The Sons of Adam

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The Sons of Adam Page 19

by Harry Bingham


  Alan’s daydreams were interrupted by the sound of boots running after him. He turned, and found himself staring into a bright red face, lit up by anger, and a ferocious black moustache stretching, it seemed, from ear to ear.

  ‘By God, it’s robbery,’ shouted the man. ‘You’ve found oil there, haven’t you? By God, I tell you, it’s robbery.’

  ‘Who are you, sir?’ said Alan, putting some distance between himself and the man.

  ‘Have you or haven’t you, sir?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Found oil, dammit, oil.’

  ‘You’re one of the Anglo-Persian geologists. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Pardon me. George Reynolds. Pardon me.’

  Some of the heat left Reynolds’ face and he held out his hand. Reynolds was a thickset northerner with a face that must have been ruddy at the best of times. He held himself compact and powerful, like a piston ready to fire. Alan shook the outstretched hand warily.

  ‘Have I drilled for oil there? No.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. A seepage. A trace. Tar in the water. Gas springs. Bitumen pits. A smell, for heaven’s sake.’

  Alan swallowed and brought something from his pocket. It was a small waxed canvas pouch containing a small handful of sand. He offered the pouch to Reynolds, who put it to his nose and sniffed. It was Ameri’s sand. The smell had worn off since being carried around in Alan’s pocket for the past few months, but all the same, it was unmistakable.

  ‘I knew it. The fault. The others didn’t see the fault. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen.’

  Secretly Alan began to be amused at Reynolds’ fire-and-brimstone approach to life, but he kept himself cool. ‘They’re probably right. Geologically the fault is certainly there, but that doesn’t mean anything about the presence of oil. I found the oil sand in the exposed strata, far above where any oil might still be today. It’s a very long shot. A very, very long shot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Reynolds was reluctant to hand back the pouch. He was standing in the gutter of the street, and a delivery van honked him to get out of the way. Reynolds sniffed and sniffed.

  ‘Not too much sulphur there.’

  ‘No, not much.’

  Reynolds kneaded the sand with his fingers, letting it trickle between his fingers.

  ‘Light. It feels light. Not too tarry.’

  ‘I think so too.’

  ‘It would refine well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Reynolds handed back the bag, without taking his eyes from it. ‘You’ll drill there, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With your seventy thousand?’

  ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘You’ll need more.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Much more. Very much more.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Reynolds nodded, his gaze transfixed by the bag. ‘If there is a field there, it could be a big one.’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Well then. I’m sorry I came out shouting.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Reynolds was half on and half off the pavement. The street was busy, and every delivery boy and motorist shouted and honked. Reynolds was oblivious.

  ‘Yes, well, sorry anyway. Goodbye. And good luck.’

  He shook hands once again. He gripped Alan’s hands as though he was grappling a drill pipe. He walked away heavy-footed, as though dragging himself off to punishment. Alan watched him go, thinking what a peculiar man Reynolds must be, then he turned and began to walk to Waterloo Station to catch the train down to Hampshire.

  He hadn’t gone far before the running of heavy boots disturbed him once again. Without turning, he said, ‘Well, Mr Reynolds, what am I accused of this time?’

  Reynolds stood in front of him, puffing. ‘No, it’s not like that. I’d like to work for you. If possible. In Persia.’

  Alan smiled – laughed – and extended his hand to his first employee.

  66

  ‘Hi-yip! Hi-yip! Hi-yip-yip-yip-yippee!’

  The teamster cracked his whip over his horses, fighting to keep them climbing the vertical bog that passed for the road up into the hills. Tom, born horseman that he was, wanted to take the reins and try himself, but the teamster knew his horses and the trail. In the back of the wagon, an assortment of huge steel plates jolted and shook like portable thunder.

  ‘Hi-yip! Hi-yip! Hi-yip!’

  The teamster’s voice was losing confidence, as rapidly as his horses were losing theirs.

  ‘I’ll get out,’ said Tom, jumping out into the mud.

