Oil Slick

by Warren Murphy

  That was at 9:00 a.m.

  At 9:30 a.m., there had been a half-dozen fistfights. Oriental youths, mainly from Japan, wanted to criticize only the Israelis, thus, they thought, scoring points with the oil-supplying Arabs. However, the American delegation would have none of it. They demanded that not only Israelis but all whites be condemned for the basic, cardinal, unforgivable sin of not being something else other than white.

  This provoked the black African delegates to a state of rage, since, misunderstanding the resolution on the floor, they thought it was one of praise and demanded to be included, too. Implicit in their demand was the threat that if their fiat was not heeded, they would eat the white delegates, one at a time.

  So it went between 9:00 and 9:30, at which time Jessie Jenkins who had been elected chairperson pro tem by an almost universal nonacclaim, recessed for lunch.

  This annoyed most of the spectators in the gallery, who were primarily American newsmen. They found that a half hour was not really enough time for them to find the deep hidden social significance laden with meaning for the entire world contained in what, if the participants had had access to lug wrenches and tire irons, more accurately might have been described as a gang fight.

  However, two of the spectators in the gallery were not upset by the early lunch.

  In their seats in the balcony, overlooking the large meeting chambers in the Revolutionary Triumph Hall, located next to the Palace, Chiun turned to Remo and said, “Do you understand one word of what has transpired here today?”

  “Of course,” said Remo. “It’s simple. The blacks hate the whites. The whites hate themselves. The Orientals hate everybody. Still to be heard from are the white Ainu of Japan.”

  Chiun nodded solemnly. “I thought that was what had happened. Tell me, why do they all come this great distance to confide that they do not like each other? Could they not send each other letters?”

  “Aha,” said Remo. “They could, but they have no guarantee that you would deliver them yourself, and therefore no guarantee that the letters would arrive. It is simpler this way.”

  Chiun nodded again, this time unconvinced. “If you say so,” he said.

  “And why didn’t Colonel Baraka contact us last night?” asked Remo.

  “He is considering my proposal,” said Chiun. “We will hear from him.”

  The two left their seats, having seen enough of brotherhood in action, and went downstairs to return to their hotel room, but in the first floor they were caught up in swirling pockets of small groups of delegates who were engaging in meaningful dialogue with each other by shouting simultaneously at the tops of their voices.

  Remo was for pushing through and out into the sunshine, but he was restrained by Chiun’s hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw that Chiun seemed to be interested in one of the conversations which pitted two Orientals against two blacks against two whites. Chiun slid between two of the participants to listen.

  “America is the cause of the problem,” said one of the Orientals.

  Chiun nodded in agreement, then turned to a black who said, “Whites can’t be trusted.”

  Chiun thought this a most worthwhile sentiment.

  So, too, did the two whites who insisted that there had been nothing on the earth to rival America’s villainy since Darius.

  Chiun shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “Darius was very good.”

  The six arguers looked at the source of the new voice.

  Chiun nodded his head up and down for emphasis. “Darius was very good. The world would be very good, if Darius still reigned. It was not my fault that he was deposed by the Greekling.”

  “That’s right,” said one of the blacks. “It was Alexander that done in old Darius.”

  “But what about the pharaohs?” shouted one of the white boys, a pimply-faced repository of insecurity, inferiority, and acne.

  “At least they knew how to deal with the Jews,” said one of the Orientals.

  Chiun nodded. “They were all right,” he said. “Especially Amenhotep. He paid right on time.”

  Even in this conversation, that comment seemed to make no sense, and the six young men stopped to look at Chiun.

  “It is true,” Chiun said. “Amenhotep paid right on time. Long live his memory. And Louis the Fourteenth too.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked one of the Americans. “You sound like a stooge for the corrupt King Adras. Long live Baraka.”

  “No,” Chiun said. “Adras’s ancestor was slow in paying. Otherwise, Adras would again have his throne. If he had, he would answer his mail. Long live Adras.”

  “Phooey,” said the pimply American.

  This guaranteed the wisdom of Chiun’s position to the two blacks, who joined with Chiun in shouting, “Long live King Adras.”

  The two hundred and fifty other arguing delegates who had remained thought they were missing something when they heard voices raised louder than their own, and they stopped to listen to the words.

  Then, lest they be left out of some very important new movement that could bring a new day of peace of the world, they picked up the chant. “Long live King Adras.”

  “Long live King Adras.”

  “Long live King Adras.”

  They vied with each other to shout the loudest, and soon the Triumph Building resounded with their voices and their echoes.

  “Long live King Adras.”

  “Long live King Adras.”

  Chiun was leading the cheers as if he were an orchestra conductor, waving his hands in front of him.

  Remo turned in disgust and bumped into the very bumpable body of Jessie Jenkins.

  “Now that you’ve got us back to endorsing the monarchy, what’s next? Feudalism?” she asked.

  “You’ll be lucky if he stops at that,” Remo said. “How did your dinner go with Baraka?”

  “Well, for a man with such a reputation as a woman user, he lost.”

  “Oh?”

