The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Go on, you pig-headed old sod, go on,’ said Ahmed.

  One thousand feet of cable wound in all right. Two thousand feet. It seemed as though the derrick was standing the strain. Then the winch began to make a groaning sound, as if it wanted to give up. The derrick seemed strong, but the winch wailed and groaned. There was nothing anyone could do but watch. The cable wound in slower and slower. The boiler was giving out ample pressure, but something in the cobbled-together chain of machinery was giving up. They could actually hear its death throes.

  Two thousand eight hundred feet. Two thousand nine hundred. There were literally only a few feet left on the cable, the very top of the Mother Hubbard had just become visible emerging from the well, when it happened. The cable broke. The flying wire snapped and shot through the air in a lethal whiplash that luckily caught no one. The derrick snapped upright for a moment, then the winching gear buckled and fell. It smashed through one of the key remaining timbers, and the derrick itself collapsed down like the useless thing it had suddenly become. And meantime, while all this was happening, the Mother Hubbard, all one and a half tons of her, was zinging her way down through the well, ready to smash one last time into the stubborn rock.

  In sudden shocking silence they heard the impact. It crashed up from the bottom of the well, muffled by its journey through half a mile of rocky tube.

  Then nothing, just silence and the subsiding hiss of steam from the boiler.

  Silence filled the valley.

  And then a sound they’d never heard before. A deep boom from the centre of the earth. A boom followed by other rumbles, which merged gradually into one continuous thunder.

  ‘The boiler,’ screamed Alan. ‘Put out the fire.’

  They hauled water like they were crazy. They slathered water over the boiler until it had fizzed out, cold and black and dead.

  And then it came.

  Oil.

  Bounding out of the ground in a jet that hosed seventy feet up into the air. Thick, black, wet, stinking, sulphurous oil. The seven men were sprayed with it. Their hair, clothes and eyes were thick with it. The oil that had eluded them for so long was running in thick streams through the dust. It was filling the rocky hollow where the goats had been found dead that morning – the goats that had been poisoned by the release of lethal natural gases from the well.

  The seven drillers danced like maniacs in the inky jet. They splashed each other with the magical substance. They rolled in it. They caught it in their hands and hurled it up into the air.

  The date was 23 August 1921, the day of Alan’s twenty-eighth birthday.

  92

  Some strikes blow your hair off, others just puddle up from underground. But though everyone loves to see a gusher, the picture postcard pretties miss the point. A strike’s a strike, and all that matters is how many barrels and how many bucks.

  They pushed the well quickly to just short of three thousand feet.

  It was time to go carefully. They quit drilling and lined the hole with steel well-casing. They cemented the top of the wellhead to protect against groundwater inflow. They replaced their nine-inch drill bit with a tiddly six-inch bit for the final phase.

  At this point, Tom let the Duster personally supervise every detail of the operation. They ran the the drill down at half normal speed. With every new length of pipe they added, they murmured prayers and touched wood and crossed fingers and muttered blessings.

  Further up the hill, six wells had now passed three thousand feet. Each one of them had gone on to strike oil. Flow rates were good. Field pressure remained strong.

  One morning, Boiler Bob came to work wearing a crucifix round his neck. No one mocked him. A couple of the men even let themselves touch it for luck.

  It came just before dawn on 23 August – the day of Tom’s twenty-eighth birthday.

  The land breeze had died down and the sea wind hadn’t yet risen but, all the same, the men were chilled and the steel pipes were cold to the touch. The Duster wanted to get drilling right away, but Tom kept a clearer head. The drill bit on the well floor was old and dull and it was time to lift it to replace it with a newly sharpened one. He gave the orders. The Duster agreed. The men threw the lifting gear into action and stowed the pipes as they came up. Three thousand feet is a hundred lengths of thirty-foot pipe, or a little more than thirty lots of the ninety-foot sections that they stowed inside the derrick. They counted down to zero, as the derrick filled with pipework and the Pacific Ocean began to glint with gold.

  They reached the last ninety-foot section. The first thirty feet came up clean, but the last sixty were slathered in an oily black liquid.

