The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Now, Montague, you won’t think us premature, I hope, but we have a matter of the profoundest importance for your consideration.’

  Churchill began to speak, giving the floor to either Brooke or Renwick when it was necessary to clarify details. Alan listened in astonishment. Churchill was asking for the impossible – and yet in time of war it was often essential to do the impossible, and to do it before breakfast at that. What was more, this was no ordinary assignment, it was one on which the entire course of the war might yet turn.

  ‘Well? What do you say? Can we do it?’ Churchill asked the question as though needing an answer on the spot. As so often before, Alan felt the man’s remorseless determination. The feeling was like a jolt of energy, a surge of will.

  ‘Goodness gracious. Good Lord.’

  Alan sat in thought. Churchill was right, of course. With America now in the war, the matter had become nothing less than critical. And yet the problem seemed all but insoluble …

  ‘Well?’ said Brooke.

  ‘Will you need to get back to us on this?’ said the American.

  Alan looked up. He hadn’t heard the others, only Churchill.

  ‘Do it? Yes, sir, I dare say we can do it.’

  ‘Excellent. And can you tell us how?’

  Churchill was silent. The soldiers were silent. Alan felt the whole of England – the whole free world – waiting on his answer. He shook his head.

  ‘No, sir, I’m afraid not. I’ve absolutely no idea.’

  155

  Now, in early 1944, that day had been weeks and months ago.

  Since then, Alan had spent a vast part of his life answering Churchill’s question. The rest of it he’d spent on other war-related matters and, in the few hours snatched from the all-consuming monster of work, with his family. Lottie had become dearer to him than ever. She was the ground on which he walked, the sun he looked to for support. His family was growing fast, and Alan was missing too much of it. Polly was turning into a beauty. Eliza was, at twenty-one, taking after her mother and doing heroic work in Lottie’s hospital, which (to its founder’s horror) was once again beginning to fill with wounded men, fresh from war. Young Tom was already enlisted as a lieutenant in one of the tank regiments, and Alan prayed daily and hourly for his continued safety.

  But there had also been losses.

  His father, for one, who had died peacefully in his sleep one night. His last words to Pamela had been, ‘Shall I turn off the light now, dear? There we are. Good night.’

  And Guy. He had been true to his word.

  In his position in the War Office, he had devoted his energies to victory. He had still drunk far too much. His mood had often been black and pessimistic. But he’d flourished. He and his abilities had finally found the position and the time that suited them best. He had done well.

  Had.

  Because Guy had followed his father into the night. He had been returning from a visit to Russia, with what amounted to a shopping list of urgently required military hardware. Somewhere near Cairo, the plane had run into engine trouble and the pilot had crash-landed. The plane had begun to burn. At that stage, Guy could have rescued himself and followed the pilot and co-pilot through the cockpit. But he didn’t. Instead, he had fought his way back into the burning fuselage and retrieved the package of Soviet documents that was so urgently needed in London. He tossed them out of the window, before making the leap himself.

  He saved the documents and lost his life. Rushed to hospital with exceptionally severe burns, he died shortly after admission.

  Alan had been saddened by the news – but also, in a funny way, pleased. Guy had no longer taken much pleasure in life. In some ways, Alan guessed, he had actually wanted to die. And in his death, finally, he had succeeded in doing something he’d wanted for so long. He had done a thing of which he could be entirely proud. He had died splendid.

  156

  It was 14 March 1944, a chilly day by Texas standards.

  Tom was on one of his rare visits home – a trip only made possible by official business down in Dallas. They ate a big family supper together. Rebecca tried to make Tom sit down and eat, but in a way all any of them wanted to do was talk. Mitchell, who, at twenty, was already more than old enough to start learning about the oil business, had started work as a roustabout on a Norgaard well near Houston. The boy had fought to join up, of course, but oil work was war work – and Tom, whose aversion to war hadn’t grown any less by becoming reacquainted with it, had out-and-out forbidden his son from donning a soldier’s uniform.

