This is Not A Drill

by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)

  Airports throughout the Western world are, I think, designed by the same firm. Each is just a slight variation on a theme. If you get hungry after you have gone through immigration, you get nailed twenty dollars for a very average cup of coffee and a bun. It’s like you’re in a limbo state, temporarily a citizen of no country, you’re in airport land where they can charge whatever they want.

  The good ones give you a trolley for free, like Singapore’s Changi Airport, but in most of them you have to pay, why? They make so much money, why do they think they can get away with stitching you up two dollars for their crappy little trolley. This is especially annoying when you discover, after arriving in a foreign land, that the machine dispensing the trolleys only accepts local coins. Japanese trolleys are free and by far the best ones I’ve used; they have a flip-up bar at the front that springs up as you pull the trolley out and stops your bags from falling off, and they have brakes, suspension and no mind of their own. British ones also have brakes, and a sticker on the lever that tells you to apply the brakes on a gradient. However, every time I’m at Heathrow I witness a hilarious trolley prang, usually involving an elderly person who has suddenly lost control of their trolley on a slope and embarked on a slalom down towards some unlucky punter coming the other way.

  So Clare and I crossed the red line together, went through the current improved security check—screen, pat-down, sniff test, strip-search—and wandered into the labyrinth that is an international airport departure building. This one is like a shrine to last-minute consumerism, another award-winning design by architects ‘Can We Cheat ’Em, and How’. It could fit like Lego into any other airport terminal in the world. While Clare went off to arm herself with magazines, I found a spot in the corner and sat quietly watching. The airport is a good place to observe the human animal under stress. Travellers scampered in that hurried way like migrating hedgehogs across a busy road. Backpackers walked past, almost floating after having checked in their massive backpacks that always look like they weigh twice as much as the owner, who has to lie down to get the pack on, only to realise they can’t get back up. Tourists in ‘Bondi’ T-shirts were going home after getting various degrees of skin cancer.

  For once, I wasn’t dreading the flight. We were flying business class; I have done my time in economy. The airlines discovered ages ago that they can physically cram an adult human into a space barely comfortable for a chimp as long as they tell you beforehand that you may lose all feeling in your extremities after the first hour. This could be permanent, and if you’re unfit, diabetic, fat, a smoker or just unlucky it could lead to deep vein thrombosis and kill you, but only after you’re enjoying your first day on the beach. For me, there would be no elbow brawls over the armrest, no fake smiles from cabin attendants whose teeth are so bright that I need sunglasses just to look at them, no mini-meals with a metal fork and a plastic knife, or some crappy pre-made cheese sandwich getting dumped on my tray table for 12.98. Instead our flight was remarkably nice; we had a whole human-sized seat each.

  Sixteen hours later we landed in Paris. During the hour we waited for our luggage to appear I went off to get a trolley. The French trolleys are free but look like reject designs for a light aircraft undercarriage, they career off in random directions much like the supermarket ones do, and they always seem to have one wheel that appears to be having a fit of some kind.

  We had a fantastic ten days in France. We visited my mum and John, her second husband and an all-round legend. They threw a party, inviting their friends. Sitting down to eat with a dozen retired people, I was surprised to find that they knew how to party. It was like being at a ‘Bond Villain’ convention.

  Afterwards we went up to Scotland to visit Klaas, an oilfield mate who was the company man on my first job offshore. He was with Shell and I was there to learn how to inspect pipe. Klaas saw his opportunity to completely mess up my head. He called me into his office, Erwin was there too, keeping a straight face. I had been working for a full day and all night, trying to make a good impression, but in the early hours of the morning Erwin had come out on deck and told me to go to bed. I wasn’t working for him yet, I was with another outfit who had sent me out there on my own. Erwin certainly didn’t need to take over from me, but he did anyway, and did a better job in the end. Mid-morning, I had just woken up and was standing in the company man’s office. ‘So, Paul,’ said Klaas, ‘did you inspect our pipe last night?’