  Tom looked at it incredulously. He was still cold and his brain was working slowly. His first thought was that they had hit some kind of problem. The pipe shouldn’t look black, it should be covered in the mud they used to lubricate the bit. And then he saw the faces of the team. Like him, they couldn’t take it in. But the evidence was unmistakable. Standing in the bottom of their well, they had sixty feet of oil.

  One by one, their faces changed to certainty, as though something holy had just happened before their eyes.

  They’d done it.

  The well had struck. They only needed to go a little deeper and the pressure would be sufficient to pump the oil to the surface. For just a second or two, the sacred silence persisted – and then shattered.

  ‘Oil! We got oil! We –’

  ‘Sweet Jesus, we hit it! I knew –’

  A couple of the men began to scream and shout, but the Duster was savage.

  ‘We ain’t got nothing to yell about,’ he shouted. ‘If you ain’t got oil at the wellhead, you ain’t got squat. I seen wells where they got oil at the bottom and ain’t never seen nothing but coyote shit up top. I seen wells –’

  He fought his team to order and they obeyed. Tom was left to himself.

  For all Duster’s yelling, Tom knew he had a producer.

  Oil. He had oil. Five years after being taken prisoner by the Germans, two years since landing in America as an impoverished cattle hand, he’d actually made the strike that he’d dreamed of so long. The world changed, the past was erased as he drank in the moment. The entire earth became shinier, gentler, more colourful.

  Tom was in love with California, in love with America, at peace with every living thing.

  After so long, he was a man beginning to live.

  93

  Nobody forgets the day they strike oil and for Alan there were two things in particular that would make the moment live for ever.

  The first was Tom.

  He and Tom had always dreamed of this moment – ‘kings of the world’, to use Knox D’Arcy’s phrase. With Tom dead, Alan had known his destiny lay in Persia. A promise made had become a promise fulfilled. Alan was satisfied, but also a little empty. A man can’t live for ever in the past he shared with a man now dead, and Alan had his future to think about.

  And the future was uncertain. Certainly he was on the road to wealth, possibly even very great wealth. He had been unable to marry Lottie because of his poverty. Now that he was rich … what?

  Perhaps she had forgotten him, or was in love with someone else. Perhaps, even, worst of all, but perfectly likely, she wasn’t just in love with someone else, she was engaged or even married. Perhaps he would return to England to find her happy, healthy, pleased to see him – and already surrounded by a husband, a home, even her first child …

  Alan literally didn’t know what to do with the infinite possibilities. Should he be pleased to be returning to England and Lottie? Or should he be terrified? In truth, he was both. That night, as he snatched a couple of hours’ sleep (three-quarters frozen because everything soft, warm and comfortable had joined the final cataclysmic blaze), he was both happy and anxious, eager and frightened, lovesick and broken-hearted.

  94

  With excruciating care, Tom’s men deepened the hole, but superstition had gone clean out of the window.

  ‘
You see the sign in the barbershop up the hill?’ said Boiler Bob. ‘You see it? Guy’s got a gusher in his backyard. He locks up shop, hangs a sign on his door, says “Cadillac Salesmen, Please find me at home.” That’s gonna be me, huh? “Cadillac salesmen, come call on me at home!”’

  ‘Have a whole fleet of damn Cadillacs!’

  ‘I’m gonna get my own wildcat rig, if we do good here. Go up coast a little. I got a friend, a trendologist, he’s got the strikes all mapped out. Drilling with him wouldn’t be like wildcatting at all. Not that we’d ever hit nothing like this, though.’

  Slowly they punched deeper and deeper. They ran down a perforated casing, which would protect the bottom of the hole from cave-in, but which would let the sweet God-sent oil flow into the well. Then, delicate as anything, they pushed a little deeper.

  There was a physical change in the pipe. A low rushing became audible.

  ‘We got OIL!’ screamed the Duster. This wasn’t just a strike, it was a strike that he owned a piece of.