  Though Mitch had protested, he’d come to love the oil world. His conversation was all oil-talk, oil-gossip and oil-questions, which Tom, laughingly, struggled to answer. Eventually, the pace subsided. Mitch went to bed. The servants finished for the night. Tom and Rebecca sat alone in their immense drawing room, a bottle of brandy for him, a mug of cocoa for her and a log fire roaring in the fireplace.

  They gazed at each other. Tom’s long absence made their times together even more special, even more intense. Rebecca thought how she loved her husband more with each passing year.

  ‘How are you, my love?’ said Rebecca. ‘Really, I mean. Really how are you?’

  Tom nodded. ‘O. Overworked. Wishing I never had to go back to DC’

  ‘Something else,’ she said. ‘There’s some kind of sadness in you. Something I haven’t seen before.’

  He shrugged. ‘War, I guess. It’s not meant to be fun.’

  She shook her head. When she was on the hunt for emotional truth, she was never deflected by that kind of answer. ‘When you were talking about the war with Germany, you became sad. Troubled. Something like that. All the time you’ve been busy with the Japanese situation, I’ve heard you get mad, or frustrated, even bored at times – but never sad.’

  Tom threw logs on the fire, though the fire didn’t need it. In the Texan climate, firewood was tinder dry and flames roared upwards in a blaze of heat and sparks.

  ‘There’s a possibility Roosevelt might want me to transfer across to Europe for a while. I’m not too keen on the idea. If it comes up again, I’ll shoot it down. I’m not going across there, no matter who’s asking.’

  Rebecca laughed and leaned out to stroke his arm. Then, having missed his touch for so long, she couldn’t let go of it once she had it. She hooked her chair forwards with her foot so she could sit holding his hand. ‘It’s because that would put you in the war alongside England, isn’t it? I guess you’d be fighting alongside a lot of your oldest friends. The ones you won’t ever talk about.’

  Tom stiffened and his hand went dead to her touch.

  ‘Ah, no!’ she cried. ‘I’m completely wrong! The opposite. The reason you left England. Whatever that was. If you went back, you’d have to face it again.’ She scanned his face again, her eyes flashing at speed from mouth to eyes to body and back to the face again. ‘The only time I’ve ever seen you like this was over that stupid affair with Blackwater Oil – your precious ruckus … What was the name of the British company involved? Alto Oil? Alamo Oil? Alanto. That’s it. Alanto.’

  Tom said nothing, but he could feel the presence of the past here in the room. Rebecca was invoking it and he was wordless in the face of it. Rebecca’s cocoa cooled and grew a skin. She was deep in thought, trying to remember something.

  ‘That name. Alanto. I’ve heard it recently.’ She scoured her memory, as Tom sat in a trance beside her. ‘It must be to do with the war. The British petrol people. The Petroleum Board. The head of that used to be boss of Alanto Oil, right?’

  Tom nodded like a dummy.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Rebecca.

  Tom hadn’t changed his position since Rebecca first leaned out to stroke his arm. But his face had lost its colour. He sat stiffer than a board.

  ‘Him? What d’you mean, him?’

  His words rang false, even to him. Almost thirty years after the fatal rupture with Alan, Rebecca had ferreted out his dark secret. He’d been
found out and he knew it.

  ‘What’s his name?’ she said. Her voice had changed once again. She didn’t need to go hunting for the truth now; the truth was lying there in front of her. Her voice was kind. Her hand was warm again on his arm.

  ‘Montague,’ said Tom woodenly. ‘Alan Montague.’

  ‘And? You knew each other?’

  Tom nodded. His feelings were numb. He spoke the words as though drugged.

  ‘You knew each other well? You were friends? Friends from childhood?’

  ‘No, not friends. Never friends.’

  ‘No? The truth, Tomek, the truth.’

  ‘No, no, not friends.’ Tom shook his head decisively. ‘We were much, much more than friends.’

  He swallowed once, then told her everything. He told her about their childhood, about their occasional quarrels, about the war, about that awful time he’d been in bed with Lisette when the bedroom door had crashed open to reveal Alan swaying with anger and outrage.

