The Virgin concentrated on erecting the umbrella and spreading the beach mat while the girls chattered. Stripped down to his bathing costume, he went to sit with them.
“I missed an accident yesterday,” Evelina told him. “After I’d gone they brought in some burnt soldiers.”
“Yes. Bad burns,” Danka shook her head with resignation. “Then just we trying to take them from the Army pick-ups, some officers scream up in big Mercedes car and make them all go back in the pick-ups and go away. It is big problem. I don’t know where they take them. No other hospital in town. I think those men die soon; some of them. Burns like that very difficult.”
“I wonder what the bastards are up to now?” The Virgin mused. “Some-one probably screwed up loading gasoline and they’re trying to hide it from Almadi. But if people are dying...”
“Sure. They dying for sure. And Virgin, not normal burning. Big blisters but no black. Steam, maybe, not fire. I don’t know, but they dying. Boże. Those poor boys. But what can you do? Not even possible to make them injections.”
The Virgin shuddered. He often heard horror stories from the nurses that made his skin crawl. He did not know how they could handle the ugliness of it all. Perhaps having the power to do something about the suffering made it easier. This accident seemed a bit different though. Firstly it was Army, and secondly they were obviously trying to hide something. He wondered what it could be for a moment and then made for the water, leaving Evelina hiding in the shade of the umbrella. She was wearing an incredibly old-fashioned, ruched pink one-piece swimming costume and reading a magazine.
- 2 -
He delivered Evelina back to the hospital before seven next morning. If that did not destroy her reputation, nothing would. He could not understand why she should suddenly want to court the disapproval of her community, but she had just insisted quietly that she wanted to stay another night, and equally quietly locked her door as she went to bed. If she understood what she was doing to The Virgin’s nervous system, she did not let it worry her. His frustrations were lost in the start of a new week.
The office was quiet at seven o’clock. Almadi did not start for another hour at least, but the boss had insisted that Sabah should start early enough to get a clear telephone line to the desert. So the first hour of the day was always quiet. Just a quick phone call to pick up any queries and fuel orders, and then he could settle back with a coffee and get on with any thinking work before the rest of the office came in.
The major job on his desk this morning was a job procedure for the RomDril-1 rig drilling just north of Sabah. Having a rig thirty minutes drive away was an unusual luxury. It meant he could get out of the office with a legitimate excuse whenever the work got too tedious. Of course, as a downside he occasionally had to go and sit through operations at inconvenient times, but it was worth it. He liked to play at being a field engineer once in a while.
The job coming up was a 13-3/8” casing cementation. Not difficult, but big. They would set the casing at 1800m, much deeper than normal because TAMCO wanted to drill deep on this hole. The thing about cementing 13-3/8” casings was not that they were technically difficult, but just that they took so much cement. If TAMCO wanted to do a proper job, filling a nominally 17-1/2” diameter hole with steel casing of 13-3/8” outside diameter left a gap between the pipe and the hole wall that could take 5000 sacks of cement to fill. Add in the chemicals - retarder and dispersant - to keep the cement slurry liquid for long enough to pump it into place, and the final bill for the operation would start to get large. Plus the casing hardware, delivery charges and the actual operational costs, and TAMCO would be running for cover. The money would lie in the size of the job rather than its sophistication. The Virgin’s task was to persuade TAMCO to write an expensive cementing program while trying at the same time to make 5000 sacks of cement look small. The proposal was going to be a challenge.
The trouble did not usually come from Bill the Drilling Superintendent. He was Canadian and used to doing things properly. Tayfun, the drilling engineer in charge of mud and cementing, was the one who always gave The Virgin nightmares. Time after time he would come up with suggestions drawn from his native Azeri oil-patch, where everything was always rosy and they never had difficult wells. Ask him for a 13-3/8” design and he would come up with a 200 sack plug that would just about hold the casing shoe in place. Blow-outs were something he read about occasionally but never expected to happen to him. The Virgin took care to write an open-ended proposal that did not look too expensive at first sight, but had the potential to grow into a really big operation. Once the concept of a proper job was on the table, it would be so much harder for Tayfun to trim it down without putting his own name to it, and like most of the foreigners in TAMCO, he would rather just let things roll on than sign his name to anything.
