The Sons of Adam (40 page)

Everyone piled backwards out of the teetering truck. Reynolds dug into their equipment and hauled out ropes and planks. With Alan and Reynolds both snapping orders as though they were two parts of the same machine, the truck was belayed to the cliff face, planks and rocks were used to give the wheels bite and to lever the huge beast back on to safe ground. But that was almost the easy part of the manoeuvre. The next stage was to turn the truck so that it was pointing back up the hill. The road was too narrow and the surface remained appalling. Nevertheless, they managed, and Alan was at the wheel again, driving furiously back up the slope. This time, every lurch into a pothole brought no silent gasps of horror. Every man on the truck was agog to know what was so urgently drawing the two Englishmen back.

A light breeze was blowing down the valley by the time they arrived back, and a small fire was burning itself out in the boiler.

‘Fuel,’ said Alan. ‘Get fuel.’

‘Come on, lads, look sharp.’

The puzzled men began to gather the few sticks or pieces of coal that were still lying around the camp, but Alan and Reynolds were way ahead of them. The two men tore into the truck. They ripped off its waxed canvas cover. They put a pipe into the fuel tank and began to siphon out the petrol. When the others got the picture, they joined in. Tents and clothing joined the fuel heap, latrines and tool cupboards, even the folding tables and chairs that had been their only comfort for so long. As soon as the pile looked large enough, they ran to the derrick to get it ready.

Like a dervish, Alan began loading the boiler. The little fire crackled and grew. Alan threw on petrol and the flames leapt up, as the water in the boiler began to heat. The Mother Hubbard was made ready.

‘Go on, you lousy bloody no-good son-of-a-desert-bitch,’ muttered Ahmed in fervent prayer. The boiler began to hiss. ‘Don’t break us down, you bugger. Don’t break us now.’

Only Alan was silent. The pressure mounted. They threw the camwheel and pulley belts into action. There were nigh on three thousand feet of steel cable down the hole now, as well as the massive Mother Hubbard. Every turn was a stretch for the aching machinery.

But it worked. The winch ground its way round. Far down beneath the earth, the Mother Hubbard raised herself for one last strike. The camwheel lifted her, lifted her, lifted her.

‘Go on,’ said Reynolds. ‘Go on.’

The camwheel completed its turn. The Mother Hubbard dropped, its massive weight smashing into the hidden rock.

‘Again.’

They worked like seven devils. The drill bit rose and fell, rose and fell.

‘Now bail,’ cried Reynolds.

They winched up the Mother Hubbard, and sent their bailing tool down.

‘Quickly!’

Their fuel pile, which had looked so vast just a few short moments before, was rapidly disappearing.

They bailed the well fast and imperfectly, but they wanted to clear the worst of the chippings before beginning to smash away once again. When the chippings came up, Alan snatched them, cleaned them off against his leg, and dropped them into a basin of water. For him, this well wasn’t just about oil, it was about Tom and it was about Lottie – the past and the future. He and Reynolds hung over the bowl like it was the Delphic oracle. Air bubbles clung to the sides of the rock and rose to the surface.

‘Come on, come on.’

Reynolds put his work-hardened hands into the bowl and swept the bubbles from the side of the stones. They bobbled up to the surface, popped and vanished. And then an odd thing happened. Chippings that were definitely free of air bubbles began to grow new ones. Little pinpricks appeared on the side of the stones, then grew into pinheads, then bright round bubbles. Alan jogged the basin and the little bubbles winked their way to the surface. Both men leaped up, wild hope in their eyes.

‘Keep going!’

‘Load the fire there, will you!’

They lowered the Mother Hubbard cautiously to within a hundred and fifty feet of bottom, then released her. Far below ground there was a thundering smash, as the rocky surface was split open once again. The drillers drilled, but the boiler began to fail. The fuel had burned brightly, but for too short a time. Once again they were out of luck.

‘The tyres,’ said Alan. ‘Who the hell left the tyres on?’

They ran to the truck and stripped its tyres, its seats, the oil sump, the hydraulics cables, anything flammable they could find. The truck looked like a skeleton picked clean by a mountain lion. The boiler pressure climbed again. The Mother Hubbard rose and fell.

They worked until it was time to bail once more, but the boiler fires were sinking again. The winch tried to lift the Mother Hubbard one last time, but couldn’t do it. Once again the well was abandoning them to failure.

‘The derrick,’ said Alan. ‘Strip it.’

The wooden derrick was sturdily built of seasoned timber that had orginally been imported from the forested uplands around the Caspian. Alone of their decrepit equipment, the derrick itself had stood robust and strong. But not now. They began to tear away its timbers. They left the most obviously structural ones, but removed nearly everything else. Alan and Ahmed climbed high into the derrick until, to Reynolds’ viewpoint on the ground, they looked like a couple of insects – one dark, one pale gold. The two men smashed away at the crosspieces with their steel mallets, until the nails gave way and the wood fell tumbling to the ground. And every piece they removed, every beam and every plank, was hurled straight into the boiler.

