Against All Odds

by R. A. Lang

  He calmly went over to the crazed man and said, “Get out.” The man didn’t react at all, so the labourer asked him a second time: “Get out.” Again, he didn’t get a reaction.

  After that, the crazed man tried to return to the bar but the labourer responded by punching him on the side of his jaw, which knocked the man out cold. Apparently he barely moved his arm more than a few inches.

  The landlord opened the front door and shouted out to the police that they could come in. One police officer asked who had apprehended the man, and they pointed to Keith. The officer went over to Keith and thanked him for helping the community. The labourer completely ignored him; he just sat at the table like nothing had ever happened.

  The shutdown was completed with time to spare. Luckily for me, before that job had finished I was approached by a new agency with regard to a two-year contract in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  I signed the contract with the Japanese steel company in their London office in September of 1990, but before I could mobilise, Saddam Hussein had popped across the Kuwaiti border, which put my departure on hold. The Japanese are known for maintaining the safety of their employees and contractors alike.

  I needed to wait at home in Wales until the Japanese considered it stable enough in Iran for me to fly. After a month, I called the London office to say that I couldn’t wait indefinitely as I needed to make money.

  The administration manager, a lady from Yorkshire, asked me to check my bank account. Evidently, the Japanese had started paying me from the day I’d signed contracts. This was wonderful news. I enjoyed watching the news about the first Gulf war in my local pub knowing I was on full salary.

  It wasn’t to last, however. Early one morning, in January of 1991, I received a phone call from London. I was advised that my flight from London, Heathrow was scheduled for later that day.

  I had very little time to get my inoculations, but with my mother’s help I managed. After that, I headed straight for the Quadrant bus station to catch the coach to Heathrow Airport.

  In the meantime, it had begun to snow very heavily. By the time I arrived at Heathrow, the snow was quite deep. By this time, both my arms had seized up due to the injections I’d had earlier in the day; I could hardly move them to manage my suitcase. As luck would have it, the snow caused my flight to be postponed until the next day. I called the London office, and they told me that I’d already been booked into the Edwardian International Hotel near the airport.

  Once in the hotel and after looking at some of the prices on the bar and restaurant menus I rang the administration manager again to explain that I didn’t have money put aside for such expenses. To my surprise, I was told to enjoy the lobster and sign everything to my room because it was probably the last good meal I’d have for months!

  I spent three nights in the hotel waiting for a flight to Tehran. Each day, I would check out and return to the airport to see whether I had a flight. I spent twelve to fourteen hours every day waiting near the check-in counter but finally on the fourth day, I managed to get a flight by way of Frankfurt to avoid flying anywhere near the Middle East.

  By the time I got to Frankfurt, I was just in time to miss my connection to Tehran. I had to stay in yet another hotel, but this time with the compliments of the airline.

  That night wasn’t unlike any other night for an expat in transit. I sat at the hotel bar the whole evening and chatted with a German journalist who was on his way to Baghdad to provide war coverage.

  In the airport I noticed on the news channel that numerous Iraqi air-force jets were believed to have defected to Iran. Those jets were supposedly located at the airport I was about to travel to.

  The next day, I was on the flight to Tehran. I asked the airline to forward my details to my Tehran office, which they said they would.

  There were only twenty-four passengers on the entire flight, so the flight attendant understandably left the drinks trolley next to an Irish engineer sitting next to me. How civilised, I thought, as I was going to spend the next four months in a dry country.

  Chapter 4

  Islamic Republic of Iran

  I eventually arrived at Tehran airport at eleven o’clock at night a little worse for wear due to the damn drinks trolley. As we came in to land, I could see hundreds of MiG-29s along the entire length of the runway. In actual fact, the Iraqi fighters had lined the length of the runway two and a half times!

  I was soon to discover that nobody had been informed of my new arrival time in Tehran so there wasn’t anyone from the Japanese company there to meet me.

