The Doomed Oasis (19 page)

“I'm afraid we have to have authority to fly to Saraifa, Sir Philip.”

“Since when?”

Otto hesitated. “I don't know exactly. Since the trouble there, I guess. It was just after you left; a border clash between Saraifa and Hadd. They had to send the Trucial Oman Scouts in, and since then nobody has been allowed to go to Saraifa.”

Gorde gave a little sigh. “Let's not argue about it, Otto. I intend to have a quick look at these locations. Now then, how do we go about it without some little clerk reporting my movements to the PRPG, eh?”

Otto thought for a moment. “I think the best thing would be to say we're doing a recce of certain areas, taking a look at a seismological outfit we've got operating at the foot of the Jebel, possibly landing at Ras al Khaima if we've time, otherwise returning here. If we make it vague like that, I guess it'll be all right. That is, so long as you don't want to land at Saraifa.”

“I don't know what I want to do,” Gorde grumbled. “Haven't had time to think about it yet.” He poked around in my briefcase until he found a sheet of plain paper. “Communications here still functions for civilian messages, doesn't it?” And when the other nodded, he pulled a gold pencil from his pocket and began to write. I watched him as he signed his name and read it through. I was more curious than angry now; he'd taken matters out of my hands, and for the moment my only concern was to get on this flight.

“Have Communications send that off right away.” He held out the message. “Then check your fuel. Oh, and Otto,” he added as the pilot was leaving. “We'll be flying on to Bahrain tonight.” The door closed and he turned to me. “I suppose you think I owe you an apology, hm?” He handed me back my briefcase. “Well, maybe I do. But I spent a lot of my time in Saraifa, and anyway I'm an oilman. We've no built-in moral code like you boys when it comes to things like locations.” He folded the foolscap sheet and put it back in its envelope and sat there tapping it against his thumbnail, lost in thought. “It's just possible, I suppose.…” He said it softly, speaking to himself.

“That Colonel Whitaker's drilling in one of these locations?”

But he shook his head. “In that area? He wouldn't be such a fool.” Silence again, and the rhythmic tapping of that envelope. “However …” The small, bloodshot eyes peered at me curiously, and then he began to chuckle. “A provincial lawyer—and it's just possible you might have got hold of the thing the Company has been searching the Gulf for during almost thirty years.” The rasp of that chuckle seemed to threaten to choke him. “You and Charles Whitaker. God Almighty!” he gasped. “And that boy … he'd never have dared operate on that border on his own.”

“You think they were together, then?”

“How the hell do I know?” He handed me the envelope. “I don't know where Charles is drilling any more than you do. I'm not even certain he is drilling. It's just rumours.” He reached for his stick and dragged himself to his feet. “But I mean to find out,” he said. “If Charles is drilling on these locations …” He let it go at that, and since he seemed to take it for granted that I was going with him, I stuffed the envelope into my pocket, picked up my briefcase, and followed him to the door. As he pulled it open, he said to me over his shoulder: “Prove Whitaker's theory correct, and on that border, and you'll be in politics so deep, my friend, that you'll wish you'd never been born. But I can't believe it,” he added, limping out into the bright sunshine. “Pig-headed, proud, revengeful … He still couldn't be such a bloody fool.” And he stumped off across the courtyard, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

We took off ten minutes later, and by then I'd had an opportunity to glance at the contents of that envelope. There were several foolscap sheets headed: REPORT OF SURVEYS CARRIED OUT ON SARAIFA TERRITORY; and it was subheaded:
Basis on which an Immediate Program of Test Drilling is Recommended at Points A, B, C, & D
. Pinned to it were four sheets of graph paper covered with figures and diagrams. There was also a sketch map giving his survey points, a whole series of them, each with the position pinpointed in latitude and longitude. A number of Arab names were given, but none that I could recall from my brief examination of the map in Erkhard's office. Points A, B, C, and D were marked in red ink; they were very close to each other, in a little huddle at the eastern end of the line of his survey. There was no covering letter. Just the report and the sketch map.

