Oil Slick td-16

by Warren Murphy

  The two hundred and fifty other arguing delegates who had remained thought they were missing something when they heard voices raised louder than their own, and they stopped to listen to the words.

  Then, lest they be left out of some very important new movement that could bring a new day of peace of the world, they picked up the chant. "Long live King Adras."

  "Long live King Adras."

  "Long live King Adras."

  They vied with each other to shout the loudest, and soon the Triumph Building resounded with their voices and their echoes.

  "Long live King Adras."

  "Long live King Adras."

  Chiun was leading the cheers as if he were an orchestra conductor, waving his hands in front of him.

  Remo turned in disgust and bumped into the very bumpable body of Jessie Jenkins.

  "Now that you've got us back to endorsing the monarchy, what's next? Feudalism?" she asked.

  "You'll be lucky if he stops at that," Remo said. "How did your dinner go with Baraka?"

  "Well, for a man with such a reputation as a woman user, he lost."

  "Oh?"

  Jessie laughed and the motion rippled her breasts under the light purple top she wore.

  "It must have been that note I gave him. The one from you."

  "Oh, you did deliver it?"

  "Sure. I told you I would. Anyway, I gave it to him. He read it and ran out of the room as if his tail was on fire. Then he came back ten minutes later and ushered us out. Before the ice cream."

  "That's interesting," said Remo, who found it interesting. If Baraka had taken the letter to show someone, that someone was probably Nuihc. It would mean he was staying right in Baraka's palace. Why? He was probably waiting for the right moment to move against Chiun and Remo.

  "Anybody offer to buy your oil secret yet?" Jessie asked a little too conversationally.

  "I've had a few nibbles. And speaking of nibbles, what are you doing tonight for dinner?"

  "After the day's rioting is over, we get marched back to our barracks. There we are fed as guests of the Lobynian state. Then we go to sleep. No deviations will be permitted," she said, mocking a deep Nazi accent.

  "How about skipping it and having dinner with me?"

  "Love to. But I can't get out." To his look of surprise, she added, "Really. We're not permitted to leave the camp."

  "Maybe Chiun's right in pushing monarchy. People's democracy seems to have everything except democracy for people," he said.

  "No gain without pain," suggested Jessie.

  "If you could get out, would you have dinner with me?"

  "Sure."

  "Be at the main gate of your place at 8:30pm sharp."

  "They've got guards who look like they'd appreciate nothing better than a chance to shoot you."

  "Don't tell them my name is Goldberg," said Remo, and turned away to look for Chiun.

  Chiun was approaching him now. The walls and ceiling of the building still resounded with cheers for bonnie King Adras.

  "I think we have done enough for today," said Chiun.

  Remo could only agree.

  At the same time in Lobynia, there was another kind of agreement, this between Colonel Baraka and Clayton Clogg.

  At Clogg's invitation, the two men had driven forty miles out into the desert to a mammoth oil field, the main depot to which more than two million barrels of oil daily from Lobynia's eight hundred wells was pumped for storage, and then for shipment by tanker to the rest of the world.

  Clogg's black limousine had stopped near the depot, and he told his chauffeur to go for a walk, despite the bone-melting one hundred and thirty degree desert temperature.

  "Before you ask," Baraka said, "I will not take steps to end the embargo on oil to your country."

  "Fine," said Clogg. "I don't want you to." The look of surprise on Baraka's face passed quickly.

  "Then what do you want?" he asked, not deferentially, but not rudely either.

  "To ask you a question. What are you going to do with your oil"

  "There will be buyers," said Baraka, detesting this pig-nosed American who instantly had put his finger on the weak spot in the "Arabian salami" tactics.

  "Yes," Clogg said. "For a while. The Russians of course will buy to try to hurt the West. But eventually they will have stockpiled and will stop buying excesses because their economy will not stand the drain."

  "There is Europe," said Baraka.

