It wasn’t Martin’s first impulse to spend time looking over the results from these old works. West Virginia had long since become home to several thousand small but successful oil and gas wells. Ten days earlier, he had simply been sitting in his office past midnight. The dusty aluminum tape canisters caught his eye and he stayed until almost daylight scanning the depths of central West Virginia off the zip drives. He was looking for a giant, undiscovered field, not another thirty-barrel- a-day well common to West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The contrasts, the images and the signatures of hydrocarbon were unbelievably clear on his computer screen. Scanning fields on his computer screen, he could find reservoirs of oil that had been hiding here or there, and they had remained undiscovered for more than sixty years because the seismic tapes were never analyzed. With ease, Martin could flip over to a map of today’s West Virginia producing properties and find a development well that had been drilled into a reservoir just five or ten years earlier and it lined up perfectly to the old seismic tapes recorded during the depression. Martin had been the explorationist on a number of these more recent wells himself when he had started out in the Appalachian Division with Empire Oil. By the time he came around, exploration tools and techniques had become so advanced that the oil companies did all their own exploration work. They had shot new seismic of their own, mostly across promising prospects. It would have been cost prohibitive to shoot seismic over a wide area of the state, just hoping to find something. The simple truth was that no one even knew that these old high-quality seismic pictures were already sitting harmlessly gathering dust in the basements of state administration buildings in half the states in the country.
So, tonight was different than last night. While he hadn’t actually tried his hand at this before, Martin was looking forward to the evening of work ahead of him. He had carefully reviewed all the pieces of the puzzle that he wished to put together. He had even awakened at night, dreaming of the most effective sequence of steps to complete his little project. He had found himself running sequence after sequence, over and over in his mind, until he believed he had worked it all out.
The first piece was probably going to be the easiest, because it was the best data he had, and he was the most familiar with it. Basin Oil had obtained a series of federal leases in shallow offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico. These leases had been held out of early Gulf development because they were in environmentally sensitive areas just south of Louisiana. For the last eleven months, Martin had spent at least half of his time leading an effort to explore and find oil in these new properties. Some of these structures had shown perhaps the most promising prospects for new oil and gas discoveries that Martin had seen in his twenty years in the business. Martin’s own personal estimate was that these tracts contained more than seven hundred million barrels of oil. Martin had split the reservoir engineering responsibilities across four separate exploration groups, and as a result, only a handful of executives in the company knew the big picture. Within the next four months, Basin hoped to obtain the necessary Federal and Environmental permits needed to commence developmental drilling on these properties. If and when those results came in, Basin’s stock would finally go somewhere. Martin had looked over this data a thousand times in every dimension; vertical, horizontal, east-west, north-south, by stratum, by material type, by wave frequency.
One of the first things Martin needed to determine was if this seismic work like that found in West Virginia was actually ever done in Wisconsin. If yes, were the canisters still in storage somewhere? Most probably if they survived, they were in or near the state capitol area in some type of storage facility in Madison. A week ago, Martin had spent six hours on the internet digging for this data. He found catalogued data for canisters in Ohio and Michigan, but nothing for Wisconsin. Finally, he searched the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which provided references to “catalog data” stored in digital format in the archives of the Helen White Library at the University of Wisconsin. Miraculously, when he was sifting through the library files, he came upon an index of “Wisconsin Seismic-CCC-Tape Files,” with numbers in the exact same format as the index he had for West Virginia. At least at one point, it appeared that the old seismic had been recorded. The canisters might still be around. The labels recorded the latitude and longitude marking the source area of data for each file. It was easy for him to print off this index of the Wisconsin CCC Canisters.
Looking at the canister labels, he studied the coordinates and found the canisters that were from an area that matched a land area from the Brule River on the west, to Ashland in the east. Seven canisters held the data. This was the area where he had been deer hunting for a number of years. This was the area with the iridescent pools of water out in the forest that looked like they had an oily film on the surface. He picked out the labels for those seven canisters and sent them to his printer to print labels. He still didn’t know exactly where the canisters were stored, but he was sure with a little digging in Madison he could find them.
The next step was simple. Electronically taking the east-west coordinates from Canister 43, Martin scanned slowly south across the federal lease data passing by several smaller patches of promise until he came to Ship Shoal 214. One of the true gems from the fifty-six leases Basin held, Martin found a series of very large hydrocarbon reservoirs that were exactly south of the area mapped in northern Wisconsin. Martin stored this view of Ship Shoal in a new file and was ready to take the next step. Using a simple find and global replace command that he had written in Fortran, Martin did a “find and replace” command on latitude. The result was a complete and systematic change in the latitudes imbedded in the data from Gulf of Mexico latitudes to northern Wisconsin latitudes. Now he had an exact replica of the very promising Ship Shoal 214 files, but with their new latitude labels, it looked like the data was from northern Wisconsin instead of offshore Louisiana. Martin kept this procedure going for two more grueling hours, scanning and changing latitude markers, scanning and changing latitude markers. When he was done, he had a block of underground seismic maps that, for all the world, looked like they had been taken from deep under the forest floor of the Chequamegon State Forest in northern Wisconsin—directly under his deer hunting lands. And more importantly, these maps seemed to show massive hydrocarbon reserves under these lands in northern Wisconsin—not in the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana. Looking over the surface maps, Martin verified that while much of the land was owned by the State Forest, there were fifteen or twenty large tracts still held by private landowners inside the boundaries of the Forest. Public forest mineral rights were held by the government, but mineral interests on private land were held by the private landowners. On his new maps, some of the biggest reservoirs appeared to lie under these privately held lands. Had this been real, these landowners would have become instant mega-millionaires from the oil on their land. But the oil reservoirs were fake. He had lifted them from Ship Shoal 214.
