The Sons of Adam (24 page)

‘My men would never steal from their brother,’ said Ameri. ‘I am sure you are mistaken.’ He had dismissed the matter and changed the subject.

The next morning, all the missing items that Alan had requested back were laid out, sparkling clean, on a white headcloth in the sun. Ameri said nothing about the mysterious reappearance and Alan knew better than to ask. He sent his men down the valley to buy food and to buy extra blankets for the onset of the cold season. It was already chilly at nights and true winter would be freezing and bitter.

Then the real geological work began: mapping the extent and depth of the oil seam, taking cores and samples, mapping the curve of the valley, the structure of the exposed strata, exploring the valleys to either side. It was long, exhausting work, carried out alone under difficult and worsening conditions. An early fall of snow caused the men to grow sullen and resentful. A bad fall down a mountainside left Alan completely unhurt, but caused one of his precious brass theodolites to be smashed to pieces. One of the horses slipped during a river crossing, dunking one of Alan’s cameras in the freezing water and ruining it.

By night, Alan worked on his maps and geological studies by the light of coarse cotton wicks burning dingily in mutton fat. When he was done on his maps, he wrote long letters to Lottie, telling her everything about his explorations, confiding his uncertainties and doubts, speaking of his loneliness and longing. She was like a physical presence in the tent. Sometimes, he could almost swear he could smell her scent: floral, modern, unutterably feminine. When morning came, he filed his maps and studies in watertight canisters and put his letters in an inner pocket of his own personal saddlebag. When he got back to Tehran, he would take out all the letters – hundreds of pages of them in total – and burn them.

Lottie was a free woman now. He would not allow his – love for her to ruin her life. It might very easily ruin his, but that was a different matter.

It was his life to ruin.

Jonah ‘Kerosene’ Matthews was back to work within three days, but Tom’s luck stayed with him and the same day that Matthews came back, a second rigger fell sick with a poisoned abscess in his groin. Tom was moved up to the regular rigger’s wage of three bucks fifty the day, and he quickly settled into an important part of Bard’s little team.

Tom learned quickly. He learned how the boiler drove the ‘kelly’, the rotating square shaft that was screwed to the top of the drill pipe and was responsible for making the drill bit turn four hundred feet. Tom learned how to add new sections of drill pipe to the pipe already underground, and how to work the massive lifting blocks that raised and lowered the pipe. He learned how to fish up the bit and replace it, stacking all fourteen lengths of thirty-foot pipe upright in the derrick as they emerged from the hole. He learned the system for pumping liquid mud down into the drill hole to bring up the stone chippings as the drill worked away. In short, he learned to ‘make hole’, to drill, to search for oil.

For the first time in many years, Tom was happy.

Happy, but not content.

Admittedly, his fortune was now increasing by the day, instead of shrinking. He was living in a shanty-built boarding house for seventy cents a night, evening meal included. He was learning the trade at the hands of men who really knew it. And yet …

Lyman Bard, the team leader, was a drill-for-hire, working for a bunch of Ohio-based investors. Nine miles and two valleys away, in Nine Snake Creek, an oil strike had been made earlier in the year. The land around that strike was now producing nearly fifteen hundred barrels a day and the whole area was in a frenzy of exploration. It was an exciting place to be, but, as far as Tom was concerned, the main point was this. He was a lowly rigger working for a man who worked for some guys who owned some drilling rights which might – just might – turn out to be worth something.

It wasn’t enough.

One Friday evening, Tom trudged back to the boarding house alongside Lyman Bard, the rest of the team lagging a couple of hundred yards behind.

‘Are we going to make a strike, you reckon?’ asked Tom, whose language was already fast Americanising.

‘Couldn’t say.’

‘But you must have a gut feel for it. You’ve been in the game for long enough.’

Bard wrinkled his nose and spat. ‘There’s oil around here, I’d say. Nine Snake Creek ain’t gonna be the only place with oil. I’d say our chances were as good as anyone’s.’

