Authors: Harry Bingham
‘There’s meant to be a hole in here somewhere, but damn me if I know where.’
The tube scraped around in Alan’s nose, looking for an exit. Alan’s nasal membranes were dried out and painful, but he just gripped the edge of his blanket and said nothing. Eventually, Reynolds found what he was looking for. The tube slipped suddenly far into Alan’s nose and down the back of his throat.
‘Ha! Can you breathe, laddie?’
Alan nodded.
Reynolds was triumphant. He fixed a funnel to the tube and began to dribble the salt-and-sugar water into the funnel. He began with just a teaspoonful every minute, then increased the rate, until a teaspoonful was entering the funnel every ten seconds. Twice Alan began to retch, but on neither occasion did he actually vomit.
‘Ha!’ said Reynolds again, relief starting to glimmer in his eyes.
The next morning, he came into Alan’s tent.
‘How are you feeling?’
Alan attempted a smile. It was a pretty feeble attempt, but it crinkled the lips just enough to cause a thin trickle of blood to come from one of the deep cracks.
‘Righto. I’m sending you to Abadan. Anglo-Persian have got a hospital there, proper doctors and all the rest of it. It’ll be a pretty lousy journey, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing to do but try.’
Alan nodded. Abadan was a long way away, and the truck journey would be brutal. If he made it to Abadan alive, his chances of recovery were fair. If not …
Alan moved his hand, as though writing.
‘You want to write? Don’t worry. I’ll look after the camp while you’re gone.’
Alan closed his eyes, waited for a little strength, then shook his head. He made the writing movement again.
‘Oh no, old chap. I’m sure you won’t need to …’ Reynolds petered out. He knew Alan well by now, knew better than to argue. ‘I’ll get pen and paper. Pen, paper and witnesses.’
Alan nodded.
Reynolds brought along writing materials and the two Poles who were best able to walk. They hauled Alan up on his sackcloth pillows and propped the paper on a board on his knees. Watched by everyone present and in an awful shaky hand, Alan wrote, ‘Last Will. Sound mind. Concession to George Reynolds. Also money. Everything else (not much!) to Mother and Father. Love to all, esp Charlotte Dunlop. Alan Montague.’
Everyone in camp was silent as Alan was carried over to the truck. The Poles and Russians removed their caps and bowed their heads towards the ground. Alan was conscious, but only just. He felt like the guest of honour at his own funeral.
Down on the beach, there was a man with a couple of dogs, friendly faced mongrels with scruffy white coats and stubby little tails. The man wasn’t just playing with them, he was getting them to do tricks. Up – down – sit – lie – stand – stay – roll over. The dogs complied quickly and barked enthusiastically once they had completed their routines. Tom liked dogs and he liked this pair as soon as he saw them.
Then the man changed his game. He took a brown paper packet from his pocket and unwrapped it. Tom couldn’t quite see what it was, but it looked like a bit of beef bone or a knuckle of pork. The man rooted round on the beach and collected together some stones. Then the game began. The man rubbed the piece of meat on one of the stones, then tossed that stone along with two or three others into the long grass high on the sand dunes. As soon as he gave the command, the two dogs raced away after the stones, searching for them among the dunes. Twenty seconds of intense silence followed, then sudden motion. One of the dogs had a stone in its mouth and was racing back towards its owner. The other dog, annoyed, chased alongside, barking frenziedly, trying to get the first dog to release its treasure.
The game was repeated a few times.
Tom watched closely. When the man threw the stone that had been rubbed with meat, Tom marked the fall with care. Every single time, it was that stone and no other that the dogs retrieved, sometimes one of them, sometimes the other. They never once missed the stone or brought back the wrong one.
The man began to get bored and threw the last of his stones into the sea. The dogs chased off into the surf and began fighting over a stick of driftwood.
Tom approached the man.
‘Nice dogs.’
‘Yep. They sure are.’
‘You got ’em well trained.’
‘They more or less train themselves. They’re only pups.’ The man whistled and both dogs shot towards him, leaving the beach neatly printed with their pawmarks. ‘Good boy, Corin. Good girl, Pippa.’
