Reckoning (10 page)

Dartley’s approach paid off on the way back up. In
a break in the fog, he saw a man climbing several levels higher than him. He hurried upward but was seen by the man before
he got very close. The man was big—Dartley noticed his broad shoulders—and he made no pretense of being a worker on the job,
which he could have been so far as Dartley knew. Instead the man rushed up the steps as fast as he could. Dartley chased after
him. But a new bank of fog drifted in and he lost the man from view.

When Dartley reached the installation platform, he rushed to the flotel walkway. McClintock was still there. He shook his
head to show Dartley that he had seen no one worth holding. Not having gotten clear away, the assassin was using the fog to
hide in while he waited for things to quiet down so he could slip back to the flotel. Dartley couldn’t raise a general alarm
and have Brent Delta sealed off officially without revealing who he himself was. He wasn’t joining anyone’s security staff.
He had come here to waste the killer and that was what he was going to do.

He looked around the platform and reckoned that the man had not gone back down the catwalks toward the sea, although he might
have. He would fear a systematic search there and chose somewhere else to hide, somewhere unexpected.

Dartley didn’t think of it because he didn’t see it—but suddenly the fog broke and he saw the derrick towering above him.
A man with broad shoulders was climbing its side—it was him! The fog closed in again
moments later, yet not before the climber above him had looked down and seen Dartley staring up at him.

The rungs of the vertical steel ladder were coated with oil and mud, which made them slippery as hell. Dartley climbed fast
so as to give his opponent no time to maneuver. He remembered that the derrick was about a hundred feet high, with a platform
about halfway up. At the very top, there was a roost, called the monkey-board, for the man who handled the cable when the
drillstring was pulled up. Dartley kind of hoped he could settle things, one way or the other, on the platform halfway up
instead of at the top. He had a head for heights—all the same, he was no trapeze artist.

Up on the derrick, the wind was stronger and kept the fog on the move, creating clear pockets in its damp blind grip. Dartley
clutched the side rails of the vertical ladder as the soles of his shoes slid on the metal rungs. He was moving fast, like
running on ice. So long as he kept his momentum going, he would not fall. He hoped.

The halfway platform was empty, a desolate midair raft of boards covered with a cold slime of mud and oil. There was nothing
for Dartley to do but go on up. Near the top, the fog cleared beneath him to one side of the derrick. He saw the painted yellow
circle, with a white H at its center, of Delta’s helideck. If he wasn’t damn careful, he might end up coming in for a hard
landing there himself. Dartley could not see whether he had bypassed his quarry and left him beneath him. It made no sense
for the man to allow himself to be trapped at
the tip of the derrick—unless he had something in mind for his pursuer. There was only one way for Dartley to find out and
that was to go see.

Clouded in by fog above and below, he climbed on up. At times he could hardly see his hands on the ladder, at other times
he could see through the entire ghostly skeleton of the derrick. There was a man on top! Dartley saw him for a moment of lightning
haze. The man was bent double on the monkeyboard, stooping over some task. Dartley was sure he had not been seen. He climbed
stealthily the remaining slippery rungs.

Like a strangler in a horror movie, Dartley stepped out of the wraiths of mist, caught the man by the throat and grappled
him to the monkeyboard. The monkeyboard was only a couple of feet wide and stuck out from the side of the derrick like a stubby
diving board. Dartley pushed him out along it so that his head and shoulders hung out 350 feet above the sea and he had to
use his hands to clutch desperately to the board’s edge. The man’s hard hat fell off and sailed down out of sight into the
fog below. He had long red hair. And narrow shoulders. This was not the man he had been chasing. Dartley pulled him back on
the board.

“What are you doing up here?” Dartley snarled.

The man stared up at Dartley with wide frightened eyes. “Doing my job, mate. I’m the derrickman.”

“Did you see anyone up here?”

The derrickman had got over his brush with death and was regaining his nerve. He said in a Lancashire accent, “You fucking
Yanks are a lot of buggers. Who
would I see up here? Fucking seagulls? I ain’t seen no one except you, and I could have done without that.”

“I mistook you for someone else,” Dartley said in a rare apology. “Sorry about that.”

“Piss off, cowboy.”

Dartley grinned. Here was another Englishman who could personally testify that all Yanks were mad dogs.

He went down the ladder in such a hurry that he half slid a lot of the way, the palms of his heavy gloves growing hot from
the friction as they passed rapidly over the ladder’s metal side supports. He hit the deck at a run and headed for the walkway
to the flotel. McClintock wasn’t there. The area was silent and deserted in the fog.

For a moment, Dartley had the hope that the big Scotsman had detained the killer and right now was locking him in a cabin
belowdeck. Then, as he stood on the walkway between the installation and the flotel, he heard a wave crash, invisible in the
fog, far beneath him. He got a sudden feeling that no one would ever see Andrew McClintock alive again.

Abdel Saleh stroked his smooth-shaven chin and nodded to his aides. “Show the ladies in.”

He could see they were a bit shocked by the way he was treating these women. Here in Iran they had restored women to their
proper place in society after the revolution. In the Shah’s time women had begun to show their faces and demand the roles
in society that Allah had reserved for men. The Ayatollah had put a quick end to that. With the country’s return to Islamic
law, a woman could be stoned to death for adultery. In Abdel Saleh’s opinion, this was too harsh. He had saved his own sister
from this sentence only by having her husband killed so that he could not continue to publicly denounce her. Some of the activist
mullahs knew this, but dared say nothing against him because of his high position in the Revolutionary Guards.