I read the report through carefully as we flew south into the desert, It was typewritten, highly technical—quite beyond my comprehension. For this reason I do not intend to give the details. But there were several references to the “Whitaker Theory,” and right at the beginning there was a paragraph that read:
It should not be imagined that I stumbled on this by accident. If anything comes of it, the credit must go to Henry Farr. He surveyed the area in the very early days of the war. The Saraifa Concession was fairly new then and Farr's outfit was the only survey team in the area. Moreover, he made his report at a time of crisis in the Middle East; it was pigeonholed away in the Company's headquarters and shortly afterwards he died fighting in Abyssinia. I was fortunate enough to come upon this report when searching old surveys for anything that had a bearing on Saraifa
.…

I leaned back in my seat, thinking about the war and how that old report had got lost in the files. Colonel Whitaker had fought in Eritrea. The same area. I wondered whether he and Farr had ever met. I was thinking about that when Gorde leaned across to me. “Well?” he said. “What are you going to do about that report when you get back to Bahrain?” He was smiling, tight-lipped. “The boy's like his father,” he grunted. “A dreamer. The same dream, too.”

“The dreams of youth sometimes come true,” I said. I was remembering how Sue had talked of him.

His eyes clouded and he looked away from me, staring out of his window towards the mountains. “Ah, yes, the dreams of youth.” He gave a little sigh. “But the boy's dead and Charles isn't a young man any more.”

“And what about Farr?” I asked.

He shrugged. “He's dead, too.”

“You don't think they could be right?”

“The Whitaker Theory?” He gave a snort. “Charles had a nose for oil, a sort of instinct for it, like Holmes. But he didn't know a damn thing about geology. That nose of his cost the Company a lot of money. We struck oil, but never in large enough quantities. I should know,” he almost snarled. “I backed him, and it cost me my job out here. And I loved it,” he added quietly. “I loved this country. Look at it!”

He leaned across, pointing to the desert that lay below the wing-tip, a corrugated dune sea stretching to the mountains that lay all along the horizon. “Clean and hard and cruel. I had twenty years of it. I know it better than I know my own country, and it calls to me the way the sea calls to a sailor—and I'm stuck in a damned office in London; I haven't been out here for almost four years.” And he relapsed into silence, staring out of his window.

But a moment later he touched my arm and pointed downward. A great sweep of dunes thrust eastward, narrowing like a finger till the tip of the yellow sand touched the red rock wall of the mountains. Right below us a black line wound like a thread across the dunes—a camel caravan going south and leaving a faded snail-like smudge behind it in the sand. “The Ramlah Anej,” he said in my ear. “We're crossing the eastern edge of the Rub al Khali.” And he added with a sort of boyish delight: “I'm one of the very few men who've crossed the Empty Quarter by camel. Charles and I did it together. We said we were looking for oil, but that was just an excuse.” He was smiling and his eyes were alight with the memory of it, so that through age and illness I got a glimpse of the young man he'd once been.

After that he fell silent and left me alone with my thoughts as the aircraft roared steadily south, the mountains always away to the left, always marching with us, a moon-mad landscape of volcanic peaks, sometimes near, sometimes receding to the lip of the earth's surface. And below us the sun marked the desert floor with the imprint of our plane, a minute shadow dogging our course.

It was just after four when the navigator came aft and woke Gorde, who had fallen asleep with the curtain drawn across his window and his battered hat tipped to shade his eyes. “Jebel al-Akhbar coming up now, sir. Otto wants to know whether you'd like to fly over Hadd or make a detour.”

“May as well have a look at the Emir's hideout,” Gorde murmured, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Long time since I last saw it.” He got to his feet and motioned me to follow him.

The view from the flight deck was a blinding glare made bearable only by the green shade above the pilot's head. All away to the right of us was sand as far as the eye could strain, a petrified sea corrugated by the action of the wind. But from the left, mountains were closing in, bare, black, lava-ash mountains marked by patches of a livid, chemical green. They swept round ahead of us in a long curve, terminating abruptly at the sand sea's edge in a bold headland topped by a pinnacle of bare rock. “Jebel al-Akhbar,” Gorde said, nodding towards it over the pilot's head. “There's an old stone fort on the top of it, and the town of Hadd is right underneath. Remarkable place. There's a saying amongst the Arabs of this part: ‘Who holds al-Akhbar holds Hadd.' You'll see in a minute.”

Otto was pushing the control column forward, and as we lost height the headland began to come up fast. “See the fort?” Gorde's hand gripped my arm. “I got a gazelle there once. The Emir invited us hunting and a seluki bitch named Adilla cornered it for me right under the walls there. My first visit to Saraifa,” he added. “The time we signed the original concession.”

