Assignment Black Gold

by Edward S. Aarons

  “The platform will float, if necessary, won’t it?”

  “Not like this. Not with the legs still down. And all the pumps are knocked out. We’re listing at about thirty degrees now. Everything, all of us, will just slide into the sea.”

  “Stay here with Betty,” Durell said. “Don‘t let her out of your sight.”

  “Sure.”

  Durell held out his hand for the Remington that Betty Tallman still gripped. She stared as if hypnotized at Madragata’s bloody body. “Give me the gun, Betty. Matt?”

  “Yo.”

  “Where do you keep the explosives aboard?”

  Matt jerked a thumb upward. “Locked room, next to Hobe’s office.”

  “Fine. Betty?”

  He wasn‘t sure about her for a moment. Then, without taking her eyes from the dead man, she handed him the rifle. Durell tossed it to Matt. “Hold on, Matty,“ he said.

  He turned and climbed the awkwardly tilted stairs. The door above hung open, pulled down and back by the slant of the crippled platform. Durell got through, hung onto the doorjamb for a moment, used the battered lantern to check that he was on the level of the lab and geology offices, and then snapped off the switch. Some daylight came through the small square windows in the yellow-painted wall. Rain rippled the image of the main deck.

  He saw nothing but chaos out there.

  Another stairway led him awkwardly to the level of the main laboratories. He moved with care, trying to be soundless, although the muddled roar of the wind and the crash of the sea outside would serve to cover most normal sounds. Something clanged steadily overhead, a loose piece of machinery or a cable blowing in the wind.

  He paused at the head of the second set of steps. The corridor slanted away into shadows. Several of the doors to the lab rooms had come ajar with the tilting of the rig, and light came in through their windows. Footsteps thudded overhead. Two, three, maybe five men. Apgaks. He stood still and listened. They went away alt, toward the heliport.

  “Hobe?” he called softly.

  The door was painted red, with various warning signs stenciled in white. The tilt of the deck kept this door tightly closed in its steel frame. Durell put down the Magnum rifle and took the .38 handgun from under his belt. The room in which he stood had been Hobe’s private executive office. The desk had slid against the opposite wall, and papers and boxes made a small heap of trash in the corner. The windows here were wide, overlooking the well pattern. He could see that the drilling tower was bent halfway to the top, although the lower sixty feet still stood firm. But the narrowing girders to the drilling engines above had bent and toppled sidewise, so that the tower lay caught between the Clyde derrick turntable and the aft port pier housing. The end of it was awash in the seething gray-green seas.

  “Hobe? This is Durell. Come out of there.”

  He could hear Hobe moving around inside when he took a misstep on the canted deck and lurched against the wall.

  “Hobe?”

  He stepped back, suddenly kicked at the door. It sprung backward, hung there halfway, and before gravity could slam it shut again, he charged through. The room reflected chaos. Cartons, metal canisters, boxes of detonators, and sticks of explosive had tumbled from the shelves and piled up in one corner. Hobe’s figure was bent over the pile, scrabbling for various items he was putting aside.

  The man turned, stared at him with wild eyes in a round moon face.

  “Hold it, Hobe. No more.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Just hold it. Exactly like that.”

  “It’s too late. You can’t stop me, Durell.”

  “Madragata is dead. His men are in a panic. They have no leader, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do now.”

  Hobe glared at him. “Dead?”

  “Yes. Madragata is dead.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Betty shot him,” Durell said.

  “No.”

  “She put at least six bullets in him. I saw it.”

  “Now I know you‘re lying. She wouldn‘t. She and Madragata—”

  “It wasn’t all true. She was just trying to hurt you. Because she’s disappointed. Because she hoped for too much. Listen to me, Hobe.”

  “She can’t be aboard?”

  “I brought her here with me. And Matty the Fork. And Kitty Cotton.”

  “Why?” the man wailed. “Why did you do that?”

  “To stop you from destroying the Lady.”

