Blood Oil

by James Phelan

  Fox led the way over and they stood by him, backpacks over their shoulders. Gammaldi pulled out one of the three empty chairs by the low table and sat down. Fox joined him, and they waited long enough for Gammaldi to cough in order to get the guy’s attention.

  “Help yourself to the water,” the man said in thick Scottish, more Sean Connery than Billy Connolly. His focus remained on his newspaper. “Touch my martini jug and I’ll take your arm off.”

  Fox and Gammaldi shared a look, the latter man shrugging it off and pouring himself a water. He leaned back and sipped at it as if considering this fascinating creature.

  Finally, the newspaper was closed, folded in half and dropped onto the table.

  “Sir Alex Simpson the third,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Lachlan Fox.”

  “Alister Gammaldi the first.”

  “Ah, Aussies!” Sir Alex said. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of you chaps here! Martini?”

  “No, thanks,” Fox said.

  “Here to talk about the ’05 Ashes, I hope, what a series…”

  “Actually, Alex—”

  “Sir Alex. Forty years of service to the BBC no less.”

  “Right. Er, Sir Alex, we’re just after a driver to get us into Port Harcourt and Abuja,” Fox said. “We’re reporters out of New York, doing a story on the bombing of the oil building.”

  “Hmmm…” Sir Alex pondered their request, his bushy grey eyebrows dancing as he sipped his martini. He drained the entire glass, then poured another from the jug that was resting in a bowl of ice. “You need a driver.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing getting into Port Harcourt, I’m afraid,” Sir Alex said. “The bombing, big security lock-down.”

  “We know that flights have been suspended,” Fox said. “We’re after a car and a—”

  “No, you don’t understand me, Foxy boy,” Sir Alex said. He leaned his girth forward in the creaking old cane armchair. “The roads are closed. Military and police are letting nothing in there that doesn’t belong in there. That means no press, certainly no Western press.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t say it otherwise,” Sir Alex said.

  “When’s it open again?”

  Sir Alex paused as if considering it.

  “I’ve been to Sydney once, didn’t care for it,” he said.

  Gammaldi gave Fox a look that would normally be accompanied by a finger twirling around his ear to signify they were in the presence of a crackpot.

  “How about via the coast?” Fox persisted. “In a boat?”

  Sir Alex shook his head.

  “CNN crew tried that yesterday. They were put on the first flight home this morning.” Sir Alex seemed to like being the one with information. “It wasn’t all their idea—those guys over there, by the corner of the bar? For a price they will pretty much get you whatever you want. Boats, information, access. Linked to what you might call a local mafia. Politicians and cops too, but that’s much the same thing.”

  “How about those guys in the cheap suits?” Fox asked.

  “Couriers,” Sir Alex said. “The old-fashioned way to get things communicated in this country. Different levels of service depending on the price: normally two guys—driver and an armed courier—to get documents around. The more you pay, the more guns and cars they send along. Oil companies use them all the time to transport not just documents but personnel too.”

  “They any good?” Fox asked. The guys were drinking pretty hard to be anywhere near alert enough to be trustworthy with a life worth caring about.

  “No, not really,” Sir Alex said. “What you must realise is that this place is kind of like the Wild West. There’s pretty much anything to be had, for a price of course. Access is about the only thing that’s hard to come by, you need someone with direct contacts for that.”

  Fox checked his watch. He wondered how Wallace was getting on, and whether the plan of getting Achebe to a table had worked.

  “Excuse me,” Fox said, and got up. “Back in a minute.”

  He went upstairs and onto the decked balcony, then dialled Tas’s cell phone.

  Wallace picked it up before the second ring.

  “How you getting on down there?”

  “Still nothing getting into Port Harcourt,” Fox said. “Any luck with Achebe?”

  Five minutes later Fox was downstairs again.

  “And you should only eat what you’ve seen cooked,” Sir Alex said. “Otherwise you’ll be shitting through the eye of a needle for weeks.”

  “Thanks, that’s good advice,” Gammaldi said, martini glass in hand, a plate of food in front of the two of them half-demolished already.

  “Okay, Wallace has come through with our interview with the minister,” Fox said, taking a seat. “We have to head for Abuja now. Then we make for Port Harcourt, where he’ll meet us with Rollins.”

  “I’m telling you, no planes in or out of Port Harcourt, except from the oil companies evacuating staff,” Sir Alex said while chewing on an olive.

  “We’ll get access,” Gammaldi said.

  “On your say-so, little friend,” Sir Alex insisted. He raised his glass for Gammaldi to top up.

  “So, can you help us with transport to Abuja?” Fox asked.

  “That I can do. There’s a good driver who can take you there, reliable chap. Used him once or twice myself, I’ll see if I can find him for you,” Sir Alex said. “It won’t be cheap, though, I’m afraid.”

  25

  LONDON

  Wallace was inside the home of the Rollins family. It was on a street of brick-fronted, double-storey houses with slate roofs and picket fences. Nothing to say of the front yard, just a few trained roses, white-painted timber sash windows—the whole street was the same. The only difference in appearance was in some of the front doors. The Rollins’s was the scarlet red of British redcoat soldiers from a time long past.