  Jessie laughed and the motion rippled her breasts under the light purple top she wore.

  “It must have been that note I gave him. The one from you.”

  “Oh, you did deliver it?”

  “Sure. I told you I would. Anyway, I gave it to him. He read it and ran out of the room as if his tail was on fire. Then he came back ten minutes later and ushered us out. Before the ice cream.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Remo, who found it interesting. If Baraka had taken the letter to show someone, that someone was probably Nuihc. It would mean he was staying right in Baraka’s palace. Why? He was probably waiting for the right moment to move against Chiun and Remo.

  “Anybody offer to buy your oil secret yet?” Jessie asked a little too conversationally.

  “I’ve had a few nibbles. And speaking of nibbles, what are you doing tonight for dinner?”

  “After the day’s rioting is over, we get marched back to our barracks. There we are fed as guests of the Lobynian state. Then we go to sleep. No deviations will be permitted,” she said, mocking a deep Nazi accent.

  “How about skipping it and having dinner with me?”

  “Love to. But I can’t get out.” To his look of surprise, she added, “Really. We’re not permitted to leave the camp.”

  “Maybe Chiun’s right in pushing monarchy. People’s democracy seems to have everything except democracy for people,” he said.

  “No gain without pain,” suggested Jessie.

  “If you could get out, would you have dinner with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Be at the main gate of your place at 8:30 sharp.”

  “They’ve got guards who look like they’d appreciate nothing better than a chance to shoot you.”

  “Don’t tell them my name is Goldberg,” said Remo, and turned away to look for Chiun.

  Chiun was approaching him now. The walls and ceiling of the building still resounded with cheers for bonnie King Adras.

  “I think we have done enough for
today,” said Chiun.

  Remo could only agree.

  · · ·

  At the same time in Lobynia, there was another kind of agreement, this between Colonel Baraka and Clayton Clogg.

  At Clogg’s invitation, the two men had driven forty miles out into the desert to a mammoth oil field, the main depot to which more than two million barrels of oil daily from Lobynia’s eight hundred wells was pumped for storage, and then for shipment by tanker to the rest of the world.

  Clogg’s black limousine had stopped near the depot, and he told his chauffeur to go for a walk, despite the bone-melting one hundred and thirty degree desert temperature.

  “Before you ask,” Baraka said, “I will not take steps to end the embargo on oil to your country.”

  “Fine,” said Clogg. “I don’t want you to.” The look of surprise on Baraka’s face passed quickly.

  “Then what do you want?” he asked, not deferentially, but not rudely either.

  “To ask you a question. What are you going to do with your oil”

  “There will be buyers,” said Baraka, detesting this pig-nosed American who instantly had put his finger on the weak spot in the “Arabian salami” tactics.

  “Yes,” Clogg said. “For a while. The Russians of course will buy to try to hurt the West. But eventually they will have stockpiled and will stop buying excesses because their economy will not stand the drain.”

  “There is Europe,” said Baraka.

  “Yes. And Europe will buy your oil until the American economy starts running down and then theirs starts running down. Oil is needed for vehicles and manufacturing and Europe must follow there where America goes.”

  How like Clogg, Baraka thought, to forget the other uses of oil. The human uses. Heating for homes. The generation of electricity. On his mind were only vehicles and manufacturing. He was so American-industrialist he would have been a cartoon, had he not been too ugly to be a cartoon. Baraka looked out at the acre after acre of storage tanks, oil derricks, complicated equipment, almost all of it operated by computers built by the American oil companies, but he said nothing.

  “So you will have a surplus of oil,” said Clogg, “and your nation cannot live on oil stockpiles.”

  “Please dispense with the economics lesson. I take it you have a proposal.”

  “Yes, I have. Continue the American embargo. However, grant Oxonoco the right to drill on one or several of your offshore islands, with a clear contract that any oil we find is ours to use.”

  “There is no oil in the offshore islands.”

  Clogg smiled, a narrow twist of his mouth that made him, God forbid, even uglier than God had planned.

  “As they say in my country, so what? Constructing an underground pipeline from this center to the offshore island would be a matter of only months. We could drain off your surplus oil and sell it as our own. Lobynia would get a great deal of private income—for you to dispose of as you see fit.”

  “And your company would control America’s economy,” Baraka said.

  “Of course.”

  Baraka stared at his oil wells. A month ago, he would have shot Clogg before the man could finish the first sentence. The effrontery of offering Baraka a bribe. But that was a month ago, when he had still believed that this land could be governed, and he could himself live to an old age in honor and glory. But now there was the prophecy against his life. So Nuihc had promised to protect him from the American assassins. But who would protect him from Nuihc? Baraka found that he had neither stomach nor tolerance to be ordered around like a child for as long as he ruled. He had thought the other day of what life might be like in Switzerland. He looked out now and saw a Lobynian workman trying to open a threaded plug with a wrench. It took him six tries before he found the right wrench. In Switzerland, people made watches and clocks. In Lobynia, people made mess and confusion.

  “Could it be kept a secret?” Baraka asked.