  “But I have to do it. I’m not going to let it all go into Madragata’s hands. And then the Chinese. He planned everything to cheat me. He’ll never pay me. He laughed at me, took my wife, went to bed with her, and all the time—”

  Hobe paused. His eyes were not sane. His mouth twitched. He rubbed it with the back of his hand and stared at Durell as if he still did not comprehend his presence here. There was an ugly bruise on his forehead, as if he had fallen against something. He had lost his glasses, and his eyes looked vague and uncertain without them. His white shirt was ripped, and his back was bloody, as if he had skidded when he fell. His thin hair was plastered wetly on his red scalp. In his hand, he carried a small timing device and a clutch of varicolored wires.

  “Betty?” he whispered. “Betty killed him?”

  “She wants you to take her back,” Durell said.

  “It’s too late for that now.”

  “It’s never too late,” Durell said. “Stop and think about it. The Lady is still afloat. She can he fixed up, set to drilling again. You know there’s oil here, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Sweet oil. Lovely stuff. Lots of it.”

  “But you changed the reports to make it look like a dry hole, right?”

  “That was because—because—”

  “Brady Cotton found out about it, didn’t he?”

  “It was stupid. He was nosing around. I should have realized that he couldn’t have known anything really.”

  Hobe fumbled in his wet shirt pocket and took out a stubby cigar. He had a lighter in there, too. He bent his head and worked on getting the wet cigar aglow. It didn’t want to stay lighted.

  “You killed Brady, didn’t you?” Durell said quietly.

  “He found out,” Hobe Tallman said. “I had to.”

  “Why did you have to?”

  “I told you, I couldn’t let Brady tell the truth. He was just poking around. I thought he had something solid on me. He pretended he did. A bluff. His mistake. I thought I had to shut him up. He was your man, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “A K Section man?”

  “Yes,” Durell said.

  “I should have known. I knew it too late, when you showed up in Lubinda looking for him.”

  Durell said, “Why did you do it, Hobe?“

  The man tried to light the soggy cigar again.

  “Money," he said.

  “You had a good job here. You hit oil. You had it made.”

  “But I wouldn't get anything out of it, don’t you see? Just the same old salary. Another job somewhere else in some other stinking hole, another jungle, maybe Sumatra, just about anywhere. Betty wanted to go home rich.”

  “Yes. It was Betty.”

  “I love her,“ Hobe said. “I need her.”

  He looked as if he was going to cry.

  He said, “When other men saw me with her, as my wife, they figured I—they said I was lucky, kidded me about whether I could give her enough to keep her satisfied. That sort of thing. It was good for me, though. I needed it.”

  “You never had to prove anything to anybody about yourself, Hobe.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “Brady Cotton didn’t fool with her, did he?”

  “No, no. It wasn’t that. He found out about the money Madragata had offered me. A million dollars, in the Banque Josper Suisse, in Geneva.”

  “A million? For what?”

  “To delay announcing the discovery of the oil strike here. It‘s a big strike. It I repor
ted it, Lubinda would really be on the map. There’d be all kinds of interests swarming in. And then Madragata’s rebels wouldn’t have a chance, of course. The government would have too much going for it, with the prospects of all that national wealth they’d never let it fall into Madragata’s hands, what with prices so high and the way the industrial nations knife each other to get their share. You can’t use force in the Middle East. but you can use it here. That’s what Madragata was afraid of. So he offered me a million, even more, if I held oil the announcement until after his coup succeeded.”,

  Hobe smiled sadly.

  “Not only that. I’d have the job of Minister of Internal Resources in Lubinda. Betty would have had everything she dreamed of. So I faked the reports. I went along with Madragata. But Brady found my real log, and I had to kill him, even though he was my friend."

  Hobe looked at his wet cigar and threw it away.

  “I want to see Betty,” he said.

  “She’s all right.”

  “Did she really kill Madragata?”