  Wallace sat in the lounge room, a cup of tea held on his knee. Penny Rollins was there, on the couch, sitting upright. Their six-year-old was standing by her mother, staring at Wallace.

  “Sorry, she’s obsessed with people who come to see her father,” Penny said.

  “You know why I’m here?”

  Penny nodded. Her daughter did the same, a little carbon copy of her mother.

  There was an awkward moment between the two adults.

  Wallace could hear the tone of Michael’s voice coming from the study across the hall. He couldn’t make out the words, despite his nicely trained BBC English.

  “They call him all the time, the press,” Penny Rollins said. “Wanting his story. Wanting a piece of him, as if what he went through was not real. To them, it’s just a story. Words on a page that a reader somewhere in the world will scan over with detached interest. They talk to him wanting realistic detail that will never be properly appreciated.”

  “Lachlan Fox’s pieces got some traction,” Wallace said. “And he won’t just let this story disappear. He’ll keep on it. As long as extraordinary rendition keeps happening, he’ll do his best to keep the public aware.”

  “If it were anyone else’s investigation, I would insist he didn’t go with you today,” she said. “But I, we, like Lachlan. He’s a good man.”

  “That he is,” Wallace said.

  Penny rubbed her stomach and looked a little off. She whispered in her daughter’s ear and the little girl reluctantly left the room, trudging up the timber stairs.

  “Those newspaper readers will never understand how my husband now sleeps,” Penny said. “How he cries in the night. How he can’t stand being alone in a room. He doesn’t like bright light. He can’t write with a pen for any longer than five minutes without having a fit of pain—have you seen how his hands have healed? His fingers—they are not fingers any more.”

  They shared in a moment of silence. What answer could he give this man’s partner? This m
an’s companion, carer, the lover that saw into the darkest recesses of Michael’s being, what could he possibly say to make any difference?

  “The US Supreme Court still not moving?” Wallace asked eventually.

  “They won’t even hear his case.” She sipped her tea, her expression bitter. “Too many official secrets involved, national security and all that rubbish.”

  “I don’t know what else I can do,” Wallace said.

  “I know. You have done enough, Tas, thank you—sincerely, thank you,” she said, softening. “I know Lachlan’s reporting made some difference in Washington. Created some awareness back there in the US. I guess I cannot ask for more than that.”

  “Michael will be safe in Nigeria, he doesn’t have to leave his hotel room, and it’s just for the twenty-four hours,” Wallace said.

  She nodded, set down her tea. Put her hands in her lap and talked to him matter-of-factly.

  “In and out, he told me that,” she said. Her eyes narrowed and she shifted forward in her chair. She leaned into Wallace’s space, spoke so only he would hear. “What was it that convinced him to work again? Hmm? The old ‘You’ve never sat on the sidelines like this before’?”

  Wallace was still looking her in the eyes. She had every right to be angry, and in this moment he’d take it. All that she had to dish out, he was willing to wear it all. If not him, who else could she strike out at?

  “What did it take?” she asked again. Shook her head in disgust.

  Wallace didn’t answer. It was between him and Michael.

  “I’m not asking you to promise me his safety,” Penny said. “I know Lachlan will look after him. I just want it to end. I don’t want him going out there any more. And I never want to see you again, ever. Not here, not in the street, never. He does this for you and that’s it, no more work. This is the last time.”

  26

  NIGERIA

  Fox sat up front with the driver, the diesel Land Rover navigating a road that for all intents was not a road at all. They were two hours out of Lagos, heading for Abuja. Gammaldi was in the rear seat, attempting to take photos out of the window. Their driver, known only as Simon, drove at a speed on these roads that had them holding on to stop bouncing out of their seats.

  “If you drive too slowly, they will stop you and you will not get through without paying a big price,” Simon said. “So we drive fast.”

  “Who will stop us?” Fox asked. “These people on the sides of the road?”

  “Yes. It’s their little economy. It’s all they have, there’s no other option. They sell what they can, others wash windscreens, many beg, many more are armed and will rob you at gunpoint.”

  Fox instinctively glanced at his backpack on the floor by his feet. His Five-seveN pistol was in there, within easy reach.

  “This city we are entering, I grew up in,” Simon said. “But that was a long time ago now.”

  The outskirts were walled, mud fortifications that were probably at least a thousand years old. Here, like so many cities on this continent, the slums were among the worst imaginable. No running water, power, sewage, nothing. But it hadn’t always been like this—there were power poles, some with greasy old unbroken lights, most stripped bare of anything made of metal that might have some value, others sawn off at their base as even the timber of the pole was put to use.

  “What happened here?” Fox asked.

  Simon didn’t answer for a while as he leaned on the horn and shifted down gears to overtake a caravan of food trucks and open-topped cars full to the brim with armed guys in civilian clothing. Fox snapped some photos out of his window. Focused in on a young child looking at the trucks, her expression showing that she knew what was in the precious cargo that bypassed her.

  “It fell apart,” Simon said. “This was a major trading town for centuries. The government simply forgot about it, like so much of the country.”