‘And what happens if you strike?’

Bard shrugged. ‘We strike.’

‘But what do you get out of it? What difference does it make to you?’

‘I get two per cent of anything we bring out the ground.’

‘Two per cent?’

‘There are plenty of guys offer nothing.’

‘Say you make a strike of two hundred barrels a day. That’s around four bucks in your pocket if prices are strong. Two bucks if they’re not.’

‘That’s why I get paid by the day, strike or no strike.’

‘You never wanted to drill for yourself?’

As they were speaking, a swollen orange sun crept down behind the hump-backed mountains. The grassy hills faded from green to blue to purple as the light left them. Down in the boarding house, kerosene lamps began to sparkle – the valley was far too remote for electricity.

‘Who said I haven’t?’

‘You did?’

Bard nodded and told Tom the story that, novice as he was, he’d already heard a dozen different times from a dozen different oilmen. Bard had finished a job, borrowed a rig, spent money to buy drilling rights, hired crewmen with beer money and promises. He’d drilled. Ran down three thousand feet through difficult ground. His money gave out. His derrick was needed elsewhere. He sold up, moved out, moved on. Eighteen months later, a team from one of the big oil companies reopened his well, went down another nine hundred feet, and struck oil.

‘There’s no money in drilling, I figure,’ said Bard. ‘Too many folks chasing too little oil. Be lucky if the oil don’t give out on us sometime soon. Youngster like you oughta be in autos or radio. Something with a future.’

Tom shook his head. He didn’t bother saying it, but he didn’t take Bard’s advice seriously. Bard didn’t take his own advice seriously. The man was an oil addict. Even though he was working for someone else, he drilled like he had till the end of the week to strike oil or else lose his life. While on the job, he was never still. The only time he slowed down was when the rotating table was turning properly, the drill bit was sounding right, the boiler was giving enough pressure, and the derrick contained a section of thirty-foot pipe in place and ready to screw on to the drill as it descended.

‘No oil. No hooch,’ said Bard. ‘That’ll be one hell of a dry country.’

Tom glanced sideways. Bard was referring to the Eighteenth Amendment – the prohibition of alcohol – which had sailed through Congress and Senate almost undebated, and was on its way to being ratified by virtually every single state in the union. By January of next year, 1920, the manufacture and sale of alcohol would become an offence against not merely the law of the land, but the very constitution itself.

They were close to the boarding house now. The food that was served was plentiful but atrocious. The only thing that saved the place from being torn down in a riot was the huge quantities of beer available at absurdly low prices. The loud voices of men and beer were already mixing with the wind off the plains. Tom indicated the shapes of men moving in the twilight ahead of them.

‘You reckon they’ll stop drinking just because Uncle Sam tells ’em to?’

Bard shrugged. His interest in any question not directly related to oil was fairly limited. ‘S’pose they’ll have to go thirsty.’

‘That’s a lot of thirst,’ said Tom.

Bard made some kind of answer and moved on into the boarding house, aiming to get cleaned up before the dinner bell rang. Tom was normally quick to the washtap himself, but on this occasion he stood back, feeling the movement of the night air on his face, looking at the stars beginning to speckle the violet sky.

Buying, crewing and running an oil rig cost around twenty-five thousand dollars. Men like Bard, who drilled on the cheap, were like poor men trying to stay in a poker game with a ten-dollar ante. Tom wouldn’t make that mistake. He wouldn’t drill until he was ready. He wouldn’t drill until he had enough cash. He’d always assumed that he’d make his money – somehow or other – from oil, but maybe it didn’t have to be like that. Maybe there were other ways. Not safe ones necessarily, but fast ones, good ones.

Tom nodded to himself. He wanted fast, he didn’t need safe. His pulse quickened. He began to run.

Sir Adam looked at his son.

