The Sons of Adam (29 page)

‘It could be.’

‘Well then. I’m sorry I came out shouting.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Reynolds was half on and half off the pavement. The street was busy, and every delivery boy and motorist shouted and honked. Reynolds was oblivious.

‘Yes, well, sorry anyway. Goodbye. And good luck.’

He shook hands once again. He gripped Alan’s hands as though he was grappling a drill pipe. He walked away heavy-footed, as though dragging himself off to punishment. Alan watched him go, thinking what a peculiar man Reynolds must be, then he turned and began to walk to Waterloo Station to catch the train down to Hampshire.

He hadn’t gone far before the running of heavy boots disturbed him once again. Without turning, he said, ‘Well, Mr Reynolds, what am I accused of this time?’

Reynolds stood in front of him, puffing. ‘No, it’s not like that. I’d like to work for you. If possible. In Persia.’

Alan smiled – laughed – and extended his hand to his first employee.

‘Hi-yip! Hi-yip! Hi-yip-yip-yip-yippee!’

The teamster cracked his whip over his horses, fighting to keep them climbing the vertical bog that passed for the road up into the hills. Tom, born horseman that he was, wanted to take the reins and try himself, but the teamster knew his horses and the trail. In the back of the wagon, an assortment of huge steel plates jolted and shook like portable thunder.

‘Hi-yip! Hi-yip! Hi-yip!’

The teamster’s voice was losing confidence, as rapidly as his horses were losing theirs.

‘I’ll get out,’ said Tom, jumping out into the mud.

One of the wagon wheels was snagging on a rock. Tom tried to shift the rock; couldn’t, and put his shoulder to the wheel instead. The wagon heaved itself over the obstruction and beyond. Tom slipped and slithered up the track after it.

He was still a member of the honourable society of bootleggers, but his business methods had undergone some necessary improvements. For one thing, his Canadian supplier now dispatched regular caseloads of whisky without any need for Tom to go and collect them. For another, the wooden boxes were now marked as containing boot polish, or condensed milk, or hair oil, or tooth powder – or anything in the world that would interest dogs not at all. And, since Tom didn’t like to leave things to chance, he’d also taken the precaution of making friends with the senior US customs official at the border and ensuring that that excellent man had as much whisky as he needed to drink, and that his wife could finally afford the mink coat she’d always wanted.

Profits from the business were strong – a hundred dollars a week or more – but Tom’s heart still belonged to oil.

At the crest of a rise, the teamster pulled up his sweating horses and waited for Tom to catch up.

‘Jesus! Heck of a place to find oil!’

In the hills beyond them, the landscape was studded with oil wells. There were now a dozen producing wells that Tom knew of, but it seemed like another well was striking every week. Tom still hung out with Lyman Bard whenever he could and it was pretty clear from Bard’s excitement that he was expecting to make his own strike any day soon.

‘It’s a perfect place,’ murmured Tom.

‘Which one’s yours?’ The teamster waved his whip in the direction of the oil wells as he clicked with his teeth to make the horses walk forwards once again.

‘Huh?’

‘Which one’s yours? Which well?’

‘I don’t have a well.’

‘You don’t?’ The teamster looked baffled. ‘I thought …’ He gestured behind him where the plated steel continued its deep grumbling.

‘You thought right. They’re oil storage tanks – least they will be once we bolt ’em together. We’ll set ’em down over there, I reckon.’ He indicated the spot.

For a minute the teamster drove in silence. Although they were over the worst of the hills, the track was still atrocious and needed careful driving. The teamster was lost in thought.

Eventually he said, ‘I don’t figure it.’

‘Figure what?’

‘You got tanks but you ain’t got oil?’

‘That’s right.’

‘No well?’

‘No.’

‘No crew?’

‘No.’

‘No nothing?’

‘Just tanks.’

The teamster was apparently happy to accept the answer in silence, but before long Tom realised that the man was shaking. Tom glanced sideways. The man was shaking with laughter. Tom grinned. The teamster began to chuckle out loud.

‘No oil, just tanks, huh?’

Tom chuckled as well. ‘You got it right there.’

Reassured that Tom wasn’t about to take offence, the teamster’s laugh grew louder. ‘No oil? Hey, don’t worry.’ He flicked his whip at one of the many streams. ‘There ain’t no shortage of water. Hey? Ha! Ha, ha, ha!’ He threw his head back and yodelled with laughter.

Tom laughed with him; threw his head back, hat in his lap, wind in his hair, letting his laughter fill the whole wide-open prairie sky.

‘You’re the craziest son-of-a-bitch I ever saw,’ said the teamster. ‘The craziest or the dumbest.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Tom, letting his laughter slowly subside. ‘Uh-huh. Either that or the smartest.’

The oil business needs money, plenty of it. To drill: you need money. To collect the oil once you’ve found it: you need money. To pipe it: money. To refine it: money. To ship it: money. To market it: money, money and more money.