  Someone came into the office behind the explosives storeroom. Durell recognized the footsteps. He turned to retrieve his rifle, but he was too late. Kitty Cotton had the Magnum, pointed at him and Hobo. There was no way to get past her and out of the storeroom.

  Fear crossed Hobe‘s round face. He thought the girl was going to shoot him to avenge Brady.

  But Hobe had gone beyond concern for his own life. A strange sound came from him and he lurched across the room for the girl, trying to grab at the rifle. Durell did not want to shoot him. He saw uncertainty in Kitty’s eyes, then surprise and a touch of fear. There came a crashing sound as the outer office door was smashed open again. Two Apgaks stumbled in, wet with rain, injured and bloody. They saw Hobe come at them, or thought he was coming at them, and one of them threw a knife. It made a fine flickering arc in the dim gray air. The sound as the point hit Hobe in the stomach was a fiat chunking. Kitty stood frozen. Durell’s handgun jumped, roared, firing once, then twice. The first Apgak went skittering backward on legs that no longer supported him, fell against the far wall, slid with his legs awry to the sloping deck. The second man spun about, a hand to his face, dead before he fell.

  “Hobe?”

  Durell knelt beside the fallen man. The knife was embedded in his stomach up to the hilt. Kitty made a moaning sound and put aside the heavy Magnum.

  “I didn’t mean—I wasn’t going to—”

  “Things happen,” Durell said. And again: “Hobe?”

  “Just as—just as well," Tallman whispered.

  He didn‘t speak again. When Betty showed up, he was already dead.

  Betty knelt beside him and looked at him with dry eyes and a set mask for a face.

  Chapter 22.

  “I need you, Sam,” Kitty said. “I really do.”

  Durell stared up at the ceiling of his room in the Lopodama Hotel. “I don’t think you do.”

  “I’ve been looking for you all my life.” She rubbed the sole of her foot along his left calf. “I really have. I’ve made two mistakes so far—”

  “Don’t make a third,” he said.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway? What kind of a man are you?”

  “You see, you don’t know anything about me.”

  It was still raining. The smell of smoke and destruction still hung over the city, but the wind had died, and the storm was passing out to the west, over the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the shopkeepers in the Pequah had taken down the steel shutters over their store windows and were open for business. The hotel was crowded. A lot of European refugees had come in from the countryside during the fighting. The clerk had honored Durell’s claim to the room, although Durell had spent little time here since his arrival in Lubinda. The bed was cool, big, comfortable. It didn’t matter how big it was. Kitty was pressed close beside him, leaving most of it empty.

  There was a change in the atmosphere, too. The sticky humidity was gone. The day was actually cool, relatively speaking, Durell thought. Everything was relative. He had managed to get the radio on the Lady working, after he and Matty had rounded up the remaining Apgaks on the rig, who were just as happy to surrender after Kitty spoke to them. in their clicking dialect, announcing the Saka’s return over the booming echoes of the PA system on the platform.

  It was evening before the rescue boats arrived from shore. One of the first aboard was Colonel Komo Lepaka. His stick figure paused only briefly when he had surveyed the tangled mess of wrecked machinery aboard.

  “It can be repaired?” Lepaka asked.

  Matty the Fork had replied. “Yes, with a lot of work. There’s plenty of oil down there. Enough for everybody.”

  Kitty said, “Enough for new schools, Colonel.”

  “Why did Hobe try to destroy everything?”

  “He didn’t want Madragata to get it, if the Apgaks took over the government. A question of revenge for being double-crossed, as he thought,” Durell said.

  Lepaka looked tired. “Ah, yes. And Mrs. Tallman?”

  “I think she ought to go home,” Durell suggested.

  “It will be arranged.” Lepaka turned his heavy-lidded eyes away from the destruction. His dark brown face looked as gaunt as ever. “It is all over, you understand. For now. The Saka came back. You brought him back. It has saved Lubinda.”

  “Lubinda could have saved itself.” Durell said.

  “I am sorry about Hobe Tallman,“ Lepaka said.

  “He had no place to go.”

