The Accidental Spy

by Jacqueline George

  - 20 -

  When he looked back on it, the week following the arrival of Major Jamal’s container was very quiet and ordinary. It would be a last island of peace and tranquillity.

  Abdul had got the ship discharged with a minimum of aggravation and sent the long chain of trucks straight down to the desert. And he had done it without paying the ridiculous charges mandated in the trucking cooperative’s charter. The Virgin blessed his good fortune at having Abdul in the office.

  He followed the shipment down to Lima-7. The last of the cement had been discharged twenty-four hours earlier so the road should have been clear, but he was passing trucks all the way south and across the desert. Battered, blunt-nosed Fiats, over-loaded with 1-1/2 ton bags of Class G cement and towing four wheeled trailers, equally over-loaded. He wondered how their drivers kept them going. They had been out of production for years and spare parts must be hard to come by. He guessed that Fiat had deliberately made the trucks tough, basic and easy to repair, and with plenty of power to cope with hauling through soft sand.

  Lima-7 was having a busy period, which meant that everyone was out working. Hardly any equipment remained in the yard, and the mess hall was empty. It would be a good month with plenty of revenue. At least he had Florian’s time to work through the job plan for the RomDril-1 9-5/8” casing. Florian complained bitterly at the amount of equipment and people that The Virgin had promised to provide. That was normal. He did it every time, but he never complained at the size of the invoices that resulted.

  The Virgin decided to take the chance to visit the TAMCO location at Waha. He needed to keep in touch with the people in the field, both TAMCO and MacAllans, and besides, it was an impressive drive. He borrowed a desert Toyota from Florian and set off after breakfast. The track was well marked to start with, heading southeast out of Lima-7, a maze of tyre marks heading away from the hub. Initially it picked its way from one pipeline crossing to the next and the heavy traffic converging on these bottlenecks had corrugated the desert surface. They made for a bone-shaking ride. Once he left the Lima-7 field behind, the vehicle tracks fanned out and it was easy to find freshly blown sand to drive on. The Toyota rode on its balloon tyres like a ship on a lake and The Virgin sailed on, carefully counting the kilometres.

  After ninety kilometres the Cape Town Road came into sight as a line of disturbed soil on the horizon. As The Virgin got nearer he could see a truck moving on it, but it had disappeared by the time he bounced onto the asphalt. He was alone in the desert. Flat to the horizon in all directions, and no living thing. He reset his odometer and headed south along the black ribbon. The Russian rig was 135 kilometres away. From a distance it looked active. The substructure and rig floor were in place; the derrick was hooked up and assembled, ready for raising. As you got nearer the signs of its abandonment became more obvious. There was nothing else there, no winch trucks, no accommodation units, no busy people rushing to get ready for the next well. No one knew the story of the rig or why it had been left in the desert. It was certainly Russian. The Virgin had stopped there one day and clambered over the sandblasted steel, marvelling at how similar it was to a Western rig and how everything differed in detail. He had even gone back to his truck for a wrench to scavenge the identification plate from the draw-works, a heavy brass tablet with cast Cyrillic lettering.

  He did not stop today. He swung off the blacktop and set his nose southeast again. On the horizon stood the single blip of an oil drum. He headed towards it. As he passed it, another drum came into sight far on the horizon. This was the most difficult stretch of the track at night. The terrain lay absolutely flat and the drums were only visible during the day. At night drivers relied on starting out in the right direction and then using the stars to keep them straight. Not for the first time The Virgin cursed the Tabrizi stupidity that banned the use of GPS navigation on security grounds. They did not want foreigners to have more sophisticated equipment than their own rag-tag army.

  Another eighty kilometres and he came to another of the Great Man’s white elephants. Crops circles; wheat fields in the central Sahara. Hundreds of metres below the surface lay limitless fresh water. The Great Man had paid a fortune to have water wells drilled and now the 500m long irrigation booms pivoted continuously under the desert sun, irrigating stunted wheat crops. The ‘farm’ was five kilometres away, looking for all the world like another oilfield camp. He had never been there but had heard that it was well equipped, a hotel in the desert, and full of young educated agriculturists who flew in for two weeks on, two weeks off. Not that there was much to do – a small contingent of Canadian farmers and Sudanese labourers kept the equipment running, and did the ploughing and harvesting as a hobby. The wheat they grew was probably the most expensive in the world as it poured into their silos. When trucking costs back up to the coast were added in, the wheat rated alongside caviar and champagne. The whole set-up rivalled the pyramids in folly.

