In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “Pipeline” tells the story of an amoral and confident employee of Butterfield-Chuu-Wolff, the biggest consortium on the face of the planet. It takes the reader on a journey from Turkmenistan to Turkey.

  PIPELINE

  Brian Aldiss

  Carl Roddard paced up and down the chamber of the Interior Minister. The floor was tiled. The sound of his footsteps drowned out the screech of the noisy air-conditioning.

  The Interior Minister sat placidly behind his desk. He smoked a cigarette. Behind him hung an oil portrait of President Firadzov, smiling. He looked up at the ceiling of the chamber. Beyond his narrow window, the sun ruled over the city of Ashkabad. Ashkabad, the capital of the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan, was where the pipeline began.

  Roddard ceased his pacing and confronted the Minister across his desk. He said, “Minister, your position is untenable. You do not have it in your power to nationalise the pipeline. Particularly at this late stage.”

  The Minister flicked ash. “We understand the pipeline is American. But it runs for the first seventy-two miles through territory that is Turkmenistan. Neither fact is under dispute. It is fitting that our forces protect this stretch from terrorism.”

  A stale odour permeated the chamber, as if it smelt ancient deceits.

  “You don’t have the fire power,” Carl told him. “You don’t control the air. Besides, our contract was drawn up nine years ago. This wild claim was not mentioned at that time. Why bring this absurd difficulty up now?”

  With a slight smile, the Minister replied, “There has been regime change since then.”

  He rose to his feet. “Now this meeting will close, Mr Roddard. No oil will flow through the pipeline until this matter of sovereignty is resolved. My government will not permit me to turn on the tap till then. Good day.”

  Carl’s auto was waiting in the shade of the Ministry. He told the driver to take him to the American quarter. Once through the blazing streets, and the various check-points, he went straight to the Embassy.

  Carl was a big man who thought big. He had been in Central Asia, on and off, for nine years. He was Chief Architect of the Pipeline Project, and employed by Butterfield-Chuu-Wolff, the biggest consortium on the face of the planet. Still he took his problems to the American Ambassaor to Turkmenistan, Stanley Coglan.

  Stanley was with his wife, Charlotte, and just finishing lunch. He stood up, wiping his mouth on his table napkin.

  “Hi, Stan, Charlie! Sorry to break in.”

  “Have a chair, Carl. Good to see you. You want something to eat? How was it with that snake of an Interior Minister?”

  Carl drew up a chair. “Not good. They’ve set us up.” He told Stanley of his meeting. “The essence of it is their demand to nationalise the first two hundred miles of the pipeline. It’s meaningless—and they know it.”

  Stanley looked thoughtful. “So what are they after, springing this on us? Can’t be money. Money is going to pour into this little tinpot state once the taps are turned. So why do they delay?”

  “Search me. National pride?”

  Charlotte looked over her shoulder to see that no servants were lingering. She said, “And what will they do with all the money? If precedents are anything to go by, they will not invest it on the infrastructure of the country, on much needed hospitals and better housing. No, it’ll go into explosives.”

  Stanley told his wife, mildly, “Darling, these are not Arabs we’re dealing with. Central Asians are rather different.”

  Charlotte shrugged. She poured Carl a glass of wine. He sipped it gratefully. The wine was imported from Italy, like many supplies in Turkmenistan.

  The ambassador swivelled in his chair to stare out of the window. Beyond the small garden, a sentry stood armed and alert at the gate. “Have you spoken yet to the top brass at Butterfield-Chou-Wolff?”

  “No. I drove straight here. BCW would probably want to give in. We can’t do that. Suoyue has to be in our hands from start to finish. It’s Security.” With a tinge of sarcasm, he had used Suoyue, the common Chinese name for the pipeline.

  “Of course, Firadzov is behind this,” Charlotte said, thoughtfully. Firadzov, the President of Turkmenistan, was the victor of a coup earlier in the previous year.

  “Not a cockroach moves without Firadzov’s say-so,” Stanley replied. He gazed at his wife.

  “So? Ziviad Haydor.”

  Both men looked at her blankly.