  “Societal breakdown…” Fox said. They rode in more silence for a while. “This road, it doesn’t bring much trade?”

  “This highway was built on a major trade path, but that’s long gone,” Simon said. “It is still a major thoroughfare but that’s all they have now, people flashing through as quick as they can. No one stops, and the government is likely to make a bypass around it soon. The people you see here, on the sides, they are the ones that are trading. That’s as organised as it gets now, aside from the criminal gangs.”

  Simon steered through a roundabout, the centre of which was a burned-out petrol tanker, a rusted skeleton long stripped by salvagers.

  “There’s nothing here any more…” Simon’s words faded into oblivion. “No more industry, barely enough agriculture to support the local population, yet they can’t go anywhere. They have nowhere else to go that will be better for them.”

  “Lagos is too full?”

  “Yes, and too full of its own problems. No one wants these people—every town and city in this country has people like this. All of them, going nowhere. They live slowly and die young.”

  Fox looked out of his window. Gammaldi was doing the same. Scenes of decay flashed by. Rusted tin houses. Decaying wrecks of cars and trucks. Dead trees. Shit ran in the gutters, accented here and there by the slick swirls of crude oil that spilled and gurgled. Repressed shells of people clung to life by threads. The broken road was lined with piles of useless litter. Down side-streets the garbage-heaped slums stretched for miles. Skinny dogs were the only animals they saw, and even they looked half-past-dead.

  “There’s oil here too?”

  Simon nodded.

  “People used to think that finding oil was a godsend,” Simon said. He surprised Fox and Gammaldi with a laugh, but it developed into a laugh that smacked of depression. A what-else-can-I-do laugh. “They treated the oil explorers like God’s own sons! They gave them everything, the land, their food. Their way of life; their means of survival. But then they realised the curse that it is. They realised, too late, that they gave away their soul for nothing in return. This is blood oil.”

  “Can we stop here?” Fox asked. “Talk to some of the people?”

  Simon was silent for some time. There was just the rattle of the diesel engine and the rolling of the tyres on the cratered road full of potholes and ruts.

  “Yes,” Simon said. “I know somewhere we can stop.”

  27

  KEY WEST, FLORIDA

  “De kuday pa aman,” the Afghan and his friend said to the other three. “Allahu Akbar.”

  Hands were clasped, hugs were shared, prayer beads were swapped. There were no tears shed among these men, just resolve, even a measure of pride.

  A final phone call to Washington had been made, the goodbyes were over, and the Buick backed out of the driveway, turned left down the quiet suburban street, then left again onto Truman Avenue. US Route 1 lay ahead of them, a road that would take them all the way to their final destination of Washington DC. The car rode low on its rear axle, six twenty-five kilo sacks of ANFO in the trunk. The Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil had been easier for the group to get hold of than they’d planned. Cheaper too. Some three billion kilos of it were exploded in this country annually, mostly in mining operations. Their purchase would not be missed from any inventories.

  The Afghan was silent as his friend drove the first shift. It was the third time he’d been to this country. There was much he liked about it, although he didn’t share that much with his friend. There were certainly worse places to die.

  “Tomorrow is D-Day!” his friend said, breaking the silence the Afghan had been enjoying.

  “Did he give you the address of his safe house in Washington?”

  “No, we must meet him at a McDonald’s,” he replied. “That is what Mr Massoud said to me on the phone. He called it D-Day!”

  “Tahir takes too much joy in what he does,” the Afghan said. “Do not—”

  He stopped himself. He knew his friend was excitable, knew he idolis
ed the Saudi and what he stood for. He hadn’t been a trained soldier like himself. He didn’t understand that, with war, there was a certain solemnity to be respected.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” the Afghan said. “Do what you like with your last moments here. Speak how you like, it is your life. But, for now, let us drive in peace so that we may think of our families.”

  28

  NIGERIA

  They were parked by the bank of a river that, like all the rivers, creeks and tributaries in the south, fed into the massive Niger Delta. This would have to be among the most fertile places on earth. The water ran dark and fast, full of nutrients that were carried downstream and out to sea.

  Fox had his backpack over one shoulder, his Nikon up and clicking away. Half-naked kids walked about, with not enough energy in their whippet bodies to play. Sullen adults milled around the riverbank, their bare feet caked in the rust-brown earth that baked underfoot in the humidity. At the river’s edge, Fox took a shot of the water’s surface—but the display showed that the camera could not pick up the full extent of the slick, oily image. Rotten, mauled fish carcasses bobbed by. Little boats lay upturned on the banks, the dust and dirt on them signalling when they’d last been used. Fox took a photo of several linedup boats; the one in the foreground had grass growing through its hull. Fishing nets were melting into the ground.

  “This way,” Simon called.

  Fox followed him down a well-trodden path between rusted metal shacks. Coloured material was hung ahead, forming a curtain that Simon walked through, then Fox, then Gammaldi. He was silent, Gammaldi. More so than Fox could ever remember. He wore a look that reflected clearly what he felt, that this place was really getting to him.

  They passed through a covered courtyard. Several men lay there in bandages, their gunshot wounds unmistakable. No doctors or nurses, just some local help that did little more than soothe them with company.