The Accidental Spy

by Jacqueline George

  “Well that makes it a bit better I suppose. But I’m still not in the charity business. If they want it, they’ll have to pay. Tell them we’re not negotiating and I want a 50% field margin. You know what that means, don’t you? $50 in every $100 has got to be clear profit, right?”

  “Right, Harris. Do you want to see the letter before it goes?”

  “No. I guess not. Just don’t screw up or you’re here for the next ten years.”

  So there it was. Five thousand litres at 95p a litre came to £4750. Plus £850 for the container was £5600. Say $7800, $8000. He would have to call Rotterdam to get the cost of diverting the boat to Southampton. That would probably cost more than the chemical. He caught himself wondering if they should ship some other items from UK at the same time, just to provide camouflage. He was beginning to stand on the wrong side of the fence, he told himself. This is a normal solvent, nothing more, and we’re picking it up in Southampton to save the safety hazard of trucking it across to Rotterdam.

  It was time to dip his toe in the water so he called Major Jamal with an outrageous price. “That solvent you asked me for. We can do it but you have to take a minimum of 5000 litres and it’s going to cost you $63,000.”

  There was only a moment of silence from the other end, then Major Jamal’s unhurried voice came back. “Very good. And the delivery charges?”

  “That includes delivery. Everything, container as well. FOB Sabah, payment by ILC.”

  “I see. $63,000 complete. Mr Cartwright, I will come to your office tomorrow and you can write me an official letter for the bank to issue the letter of credit. When shall I come?”

  The Virgin was stunned. Major Jamal was not meant to go for this price. The Tabrizi did not exist who paid the first price asked. Bargaining was an essential part of purchasing whether shopping for a dozen eggs or a dozen oil-wells. “Nine o’clock would be good, I guess.”

  “Very good. I will see you then.” The Virgin was left listening to the dialling tone in disbelief. Then he started to call Rotterdam to make sure he had not made a mistake over the shipping charges.

  - 11 -

  Major Jamal picked up the official quotation next morning. He was in a fine mood and took a cup of coffee before he left. The Virgin found himself warming to the big man with his animated grey moustache who sat overflowing from the upright office chair. Major Jamal had been out in the world enough to treat foreigners as equals, and that made him comfortable to sit with. Although his profession made him suspicious of everyone, he was smart enough to see that the threats to the Great Man’s regime were much more likely to come from home-grown malcontents than from foreign engineering companies.

  On RomDril-1 things had begun to happen. Another load of cement had come in on Tuesday, and the back-up pump unit had already left the desert. The rig should reach casing point during the night, or maybe at breakfast time. The lead cementing engineer would arrive during the day, and on his morning telephone sched The Virgin promised Florian he would be on the rig to meet him.

  He passed the back-up pump unit as he drove to the rig. The big black and grey Super Kenworth was thundering along the highway at its painfully slow maximum speed, its General Motors Detroit turbo-charged 12V92 diesel roaring smoke. The huge balloon tyres made it appear even more slow and ponderous as it rolled deliberately in through the location gates and pulled up outside the company man’s trailer.

  “Hey, Greg!” shouted Terry from his doorway. “Tell him to move that heap of junk out of my window. I can’t see a dammed thing” .

  Joe Milut the Maltese driver climbed back up to the cab and fired the beast up again. The Virgin dived inside to get away from the noise. “How’s it going?”

  Terry looked pained and shouted over the truck engine. “Be a dammed sight better when he’s moved off. Good. He’s going. I don’t know when you guys are going to give up those GM engines. Don’t use them in North America no more. Say they don’t meet the emission standards and they won’t have the noise. Health and Safety won’t allow it and a damned good thing too. Everyone’s changing to Cats - even your guys.”

  The Virgin shrugged. “You know what Tabriz is like. Twenty years behind. They’re probably shipping all the old engines out here.”

  “Man, you should change too. Those Cats are reckoned to do 35,000 hours before rebuild. Guaranteed, so they say.”

