The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  Nobody spoke the word, but they all knew that failure was creeping closer by the day.

  Alan shifted his weight and grimaced. His hands were blistered where the boiler had scalded him, and his legs and back seemed to be fused in a permanent ache these days. He tweaked back the tent flap to encourage cool air to flow inside the baking canvas, but it was a fond hope. He turned back to his figures. Whichever way he did them, the answer was that they’d have to quit drilling in twenty-six days.

  Reynolds’ heavy tread came along the little path leading to Alan’s tent. Reynolds puffed as he walked these days, and when he was sitting alone, his face often looked sad.

  ‘Evening, laddie. I’m not disturbing you?’

  Alan reached for his cigarettes, gave one to Reynolds and lit one of his own. He drew deeply on the blessed tobacco and waved his papers. ‘Doing my sums.’ The tobacco was bad for his war-damaged lung, but he allowed himself the pleasure all the same.

  ‘Got the right answer yet?’

  Reynolds meant: have you found us another two hundred drilling days? It was a joke between them. Alan shook his head. ‘Twenty-six days, unless the fuel comes cheaper tomorrow.’

  ‘Twenty-six days … That’s a hundred and twenty feet, if we’re lucky.’

  Alan nodded. ‘If we’re lucky.’

  There was a pause. For Alan, no oil meant no Lottie. For Reynolds, it meant that the grand finale to his professional life had ended in a bust. He’d return, wifeless and childless, to a poor man’s London. They had twenty-six days to change their futures.

  ‘How badly do you want to go home, George?’ said Alan, at last.

  ‘Want to go home? By Christ, I’d give my – Why? Why d’you ask? What d’you mean?’

  ‘I thought if we turned up penniless at Abadan, they’d hardly let us starve.’

  ‘Hardly, no, of course not. Good God, man, you haven’t been saving money for our return journey, have you?’

  ‘Only a little, only a very little.’

  ‘To hell with that, laddie. We can shovel coal on a steamship from India, if we have to. No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to go home that badly.’

  Alan laughed. ‘Thirty days, then. A hundred and fifty feet.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty feet. We strike at one forty-nine, eh, lad?’

  ‘Inshallah, George, inshallah.’

  90

  Oil changes everything. It changes everything, everywhere, always. It changed everything on Signal Hill.

  There were forty-two wells there now, and more coming every day. The once dozy Hill rang with noise. Normal life collapsed. Who needs a five-and-dime store when you could have an oil well? Why grow cucumbers, when you could lease your land for treble the cash? Even the air had lost its previous sea-scoured clarity. The boilers spewed steam, trucks threw up dust; gas jets added smoke, soot and fire.

  To some, Signal Hill was a picture of hell. To Tom, it was the next best thing to paradise.

  Or almost: Signal Hill might have the oil, but it lacked Rebecca. There were times Tom wasn’t sure which one he wanted more.

  They’d drilled down two thousand feet when a drill pipe buckled. It was now stuck down a hole eighteen inches wide and a third of a mile deep, and until the pipe was shifted they could make no more progress. They cursed but there was nothing to be done. They pulled up their drill, sent down a fishing tool, and fished for the pipe. They hooked it, brought it up, lost it, fished for it again, caught it, and brought it to the surface. They lowered the drill again, but they had lost time. A team who had begun drilling eight days after them, struck oil ahead of them. Nine hundred barrels a day and no problems with pressure.

  The fever mounted and Tom was caught up in the tension. Anxiety and hope became two rats that gnawed at his belly, day and night. When his clothes became dirty he just left them. He forgot to shave. He never left the well.

  The men worked like no drilling crew Tom had ever heard of. To a man, they were too superstitious to be openly hopeful, but the expectation was tearing them apart. Dawn had barely lifted the lid on the eastern horizon before the full crew was there, beneath the derrick, getting the boiler stoked up and the lifting blocks in position. Evening had pretty long gone in the west before they were done, lifting pipes into racks and prettying the rig ready for tomorrow.

  But though they worked like demons, they spoke like milksops.

