“Why? Nobody’s after me.”
“You can’t tell.”
“But I don’t know anything that might bother someone.”
“The ‘someone’ doesn’t know that. Whatever happened just now down at the oil docks was no accident. I’m betting on that. If it was the Apgaks, then their attack at the Tallman bungalow was a feint, and there’s something down at the docks that they want to get rid of. I’m sure they know I came here with you. So be careful. Stay here, as I said."
“I'd rather go with you.”
"No."
She stared at him. “Sam?”
He was impatient. “I have to go.”
“Brady, as a person, isn‘t the real reason you’re here, is it?“
“Not exactly.”
“He found out something. and that’s why he‘s missing. That’s why you came to locate him.“
“We think he learned something, yes.”
“Is Lubinda so important?”
“It’s a free republic. So it’s important. It‘s like a small island surrounded by a stormy ocean. We’d like to help save it from being swept away."
“And that’s all?”
“It's enough,” Durell said.
“So Brady is only secondary?”
“My job depends on what he found out and why he’s missing."
She looked at him blankly as he quit the kitchen and she hit her tip as she watched him go down the stairs two and three at a time.
The small WDT shifter locomotive that served the Lubinda Marine decks and the oceangoing platform tender had been blown off the rails. The diesel lay like some disabled monster, half on its side, its striped nose canted toward the water and hanging over the concrete bulkhead. Several storage sheds were still burning, and the rank smell of diesel oil filled the hot night. The smoke was blacker than the sky, billowing up over the scene, pushed by the faint sea breeze over the estuary, choking the men who struggled with fire hoses to keep the flames from spreading.
The engineer of the loco had been killed. No one seemed to know what had happened. The crew of the tender ship, which had been tied up to the concrete dock only a short way from where the locomotive had been derailed, were still climbing confusedly ashore. In the small switching yard there was a long low shed for drilling pipe, tanks for mud and drilling water storage, a ship’s chandlery, a barracks for the shore and rig crews’ quarters, a crawler crane, and a large oil storage tank with a pipeline snaking into the dark sea. The men struggled to keep the burning oil spilled from somewhere from reaching the main storage tank.
Durell went through the open wire gate without anyone attempting to stop him. He saw that the second explosion had occurred on the tender ship, and its Link belt 10-ton crane was canted forward toward the small helicopter deck. Some of the men were fighting to save the Sikorsky S-61N chopper on the octagonal pad. The flames lit the painted bull’s-eye on the deck with lurid colors.
"Ah, you must be Mr. Durell.“
He turned at the sound of the Oxford accent.
“Mr. Samuel Durell?”
“Yes.”
The black man was very tall, almost seven feet, with legs like a gawky heron’s protruding from his South African-type military drill khaki shorts. He had a small smile on his face, which was all bony protuberances, minor tribal scars, and deep-set muddy eyes that looked as if they had not been closed in sleep for too many hours. His eyelids drooped. His thick mouth smiled. He wore a holstered Walthers in at gun belt, sported a Sam Browne, and had several medal ribbons over the pleated pocket of his bush jacket. In his left hand, he tapped a short swagger stick.
“A calamity,” the man said. “One calamity after another. And our poor country had set such high hopes on the alleged efficiency of American technology to bring oil riches to our struggling democracy.”
“You sound like a political text,” Durell said.
“Ah, no. It is just that I make so many speeches to the tribal villagers. Forgive me. My name is Colonel Komo Lepaka. Security Police.”
Durell waited, watching the firefighters. An ambulance whined into the railroad yard and swerved toward the derailed locomotive to pick up the engineer’s body. The flames would not reach the oil storage tank. The firefighters were beginning to get the disaster under control.
“I hear," said Colonel Lepaka, “that you had an unfortunate welcoming experience at the Tallman bungalow. My apologies and regrets. I was among those who followed Mrs. Cotton to the place.”
“Did you get Lopes Madragata?"
“Unfortunately, no. That man is like a fdata—one of our swamp snakes, Mr. Durell. He can vanish in the mud in the wink of an eye. One day soon, however. . .” The black man touched his little swagger stick against his stork-like leg and smiled. His hooded eyes looked at the scene with regret. “I was hoping you would make a voluntary report of the incident, Mr. Durell. Mrs. Tallman tells me that Madragata seems to have been planning an especially exquisite welcome for you.”