  “Ziviad Haydor,” Charlotte repeated. “That rare thing, a powerful Turkmen dissident. Funded by Moscow, naturally. Come on, guys, when Firadzov took over, and was gunning for him, Haydor ran here to us for sanctuary.”

  Carl remembered. “Moscow has no use for Firadzov. They wanted the oil pumped north to Moscow, as in Soviet times, when they owned this dump. This guy Haydor was Moscow’s man. Where is he now? Syria?”

  Stanley thumped the table. “He’s still here! One of our permanent lodgers. He lives in couple of rooms in the annexe. No one else will have him. Where can he go? The Arabs hate him even more than the Ruskies, because they think he did a deal with us. Of course, Firadzov would kill Haydor if he got half a chance.”

  Charlotte said quietly, “We could do a trade . . .”

  The two men looked at each other. Then they both grinned.

  Carl Roddard had himself driven to the offices of Butterfield-Chou-Wolff on the edge of town. Big initial letters BCW loomed on the facade of a square concrete building. It was ringed with a double protective fence. Nearby, the road led to a spot where the city abruptly stopped. A red-and-white painted metal pole was down. Beyond it, the great desert began, stoney and drab. The barrier kept out various camels, who stood hopelessly, staring in at this outpost of civilization.

  After thrusting his biometric card in the entry-slot to the building, Carl took the elevator to his offices on the fourth and top floor. It was blessedly cool in BCW, where the air-con unit worked. His assistant, Ron Deeds, greeted him. Preoccupied, Carl went to study the map of the area on the far wall.

  A silver marker pen depicted the pipeline running a thousand miles from East to West. It started just outside Ashkabad, to cross the frontier with Northern Iran at the town of Gifan. At the frontier was a fortified pumping station, marked as at Milestone 72.

  Ron came over, looking serious, tousling further his untidy fair hair. “The BCW committee met this morning,” he said in a low voice. “It’s looking not good. The world is waiting for the opening of the pipeline next week. BCW don’t want hitches. They were on the air to Washington and Beijing this morning, saying they would acceed to Firadzov’s demand for nationalisation of the first stretch of pipeline. They will take over control. We’ll just have a watching brief.”

  Carl scowled. “We can’t let it happen. Look, Ron, we’re going to do a trade. We think it will work. I need your help, okay?”

  “Sure. What can I do?”

  “We buy Firadzov off with a well-known dissident in our keeping. This nationalisation idea is just a bluff. We’ll call their bluff. We give Firadzov the dissident, he stops this nonsense. After all, Firadzov needs the oil flowing as much as we do.”

  “What do I do?”

  Carl began wagging his finger as if counting. “One, we can’t let anyone know the Embassy is involved in this deal. Two, we need you because you are British. Three, you drive round tonight and we have everything ready. Four, you take the dissident, whose hands will be tied and whose legs will be shackled, to the gates of the Interior Ministry. Tanks and major fire power will be there to protect you. Five, you speak over the intercom to the Interior Minister offering him the deal. Call off this nationalisation ploy immediately and you hand over the dissident they want like mad. Okay? Will you do it?”

  Ron had begun to look dubious during this speech. “Very dicey. Who is this dissident guy any way?”

  “His name’s Haydor, Ziviad Haydor.”

  Ron let out a whistling breath. “Him? Carl, you can’t hand Haydor over to that bastard Firadzov
! Haydor is a hero of the people. It was Haydor who represented the chance of a better life for everyone. Firadzov would torture him to death!”

  “Look, Ron, Haydor is a spent force. That issue’s closed, okay? It’s worth one life to get the damned oil flowing, isn’t it?”

  Ron stuck his fists in his jeans and turned his back. “It’s treachery, Carl. We swore to protect Haydor only a year since. Sorry, I want no part of it.”

  Carl grabbed Ron’s shoulder. “Can’t you see what’s involved? This is no time for scruples!”

  “Take your hand off me,” Ron said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Fuck you! Then I’ll do it myself!”

  He did it himself. It worked. Carl Roddard was hooded as he handed over his prisoner to the Interior Ministry. Ziviad Haydor disappeared into the regime’s torture chambers. Next morning, President Firadzov himself spoke on television. He stated, “Regretably, an attempt was recently made by unreliable elements to seize control of the oil pipeline. We of course recognise the legitimacy of the present international construction company to operate the pipeline for the benefit of all concerned. I have personally supported this great international venture, which affirms the greatness and importance of our dear nation, Turkmenistan.

