The Spoilers / Juggernaut

by Desmond Bagley

  A mistake! They’d bombed their own men thinking they were the enemy. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened in a war. But they’d bombed them in the middle of a town when they could easily have waited to catch them out in the open. So would somebody eventually apologize for this colossal, tragic mistake? Apologize for the pits full of corpses, the ruined town, the wrecked and tortured people on the rig or hobbling through the wasted country? To Sister Ursula and Dr Kat, to Dr Marriot for the killing of her husband? To Antoine Dufour for the death of his partner?

  Somebody ought to say they were sorry. But nobody ever would.

  SEVENTEEN

  We left Kodowa again.

  We went north-west this time, descending from the scrubland to the rainforest country of the lower plains, the same sort of terrain that we’d moved through on our journey northwards. The people in the little villages we passed through came out to see us but they weren’t laughing this time. They gazed at the great rig and the strange load it carried and their faces were troubled. Even the children were subdued, catching the uneasiness of their elders.

  The rig’s passengers varied. Some improved and were allowed to ride in one of the trucks, others collapsed and were given a place on the bedding. Two women gave birth on the rig, and Dr Kat removed a swollen appendix from a ten-year-old boy. The medical supplies dwindled steadily.

  At each village Sadiq sent his men out to forage. A couple of beat-up trucks were added to the convoy as well as provisions. Occasionally they found petrol and it was added to our store. Our own food became more basic and the beer had long since run out. But we managed.

  In one village we found a small cache of clothing and bartered food for it, and it did feel wonderful to be wearing something clean for a while. The men were beginning to look shaggy as beards sprouted.

  With each few hours the make-up of the flock of Nyalans that trailed along after us subtly altered. The convoy was behaving much like a comet in space, picking up and losing bits of its tail as it went along. Groups of Nyalans would arrive at some village where they had kin or were too weary to walk further, and would leave us there. Others would follow along. There may have been several hundred in our wake, and there was something of a ritual, almost mystic, quality in their behaviour. Often one or more would approach the rig and reach up to touch it wonderingly before dropping behind again.

  It was Dan Atheridge who explained it to me. He’d lived here for many years, and spoke a littie Nyalan. His arm troubled him and he had to be restrained from doing too much; but I knew that he was deliberately driving himself into exhaustion in an attempt to numb the pain and horror of leaving his wife Susie somewhere behind him in the hills beyond Kanja. He had begged to be allowed to go off and try to find her, but had finally been persuaded not to.

  I asked him about the Nyalans.

  ‘Your rig’s turning into a juggernaut, Neil,’ he said.

  ‘That’s an Indian thing, isn’t it? A sort of God-mobile?’

  That got a smile from him. ‘You could put it that way. Actually it’s one of the names of the god Krishna. It became applied to a huge idol that’s dragged through the streets in a town in India annually in his honour. In the olden days sacrificial victims were thrown under it to be crushed to death. A rather bloodthirsty deity, I fear.’

  ‘It isn’t inappropriate,’ I said. ‘Except that nobody’s been run down by the rig yet, which God forbid.’

  ‘It’s followed in procession by thousands of devotees, who regard it as a sacred symbol of their wellbeing. That’s the similarity, Neil. This rig of yours has become a fetish to the Nyalans. You’re leading them to the promised land, wherever that is. Out of danger anyway.’

  ‘I hope that’s true, Dan. Still, I guess they have to believe in something.’

  I mentioned the parallel with the Pied Piper and he smiled again. ‘I hope you think of them as children rather than as rats, Neil.’

  I got precisely the other viewpoint from Russ Burns some time later that day, when we stopped at last, more than halfway to Makara.

  Several of us were waiting for whatever Brad Bishop could offer as an evening meal. Making idle conversation, I mentioned Atheridge’s theory about the new role of the rig as a fetish, and Wingstead was fascinated. I could see him formulating an article for some truckers’ magazine. Burns’ attitude was very different and typical of him.