“I don't know why," Durell said.
“You are an American attorney, here to settle an estate in which Brady Cotton is a beneficiary, according to your entry papers.”
“That is correct.
“How could that possibly concern the Apgaks?”
“I don’t know, Colonel. Perhaps it was all a mistake.”
“A mistake,” the tall man repeated, musingly. “Ah, yes. These things happen in the confusion of a newly created nation, amid the passions of foreign-inspired rebellion. Yes, a mistake." Lepaka tapped his bony black knee with his stick again, and sighed as he looked at the firefighters in the railroad yard. “You will come into headquarters and file a report on the incident, Mr. Durell?"
“Of course. I'll cooperate in every way.”
“I would like to have your statement, along with Hobart Tallman’s and Mrs. Tallman’s. For the records, you see.”
“Naturally.”
“As soon as possible?”
“Yes.”
“It would be appreciated.”
Durell nodded and the security man wandered off, apparently aimless in his direction. His long legs moved with slow care amid the debris and litter scattered by the explosions and the firefighters. The rank smell of burning diesel oil blew in Durell‘s face. He moved in the opposite direction from Colonel Komo Lepaka, toward the barracks building at the other end of the switching yard. A fire engine had belatedly appeared to help the tender boat’s crew. In the main doorway to the barracks, shouting orders in an unmistakable Cajun accent, was a stocky, white-shirted, familiar figure. Matty Forchette. Matty the Fork.
They had known each other in boyhood days around Bayou Peche Rouge in Louisiana. Matty had hunted with Durrell occasionally along the chenieres that twisted through the moss-draped oaks and wild vines of the bayou channels, and now and then old Grandpa Jonathan had had Matty aboard the hulk of the Trois Belles, the old Mississippi side-wheeler that the old man called home. But Matty had followed the lure of oil when the oilshore rigs came to the delta country, and Durell had gone to Yale to study law, and later to Washington to enter the world of K Section. He had not seen Matty for at least fifteen years, but the man still looked the same, perhaps a little stouter in the belly—although Dwell was sure that the belly was as hard as a beer keg»-and balding now, with a gleaming scalp encircled by thick, wiry black hair that stood up like porcupine quills to reflect his present rage.
“Matty?”
The man turned at Durell’s call, stared with hard, angry blue eyes, then shook his head as if he had been punched. A slow grin spread across his flat Acadian features.
“Like ducks fallin' from the sky,” he muttered.
“Like cattles in the ditches,” Durell said, completing the old boyhood formula.
“Really you, Sam?”
“Really me.”
“Jesus.”
They shook hands. Matty’s grip was that of a rig boss’s, hard and callused, like the steel slap of a tong man on a drilling crew.
breaking out drill pipe. “You’ve come at a bad time, Sam."
“l hear you’ve been having bad times all along.”
Matty nodded, glared at the scene of wreckage and fire, cupped his hands and bellowed, “Frankie, get that Link crawler hooked onto the loco right, you boll weevil!” “Weevil” was an epithet for an inexperienced rig worker. “You want the WDT to go overboard on the tender?” The barrel-shaped man grunted, looked at Durell, and managed at rueful grin. “ ‘Ducks fallin’ from the sky,’ my ass. More like rocks on my head, Sam. This job was goin’ to be my last chance. lf we miss here, I really go back to wrestlin’ cattles outa the ditches in the bayous.”
“Is it that bad?”
“We’ve had a run of bad luck. Come upstairs and we’ll drink to better days.”
The firefighters finally had matters under control. Matty the Fork gave a last hard glance at the small switching yard. touched Durell’s arm, and led the way into the barracks, up a flight of prefabricated steel steps to a small office with windows like those of an airport control tower, overlooking the harbor and the black Atlantic. A draftsman’s tilted drawing board had a number of geological survey sketches pinned to it. The long table looked like a snowstorm of manifests, lading bills, import clearances, supply lists, lithographic studies, an AAODC standard drilling report, routine tables of penetration rates, instrumentation controls, crew lists, a repair report on down time, all intermixed with small hand tools tossed carelessly aside. Matty picked up a bottle from the cot against the far wall, where he obviously slept, rummaged around in the mess for two plastic cups, and poured them both full.
