Assignment Black Gold (4 page)

“But you discovered you didn’t?"

She shrugged. “I discovered I have no talent for anything.
Not tor art. And not for love.”

“You don’t seem worried about Brady.”

“At first I figured he was away on a job for you
people, or looking for more merchandise.” She waved negligently at the crates
of African souvenirs in the dimly lit storeroom. “We weren’t speaking to each
other when he left.”

“He gave you no hint of anything special in the wind?”

“No. And short of breaking down that locked door to his room
upstairs, I’ve no idea what he might be doing.”

“Let’s see that door."

She led him up a flight of wooden steps to the
second-floor living quarters. Her round bottom in the tight jeans was
suggestive, but he didn‘t think she was deliberately tempting him. Durell
followed her with care. There was a living room, a bedroom, and a small and
very tidy kitchen. Everything was neat and tidy—a heritage from her New England
forebears, he thought. She had been a good homemaker for Brady Cotton, whose
habits were like those of it bear. Sloppy and disheveled, he dropped his
clothes wherever he happened to be. He had eternally muddy boots and a habit of
disrupting the orderliness of any room he occupied. Perhaps that was one of
their marital difficulties, Durell thought.

“Don't put on the lights,” he said as she reached for a
switch again. “Have you a flashlight?”

“Sure.”

A place for everything. and everything in its place. The
torch hung on a nail in the doorway casing. She put it in his hand in the
gloom; her fingers were warn and dry. She said, “'That’s the door. He has
a radio in there, you know."

”Yes.”

“One of yours?”

“Yes.”

“How much was he paid for spying on Lubinda?” Her tone was
suddenly but mildly hostile.

“Not very much. A hundred a month. Lubinda doesn’t rate ‘with
the State Department." He paused. “It’s not a matter of spying on the new
republic. It’s more a question of relaying social and economic data. Like the
progress LMO is making in their exploratory offshore drilling.”

“Oh. Brady was interested in the Lady.”

“The Lady?”

“Lubinda Lady No. 1. The offshore drilling platform.”

“I see. How was he interested?"

“Well, I just thought it was because he came from Texas, and
I figured everybody from Texas is interested in oil. Dumb of me, I
reckon. Brady was really just a businessman. We’re doing real well in the
export business, although President
Kumashaga
took a
hefty whack at our revenue for licenses to ship out what he claims to be
Lubinda’s cultural heritage.”

Durell took a picklock from his pocket and worked at the
Smith-Hawes lock on the door. He wasn’t sure what he would find. He
didn’t think Brady Cotton’s big body was lying dead behind the door. In this
climate, such a fact would have become self-evident.

“Can I go in with you?” Kitty asked.

“He’s not in there.”

“I know. But I’ve never been in before.”

“No.”

“You owe it to me. I helped you get away from the Apgaks.
That Lopes Fuentes Madragata is a real son of a bitch, you know. He’d have
sliced you up, but good. I’d feel better if the local fuzz finally put him
in the slammer.”

He shrugged. “All right.”

The room had no windows, and it still held the pent-up,
explosive heat of past days. Since there were no outlets, Durell put on the
light after closing the door behind the girl. The heat poured over him like a
wave, and sweat popped out through his shirt. The girl said, “Shall I put on
the air conditioner?”

“No.”

“You think somebody is outside watching?”

“Possibly.”

“It‘s torture in here.”

“We won’t be long. Do you have any of Brady’s bourbon?”

The girl‘s voice changed. “He doesn’t drink anymore.”

“Since when?”

“Since I asked him not to. Right after we were married.”

One wall of the room was filled with the GK-12 radio
transceiver with which Brady sent his reports to Luanda, in Angola, where they
were relayed through the consulate to Washington. Everything here seemed to be
in order. There were filing cabinets, a desk against the opposite wall.
Durell went to the desk, pulled out the lower right-hand drawer, and lifted a
square bottle of sour mash.

The girl’s lips tightened.

“The sneaking bastard,” she said.