  One of the wagon wheels was snagging on a rock. Tom tried to shift the rock; couldn’t, and put his shoulder to the wheel instead. The wagon heaved itself over the obstruction and beyond. Tom slipped and slithered up the track after it.

  He was still a member of the honourable society of bootleggers, but his business methods had undergone some necessary improvements. For one thing, his Canadian supplier now dispatched regular caseloads of whisky without any need for Tom to go and collect them. For another, the wooden boxes were now marked as containing boot polish, or condensed milk, or hair oil, or tooth powder – or anything in the world that would interest dogs not at all. And, since Tom didn’t like to leave things to chance, he’d also taken the precaution of making friends with the senior US customs official at the border and ensuring that that excellent man had as much whisky as he needed to drink, and that his wife could finally afford the mink coat she’d always wanted.

  Profits from the business were strong – a hundred dollars a week or more – but Tom’s heart still belonged to oil.

  At the crest of a rise, the teamster pulled up his sweating horses and waited for Tom to catch up.

  ‘Jesus! Heck of a place to find oil!’

  In the hills beyond them, the landscape was studded with oil wells. There were now a dozen producing wells that Tom knew of, but it seemed like another well was striking every week. Tom still hung out with Lyman Bard whenever he could and it was pretty clear from Bard’s excitement that he was expecting to make his own strike any day soon.

  ‘It’s a perfect place,’ murmured Tom.

  ‘Which one’s yours?’ The teamster waved his whip in the direction of the oil wells as he clicked with his teeth to make the horses walk forwards once again.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Which one’s yours? Which well?’

  ‘I don’t have a well.’

  ‘You don’t?’ The teamster looked baffled. ‘I thought …’ He gestured behind him where the plated steel continued its deep grumbling.

  ‘You thought right. They’re oil storage tanks – least they will be once we bolt ’em together. We’ll set ’em down over there, I reckon.’ He indicated the spot.

  For a minute the teamster drove in silence. Although they were over the worst of the hills, the track was still atrocious and needed careful driving. The teamster was lost in thought.

  Eventually he said, ‘I don’t figure it.’

  ‘Figure what?’

  ‘You got tanks but you ain’t got oil?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No crew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No nothing?’

  ‘Just tanks.’

  The teamster was apparently happy to accept the answer in silence, but before long Tom realised that the man was shaking. Tom glanced sideways. The man was shaking with laughter. Tom grinned. The teamster began to chuckle out loud.

  ‘No oil, just tanks, huh?’

  Tom chuckled as well. ‘You got it right there.’

  Reassured that Tom wasn’t about to take offence, the teamster’s laugh grew louder. ‘No oil? Hey, don’t worry.’ He flicked his whip at one of the many streams. ‘There ain’t no shortage of water. Hey? Ha! Ha, ha, ha!’ He threw his head back and yodelled with laughter.

  Tom laughed with him; threw his
head back, hat in his lap, wind in his hair, letting his laughter fill the whole wide-open prairie sky.

  ‘You’re the craziest son-of-a-bitch I ever saw,’ said the teamster. ‘The craziest or the dumbest.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Tom, letting his laughter slowly subside. ‘Uh-huh. Either that or the smartest.’

  67

  The oil business needs money, plenty of it. To drill: you need money. To collect the oil once you’ve found it: you need money. To pipe it: money. To refine it: money. To ship it: money. To market it: money, money and more money.

  That’s why oil companies grow so big. Whoever heard of a small oil company? Whoever heard of an oil company worth just seventy thousand pounds?

  ‘We’re mapping the field now with the American seismographs. Rather jolly, as a matter of fact. Let off dynamite and listen for the echo. Oil sounds different from everything else, apparently. It must be wobblier, I suppose. Something like a giant trifle.’

  The Anglo-Persian field manager, Chandos Hughes, was a pale-faced public schoolboy who was seemingly untouched by the fact that he was now stuck out in the middle of the Persian desert about a million miles from Eton and Henley and Royal Ascot and all the other things that had once made up his life.