His pale blue eyes were red-rimmed.
“Here’s to the two kids we used to be, back in Bayou Peche Rouge. Your grandpa still alive, Sam?"
Durell nodded. “Yes.”
“Must be almost ninety by now.”
“Ninety-two.”
“Still on the old paddlewheeler?”
“He’ll die there,” Durell said.
Matty said, “l heard there was a lawyer comin’ to see Brady Cotton, but I didn't realize it was you. Is it a lot of money for the son of a bitch?”
“Not too much. l don’t work directly at being a lawyer, Matt. You don‘t like Brady? He’s got a fine girl for a wife.”
The Fork grunted, gulped his bourbon, stared at Durell with eyes that almost scented hostile for a moment. “Kitty is a fine gal, for sure, but too much a Yankee Puritan for Brady. Maybe she’s too good for him. Sam, you weren’t sent here from the Houston office to check up on this mess here, were you?”
“No.” Durell said. “I’m not in oil. But what happened to Brady? Where can l find hint?”
“He’s probably oil in the bush or the Kahara lookin’ for those wood-carved gadgets he exports. He’ll turn up, like any bad penny. The way things are with him and Kitty, he won’t be in a hurry to come back, I hear.” Matty grinned. He was missing two teeth in the upper right side of his mouth. “Me, I’ve been married four times, and blew each contract. Never did strike a gusher with the ladies. Probably be married four times again, though. Like hoping for a lucky strike. Wildcatting is in my blood, Sam, and I guess I go for the gals like I'd go for a likely new oil field. Want to look at my latest?”
Matty gestured toward a powerful reflector-telescope on sturdy tripods at one of the big observation windows. “The Lubinda Lady—settin’ out there at nineteen-point-three miles like an egg-bound old biddy. Useless. Due west-by-south. She’s bound to die.”
Durell looked through the scope. The mirrored image showed him miles of placid black ocean. Then, dimly, at a great distance, he saw the wink and blink of tiny red, yellow, and green navigation lights. The rig loomed like a tiny miniature of the scale model he had seen in Hobe Tallman’s bungalow office. Gradually he made out the massive piers of the submersible jack-up platform, the decks. the crew‘s quarters. the derricks with frozen, crooked arms, the tall web of the drilling mast. He stared for a long moment, then turned his back and retrieved his drink.
Matty was watching the Link crawler lift the front end of the WDT switching diesel, swinging it away from its perilous perch on the edge of the concrete pier by the tender. There was a low crash as the locomotive was set ponderously back on the tracks.
“Why all the trouble?" Durell asked. “Is it the new government? Competition? The Apgaks ?”
Hobe Tallman says they’re all pure accidents. I say they are not,“ Matty growled grimly.
“Sabotage?”
“Sure. What else could it be?”
“Is it company work? Another oil outfit?
“Don’t know yet, Sam. I’ve sent feelers out around Companhia de Petroleos de Angola—that’s Petrangol, one-third Portuguese government, two-thirds Petrofina, Belgian. I’ve got friends in there. They operate off Angola in five fields—Galinda, Benefica, Quenquela-Norte. That last one flows more than twelve thousand b/d. Nobody knows anything. They’re decent people. So are Elf-Sprafe, the French outfit working with Shell. They hit a gas field farther north in sandstone zones at four thousand two hundred and sixty-five feet that tested over ten million cubic feet daily, and sweet oil up to fifty-two hundred barrels daily through a half-inch choke."