  Still, The Virgin liked to thread his way through the circles and marvel at them. They made for a welcome visual break on the skyline. They also marked the beginning of the heavy sand. Slowly the desert surface became looser, the gravel gave way to fine sand and the Toyota started to labour. The Virgin changed down into low ratio and dithered between second and third gear. Even balloon tyres at 20 psi could not float over this. He drove into the edge of the deep sand desert and its low, rolling dunes. Progress was slow and tedious.

  A smudge of smoke on the horizon flagged the Waha field, one of the world’s jumbo-sized pools of oil and the major source of the Great Man’s money. Pieces of steel junk began to appear in the sand and then the first wells, lone christmas trees linked to gathering stations by four inch pipelines lying on the sand. Here the sand was deeply furrowed and the Toyota needed confidence and power to keep its course. The Virgin pushed the Toyota towards a narrow gap in the line of sand dunes ahead. Lurching from side to side and never letting his momentum drop, he broke through into an open plain with the Waha camp at its centre. Two flares stood to one side, burning continuously and sending a plume of black haze down the wind. Well-heads dotted the plain and black pipelines netted them together. The sun was beginning to touch the dunes. A surreal orange light painted the desert and cast sharp, deep shadows. He swung off the main track and headed for the cluster of small contractor camps.

  Snowy the Australian presided over a few hundred square metres of desert, bounded by a low bank of sand thrown up to break the wind. He had an office and two portable dormitory buildings for himself and his Filipino crew. A roofed concrete pad as a workshop, two storage containers for spares and supplies, and four bulk cement silos. He stood in his office door and watched as The Virgin drove into the yard.

  “G’day – you timed that right. I was just going to give up on you and go for dinner.” Snowy was a tall, thin engineer, middle-aged, who had worked out of the Waha base for as long as anyone could remember. He reached out his hand as The Virgin clambered stiffly from his Toyota. “Leave your stuff. I’ll sort your room out later. I’ve radioed Florian already that you’ve arrived, so we can go and eat.”

  Dinner was at the Revard’s camp. They had a bigger crew and ran their own mess. It suited them to contract services to other companies, to give the economies of scale and continuity. And it suited MacAllans to pay Revard’s merely high fees rather than the astronomical ones that TAMCO demanded for eating at their base. They lined up for their food and sat together to eat.

  “So – to what do we owe the honour? The luxuries of Sabah getting you down? Or you’re just getting away from the girls?”

  “No – neither of those. Just showing my face down here, that’s all. And I’ve been talking sand control to TAMCO – Harris says it’s the flavour of the month so we’d better do some or else – and I’ve got some fliers and technical stuff to hand out. Not that it’ll do any good. Even if the TAMCO people down here had an opinion about it, no one would listen to them. But still, we might as well be the good guys.”

&
nbsp; “Sand control,” snorted Snowy. “I wish you luck. They need it, sure enough, but they’d much rather just keep pulling those pumps every nine months. What would they do with half the work-over rigs if they suddenly got efficient?”

  “Ours not to reason why. Anyway, I like coming down to visit. It beats working. Found anything good recently?” Snowy’s hobby – more like a passion in fact – was the Neolithic culture that had inhibited Waha in more temperate times. He had developed a sharp eye and a feel for what the ancient landscape must have looked like. He had the supernatural knack of finding campsites abandoned 15,000 years ago. Now he never took a trip out of the camp without trying a new path or a different direction. He slowed down for any wind scour and stopped at any scattering of pebbles. He must have found hundreds of kilos of stone tools over the years, and he silently smuggled out a handful on every trip. He had showed The Virgin some of his prizes, delicate leaf-shaped arrow heads, knives, a black flint hand axe still sharp enough to cut your finger. Pierced fragments of ostrich shell and even a whole half-shell, decorated and treasured as a cup. Once on impulse he had taken a bag full of artefacts into the museum for prehistory in Berlin. He never tired of telling how white-coated professors and students had suddenly surrounded him, all handling his treasures and muttering enviously. They had recognized the material immediately and showed him some inferior examples of their own. He had offered to leave his treasures but the museum could not touch material without a legal provenance. They went as far as buying him lunch while they photographed the horde and the senior curator himself had escorted Snowy to the grand front door and reluctantly waved him goodbye.