Durell took a short drink from the bottle, watching her. She
didn’t say anything more. Then he carefully searched the desk. There was
nothing incriminating there. The filing cabinets and the desk reflected
Brady Cotton’s casual habits. Nothing seemed to be in its right place. It could
be in character with Brady; or the place might have been searched by someone
who hadn’t cared if the search was known, He couldn’t tell which it was. He
felt frustration building up in him, along with the stifling heat in the
airless room.

He went to the long table against the opposite wall. There
were geological charts of the ocean bottom similar to those he had seen in Hobe
Tallman‘s office. And clipped to a sheaf of typewritten specifications was a
data list on the drilling rig and a draftsman’s sketch of the offshore
platform. He skimmed through the closely typed list of figures.

The
drawworks
were driven by two
1200-HP GE 752-R electric motors, with
Elmagco
6000
brakes. There were five Caterpillar D-398-TB diesels, each rated at 800
HP, connected to a 520-KW generator. There were two Continental mud pumps; and
the drilling mast rose 142 feet with a 25-foot base rating a 900,000-pound
static
hookload
, and provisions for stringing ten 1
3/8-inch lines. Durell skimmed details of the rotary table, blowout preventers,
Byron mud-mixing pumps, mud tanks of 2000-barrel capacity with electric
agitators, eight
desanders
, five dry-mud
storage tanks with additional space for 8000 sacks of material, a Haliburton
cementing unit.

He noted that the personnel quarters could accommodate fifty-six
men. Water was provided by a distilling unit. For handling supplies, the
equipment consisted of a Clyde derrick rated at 41 tons capacity and a Link
belt crawler crane with a 7.8-ton capacity and a 38-foot radius. He noted that
the heliport was designed for use by a Sikorsky S-61N. He skimmed over the
statistics for liquid storage capacity of drilling water, potable fuel, and
diesel fuel, and checked the leg length of the platform at 220 feet from the
sea bottom. The overall length of Lubinda Lady I was 215 feet by 135 feet, not
including the projecting table of the heliport. The design criteria included a
79-foot wave with a 15 1/2-second wave period and a wind speed of 138 MPH. The
platform should be able to ride out any storm that hit this coast, he decided.

Behind him, the girl said restlessly, “l can make some
coffee. Some scrambled eggs, maybe?”

He did not look at her. “Did Brady ever go out to the rig?”

“Sure, a couple of times. He was a great buddy of Matt
Forchette.
 
Cajun, like you. They call
him the Fork. Matt is the rig boss, rough and tough, like Brady. Like all of
them."

He turned. “You sound bitter.”

“I had problems with Brady. His pals didn’t help.”

“Maybe you tried too hard."

“I was brought up to live by certain rules and standards. l
won't give them up."

“And
 
Brady wouldn't
fall into line?”

“No. What about the eggs?”

“You shouldn’t have tried to change him.”

She indicated the charts and specifications on the
table. “What’s so important about the Lady?"

“l don’t know.” Durell admitted. “Maybe nothing at all. I’d
like to talk to Matt Forchette. I knew him once."

“Yes, Brady said so. Brady admired you, you know. But you’re
not the way he described you." She looked at the bourbon bottle Durell had
put back on the desk. “Brady would have finished that after a run-in with
Madragata’s killers like you had tonight."

“You’re sure you don't know where Brady might be?"

“No idea at all.”

“But you know something. Maybe not directly related to
him—but something.“

“Come on, I'll make the coffee. Louisiana coffee, with lots
of chicory in it, the way Matt and Brady like it. You, too, I presume.
Ugh."

He followed her into the spotless kitchen, carefully locking
the door to Brady Cotton’s Central office before he left.

Kitty Cotton made a face over the rim of the steaming mug
she lifted to her lips. “There are the accidents, of course.”

“What accidents?”

“Didn’t Brady report them?”

“No.”

“Maybe he was saving them up to see if anything connected.
Hobe Tallman could have told you about them. The Fork will rave and rant about
them and call the local security people every kind of sons of bitches under the
sun.”

“Tell me." Durell said.

