Progress was slow, but roughly constant. They were down eight hundred feet so far, and the chippings that came up did nothing to rule out the existence of oil lower down.
‘I smell it,’ said Reynolds, tapping his almost luminous nose. ‘I can smell the oil in this valley.’
After the diarrhoea had abated, there was a day of normality. They drilled eighty feet. The Poles and the Russians managed to go the whole day without arguing. Alan felt light-headed but otherwise fine. Two trucks came up from Shiraz, bringing a ton and a half of prime steam-coal, some more goats, and ninety-five bales of hay, which would keep the camp’s livestock going when the summer grass began to run out.
The next day was worse.
Once again, dawn brought a queue of men outside the latrines, Alan amongst them. His diarrhoea was completely watery and quite violent, but almost entirely painless. A couple of the men complained of vomiting, but diarrhoea was the one common symptom. Alan noticed that while all of the Westerners were ill, except the steely Reynolds and one of the Russians, the casualty rate among the Persians was much lower, perhaps only thirty per cent.
‘Feeling all right, old man?’ asked Reynolds.
They didn’t ‘old man’ each other much, and Alan could tell from Reynolds’ question that he was concerned.
‘Perfectly. Just a case of the galloping trots. Last night’s lamb, I expect.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It was fairly beastly.’
‘Yes, I suppose. Better to rest up, though.’
Alan shook his head. The boiler had a safety valve, which seemed to release steam much too easily, and the pressure was often insufficient to drive the lifting gear. Alan and Reynolds had devised a way to jury-rig the valve so it would hold the pressure better and it had been Alan’s job today to begin the fabrication.
‘Well, take care, old man. These things can rather knock one for six.’
An understatement. By the end of the day, it was obvious that this was no ordinary outbreak of Basra belly. The fourteen men who were taken sick were losing up to two pints of water every hour. The latrines were once again disgusting and once again Reynolds’ energies were taken up with keeping hygiene controls in order.
He personally supervised setting up the water butts and saw to it that they were scalded with boiling water. He then forced the kitchens to boil cauldrons full of water for a full ten minutes before emptying the cauldrons into the butts. Once the butts were full he summoned Ahmed, gave him a pair of revolvers and ordered him to shoot dead any man who threatened to contaminate the water. Ahmed took his orders with immense seriousness and more than once put his gun to the head of a man who approached the water butts intending to rinse his hands or bathe his face in them.
By evening, Alan’s eyes were shrunk into his head. His fingers were wrinkled and his lips cracked and bleeding. Despite the warmth of the day, he had stopped sweating and it took a Persian boy to keep him cool by keeping a fan trained on his chest and head. Reynolds had cancelled all work for the day and had been in and out of Alan’s tent like an anxious nursemaid.
‘For God’s sake, old fellow, I’m perfectly all right,’ said Alan. ‘I’ve had this kind of thing before.’
‘No, you haven’t, laddie. This isn’t diarrhoea. This is cholera.’
74
Californian sun is different from the sun anywhere else.
Californian sun is Friday afternoon sun. It’s a sun with a big glass of gin and tonic and nothing to do but wait for dinner. By the time it gets to California, the sun has blazed down on Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe, the Atlantic Ocean and forty-nine out of fifty American states. Now it just needs to beam down on California, and apart from little old Hawaii and a few sun-soaked islanders, it’s all done for another day.
Of course, just like anywhere else, the sun in California means nothing at all. If your luck’s out, your luck’s out. The sun won’t make a blind bit of difference.
The evening slanted down in the west, with a big red sun about to fizz down into the Pacific beyond Santa Catalina Island. Tom pulled the brim of his flat cap down over his eyes as he approached the rig. A hand-painted sign said ‘Alamitos No. 1, Signal Hill’, but the rig was silent and the drill motionless. The boiler had developed a fault and its innards were spread out over a dirty cotton sheet as the drilling crew worked to fix it.
‘That O-ring is shot,’ said Tom, pointing. ‘I’d be happy to go get you a new one.’