  ‘More like rats,’ he said when I invoked the Pied Piper image. ‘Little brown bastards, eating up everything that isn’t nailed down. Probably carrying disease too.’ I felt a strong desire to hit him. Wingstead got up and walked away.

  After a strained silence Burns spoke again. ‘How come you work for a limey outfit?’ He seemed to enjoy baiting me.

  ‘Good pay,’ I said briefly.

  He snorted. ‘For pushing this thing along?’

  ‘Good enough,’ I said. He seemed to have got the notion that I was a transport man and I didn’t bother to disillusion him. It wasn’t worth the trouble, and in any case right now it was nearer the truth than otherwise.

  ‘What do you do with Lat-Am?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m a tool pusher. Harry here’s a shooter.’

  ‘Come again? I don’t know oil jargon.’

  Zimmerman laughed. ‘Russ is a drilling superintendent. Me, I make loud bangs in oil wells. Blasting.’

  ‘Been in Nyala long?’ I didn’t take to Burns but Zimmerman was a much more likeable man. They made an odd pair.

  ‘A while. Six months or so. We were based in Bir Oassa but we went down to the coast to take a look. The desert country’s better. We should have stayed up there.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Burns said, ‘then we’d be out of this crummy mess.’

  ‘I was up in Bir Oassa earlier this month,’ I said. ‘Didn’t have much time to look at the oilfields, though. How you doing there?’

  ‘We brought in three,’ Zimmerman said. ‘Good sweet oil, low sulphur; needs no doctor at all. Lat-Am isn’t doing badly on this one.’

  ‘What about the war, though?’

  Burns shrugged. ‘That’s no skin off Lat-Am’s ass. We’ll stop pumping, that’s all. The oil’s still in the ground and we’ve got the concession. Whoever wins the war will need us.’

  It was a point of view, I suppose.

  They talked then between themselves for a while, using oilfield jargon which I understood better than I’d let on. Burns appealed to me less and less; he was a guy for whom the word chauvinist might have been invented. Texas was Paradise and the Alamo was the navel of the earth; he might grudgingly concede that California wasn’t bad, but the East Coast was full of goddamn liberals and Jews and longhaired hippies. You might as well be in Europe, where everyone was effete and decadent. Still, the easterners were at least American and he could get along with them if he had to. The rest of the world was divided between commies, niggers, Ayrabs and gooks, and fit only for plundering for oil.

  The next day we arrived at Makara. It was no bigger than other villages we’d passed through, but it earned its place on the map because of the bridge which spanned the river there. Further west, near Lake Pirie where the river joined the huge Katali there was a delta, and building a bridge would not have been possible. Our first concern was to find out whether the river was passable, and Sadiq, Kemp and I went ahead of the convoy to take a look. To our relief the bridge stood firm and was fit for crossing.

  We halted outside the village and sent off another scouting party to investigate the cotton warehouses. Word came back that they were intact, empty and serviceable as a hospital, and so we moved to the cotton factory and camped there. Apart from the grave faces of the local people there was no sign of trouble anywhere.

  That was the last good thing that happened that day. Dr Katabisirua came to look at the warehouses and arranged for some Nyalan women to give the largest a clean through before bringing in the patients, which he wouldn’t do until the next day. ‘My nurses are tired from the journey,’ he sa
id, ‘and that is when mistakes are made.’

  He was very despondent. Two more burn patients had died and he feared for one of the new born babies. Some of the wounded were not improving as he would wish. ‘And now Sister Ursula tells me we have no more Ringer’s lactate.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A replacement for lost plasma. We have no substitute.’ There was no hospital closer than Lasulu, and that was as far away as the moon. He also fretted about Sister Mary who was sinking into frail senility under the stress.

  By the end of our talk I was even more depressed than he was. There wasn’t a thing I could do for him or his patients, and I was profoundly frustrated by my helplessness. Never before in my adult life had I been unable to cope with a situation, and it galled me.