  "Yes. And Europe will buy your oil until the American economy starts running down and then theirs starts running down. Oil is needed for vehicles and manufacturing and Europe must follow there where America goes."

  How like Clogg, Baraka thought, to forget the other uses of oil. The human uses. Heating for homes. The generation of electricity. On his mind were only vehicles and manufacturing. He was so American-industrialist he would have been a cartoon, had he not been too ugly to be a cartoon. Baraka looked out at the acre after acre of storage tanks, oil derricks, complicated equipment, almost all of it operated by computers built by the American oil companies, but he said nothing.

  "So you will have a surplus of oil," said Clogg, "and your nation cannot live on oil stockpiles."

  "Please dispense with the economics lesson. I take it you have a proposal."

  "Yes, I have. Continue the American embargo. However, grant Oxonoco the right to drill on one or several of your offshore islands, with a clear contract that any oil we find is ours to use."

  "There is no oil in the offshore islands."

  Clogg smiled, a narrow twist of his mouth that made him, God forbid, even uglier than God had planned.

  "As they say in my country, so what? Constructing an underground pipeline from this center to the offshore island would be a matter of only months. We could drain off your surplus oil and sell it as our own. Lobynia would get a great deal of private income-for you to dispose of as you see fit."

  "And your company would control America's economy," Baraka said.

  "Of course."

  Baraka stared at his oil wells. A month ago, he would have shot Clogg before the man could finish the first sentence. The effrontery of offering Baraka a bribe. But that was a month ago, when he had still believed that this land could be governed, and he could himself live to an old age in honor and glory. But now there was the prophecy against his life. So Nuihc had promised to protect him from the American assassins. But who would protect him from Nuihc? Baraka found that he had neither stomach nor tolerance to be ordered around like a child for as long as he ruled. He had thought the other day of what life might be like in Switzerland. He looked out now and saw a Lobynian workman trying to open a threaded plug with a wrench. It took him six tries before he found the right wrench. In Switzerland, people made watches and clocks. In Lobynia, people made mess and confusion.

  "Could it be kept a secret?" Baraka asked.

  "Certainly. Part of our agreement would be that only Lobynian personnel could man the new oil installations for Oxonoco. And ..."

  "You need not finish. I know full well that our Lobynian craftsmen could work in a false oil depot for fifty years without ever suspecting that there was anything odd about oil coming out of a faucet."

  Clogg shrugged. He was glad Baraka had said it and not him. Sometimes these camel-herders were sensitive about the shortcomings of their people.

  It might work, Baraka decided. And Clogg, of course, was right. Without some such plan to drain off Lobynia's surplus oil, the economy of the country, already on the edge of disaster, would slide over the brink.

  He would have to be careful to keep the plan from Nuihc. But it would work. It would work.

  "There is a problem, though," said Clogg, intruding on Baraka's thoughts. Baraka turned to the oil man.

  "There is an American," Clogg said. "He has discovered a substitute for oil. His name is Remo Goldberg."

  "He has contacted me," said Baraka. "He is a fraud."

  Clogg shook his head. "No, he is not. I had him che
cked by our people. His is one of the most brilliant scientific minds in our country. If allowed to proceed, he could hurt not only your country but my company as well."

  "I am not permitted to move against him," said Baraka.

  "Not permitted?"

  Baraka realized his slip and backed off quickly. "I cannot risk confrontation with the United States government by simply removing one of their citizens."

  "Still," Clogg urged, "an accident..."

  "There have been a number of accidents involving American oil researchers lately," said Baraka.

  "I thought you might know something about that," said Clogg.

  "And I thought you might know something about it." The two men looked at each other, knowing the way men sometimes do, that each spoke the truth. Baraka wondered though who was right and "who was wrong about this Remo Goldberg. An oil scientist or an assassin? Perhaps both. One never knew the lengths of perfidy to which the United States would go.

  Clogg looked ahead and mused aloud, "Accidents happen to many people."

  "Well, of course, I cannot be held responsible for accidents," Baraka said, giving Clogg what he wanted: a license to remove Remo Goldberg.