  And then it came: oil bursting up from the ground, running over their shoes, covering the sleeping Pipsqueak in a tide of black. The world seemed better and better. Somebody produced a huge bottle of moonshine, and they drank whiskey in huge delighted mouthfuls as they wrestled to get the wellhead into place. Tom needed to move out of the way, but more to the point, he wanted to enjoy the moment alone.

  ‘Hey, girl, hey, Pipsqueak.’

  He carried his bedraggled dog a few feet from their beloved well. She licked him with long salty licks, as he rubbed the pink inside of her ears.

  ‘Maybe it’s all been worth it, eh, old girl? Even rough stories can have a happy ending.’

  If licking was agreeing, then the Squeaker agreed. He stroked her. For some reason, at that moment, Whitcombe House sprang forcefully into his mind. He remembered Sir Adam and Pamela and Alan as though he had seen them yesterday. For a second, no longer, the thought of them brought nothing but warmth, even love – but the moment passed. He thought about his next steps. He had twenty-seven acres. He could get at least two dozen rigs on it, even more in time. Higher up the hill there were places where the legs of the derricks interlaced on the ground, but Tom didn’t even have to squash ’em up close. He had twenty-seven acres of the most valuable land in America.

  The crew got the wellhead in place, fixing it with massive bolts set into the cement. The wellhead was made fast. They threw a valve. The flow of oil out onto the ground was turned off. All that was left was to hook the well up to a pipeline and start to count the money. Duster let the crew begin to celebrate, but Tom was in a land of his own.

  He climbed ninety feet up the steel ladder that ran up the outside of the derrick. He hung out as far as he could to let the oil-perfumed air run through his hair.

  He was happy. Maybe for the very first time since being taken prisoner in 1916, he was truly happy. The ghosts of his past, the betrayals, the hardship and dangers – everything was rubbed out by this one huge, magnificent success.

  He turned his head down to survey his acreage. Pipsqueak had caught the prevailing mood and was hurtling round the field in a blur of dirty white. Tom smiled. He already knew where to plant the wells that would follow this. He knew where to run the pipeline, how to sell the oil, how to raise new capital.

  And that was when he saw it. His destiny. His demon. A pasty-looking man in a shiny suit and thin-soled city shoes running across the dirt acres, dodging drill pipes and slush pits and sucker rods and well-casings. He looked like nothing at all. He looked like a cheap city suit a thousand miles out of place. But it wasn’t how he looked, it was what he was saying. And what he was saying was something Tom would never live to forget.

  ‘What the hell are you boys doing here on my land?’

  95

  When oil decides to spout, it spouts. And when the men who tried to make it happen then go and try to stop it – well, sometimes you’d wonder which was the harder job.

  For nineteen days, the oil had burst unstoppably forth.

  To begin with, Alan and his men had tried to cap the wellhead, to block it with rocks or chains or bits ripped from their defunct drilling equipment. They’d tried, but the effort had been useless. The oil shot from the ground so fast that nothing short of a landslip would have covered the hole.

  Quickly, then, they’d turned their efforts to their next task: building a reservoir big enough to hold the oil. The dozen exhausted men made little progress, though they worked all through the night and into the next day. Relief only came when some of their former comrades, fearing the worst, had come back to look for signs of the truck and found an oil well instead. With astonishing rapidity, the valley had filled with Qashqai tribesmen: some of them the men who had worked alongside them the year before, others rounded up by Muhammad Ameri, who had heard the news, and ridden in to survey ‘his’ well. At this stage, no one worked for pay. They worked because the valley was filling with oil, and everyone knew that unbelievable riches lay in store for the people who could catch it.

  For nearly three weeks they’d laboured. Using bits of truck panel for shovels, even their bare hands, they’d diverted the course of the river, and set out to build a huge dam across the valley for the oil. All this time, they barely slept. They worked like donkeys. They ate nothing but boiled rice, which they cooked in cauldrons five miles up the valley and brought down stone cold, for fear of the spark that could blow the whole valley higher than heaven.

  Then they were done. The flood of oil hit the dam and began to fill the reservoir. There were a few minor leaks, but nothing that couldn’t easily be repaired.

