Authors: Harry Bingham
And the fate of the free world depended on getting it right.
‘Hey there!’ Lyman Bard was elated to see the man who was still theoretically his boss come striding over the sun-bleached acres. ‘Welcome to West Osiman Four. Three hundred barrels a day. More, if we can find a way to jack the pressure up.’
‘This a discovery hole?’
‘Discovery, pal?’ Bard was shocked. In the old days, there was no way that Tom wouldn’t know every last detail about the oil wells he owned. ‘This is a step-out, remember. We hit oil with Number One. Two, Three and Four have all been step-outs, trying to gauge the size of the field.’
‘Oh right, sure. I remember.’
Bard looked worried. ‘Did you even recall that we had this field? Eight thousand acres under lease. Three wildcats came up dusters, East Osiman One through Three. The geology types were telling us to go to hell, but the exploration boys swore they could smell the juice, so we sunk another just to show ’em. Hit West Osiman One, our first producer.’
‘Yeah, yeah, now you mention it.’
Tom sat down heavily on a field pipe.
Not for long.
‘Ow! Hell!’ Tom leaped up like a scalded cat, beating at his backside with his hands.
‘Jeez, pal. I’m gonna take you away from Washington if you can’t even recognise a steam pipe when you see it. That pipe’s hotter’n a hog on spit roast.’
‘Screw it.’
Tom kicked the pipe. He
had
been away too long. Though Tom excelled at his Washington work, he hated it. He hung out with soldiers and politicians, navy types and bureaucrats. They were good guys to a man, but they weren’t oilers. They didn’t know what it was to sink a new hole. They treated oil like it was just another munition of war, like tanks or bullets. They didn’t know the stuff was holy. Tom looked properly at West Osiman Four for the first time. The derrick was unnaturally full of drill pipe.
‘What the hell you got nesting there?’ said Tom. ‘That don’t look like a rig, it looks like a housemarm’s pantie drawer.’
Bard laughed. ‘Boy, have you been gone too long! We’re sinking fields more than ten thousand feet here. You need plenty of pipe to go down ten thousand.’
‘Ten thousand! Sheez! What’s that costing us?’
The two men sunk into oil-talk. For Tom it was like a warm bath, a glass of whisky. He never wanted to leave Texas again. He never wanted to be further than a short drive from an oilfield. Perhaps some day when the war was won but not yet over, he’d quit his Washington job and return to Norgaard. He could sink some wells, pump some oil, make some money … The two men chatted for half an hour; a blissful interlude in the midst of war.
After a while, Tom sighed.
‘Is Mitch around?’
‘Yeah, sure. He’s a good lad, that boy.’ Bard halted, bursting to tell Tom something, but holding himself back.
‘What? What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Sure it’s something.’
‘No, don’t worry. I wasn’t going to say nothing.’
‘Lyman, will you please quit –’
‘Hey, hey, OK. Only don’t tell Rebecca. She’ll pretty near kill me if she learns. Kill you too, at that.’
Tom nodded and Bard continued.
‘We had a well blow out on us, pretty bad. We was fighting to control it, get it capped off. Your Mitch was like a lion. Balls of steel and worked his ass off too. Anyhow, we’d pretty much got the flow shut off, when some dunghead drops a load of well casing on the floor of the pumphouse. Sparks fly. Gas ignites.
Boom!
Your boy, Mitch, was out of there like some kinda fire beetle. Head on fire. Clothes on fire. Now, just as Mitch runs out, that guy Fishtail Shorthausen – you remember him, right? Called Fishtail on account of –’
‘Lyman, you gonna spend time telling me how Fishtail Shorthausen got his name? You got my only boy with his head on fire there.’