The Virgin fired up the office computer and prepared to fit a quart into a pint pot. He was still there when his stomach told him that lunch would be appreciated. If RomDril had not been RomDril, he could have driven to the rig for a meal and a coffee with the company man, but the thought of dry Romanian fried chicken sent him home instead. Micro-waved jacket potato and tinned tuna again. Why not? Add a couple of fresh tomatoes and it was nutritious enough. Anyway, he did not want to eat too much because it was Saturday afternoon, and Saturday meant the Hash.
Five o’clock saw him driving off to Cape Horn, this week’s Hash venue. Cape Horn was a minuscule rocky nubbin interrupting the smooth run of sandy beach north of town. For most of the year the Mediterranean lay lifeless around its sandy rocks, and rounding the Horn was a pleasant summer dog-paddle. Now the early autumn days meant cooler weather, and the local fishermen had packed their gear away for the year. The car bounced down the track to an old tyre that some-one had stood on edge against a rock. ‘Run #783’ was daubed crudely around its walls in pink paint. The others had started to arrive and were hiding in their cars from the watery breeze. Over the next five minutes another dozen cars bumped up to the old tyre, and their occupants got out and began to change. It felt a touch chilly standing around without a track suit and The Virgin thought about running in a sweater. Some vestige of masculine pride prevented him.
The clock soon drove the Master over to the old tyre. He pulled his miniature hunting horn from his track-suit pocket - no false pride there - and blew a raspberry. “Sabah Hash House Harriers, Run Number 783, running on pansy pink - ON-ON!” He ran a token half a dozen strides at the head of the pack and lapsed into a walk. The serious hashers jostled past him and away.
They followed pink splotches of paint daubed on loose pebbles. The marks stood out clearly against the bare sandy earth and cropped vegetation, and the pack was soon well spread out along the trail. Fast runners at the front, the casual hashers walking along behind and every sort of unfit or lazy foreigner straggling between them. The Virgin applied himself to guessing where the trail would be going, and where profitable short cuts might lie. Normally at this venue the trail was a tight loop heading out along the coast and back on the beach (or vice versa). The Virgin could run as far as his energy level would allow and then cut across the loop and sneak home. But the Hare this week was Rubberdy-Dub and he had a reputation for second-guessing even the most determined of short-cutters. Right now his trail led them straight away from the sea and who knew if he would turn left or right? As The Virgin puffed up to the first check it seemed that Rubberdy was living up to his reputation. The front runners had already found and abandoned two false trails and were scattered wide looking for the real one.
The trail zigged and zagged, and headed more or less away from the cars for a depressingly long distance. Difficult checks with easy trails beckoning back down towards the beach - all false. The Virgin’s private energy conservation programme would normally have led him off to one side or the other by now in search of some not-too-blatant short-cut. This week he was still undecided which way to turn.
He jogged on into some scrubby trees to yet another
check - number 7 painted on the rusting shell of an abandoned refrigerator. He hardly had time to catch his breath when the Hash Horn beeped from somewhere in front and to his left. He slid down a bank into a stony wadi and followed the other slow coaches. He had begun to doubt Rubberdy’s sanity when the wadi opened out into a bigger channel and the paint turned right - up towards the jebel and still further away from the sea.
Rubberdy was waiting for them where the main road crossed the wadi. He had somehow borrowed a bus – a fearsome Russian wreck with no glass in its windows and very little of its original blue paint surviving - to drive them back to the cars. No-one but Rubberdy would go to such lengths to fool everyone. Still, it felt good to jolt slowly back to the cars. It felt even nicer to watch all the faint hearts, who had given up early and not reached the bus, having to jog back down to the sea under their own power.
