The Sons of Adam (22 page)

As he spoke, Alan took care to remain visibly calm and unflustered. He knew perfectly well that nothing panicked men like any sign of panic in their commander. He walked among his men, giving brief orders, supervising the packing of his geology equipment (‘rock-tools’ as he’d dubbed them in Persian). When the packing was underway to his satisfaction, he strolled casually to his saddlebags, drew out his army-issue revolver and buckled the holster to his belt.

They had been camped up on a scrubby little plateau overlooking a shallow lake. The lake provided water and enough thorn-bushes for cooking and a fire in the evening. They had been there two days and had met nobody. Even the shepherds who came up there in summer had driven their flocks down to lower ground for the winter. But then one of the men had come hurtling into camp, terrified. ‘The Qashqai are coming. Forty men. A war party.’

The other drivers had begun to saddle the horses ready for immediate flight, but Alan had roared them into silence. A raiding party of forty men could easily ride down a procession of eight tired baggage-ponies. Running away would only induce a chase that could easily lead to tragedy.

‘Coffee, Ahmed. Put the water on.’

‘Coffee,
aqa?
’ ‘
Aqa
’ was Persian for ‘sir’, and was how Alan was invariably addressed by his men. The poor boy was obviously bewildered by Alan’s sudden need for hot refreshment.

‘Coffee, Ahmed, coffee, coffee, coffee. Husain, why are you standing there? The fire is going out. Lend a hand.’

Baffled but obedient, the men began to boil water and the Persian adoration of coffee quickly overcame any remaining terror. By the time the hoofbeats of the approaching party were audible, the water had boiled and the coffee was brewing. Husain, the most intelligent and courageous of the horse-drivers, drew close to Alan.

‘I am ready,
aqa,
’ he said in a whisper.

Alan glanced down and noticed that Husain had brought the tin ammunition box out of its wrappings in one of the saddlebags. Husain had taken the party’s second revolver out and was proposing to lie next to Alan and fight it out.

‘Give me that bloody gun,’ snapped Alan in English, adding the same thing a little more gently in Persian. ‘We’re not going to fight.’

Husain looked crestfallen, but there was no time to debate. The mounted tribesmen broke like a tide over the brow of the hill and swept into and round Alan’s encampment in an instant. There weren’t anything like forty of them – fifteen would have been nearer the mark – but every one was armed with a rifle, and their horses were of a different class to Alan’s little team.

‘Salaam,’
said Alan, greeting the new arrivals with a polite but measured bow. ‘You see I have your coffee already prepared.’

The tribesmen milled around. They circled the little camp, laughing amongst themselves and talking. They spoke in a thick tribal dialect that Alan was unable to understand. Most of the men carried knives, either in their belts or their headgear, and none of them looked shy about using them. For all his exterior calmness, Alan realised that his life lay in the hands of these men, who knew no law beyond raiding, theft and blood-feud.

Alan spoke to Husain in an undertone. Pour them some coffee. Act as if we’ve invited them.’ Husain began to pour the coffee, swearing and punching Ali, the youngest in their team, for not having wiped the cups properly.

‘I have eight cups only. But I invite seven of you to drink with me.’

Alan sat down. He allowed his revolver to be completely visible to the tribesmen, but Alan himself ignored it completely. There was more movement, more laughter among the horseback men. Then at last, one of them trotted forwards, leaped off his horse – a magnificent beast – and tossed his reins to one of the others to look after. He was very tall and erect, with an untrimmed beard and the hooded eyes of a man who spent most of his time on saddleback in the high altitude sun.

‘I am Muhammad Ameri,’ he said with a bow. ‘These are my men.’

Ameri and a couple of his lieutenants sat and drank coffee. Alan called for
noql
– the sugar-coated almond sweets that the local Persians couldn’t get enough of – and the mood began to improve. Even so, all the time the other men remained on horseback, fingering their weapons, except for a half-dozen or so, who dismounted and began going systematically through Alan’s belongings. Alan’s men sat together and shot dirty looks at the newcomers. Once, when one of the tribesmen began going through the saddlebag containing Alan’s bedroll, shaving tackle and personal papers, the fourteen-year-old Ali leaped up and with a shrill yell began to attack the man, jumping on his back and beating him with his fists. The tribesman shook the boy to the ground and scuffed him away with a boot. There was a moment’s dangerous tension, then the tribesman laughed and moved on to a different bag.

The coffee was finished and Alan called for food. Usually, his little team led a fairly spartan life: living off rice and bread, varied by eggs, tomatoes, melons, goat’s cheese and almonds purchased from villagers that they passed. Luckily, though, this day they happened to have with them a couple of plump young chickens, ready for eating. Grumpily, because he’d been spoiling to play the hero, Husain ordered the others around and took charge of producing the best meal that their little camp could supply.

To begin with, Muhammad Ameri’s conversation was completely centred on a few things: rifles, horses, war, blood-feuds, the superiority of the Qashqai to anyone and everyone else. Alan nodded, agreed, and played his part of polite host to perfection. He still had no idea what Ameri intended, but he assumed that the major options under review were armed robbery on the one hand, and armed robbery with violence on the other.