‘Uh, OK, sorry. Any case, Fishtail grabs a hold of him and jumps with him right into the water tank we got set up there. They stay under maybe a minute. Mitch ain’t on fire any more, but he’s pretty near drownded. He manages to punch his way outa Fishtail’s grip and comes to the surface. We make him stay in that tank most of the night. Only way to keep him cold. His skin turned out fine, only his head got crisped down bald as a cue ball. Had to send him off to check out our gas stations in Florida for a few weeks, cause I knew I’d catch hell from Rebecca if she knew we’d tried to fry him.’
‘He OK now?’
‘Fine. Just as much hair as you or me, only his eyebrows don’t seem to have come back too good. Question of time, I reckon. Any case, what the hell are eyebrows for, exactly?’
Tom nodded. Oilfields were dangerous places, but he’d never want to shelter Mitch – not that Mitch would let him, anyway.
‘I oughta see him, really.’
Bard nodded, but he caught something in Tom’s tone that wasn’t right. ‘You down here long, pal? You spend too long in DC and you’re going to start thinking DC. You heard they want motorists to cut down petrol usage? Like something out of Russia, ain’t it?’
There’s a war on, in case you were forgetting.’
‘And this is America, in case you were forgetting.’ Bard spat. In America you should be able to fight a world war in Asia and Europe, win in both places, and still give motorists as much cheap gas as they wanted.
‘I’m going to Europe,’ said Tom.
It was true. Tom’s role in the Pacific war was increasingly unnecessary. The oil war had been won so conclusively, that there wasn’t much more for an oilman to do there. From an oil perspective, the real action was transferring to Europe. Tom was America’s top oil strategist. It made every sense for Tom to go out there and liaise closely with the British Petroleum Board.
But that didn’t mean he wanted to go. The Secretary of State had suggested it. Tom had refused. President Roosevelt had suggested it. Tom had refused. Then Roosevelt had called Tom into the Oval Office, told Tom he was damn well going to go if he, Roosevelt, had ordered him to go. And it was only then, deeply reluctant, but no longer able to say no, that Tom had agreed.
‘You just going for a trip,’ said Bard, ‘or –’
‘No. There’s work to be done. Plenty of it.’
Bard stared hard at his boss. There could be only one reason for Tom going to Europe. The Americans were finally going to take the war to Hitler, and Tom was going to be the man holding the petrol pump.
‘Sheez,’ said Bard, ‘you gonna have your work cut out there, no mistake. Oil business is hard enough, never mind Kraut-heads shooting at you.’
Tom nodded agreement. He couldn’t say anything, but Bard was right. Never in the history of war had anything been attempted on the scale now envisaged, and in terms of supply logistics, by far the toughest part related to oil. The American Quartermaster Corps reckoned each allied soldier would need to be supported by approximately seventy pounds of supplies and equipment. Fully half of that total was oil-related.
But as the moment drew nearer, Tom found it harder and harder to concentrate.
He was going to London to meet Alan.
He couldn’t think about it. The very idea was like a plate of red-hot metal. If he allowed his mind to touch upon it, even for a second, he had to snatch his attention away with a mental shriek of pain.
Alan had tried to kill him, had tried to wreck his company, had tried every way he could to ruin his life.
Tom would have given all the money he had – his oil wells, even – to avoid meeting his twin again.
Bard was looking at his boss with concern. ‘You OK, bud?’
Tom forced himself to grin. ‘Yeah, guess they’ll keep me busy.’
‘So this is like a kind of goodbye visit, then?’
Tom nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, good luck, pal. I guess you have the honour of serving your country, and all.’
Tom nodded.
‘I’ll take you to Mitch.’
Tom nodded again. ‘Yeah.’ He hesitated.
Bard raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Yeah, look, do me a favour, would you?’
‘Sure. Whatever.’
‘Just don’t tell him I sat on the goddamn steam pipe, willya?’
It was 18 May 1944.
Pipeline or tanker.
That was the choice. One alternative which couldn’t be built. A second alternative which was a please-bomb-here invitation to the Luftwaffe. So what was to be done?