All across England, a generation of men looked older than they were. War had driven lines deep into youthful faces. The eyes of twenty-year-olds held expressions that would have been disturbing in men twice their age. And Alan? He was twenty-six years old. What with war and his hardships in Persia, Alan could easily have passed for thirty-five or even more. His face was so deeply bronzed from Persian sun and high altitudes that it seemed hard to believe he had ever been fair-skinned as a boy. His hair, meantime, had become so deeply bleached that it seemed almost white, his eyebrows all but invisible.

But there was something else in his face too. Something that Sir Adam understood but couldn’t very well mention. Alan was still painfully in love with Lottie. Sir Adam gazed a little too long and hurriedly turned back to the papers. The maps were spread out on the full-size billiard table in the billiard room at Whitcombe House. Although it was broad daylight outside and the heavy brocade curtains were thrust back away from the windows, the electric lights above the table glowed at full strength to give the maps as much illumination as possible.

‘These are quite astonishing. Extraordinary.’

Alan nodded. He’d stayed in the Zagros – measuring, surveying, photographing, examining – until the job was done. Valley after valley had fallen beneath Alan’s rock-hammer and sample bag. He knew the geology of the northern Zagros better than any man in history. The table was littered with fossil, rock and soil samples.

Sir Adam riffled through the maps, using lumps of rock to keep them flat. His own command of geology was much less good than Alan’s, but he still knew enough to identify the sites of greatest interest – and enough to know when there was virtually no hope of oil at all. Most of the maps fell into the latter category and Sir Adam’s anxiety increased with each new sheet he examined. His expression must have revealed his concern.

‘We always knew it was going to be difficult,’ said Alan. ‘I never thought we’d find oceans of the stuff.’

‘Mmm,’ Sir Adam agreed. He pulled one of the maps to the surface. There were some geological formations of the right kind of age, and some structures that could possibly indicate an oil reservoir underneath. ‘This dome shape here. An anticline, possibly?’

An anticline is an arch-shaped structure buried deep beneath the ground. If the curve of the arch is made of a good impermeable rock and if the strata beneath contain oil, then an anticline is the perfect place for oil to collect – and the dream of every oilman.

‘Possibly, Father. Most likely not.’ Alan pointed out a few indications on the map that suggested the anticline was empty of oil now, even if it had ever held any.

‘But worth a try, perhaps.’

‘Perhaps. But look at this.’

Alan brought out the one map he’d held back. This was a map of Ameri’s valley, and the neighbouring valleys to east and west. A thin red cross – the only red mark on any of the maps – was labelled in Alan’s neat handwriting: ‘Oil seepage!’ Sir Adam studied the map with mounting interest.

‘You actually found oil?’

‘I found enough to light a kerosene lamp for about twenty-five seconds. Not even a teaspoonful.’

‘But still … oil.’

‘Yes, oil. It smelled good. Not too much sulphur. Not much tar. If there is oil there, it’ll be a beautiful one. Light, sweet-smelling, easy to refine.’

Sir Adam stared back at the map. He was looking for the structures that might indicate some hope: an anticline, a salt dome, a ‘nose’ or monocline. There was nothing there. ‘In America, I understand, they have places where they mine oil. They literally dig shafts into the hillside and let the oil drain out. Even if there’s no chance of conventional drilling, you’ve found your hillside here. Perhaps a different approach …’

‘Father, they get twenty barrels a day from those mines. Thirty if they’re lucky. That’s all very well when the market’s on your doorstep, but this oil’s got to be carried all the way to England. If we don’t strike it big, there’s no point in striking it at all. But look at the map. Look back at the map. You’re missing something.’

Sir Adam studied the map. He couldn’t for the life of him see what his son was referring to.

‘Don’t you see it, Father? The fault line?’

A fault was another classic way in which oil could be trapped underground. If two strata are broken and overlap one another, forming a kind of roof, then oil could sometimes be found in the break.

‘A fault line? There’s obviously some change in geological contour east and west, but I don’t see –’