I could see the fort clearly now, a biggish place, crumbling into ruin, with an outer ring of mud-and-rock walls and in the centre a single watchtower perched high on a pinnacle of rock. We skimmed it with about a hundred feet to spare, and on the farther side the hill dropped sheer to a valley shaped like a crescent moon and half ringed with mountains.

The valley floor was flat, a patchwork quilt of cultivation; date-palms, grey with dust, stood thick as Indian corn in mud-walled enclosures, and there were fields of millet green with new growth. In the further reaches of the valley, where cultivation dwindled into grey, volcanic ash, a solitary sand-devil swirled a spiral of dust high into the air.

“Hadd.” Gorde stabbed downward with his thumb, and, peering over his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of a mud town that seemed built into the rock below the fort. Right below us a
mêlée
of men and goats and camels stood transfixed beside a well. Mud walls towered above them, and, looking back, I saw the town of Hadd climbing into its rocky cleft, with a great fortified palace built on many levels facing towards the desert. A green flag fluttered from a flagpole. “Always reminds me of the Hadhramaut,” Gorde shouted in my ear. “They build like that in the Wadi Duan. Well-sited, isn't it?” He might have been a soldier, his interest was so professional.

Otto half turned in his seat. “I'm setting course now for the position given in the search report, that okay?” And when Gorde nodded he banked the plane so that I had a last glimpse of the Wadi Hadd al-Akhbar, a little oasis of green set against a nightmare backdrop of volcanic rock. And then it was gone and the arid, lifeless desert stretched out ahead of us.

Gorde produced the slip of paper he'd used for making notes and handed it to the navigator. “Those are the fixes for the Saraifa-Hadd border locations. Plot them now. We'll be flying over them as soon as we've had a look at the spot where he abandoned his truck.”

We flew on in silence then, and gradually the gravel plain gave place to sand, the dunes getting higher, their shadows longer, until they were towering crescent-shaped downlands stretching into infinity. The navigator passed Otto an alteration of course and the shadow of the plane came ahead of us, growing imperceptibly bigger, as we lost height.

“Have we crossed the border?”

The navigator nodded. “Just crossing it now.”

Gorde's hand gripped my elbow. “That's the trouble with this damned country,” he said. “The borders are nothing but map references. Nobody cared so long as it was just a waste of desert sand. But you try explaining map references to an Arab sheikh once he's dazzled by the prospect of oil.”

The navigator leaned across and made a circling movement with his hand. Otto tipped the plane over on the port wing-tip and we searched the glaring dunes below us. We circled like that, slowly, for several minutes, and then suddenly we straightened out, swooping down towards the humped back of a dune, and there, halfway up it, was the truck, almost obliterated by sand. I never saw such a desperately lonely-looking object in my life, a piece of dead machinery lying there like a wrecked boat in the midst of an ocean of sand.

We slid down on to it like a hawk stooping to its prey. It was a big closed-in truck, old and battered-looking and patched with rust. There were no markings on it, and as it rushed away beneath us Gorde echoed my own thoughts. “What was the fool doing, driving that truck alone into these dunes?” he demanded. “Do you know?” He was glaring at me, and when I shook my head, he grunted as though he didn't believe me. “A good twenty miles west of the survey locations,” he growled. “He must have had some reason.”

Otto banked steeply so that the truck was there, just beyond the port wing for us to stare at. But looking at it couldn't explain its presence on the slope of that dune, and in the end Gorde gave instructions for us to proceed to the locations David had surveyed and motioned me to follow him back into the relative quiet of the passenger cabin.

“Well,” he said, dropping into his seat, “what do you make of it, eh?” But I could see he didn't expect an answer. He was slumped in his seat, an old man lost in thought. “Doesn't make sense, does it?” he grumbled. “The boy dead somewhere down there below us and his father not caring a damn and busy drilling a well …” He turned to me. “How did they get on, those two, do you know? What were their relations just prior to the boy's death?” And when I didn't say anything, he snapped: “Come on, man. You must know something. You've come all the way out from England; you wouldn't have done that unless you knew a little more than you've told me.” He stared at me angrily. “Have you seen his sister?”