The Sons of Adam (23 page)

Up at the top of the train, the mournful whistle called a second time. A series of jolts ran through the train as it began to move forwards once again. The steel boxcar floor came back to life, turning into a giant skillet upon which Tom was to be shaken, fried and tossed all at the same time.

To hell with it.

Tom was – he guessed – still short of his destination, but he could see a road in the distance and he’d enjoyed as much free rail travel as he could take. He tossed his only luggage, a soft green canvas bag, onto the ground, then braced himself for the jump. For a second or two, he wondered if he’d misjudged things. The train was moving faster all the time and the railroad grade fell sharply away down a bank only a couple of feet from the speeding wheels. Tom glanced back. His entire worldly goods were in the bag he’d just tossed away.

He jumped.

He hit the ground hard, rolled with the impact, then stopped. He swore again, and sat for a minute or two, rubbing his ankle and listening to the train’s thunder rolling away behind him.

Tom had arrived in America as a cattle hand, second class. He’d arrived in Wyoming as a bum. But his method of arrival didn’t matter. Nothing about the past mattered any more, not even the pathetic thirty-eight dollars that he still had in his pocket.

Because Tom hadn’t been quite candid with the bureaucrats of Ellis Island. He’d told them he’d come to America to drill for oil. That was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Tom hadn’t come simply to drill, he’d come to build himself an oil fortune on an extraordinary scale. He’d come to build an empire in oil that would rival and exceed anything that Alan might find for himself in Persia. He intended to try and he intended to succeed.

Starting today.

The path was too difficult for horses, so Ameri and Alan had been forced to come up on foot. The sunlight was brilliant but cold, the skies blue but wintry. In the valley two and a half thousand feet below, the camp looked like a tiny collection of dots, the horses as small as fleas and the people barely visible at all. Alan hoped they would get some rest. For the last five days, his team had been travelling hard alongside Ameri’s men. In that time, the tribesmen had eaten their way through every last part of Alan’s stores. For two days now, they’d mostly lived off what they’d been able to hunt: a few rabbits, a pigeon of some sort, yesterday a goat who’d injured its leg and had been left to die by its shepherd.

Ameri was scrupulously polite towards Alan, but it was the politeness of the captor to the captive. By night, Ameri posted four armed guards around the camp and tied metal bells to the necks of Alan’s pack-animals. The guards weren’t there to protect them from dangers outside. They were there to be certain no one escaped.

And not once had Ameri revealed where they were going. Or why.

Ameri climbed with an athletic intensity, breathing out in short sharp puffs. Alan too laboured in the thin air. His weaker lung ached and his heart raced. With his pale blond hair and ultra-fair skin he suffered easily in sunshine, even the weak rays of this altitude, and he wore a wide-brimmed sunhat, which had once been white and was now stained a deep dust-coloured grey.

Even as they climbed, Alan was studying the ground hard. Whether or not Ameri knew anything of value, what was certain was that the valley he’d chosen was a geologist’s daydream.

For one thing, it was virtually bare. In the valley bottom, there was a little brown grass and, higher up, some tough and wizened shrubs. But mostly there was nothing to see except rocks. Rocks, dirt, sand, cliff, scree – Mother Earth without her clothes on.

For another thing, the valley wall was like a sandwich built of many layers of rock, all ripped from deep inside the earth and now exposed to view. It was like a duffer’s guide to geology in one panoramic lesson. Even as he climbed, Alan’s quick mind tried to puzzle out the secrets of the surrounding strata. Oil or no oil? A gold mine or a failed dead end?

On and on they climbed.

To begin with, they’d followed goat trails, but when the goat trails had finished, they’d continued both upwards and onwards, following the valley wall round as it steepened and curved. After another hour, Ameri halted. He sat on a flake of rock protruding out over the valley. Each man had a flask of water, which he quickly finished. It wasn’t enough and Alan could easily have drunk another couple of pints on the spot.

‘Nearly there,’ said Ameri, panting. Up here on the mountainside, without his followers, he’d lost some of his chieftain’s mannerisms, and found it less necessary to impress Alan with his importance the whole time.

‘How do you know this spot?’ asked Alan, who was well aware by now of the Qashqai’s fondness for horses above all other modes of transport.

Ameri laughed. Two years ago, the Shah was angry because his tax collectors came back to Tehran with their pockets empty. He sent out an army of two thousand men and sixteen field guns to make us pay. We ambushed them there –’ he pointed down to the valley floor – ‘and made them run home to Tehran. We captured fifteen hundred rifles and all the big guns. The rifles we kept, the guns we handed back because we have no use for them. That is how I know this path.’

They regained their breath and went on, picking their way slowly now and with care. One slip could easily result in a fall of a hundred feet or more, and they used hands as well as feet to move forwards. Alan’s geology bag thumped against his thighs and he wished he’d packed the tools in a knapsack instead.

And then, all of a sudden, they were done. Ameri threw his own small bag to the ground.

‘Here.’

He took his long-bladed knife from his belt and began to hack into the hillside, where a band of sand separated two differently coloured streaks of rock. He cut away the dried-out crust, releasing a shower of fine debris to whisper its way down the side of the mountain. Then, when the whiter outside layer had been cut back, Ameri jabbed the knife into the soft interior and brought out a small pile of sand on the tip of the blade. Ameri held his nose against it, sniffed, then passed it across to Alan.