  ‘Even if we make a strike, the well’ll lose pressure when all them other wells get going. Most of them folks on the hill ain’t never seen a field drilled proper.’

  ‘Yeah, but we might be off-field here. You don’t know. No way to tell. I drilled wells in West Texas, dusters every one, but not one of ’em more than a coupla hundred yards from a producer.’

  ‘That’s the Duster for you.’

  ‘Hell, I ain’t too sure about our casing. We got well casing made out east. I don’t reckon it’s right for this kinda sandy-type rock.’

  All the same, certain types of conversation apparently didn’t break the rules of superstition. For instance, the Duster might spit tobacco juice onto the ground and say thoughtfully, ‘S’posing we strike – just s’posing, of course – what kind of control gear d’you reckon we’ll need? I’m wondering about pressure and flow rates. What d’you figure? Two thousand pounds per square inch, and what? Guess around a hundred barrels a day? Mebbe a little less?’

  ‘Mebbe more. Alamitos One’s still doin’ nearly twelve hundred, and pressure’s showing no signs of slacking off.’

  ‘That ain’t even so much. Bolsa Chica One down at Gospel Swamps came in at twenty thousand barrels a day. I once rigged with a guy who drilled down there. Said it just about blew the hair off of his head.’

  ‘Twenty thousand barrels a day, at eighty cents a barrel, less maybe twenty cents production costs, that’s … hell, that’s something … Not that we’re going to get that, o’ course. Me, I’d be pleased just to strike at all.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  ‘Hell, if we get forty barrels a day, that’s still a producer, ain’t it?’

  ‘Hell, yes, that’s a producer.’

  The men agreed that forty barrels would be a stunning result, though in truth the disappointment would have all but killed them. Nor was Tom exactly calm about things. This was his well. Every good thing, every bad thing in his whole life was now staked on succeeding here. Success on a grand scale would redeem everything that had been wrong in the past. Failure would pretty much annihilate Tom beyond hope of recovery.

  But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. So long as the spinning pipes continued down into the earth. So long as the drill bit ate its way deeper and deeper. And so long as the oil was there.

  So long as the oil was there.

  91

  It was their thirtieth day.

  Their money was finished and so were their hopes. The well now stood at nearly three thousand feet – perhaps the deepest well yet dug in Persia – and it remained drier than dust.

  They were left facing a simple truth. They had done their best and failed.

  As if to symbolise their failure, their last two goats had dropped dead in the night and lay soft and peaceful in a little hollow near the derrick. Alan was so upset, he almost wanted to bury them.

  He doled out the final week’s wages. The tiny crew that remained had turned into a superbly efficient and tightly knit bunch. Nobody much wanted to take money at this stage, and even the two phlegmatic Russians had tears in their eyes as they hugged Alan, Reynolds, and everybody else. Ahmed’s stream of swearwords turned dark and Persian, and became mixed with enough blasphemies to merit the death penalty in certain less tolerant countries. The camp was dismantled and loaded onto the last remaining truck. The derrick, boiler, pipes and drill bits were left standing in the wasteland as a monument to what could have been.

  The seven remaining horses were saddled and mounted. The other men clambered onto the overloaded truck for the journey down. Everything saleable would be sold in Shiraz
and the proceeds given away in payment of various debts.

  Alan – clean-shaven and washed, though in clothes now so tattered that an English tramp would look down on them – walked over to the rig, alone. He laid his hand on the cable, which was slack now, the huge Mother Hubbard lying in the darkness half a mile below ground. No oil meant no Lottie – neither the beloved one of wartime memory, nor the bright, flirty, superficial girl he’d encountered in a rainy London street. Either way, no Lottie seemed like no life at all.

  Alan went next to the derrick and scratched at its timbers. Touching wood: it had been a superstitious gesture common to all soldiers, and there had been countless times when heavy shelling or sudden gunfire had caused Alan to reach for a bit of revetting or mud-soaked duckboard. He pulled off a splinter of wood and wandered over to the hollow where the two goats lay dead.