  “Makes a lot of sense in a place like this. They won’t let you re-export old engines for re-build, they can’t do it themselves, and hiring mechanics to work in the desert would break your heart. We must have a yard full of old GM’s. Never mind. TAMCO can afford it.”

  “Ha! You say! They might think so now, but times are changing.” This was Terry’s favourite theme, the inevitable slow decline of the Tabrizi oil-fields and the cold winds of economic reality that would be starting to blow any day now.

  The Virgin interrupted him before he could get into his stride. “Our guys here yet?”

  “What? Yes, sure. Guess they’re having lunch. You coming?”

  To say the food on RomDril-1 was basic would be polite. Most of the service hands used stronger language. Nobody understood what the Romanians thought of it because none of them spoke English. The Virgin knew what would be on the table before he got to the mess trailer; boiled potato, canned peas and stringy chicken. The Tabrizi government subsidised chicken production, and frozen chickens were cheap and plentiful. People reckoned you could tell an oil-field hand from Tabriz because he had feathers under his arms instead of hair. The Virgin borrowed Terry’s bottle of Tabasco in an attempt to draw some life from the dry white meat.

  The cementing crew sat at the next table. Rene De Groot was lead engineer, a battered, white-haired veteran of a couple of thousand cement jobs. He had brought Bjorn the Norwegian trainee, and two more Filipinos, Edgar and Manny. All good guys. It was a relief that they had got a steady man like Rene. Any cement job could get a little tense. The man on the pump truck was the star of his own show with everybody watching his performance. Once water had been mixed with cement, it would start to set. A fact of life, and it was up to the cementing engineer to make sure it was in the right place when it did so. Losing your temper, shouting, throwing your hard hat at people would not help when things were going wrong. Rene inspired confidence and made everything seem easier. Right now he was ragging the Filipinos about how they managed their three month hitches in the desert without access to women. They were in a weak position because not so long ago two of the Filipino catering hands had been caught by a Tabrizi watchman while deeply engaged. Now everyone chose to pretend that they had only been reported because the watchman was jealous, and that there had been no more reports because some-one else was keeping the watchman happy.

  After lunch The Virgin walked around the MacAllans gear with Rene. Things were looking good. The silos were all set up and tested. There was a cement bulker due anytime, and the last two loads were due in late that night. The main compressor had been fired up and was good, and they would have the trailer compressors as back-up. That would get the cement to the pump units, no matter what. Both units would be rigged to mix and pump down hole, but Rene was planning to use one for mixing and one for pumping. He should have no trouble going down hole at ten barrels a minute, provided the rig kept the mix-water coming. They walked over to the rig together. It was a good piece of gear - a National 130 from the States - but bore marks of RomDril neglect. For a start it was filthy, covered in grease and old mud. And it was battered. During every rig move you could expect some damage to be done rigging down and then up again. A western company would do its best to straighten out damage immediately but RomDril tended to just leave things. An experienced glance could pick out bent railings, damaged stairways, pipe-work loose of its mountings.

  Even the location was filthy. No surface ditches had been dug and to reach the shakers they had to skip across pallets dropped into a pool of overflow mud. They stood for a while watching the steaming mud pour over the shakers. The
drill-pipe was on bottom and they were circulating to condition mud. There were few cuttings being shaken out of the mud now but The Virgin and Rene were looking at the viscosity. It was pouring in smooth heavy curtains onto the shakers. They trekked back over the pallets to the mud-man’s shack. It was empty. Leaving Rene to supervise rigging up the two-inch cementing line, The Virgin went over to speak to Terry about the mud.

  “How’s your mud, Terry?”

  “Pretty good; why?”

  “We’ve just been looking at it. It looks kind of heavy.”

  Terry reached for the clip-board with the daily report. “No, it’s OK. 8.6 pounds a gallon and low viscosity.”

  “Want to put a beer on it?”

  Terry looked at him long enough to read that he was serious. “Aw, shit! Come on, let’s go look.”

