The Sons of Adam (41 page)

They reached the last ninety-foot section. The first thirty feet came up clean, but the last sixty were slathered in an oily black liquid.

Tom looked at it incredulously. He was still cold and his brain was working slowly. His first thought was that they had hit some kind of problem. The pipe shouldn’t look black, it should be covered in the mud they used to lubricate the bit. And then he saw the faces of the team. Like him, they couldn’t take it in. But the evidence was unmistakable. Standing in the bottom of their well, they had sixty feet of oil.

One by one, their faces changed to certainty, as though something holy had just happened before their eyes.

They’d done it.

The well had struck. They only needed to go a little deeper and the pressure would be sufficient to pump the oil to the surface. For just a second or two, the sacred silence persisted – and then shattered.

‘Oil! We got oil! We –’

‘Sweet Jesus, we hit it! I knew –’

A couple of the men began to scream and shout, but the Duster was savage.

‘We ain’t got nothing to yell about,’ he shouted. ‘If you ain’t got oil at the wellhead, you ain’t got squat. I seen wells where they got oil at the bottom and ain’t never seen nothing but coyote shit up top. I seen wells –’

He fought his team to order and they obeyed. Tom was left to himself.

For all Duster’s yelling, Tom knew he had a producer.

Oil. He had oil. Five years after being taken prisoner by the Germans, two years since landing in America as an impoverished cattle hand, he’d actually made the strike that he’d dreamed of so long. The world changed, the past was erased as he drank in the moment. The entire earth became shinier, gentler, more colourful.

Tom was in love with California, in love with America, at peace with every living thing.

After so long, he was a man beginning to live.

Nobody forgets the day they strike oil and for Alan there were two things in particular that would make the moment live for ever.

The first was Tom.

He and Tom had always dreamed of this moment – ‘kings of the world’, to use Knox D’Arcy’s phrase. With Tom dead, Alan had known his destiny lay in Persia. A promise made had become a promise fulfilled. Alan was satisfied, but also a little empty. A man can’t live for ever in the past he shared with a man now dead, and Alan had his future to think about.

And the future was uncertain. Certainly he was on the road to wealth, possibly even very great wealth. He had been unable to marry Lottie because of his poverty. Now that he was rich … what?

Perhaps she had forgotten him, or was in love with someone else. Perhaps, even, worst of all, but perfectly likely, she wasn’t just in love with someone else, she was engaged or even married. Perhaps he would return to England to find her happy, healthy, pleased to see him – and already surrounded by a husband, a home, even her first child …

Alan literally didn’t know what to do with the infinite possibilities. Should he be pleased to be returning to England and Lottie? Or should he be terrified? In truth, he was both. That night, as he snatched a couple of hours’ sleep (three-quarters frozen because everything soft, warm and comfortable had joined the final cataclysmic blaze), he was both happy and anxious, eager and frightened, lovesick and broken-hearted.

With excruciating care, Tom’s men deepened the hole, but superstition had gone clean out of the window.

‘You see the sign in the barbershop up the hill?’ said Boiler Bob. ‘You see it? Guy’s got a gusher in his backyard. He locks up shop, hangs a sign on his door, says “Cadillac Salesmen, Please find me at home.” That’s gonna be me, huh? “Cadillac salesmen, come call on me at home!”’

‘Have a whole fleet of damn Cadillacs!’

‘I’m gonna get my own wildcat rig, if we do good here. Go up coast a little. I got a friend, a trendologist, he’s got the strikes all mapped out. Drilling with him wouldn’t be like wildcatting at all. Not that we’d ever hit nothing like this, though.’

Slowly they punched deeper and deeper. They ran down a perforated casing, which would protect the bottom of the hole from cave-in, but which would let the sweet God-sent oil flow into the well. Then, delicate as anything, they pushed a little deeper.

There was a physical change in the pipe. A low rushing became audible.

‘
We got OIL
!’ screamed the Duster. This wasn’t just a strike, it was a strike that he owned a piece of.

And then it came: oil bursting up from the ground, running over their shoes, covering the sleeping Pipsqueak in a tide of black. The world seemed better and better. Somebody produced a huge bottle of moonshine, and they drank whiskey in huge delighted mouthfuls as they wrestled to get the wellhead into place. Tom needed to move out of the way, but more to the point, he wanted to enjoy the moment alone.

‘Hey, girl, hey, Pipsqueak.’

He carried his bedraggled dog a few feet from their beloved well. She licked him with long salty licks, as he rubbed the pink inside of her ears.

‘Maybe it’s all been worth it, eh, old girl? Even rough stories can have a happy ending.’

If licking was agreeing, then the Squeaker agreed. He stroked her. For some reason, at that moment, Whitcombe House sprang forcefully into his mind. He remembered Sir Adam and Pamela and Alan as though he had seen them yesterday. For a second, no longer, the thought of them brought nothing but warmth, even love – but the moment passed. He thought about his next steps. He had twenty-seven acres. He could get at least two dozen rigs on it, even more in time. Higher up the hill there were places where the legs of the derricks interlaced on the ground, but Tom didn’t even have to squash ’em up close. He had twenty-seven acres of the most valuable land in America.

The crew got the wellhead in place, fixing it with massive bolts set into the cement. The wellhead was made fast. They threw a valve. The flow of oil out onto the ground was turned off. All that was left was to hook the well up to a pipeline and start to count the money. Duster let the crew begin to celebrate, but Tom was in a land of his own.

He climbed ninety feet up the steel ladder that ran up the outside of the derrick. He hung out as far as he could to let the oil-perfumed air run through his hair.

