Authors: Harry Bingham
For a while there was silence, but Nasr lifted the shutters from the lantern and let the light beam out openly for a moment or two. Then he replaced the shutters, and dropped down to the little seating area in the bows of the boat. He spread out carpets over the wooden planking, arranged some pillows, and brought out the hubble-bubble water pipe that he’d set alight an hour or so before. The charcoal was glowing in the bottom, but he added more and blew on it to make it glow yellow and hot.
Then there was a gentle bump at the side of the boat. Invisible hands made the two boats fast, and a couple of figures sprang over the side.
Nasr leaped up and embraced the two men, kissing them cheek to cheek three times. There was a quick babble of conversation in a dialect that Alan had difficulty in following: Persian mixed with a scattering of Russian and perhaps Armenian. There was a clink of bottles and glasses. The three men moved to the carpeted area and the hubble-bubble, and Nasr indicated that Alan should follow them. The newcomers were dressed in dark coats and boots, the universal dress-code for their trade. Though their skin had a Persian darkness, both men had the solid build and square, heavy faces of Mother Russia. Alan shook hands; then, feeling like a fool, embraced the newcomers cheek to cheek. He could smell onion and vinegar on their breath, tobacco and sea salt.
The four men sat down. The Russians had brought two bottles of vodka and some tiny vodka glasses. Alan shot a glance sideways at Nasr. Alcohol was forbidden to followers of the Prophet, and Alan had never seen Nasr partake of anything stronger than betel juice or tobacco. He needn’t have worried. Islam was obviously less important for the moment than being good neighbours, and the hubble-bubble and vodka turned colleagues into friends.
After half an hour, the talk turned very slowly to business. Alan began to understand the Russians better than he had done at first, but Nasr still had to act as interpreter.
‘The Revolution will set free the proletariat,’ said the senior of the two Russians solemnly, ‘but times are hard.’
Alan said how he had passed through Baku on his first journey out to Persia, and how impressed he had been with its prosperity and industrial power.
The Russian shook his head. ‘Once, yes, once it was a great city. But now … People are hungry. They are afraid no one will buy their oil. They are afraid they will starve.’
Alan knew Easterners well enough by now to be aware of the proper reply. He said how much he admired the people of Baku, how he would gladly do anything he could to help relieve them of their distress.
The conversation then passed quickly to business. What did Alan want? How much could he pay? Would he pay in paper or gold? How could they be sure that Alan wasn’t a Revolutionary spy?
Alan handed them a list, drawn up in Persian and Russian, of his requirements. He handed them a bag of thirty golden sovereigns as a token of his seriousness. He spoke of delivery needs and timings. Nasr listened like a hawk, and took over as soon as the nitty-gritty of delivery was discussed. What Alan wanted was going to require heavy shipping to deliver. The usual smuggler’s stock-in-trade of alcohol, silk, fur and tobacco was all small and easy to handle by comparison. Nasr was voluble and insistent. Brokering this deal would make him enough money to retire on, a wealthy man. Screwing it up could easily mean that he’d be shot dead by a Russian coastguard, or simply be tipped overboard into the ocean. The Russians became voluble too, their voices thickened with drink and excitement. Alan was unable to follow what was going on.
He moved to the side of the boat and dashed a couple of handfuls of stinging salt water in his face. He thought of George Reynolds and the task they’d set themselves.
He thought of Lottie, confused as to who she really was: wartime Lottie, loving, serious and committed? Or peacetime Lottie, superficial and flirtatious? The thought tormented him, as ever.
He turned his attention back to the conversation. Nasr and the Russians were finishing. Far to the east, a glimmer of grey lightened the blackness. It was time to be gone.
The tank stood at the bottom of a small dip, lapped all round by coarse prairie grasses. No pipes led down into the dip. The tank’s steel sides boomed hollow and empty. There was room inside for three thousand barrels of oil, but right now it held three thousand barrels of nothing.
Men from the rigs round about came to stare, snigger and laugh.