  Burns, passing by, said casually, ‘Hey, Mannix, the coon captain wants you,’ and walked on.

  ‘Burns!’

  He looked back over his shoulder. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come here.’

  He swung back. ‘You got a beef?’

  I said, ‘This morning Captain Sadiq persuaded his superior officer to let him stay with this convoy. He put his career on the line for us. What’s more, over the past few days he’s worked harder than you could in a month, and a damned sight more willingly. Around here you’ll speak respectfully of and to him. Got the idea?’

  ‘Touchy, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes I am. Don’t push me, Burns.’

  ‘What the hell do you want from me?’ he asked.

  I sighed, letting my neck muscles relax. ‘You will not refer to the Captain as a coon or a nigger. Nor his soldiers, nor any other Nyalans, come to that. We’re fed up with it.’

  ‘Why should I take orders from you?’ he asked.

  I said, ‘Because right now I’m top man around here. As long as you’re with us you do what I say, and if you don’t toe the line you’ll be out on your can. And you won’t hold a job with Lat-Am or any other oil company after this is over. If you don’t think I can swing that then you just ask Mister Kemp.’

  I turned my back and walked away, seething. If I’d been near him much longer I couldn’t have kept my hands off him, which wouldn’t have solved any problems. I passed a couple of staring men and then McGrath was beside me, speaking softly.

  ‘Need any help, Mannix?’

  ‘No,’ I said curtly. McGrath stuck in my craw too.

  ‘I’ll be around if you do.’ He returned to his job.

  I recalled that the reason for this outburst had been that Captain Sadiq wanted a word, and I set about finding him. It was a routine matter he wanted settled. After our business was over I pointed to the milling flock of Nyalans around the camp.

  ‘Captain, how many of them are there?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps two hundred, Mister Mannix. But they do not stay with us for long. It is only that there are always more of them.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. I understand they’ve attached themselves to the rig, made some sort of mascot of it. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘I am of Islam,’ he said. ‘These people have different ideas from you and me. But they are not savages, Mister Mannix. Perhaps it is no more than the thing Mister Lang hangs in the cab of his tractor. It is a lucky charm.’

  ‘That’s a rabbit’s foot. I see what you mean,’ I said, impressed by his logic. ‘Just a bigger talisman than usual. But I’m worried about them. Are they getting enough food and water? What if a real sickness strikes among them? What can we do to stop them, make them return to their homes?’

  ‘I do not think anything will stop them, sir. They manage for food, and none will walk further than he can achieve. For each of them, that is enough.’

  One thing it ensured was a redistribution of the local population, a reshuffle of families, genes and customs; perhaps not altogether a bad thing. But it was a hell of a way to go about it. And suppose ill fortune should fall on these people while they were tailing us. Would they see their erstwhile lucky talisman becoming a force of evil instead, and if so what might they take it into their collective heads to do about it, and about us?

  I reflected on the crusades. Not all of them were made by armed and mailed men; there was the Peasants’ Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, and the Children’s Crusade. If I remembered my history, terrible things happened to those kids. And come to think of it, Hamelin’s rats and children didn’t do too well either.

  I didn’t much relish the role of a twentieth century Peter leading a mad crusade into nowhere. A whole lot of people could die that way. The thought of an armoured column ploughing through this mob chilled my blood.

  The run-in with Burns later that day was inevitable, a curtain-raiser to the real drama that followed. The men who work the oil rigs are a tough bunch and you don’t get to boss a drilling crew by backing down from a fight. Maybe I should have handled Burns more tactfully, maybe I was losing my touch, but there it was. I had threatened him and I might have known he wouldn’t stand still for it.

  But that was yet to come. First we had to set up the cotton warehouse for Dr Kat to move in to the next day, and we parked the rig close by in order to run a cable from its generator. Ben Hammond, as usual, provided ideas and the equipment to put them into action, and his goody box included a sizeable reel of cable and several powerful lamps.