  “Certainly. Part of our agreement would be that only Lobynian personnel could man the new oil installations for Oxonoco. And…”

  “You need not finish. I know full well that our Lobynian craftsmen could work in a false oil depot for fifty years without ever suspecting that there was anything odd about oil coming out of a faucet.”

  Clogg shrugged. He was glad Baraka had said it and not him. Sometimes these camel-herders were sensitive about the shortcomings of their people.

  It might work, Baraka decided. And Clogg, of course, was right. Without some such plan to drain off Lobynia’s surplus oil, the economy of the country, already on the edge of disaster, would slide over the brink.

  He would have to be careful to keep the plan from Nuihc. But it would work. It would work.

  “There is a problem, though,” said Clogg, intruding on Baraka’s thoughts. Baraka turned to the oil man.

  “There is an American,” Clogg said. “He has discovered a substitute for oil. His name is Remo Goldberg.”

  “He has contacted me,” said Baraka. “He is a fraud.”

  Clogg shook his head. “No, he is not. I had him checked by our people. His is one of the most brilliant scientific minds in our country. If allowed to proceed, he could hurt not only your country but my company as well.”

  “I am not permitted to move against him,” said Baraka.

  “Not permitted?”

  Baraka realized his slip and backed off quickly. “I cannot risk confrontation with the United States government by simply removing one of their citizens.”

  “Still,” Clogg urged, “an accident…”

  “There have been a number of accidents involving American oil researchers lately,” said Baraka.

  “I thought you might know something about that,” said Clogg.

  “And I thought you might know something about it.” The two men looked at each other, knowing the way men sometimes do, that each spoke the truth. Baraka wondered though who was right and “who was wrong about this Remo Goldberg. An oil scientist or an assassin? Perhaps both. One never knew the lengths of perfidy to which the United States would go.

  Clogg looked ahead and mused aloud, “Accidents happen to many people.”

  “Well, of course, I cannot be held responsible for accidents,” Baraka said, giving Clogg what he wanted: a license to remove Remo Goldberg.

  The two men talked some more, comparing notes on Remo Goldberg. Both realized that the only person who had any contact with him in Lobynia had been Jessie Jenkins, the buxom black American revolutionary. It was agreed that Baraka would allow one of Clogg’s men to be admitted to the Third World compound, where he could keep an eye on Jessie. Baraka also gave his agreement to the plan, but said its announcement must wait a few weeks until “some small business” was accomplished.

  Clogg nodded, then leaned forward and blew the vehicle’s horn. As if from nowhere, the chauffeur reappeared and was back in his seat, driving the car toward Dapoli.

  Baraka noticed the chauffeur was a young Lobynian, barely out of his teens, with smooth light skin, long black curly hair and the petulant lips of a woman. He looked at the chauffeur in mild distaste then asked Clogg if he had enjoyed the pleasures of the city.

  Clogg smiled but did not answer. He, too, was looking at the chauffeur.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JESSIE JENKINS WORE A WHITE dress as she waited behind the two guards who stood at attention at the only entrance to the fenced-in compound that housed the jerry-built barracks used by the delegates of the Third World International Youth Conference.

  The compound was surrounded by eight-foot-high hurricane fencing, topped by another two feet of barbed wire angled to prevent anyone inside from climbing out.

  Remo saw Jessie from a distance as he approached the gate. He also saw a young American with red hair leaning against a nearby barracks building, casually smoking and very uncasually watching Jessie.

  Remo stopped just short of the two armed guards and called past them to the young black woman.

  “Hi. Can you come
out and play?”

  “My keepers won’t let me.” She nodded toward the guards.

  “Is that right, gentlemen?” Remo asked them.

  “No one is permitted to leave without a written pass.”

  “And who issues these passes?” asked Remo.

  “No one,” said the guard. The other stifled a smile.

  “Thank you for your courtesy,” said Remo. “Come on down here,” he called to Jessie, motioning with his head along the fence.

  She walked on her side, he on his, until they were a full hundred feet away from the guards. Glancing over his shoulder, Remo noticed that the redheaded American had moved along with them, still lurking back in the shadows of the compound.

  The fence with its inward-facing barbed wire was meant to keep prisoners in, but not to keep visitors out.

  Remo waited until he and Jessie had strolled into am area that was on the perimeter of a floodlight’s reach, then he grabbed the top of the bar atop the hurricane fencing with both hands, ran two steps up the fence, and thrust out with both feet. The thrusting straightened his body; the upward momentum whirled it around as if he were a weight on the end of a string. His body flipped straight up in the air, then came down, still stiff, on Jessie’s side of the fence. Just before his swinging body would have hit the barbed wire, he loosened his grip, tucked his upper body in, cleared the barbed wire, and landed noiselessly on his feet, alongside the amazed Jessie.

  “How’d you do that?” she said when she finally spoke.

  “Clean living.”

  “Well, now that you’re in, what do we do?”

  “Go out, of course.”

  He led Jessie back toward the front gate.

  “How’d the conference go?” he asked.

  “Don’t ask,” she said.

  “If I promise not to ask, do you promise not to talk about racism, lack of opportunity, the ghetto, genocide, and oppression?”