‘Hey, pal! You better watch out. You got yourself a leak right there. Can’t you see the nothing spilling out?’
‘Hey, mister. You wanna fill her up with water? I fancy a swim, me.’
Another joker took his coat and shirt off and pretended to get ready to dive in.
Tom let them laugh. It was one of the first warm and sunny days of spring. He ate sandwiches and joked with the men who had come to gawp. He brewed coffee on a kerosene stove and handed it out in tin mugs to anyone who wanted some. But it wasn’t long before Tom’s lunch was interrupted.
A heavy-set man with big Victorian whiskers came to stand in between Tom and the sun. Tom recognised the man as the head driller on one of the first wells to have struck oil.
‘This your tank?’ said the man bluntly.
‘Yep. You want some coffee?’
The man shook his head rudely. ‘What you planning to put in it?’
‘Sugar. I’m clean out of milk.’
‘The tank, for Chrissake, not the coffee.’
Tom shrugged. ‘It’s called an oil storage tank, so I figure I oughta use it to store some oil.’
‘I got oil.’
‘Hey, good for you. Congratulations,’ said Tom, without sarcasm.
‘And you got a tank.’
‘Sure have.’
‘I’ll give you a penny a month for every barrel of oil you store for me. Just till we can get a pipeline up the valley. Three or four months, maybe.’
‘It’s good coffee,’ said Tom. ‘Real fresh. I can’t persuade you?’
‘Three thousand barrels, is it? A penny a month. Three months. That’s – what? – ninety bucks. Call it an even hundred.’
‘No deal.’
‘No deal?’ The man was non-plussed. ‘You got no oil.’
‘Not a drop.’
‘I’ll give you a hundred and fifty. Right now, I’m pumping oil I can’t hardly use. I’m burning it off mostly.’
‘Now that’s a shame.’
‘One eighty?’
‘Nope.’
The day wore on. Word of Tom’s tank spread quickly. But by the end of the day, nobody was there to laugh at him, nobody was pretending to strip off for a quick swim.
Instead, a cluster of men squatted on the rocks round Tom’s little camp site. The situation up on the oilfields was pretty extreme. More and more oil was being struck, but with the road down to the valley all but impassable, the oil that was pumped was next to worthless.
When Tom announced he was there to buy oil, he had half a dozen eager sellers.
‘Tell you what, boys,’ said Tom, as the sun began to slope down towards the hills, ‘we’ll have an auction.’
‘An auction? How d’you figure that? We only got one buyer.’
‘It’s gonna be a special kind of auction. Here’s what I have in mind.’
And he explained. Tom’s idea was a kind of reverse auction. He’d offer to buy a thousand barrels of oil at twenty-five cents the barrel. At that price all six oilmen were eager sellers but Tom wasn’t yet ready to do the deal.
‘Now, anyone here willing to sell me a thousand barrels at twenty-four cents the barrel?’ he said.
The man closest to Tom looked like he’d been socked in the jaw. He sat heavily down on a rock.
‘Holy shit,’ he said, ‘we’re going down.’
But he raised his hand anyway. So did the others.
‘Six buyers at twenty-four cents?’ said Tom. ‘Who’ll sell at twenty-three?’
The six men raced to raise their hands. Tom picked the man who’d moved fastest.
‘Yours at twenty-three,’ he said. ‘Who’ll sell at twenty two? … At twenty one? … At twenty? … At nineteen?’
As the last gold vanished from the horizon, the men were still there. Still glum, still shocked, still bidding.
‘It’ll never get up,’ said Alan.
‘It will,’ said Reynolds.
They looked down at the truck, shimmering in the heat below. The khaki cab was covered in dust, knocks and scratches. It looked like an old prize-fighter after a losing bout.
‘They overheat. Even without a load, most of the trucks need to stop a couple of times to cool off.’
‘It’ll get up.’