  While this was being done I had a look around the warehouse. It was just a huge barn about a quarter full of cotton stacked at the far end. The bottom stacks were compressed but the upper layers were soft and would provide comfort for everybody soon, including myself. I intended to sleep there that night. The biggest mattress in the world, but better not smoke in bed.

  Late in the afternoon I saw Harry Zimmerman sitting on an upturned box near the Land Rover, smoking and drinking a mug of tea. I sensed that he was waiting for me, though his opening remark was casual enough.

  ‘Been a busy day,’ he said.

  ‘Sure has. And it’ll be a busy night. I’ve got another job for you, anytime you’re ready.’ I dropped down beside him. ‘Trade you for a mouthful of that gunfire, Harry.’

  ‘What have you got to trade?’ he asked as he handed over the mug. I took a swig and passed it back.

  ‘Good soft bed for tonight.’

  ‘Now you’re talking. Anyone in it?’

  ‘Sorry, only me—and probably all the rest of the crew. We may as well doss down in comfort for one night before handing the warehouse over to the medics.’

  He was silent for a spell and then said, ‘Seen Russ about?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Just thought I’d mention it. He’s spoiling for a fight. Can be nasty, once he’s off and flying.’

  It was a fair warning and I wasn’t particularly surprised. I nodded my thanks and crossed to the Land Rover. Zimmerman seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It did. As I opened the door an object rolled off the seat and smashed at my feet. It was my bottle of Scotch, and it was quite empty.

  ‘Russ did this, Harry?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  He’d left the bottle where I’d find it; it was a direct challenge. There would have been just enough in it to put an edge on his appetite for supper, or for a brawl.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Neil, Russ is one tough guy to tangle with. Be careful.’

  I said, ‘He’s not going to hurt me. I’m going to straighten your buddy out.’

  ‘Hell, he’s not my buddy,’ Zimmerman said, and there was an edge to his normally placid voice. ‘We just work together. I’ve seen this before and I don’t have a taste for it. He’s having a game of poker with some of your guys.’

  I picked up the pieces of glass and ditched all but the largest which had the label still attached, and closed the car door. Zimmerman added, ‘Watch his left. He has a sneaky curve punch there.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I knew where to find Burns. One of the lamps leading from the generator cable had been looped over a tree so th
at the light shone on the ground below. Five men were sitting playing cards, using a suitcase as a table. I didn’t notice who they were; I had eyes only for Burns. He played a hand casually but I knew he’d seen me arrive and his back had stiffened.

  I stopped just outside the circle of light and said, ‘Burns, come here. I want you.’

  He looked up and shaded his eyes. ‘Why, it’s our top man,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, Mannix?’

  Cards went down all round the circle. I said, ‘Come over here.’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’ He uncoiled his lean length from the ground.

  I watched him come. He was younger, taller, heavier and probably faster than I was, so I’d have to get in first. It’s a stupid man who starts a fight without reckoning the odds. Burns knew that too; he was spoiling for a fight, as Zimmerman had warned me, and he had set up the time and place. It was years since I’d done much fighting except with words, while he was probably well in practice.

  I was aware of figures forming the inevitable spectators’ ring, but I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off Burns. Witnesses were in any case going to be more on my side than on his, so long as I could hold my own.

  I held up the bottle shard. ‘Did you drink my whisky?’

  ‘Sure I drank it. What’s wrong with borrowing a little booze? It was good stuff while it lasted.’

  I controlled my anger, and was so intent that when the interruption came I couldn’t quite credit it. A hand came over my shoulder and took the broken glass from me. ‘Do you mind if I have a look at that?’ a voice said.

  McGrath stepped out beside me and peered at the label. Everyone else stood motionless.

  ‘I’ve seen this before. Isn’t it the bottle you were keeping for medical emergencies, now?’

  Then without warning the hand not holding the shard connected with Burns just at the angle of his jaw and the Texan grunted, staggered and dropped as though poleaxed. Only afterwards did I see the cosh.