The flames bit into the singing wood. Alan clambered down from the derrick, drew more water from the river and added it to the boiler. He had worked harder than any of the men present, but fatigue belonged in a different lifetime. The boiler fire bit into the water, and the pressure rose.

‘All right, let’s do it.’

Alan threw the winch into action. It had to raise the Mother Hubbard and all the cable three thousand feet. It wasn’t clear if the derrick would stand the strain. Everybody stood well back as the winch wound round. The derrick physically bowed under the effort. Nobody had ever seen the derrick move before, not by so much as an inch, but now there was a clear six-or eight-inch bend in the main supporting timbers.

‘Go on,’ said Reynolds.

‘Go on,’ said Alan.

‘Go on, you pig-headed old sod, go on,’ said Ahmed.

One thousand feet of cable wound in all right. Two thousand feet. It seemed as though the derrick was standing the strain. Then the winch began to make a groaning sound, as if it wanted to give up. The derrick seemed strong, but the winch wailed and groaned. There was nothing anyone could do but watch. The cable wound in slower and slower. The boiler was giving out ample pressure, but something in the cobbled-together chain of machinery was giving up. They could actually hear its death throes.

Two thousand eight hundred feet. Two thousand nine hundred. There were literally only a few feet left on the cable, the very top of the Mother Hubbard had just become visible emerging from the well, when it happened. The cable broke. The flying wire snapped and shot through the air in a lethal whiplash that luckily caught no one. The derrick snapped upright for a moment, then the winching gear buckled and fell. It smashed through one of the key remaining timbers, and the derrick itself collapsed down like the useless thing it had suddenly become. And meantime, while all this was happening, the Mother Hubbard, all one and a half tons of her, was zinging her way down through the well, ready to smash one last time into the stubborn rock.

In sudden shocking silence they heard the impact. It crashed up from the bottom of the well, muffled by its journey through half a mile of rocky tube.

Then nothing, just silence and the subsiding hiss of steam from the boiler.

Silence filled the valley.

And then a sound they’d never heard before. A deep boom from the centre of the earth. A boom followed by other rumbles, which merged gradually into one continuous thunder.

‘The boiler,’ screamed Alan. ‘Put out the fire.’

They hauled water like they were crazy. They slathered water over the boiler until it had fizzed out, cold and black and dead.

And then it came.

Oil.

Bounding out of the ground in a jet that hosed seventy feet up into the air. Thick, black, wet, stinking, sulphurous oil. The seven men were sprayed with it. Their hair, clothes and eyes were thick with it. The oil that had eluded them for so long was running in thick streams through the dust. It was filling the rocky hollow where the goats had been found dead that morning – the goats that had been poisoned by the release of lethal natural gases from the well.

The seven drillers danced like maniacs in the inky jet. They splashed each other with the magical substance. They rolled in it. They caught it in their hands and hurled it up into the air.

The date was 23 August 1921, the day of Alan’s twenty-eighth birthday.

Some strikes blow your hair off, others just puddle up from underground. But though everyone loves to see a gusher, the picture postcard pretties miss the point. A strike’s a strike, and all that matters is how many barrels and how many bucks.

They pushed the well quickly to just short of three thousand feet.

It was time to go carefully. They quit drilling and lined the hole with steel well-casing. They cemented the top of the wellhead to protect against groundwater inflow. They replaced their nine-inch drill bit with a tiddly six-inch bit for the final phase.

At this point, Tom let the Duster personally supervise every detail of the operation. They ran the the drill down at half normal speed. With every new length of pipe they added, they murmured prayers and touched wood and crossed fingers and muttered blessings.

Further up the hill, six wells had now passed three thousand feet. Each one of them had gone on to strike oil. Flow rates were good. Field pressure remained strong.

One morning, Boiler Bob came to work wearing a crucifix round his neck. No one mocked him. A couple of the men even let themselves touch it for luck.

It came just before dawn on 23 August – the day of Tom’s twenty-eighth birthday.

The land breeze had died down and the sea wind hadn’t yet risen but, all the same, the men were chilled and the steel pipes were cold to the touch. The Duster wanted to get drilling right away, but Tom kept a clearer head. The drill bit on the well floor was old and dull and it was time to lift it to replace it with a newly sharpened one. He gave the orders. The Duster agreed. The men threw the lifting gear into action and stowed the pipes as they came up. Three thousand feet is a hundred lengths of thirty-foot pipe, or a little more than thirty lots of the ninety-foot sections that they stowed inside the derrick. They counted down to zero, as the derrick filled with pipework and the Pacific Ocean began to glint with gold.