  Luckily, I had a number to call. After an hour of trying to wake somebody up, I was finally able to announce my arrival. It took over an hour for a Japanese man to get to the airport because the traffic in Tehran was like a permanent rush hour 24/7. As I stood there guarding my suitcase in the freezing cold, Iranian black marketers tried to buy my dollars from me.

  The best was yet to come. The next day was a national holiday in Iran, so there were no domestic flights. After catching just four hours of sleep, they woke me up and explained that my taxi was waiting to take me south on a ten hour drive from Tehran to Mobarakeh, near Esfahan.

  After a short time in the battered Hillman Hunter taxi, which didn’t even have headlights, I heard gunfire all around us. I asked the driver what the hell was happening, and he calmly smiled and said, “It’s Revolution Day in Iran. We celebrate this every year.” It was quite dangerous outside because everything they were shooting up into the air was coming back down all around us!

  I never quite understood why they celebrated ‘Revolution Day’, as the end result from the revolution was that Iran became a dry country and all bars and clubs had been destroyed. Apparently, the streets of Esfahan were flowing with rivers of beer from the barrels being carried out of hotel bars and broken up in the streets.

  It was pitch dark for the last couple of hours, and we were relying on the moonlight to avoid all the potholes in the road. I remember telling the driver to slow down because we were going far too fast. I didn’t want an accident in the middle of nowhere. The driver told me that everything was okay because Allah was watching over him. I reminded him that Allah certainly wasn’t watching over me, and I told him again to slow down.

  Working in Iran was a good experience, and the Iranians were wonderful people. I was always getting invited to somebody’s home on my Fridays off. I’d buy a bottle of black market whisky to take along, which was always appreciated. Sadly, I did see a sick sight on one of my trips into Esfahan. As we drove through a small village, the driver stopped the taxi to show me a public execution.

  I saw a young man’s head placed in a noose, which was tied to the hook of a very small crane we like to call a cherry picker. There was a young girl standing against a wall with her hands tied behind her back. Her head was covered with a black cotton sack. Near the girl were piles of large rocks, and fat old women stood next to them. At that time, only women could throw the rocks at the victim.

  The execution was just about to begin, so I ordered my driver to go. He was hesitant because he wanted to watch, but I strongly insisted. Fortunately, he drove away just before they murdered the no doubt innocent young couple.

  My heart wasn’t into visiting anyone after seeing such a terrible sight, but I continued to visit the family anyway. They understood my feelings on the matter, and they didn’t agree with how Iran handled young couples holding hands or caught having a little cuddle in those days.

  Alcohol was legal in Iran if you weren’t a Muslim, but there was no tolerance if you were caught carrying it into your home. The easiest answer was to make your own, so that was exactly what I did. First, I bought a pressure cooker and a few feet of 8mm copper piping. And then I managed to find a short plastic tube to connect the copper pipe to the safety valve connection on the pressure cooker’s lid.

  The copper pipe was pulled around an empty bottle to form it into a coil, and that ran from the pressure cooker into the kitche
n sink (which was full of cold water). During the distilling process, I left the cold water tap running, allowing the water to run out through the overflow. This helped condense the vapour going through the pipe. I had to be careful not to let the liquid inside the pressure cooker reach over 89 degrees because alcohol evaporates at 89 degrees and methanol evaporates over 90 degrees.

  I regularly lit the clear liquid dripping from the end of the copper pipe to ensure that the liquid was producing a very clear blue colour. Any hint of orange, purple, or red would mean that I had to stop the process and pour the remains down the toilet. I had the shiniest, cleanest toilet on the compound.

  It took several hours to fill a water bottle full of the uncut alcohol, but that was just the first part of the process. Once I had filled a bottle two-thirds full, I filled the rest of the bottle with raisins.

  After that, I would turn the bottle once per day for a month before using it as a rough brandy. It tasted okay mixed with Coke. I never bothered to cut it back with 50% water; instead, I used more Coke and ice.