The sun was dropping scarlet into the sea as they drove the short distance to the Bash. A hollow in the sand dunes, out of sight and relatively safe. Eytie Joe had brought a pick-up load of broken pallets from his camp and the boy scouts amongst them got busy lighting a fire. They put the table up and set the Tilley lamp glowing. The pack stood and watched as the amber was decanted into the insulated urn and then crowded around with their plastic cups, faces glowing in the lamp-light as they poured their first drink of the day.
The Virgin felt a tug at his elbow. “You go swimming tonight? I come too.” He looked down at Danka.
“Swimming? It’s too bloody cold for that. Besides, I don’t have my swimming gear.”
“Neither I,” she announced blandly. “Come on, we go a little away.”
Too polite or too lazy to refuse her anything, The Virgin turned to follow. Strange, he thought, why me? There had never been more than shared friends and polite conversation between them, and now she had invited him to skinny-dip in the starlight. What could a gentleman say? She took his arm as they picked their way along the beach.
“Where is Evelina tonight? You not bring her to Hash?”
“No - well - I don’t think she’d want to come.” He could just imagine the expression on Evelina’s face if she had been forced to join in the noisy drinking games for which the Sabah Hash was famous.
“I think she have trouble with Zella.”
Now The Virgin understood. Danka was fishing for gossip. “Yes – the bastard caught her in a store-room. He tried to touch her but she screamed and one of the Sudanese came into the room. No harm done, but he really pissed her off.”
“I think she hurt him. He not come to hospital today and she cut her nails too short. I think she scratch him and break her nails.” Danka would obviously get the full story eventually.
“Good. She should have scratched his eyes out.” Indeed, The Virgin wished she had done some real damage.
“And then you take her home, right?”
“Ah, yes. She stayed with me. In the guest room.” Danka looked at him in disbelief. “It’s true. She slept in the guest room.” And locked the door, he might have added, and me with my tongue hanging out in the next room.
Danka chuckled. “Poor Virgin! Never mind - she too dry and bony. Not good in bed.” She chuckled again and hung on his arm, a hot, round, inviting dumpling of a girl. “I think she never try a man. And you not want to be the first. Too much trouble I think, and not good fun.”
Her closeness and cheerful sexiness had begun to stir The Virgin and he was just wondering if it would be worth getting a bit closer when she turned back. “Good. We go far enough. We swim here.” The Bash showed as a faint glow in the dark dunes behind them, and the twilight from the west gave little light to see by. The breeze had died with the sun and the shivering cold had gentled. Danka began to undress.
What could a gentleman do, The Virgin asked himself again? He quickly stripped off, trying not to look too closely at the white form emerging beside him. It was too dark to make out any details but the animal in him was beginning to raise its head. He started for the sea to drown his embarrassment but she called him back. “Wait, wait. We go together.”
She was unhooking her bra and then using his arm for balance, she pulled her socks off and dropped them onto the heap of clothes. “Ah. It is too cold. And will be colder when we come out. Oh look!” She chuckled and made a firm grab for him. “Jaki ładny! Is very good. I like him! Come, first we swim.” Like a dog on a lead, The Virgin found himself being drawn into the water. It was cold enough to reduce the problem.
Getting out was a cold business. Neither of them had a towel so The Virgin rubbed her down briskly with his tee-shirt and then wrapped the jacket of his track suit about her shoulders. Sitting bare-bottomed on the dry sea grass, he hugged her close and felt his blood start to race again. The craziness had started to run through Danka’s veins too and she burrowed into his embrace, offering a kiss. She tasted strong and sexy. Reaching under her legs he lifted her onto his lap without breaking their kiss. His free hand groped inside the track suit jacket to squeeze a heavy breast.
“Stop right there!”
Standing in front of them stood a man with a gun. A soldier. In uniform. Pointing a stubby machine gun at them. His dark green clothing showed almost black, and his face was invisible beneath the peak of his forage cap. Danka gave a gasp and tried to reach for their clothes.