  He had not found anything as exciting recently. He had other things on his mind. “There’s a seismic project north of here, did you know that? I’ve arranged with Florian to look the other way while I go up there and look for the Lady be Good.”

  “Lady be Good?”

  “Yes – you’ve heard of it. It was a Yank bomber from the war – a Liberator - flying Naples to Cairo. Somehow got lost over the desert. Ran out of fuel. Put down more or less OK and then they all died of thirst. It got covered by a sand dune and they didn’t find the bodies for years. Then it got covered up again, but apparently the dunes are moving and it’s in the clear now. I’ve arranged to go with a couple of the seismic hands. Should be a good trip.”

  “Yeah – that’d be quite something. Take lots of pics – I’d be interested in them. What’s it like out there, anyway? Easy enough to move around?”

  “Depends how far east you are. There’s a lot of ground up there that’s more or less like it is here. Slow going; heavy sand. But you don’t have to go far east and you’re in big dune country. That’s real serious stuff. I bet there’s a fortune in oil under there, but it’s going to cost a fortune to find it. That’d be a project – putting seismic lines through there. Take forever.”

  “Friend of mine’s planning to walk down here from the coast…”

  “What? Jeez, you must have some strange friends. He’ll never make it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He’s got a little cart thing to pull along behind him. Says he can carry all his water in it, and he’ll have ground stills with him as well. He says it’s only the last 50 klicks or so that are really heavy going.”

  “Will this be official?”

  “Nope. Can you imagine the Tabrizis giving permission for anything like that? It’d blow their little minds. No – he’ll just get a lift out of town, and go for it. He’s quite confident. He says there’s two stretches of sabhka on the way and he should make good time on them.”

  “You know, he could be right. What’s the desert like up nearer the coast?”

  “Not bad at all. Pretty flat. Only bits I’ve seen are gravel. No real topography at all. Not like over in the West.”

  “I’ve seen that sabhka he’s talking about. Or at least, I’ve seen one of them. Wandered a bit far north one day. Florian would shoot me if he ever found out. It’s big, that sabhka. Runs a long way east, you know. From by the Cape Town Road right over into Egypt. If your friend was travelling east-west, he’d be in much better shape. Still, the southern side is gravel – pretty much like around Lima-7. You could walk on that, I guess. But Jeez, it would be hard work. How many klicks does he think he’ll do in a day? 40? 50?”

  “I don’t know. He’s been training on the beach and says he can do 25 in soft sand. But day after day? I don’t know, and I don’t think he does either.”

  “His best bet would be to stay west of the sand for as long as he can. Head down towards the crop circles. But not get too close to them or he’ll be arrested for sure. If he can get that far in reasonable shape, he’ll have a chance. Tell you what – when I go up to the seismic camp next week I’ll get the exact location for you. If he gets into trouble, it might be good to know. But he’ll have to go soon – the camp won’t be there forever.”

  They watched a video that night and The Virgin went to bed early. He showed his face in the TAMCO office next day before heading back to Lima-7.

  - 21 -

  He had just finished his sched with the desert when the phone ran. It was too early for Almadi or for any official Tabrizi office, so he picked it up expecting to hear Florian from the desert. It was Elena.

  “Good morning, Greg – are you out of bed yet?”

  “What – I’m in the office. What are you doing calling so early?”

  “Oh – I couldn’t sleep. It’s ten past six – not so bad. How are you going? Did you get the parcel I sent you?”

  Greg ears stood on end. Word code. Parcel referred to – to the shipment. Why was she asking? She must know it had arrived by now.