  Together they stood in the steamy warmth of the shakers. “OK. You win. That sure ain’t what was on the mud sheet this morning.” He was letting it run through his fingers. “The weight I’d believe but... Jesus, you can’t believe anything round here. Mud-man’s not there, I suppose. God dammit! I tell you, it’s a real bind being this close to town. Any chance they get and they’ve disappeared. OK. I’ll get after him when I can find him. Hey, you guys know you’re displacing?”

  “What? You’re joking! I thought we’d sorted that one out.”

  “Nope. RomDril must have been talking to some-one in town and the programme stays the way it is. You to displace.”

  “Jesus. I hope they can get us the mud fast enough. But you’re still not going to get much more than ten or twelve barrels a minute down our line. It’s only two inch, don’t forget.”

  “Yeah. I know. But that’s what the mudirs want, so that’s what they’ll get.”

  “You’ll have RomDril hooked in, just in case?”

  “Yeah. Sure. And I’ll make sure they dip their tanks and are all ready to go. Just in case.”

  They climbed up from the shakers onto the rig floor. It was empty. The kelly was half-way down and the block and swivel swung above their heads. The kelly hose was pulsing with the beat of the mud-pumps and the whole structure beneath their feet vibrated in sympathy. The brake was chained down but there was no sign of the driller. Terry looked into the dog-house. Also empty. The Virgin could see he was pissed off from the set of his jaw. They met the driller as they stepped off the stairway onto the ground. He was a small man in soft rubber boots and a navy-blue coverall. There was no hard hat covering his thinning hair.

  Terry attacked him. “Where the hell have you been? How many God-dammed times have I got to tell you to keep some-one on the floor all the God-dammed time?”

  The Romanian did not bother to say anything. He just shrugged sheepishly and showed Terry the packet of cigarettes he had been fetching from his cabin. When there was no response, he offered them round. Terry turned abruptly away and stumped off across the dirt towards his cabin. “I don’t know why I bother. Always the same. I can’t believe it. Not on the floor because he’d run out of cigarettes. Jesus! If he’d been caught smoking in Canada, his ass would have been out of the location gates in thirty seconds. Here running out of cigarettes is a reasonable excuse for leaving the floor. Jesus! It’s like trying to teach a cat to do tricks. They’re just smart enough to know that they don’t want the hassle.”

  The next thing on the schedule, once the Revard’s truck had turned up, would be to pull out and log the hole. That should not take too long; just one pass at this depth, say eight hours including rigging up and down. Then another wiper trip and run casing. That would definitely put the cement job on Friday. The Virgin’s day off. Oh, well. He drove back to town carefully, looking along the road for the big blue Revard’s truck.

  Back at the office he decided to give Elena a call. It was a thrill to hear her distant voice. “Executive Travel, good afternoon. How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to buy a ticket from Sabah in Tabriz to Crete. Do you have any special fares?”

  “Greg! Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you for ages!”

  “Yes - well. I didn’t know if you’d want me to call you at work.”

  “Of course I do. Or at home, it doesn’t matter. How are you anyway? Did you get home safely?”

  “Oh, I’m alright. I got stopped at the airport though. I’d left a stupid magazine in my brief-case and they wanted to put me in calaboosh for importing pornography.”

  “Jesus! What happened?”

  “I had to ask them to telephone a friend who works in Security, and he helped sort things out. They were quite kind really, considering the magazine was a bit naughty.”

  “What are you doing with naughty magazines anyway?”

  “Well I’ve got to have some kind of substitute for the real thing. Otherwise I’ll forget what real ladies look like.” He imagined a snort of disapproval from the other end.

  “I’m sure I don’t look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your magazine. No-one looks like that.”

  “Well I remember when we were in London...” but she cut him off with a scandalised shriek. She was playing her part.

  “Greg! You told me that the police listened to telephone calls!”

  “Yes, but they can’t listen to them all. Anyway they haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

  “If you don’t stop it, I’ll call the police at my end and tell them I’ve got a pervert on the line. Talk about something else. How’s the weather there?”

