Assignment Black Gold (5 page)

“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.”