‘No hirings, son. Sorry.’
‘I’ve worked out in Wyoming. I can handle a rig.’
‘I’ll bet you can, son, but we ain’t hiring. Sorry.’
‘I’m not overanxious about pay.’
The driller – a well-known toolpusher named O. P. ‘Happy’ Yowell – had been wiping his hands on an oil-spattered rag. Now he looked down and saw he’d just been spreading oil ever more widely across his hands and arms and he threw down the rag in annoyance.
‘Listen, son. This is Shell Oil, not one of your two-cent independents. If you want to earn some money making hole, then go find yourself somebody who’s hiring. If you want to hang around the rig here hoping to take a gander at our cores, then to hell with you. You ain’t going to see ’em and nor is anyone else neither. Motherogod, I swear you’re the fiftieth person we’ve had poking round here. We’re just drilling a discovery well, son. That’s all. It’s just another goddamned well.’
Tom got the message. He wasn’t surprised. When a driller gets close to where he thinks the oil is, he takes the time to take cores. That means, roughly speaking, he sends down a coring tool, which works pretty much the way an apple corer does. The coring tool cuts out a cylinder of rock and brings it right up to the surface. That way you can see what you’re drilling through. If you’re getting close to oil, there’ll be signs of it written into the rock.
Tom took a last loving look at the rig, then walked away down to the beach. The sunlight was still tilting in his eyes. He was deep in thought.
When Tom had been camped up by his oil tanks, he’d made it his business to acquire information. Not the worthless sort beloved by most independent drillers, but the quality sort on which real decisions are made.
He’d bought maps, studied existing fields, refreshed his geology. He’d kept the papers beneath his pillow, enjoying the rustle of them as he moved. He’d read and thought and thought and read – and finally one day he’d obtained a geological survey of the Pacific coast. He opened the survey wide on his knees and finally saw what he’d spent his life looking for.
Two fists held together.
Knuckles uppermost.
The left-hand edge of the left-hand fist: Newport Beach. The right-hand edge of the right-hand fist: Beverly Hills. That line of knuckles marked out a whole chain of topographic highpoints: Reservoir Hill, Seal Beach, Signal Hill, Dominguez Hills, Rosencrans, Baldwin Hills, Inglewood.
Tom had guessed that none of them was much to look at. Low hills scraped together from shale. A few frowsy palm trees. Streams full of silvery sunfish and turtles. Cucumber farms, melon patches, avocado groves. Houses, roads, shops, sand. Not a lot.
But that line of highpoints had one thing in common. Each knuckle lay over a well-known oilfield.
Each knuckle, except Signal Hill.
Tom thought again and again of the core that Shell was about to take. If they were getting close to oil, then Tom had to get his hands on some drilling rights before land prices went crazy. If they weren’t getting close, then there was no way Tom would drill there, no matter what the geology looked like.
In essence, his problem was simple. He had to see that Shell Oil core. He had to.
But how?
75
Under horrible conditions, Reynolds kept the camp running.
The Persians had mostly had exposure to cholera in the past, and their immunity was stronger. But that still left seventeen Persians, as well as the three Poles, one of the Russians and Alan. Properly treated, the disease could be contro
lled. Without proper treatment, the disease was usually lethal.
Reynolds did what he could. He boiled water, added salt and sugar, and forced all the victims to drink at least a pint and sometimes a quart of fluid every hour. If any man resisted or dared to complain, Reynolds would have the patient held down by a pair of burly tribesmen as he personally forced the water down the man’s throat. He continued the treatment right through the night, and into the next morning.
The ravages of the illness were very severe, but no one further came down with the disease, and those who were sick didn’t appear to be getting any sicker.
No one except Alan.
Alan had never had a particularly steely stomach. Often enough during the war, he’d hurriedly eaten some poorly cooked food and suffered for it the next day. Right now, although he did his best to drink what was put in front of him, his throat was so parched and swollen that he could hardly swallow. Where other men were drinking pints, Alan was taking only sips. His weakness was growing worse. Reynolds was acutely worried.