  If he knew Erwin had done half the work then I was in big trouble. ‘Well, Mr Van der Plaas, you see, I was getting tired, and Erwin here was nice enough to take over for me . . .’

  He cut in, ‘Does Erwin have the right pipe inspector’s tickets?’

  I looked at Erwin, who shrugged at me.

  ‘He doesn’t even work for the same company as you.’ Klass looked really serious. ‘Take a seat,’ he said and nodded towards a chair in the corner. I sat down. I’m going to get run off, I thought.

  Klaas picked up the phone on his desk and began banging his index finger down on the buttons while he glared at me through the smoke rising from the Marlboro dangling from his bottom lip. Erwin just sat there, pulling all the right faces. I was shitting myself.

  Klass suddenly launched into a high-speed Dutch conversation. Occasionally I heard my name, some bad language, my name again, oh God, now the company name; he looked at his watch, glared at me again, then he was talking about choppers. That’s it, I thought, he’s got me on the next chopper, the end of the shortest oilfield career in history. He banged down the phone, leaned back in his chair, had a long drag on his smoke and exhaled, his eyes hard and fixed.

  I was waiting for it, indeed now fully expecting it. He sat forward in his big company man’s chair and started laughing. Erwin jumped up and was out the door, laughing all the way down the hall. ‘Ya, it’s okay buddy, we’re just fucking with you. Go and get some sleep.’

  I got up and turned to go, then stopped and asked, ‘Who did you call?’

  Klaas was still laughing. ‘My wife. I just bullshitted about who’s out here, and what she’s cooking for dinner tonight.’

  Fifteen years later and he’s not changed a bit. Klaas is bright and has done well in his career. I went to a work function with him and ended up sitting next to some ambassador’s wife making polite conversation while Klaas pulled faces across the table at me.

  The next day I ran into another guy, at Aberdeen Airport. I was leaving for London, walking towards departures. He had just arrived from a rig and was walking towards arrivals. We approached each other, glanced, made eye contact for a second, then continued on our paths. Then we both stopped about three meters apart and turned around at the same time.

  It was Donald, I hadn’t seen him in years. When I knew him, he was a driller. Now he was a company man; everyone has moved on, done well and become successful in oil, except me. I’m still doing the same shit I was doing ten years ago. But he was just as I remembered him, and within five minutes we had abandoned our respective plans and were sitting in the airport bar.

  The last time I saw Donald, he was getting fired. A new tool pusher had come out to our rig in a quiet corner of the South China Sea and took a disliking to Donald. This escalated over the next few weeks, culminating in an explosive display of what happens when you wind up Donald. All I remember was the tool pusher getting punched, falling over and Donald casually picking him up by his ankles and dangling him over the side of the drill floor. The guy was beside himself, screaming while the contents of his pockets spiralled down to the sea some two hundred feet below. Donald eventually put him down and walked off to the locker room, as he knew the chopper would be en route within the hour.

  That’s one of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the oilfield: you could be sitting in some God-awful backwater on your way to or coming from a job and run into someone you worked with years ago, and you pick up right where you left off. If it doesn’t happen that way, then it will on the job. Once I was standing on the drill fl
oor on a jack-up rig in Asia, sucking on a boiled sweet and thinking about a workover job we were about to start, when a Baker fishing-hand marched up to me. Fishing-hands are specialists, like directional drillers who speak their own dialect that revolves around the language of drilling. They retrieve lost ‘items’ from a well. They are skilled individuals who use various ‘fishing tools’ down an open or cased hole, and they can fish everything out from a drill pipe to hand tools or the occasional unlucky roughneck, but that could be a myth. He was older than me by about twenty years, and had strong features and a purposeful stride. He took off his safety glasses when he was standing right in front of me, gave me a hard look and said, ‘Spit that shit out, Paul. If your mother saw that, she would kick your arse.’