  “Unreliable elements involved in this attempted illegal appropriation of property have been arrested, including the Minister for the Interior. They will stand trial at a future date.”

  Stanley Coglan and Mr Freddie Go from the Chinese Embassy shook hands with Carl in a brief ceremony. After which they toasted each other in champagne.

  “We must reward you somehow, Carl,” said Freddie Go, his face crinkling in the friendliest of smiles.

  “I didn’t want anyone to adopt my baby,” said Carl, thus mystifying his Chinese friend. “My marriage has collapsed, Freddie. Margie refused to live here in Ashkabad with me. She’s in England now. I’m hoping to patch things up, now that the oil is at last about to run.”

  “Okay,” said Stanley. “We’ll charter you a special plane right into London Heathrow—with our best wishes.”

  Carl, smiling, shook his head. “A bigger favour even than that, Stan, and Freddie. I want to be the first guy ever to drive along the whole length of Suoyue, all the way to the Med.”

  “Do we let him?” Stanley asked Freddie.

  Freddie pretended a sigh. “Can we stop him?”

  Carl Roddard shook hands with his Chief Engineer in farewell before climbing into his car. Behind them lay the first pumping station and the opening stretch of pipeline. The all-steel pipe had cathodic protection—the negative electric charge running throughout the length of the pipe. The pipeline and its associated roads stretched for over one thousand miles, covering some dangerous territory.

  Carl left Ashkabad, the capital city of Turkmenistan, early that morning. He kept himself well-armed, and tucked a revolver into the auto’s front compartment. The Pipeline Road began outside Ashkabad on its long journey westwards. Carl had programmed his car accordingly, and was travelling at an average of ninety miles per hour.

  With him in the car was Donna Khaddari. Donna had taken a Luckistryke and was sitting quietly, smiling to herself. Carl’s secretary was ill; she had sent her sister Donna instead. A pretty girl, thought Carl, approvingly. They had passed Gifan, where they crossed the frontier between Turkmenistan and Iran.

  To the right of the speeding vehicle—to the north—the coast of the Caspian Sea was visible. Dead ships lay there aslant, stranded, beached for all time, bones merely of boats that had once sailed from Baku in Azerbijan to Bandar-e Shah in Iran. Now the sea itself, whose waters had been syphoned off in the construction of the pipeline and its attendant highways, was wan, white, waveless, shrinking from its forsaken shore.

  To the south of the highway, the Elburz Mountains rose, their rainy slopes thickly forested, except where new roads had cut fresh scars through the trees.

  Carl, vacationing from his engagement to contractors Butterfield-Chuu-Wolff, kept his eyes on the highway ahead. It curved little, it swerved little, it climbed on gentle inclines, only to dip again, always following beside the armour-plated oil pipeline. Where the pipeline went, monstrous, shining metal-black, there the road went. Where the road went, there sped Carl’s auto, streamlined as a fish. And on the north side of the great pipe, there a twin road went, designed to carry traffic eastwards.

  At present, though, the twin routes were empty of traffic. The great highways were not yet officially open. Only Architects-in-Chief travelled them. Together with a few military vehicles. Carl concentrated on recalling details of his conversation with Coordinator Mohamed Barrak before he left Ashkabad. He had voiced a complaint that the consortium to which he belonged was filling the pockets of the dictator, Firadzov.

  He regarded Barrak as yet another corrupt native official, one of a kind with which BCW had become used to dealing. Barrak had grown distant and formal. He clasped his hands over his white jacket and his ample stomach. The vodka was getting to him.

  He spoke of historic necessity. The need of the West to draw on Central Asian oil overrode other considerations. Yes, Firadzov was rather—shall we say, overbearing?—well, dictatorial; but he controlled a country that floated on oil, and those vast reservoirs were needed to sustain the greedy West. A West, Barrak might say, also dictatorial. When the oil was flowing, the West would no longer have need of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, such as Iraq and Kuwait.

  Then Barrak had abruptly changed the subject, demanding to know why Carl Roddard suddenly needed leave to go to England.