Alan did the only thing he could do. Working with his best engineers, he ordered the development of a brand-new technology, one never used anywhere in the world before. They hammered out the concept during an all-night conference that began with tea and cigarettes and ended with dawn tangling in the London trees and the air thick with tobacco smoke and optimism. They built scale models. The mathematicians ran computations, came up with the wrong answers, and worked their numbers again. Alan ordered prototypes and simulations and dummy runs, until he was sure he had something that could work. But the fact remained there was only one test that mattered, and it was coming up shortly.
The project had been kept top secret, of course – though, naturally enough, Tom Calloway had been kept in the loop. But it needed a codename and Alan had been the one to christen it. The name, once you thought about it for a moment, was obvious. There was only one thing it could be called:
PLUTO.
The fate of the free world would hang on a thing called
PLUTO.
The Boeing Clipper seaplane bobbed uncomfortably on its ungainly floats. The engines started up, the propellers beating the grey water into spray. The engine noise ascended into a high whine, the plane lurched, then took off, slewing a little in a vicious little sidewind. They gained height and the pilot took the plane round in a long arc, heading east. Beneath them, a dirty Atlantic surf creamed round the rocky Newfoundland coast, before it too passed behind them. They wouldn’t see a coastline again until just a few minutes short of their destination.
The plane was unheated and it quickly grew freezing. There was a pile of American army-issue blankets at the back of the cabin, and Tom and the four other passengers helped themselves generously. Although it was theoretically a night flight, there wasn’t much darkness this far north at this time of year. Tom attempted to sleep and failed. Instead, for the long thirteen-hour flight, he sat beneath a mound of blankets, half-deafened by the noise, sipped from a flask of coffee he’d brought with him and stared out of the window at the grey-blue world beneath.
He tried to think of other things. He tried thinking of Rebecca or Mitch or Lyman Bard or Norgaard Petroleum. He tried focusing on work. He thought about
PLUTO
and the huge test it was about to face. But it was hopeless.
For the first time since he embarked from Liverpool in 1919, he was returning to the country of his birth. To England. To Alan. He tried to wrestle his thoughts away, but couldn’t. His heart was locked and inaccessible. His feelings were numb. He felt like the seascape passing under the wing: frozen, grey, desolate.
An odd-looking coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack nosed her way towards them. The wind was at cross-purposes with the tide, and sharp little waves griddled the water. Alan looked at the boat long and hard through a pair of binoculars. She looked like nothing at all: a snub-nosed sea-tramp out of place amidst the jam of naval shipping. But though less than beautiful, she was the most important ship in port.
On the dockside with Alan – Sir Alan Montague now, following the death of his father and brother – there was a lieutenant colonel from the American staff. He had the spacious sun-filled manner of a born Westerner, but the slow intelligent eyes of a serious professional. The American looked at the coaster for a little, then said, ‘So? Can we go see it now?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Go see it.
PLUTO
.’
Though Alan was tired all the time these days, he couldn’t help but laugh. Obviously no one had told the American what to expect. Alan pointed out across the water. ‘There.
PLUTO
.’
‘
What?
You’re kidding, right?’
‘No.’
‘That little … boat?’
‘Well, not the ship so much, it’s what’s on board her.’
The American took another look. The coaster had passed them now. It was clear that her hold had been adapted for some specific type of cargo, but the cargo space itself was empty.
‘I’m not getting you,’ said the American. ‘There’s nothing on board her.’
‘Precisely. That’s precisely the beauty of it.’
But Alan wasn’t thinking about
PLUTO
. He was thinking about Tom. Tom was in England now. In little more than a day, they’d meet. He tried to wrestle his thoughts away, but couldn’t. His heart was locked and inaccessible. His feelings were numb. He felt like the crowded seascape in front of him: wind-blown, grey, desolate.
The Clipper landed neatly on the windy waters at Stranraer, Scotland. The breeze outside the plane was salt and sharp, and Tom was half soaked by the time they made it from the plane to shore. An American GI had a car waiting.