  ‘Lots of jolly nice new rigs, as well,’ he continued. ‘New rotary tables mean we can drill to a thousand feet in about a third of the time it used to take us.’

  George Reynolds nodded. The sun was burningly hot on the dry plain, and Reynolds took out a huge white handkerchief to mop his forehead. ‘Blast the heat,’ he said.

  ‘Blast the … ? Gosh, yes, it is hot, isn’t it? Lucky devils at Abadan have got refrigerators full of cold drinks. We poor desert rats do suffer rather.’

  Reynolds pointed towards a heap of metal pipes lying in the dust. ‘What’s that? That looks ready for scrap, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Lord, yes. That’s one of our old percussion rigs. Not zoom-zoom-zoom –’ Hughes made a drilling motion with his hand – ‘but rather bash-bash-bash. Literally dropped a thumping great weight down into the hole and smashed the rock underneath to smithereens. Imagine digging a well that way! Must have been a fearful old bore. Bash-bash-bash-bash-bash. Hard enough with a proper rig …’

  Hughes rambled on. The sun blazed down. The battered old percussion rig shimmered in the heat. The drill bit was about twelve feet high, eighteen inches wide, and must have weighed well over a ton. The tangle of pipes showed little sign of rust – this was the desert, after all – but the hollow tubes were filled with sand and there were heaps of mouse droppings by their mouths. Hughes blathered on. Reynolds hardly bothered to listen. He was twenty years older than Hughes and had loads more field experience.

  And besides, he hadn’t come to learn anything. He’d come to steal.

  The Americans were world leaders in oilfield technology. They’d offered to provide the very latest equipment, guaranteed to reach up to nine thousand feet in favourable terrain. The price was thirty-two thousand pounds.

  British technology was less advanced, but Alan had found a Glasgow firm that could build equipment to his specification and ship goods free of charge to anywhere in the British Empire, at a price of twenty-seven thousand pounds.

  But Alan had seventy thousand to cover everything. Not just equipment, but getting it set up, drilling, storing, piping, refining, shipping, selling.

  He’d done his sums again and again. He didn’t have twenty-seven thousand to spend. He had seven.

  It was a night without moon. A slight wind blew out of the east and sent black waves slapping against the side of the little boat. The boat rode at anchor and showed a single dark-shaded lantern gleaming from the masthead.

  ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’ asked Alan in Persian.

  The boatman grinned and spat. A squirt of blood-red betel juice went over the side into the water. ‘Sure, aqa, sure.’ The boatman was an old man. Hossein Nasr, who had made his living from the Caspian Sea ever since he’d been a boy. Sometimes he caught fish. Sometimes he smuggled. It was all the same.

  Alan rubbed his hand against the rough wooden side of the boat. He disliked the sea and there was something vaguely comforting about the familiar presence of wood. The crossing had taken eighteen hours and they were now only a mile off the coast of Lenin’s Russia. A short distance to the west lay Baku, the biggest port in Azerbaijan, but more importantly by far, the heart of the Russian oil industry. The civil war was still dragging on, but it had become fairly clear that Trotsky’s Red Army would annihilate all opposition. Stories were beginning to filter out of Russia about Soviet atrocities, and the fate of the kulaks, the Russian landowning class. Alan didn’t believe everything he heard, but he knew that the Reds wouldn’t look kindly on an aristocratic English spy anchored within spitting distance of Russia’s most valuable industrial asset.

  Nasr rooted around in a locker and came out with some flat bread, spiced meat cakes and a wooden bowl of goat’s milk yoghurt. ‘Eat, aqa. You must relax.’

  They ate. Alan was surprisingly hungry and let himself gorge. They broke the meat cakes into pieces and used the flat bread to dip them into the yoghurt. It tasted like the best food in the world. When the shout came, Alan didn’t even hear it. Only when it was repeated, did his heart suddenly stop beating in his chest. He held his breath.

  Nasr listened to the cry, then called back in a strange singsong whisper that crept far over the water without ever seeming to gather much force. An answering whisper came back and Nasr turned to Alan with a grin. ‘It is my friend, aqa. Peace be with him.’ Alan breathed again.

