Alan tried to say something further, but his strength was ebbing away. Tom bent his head, closer and closer, until he heard.
‘Whitcombe,’ said Alan. ‘Whitcombe. Look after it.’
And then Tom did hear. Or rather, he understood. With Sir Adam dead and Guy dead and Alan possibly dying, then Alan was asking him to take care of Whitcombe House, at least until the next generation, Alan’s children, were old enough to take charge themselves. Nearly fifty-one years after Tom had struggled into the world, the motherless son of an English under-gardener, he was being entrusted with the care of one of the great country houses of Hampshire. He was suddenly and intensely moved. He shook his head.
‘Lazy sod, you bloody well look after it.’
There was another pause. Tom spat silently. A light breeze fluttered in the trees. Tom put his hand to the bottom of the car. Blood was still dripping. Alan was still fading.
‘Brother?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid we haven’t got that tourniquet tight enough. You’re still bleeding.’
There was a moment’s silence. The two men looked at each other.
‘I can, if you can,’ said Alan.
‘It’s worth a try.’
Alan nodded. ‘Just pull. Don’t stop whatever. I trust you.’
‘OK, buddy, hold tight.’
He put his arms under Alan’s shoulders and began to heave. Alan’s leg was crushed and trapped by the Bentley’s massive engine. Tom pulled hard. Even in the moonlight, he could see his brother’s face white with pain.
‘Pull. Just pull,’ said Alan in a croak.
For ten seconds, Tom pulled, harder and harder. Alan made no sound. The agony must have been indescribable. Tom stopped to adjust his grip, when something changed. Something inside the car had twisted, something had come free. Alan turned his head.
‘We’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve done it.’
Tom pulled again and with sudden, astonishing ease, he lifted Alan through the shattered window and out onto the grass.
They stared at each other, brilliant with joy.
Tom tore his shirt into strips and fastened a tourniquet so tight that the bleeding stopped. Alan’s wound was no longer lethal. Already, it seemed, Alan was stronger, better.
They lay next to each other under the stars, just as they had done as babies, just as they had done as boys, just as they had done as young men and soldiers. And they laughed. For no reason, they laughed. Throwing their heads back into the tangle of buttercups and dandelions on the bank behind them, they laughed and laughed and laughed.
‘Goddamn Bentley,’ said Tom. ‘Your fault for buying English.’
‘Not the Bentley. The tree. Damned stupid place to put a tree. Careless.’
‘You may as well rest. We’ve got all the time in the world now.’
Alan lay back on the grass. ‘Yes. Leg hurts like hell, by the way.’ He grinned once more, and closed his eyes. Tom laid his hand tenderly on his brother’s forehead.
The great chains of the past had lost their hold now. All the years of war, of anger, of mourning, of searching, of fighting – all of it was meaningless now. Down below, from the village, there was a surge of motors. Cars and people began to swarm up the hill.
‘Brother?’ said Tom.
‘Yes?’
‘We’re fools, we two. A pair of bloody fools.’
Alan nodded. ‘Yes. But we struck oil, didn’t we? We’re fools who struck oil.’
And as they lay on the grass, listening to the wind and the sound of the cars racing up the hill towards them, down on the south coast an invasion fleet was setting sail.
The ships contained the troops that would liberate first France, then Germany from Hitler’s grasp. Everything good in the world depended on their success.
And at a distance behind the main fleet, waiting until the beaches were cleared of mines, an ugly-looking coaster would steam south to Normandy. The coaster was an unremarkable little vessel, but her hold had been adapted for a special sort of cargo: more than a hundred thousand yards of coiled black three-inch pipe. From the back of the ship, the pipe ran out silently into the water and disappeared. This was PLUTO, the Pipe-Line Under The Ocean, the world’s first ever undersea pipeline and nothing short of a technological master-stroke. In a few hours’ time a pumping station would begin to beat, the pipe would begin to stiffen, and on a sandy beach in Northern France, a couple of soldiers would manage to soak themselves as the first liquid came tumbling out.
This was the oil that would fuel the invasion.
This was the oil that would win the war.
HISTORICAL NOTE
When history and fiction collide, it’s usually history which comes off worse. This book would be the same, except that its subject is oil and, where oil is concerned, fiction may alter history, but is hardly likely to better it.
Time and again, the most improbable facts contained in this book are literally true.
Aside from some minor jiggling of dates, I’ve taken care to be true to history. My description of the oil boom on Signal Hill is drawn from eyewitness accounts. My description of the oil strike in East Texas is so carefully based on fact that it could have been cribbed from the drilling log of Ed Laster, the driller who actually brought the well home.
