and bought a package of 20 mm diameter Velcro tabs at a department store. These tabs had glue-backed adhesive. Then he drove to the All Tools store on Winnellie Street in Darwin and picked up a few hand tools.
Back at the cottage, he sized up the job. He noticed that if he pulled the paneling down from the top, it would probably scrape the ceiling and leave a mark. So he worked from the bottom. He found that the brads the builder had used were quite thin, and had just a very slight flare at their head ends. This meant he was able to gingerly pull the paneling off, with the brads staying in the studs, and their head pulling through the paneling. Once he had the first ten inches loose, the rest of the panel came off easily. With the paneling removed, he used his hammer to nail the protruding brads down flush.
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