  The two men talked some more, comparing notes on Remo Goldberg. Both realized that the only person who had any contact with him in Lobynia had been Jessie Jenkins, the buxom black American revolutionary. It was agreed that Baraka would allow one of Clogg's men to be admitted to the Third World compound, where he could keep an eye on Jessie. Baraka also gave his agreement to the plan, but said its announcement must wait a few weeks until "some small business" was accomplished.

  Clogg nodded, then leaned forward and blew the vehicle's horn. As if from nowhere, the chauffeur reappeared and was back in his seat, driving the car toward Dapoli.

  Baraka noticed the chauffeur was a young Lobynian, barely out of his teens, with smooth light skin, long black curly hair and the petulant lips of a woman. He looked at the chauffeur in mild distaste then asked Clogg if he had enjoyed the pleasures of the city.

  Clogg smiled but did not answer. He, too, was looking at the chauffeur.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jessie Jenkins wore a white dress as she waited behind the two guards who stood at attention at the only entrance to the fenced-in compound that housed the jerry-built barracks used by the delegates of the Third World International Youth Conference.

  The compound was surrounded by eight-foot-high hurricane fencing, topped by another two feet of barbed wire angled to prevent anyone inside from climbing out.

  Remo saw Jessie from a distance as he approached the gate. He also saw a young American with red hair leaning against a nearby barracks building, casually smoking and very uncasually watching Jessie.

  Remo stopped just short of the two armed guards and called past them to the young black woman.

  "Hi. Can you come out and play?"

  "My keepers won't let me." She nodded toward the guards.

  "Is that right, gentlemen?" Remo asked them.

  "No one is permitted to leave without a written pass."

  "And who issues these passes?" asked Remo.

  "No one," said the guard. The other stifled a smile.

  "Thank you for your courtesy," said Remo. "Come on down here," he called to Jessie, motioning with his head along the fence.

  She walked on her side, he on his, until they were a full hundred feet away from the guards. Glancing over his shoulder, Remo noticed that the redheaded American had moved along with them, still lurking back in the shadows of the compound.

  The fence with its inward-facing barbed wire was meant to keep prisoners in, but not to keep visitors out.

  Remo waited until he and Jessie had strolled into am area that was on the perimeter of a floodlight's reach, then he grabbed the top of the bar atop the hurricane fencing with both hands, ran two steps up the fence, and thrust out with both feet. The thrusting straightened his body; the upward momentum whirled it around as if he were a weight on the end of a string. His body flipped straight up in the air, then came down, still stiff, on Jessie's side of the fence. Just before his swinging body would have hit the barbed wire, he loosened his grip, tucked his upper body in, cleared the barbed wire, and landed noiselessly on his feet, alongside the amazed Jessie.

  "How'd you do that?" she said when she finally spoke.

  "Clean living."

  "Well, now that you're in, what do we do?"

  "Go out, of course."

  He led Jessie back toward the front gate.

  "How'd the conference go?" he asked.

  "Don't ask," she said.

  "If I promise not to ask, do you promise not to talk about racism, lack of opportunity, the ghetto, genocide, and oppression?"

  "Why, Mr. Goldberg, you don't sound like a liberal at all."

  "To me it always seems as if liberals love people in large masses, and this is the price they pay to hate people individually. I guess I'm not a liberal."

  "You don't hate people individually?" asked Jessie.

  "Sure I do," said Remo. "But I won't pay the price of having to love everybody in a lump. I reserve the right to decide a bastard's a bastard, just because he's a bastard."

  "All right," said Jessie. "That makes sense. No ghetto talk. You've got a deal."

  By now, they were within ten feet of the two guards.

  With his hand, Remo signaled Jessie to wait while he approached the guards.

  "Hi, fellas. Remember me?" he said.

  Both guards turned and looked at him, first in surprise then in annoyance.

  "What are you doing here?" they said.

  "I went to get two passes to leave this place."