They squinted down at the truck. It was carrying the twelve-foot drill bit that Reynolds had seen in the desert. Anglo-Persian had refused to sell any of its equipment to its upstart competitor, not even the equipment that was good only for scrap. That had been as expected. When Reynolds had finished his reconnaissance, he and Alan had ridden out to the local Bakhtiari chieftain. Alan explained how certain materials had been left to rot by Anglo-Persian, and how he personally had a great use for those materials.
The chieftain had furrowed his brow. He’d ordered lemon sherbet and the slaughter of two young lambs for a feast. Then, once a sufficient volume of gold had changed hands, the chieftain had agreed to act. The very next week, he’d ridden out to the drilling site with a great troop of men, mounted variously on horses, motorbikes and trucks. The men had swirled around the camp, fired off a few shots to indicate that they weren’t to be trifled with, then stolen everything that Alan had asked for.
Around the same time, the Russian smugglers completed their part of the transaction. Alan’s cash had been enough to buy a complete set of drilling tools, storage tanks, temporary pipelines, and various other sundries. The equipment had been delivered by a tramp steamer with Russian Soviet documentation claiming that a cargo-load of grain had been delivered. Some of the Russian-made stuff was brand new; much of it already well used. Alan had more than a suspicion that some existing working installations had been simply dismantled and shipped out – right under the noses of the Revolutionary Red Guards.
With all the equipment assembled, the next task had been to haul it down to the Zagros: an immense labour. Roads were mostly nonexistent. Bridges were absent where spring floods had washed them away. Mules got lame and trucks gave up the ghost. And so they’d built rafts and rope bridges. They’d levelled mountain paths. They’d planted dynamite beneath falls of rock. They made and carried with them a mobile forge, so that they could improvise replacement parts for their battered trucks.
And now it was all almost here. Below them, the truck ground its gears and began the ascent. The air was giddy with the heat and the temperature inside the engine casing must have been unthinkable.
‘A bottle of cold beer says it’ll make three stops or give up completely.’
‘A bottle of beer if it doesn’t make it in one.’
There was no beer in the Zagros and no way of making it cold even if there had been. So far, since they’d begun work in Persia together, Alan owed Reynolds seventy-five bottles of cold beer, while Reynolds owed his boss sixty-one. The truck ground its way up the hill. The slope was steep and though Alan had road-gangs working on the track pretty much all the time now, the terrain was a mixture of gritty sand and sharp rocks and the track simply disintegrated under the pressure of the heavy tyres. The truck negotiated the first bend and seemed to waver a moment.
‘It’s stopping.’
‘It isn’t.’
The driver found the right gear and continued on up. The drill bit on the rear looked like some giant molar dragged from some dinosaur’s jaw. It glinted dirtily in the sun.
‘How are your sums?’
For the last few nights, the lamps had been burning late in Alan’s tent as he figured out the total cost to the start of drilling. Back in London, Reynolds had advised him that doing things Anglo-Persian style would end up costing more than forty-five thousand pounds – or more than half their available funds just to get their equipment in place for the start of work. The truck ground on. A sudden lift of air brought a smell of petrol fumes and hot oil.
‘Good,’ said Alan. ‘We’ll come in just over fourteen.’
‘Fourteen? Fourteen thousand pounds? By God, that’s an achievement.’
Alan nodded with a smile. ‘Not just that. There was a whole case of cold beer in it for me, as I remember.’
Reynolds acknowledged his debt with a glower and a tug at his moustache. ‘The truck’s still going, though.’
It was true. The truck was close enough now that they could hear the din of its engine bouncing around the craggy slopes. Alan shook his head. He couldn’t understand it. Every truck overheated on this last slope. Every one. Most of them needed to stop and cool off with their hoods up for at least a couple of hours. But the truck with its massive load had already run much further than the others had.
‘If it does get up, we can start drilling tomorrow.’
‘If?
If?
It will get up. I’ve told you.’
Alan shook his head. ‘It won’t.’
Reynolds chuckled. He knew something Alan didn’t.
‘Ice in the radiator?’ asked Alan.