Alan smelled it. It smelled of victory. It smelled of oil.

‘Drilling experience?’

‘None.’

‘Rigging?’

‘None.’

‘Then you’d better tell me you’re a blacksmith, pal, because I seen eight-year-olds with more experience than you.’

Tom scowled. This was the sixth oil exploration outfit he’d approached since arriving in Wyoming and so far his luck was no better than it had been with the first five. His forty-dollar fortune was down to just eight bucks and his patience was running out as fast as his money.

‘I can mend things,’ said Tom. ‘If your machines break down, I can mend them.’

‘That a fancy way of telling me you ain’t a blacksmith?’

Lying in the long grass, there was an old pump. It was beginning to rust and had weeds growing through it. ‘I could mend that,’ said Tom.

The driller kicked the pump. ‘If you can fix this, then you know what I’ll do? I’ll throw the damn thing right back down there. It’s a pile of junk, son, and we ain’t got a use for it.’

A kid came scrambling across a rocky slope towards them. Tall prairie grasses waved in the valley, thinning out as they reached the higher slopes above. The kid was wearing a pair of old khaki shorts and his shins and knees were grazed and dirty.

‘Please, Mr Bard, I’m to tell you that Jonah Matthews is a blockhead, an’ he’s gone an’ drunk about half a pint of kerosene thinking it was whiskey. He’s getting mighty sick right now and he ain’t fit to work any.’ His message delivered, the boy added conversationally, ‘He’s puking so bad, I even saw it coming out of his nose.’

Tom looked at Bard.

Bard looked at Tom.

Tom raised his eyebrows. Bard made a hacking noise in his throat and spat out a pellet of phlegm, which he stared at as though annoyed with it.

‘The hell with it,’ said the oilman. ‘OK, you can cover for Matthews while he’s sick. Two bucks fifty a day. Starting this minute.’

‘Certainly,’ said Tom. ‘Sure thing.’

Bard jerked his head at the tall steel derrick ahead of them. A boiler thumped away. Thirty-foot lengths of drill pipe swung softly in the derrick. Tom gazed on the scene, his pulse quickening. Entranced for a moment, he shook himself out of it to find Bard addressing him again.

‘Your name? What the hell did you say your name was?’

‘Calloway,’ said Tom. ‘Tom Calloway.’

Bard grunted, as though Calloway was the name he most disliked in the entire world. He said nothing else, but began to walk on towards the rig. Tom picked up his bag and followed. He had eight bucks in his pocket and a job that might last no more than a day.

But he didn’t care. Why should he?

His luck had turned.

The oil business is full of stories.

Sad ones, glorious ones, ones about the half-chances that dwindled out into no-chances, or ones about half-chances that exploded upwards in a gush of oil reaching eighty feet up to the crown of the derrick.

Here was one story that Alan particularly liked.

In California, there are places where oil literally seeps out of the ground, staining the rivers and creeks with tar. In 1864, a geologist named Professor Silliman wrote a report on the geological conditions. The report was so enthusiastic that an oil boom was sparked. Without delay, the California Petroleum Company was established with a capital of ten million dollars and drilling rights to more than a quarter of a million prime acreage. Over the next two years California Petroleum, along with some seventy other smaller companies, drilled upwards of sixty holes in search of oil. The geologists were right. Oil was present. The intensive two-year search yielded well over five thousand barrels of the precious fluid.

But here was the punchline.

The value of the oil was about ten thousand dollars. The cost of getting it had been well over a million. Although Alan was pleased to have discovered a trace of oil in the Zagros, he knew that a trace was meaningless. If he didn’t strike big, there was no point in striking at all.

For thirty-five days, Alan stayed in that valley and its immediate neighbours. Ameri and his men stuck around for a day or so, but grew quickly bored and made ready to leave. Before he left, Ameri took Alan aside.

‘Will you come back to dig here?’

‘To drill? Perhaps. I hope so.’

‘This oil. It is very precious in England?’

‘It is.’

‘And there will be great labour to dig – to drill – it out?’

‘Immense labour. Vast labour. Drilling it, collecting it, piping it, shipping it.’

‘And riches too?’

‘I hope so. I certainly hope so.’

Ameri nodded solemnly. ‘You will not forget?’ He meant, not forget the person who had ‘found’ it.

‘No, Muhammad, I will not forget.’

Ameri looked intently at his
Farangi
companion and his hand strayed absent-mindedly to the strap of his rifle. It was probably an unconscious gesture, but Alan understood the implication very well. It didn’t matter too much whether Alan forgot or didn’t forget. Muhammad Ameri would be back to remind him of his debt with fifty armed and battle-ready horsemen.

The two men embraced in Persian fashion, then Ameri leaped lightly onto his horse and led his men cantering away in a cloud of dust, heading down the valley. During their time together with Alan’s party, they had eaten every last mouthful of food and stolen anything that had caught their fancy. The evening before, Alan had been forced to spend three hours making a full inventory of his surveying and geological equipment to check how much had been pilfered. Once he had a list of the essential items, he had taken Ameri aside and told him how much had gone.