  "Yes," the bigger guard said suspiciously.

  "I have them right here."

  "Yes?" said the guard again.

  Remo reached his hand into his trousers pocket and brought it out slowly, in a fist. He held it up between the two guards.

  "Right here," he said.

  They leaned forward to look.

  "Well?" said one of them.

  The two guards were leaning close to each other now, almost head to head, when Remo partially opened his hand, uncoiling the little finger and the index finger. He drove these fingers upward.

  Each one hit into the forehead of one of the guards, right at that delicate point where veins merge to form a Y close under the skin.

  The iron hard fingers like blunted spikes squashed into the veins, closing them for a moment, and bringing on total if short-lived unconsciousness. The two soldiers dropped to the ground, in what seemed, in the darkness, to be a heap of dirty olive drab clothes.

  "Come on, Jessie," said Remo.

  He helped the girl over the unconscious forms of the two guards. She looked down at them, seemingly unable to look away.

  "Oh, don't worry," said Remo. "They'll be all right. Just out for awhile."

  "Are you always so aggressive?" she asked.

  "I told you, I reserve the right to decide a bastard's a bastard and deal with him in bastardly fashion. These two qualified."

  "I have a notion we're going to have an interesting night."

  As they walked away from the compound, Remo glanced back over his shoulder to make sure their redheaded companion was following. He was.

  "Yes, an interesting night," Remo agreed.

  He did not know it would be made even more interesting by the man following the redhead. He was a slight man, an Oriental, in a black business suit. He rarely smiled. His name was Nuihc and he had vowed to kill not only Remo, but Chiun.

  This was the first occasion Jessie had had to sample Lobynian nightlife, which was nonexistent.

  "You can't get a drink," Remo said. "Baraka doesn't allow alcohol."

  "Well, jazz then. There must be a jazz joint."

  "Sorry," said Remo. "Baraka's closed down nightclubs too."

  "Can we dance?"

  "Men and women aren't allowed to dance together."

  "Baraka?" she asked.
>
  He nodded. "Baraka."

  "I should have poisoned his stuffed cabbage when I had a chance," she said.

  "Excuses, excuses."

  Remo and Jessie walked along Revolutionary Avenue and finally found one open place, that looked as if it might have once been called a nightclub. It was now labeled a private club "for Europeans only." Remo became a member of the club by slipping twenty dollars to the doorman. Inside, the place still carried memories of its nightclub days. There was a bar on the right. A large room in the back was full of tables leading up to a bandstand, where a belly dancer sweated to the music of three Lobynians playing unnameable string instruments and an unmentionable horn.

  "Ain't exactly Birdland," said Jessie.

  "Sufficient unto the day," began Remo. Jessie challenged him to finish the quote, but Remo declined since he could not remember the rest.

  Remo insisted to the waitress who came to greet them that they be seated in one of the large booths that bordered the main room. The booths were more like small rooms, big enough to seat eight along padded benches around the U-shaped wall. They were screened off from the rest of the room by beaded ropes which could be pulled back if one wanted to watch the floor show. The ropes were infrequently pulled back, since the booths were favorite meeting places for European men and their young male Lobynian lovers.

  Remo insisted on a booth. The waitress insisted that she did not understand English or his request. Remo insisted upon giving her ten dollars whereupon the waitress insisted that such a fine gentleman and his lady be seated in one of the fine booths that bordered the room.

  As they moved toward the back, Remo glanced behind him and glimpsed the redheaded American moving toward the bar.

  Jessie was upset that there was no alcohol, but finally she shared Remo's order of carrot juice.

  "You order that like you're used to it," she said. "A teetotaller?"

  "Only when I'm on duty."

  "And what kind of duty is that?" asked Jessie, after the waitress had left and Remo had unfastened the clips on the sides of the beaded ropes allowing them to drop and sealing off their booth from the view of the room.

  "The same kind of duty you're to," said Remo. "You know. Uncle Sam. The whole gig."