  Apart from my still, I brewed beer from cases of alcohol-free cans. I’d just add dark brown sugar and yeast. This process was much simpler and quicker. For each case of alcohol-free beer, I would dissolve a kilo of dark brown sugar. I’d pour a sachet of dried yeast into a cup of warm water with a little sugar to start the fermentation process, and then I’d add it to my plastic bin with four cases of beer and four kilos of dissolved brown sugar.

  After ten days, I’d siphon the beer into empty Coke and lemonade bottles, which were capable of taking the pressure. And then I’d add a tablespoon of white sugar to each bottle and replace the tops as quickly as possible, before the yeast reacted to the additional sugar.

  I’d keep the filled bottles in a dark place for another seven days before moving them into my refrigerator. And then I’d wait until they were so cold that the internal pressure was low enough to open them without having them spray all over the place. I continuously poured the liquid into a large jug until the sediment arrived at the bottles neck, which meant it was time to stop.

  And then there was the wine. Originally discovered in that region well over four thousand years before Christ, and even earlier in some places, it seemed like a natural choice, plus, it was easy to do. I just bought twelve bottles of grape juice, two-and-a-quarter kilos of white sugar and a sachet of dried yeast. From there, I simply mixed everything together and let it sit for twenty-one days before bottling.

  I made an air lock in the shape of an s with a little water and some cotton wool. That way, the carbon dioxide could escape, which stopped the explosions from happening but didn’t allow anything to re-enter. The original airlock was just a prototype, but later, I was able to smuggle in purpose-made airlocks bought from winemaking shops in Wales. They were perfect for the job.

  Sometimes I needed to acquire whisky at short notice so I made the run into Esfahan myself. I used to go to a jewellery shop, which was more a front for the black marketers peddling the contraband goods. Every trip into Esfahan would pick up a government spy. He was easy to spot, as he’d follow me down every street keeping, he thought, un-noticed and would pretend to be looking into a shop window if I’d turn around in his direction.

  The shop knew all about this and made the exchange very fast. I’d enter the shop and discreetly drop my bag on the floor, out of sight of my spy. Then someone would very quickly remove the rags that were used to fill it together with the payment in $$s and replace with the bottles. The whole exchange was done so fast so I could leave without time to be seen buying anything. I purposely visited a few more shops, normally just looking through the windows to give the illusion I wasn’t in any kind of hurry, whilst slowly making my way back to our courtesy bus.

  Once safely back on the bus, it was time to run the gauntlet through the periodic roadblocks back to my compound. It was on one of these trips that the bus was held up at a makeshift roadblock and also boarded. Two Iranian police holding Kalashnikov AK-47s searched the bus seat by seat until they came to where I was sitting. I figured this was a good time to pretend to sleep, which is exactly what I did. The officer ordered me in Farsi to open my bag, but I completely ignored his instructions and continued to sleep. He was quite insistent that I open my bag and I began to find the entire situation rather funny. I felt the urge to start laughing, but instead, I bit my tongue to try to control myself.

  After a few minutes the police gave up and left me carry on my journey. Once they’d left, I opened my mouth to take a deep breath of relief and blood poured out, all down the front of my polo shirt. I hadn’t realised I was biting so hard, but it was a rude awakening of the country I was in.

  During the construction phase of the project, we heard that the Iranian president was planning to visit the site. Nobody was told which day he would arrive for security reasons, but I saw numerous people planting evergreen trees all along the entrance roads to the steelworks to prepare for his arrival.

  One day, I was walking around one of the five direct reduction iron ore modules where nobody was working. I was checking the status of piping that had been installed, and I lost track of time. A couple of hours must have passed before I realised how quiet the site had got, so I became suspicious and decided to return back to the office to find out what was happening.