He went over to one of the trucks and rooted around its hydraulics system for a suitable tube. He found a decent length of rubber pipe, had it boil-washed for half an hour, then sucked clear water through it for twenty minutes. This done, he went back to Alan’s tent.
‘Look, I’ve never done this before, old man, but I think it’s high time I learned. I’m sorry if it hurts.’
He passed the tube into Alan’s nose.
‘There’s meant to be a hole in here somewhere, but damn me if I know where.’
The tube scraped around in Alan’s nose, looking for an exit. Alan’s nasal membranes were dried out and painful, but he just gripped the edge of his blanket and said nothing. Eventually, Reynolds found what he was looking for. The tube slipped suddenly far into Alan’s nose and down the back of his throat.
‘Ha! Can you breathe, laddie?’
Alan nodded.
Reynolds was triumphant. He fixed a funnel to the tube and began to dribble the salt-and-sugar water into the funnel. He began with just a teaspoonful every minute, then increased the rate, until a teaspoonful was entering the funnel every ten seconds. Twice Alan began to retch, but on neither occasion did he actually vomit.
‘Ha!’ said Reynolds again, relief starting to glimmer in his eyes.
The next morning, he came into Alan’s tent.
‘How are you feeling?’
Alan attempted a smile. It was a pretty feeble attempt, but it crinkled the lips just enough to cause a thin trickle of blood to come from one of the deep cracks.
‘Righto. I’m sending you to Abadan. Anglo-Persian have got a hospital there, proper doctors and all the rest of it. It’ll be a pretty lousy journey, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing to do but try.’
Alan nodded. Abadan was a long way away, and the truck journey would be brutal. If he made it to Abadan alive, his chances of recovery were fair. If not …
Alan moved his hand, as though writing.
‘You want to write? Don’t worry. I’ll look after the camp while you’re gone.’
Alan closed his eyes, waited for a little strength, then shook his head. He made the writing movement again.
‘Oh no, old chap. I’m sure you won’t need to …’ Reynolds petered out. He knew Alan well by now, knew better than to argue. ‘I’ll get pen and paper. Pen, paper and witnesses.’
Alan nodded.
Reynolds brought along writing materials and the two Poles who were best able to walk. They hauled Alan up on his sackcloth pillows and propped the paper on a board on his knees. Watched by everyone present and in an awful shaky hand, Alan wrote, ‘Last Will. Sound mind. Concession to George Reynolds. Also money. Everything else (not much!) to Mother and Father. Love to all, esp Charlotte Dunlop. Alan Montague.’
Everyone in camp was silent as Alan was carried over to the truck. The Poles and Russians removed their caps and bowed their heads towards the ground. Alan was conscious, but only just. He felt like the guest of honour at his own funeral.
76
Down on the beach, there was a man with a couple of dogs, friendly faced mongrels with scruffy white coats and stubby little tails. The man wasn’t just playing with them, he was getting them to do tricks. Up – down – sit – lie – stand – stay – roll over. The dogs complied quickly and barked enthusiastically once they had completed their routines. Tom liked dogs and he liked this pair as soon as he saw them.
Then the man changed his game. He took a brown paper packet from his pocket and unwrapped it. Tom couldn’t quite see what it was, but it looked like a bit of beef bone or a knuckle of pork. The man rooted round on the beach and collected together some stones. Then the game began. The man rubbed the piece of meat on one of the stones, then tossed that stone along with two or three others into the long grass high on the sand dunes. As soon as he gave the command, the two dogs raced away after the stones, searching for them among the dunes. Twenty seconds of intense silence followed, then sudden motion. One of the dogs had a stone in its mouth and was racing back towards its owner. The other dog, annoyed, chased alongside, barking frenziedly, trying to get the first dog to release its treasure.
The game was repeated a few times.