  “My ex-wife has moved to England from Savannah. She lives with her brother in Oxford. I need to see her again.”

  “You are planning to remarry?”

  “That remains to be seen.” None of your business. He disliked Barrak and his pompous manner. Barrak liked to speak of the pipeline as “this great engineering achievement,” as if he had built it himself.

  Carl Roddard had broad shoulders and a broad base. He sat hunched in a narrow chair, saying nothing. He was drinking vodka with Barrak in a more-or-less westernised tea house in the European quarter of Ashkabad. Although the Turkmen were Muslim, or faintly Muslim, their seventy years under Russian domination had taught them to drink vodka like Cossacks. Carl did not tell the other man he had two young sons wandering about somewhere in the eastern United States, kicking up hell.

  Barrak had not enquired why Carl wished to drive the length of the pipeline road instead of flying. Everyone involved in the grandiose project desired to drive the whole length of it one day. Perhaps even Barrak felt the itch.

  The car sped ever on. Carl’s great tanned face was immoveable as he half-listened to a remastered ribbon of music from the long-dead Django, cool as a dingo in December. Donna appeared to be listening. She sat close to Carl, saying nothing.

  He gazed at the landscape he had helped forge. The highway undulated over northbound rivers pouring down from the mountain slopes. It followed the great coffin of the oil pipeline, by far the strongest feature of the moribund natural scene. Haze overhead filtered sunlight down evenly, shadowlessly; as the distance indicators flashed by; the scene resembled a computer playscene.

  The pipeline would, in a sense, unite East and West. Yet it was Carl’s absorption in the mighty project which had broken up his marriage to Margie. That could be put right, maybe. He would try. He regarded himself as a good fixer. Results were in the lap of the gods.

  Gigantic yellow-painted Chinese constructors toiled along in parallel with the pipeline. They were preparing to build a third lane on the westbound route. The great project was yet to be completed. High overhead, geostationary satellites saw to it that the project was not interfered with.

  The auto map was signalling fifty miles to Amol-Babol when Donna said, “I need a coffee.”

  “Right behind you.”

  “No, I need to stretch my legs. I have long legs, you know.”

  “I have noticed.”

 
“Stop at Amol-Bobol, please, Carl.”

  Amol-Babol was first stop after Ashkabad, the site of a big pumping station. As they had had to show their biometricards to enter the pipeline road, so they had to show their biometricards to get off it. The barriers swung up, the steel teeth sucked themselves down into the roadway and they drifted through.

  After the auto was douched with germicidal wash, it parked itself and the couple were free to walk.

  Amol-Babol was situated on the coast. Ships manoeuvred in the overcrowded harbour. Tehran was no more than sixty miles away, south over the Elburz Mountains. Amol-Babol was a newly compounded city, a transitory refuge for many of the men and women of all nationalities who worked on the pipeline. They included American, Australian, French, Spanish, English, Kurdish, Japanese and certainly Chinese. Many were soldiers, clerks, prostitutes, thieves, adventurers.

  The chaos of Amol-Babol was preferable to the deadness of Firadzov-ruled Ashkabad.

  At least Firadzov had cooperated with the constructors of the gigantic pipeline. The gross egotist he was regarded the pipeline as his memorial. He already had a pipeline, but it ran northward to Moscow, and Moscow paid peanuts compared with what the West would pay. Everything was a question of money.

  A big transporter aircraft was thundering down on the Amol-Babol airport even now, bringing in more workers, more machinery.

  The permanent civilian population consisted of a small clique of Iranian, Indian and Chinese bureaucrats, sitting at the top of the pile, then mainly of Kurds and other Iranians, with a scattering of Afghans. These latter, the poor, had set up stalls and markets through which Carl and Donna now strolled. Here were the world’s electronic gadgets, blinking, winking, chirruping, together with bright cheap Chinese-manufactured toys and clothes. Oriental music shrilly played.

  Donna bought a deep blue T-shirt bearing the elegantly complex Chinese symbol, Suoyue, for ‘Pipeline’. At another stall they sat and drank a rich Sumatra coffee. No alcohol was permitted anywhere along the course of the pipeline; it was a condition on which the Chinese had insisted.