  I was completely bamboozled and quickly looked around. Is this guy mental? I thought. So I cupped my gloved hand under my chin and spat out my sweet, totally taken aback and a little worried about what this guy’s problem was.

  ‘Oh shit. Sorry, mate, I thought you were chewing tobacco.’ He gave me a huge grin, he could see that I had no idea who he was. ‘It’s me, you fuckwit, Tony.’

  I was blank.

  ‘Tony Lacey. Shit, you used to play with my kids, come over for barbeques.’

  Finally I remembered. My parents worked with Tony when I was eight, but to him it may have well been yesterday. He recognised me straightaway. That’s the oilfield.

  Clare had to go home a few days before me for work. I didn’t want her to go; I didn’t want our trip to end. When my turn came, things got complicated, they always do. I departed London on the seventh of the seventh; exactly one year since I’d arrived in the middle of the bombings. The city was functioning as it normally would, but there were masses of people attending memorial services at tube stations, flowers and wreaths adorned station entrances, and all over London crowds had gathered. I took a cab to Paddington Train Station where I planned to catch the Heathrow Express to the airport. The cab ride seemed to take forever, and when I did get to Paddington I emerged from the cab into a sea of people. It was peak hour times ten, I’ve never seen so many people. The central staircase descending to the tube was a river of people. Moving against the flow was impossible; it was like trying to move through a packed nightclub, with luggage. I stood there for a moment, just looking into the void, then picked up my offshore bag and ran the gauntlet over to a café on my left. It was strangely unoccupied, so I ordered coffee and parked my arse in the corner, deciding to kill the next hour there before braving the hoards. There was an air of worry and concern in every face that went past, the horror twelve months ago still alive in their memories.

  I pulled a magazine I’d nicked from the hotel lobby coffee table out of my bag and settled in, blanking out the millions around me. It was one of those blokey mags with a model in a bikini holding an automatic weapon on the cover. After forty pages of beer, sport and tits, followed by a sudoku puzzle, I was successfully distracted enough to relax.

  That’s when I noticed the black Samsonite suitcase under the table next to me.

  It was one of those smaller ones that you can bring into the aircraft as hand luggage. The masses flowed past, ignoring the empty café and its unattended bag, as did the guy running the place. I sat there for a moment, then called him over and asked for a latte. ‘Who’s case is that mate?’ I pointed at the suitcase.

  He bent down to look. ‘I have no idea,’ he replied, and instinctively and cleverly backed away towards the shelter of his cardboard booth.

  I got up and walked the few metres to his booth. ‘Look, make my coffee and I’ll be back with a security guy, okay?’ He just nodded, keeping his eyes on the suitcase.

  I picked up my offshore grip bag and stood on a chair. Throughout the tube stations and train stations in London there were posters to recruit new security staff, in a push to put people at ease. These new staff wear a luminous yellow vest and carry a two-way radio, but spotting one was proving difficult. Then I saw one, with his back to me, also trying to stay out of the flow of people. He was too far away to hear me, so I waded in. At first I was carried along with the current of people; no-one gives a fuck or gets out of your way so you have to just go head down and barge. Finally I got to him and explained that I’d found an unattended bag. He got on the radio, then said, ‘Show me.’

  The café now had a German family sitting at my table. They were oblivious to the suitcase, and the dad had also become fascinated in the beer steins, guns and airbrushed topless cheerleaders. The café guy was still in his booth with my coffee sitting on the counter in front of him.

  I pointed at the suitcase. ‘There it is.’ I went to the booth to pay for my coffee, and by the time I’d turned around the German father was gathering up his children, one under each arm, and jumping into the mad faceless blur of people flowing past the café’s boundary, his wife, struggling with the luggage, swept along behind him, their steaming drinks all sitting on the table untouched.