He was happy. Maybe for the very first time since being taken prisoner in 1916, he was truly happy. The ghosts of his past, the betrayals, the hardship and dangers – everything was rubbed out by this one huge, magnificent success.

He turned his head down to survey his acreage. Pipsqueak had caught the prevailing mood and was hurtling round the field in a blur of dirty white. Tom smiled. He already knew where to plant the wells that would follow this. He knew where to run the pipeline, how to sell the oil, how to raise new capital.

And that was when he saw it. His destiny. His demon. A pasty-looking man in a shiny suit and thin-soled city shoes running across the dirt acres, dodging drill pipes and slush pits and sucker rods and well-casings. He looked like nothing at all. He looked like a cheap city suit a thousand miles out of place. But it wasn’t how he looked, it was what he was saying. And what he was saying was something Tom would never live to forget.

‘What the hell are you boys doing here on
my
land?’

When oil decides to spout, it
spouts.
And when the men who tried to make it happen then go and try to stop it – well, sometimes you’d wonder which was the harder job.

For nineteen days, the oil had burst unstoppably forth.

To begin with, Alan and his men had tried to cap the wellhead, to block it with rocks or chains or bits ripped from their defunct drilling equipment. They’d tried, but the effort had been useless. The oil shot from the ground so fast that nothing short of a landslip would have covered the hole.

Quickly, then, they’d turned their efforts to their next task: building a reservoir big enough to hold the oil. The dozen exhausted men made little progress, though they worked all through the night and into the next day. Relief only came when some of their former comrades, fearing the worst, had come back to look for signs of the truck and found an oil well instead. With astonishing rapidity, the valley had filled with Qashqai tribesmen: some of them the men who had worked alongside them the year before, others rounded up by Muhammad Ameri, who had heard the news, and ridden in to survey ‘his’ well. At this stage, no one worked for pay. They worked because the valley was filling with oil, and everyone knew that unbelievable riches lay in store for the people who could catch it.

For nearly three weeks they’d laboured. Using bits of truck panel for shovels, even their bare hands, they’d diverted the course of the river, and set out to build a huge dam across the valley for the oil. All this time, they barely slept. They worked like donkeys. They ate nothing but boiled rice, which they cooked in cauldrons five miles up the valley and brought down stone cold, for fear of the spark that could blow the whole valley higher than heaven.

Then they were done. The flood of oil hit the dam and began to fill the reservoir. There were a few minor leaks, but nothing that couldn’t easily be repaired.

And meanwhile, stores began to flow up from Shiraz, everything on credit, nothing too hard to find for the suddenly rich
Farangi.
Eventually the oil-smeared labourers even managed to cap the wellhead. They brought a truck up the valley, filled it with rocks and cement, dragged it by hand to the wellhead, then toppled it over. The oil still came out, but the jet was no longer the force it had been. After another three days, and another three hundred sacks of cement, the wellhead was capped.

On the shore of their black and foul-smelling lake, two oil-blackened dervishes embraced each other. One was short and powerful. He had a nineteen-day-old beard, but his moustache was much older and better kept than that. His face was as black as a coal-face by night, but beneath the black there were glints of red. The second man was tall, upright and exhausted. His once-blond hair had turned the same deep black as everything else. His pale eyes seemed out of place in their filthy surroundings. Both men stank of rotten eggs from the sulphur in the oil, but neither man noticed or cared.

‘I’ll miss you, laddie.’

‘Yes, I’ll miss you too. God knows, I’ll even miss being here.’ Alan looked around the rocky valley, home for so many months. ‘Cold rice and oil sauce.’

‘Aye … Well, you’ll have a job facing you in England. A damn sight harder than hitting oil here, I make no doubt.’

‘Yes.’

Alan was returning to England. His job there would be to turn his lake of oil into a company. He’d need money, investors, shares, directors, accounts and managers. It was vital work, but also difficult, and both men knew that Alan would infinitely have preferred to be staying, as Reynolds was, to supervise the works on the ground.

‘Is there anyone at home you’d like me to call on for you? There’s so much one can’t quite say in a letter.’

‘Aye, there’s my mother and father, if you wouldn’t mind. They’re a pair of nervous ninnies, so –’

‘So I’ll explain to them in great detail how cushy our life has been out here –’

‘The fine houses, the pleasant climate –’

‘The ease of drilling, the diversity of amusements –’

‘The helpful and attentive local officials.’

Both men laughed.

‘And you can call on Sir Charles Greenaway for me,’ said Reynolds. ‘You can tell him that there’s an oilfield, vast in its possible dimensions, in precisely the spot I told him it would be. You can remind him that I said seventy thousand pounds for the right to drill there was criminally low.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘And then this.’ Reynolds produced a sheet of paper. It contained the name and address of somebody in London, and the words ‘PSALM 104 VERSE 15 STOP REYNOLDS’.

Alan looked at him questioningly.

‘If you wouldn’t mind sending this telegram for me, please … I believe there are facilities at Abadan.’

Alan nodded. ‘Psalm one-oh-four? I’m not sure I remember how that one runs.’

‘Well, there’s to be no peeking at your Bible, laddie. If I wanted you to know how it runs, then I’d sing it to you.’

The two men embraced again. A mile away in the distance, a pair of long-legged Arab horses danced impatiently, their hoofs muffled with rags to avoid the danger of sparks from their shoes. Alan would ride quickly down into Shiraz, then make his way to Abadan, and either hop aboard a passing oil tanker and ride through the Suez Canal directly home, or, if no tanker was expected soon, make the more arduous journey overland via Istanbul.