In Signal Hill, the flow of oil really was as sudden and prolific as described. Barbershops did sprout oil wells. The dead buried in churchyards really did become goldmines for the living. In East Texas, things were, if possible, even crazier. Within months of the first oil strike, local towns had increased in size ten or even fifty times over. Derricks were built so close together that their legs interlaced. The flood of oil was so strong – and the collapse of order so total – that martial law had to be declared and enforced at gunpoint.
In Persia, the account of Anglo-Persian’s beginnings is likewise close to the truth, except that the concession was never divided between two companies. Alan’s experience in the Zagros would have been all too familiar to the pioneers of Persian oil, the only exception being that Alan had a quick and easy time of it by comparison.
Nor is it just the events and settings of the book that are drawn from fact. A number of the minor characters are genuine historical characters (Knox D’Arcy, Sir Charles Greenaway and Cordell Hull, to name a few). Much of the incidental detail is taken straight from actual events. The early Persian pioneers really did use watermelons to cool their trucks. There really was a rigger who dropped eighty foot from a derrick then bummed a cigarette. Even Tom’s scam for making money in Wyoming is based on truth.
But most important of all, there are two major characters in the book loosely based on real individuals. The first of those is Titch Harrelson, who draws inspiration from Columbus Joiner. Like Harrelson, Joiner was a dreamer and a fraudster, an oilman and a conman. Having made the most important strike in American history, he found himself threatened with the courtroom. Like Harrelson, Joiner had vastly oversold his leases – some of them eleven times over. This hadn’t mattered when the leases were worthless, but mattered a lot as soon as oil was struck. Joiner was lucky to escape jail. He ended his life, wild-catting to the last, never striking oil again, virtually penniless.
Likewise, the George Reynolds of The Sons of Adam owes a debt to the real-life George Reynolds who was Knox D’Arcy’s man in Persia from 1901 to the 1908 strike and beyond. The real-life George Reynolds showed an extraordinary drive and tenacity of purpose, without which no oil strike would ever have been made. It says something about the man’s ability to get things done that he first struck oil in the Middle East in 1904, with his first major well yielding in 1908. By comparison, the first strike in Iraq didn’t come until 1927, the first strike in the Gulf not coming until 1932 in Bahrain. My George Reynolds was blessed by a good relationship with his boss, not to mention a good parcel of stock in Alanto Oil. The real-life George Reynolds had no such pleasure – though one hopes he would have been pleased to know that An
glo-Persian would grow into a company (later renamed British Petroleum) worth as much as two hundred billion dollars by the century’s end.
But my debt to history goes deeper still. In a way, the story of oil is the story of the twentieth century.
In the Great War, oil already signalled its importance. The British Army started the war with virtually no motorised equipment. By the end of the war, the Western allies had two hundred thousand vehicles in action. They had built aeroplanes by the tens of thousands. They had launched and won the first tank battles in history. Lord Curzon was hardly exaggerating when he declared that ‘the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil.’
In the two inter-war decades, oil continued to grow in importance. By the time of the Second World War, oil was, beyond doubt, the most important commodity in the world. The German failure to reach oil in either North Africa or the Caucasus, the Japanese failure to strike the oil at Pearl Harbor, the British ability to use 100-octane fuels in the Battle of Britain were all matters of the utmost strategic importance. As for PLUTO, the Pipe-Line Under The Ocean, it’s a staggering fact that the world’s first undersea pipeline should have been laid within hours of the largest-ever seaborne invasion. While there were some early teething problems, the technology eventually delivered more than a million gallons of fuel per day to the Allied forces in Europe – and conferred a strategic advantage that the oil-poor German forces were never able to overcome.
Finally, one cannot write about the two world wars without being conscious of an enormous debt to the men who fought them. This book has attempted to walk a fine line between entertainment on the one hand and respect for what actually occurred on the other. It is to be hoped that the balance is right. From George Reynolds to the infantrymen of the Somme, from Knox D’Arcy to the pilots of the Battle of Britain, from Columbus ‘Dad’ Joiner in East Texas to the mounted tribesmen of the Persian oilfields, this book is intended to honour them all.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Money Makers
Sweet Talking Money
COPYRIGHT
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s
imagination, other than the names of certain historical
characters from the early days of the oil industry. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events
or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2003
Copyright © Harry Bingham 2003
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be identified as the author of this work
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