Martin was intimately familiar with many of these private tracts, having hunted, for the last thirty years, on both public and private lands all around the area. Even now looking on the USGS surface map, Martin warmed to the memories of days and nights lost around places he found on the map. Delta, where, ten years ago, the old lodge had burned down, the charred timbers still standing today. Canthook Lake, where his dad and Wayne had nearly drowned when, as kids, a huge thunderstorm had rolled suddenly over the lake and nearly swamped their boat. Now the square mile around Canthook was a damn private game preserve, surrounded by sixteen-foot fences, where rich businessmen from Chicago would come up for a few days of “hunting.” The old Baker place was actually land where Martin had just shot the biggest buck in his life. He could see the old house and the outbuildings, marked with six tiny black dots, highlighted against the green relief map from the USGS map.
Martin had selected his source data for three reasons. He had to have data that showed tremendous oil and gas reserves with some basic sedimentary tra
its similar to those of the upper Midwest. The source data had to be data not well known by other geologists and geophysicists. The Ship Shoal maps had only been seen by a handful of explorationists. Maps from well-known fields, or fields that had been producing for decades, might be recognized. Maps from famous fields like that had been studied, and taken apart, by people just like Martin in oil companies all over the world who might easily recognize the particular formations of a previous major discovery. Not only was Martin intimately familiar with Ship Shoal data, few others, even inside his own company, had even seen it.
Running on adrenaline, Martin looked at his watch. Customarily, Martin would stay until eight or nine in the evening if he got in the middle of an extended stream of analysis. But now it was nearing midnight and his presence would be difficult to explain if another employee saw a light on and stopped by.
Satisfied with his work, Martin used a special HDMI transfer cable to route a copy of the finished file to the ancient reel-to-reel tape drive. He pressed record on the old digital recorder, and watched the wheels slowly turn as it recorded the new digitized Wisconsin seismic maps onto the old tape from West Virginia. Secondly, he placed a copy of the file on his hard drive, password protected, but titled Chequam.file. With a click, Martin routed select portions of his new masterpiece to the huge Varian plotter down the hall. He turned off all of the lights in the office, just in case someone was passing by. Sitting in his office with the lights off, Martin drank another Diet Coke and waited patiently while the plotter methodically churned out several hardcopies which detailed the fake underground reservoirs. Each map was sixty-eight inches wide, some more than nine feet long—exactly the dimensions of the ancient maps he had gotten from the West Virginia Archives. When the chattering of the plotter had stopped, Martin slunk down the hall in the dark and took a quick look at the document to see if it had printed okay. Back in his office, he dropped the newly digitized tapes of Wisconsin into the old canisters from West Virginia. Then he took the new Wisconsin labels that he had printed out and carefully placed the new labels directly over the old labels from West Virginia. Now he had seven official Corp of Engineer canisters, labelled for Wisconsin, and full of tapes which showed promising underground oil fields, stolen from Ship Shoal 214.
Slipping out through the door, he quietly turned to lock up. From the second floor of the atrium lobby he surveyed the parking lot for any sign of activity. Seeing none, he quickly descended the stairs, carrying with him an oversized gym bag with his seven prized tape canisters, and a long brown corrugated tube with plotted out seismic maps of what now appeared to be huge oil fields underlying the far reaches of Wisconsin’s Chequamegon State Forest.
Back at The Creole, he opened a beer and spread the first huge map across his kitchen. From the small bookcase in the living room, he took the brass-mounted, ten-inch magnifying glass mounted on little ball-bearing rollers and spent another two hours, and another three beers, carefully scanning his manufactured maps from end to end to end, letting his oven preheat on low. Finally, he spent the last twenty minutes slowly rotating each map in front of the oven door he had cracked open, the fresh paper easily taking on a yellowed, worn look that usually comes from decades of storage in less than perfect climatic conditions. Satisfied with his product, he rolled the maps up and slipped them into the big fat map tube. He fell into bed a little before three in the morning, energized by his success, exhausted from his effort. He had created a full set of tapes and print-outs that looked, for all the world, like a giant new oil discovery in northern Wisconsin.