The chicken and rice arrived, seasoned with whatever sultanas, yoghurt, and saffron was available. The tribesmen ate greedily, leaving a ring of rice around their plates, in the true polite Persian fashion. Eventually Ameri’s curiosity grew too great.

‘Farangi?’
he asked.

Strictly speaking, the word meant French, but to Persians it had come to mean anyone from Europe. Alan nodded. ‘I’m English,’ he explained.

‘Ah yes …’ Ameri’s attention had been caught by Alan’s surveying equipment, which hadn’t been fully packed away. ‘English … You are building a railway?’

Alan laughed. It was strange the associations that his nationality brought up. ‘No.’

‘A road?’

‘No.’

Ameri paused, curiosity and suspicion competing in his face. ‘You are making maps? You are a tax collector?’

‘No, no, no. None of those things.’

Ameri paused, picking bits of chicken from his teeth and spitting them onto the embers of the fire. ‘You have come to buy carpets,’ he pronounced finally, sure of having found the right answer at last.

‘No. Oil. I’m looking for oil.’

Ameri nodded gravely, then turned to his lieutenants and the three of them began speaking very rapidly amongst themselves, apparently trying to work out what Alan meant and whether he was telling the truth. Eventually, Ameri called over to one of his men to bring something. The man dug round in a saddlebag and came over with a very old kerosene lamp (stamped ‘Armitage & Co Ltd, Leeds’ on its rusted side). The fuel vase was empty, but the smell remained.

‘Oil?’ Ameri said. ‘Oil for lamps?’

‘Yes. You’ve heard of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, working up at Masjid-i-Suleiman and Abadan?’

Ameri nodded, but Alan suspected that the nod concealed almost total ignorance.

‘I think there may be oil in the Zagros and I’m here to look for it. If I find it, it will make everyone here rich, very rich indeed.’

‘You have found it yet?’

‘No.’

‘But you have found some … some signs of oil, no?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

Alan opened his hands in the expressive Persian gesture that signified nothing. ‘Nothing at all.’

And he spoke the truth. Since leaving England and Lottie, Alan had spent months in the Zagros, traversing the high mountains and deep valleys, building an unrivalled picture of the geology of the area. It was a monumental work that had many months yet to run. But so far, for all his labour, he’d found nothing – not even a clue that there might be something. So far, all his work had simply proved that he was wasting his time.

Another long conversation followed amongst the tribesmen.

Alan was growing used enough to their thick dialect to understand a little even when they spoke fast. It was clear that they had heard rumours of the great industrial enterprise taking shape to the north, but that all of them had tended to dismiss the rumour as fantasy. Then the voices sank. The three Qashqai leaders were discussing something and were careful to exclude Alan from their deliberations. Bizarrely, Alan was suddenly reminded of Egham Dunlop, and the way he too had sized up Alan’s money, power and prospects. He felt a desperate longing to be with Lottie again, and a moment of violent loneliness. First Tom, then Lottie …

At last, the tribesmen came to a conclusion. Ameri rose. He was tall and held himself very upright. ‘Come.’

It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order.

When God built America, He took special care of her. He threaded her with veins of coal. He seeded her with iron. He gave her deepwater ports and navigable rivers and fertile farmland and forests for lumber. He even showered nuggets of gold into her streams and brooks.

But best of all, He gave her oil.

Sometimes He let the oil seep right out, as though the earth was so full that something had to give. Other times He played coy. He hid the oil in places that no one would think to look for it, except that this was America, and, when there was a chance of making money, people would look pretty much anywhere and look pretty hard, at that.

He buried oil in California, oil in Texas, oil in Pennsylvania. He buried the stuff – huge great lakes of it – beneath the icy wastes of frozen Alaska.

But this is America. And when God sets out to bless a country, His gifts are prodigal. So even less well-favoured states got the treatment. He put oil in Oklahoma. Oil in Louisiana. Oil in Kansas. Oil in Arkansas. Oil in Indiana. Oil in Kentucky.

And oil in Wyoming.

Oil aplenty in Wyoming.

Somewhere up the line, a long whistle moaned through the empty landscape. The line of freight cars juddered and clattered to a halt. Metal clacked against metal. In an empty boxcar at the rear of the train, a badly stowed cotton bale slid from its stack and thumped down on a crumpled-looking shape beneath.

The shape swore and rubbed its head.

Since jumping on his first freight train in New York, Tom had been jolted, thumped, bumped and tossed across no fewer than nine American states, until he felt as if the map of continental America was printed in bruises across his body. On top of the physical battering, the heat of an American summer had turned the steel boxcar into a roasting oven, Tom had run out of water in Iowa and, worse still, he’d run out of cigarettes on the wrong side of Nebraska.

He rubbed a dry tongue over a dry mouth and massaged his scalp with dusty fingers. Then, with his morning cleaning rituals as complete as possible given the circumstances, he went to the side of the gloomy car and swung open the heavy door. Brilliant Wyoming light flooded in. Tom sat on the side of the truck, legs swinging down over the gleaming wheels. He wanted to jump down and stretch his legs before the train restarted, but he hadn’t had any trouble from the train’s brakeman so far and he didn’t want any now.