  Later, after he had seen Matty back to the hospital, he had walked with Kitty through the wet, rubbled street to the hotel. Armored troops were stationed at strategic posts throughout the city. Lights blazed in the Presidential Palace. There was the sound of commercial jets at the airport, probably bringing in scores of reporters from all over the world to add their din and sensationalized comments to the affair for the next few days.

  But it was all over.

  There was a call for him from the elegant, isolated U.S. Embassy down the coast, well out of the area of disturbance. Durell took the call while Kitty, by unspoken agreement, showered in the bathroom with its blue Portuguese tiled walls.

  “Durell? We’ll want a full report on what you’ve seen and done, at the soonest. We want to know about the People’s Army and how the military security forces crushed opposition to the legitimate aspirations of the Lubindan people—"

  “Who is this?" Durell asked.

  “I’m Henry Adams, the Ambassador's secretary.”

  “You have a good name,” Durell said.

  “What? I'm sorry, I don’t understand—"

  “Don’t spoil it,” Durell said. The shower in the bathroom had stopped hissing. The lights were still not working in the Lopodama, but the manager had provided candles and oil lamps. There were ships’ lights moving out on the broad anchorage in the estuary, beyond the windows. Durell said, “I’ll make my report directly to Washington.”

  “But we have a need to know—”

  “To hell with you,” Durell said.

  He hung up, then took the phone off the hook.

  Kitty was waiting for him.

  Later, when they had Slept, and the next clay had begun with a drizzle that promised to end before noon, he ordered breakfast brought up to the room. It was served by a thin, long-legged boy who might have been Lepaka’s son. They ate in bed, listening to the drip of the rain from the roof eaves, enjoying the cool sheets and the wind that blew in off the harbor, Traffic began to move more briskly in the streets.

  “Sam, will you be taking Brady’s place?” Kitty asked.

  “No.”

  “But that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  "I'll clean up Brady’s Central, yes. The main thing is, Lubinda will remain a free republic for a while yet—perhaps until the old man, the Saka, dies. For real, this time. Then we’ll have to watch Komo Lepaka. Most people in the police and security business gradually get totalitarian ideas.”

  “I thought
you liked Komo.”

  “I do.”

  “But you’ll swing against him if he turns?”

  “If he tries later on to put Lubinda on the other side, yes.” .

  “It seems so futile. Why did Brady have to die?”

  “He died in a small skirmish. You can think of it like that. At least, things are kept stable here for a while longer, thanks to him. That’s why I came here. It’s a worldwide struggle, and every little bit helps. Soon enough, I’ll be sent somewhere else, Kitty You seem to want a personal substitute for Brady, a better dream. Maybe a better man. I don’t know if I’m better than Brady, except that I’m alive and he got himself killed. I couldn‘t live up to any woman’s dream, in any case.”

  “Sam, you and I—”

  “You and I have this, now. Now, and nothing more.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said. She turned her face away from him and stopped rubbing her foot along his leg. “It’s so good like this, you and I . . .”

  She turned her back to him and moved to the other side of the bed. It was as if she had moved to the opposite end of the world. The bed was wide and cold between them.

  Durell said, “Come here.”

  She did not move.

  “We still have some time together,” he said.

  “No.” Her voice was muffled. Her hair was tumbled over the white pillow. “It’s wrong.”

  “You’re a Puritan again?”

  “I never was. You know that.”

  “So let’s make use of our time," he said.

  For a long minute, she did not move. She drew a deep breath and he looked at her fine smooth back, the swell of her hip, her lustrous hair. He thought maybe he ought to get out of the bed and go about the business that had brought him here. Then he thought of the Ambassador’s man in the distant, safe embassy down the coast, smug in its antiseptic isolation, and decided it could all wait. All of them could wait. He reached out for Kitty, and when she felt his hand on her thigh, turning her toward him, she made a small sound and came back across the wide bed and hugged him tightly, as if it could be forever; and he thought that even an hour, a minute, or a moment, could be an eternity.