  And meanwhile, stores began to flow up from Shiraz, everything on credit, nothing too hard to find for the suddenly rich Farangi. Eventually the oil-smeared labourers even managed to cap the wellhead. They brought a truck up the valley, filled it with rocks and cement, dragged it by hand to the wellhead, then toppled it over. The oil still came out, but the jet was no longer the force it had been. After another three days, and another three hundred sacks of cement, the wellhead was capped.

  On the shore of their black and foul-smelling lake, two oil-blackened dervishes embraced each other. One was short and powerful. He had a nineteen-day-old beard, but his moustache was much older and better kept than that. His face was as black as a coal-face by night, but beneath the black there were glints of red. The second man was tall, upright and exhausted. His once-blond hair had turned the same deep black as everything else. His pale eyes seemed out of place in their filthy surroundings. Both men stank of rotten eggs from the sulphur in the oil, but neither man noticed or cared.

  ‘I’ll miss you, laddie.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll miss you too. God knows, I’ll even miss being here.’ Alan looked around the rocky valley, home for so many months. ‘Cold rice and oil sauce.’

  ‘Aye … Well, you’ll have a job facing you in England. A damn sight harder than hitting oil here, I make no doubt.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Alan was returning to England. His job there would be to turn his lake of oil into a company. He’d need money, investors, shares, directors, accounts and managers. It was vital work, but also difficult, and both men knew that Alan would infinitely have preferred to be staying, as Reynolds was, to supervise the works on the ground.

  ‘Is there anyone at home you’d like me to call on for you? There’s so much one can’t quite say in a letter.’

  ‘Aye, there’s my mother and father, if you wouldn’t mind. They’re a pair of nervous ninnies, so –’

  ‘So I’ll explain to them in great detail how cushy our life has been out here –’

  ‘The fine houses, the pleasant climate –’

  ‘The ease of drilling, the diversity of amusements –’

  ‘The helpful and attentive local officials.’

  Both men laughed.

  ‘And you can call on Sir Charles Greenaway for me,’ said Reynolds. ‘You can tell him that there’s an oilfield, vast in its possible dimens
ions, in precisely the spot I told him it would be. You can remind him that I said seventy thousand pounds for the right to drill there was criminally low.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘And then this.’ Reynolds produced a sheet of paper. It contained the name and address of somebody in London, and the words ‘PSALM 104 VERSE 15 STOP REYNOLDS’.

  Alan looked at him questioningly.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind sending this telegram for me, please … I believe there are facilities at Abadan.’

  Alan nodded. ‘Psalm one-oh-four? I’m not sure I remember how that one runs.’

  ‘Well, there’s to be no peeking at your Bible, laddie. If I wanted you to know how it runs, then I’d sing it to you.’

  The two men embraced again. A mile away in the distance, a pair of long-legged Arab horses danced impatiently, their hoofs muffled with rags to avoid the danger of sparks from their shoes. Alan would ride quickly down into Shiraz, then make his way to Abadan, and either hop aboard a passing oil tanker and ride through the Suez Canal directly home, or, if no tanker was expected soon, make the more arduous journey overland via Istanbul.

  It was time to leave.

  Alan felt as though the easy part now lay behind him. He faced the future with foreboding.

  96

  At times during the war, Tom had put his hand out to a man, perhaps a soldier lying out in no man’s land, perhaps a man leaning up against the wall of a trench. He’d put his hand out, expecting to find a human being, then the body rolled over, the head had no face, and the skin was as cold as death.

  This moment was like that. It was a leap of horror, the touch of a corpse.

  The man came running across the dirt. Once his thin-soled shoes slid on some slush-pit mud and sent him sprawling, but he kept on coming. He was bald-headed, spectacled, out-of-place, furious.

  Tom climbed slowly down the ladder. Pipsqueak, who’d been hurtling round the field, now threw herself at the man, leaping at his ankles, snapping and growling. The men in the drilling crew stopped their celebrations and fell silent, looking alternately at the newcomer, who was picking his way over a pipeline trench, and at Tom, who was still forty or fifty feet up the ladder.