  As I walked out from under the module, a large group of Iranians ran towards me and pointed their Kalashnikov AK-47s at me. Just before I was totally surrounded I caught sight of Rafsanjani himself. He briefly saw me before I was blocked from view and hastily escorted off the site.

  My work rotation was sixteen weeks of work and just ten days’ break, back in the United Kingdom. Fortunately, due to the flight timetable, I was able to have twelve days back at home. I always tried to time my home breaks so I would be home at the same time as a friend of mine who was working in the merchant navy as a marine engineer.

  In March of 1992 I was presented with my usual home leave flight tickets. My flight home consisted of a domestic flight from Esfahan to Tehran, where I would stay overnight, and then two international flights; one from Tehran to Amsterdam, and a final flight from Amsterdam to Cardiff airport in Wales. On this particular home trip, my scheduled arrival date was a week before my friend would arrive back from the ship he was on, leaving me with just a few days to have his company.

  We were quite busy on site at that time with all the piping which I was responsible for, so the Japanese project manager allowed me to postpone my home leave by a week. This was great news, as I’d earn an extra week’s salary, plus have my friend’s company the whole time I was home.

  Unbeknown to me at the time, my original flight wasn’t going to make it to Tehran, at least not in one piece. The day I was originally booked to fly to Tehran was a busy one for me. I was on site most of the day supervising the pressure testing of a large process piping system and also air-flushing any remaining debris from inside the piping loops by opening valves wherever there was a pipe branch. It was late in the afternoon when I returned back to my office to update the records I kept of all piping activities and progress records, and a young Iranian documentation engineer came running over to me.

  He was very hard-working and had managed to learn very good English in just six months! He asked me if I had heard the news, to which I replied, “How? I’ve been on site almost the whole day.” We entered my office and sat down at my desk where my original flight schedule was still visible amongst the piles of other papers.

  The young Iranian immediately put his index finger on my flight schedule and told me that I was one very lucky man. Puzzled, I asked why. He told me that my flight had had a bomb planted onboard and the fully-laden flight blew up just as it neared Tehran. It was later printed in the Tehran Times that the flight was carrying some high-ranking VIPs from the National Iranian Steel Company, which may have been the reason for the bomb on board. There were no survivors. I kept that flight schedule for quite a long time until it eventually was lost. />
  The Iranians also made new postage stamps to commemorate the project we were working on and each of us in the office were given a full sheet of the first edition stamps. The stamps were of an artist’s impression of an aerial view of the steelworks we had built. At that time it was the second biggest in the world; the biggest was in Russia. It didn’t feel right that we as foreigners were given such a unique gift, whilst our Iranian contractor received nothing, so I gave mine to the young documentation engineer as they would surely be worth something in years to come.

  In December of 1992 I was responsible for pressure testing a natural gas ‘header’ (pipe manifold) which was one hundred metres long. Due to budget restrictions and lack of chemical consumables, I had to pressure test with water (hydro-test), without any anti-freeze chemicals added to the test water.

  The daytime temperature was minus twenty-two degrees centigrade so if I raised the internal test pressure, the entire pipe line would have frozen in seconds, causing it to burst along its entire length, including some very expensive globe, ball, check and gate valves at the same time, with a serious dollar and schedule value. It was a genuine mission impossible for the time of year. At that time, there was something playing on my mind that nothing was impossible. I checked the site’s general arrangement drawings, the process and instrumentation diagrams, isometric drawings and any other drawing I could find relating to the area I needed to pressure test.

  Eventually, and so conveniently, I discovered that there was a super-heated water supply right at the beginning of the piping I needed to test. The super-heated water supply came from the Italian part of the site, as they were building the steel rolling mill, and their site was segregated from my side of the complex by a chain-linked fence. Unfortunately for the Italians, the fence didn’t cover access to the drain valve of their super-heated water supply piping. I had my brilliant Iranian piping gang connect a high pressure hose to the Italians’ super-heated water drain valve, so we could run the hot water down the pipe manifold which I needed to pressure test.