That’s why oil companies grow so big. Whoever heard of a small oil company? Whoever heard of an oil company worth just seventy thousand pounds?

‘We’re mapping the field now with the American seismographs. Rather jolly, as a matter of fact. Let off dynamite and listen for the echo. Oil sounds different from everything else, apparently. It must be wobblier, I suppose. Something like a giant trifle.’

The Anglo-Persian field manager, Chandos Hughes, was a pale-faced public schoolboy who was seemingly untouched by the fact that he was now stuck out in the middle of the Persian desert about a million miles from Eton and Henley and Royal Ascot and all the other things that had once made up his life.

‘Lots of jolly nice new rigs, as well,’ he continued. ‘New rotary tables mean we can drill to a thousand feet in about a third of the time it used to take us.’

George Reynolds nodded. The sun was burningly hot on the dry plain, and Reynolds took out a huge white handkerchief to mop his forehead. ‘Blast the heat,’ he said.

‘Blast the … ? Gosh, yes, it is hot, isn’t it? Lucky devils at Abadan have got refrigerators full of cold drinks. We poor desert rats do suffer rather.’

Reynolds pointed towards a heap of metal pipes lying in the dust. ‘What’s that? That looks ready for scrap, doesn’t it?’

‘Lord, yes. That’s one of our old percussion rigs. Not zoom-zoom-zoom –’ Hughes made a drilling motion with his hand – ‘but rather bash-bash-bash. Literally dropped a thumping great weight down into the hole and smashed the rock underneath to smithereens. Imagine digging a well that way! Must have been a fearful old bore. Bash-bash-bash-bash-bash. Hard enough with a proper rig …’

Hughes rambled on. The sun blazed down. The battered old percussion rig shimmered in the heat. The drill bit was about twelve feet high, eighteen inches wide, and must have weighed well over a ton. The tangle of pipes showed little sign of rust – this was the desert, after all – but the hollow tubes were filled with sand and there were heaps of mouse droppings by their mouths. Hughes blathered on. Reynolds hardly bothered to listen. He was twenty years older than Hughes and had loads more field experience.

And besides, he hadn’t come to learn anything. He’d come to steal.

The Americans were world leaders in oilfield technology. They’d offered to provide the very latest equipment, guaranteed to reach up to nine thousand feet in favourable terrain. The price was thirty-two thousand pounds.

British technology was less advanced, but Alan had found a Glasgow firm that could build equipment to his specification and ship goods free of charge to anywhere in the British Empire, at a price of twenty-seven thousand pounds.

But Alan had seventy thousand to cover
everything.
Not just equipment, but getting it set up, drilling, storing, piping, refining, shipping, selling.

He’d done his sums again and again. He didn’t have twenty-seven thousand to spend. He had seven.

It was a night without moon. A slight wind blew out of the east and sent black waves slapping against the side of the little boat. The boat rode at anchor and showed a single dark-shaded lantern gleaming from the masthead.

‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’ asked Alan in Persian.

The boatman grinned and spat. A squirt of blood-red betel juice went over the side into the water. ‘Sure,
aqa,
sure.’ The boatman was an old man. Hossein Nasr, who had made his living from the Caspian Sea ever since he’d been a boy. Sometimes he caught fish. Sometimes he smuggled. It was all the same.

Alan rubbed his hand against the rough wooden side of the boat. He disliked the sea and there was something vaguely comforting about the familiar presence of wood. The crossing had taken eighteen hours and they were now only a mile off the coast of Lenin’s Russia. A short distance to the west lay Baku, the biggest port in Azerbaijan, but more importantly by far, the heart of the Russian oil industry. The civil war was still dragging on, but it had become fairly clear that Trotsky’s Red Army would annihilate all opposition. Stories were beginning to filter out of Russia about Soviet atrocities, and the fate of the kulaks, the Russian landowning class. Alan didn’t believe everything he heard, but he knew that the Reds wouldn’t look kindly on an aristocratic English spy anchored within spitting distance of Russia’s most valuable industrial asset.

Nasr rooted around in a locker and came out with some flat bread, spiced meat cakes and a wooden bowl of goat’s milk yoghurt. ‘Eat,
aqa.
You must relax.’

They ate. Alan was surprisingly hungry and let himself gorge. They broke the meat cakes into pieces and used the flat bread to dip them into the yoghurt. It tasted like the best food in the world. When the shout came, Alan didn’t even hear it. Only when it was repeated, did his heart suddenly stop beating in his chest. He held his breath.

Nasr listened to the cry, then called back in a strange singsong whisper that crept far over the water without ever seeming to gather much force. An answering whisper came back and Nasr turned to Alan with a grin. ‘It is my friend,
aqa.
Peace be with him.’ Alan breathed again.