Matty sighed enviously. “Hell, everybody’s working the West African fields. Petrofina, BP, Italy’s Agip and ENI, the French CFP, the Teijin and Teikoku Japanese, the West German Deminex Consortium, the NNK from Nigeria—“ The man paused and drew a deep breath. “I know ’em all. Lubinda Marine got in here with luck, on preemptive leases, heating the whole crowd. Sure, they were all sore about our making it first. But sabotage like this?” Matt paused and rubbed his face downward with the flat of his hand. "I was so Sure, Sam. So sure! Look, they had a strike to the north, across the frontier, a test well drilled in eighty-six hundred feet of limestone that extends this way. They got a flow of thirty-nine-degree-gravity oil from their rig, the PD-27. That was after five years and fourteen dry holes. Ours is n wildcat in only a hundred and thirty feet of water. I’d hoped for a similar strike. But so far—nothing. I sure as hell figured we could put this field on stream in eighteen months. We’ve got a lease of a hundred and fifty thousand acres of potential oil and gas to be explored. I’m not giving up, but—well, it’s been one thing after the other.”
“What sort of things?” Durell asked.
“Pressure. The local government, the Apgaks. The government is making noises about putting up more blocks of concessions, as much as fifteen blocks covering a thousand square miles, if we don’t come through. We’ve been delayed—the usual stuff. Safety valves and packing, and getting that sixty-ton blowout preventer stack in position before we started drilling. Shit. I figured we’d put Nigeria in the shade. I figured the Lady would pump some fifteen-thousand barrels a day, sweet oil, no sulfur. So after rig-up, we got a pinchout due to overlap, missed the dome. the mud-pit agitators broke down. lost some junk down the hole. and laid down three days fishing for it with the junk basket. Just some lost tools. I fired the roustabout who was there.”
"Is there oil out there?” Durell asked.
"Yes," Matty said flatly.
“Any proof?"
“Not yet. Not a drop. But I’m an old rigger. Sam. I can smell it, I tell you. But Hobe took all the records and shut us down. No more pipe, no more trips made, nothing. Hobe says it’s a tiny hole. But l know there’s oil under that water." Matty chopped the air vehemently, as if attacking an invisible, frustrating enemy. “I’m sorry, Sam. I’m just plain mad. is all. I got to get down there on the dock and help those flatheads set things right. You’re
staying at the Lopodama Hotel?“
“I checked in there, but I haven’t seen the room yet.” Durell paused, watching the squat man. “One more thing, Matt. Tell me about Hobe Tallman and his wife.”
“Oh. Betty?”
"Yes."
Matty the Fork looked sour. “Like almost every other Stateside dame you see down here. Cranky and full of tricks. Makes passes at anyth
ing in pants just to while away the time. Maybe that‘s what bugs Hobe. He‘s a good superintendent, mostly. Worked with him before, in Sumatra. But he’s got ants up his ass or something. Maybe it‘s Betty, but i don’t know. He ought to send her home. But maybe we’ll all be going home soon, anyway.” Matty hesitated. “They even say she took on Lopes Fuentes Madragata. The Apgak general. The Mao Chinese got Lopes in their pockets, no mistake, but I don’t think Betty‘d care about that, Just before he broke with the new government, he was around town a lot, quite a wheel. Then he took to the bush and began terrorizing and murdering. Maybe Betty figured he had enough Portuguese blood in him to pass, make him acceptable, I wouldn’t know. Maybe she doesn‘t have any scruples. But they say that she and Lopes, during the time he was Interior Minister, had a hot fire going.”
“Did Hobe know about it?”
“Even if he did, he wouldn’t have let on.” Matty sighed. “I’m sorry, Sam, I’ve got to get back to work. Come back for a drink. any time—if I’m still here.”
"You can’t help me about Emily Cotton?"
“I told yon, he must be in the bush somewhere, And one other thing. l saw you talking to Colonel Komo Lepaka. You want to watch out for him. His little swagger stick can turn into a spiked jamba club if you don’t play things his way. Does he want to see you?"
"Yes, in a mild kind of way," Darrell said.
“There‘s nothing mild about Komo. You’d better get your ass over there.”
Chapter 6.
Durell returned to the Lopodama Hotel instead. It was after one in the morning, and the excitement generated by the explosions—sabotage or accident—on the dock had died down. The night‘s humidity made him feel as if he were breathing water. The hotel was an old one, going back to Portuguese days, built in the rococo colonial style. The central building resembled a miniature Petite Trianon, and there were two low wings of faded pink stucco and ornate pilasters that faced the estuary. Two freighters swung at their anchor moorings offshore. The riding lights made red and green ribbons across the quiet black water.
Assignment Black Gold Page 4