Tom bent down to fondle the smaller of the two dogs behind her ear. He received a couple of salty licks in exchange.
‘Nice trick that, with the stones.’
‘Yeah. They ain’t strictly speaking retrievers, but I ain’t never seen a retriever do any better ’n that.’
‘Nope, nor me. Can I give it a go?’
‘You want to throw something for ’em?’
‘How about this?’ said Tom. He took a pocket knife from his coat and opened it out to reveal a thin smear of greyish oil around the hinge. He picked two stones from the beach. Both of them were flattish and smooth, but one of them had a rusty iron ore stain running through the centre. Tom wiped the red-coloured stone with the oil from his knife, then let both dogs sniff the knife all over. ‘Ready, folks?’ he asked. The two dogs ran backwards ten feet and began yelping with excitement. ‘Go on then, fellers.’ Tom threw the stones, hard and far into the dunes. He himself would have had the devil of a job finding them. It would be an exceptional dog who could find either stone, let alone pick out the right one.
‘You didn’t use a scrap o’ meat,’ said the man. ‘I always use a scrap of meat. That’s what they want to retrieve for, see. They want meat. It’s only natural.’
‘That’s true,’ said Tom. ‘I should have thought of that.’
The dogs were invisible and silent. Every now and then, the dune-grass was stirred by something other than the sea breeze and once Tom spotted a stumpy white tail wagging intently amongst the blue-green stems.
‘See, I told you,’ said the man. ‘It’s their animal nature. Wipe a bit o’ meat on the stone an’ you’re working with their animal nature.’
Tom wasn’t listening. His gaze was concentrated on the dunes. All of a sudden, the silence was broken. A yelping went up. The grass was shaken violently as though a sudden gale had blown up, two feet wide and forty feet long. The two young dogs exploded out onto the beach. The bigger one, Corin, was tumbling the other one, Pippa, to the ground in an effort to get her to release her prize. He was out of luck. Although Pippa was knocked over four times on her journey back, she arrived, panting, back at her master’s feet and dropped a stone, wet and slobbery, into his hand. The stone was flat, smooth, with a distinctive rusty stripe down its centre.
‘Well, I’ll be jiggered!’ said the man.
Tom turned to him with his broadest smile.
‘I have a proposition,’ he said.
The lurching of the truck was acutely uncomfortable. Alan hadn’t the strength to hold himself steady and he didn’t even have the muscle tone to bounce with the truck as it crashed over rocks and potholes. Reynolds had wanted to accompany him, but Alan had insisted absolutely and categorically that he should stay in the drilling camp until the very last trace of disease had been eradicated.
Instead of Reynolds, Ahmed was Alan’s escort, as well as the two tribesmen who took it in turns to drive the truck. Ahmed attempted to keep the salt-and-sugar solution draining down the funnel, but the careening of the truck proved far too violent. Every hour they stopped for ten minutes. Ahmed used the pause to send more water down the funnel, but he was less skilful than Reynolds and perhaps Alan was in too weakened a condition to tolerate much fluid in any event.
The truck jolted down into Shiraz, then bounded along a rough track to Bushehr, before heading north towards the malarial flatlands around Abadan. The journey took three days. By the end of it, Alan was unconscious most of the time. His bowel continued to leak fluid that was now almost as clear as glass.
When his stretcher was carried solemnly into the Anglo-Persian hospital at Abadan, the chief doctor shook his head.
‘It’s no use, these people,’ he complained in a high, whining voice to his Indian assistant. ‘They will insist on bringing me patients in this condition, then seem to be surprised when they die. I mean, look at the fellow. And that tube down his throat’s been taken from some kind of motor-vehicle. It really won’t do, won’t do at all.’
Alan was conscious at this point and heard every word. His lips were too broken now to move at all, but if they had been able to, they’d have echoed the thought in his brain. ‘Christ have mercy on me.’