  “The weather? Now you’re being dreadfully English. We haven’t spoken for ages and you want to talk about the weather. Well, it’s the Mediterranean, you know. Just about cold enough to wear a sweater during the day. The sun’s out and all’s well with the world. How is it there?”

  “Oh, you know. Awful. Raining, windy. The tube’s packed with people trying to get home with all their Christmas shopping. No-one’s got enough money...”

  “Oh yes, and it’s hard to get from one pub to the next before closing time. It must be tough. I bet you have parties every night and a two-week break over Christmas and New Year, right?”

  “Well, there are a few parties, but you know Christmas is on Saturday this year so we have to be in work on the Tuesday. What do you do? Do you have Christmas over there?”

  “Sort of. Harris lets us go home as soon as we finished the work we have to do, so I expect I’ll get myself an invitation for lunch somewhere. And that’s about it. There’s not too many people around. All the ones that can have gone home for Christmas.”

  “Poor you. What shall I send you for Christmas? Another naughty magazine?”

  “For God’s sake don’t do that. They wouldn’t believe me a second time. What about an exciting photo of you instead?”

  “If you think I’m getting photographed in the nude so that you and your sex-crazed friends can drool over me...”

  “We wouldn’t drool, honestly. It’s bad manners. We’d just sigh respectfully and wish you were here. Just for the quality of your intellect.”

  “Intellect my backside!” Elena snapped.

  “That too, that too,” said The Virgin happily. “I can just picture it in my mind’s eye.”

  “You really are a pervert, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. Didn’t you realise? But I’m a very nice pervert.”

  “Oh Greg, Greg. What am I going to do with you? No, I shan’t ask you that because I can guess what you’ll say, and anyone listening in will think I’m as bad as you. Oh, my boss is coming. You’ll call me again before Christmas?”

  The Virgin put the telephone down with a happy glow in his stomach. It was nice to have a dream-girl on the end of the telephone. Which gave him a sudden desire for female company. Evelina possibly, but she was too much like hard work. Perhaps he would just close up the office and go to Barani to visit Danka. Or maybe Wanda. There was not much to do in Sabah of an evening, so he may as well do it in company.

  Barani was living up to the worst of its
reputation. He steered car around the rubbish-strewn lagoons of foul water, trying to keep to the higher ground. Winter was here and every hollow was full. Still, at least it was too cold for the mosquitoes, he reflected as he stood at the windy foot of the Polish nurse’s tower, waiting for an inmate with a key to come out or go in. At this time of the evening it did not take long. A woman popped out to shop in the local store, and The Virgin popped in.

  The hall-way was dark and he felt his way cautiously up the three marble steps towards the lift. He peered towards the lift doors; if the lift was working the red floor indicator would be alight. Nothing broke the darkness. Oh, well. Eighth floor here we come, The Virgin thought as he fumbled for the stairway.

  There were lights on most of the floors above. The bulbs were less likely to get stolen than the ones in the entrance and most of the girls had rigged up some sort of light outside their apartments. They wanted to check visitors through the peep-hole before they opened the door. He was breathing deeply by the time he was on Danka’s doormat. A magazine picture of three puppies had been cut out and pasted to the door. Written above them were the names of the inmates with drawings of bells; Danka had two bells. He rang twice.

  “Czesz, kochanie!” Danka’s plump figure was wrapped in a thread-bare dressing gown, and her face was still pink from the shower. “It is so long before that you come here. Come in, sit down.” The Virgin ignored her efforts to steer him to the bleak central room where the windows rattled in the wind, and headed instead for the kitchen. Wanda was inside cooking. Their ash-tray, a cleaned sardine tin, lay with coffee glasses on the table. The Virgin squeezed himself into the folding chair between the table and the refrigerator. The atmosphere was cosy, redolent of the soup Wanda was stirring. Danka put the kettle on and sat opposite him.

  “So. You have news from my friend Dov?”

  The Virgin’s heart skipped. “Er, who?” He tried to glare at her but Wanda was looking straight at him. “Oh, him. No, nothing. But why would he write to me? I only met him once and I’m not sure if he even knows my name. What about you?”