  For a while there was silence, but Nasr lifted the shutters from the lantern and let the light beam out openly for a moment or two. Then he replaced the shutters, and dropped down to the little seating area in the bows of the boat. He spread out carpets over the wooden planking, arranged some pillows, and brought out the hubble-bubble water pipe that he’d set alight an hour or so before. The charcoal was glowing in the bottom, but he added more and blew on it to make it glow yellow and hot.

  Then there was a gentle bump at the side of the boat. Invisible hands made the two boats fast, and a couple of figures sprang over the side.

  Nasr leaped up and embraced the two men, kissing them cheek to cheek three times. There was a quick babble of conversation in a dialect that Alan had difficulty in following: Persian mixed with a scattering of Russian and perhaps Armenian. There was a clink of bottles and glasses. The three men moved to the carpeted area and the hubble-bubble, and Nasr indicated that Alan should follow them. The newcomers were dressed in dark coats and boots, the universal dress-code for their trade. Though their skin had a Persian darkness, both men had the solid build and square, heavy faces of Mother Russia. Alan shook hands; then, feeling like a fool, embraced the newcomers cheek to cheek. He could smell onion and vinegar on their breath, tobacco and sea salt.

  The four men sat down. The Russians had brought two bottles of vodka and some tiny vodka glasses. Alan shot a glance sideways at Nasr. Alcohol was forbidden to followers of the Prophet, and Alan had never seen Nasr partake of anything stronger than betel juice or tobacco. He needn’t have worried. Islam was obviously less important for the moment than being good neighbours, and the hubble-bubble and vodka turned colleagues into friends.

  After half an hour, the talk turned very slowly to business. Alan began to understand the Russians better than he had done at first, but Nasr still had to act as interpreter.

  ‘The Revolution will set free the proletariat,’ said the senior of the two Russians solemnly, ‘but times are hard.’

  Alan said how he had passed through Baku on his first journey out to Persia, and how impressed he had been with its prosperity and industrial power.

  The Russian shook his head. ‘Once, yes, once it was a great city. But now … People are hungry. They are afraid no one will buy their oil. They are afraid they will starve.’

  Alan knew Easterners well enough by now to be aware of the
proper reply. He said how much he admired the people of Baku, how he would gladly do anything he could to help relieve them of their distress.

  The conversation then passed quickly to business. What did Alan want? How much could he pay? Would he pay in paper or gold? How could they be sure that Alan wasn’t a Revolutionary spy?

  Alan handed them a list, drawn up in Persian and Russian, of his requirements. He handed them a bag of thirty golden sovereigns as a token of his seriousness. He spoke of delivery needs and timings. Nasr listened like a hawk, and took over as soon as the nitty-gritty of delivery was discussed. What Alan wanted was going to require heavy shipping to deliver. The usual smuggler’s stock-in-trade of alcohol, silk, fur and tobacco was all small and easy to handle by comparison. Nasr was voluble and insistent. Brokering this deal would make him enough money to retire on, a wealthy man. Screwing it up could easily mean that he’d be shot dead by a Russian coastguard, or simply be tipped overboard into the ocean. The Russians became voluble too, their voices thickened with drink and excitement. Alan was unable to follow what was going on.

  He moved to the side of the boat and dashed a couple of handfuls of stinging salt water in his face. He thought of George Reynolds and the task they’d set themselves.

  He thought of Lottie, confused as to who she really was: wartime Lottie, loving, serious and committed? Or peacetime Lottie, superficial and flirtatious? The thought tormented him, as ever.

  He turned his attention back to the conversation. Nasr and the Russians were finishing. Far to the east, a glimmer of grey lightened the blackness. It was time to be gone.

  68

  The tank stood at the bottom of a small dip, lapped all round by coarse prairie grasses. No pipes led down into the dip. The tank’s steel sides boomed hollow and empty. There was room inside for three thousand barrels of oil, but right now it held three thousand barrels of nothing.

 

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