  ‘You slept with his girl?’

  Tom nodded. ‘But that wasn’t it. I mean, it was a low and mean thing to do, but we’d have got over it – leastways, I think we would. Only we never got as far as that.’

  And Tom told her the rest of it. The suicide mission for which Alan had volunteered him. His unlikely survival. His time in prison. Escape and recapture. The letters that went unanswered. The death of his father. ‘There was nothing left for me in England. I wanted to leave and never go back.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s it. Everything. The rest of it you know.’

  He spoke in a flat voice. His feelings were still hidden from him. Anger, love, bitterness, self-pity all swirled together in a thin cloud a few yards out of his reach. Rebecca nodded. The fire had burned down to a heap of embers, a waste of grey ash. Neither she nor Tom felt like moving to help it.

  ‘The ruckus,’ she said. ‘You were trying to get Blackwater out of your back yard. No wonder you got mad about it.’

  ‘It seemed all wrong to have Brits – any Brits – buying up pieces of Texas. It made it worse who it was.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘We fought as kids. We never gave up. Never. It was like that again. Only for real.’

  She nodded. ‘My poor love.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, though,’ said Tom. There’s no reason for me to ever go out there.’

  ‘Oh, Tomek!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Truth, Tomek, truth.’

  ‘What? I’ve told you everything. I swear I’ve –’

  ‘Don’t swear anything. I know you’ve told the truth. But here’s another one for you. You will have to go to him. You will have to meet him.’

  ‘No. Why? Why the hell should I? I won’t see him. It’s that simple’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘I will not. He tried to kill me. He tried to wreck my company.’

  ‘You will do it because he’s here with you now. You’ve been fighting this same old argument every day of your life. All those horrible years after Signal Hill, I knew you were fighting something. I never knew what. Now I do.’ Rebecca frowned a little. The memory of those first few difficult years still caused her pain.

  ‘I just wanted to strike some oil.’

  ‘No.’ Rebecca shook her head. The lights had been turned down low for the evening, and it was hard to read the message in her deep, dark eyes. ‘You were fighting him. You fought him over Signal Hill. You fought him over all those stupid dry holes in Texas. You fought him over Blackwater Oil. You fight him still. You’ll never rest until you meet him.’

  ‘He’s the last man on earth I want to meet.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s why you must.’

  157

  Churchill’s request of Alan had been simple. Not easy, but simple. It was this.

  To fuel a land invasion of Europe.

  To be ready within a year.

  To eliminate the possibility of failure.

  As a rough estimate the invasion forces would be equipped with approximately one hundred and fifty thousand vehicles. Those vehicles would need an astronomical amount of petrol – and the faster and more successful the invasion, the more demanding the fuel requirements would be. That fuel had to be brought from England and America to the beaches of France. It would have to be brought under conditions of constant attack.

  There were only two ways of transporting oil. Either by pipeline or by tanker. But there were problems with either route. A pipeline was all very well, but it couldn’t be built underwater and it couldn’t be built in a matter of days. A tanker was all very fine, but few things crawled more slowly across the sea than an oil tanker – and few targets were easier for roaming Luftwaffe pilots to spot and destroy.

  That was the problem. It was, beyond question, the toughest assignment in the history of military logistics.

  And the fate of the free world depended on getting it right.

  158

  ‘Hey there!’ Lyman Bard was elated to see the man who was still theoretically his boss come striding over the sun-bleached acres. ‘Welcome to West Osiman Four. Three hundred barrels a day. More, if we can find a way to jack the pressure up.’

  ‘This a discovery hole?’

  ‘Discovery, pal?’ Bard was shocked. In the old days, there was no way that Tom wouldn’t know every last detail about the oil wells he owned. ‘This is a step-out, remember. We hit oil with Number One. Two, Three and Four have all been step-outs, trying to gauge the size of the field.’

  ‘Oh right, sure. I remember.’