Tom watched closely. When the man threw the stone that had been rubbed with meat, Tom marked the fall with care. Every single time, it was that stone and no other that the dogs retrieved, sometimes one of them, sometimes the other. They never once missed the stone or brought back the wrong one.
The man began to get bored and threw the last of his stones into the sea. The dogs chased off into the surf and began fighting over a stick of driftwood.
Tom approached the man.
‘Nice dogs.’
‘Yep. They sure are.’
‘You got ’em well trained.’
‘They more or less train themselves. They’re only pups.’ The man whistled and both dogs shot towards him, leaving the beach neatly printed with their pawmarks. ‘Good boy, Corin. Good girl, Pippa.’
Tom bent down to fondle the smaller of the two dogs behind her ear. He received a couple of salty licks in exchange.
‘Nice trick that, with the stones.’
‘Yeah. They ain’t strictly speaking retrievers, but I ain’t never seen a retriever do any better ’n that.’
‘Nope, nor me. Can I give it a go?’
‘You want to throw something for ’em?’
‘How about this?’ said Tom. He took a pocket knife from his coat and opened it out to reveal a thin smear of greyish oil around the hinge. He picked two stones from the beach. Both of them were flattish and smooth, but one of them had a rusty iron ore stain running through the centre. Tom wiped the red-coloured stone with the oil from his knife, then let both dogs sniff the knife all over. ‘Ready, folks?’ he asked. The two dogs ran backwards ten feet and began yelping with excitement. ‘Go on then, fellers.’ Tom threw the stones, hard and far into the dunes. He himself would have had the devil of a job finding them. It would be an exceptional dog who could find either stone, let alone pick out the right one.
‘You didn’t use a scrap o’ meat,’ said the man. ‘I always use a scrap of meat. That’s what they want to retrieve for, see. They want meat. It’s only natural.’
‘That’s true,’ said Tom. ‘I should have thought of that.’
The dogs were invisible and silent. Every now and then, the dune-grass was stirred by something other than the sea breeze and once Tom spotted a stumpy white tail wagging intently amongst the blue-green stems.
‘See, I told you,’ said the man. ‘It’s their animal nature. Wipe a bit o’ meat on the stone an’ you’re working with their animal nature.’
Tom wasn’t listening. His gaze was concentrated on the dunes. All of a sudden, the silence was broken. A yelping went up. The grass was shaken violently as though a sudden gale had blown up, two feet wide and forty feet long. The two young dogs exploded out onto the beach. The bigger one, Corin, was tumbling the other one, Pippa,
to the ground in an effort to get her to release her prize. He was out of luck. Although Pippa was knocked over four times on her journey back, she arrived, panting, back at her master’s feet and dropped a stone, wet and slobbery, into his hand. The stone was flat, smooth, with a distinctive rusty stripe down its centre.
‘Well, I’ll be jiggered!’ said the man.
Tom turned to him with his broadest smile.
‘I have a proposition,’ he said.
77
The lurching of the truck was acutely uncomfortable. Alan hadn’t the strength to hold himself steady and he didn’t even have the muscle tone to bounce with the truck as it crashed over rocks and potholes. Reynolds had wanted to accompany him, but Alan had insisted absolutely and categorically that he should stay in the drilling camp until the very last trace of disease had been eradicated.
Instead of Reynolds, Ahmed was Alan’s escort, as well as the two tribesmen who took it in turns to drive the truck. Ahmed attempted to keep the salt-and-sugar solution draining down the funnel, but the careening of the truck proved far too violent. Every hour they stopped for ten minutes. Ahmed used the pause to send more water down the funnel, but he was less skilful than Reynolds and perhaps Alan was in too weakened a condition to tolerate much fluid in any event.
The truck jolted down into Shiraz, then bounded along a rough track to Bushehr, before heading north towards the malarial flatlands around Abadan. The journey took three days. By the end of it, Alan was unconscious most of the time. His bowel continued to leak fluid that was now almost as clear as glass.
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