“No! Stop right there. If you keep still nothing will happen.”
Danka pushed The Virgin’s hand from her jacket and tried to cover herself up. As they sat uncomprehending, more uniformed figures appeared behind the threatening man. Muted comments were made in a language The Virgin did not recognise, and met with quiet laughter. It was not Arabic, and the American-accented English of the man in front of them had given no hint of their origin either.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stay sitting where you are. Just for a few minutes. Then we’ll go.”
“I want my clothes,” said Danka. Her voice sounded shaky and close to tears. The soldier called to one of the others and their clothes were brought over. Still sitting, they wriggled into them.
“Stop. No shoes. I don’t want you to run away. Here, I’ll throw your shoes over there, OK?”
That’s nice of him, thought The Virgin. At least we’re not stranded and if he’s taking that much trouble, we’re probably safe. “Who are you?”
“Never mind that. Just keep quiet.” He called to the soldier who had brought their clothes and gave him the job of guarding them. He walked off along the edge of the water, peering out to sea.
Danka inched closer, and The Virgin put his arm around her. “What do they want?” she asked.
“Not speaking!” Their guard gestured with his gun and they fell silent.
From across the dark water The Virgin became aware of a low grumbling sound. Two of the soldiers slung their weapons over their shoulders and waded into the sea. The one who had first secured them was muttering into a hand-held radio. He seemed to be the officer in charge. Everyone was looking out to sea.
In a rush, two inflatable boats rode into the beach on white foam trails. The officer hurried over to his prisoners and again held them at gunpoint. Behind him, the boats had been spun round and the soldiers were wading out and jumping aboard. With his free hand the officer spoke again into the field radio. For a moment all was still until two more men ran out of the dunes and down to the boats. It all seemed very quiet and professional.
With the two sentries safely aboard, the officer raised his gun to the peak of his cap. “Well, goodnight. I hope you have a very exciting evening.” He turned and in moments the two boats were picking up speed, their heavily silenced engines making no more than a subdued puttering sound. The whole episode could only have taken a few minutes.
“Moj Boże!” whispered Danka. “What is happening? Who are they?”
“Not locals, that’s for sure. Not Americans either. And very professional.” The Virgin thought for a moment. Whatever had happened, he knew he would have been better off n
ot seeing it. Or even being anywhere around. They had just seen a small group of foreign soldiers being covertly extracted from Tabrizi territory. Whatever they had been up to was undoubtedly a lot of trouble for some-one, and life threatened to get very unpleasant for The Virgin if the local security forces got wind of it. And for the Hash and all its members. Half the foreigners in Sabah in sports clothes, men and women together, drinking beer, at night. That was enough of a catalogue of sins in the narrow Muslim mind to put them all away in calaboosh for a few nights at least. Add to that military saboteurs or assassins and they would all be locked up forever. Flight was the surest remedy.
“OK, we’d better get out of here right now. God knows who’ll be chasing after that lot, and if they catch us here we’ll be shot on sight. If we’re lucky. And we’d better tell the Hash. Come on, where are our shoes?”
They fumbled across the dark sand to find their shoes. “I’m very frighted,” said Danka. “I think we have big problem.”
“Too right! Come on, get moving.” They hurriedly brushed the worst of the sand from their feet and started to get into their shoes. Too late. From behind the dunes came the thumping sound of some-one running to the beach. They were just straightening up as another soldier burst onto the sand, gun at the ready.
There did not seem to be much they could do. Their hands went up automatically as the gun swung towards them. The soldier ran past them to the water’s edge. He knew he was too late, but he turned anyway and shouted something at them in Arabic.
Danka answered but he did not seem to understand and tried again in English. “You are foreigners? Did you see soldiers here?” He was panting heavily and looked pathetic in his distress.
“They’ve gone. It must be five minutes ago,” The Virgin said.
The Accidental Spy Page 2