  Their eyes stared upwards, already glassy. Flies crept on the exposed eyeballs. Alan sniffed, but the mountain air was clean and bright. He put out a finger and closed the eyelids on the two dead animals. Their eyelids were tougher than human lids and they resisted his finger. Alan applied more force and closed the eyes. The flies buzzed angrily away. It was time to go.

  He walked back to the men, put the truck into gear and began down the hill.

  It was the end of an era.

  The horsemen went quicker than the truck, and were soon out of sight down the twisting valley. Alan steered the truck cautiously down. In places, the slopes were very steep and the lack of men had meant that the track was in a terrible state of repair. Even the hairpins were potholed and loose-sided. Each journey became a battle of skill as well as a terrifying game of odds. Alan appeared to be concentrating hard, but twice he misjudged a bump in the road, and twice the truck jolted precariously towards the edge. Reynolds would have said something, but Alan’s hands were white on the wheel and his face was set like a mask. Another couple of minutes went by. Then Alan made yet another poor turn and Reynolds spoke.

  ‘Are you all right, laddie? Perhaps I should take a turn at the wheel?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Alan spoke, and even as he spoke, he let the truck drift into a soft-sided mudslip that hadn’t been properly cleared. They rolled gently but unstoppably towards the edge. The truck slithered to a halt, its front left wheel spinning slowly in space. A couple of feet further, and they’d be dropping down a forty-five degree slope, a thousand feet long, and littered with rocks the size of houses. The six men in the cab felt their hearts stop as they watched to see if the vehicle would continue its roll. It didn’t. Alan turned the engine off and let it die. All the time, his attention had been so keenly directed elsewhere, it was almost as if he hadn’t noticed the near-tragedy.

  ‘By Jove, that was a let-off,’ said Reynolds. ‘We’ll all get out, from the back, of course, rope the truck fast, get it unloaded, and –’

  ‘The goats,’ said Alan. ‘Have you thought about the goats?’

  ‘The goats, lad? Never mind –’

  ‘No, George, pay attention. The goats. Why did they die?’

  Reynolds laughed softly. He was worried that the mission’s failure was proving more than Alan could handle. ‘They just died. People die, goats die. It happens to –’

  ‘Nothing just dies,’ said Alan sharply. ‘You have to die of something. What did the goats die of?’

  Reynolds stared at Alan. Then it clicked. ‘Oh, by God, lad! Oh, by God!’ He stared wildly for a moment. Both men were now infected by whatever it was that had Alan in its grip. ‘Out of the truck,’ said Reynolds. ‘Now.’

  Everyone piled backwards out of the teetering truck. Reynolds dug into their equipment and hauled out ropes and planks. With Alan and Reynolds both snapping orders as though they were two parts of the same machine, the truck was belayed to the cliff face, planks and rocks were used to give the wheels bite and to lever the huge beast back on to safe ground. But that was almost the easy part of the manoeuvre. The next stage was to turn the truck so that it was pointing back up the hill. The road was too narrow and the surface remained appalling. Nevertheless, they managed, and Alan was at the wheel again, driving furiously back up the slope. This time, every lurch into a pothole brought no silent gasps of horror. Every man on the truck was agog to know what was so urgently drawing the two Englishmen back.

  A light breeze was blowing down the valley by the time they arrived back, and a small fire was burning itself out in the boiler.

  ‘Fuel,’ said Alan. ‘Get fuel.’

  ‘Come on, lads, look sharp.’

  The puzzled men began to gather the few sticks or pieces of coal that were still lying around the camp, but Alan and Reynolds were way ahead of them. The two men tore into the truck. They ripped off its waxed canvas cover. They put a pipe into the fuel tank and began to siphon out the petrol. When the others got the picture, they joined in. Tents and clothing joined the fuel heap, latrines and tool cupboards, even the folding tables and chairs that had been their only comfort for so long. As soon as the pile looked large enough, they ran to the derrick to get it ready.

  Like a dervish, Alan began loading the boiler. The little fire crackled and grew. Alan threw on petrol and the flames leapt up, as the water in the boiler began to heat. The Mother Hubbard was made ready.

  ‘Go on, you lousy bloody no-good son-of-a-desert-bitch,’ muttered Ahmed in fervent prayer. The boiler began to hiss. ‘Don’t break us down, you bugger. Don’t break us now.’