Tom lay with his back against a sun-warmed boundary wall, watching cottontails and jack rabbits squabble; ground squirrels loping along; trapdoor spiders digging tunnels into the sand. But most of all he watched the scene where, a hundred and fifty feet away, the Shell Oil derrick reared up against the skyline.
On the rig, the drilling crew were lifting the pipe section by section. Tom counted the sections as they came out.
‘We’re getting closer, Pips,’ he said.
Pippa – or Pipsqueak, as Tom immediately renamed her – was turning out to be a lovable little rogue. She’d watched her previous owner walk away down the beach, richer to the tune of fifteen of Tom’s dollars, then simply turned to Tom, gave him a lick and voted him in as her brand-new full-time unpaid dog-slave. She trotted round with him by day, snuggled close to him at night, and stole food from his hand in the serene conviction that there was no such thing as theft between dog and master.
Pipsqueak yawned, then scrabbled to get into Tom’s pocket, where she could smell warm bacon. He pushed her away. Another section of pipe rose from the well.
‘Any time now.’
The derrick was about a hundred yards from the truckstop at the top of the hill. Today was the day that Shell Oil was taking its core, and half the local community had bets on whether or not the core would show signs of oil. A couple of heavies stood at the base of the rig, ready to keep prying eyes away, with fists if necessary.
The next section of pipe came up. Pipsqueak had given up trying to get at the warm bacon, and had fallen asleep with her nose pressed blissfully up against the magic pocket. By Tom’s reckoning, there was just one more section before the corer itself. He shook Pipsqueak awake. ‘Rise and shine, sweetheart.’
The little white mongrel yawned and wagged her stump of a tail.
The last section of pipe rose from the hole. Up at the truckstop, a big car was parked, its nose already pointing down the hill. A man in a dark business suit leaned against the fender and watched the scene. He was the man from the Shell laboratories, there to take the sample off for analysis.
‘OK, Squeaker, get ready.’
The black ants on the drilling rig had their corer now. They bent over it, taking superstitious care to bring the sample out whole. They sniffed at it, of course, but that meant nothing. If it was as full of oil as a sponge in your petrol tank, they’d have sniffed it. If it was as empty of oil as a bucket full of nothing, they’d have sniffed it just the same. Oilmen always sniff their cores.
Tom nudged Pipsqueak to make her stand. He stood up himself and strolled closer. A dusty trail connected the rig to the truckstop. Tom walked to within forty yards of it, then stopped. He bent down and put his hand on Pipsqueak’s collar.
The riggers on the drilling platform wrapped the core in a canvas bag, then lowered it carefully to the ground. The two heavies now enjoyed their moment of glory. They heaved the bag up – it was a big core, two feet long and eight inches in diameter – and began to carry it between them up the path. Given the level of interest in the well, Tom guessed that the two heavies would escort the sample all the way to the laboratory and a Shell Oil safe inside.
‘OK, Pips, don’t you let me down now.’
Pipsqueak began to feel the tension acutely. Her mouth was open and panting, and every now and then she punctuated her pants with a long-drawn-out whine of excitement.
‘Nearly, Pips, nearly.’
The two heavies were ten yards up the path. Twenty yards.
‘OK, Squeaky, OK.’
Thirty yards up the path. In a moment’s time they’d be as close to Tom as the path would bring them. Tom’s mouth was drier than sand, drier than dust. One of the two heavies dropped his end of the bag and readjusted his grip. They started up again. They were forty yards up the path, halfway to their precious truckstop.
‘Go, Squeaker, go.’
Tom released his grip on Pipsqueak’s collar. The little dog raced away. She was a stumpy little thing with a big dose of terrier in her exceptionally well-mixed ancestry, but Tom could see that there was something faster too: a whippet maybe, or possibly one of the larger poodles.
She ran over the stony grass: a white blur. The two heavies saw her coming and grinned. People always grinned when they saw her. It was one of the nice things about having her.
Within a few seconds, Pipsqueak had caught up with the heavies. She hurled herself at the canvas bag and sniffed it as though trying to inhale the entire sample. The heavies became instantly suspicious, and began to drive her away.