CHAPTER 19
Anita and Martin had gone to one of her favorite places for lunch. She thought lunch had been fun. She had dressed nice. Martin had on his navy-blue suit and looked sensational. Anita had guessed Liz could be a handful, but she thought Liz was crazy for giving up on Martin. He just looked too good. After chit chatting for a while, Martin relived their special dinner back at the NPRA dinner and took her by surprise by joking about punching Hilton at the party at Café Annie. He joked that he might find it hard to get an invitation to the dinner next year. He talked in short choppy sentences when describing how incensed he was to see Liz at such a dinner with Hilton. Martin knew about Hilton and Anita, and of their arrangement. Martin asked lots of questions about Hilton. Anita talked openly about how she wanted to get close to him, said she wouldn’t mind seeing Hilton’s marriage fail. Hilton and his wife were going through some tough times. Anita said she sometimes dreamed about marrying Hilton. At the same time, she felt like he was using her. After a couple of glasses of wine, she wondered aloud if Hilton ever had had any intention of leaving his wife. Just when things would get a little too serious, Martin would crack a joke. Then, they’d laugh all over again at the ruckus they’d caused at the dinner and what Hilton’s face looked like when he realized that he was seated at the same table with Anita at dinner that night.
At that, Martin had launched into even more questions about Hilton: where he worked, what he did, how much money he had, how long had he had worked at Prolea. In some ways, talking to Martin was like talking to a girlfriend. He was a good listener. She had known Hilton for years. She even told Martin a long story about how she and Hilton first met. Then Anita admitted that Hilton had been paying her rent now for more than two years, as a showing of how much he cared for her. Anita told Martin that Hilton was sick and tired of the French people coming over all the time and getting in his business. For a number of months now he’d talked about going out on his own. Anita said Hilton had his own little business on the side, trading secretly on his own account. He was using an independent trading company down in Montrose; some guy named Gannon. The guy had even called Anita’s phone a few times looking for Hilton.
Martin was getting comfortable with Anita as a friend. He felt he could trust her. He told her that he’d been thinking of leaving Basin Oil. He’d been working secretly at night on a project. Said he thought there was a huge opportunity to get into the timber and the paper business in northern Wisconsin. He needed to lease a bunch of forest land, before anybody else thought of his idea. While he had not done a lot of work on it, with some money from just a few wealthy investors, Martin thought he could get out of the oil business and make a bundle. Now as he sat there with Anita, he said he had no idea where he’d ever find such investors or who might possibly have such an interest in pursuing such an opportunity. Anita said that despite their scuffle, maybe Hilton or somebody Hilton knew would have some interest in investing. Martin said he was wary of Hilton and he doubted that Hilton would have even a passing interest in such an opportunity. But yeah, maybe Anita should give Hilton a call and feel him out on something like this. Martin emphasized that he wanted to be careful with whom he shared this information because he really wanted to do business with someone he could trust, and someone who would truly appreciate what he was bringing to the table. And then came even funnier remarks about their little escapade over at Café Annie the other night.
By the time Martin and Anita got back to Basin’s offices it was midafternoon Friday. Dead tired from the night before, and dragged down by the wine, Martin surprised her when he said he thought he’d call it a day. He asked Anita to call him at home if he had any important messages. Then they sat in his car outside the front door of Basin, wishing each other a nice weekend. Anita thanked him for a wonderful time and then leaned over unexpectedly and kissed him on the cheek. Looking at him without another word, she smiled, opened her door and half ran into the office.
Back at his apartment thirty minutes later, Martin checked his answering machine for messages. Nothing. Martin was tired. Those late nights at Basin working on his “secret project” were taking a toll. He carefully took off the Hermes tie the kids had given him for Father’s Day, stripped off the navy suit and fell into bed at five in the afternoon.
CHAPTER 20
Gerard showed up unexpectedly on Wednesday. Well, it wasn’t totally unexpected. He had said he would be back to Hou
ston in thirty days. Thirty days would have been on the following Monday, but he had had other business in New York on Monday and Tuesday. At the last minute he had decided to come directly to Houston rather than fly back to Paris for the rest of the week. This time, Gerard had a new goon with him. Hilton had smelled trouble as soon as he was introduced to the guy. Currently Michel was working in the Corporate Development Group, a training ground for well-educated high-performing employees at Prolea. Gerard had gone through the same rotation. But Michel had also spent almost two years on the crude trading desk in Singapore as the risk control analyst. Occasionally Hilton had spoken to him over the phone on a quick market question, or Michel would speak on the daily conference call, when Asia was closing for the day and handing over some of their positions for Paris or London to work on. At any rate, this made for an especially dangerous combination for Hilton to deal with—someone who was both smart and experienced in trading. Gerard had spent most of the yesterday going over the financial reports and meeting with Hilton, his financial controller, and various members of the trading group. Meanwhile, Gerard had sent Michel and a couple of the other guys to the trading room to pore over records and interrogate Hilton’s traders. When he thought about his private deals with Gannon, Hilton found his heart pounding. He didn’t have any of his personal stuff in Prolea’s records, but one slip up…
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