It was quiet in the Pequah, almost midnight now, and a low
moon hung over the Atlantic, west of the port. The kitchen was cozy. it seemed
to Durell that Brady Cotton had had it made with this Yankee-Portuguese girl,
whose gaze was as honest and direct as a child’s, but also as that of a woman
whose first attempt at love had ended in failure. He almost envied Brady’s
chance, although this sort of life was not for him; he knew it could never be
his; it would make him vulnerable to being reached through the one he loved. He
shook his head slightly.

“What accidents, Kitty?”

She shrugged her square shoulders and sighed. “One of the
derrickmen
was killed on the rig. They were making a hole
and had a
pinchout
due to an overlap—hit some
unconformity leading to a basal conglomerate. That didn’t do it, of course.
They were running triple lengths of pipe, and the man was up on the mast at the
third platform—the
thribble
—when he simply fell.
Nobody saw it happen. The
floormen
and roustabouts
were busy shaking shale for cuttings removal.”

He watched her. “What else?”

“Another man, the tong man, was decapitated, caught in a
bight of cable from the Clyde crane, near the jack-house. Then three others—two
drillers and a motorman just quit and flew back to the States, sore at the Fork
about something. I don’t know what. He'll tell you, if you ask about it. And
then Brady . . ." She paused.

He asked, “What did Brady have to do with it?”

“Matt Forchette caught him snooping, I guess. Again, I don’t
know. Brady wouldn’t talk about. They had a pretty bad fight. Brady was
banged up in the worst way. I had to nurse him for a week, right here. Wouldn’t
let him go into the local hospital.”

“You don’t know what they fought about?”

“As I said, Brady was just snooping.”

“Did he think anything was wrong with the rig?”

“Oh, everybody knows there’s something wrong with the Lady.
They all started out with such high hopes. You ought to look at the geologists‘
reports and the sample cores fished out of the hole. Terrific.
Sweet oil, they said. Then all of a sudden, Hobe Tallman called it quits and
they stopped drilling hole and shut down. Everything. Last week.”

“Because of the accidents?”

“Because. the way I heard it, Hobe decided there was no
offshore oil after all.”

Kitty Cotton made a delicate snorting sound in her fine
nose.

The sound became magnified into a tremendous, rolling,
crackling, thunderous explosion.

Chapter 5.

The window blew in, showering them with broken glass. Durell
noted that the girl did not scream. She sat very still for a moment, holding
her coffee mug, her pale eyes staring wide and round at him. Then she put the
cup down very carefully on the glittering layer of glass that covered the
kitchen table.

“Take it easy," Durell said softly.

"I’m all right. Sam."

"It came from the LMO docks. Nothing aimed at us directly.
We just felt the blast wave.”

“You’ve got a cut on your face," she told him.

“And your kitchen is a mess.”

The china and glassware had all tumbled from the cabinets
around her, directly in the path of the concussion. Durell went to the broken
window. There were flames down m the small rail terminal on the docks
owned by the Lubinda Marine. Over the roof of the Pequah shops, the red glare
burst skyward, showering sparks into the black sky. From far off in the
distance, a siren sounded. He heard dim shouting, heard a secondary burst of
explosives, saw more flames. The market quarter came awake to the
catastrophe.

He pushed away from the window and saw Kitty Cotton heading
for the door.

“You stay here,” he said. “Lock your doors. Don’t let anyone
in until l come back.”

“Why? Nobody’s after me.”

“You can’t tell.”

“But I don’t know anything that might bother someone.”

“The ‘someone’ doesn’t know that. Whatever happened just now
down at the oil docks was no accident. I’m betting on that. If it was the
Apgaks, then their attack at the Tallman bungalow was a feint, and there’s
something down at the docks that they want to get rid of. I’m sure they know I
came here with you. So be careful. Stay here, as I said."

“I'd rather go with you.”

"No."

She stared at him. “Sam?”

He was impatient. “I have to go.”

“Brady, as a person, isn‘t the real reason you’re here, is
it?“

“Not exactly.”

“He found out something. and that’s why he‘s missing. That’s
why you came to locate him.“

“We think he learned something, yes.”

“Is Lubinda so important?”

“It’s a free republic. So it’s important. It‘s like a small
island surrounded by a stormy ocean. We’d like to help save it from being swept
away."