  Bard looked worried. ‘Did you even recall that we had this field? Eight thousand acres under lease. Three wildcats came up dusters, East Osiman One through Three. The geology types were telling us to go to hell, but the exploration boys swore they could smell the juice, so we sunk another just to show ’em. Hit West Osiman One, our first producer.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, now you mention it.’

  Tom sat down heavily on a field pipe.

  Not for long.

  ‘Ow! Hell!’ Tom leaped up like a scalded cat, beating at his backside with his hands.

  ‘Jeez, pal. I’m gonna take you away from Washington if you can’t even recognise a steam pipe when you see it. That pipe’s hotter’n a hog on spit roast.’

  ‘Screw it.’

  Tom kicked the pipe. He had been away too long. Though Tom excelled at his Washington work, he hated it. He hung out with soldiers and politicians, navy types and bureaucrats. They were good guys to a man, but they weren’t oilers. They didn’t know what it was to sink a new hole. They treated oil like it was just another munition of war, like tanks or bullets. They didn’t know the stuff was holy. Tom looked properly at West Osiman Four for the first time. The derrick was unnaturally full of drill pipe.

  ‘What the hell you got nesting there?’ said Tom. ‘That don’t look like a rig, it looks like a housemarm’s pantie drawer.’

  Bard laughed. ‘Boy, have you been gone too long! We’re sinking fields more than ten thousand feet here. You need plenty of pipe to go down ten thousand.’

  ‘Ten thousand! Sheez! What’s that costing us?’

  The two men sunk into oil-talk. For Tom it was like a warm bath, a glass of whisky. He never wanted to leave Texas again. He never wanted to be further than a short drive from an oilfield. Perhaps some day when the war was won but not yet over, he’d quit his Washington job and return to Norgaard. He could sink some wells, pump some oil, make some money … The two men chatted for half an hour; a blissful interlude in the midst of war.

  After a while, Tom sighed.

  ‘Is Mitch around?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. He’s a good lad, that boy.’ Bard halted, bursting to tell Tom something, but holding himself back.

  ‘What? What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Sure it’s something.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I wasn’t going to say nothing.’

  ‘Lyman, will you please quit –’

  ‘Hey, hey,
OK. Only don’t tell Rebecca. She’ll pretty near kill me if she learns. Kill you too, at that.’

  Tom nodded and Bard continued.

  ‘We had a well blow out on us, pretty bad. We was fighting to control it, get it capped off. Your Mitch was like a lion. Balls of steel and worked his ass off too. Anyhow, we’d pretty much got the flow shut off, when some dunghead drops a load of well casing on the floor of the pumphouse. Sparks fly. Gas ignites. Boom! Your boy, Mitch, was out of there like some kinda fire beetle. Head on fire. Clothes on fire. Now, just as Mitch runs out, that guy Fishtail Shorthausen – you remember him, right? Called Fishtail on account of –’

  ‘Lyman, you gonna spend time telling me how Fishtail Shorthausen got his name? You got my only boy with his head on fire there.’

  ‘Uh, OK, sorry. Any case, Fishtail grabs a hold of him and jumps with him right into the water tank we got set up there. They stay under maybe a minute. Mitch ain’t on fire any more, but he’s pretty near drownded. He manages to punch his way outa Fishtail’s grip and comes to the surface. We make him stay in that tank most of the night. Only way to keep him cold. His skin turned out fine, only his head got crisped down bald as a cue ball. Had to send him off to check out our gas stations in Florida for a few weeks, cause I knew I’d catch hell from Rebecca if she knew we’d tried to fry him.’

  ‘He OK now?’

  ‘Fine. Just as much hair as you or me, only his eyebrows don’t seem to have come back too good. Question of time, I reckon. Any case, what the hell are eyebrows for, exactly?’

  Tom nodded. Oilfields were dangerous places, but he’d never want to shelter Mitch – not that Mitch would let him, anyway.

  ‘I oughta see him, really.’

  Bard nodded, but he caught something in Tom’s tone that wasn’t right. ‘You down here long, pal? You spend too long in DC and you’re going to start thinking DC. You heard they want motorists to cut down petrol usage? Like something out of Russia, ain’t it?’