  Only Alan was silent. The pressure mounted. They threw the camwheel and pulley belts into action. There were nigh on three thousand feet of steel cable down the hole now, as well as the massive Mother Hubbard. Every turn was a stretch for the aching machinery.

  But it worked. The winch ground its way round. Far down beneath the earth, the Mother Hubbard raised herself for one last strike. The camwheel lifted her, lifted her, lifted her.

  ‘Go on,’ said Reynolds. ‘Go on.’

  The camwheel completed its turn. The Mother Hubbard dropped, its massive weight smashing into the hidden rock.

  ‘Again.’

  They worked like seven devils. The drill bit rose and fell, rose and fell.

  ‘Now bail,’ cried Reynolds.

  They winched up the Mother Hubbard, and sent their bailing tool down.

  ‘Quickly!’

  Their fuel pile, which had looked so vast just a few short moments before, was rapidly disappearing.

  They bailed the well fast and imperfectly, but they wanted to clear the worst of the chippings before beginning to smash away once again. When the chippings came up, Alan snatched them, cleaned them off against his leg, and dropped them into a basin of water. For him, this well wasn’t just about oil, it was about Tom and it was about Lottie – the past and the future. He and Reynolds hung over the bowl like it was the Delphic oracle. Air bubbles clung to the sides of the rock and rose to the surface.

  ‘Come on, come on.’

  Reynolds put his work-hardened hands into the bowl and swept the bubbles from the side of the stones. They bobbled up to the surface, popped and vanished. And then an odd thing happened. Chippings that were definitely free of air bubbles began to grow new ones. Little pinpricks appeared on the side of the stones, then grew into pinheads, then bright round bubbles. Alan jogged the basin and the little bubbles winked their way to the surface. Both men leaped up, wild hope in their eyes.

  ‘Keep going!’

  ‘Load the fire there, will you!’

  They lowered the Mother Hubbard cautiously to within a hundred and fifty feet of bottom, then released her. Far below ground there was a thundering smash, as the rocky surface was split open once again. The drillers drilled, but the boiler began to fail. The fuel had burned brightly, but for too short a time. Once again they were out of luck.

  ‘The tyres,’ said Alan. ‘Who the hell left the tyres on?’

  They ran to the truck and stripped its tyres, its seats, the oil sump, the hydraulics cables, anything flammable they could find. T
he truck looked like a skeleton picked clean by a mountain lion. The boiler pressure climbed again. The Mother Hubbard rose and fell.

  They worked until it was time to bail once more, but the boiler fires were sinking again. The winch tried to lift the Mother Hubbard one last time, but couldn’t do it. Once again the well was abandoning them to failure.

  ‘The derrick,’ said Alan. ‘Strip it.’

  The wooden derrick was sturdily built of seasoned timber that had orginally been imported from the forested uplands around the Caspian. Alone of their decrepit equipment, the derrick itself had stood robust and strong. But not now. They began to tear away its timbers. They left the most obviously structural ones, but removed nearly everything else. Alan and Ahmed climbed high into the derrick until, to Reynolds’ viewpoint on the ground, they looked like a couple of insects – one dark, one pale gold. The two men smashed away at the crosspieces with their steel mallets, until the nails gave way and the wood fell tumbling to the ground. And every piece they removed, every beam and every plank, was hurled straight into the boiler.

  The flames bit into the singing wood. Alan clambered down from the derrick, drew more water from the river and added it to the boiler. He had worked harder than any of the men present, but fatigue belonged in a different lifetime. The boiler fire bit into the water, and the pressure rose.

  ‘All right, let’s do it.’

  Alan threw the winch into action. It had to raise the Mother Hubbard and all the cable three thousand feet. It wasn’t clear if the derrick would stand the strain. Everybody stood well back as the winch wound round. The derrick physically bowed under the effort. Nobody had ever seen the derrick move before, not by so much as an inch, but now there was a clear six-or eight-inch bend in the main supporting timbers.

  ‘Go on,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘Go on,’ said Alan.