  “Parcel? Yes – it came last week. No problem.”

  “Oh good. Did you like it? I sent a calendar with pictures of England, because you said that pictures of girls would be illegal.” She went on to talk about the chance of sharing a few days together in Crete. An attractive thought, but The Virgin’s mind was struggling with the implications of her call. How could she possibly not know about the container’s arrival? The idea troubled him for the rest of the day.

  Next day brought other things to worry about. The Virgin drove out to RomDril-1 to talk about job planning. As he started down the location road towards the rig he could see nothing much was happening. The kelly was down and no drillpipe stood in the derrick. Must all be drilling ahead, he thought. Then, as more of the location came into view, he realised that the flare pit was burning. Flames were playing fiercely over the pit walls and black smoke rushed away in the wind. There was no one on the floor or even anywhere around the rig. He pulled up at Terry’s door. It was not locked and Terry sat writing at his desk.

  “Hello stranger. Come to join in the fun?”

  “You hit something?”

  “You’d better believe it. Didn’t you notice how quiet everything is? H2S. Lots of it. Nearly wiped out the village last night.”

  The Virgin was stunned. “What happened?”

  “We just got there early, I guess. That’s the trouble with exploration. Drilling along happily and suddenly we lost everything. Tried to move but we’d stuck fast. Most of the mud on location’s gone. You should have been here! I was running around like an idiot shutting everything in and getting the choke manifold on line. And you know what? There’s no chokes on location. Not one.”

  “No chokes? How -?”

  “Don’t ask. We’ve got the choke valve – we know that’s old and cut out. What I didn’t know was RomDril 1 and 2 only have one lousy choke nipple each – but it’s got no bean in it. There’s only one choke between them. Can you believe that? Only one choke and that’s on RomDril-2 at the moment. We’re hot-shotting a bunch of them up from the desert just now. And the kelly cock’s leaking. The annular preventer closed more or less but we were kelly down so I can’t use the pipe rams. And the kill line valve – they tried to use it as a choke and – guess what? It cut out – surprise, surprise. Boy, am I glad I got a fi
re going in the flare pit. There was nothing holding it all back for a while there. There’s not much holding it back now, to be honest.”

  The Virgin thought for a moment. This was dangerous. The well was basically out of control. If they could not shut it in at the surface, and they had been losing mud… This was very bad. “How much H2S?”

  “Oh – not much,” Terry joked. “Say 300, 400,000 ppm. But I’ve only got a mickey-mouse hand held detector. I can’t be sure. Gas detection is something that TAMCO feels is a luxury. Unnecessary. Only foreigners need stuff like that. “

  “Jesus Christ! And you’re just sitting here? You got a Scott pack?”

  Terry waved him to shut the door. Behind it stood the cylinders of a breathing set and mask, ready to go. “Mine. My own personal one, bought by me in Canada. Only one on site, so everyone else has left location and gone into town. I’m managing the well all by my little self. No – don’t worry. You’re OK. The flare’s going and anyway, the wind’s good for the moment. Did you see anyone around the village? We cleared them all out last night.”

  The Virgin thought back. He did not recall seeing anyone as he drove up to the location turn-off. “Didn’t see anyone. What happens now?”

  “We wait. Nothing else to do. And hope the thing kills itself or the reservoir isn’t too big. I’ve got your guys coming up because we’ll end up pumping under pressure for sure. And they’re sending up a couple of Miller hands from Waha to give me some help – at least I’ll have someone who can tell his right hand from his left. They’re bringing a lot of gear. The first thing we’ll have to do is rig up a choke manifold and get the damn thing shut in. And then we’ll see.”

  The Virgin’s mind was still reeling. Hydrogen sulphide gas was the most feared killer in the oilfield. Low concentrations could be lethal. First you would get the rotten egg smell, and then it would anaesthetise your nose and you would not know if it was getting any worse. And then you would be dead. That was at relatively low concentrations of gas. Things happened very much faster with concentrations in the hundreds of thousands of parts per million. He wondered if TAMCO realised just what they had on their hands. They could easily have had dead people everywhere. From here to the sea.