He was a handsome man and was very attractive to women. While he had been in exile from the Shah’s
regime in London, he lived as the English did. He had not forgotten the good times. He missed London women.

The delegation of British women journalists was shown in. Abdel Saleh looked them over carefully. There were two pretty ones.

“I hope things have been going according to your expectations,” he said to them in his heavily accented English. It was just
a Middle Eastern courtesy phrase that should have been met with a polite meaningless answer.

“Certainly not,” one of the pretty women snapped. “We get to meet no one except women doctors in women’s hospitals, female
teachers in all-girls’ schools, mothers and daughters but never fathers and sons. It’s the same in all Arab countries. You’re
deliberately restricting our movements because we’re women.”

Abdel Saleh smiled and gazed at her until she dropped her eyes. “First of all, I must tell you that Iran is not an Arab country.
We are not Arabs. We are Moslems, like the Arabs. Women here live differently than they do in the West. You knew that before
you came. Why complain now?”

“We are not trying to change your country,” she replied. “We want to talk with the people who run your nation. The women don’t,
that’s for certain. Yet we’re not allowed to interview anyone else.”

“You’re interviewing me,” Abdel pointed out. “I am not a woman.”

The women tittered.

“You are an exception,” the pretty woman told him. “Very few other men agree to see us.”

“It is confusing for them,” Abdel explained. “They are not used to women approaching them as you do. That is why I have had
you brought to my home today. I want you to see how my family lives. I want you to meet my wife—I have only one—and children.”

“Here we go again,” one of the women grumbled. “More bloody wives and kids.”

“We would prefer to discuss the Revolutionary Guards with you,” the pretty one insisted, “rather than meet your family.”

Abdel smiled at her. “Perhaps another time. For now, you must be satisfied with what you are given.”

He nodded to one of his aides and his family was brought in and introduced to the women reporters. He posed with them for
the photographers, smiling like a proud family man.

“You see,” he said, “we are just like you in the West. We too love our wives, our sons, our daughters. We are not the monsters
that Reagan says we are.”

Tea was served. Interpreters translated the children’s words for the reporters. In spite of their personal reservations, the
reporters knew good copy when they saw it—the human side of a Middle Eastern terrorist and fanatic. Their publishers had paid
to send them here. They had to come up with stories. If this was the only story available today, they would use it. Abdel
Saleh would not be the first person in history to manipulate the press.

When it was time for them to leave, Abdel had two aides speak separately with two of the women. He followed one aide and the
outspoken pretty reporter into another room. The aide left. The Englishwoman looked about her nervously. The room was simply
furnished with a couch and some chairs around a coffee table on the tiled floor. Abdel gestured toward the couch. She picked
a chair.

Having drawn up another chair for himself, he sat close to her. He put his hand on her bare arm. She pulled her arm free.

“I can arrange for you to meet—you alone—the most important men in Iran,” he offered, dropping his hand on her knee.

She pushed his hand off indignantly and jumped to her feet. “All that talk of being a family man was just a facade,” she said.
“You put on a great show. You might even have fooled us a little. But you’re just a dirty lecher behind it all.”

She headed for the door. Abdel did not try to stop her. He looked after her with a smile. Then he left the room by another
door, walked down a narrow corridor and entered another room, furnished much like the first. The second pretty Englishwoman
sat alone on the couch, writing in a notepad on her knee.

Abdel was in a mood for no more foolishness. He would make no more promises. He strode rapidly to where she sat and stroked
her cheek with his right hand. She tried to get to her feet, but he pressed her down
with his hand on her shoulder. His hand went farther down her body, to her left breast.

“I want to leave,” she said, frightened.

“You can’t until I let you go.” He began to push her down on the couch.

“I’ll scream!” she threatened.

“These are mud-and-stone walls, radios are playing.”

“I’ll go to the police!” she shouted.

“They will put you in prison for insulting a member of the Revolutionary Guards. You are an infidel. A shameless Western woman
who has no modesty. Look at the way you dress! It is enough to inflame impure passions in any man!”

He pulled open her blouse, popping the buttons down its front. Then he ripped off her bra and roughly grasped a breast in
each hand, squeezing hard enough to hurt her.

“Don’t,” she whimpered and struck at him with her fists.

“You’re a foolish woman a long way from home,” he said, laughing.

Herbert Malleson had all the data on visitors to the Brent field and their locations at all times. By far the majority of
them were well known in the oil business. Malleson concentrated on those with vaguer credentials. Only one of these was at
the flotel during the times of the deaths, a Wyoming mud engineer with extensive experience in Iran. From descriptions of
the man, and the guess that he was a professional assassin, Malleson
came up with the name of a Canadian named Douglas Dockrell.

“He’s where you were four or five years ago, Dartley,” Malleson said, “anxious to prove his worth, willing to take on any
crazy assignment if he thinks it will build his rep and bring customers in. Dockrell lacks a man of your uncle’s wisdom to
guide him.”

Charley Woodgate grinned and Richard Dartley nodded in acknowledgment.

Dartley said, “Charley nearly had to shoot me in the foot to stop me from going on some half-assed mission several times.
I think I’ve heard vaguely of this guy. Didn’t he have trouble in Washington a year or so back?”

“With the CIA,” Malleson said. “Seems he did a job for someone else in East Africa and made it look like a CIA operation.
They called him in and he came. My bet is he had to spill his guts on everything he’d ever done since grade school before
they let him off the hook. Canadian and British intelligence won’t touch him. Anyone want coffee?”

They were sitting at the big kitchen table in Charley Woodgate’s farmhouse near Frederick, Maryland. Their cups were refilled.