Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“It’s this Texas dust,” Mackenzie said. “Sticks in the gullet like no other dust. Laughs at water.”

Finlayson made a sweeping motion with his hand. “Some big rigs out there. Damned expensive and damned difficult to handle. It’s pitch dark, say, forty below and you’re tired – you’re always tired up here. Don’t forget we work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A couple of Scotches on top of all that, and you’ve written off a million dollars’ worth of equipment. Or you damage the pipeline. Or you kill yourself. Or, worst of all, you kill some of your mates. Comparatively, they had it easy in the old prohibition days – bulk smuggling from Canada, bathtub gin, illicit stills by the thousand. Rather different on the North Slope here – get caught smuggling in a teaspoonful of liquor, and that’s it. No argument, no court of appeal. Out. But there’s no problem – no one is going to risk eight hundred dollars a week for ten cents’ worth of bourbon.”

Mackenzie said: “When’s the next flight out to Anchorage?”

Finlayson smiled. “All is not lost, Mr Mackenzie.” He unlocked a filing cabinet, produced a bottle of Scotch and two glasses and poured with a generous hand. “Welcome to the North Slope, gentlemen.”

“I was having visions,” said Mackenzie, “of travellers stranded in an Alpine blizzard and a St Bernard lolloping towards them with the usual restorative. You’re not a drinking man?”

“Certainly. One week in five when I rejoin my family in Anchorage. This is strictly for visiting V.I.P.s. One would assume you qualify under that heading?” Thoughtfully, he mopped melting ice from his beard. “Though frankly, I never heard of your organisation until a couple of days ago.”

“Think of us as desert roses,” Mackenzie said. “Born to blush and bloom unseen. I think I’ve got that wrong, but the desert bit is appropriate enough. That’s where we seem to spend most of our time.” He nodded towards the window. “A desert doesn’t have to be made of sand. I suppose this qualifies as an Arctic desert.”

“I think of it that way myself. But what do you do in those deserts? Your function, I mean.”

“Our function?” Dermott considered. “Oddly enough, I’d say our function is to reduce our worthy employer, Jim Brady, to a state of bankruptcy.”

“ Jim Brady? I thought his initial was A.”

“His mother was English. She christened him Algernon. Wouldn’t you object? He’s always known as Jim. Anyway, there are only three people in the world any good at extinguishing oil-field fires, particularly gusher fires, and all three are Texas-based. Jim Brady’s one of the three.

“It used to be commonly accepted that there are just three causes of such oil fires: spontaneous combustion, which should never happen but does; the human factor, i.e. sheer carelessness; and mechanical failure. After twenty-five years in the business Brady recognised that there was a fourth and more sinister element involved, that would come broadly speaking under the heading of industrial sabotage.”

“Who would engage in sabotage? What would the motivation be?”

“Well we can rule out the most obvious – rivalry among the big oil companies. It doesn’t exist. This notion of cut-throat competition exists only in the sensational press and among the more feebleminded of the public. To be a fly on the wall at a closed meeting of the oil lobby in Washington is to understand once and for all the meaning of the expression ‘two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one’. Multiplied by twenty, of course. Let Exxon put up the price of gas by a penny today, and Gulf, Shell, B.P., Elf, Agip and all the others will do the same tomorrow. Or even take Prudhoe Bay here. The classic example, surely, of co-operation – umpteen companies working hand-in-glove for the mutual benefit of all concerned: benefit of all the oil companies, that is. The State of Alaska and the general public might adopt a rather different and more jaundiced viewpoint.

“So we rule out business rivalries. This leaves another kind of energy. Power. International power politics; Say Country X could seriously weaken enemy Country Y by slowing down its oil revenues. That’s one obvious scenario. Then there’s internal power politics. Suppose disaffected elements in an oil-rich dictatorship see a means of demonstrating their dissatisfaction against a regime that clasps the ill-gotten gains to its mercenary bosom or, at best, distributes some measure of the largesse to its nearest and dearest, while ensuring that the peasantry remains in the properly medieval state of poverty. Starvation does nicely as motivation; this kind of set-up leaves room for personal revenge, the settling of old scores, the working off of old grudges.

“And don’t forget the pyromaniac who sees in oil a ludicrously easy target and the source of lovely flames. In short, there’s room for practically everything, and the more bizarre and unimaginable, the more likely to happen. A case in point.”

He nodded at Mackenzie. “Donald and I have just returned from the Gulf. The local security men and the police were baffled by an outbreak of small fires – small, so-called, but with damage totalling two million dollars. Clearly the work of an arsonist. We tracked him down, apprehended him, and punished him. We gave him a bow and arrow.”

Finlayson looked at them as if their Scotch had taken hold too quickly.

“Eleven-year-old son of the British consul. He had a powerful Webley air pistol. Webley make the traditional ammunition for this – hollow, concave lead pellets. They do not make pellets of hardened steel, which give off a splendid spark when they strike ferrous metal. This lad had a plentiful supply obtained from a local Arab boy who had a similar pistol and used those illegal pellets for hunting desert vermin. Incidentally, the Arab boy’s old man, a prince of the blood royal, owned the oilfield in question. The English boy’s arrows have rubber tips.”

“I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere.”

“Sure, there’s a lesson: the unpredictable is always with you. Our industrial sabotage division – that’s Jim Brady’s term for it – was formed six years ago. There are fourteen of us in it. At first it was as a purely investigative agency. We went to a place after the deed had been done and the fire put out – as often as not it was Jim who put it out – and tried to find out who had done it, why, and what his modus operandi had been. Frankly, we had very limited success: usually the horse had gone, and all we were doing was locking the empty stable door.

“Now the emphasis has changed – we try to lock the damned door in such a fashion that no-one can open it. In other words, prevention: the maximum tightening of both mechanical and human security. The response to this service has been remarkable – we’re now the most profitable side of Jim’s operations. By far. Capping off runaway wells, putting fires out, can’t hold a candle, if you’ll pardon the expression, to our security work. Such is the demand for our services that we could triple our division and still not cope with all the calls being made upon us.”

“Well, why don’t you? Triple the business, I mean.”

“Trained personnel,” Mackenzie said. “Just not there. More accurately, there are next to no experienced operatives and there’s an almost total dearth of people qualified to be trained for the job. The combination of qualifications is difficult to come by. You have to have an investigative mind, and that in turn is based on an inborn instinct for detection – the Sherlock Holmes genes, shall we say. You’ve either got it or not: it can’t be inculcated. You have to have an eye and a nose for security, an obsession , almost – and this can only come from field experience; you have to have a pretty detailed knowledge of the oil industry world-wide: and, above all, you have to be an oilman.”