  The security guy was back on his radio. I stood at the booth with the café guy and watched two more security guys roll up through the masses. One walked over to us. ‘No idea who left it, mate?’ he asked the café guy, who shook his head and began to look worried. The suitcase was nameless; it sat there looking more and more conspicuous. Two of the security guys very carefully lifted up the table that the suitcase sat under and moved it away. Then they all stood around it and talked. Finally, one leaned over to listen. Was it ticking? I thought. He casually booted the suitcase with his size-ten combat boot, and it slammed over on its side with a thud.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ The café guy was off, with me following right behind him. I walked all the way around the station to enter from the other side and get on the next Heathrow Express, waiting for a bang the whole time.

  The last time I’d heard a bomb go off, a really big bomb, was in 2001 when I was working in Nigeria. Anyone who has worked in Nigeria will know the expression ‘419’, after section 4-1-9 of the Nigerian Penal Code, which relates to fraudulent schemes. I drove in through the office gates, it was a lovely sunny day. The vultures were all lined up on the office roof—the base was only a stone’s throw away from the Port Harcourt slaughter market—and were looking down at the office staff and workshop technicians, who were all standing outside in the carpark.

  The first thing that jumped into my head was, ‘Fuck, they’ve all gone on strike.’ But no, I was told we had been robbed and that the security men had been found out the back, gagged, tied up and smelling of shit.

  On entering the office we found the place trashed, tables and chairs upside-down, and the safe opened with the aid of a sledgehammer. There were expatriate passports all over the floor. The safe we had purchased locally some months earlier, and by the looks of things it wasn’t the first time it had been broken into; lumps of car filler had broken off its shell. We didn’t keep the petty cash in the safe—it came back to the staff house each night—so the thieves ended up stealing passports, the fax/copier machine and the company communication equipment, VHS and VHF radios.

  Later in the morning the local CID arrived on the crime scene. They told us they needed a photographer, the loan of a car and driver, some money for food and drink or, as they say, ‘minerals’, before they could start their investigation and apprehend the criminals. The officers then took advantage of the car for the rest of the week, without coming up with a thing, so we decided to drop the case and get back to as normal a working life as you can expect in Nigeria.

  One of the passports that got lifted was mine, which meant I had to go to Lagos to get a new one. I stayed in a staff house on a very busy, very dirty road. It had huge solid iron shutters on the windows and another for the front door, and every night the house was closed up like the dark ages, both to keep the locals out and us in. I was only going to be there for a few days so I didn’t mind too much. My first night was spent chatting to the other two guys who were also temporarily staying there. One of the guys worked for a well testing co
mpany. He was in Lagos because his warehouse had been broken into and the thieves had made off with some very powerful high explosives which we use inside special tools that are sent down the well to fracture a formation.

  The second night I was halfway through dinner, eating at the coffee table in front of the TV, when the whole house and everything in it, including me, appeared to go up a few feet then crash back down again. The TV fell forwards onto its screen and blew up, glasses and plates smashed on the kitchen floor, the windows flexed and shattered in their frames. The other two guys in the house came sprinting out of their rooms, one in his jocks, the other in coveralls. We all went for the front door. The lights had gone out, so we fumbled at the bolts on the iron door, then finally it swung open and we spilled out onto the street. Car alarms shrieked in the distance, I could hear children screaming. At the end of the street where an apartment building had stood a few minutes earlier, there was a big pile of rubble. A giant cloud of concrete dust roared down the street, swallowing up everything. We ran back inside and bolted the door.

  ‘How much of that shit did you lose?’ I asked the well tester.

  ‘That much,’ he replied.

  The following morning the sirens were still wailing up and down the street as I got in the car to go and get my passport. By the time I had done that and jumped on the next flight to Port Harcourt, the story was on the news. It was the well tester’s high explosive that went off the night before. Some would-be bank robbers had stolen it, improvised a device using all of it, put it in a car and parked the car in the basement carpark of the apartment building; it was supposed to be a distraction from the real drama, the bank directly across the street, which they had planned to knock off. Not realising how powerful the explosive was, and not doing a very good job of rigging it up, they all went bang in the car and vaporised at two thousand feet per second, as did the whole building.