Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

‘Perhaps you’d tell me just what happened?’ I suggested.

‘Well-’ He hesitated, his eyes still on the envelope. ‘It was night, you see. We had finished unloading and the deck lights had been switched off about an hour when one of my Arab crew reports a dugout alongside and a white man in it called Thomas asking for me. Well, I couldn’t recall his name, how should I? I have so many passengers; they come and go along the coast — oilmen, Locust Control, Levy officers, Air Force personnel, Government officials. How should I remember his name, even if he was another Welshman? It was four years since he’d used it anyway. And then he came stumbling into my cabin and I recognized him at once of course.’

I thought he was going to stop there, but after a moment’s silence he went on: ‘Only the previous voyage I’d had him on board as a passenger, from Bahrain down to Dubai. He’d changed a great deal in those six months; all the vitality of youth seemed to have been whipped out of him, his skin burned almost black by the sun and the hard, angular bones of the face showing through. But it was the eyes, man. They weren’t the eyes of a youngster any more; they were the eyes of a man who’d looked the world in the face and been badly frightened by it.’

‘Who was he afraid of?’ I was thinking of the father then.

‘I didn’t say he was afraid of anybody.’

‘Did he talk to you at all — about himself?’

‘Oh yes, indeed. He was talking all the time. To be honest, Mr Grant, I thought he might be going round the bend. Some of them do that you know … the heat and the sand, and it’s lonely work-’

‘Yes, but what did he say?’

‘Nothing very much. Nothing that I can remember, that is. He was talking very fast, you see, the words tumbling over themselves — about his job and where he’d been.’

‘And where had he been? Had he been to Saraifa?’

But Griffiths shook his head. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he mentioned Saraifa. It was talk for the sake of talking, you know — for the sake of hearing the sound of his own voice and having somebody listen to it. He’d been in some wild places, I think, and mostly on his own, with nobody with him but Arabs.’

I asked about the packet then. ‘Did he talk about that at all?’

‘No. He sat at my desk and wrote that covering letter. And when he’d finished it, he borrowed an envelope from me, sealed the whole thing up and asked me to put it in my safe and deliver it to you personally the moment I docked.’

‘Didn’t you ask him why it was so urgent?’

‘Of course I did. I was damned curious about the whole thing. But his manner was so odd-’

‘He didn’t say anything about it being political dynamite then?’

‘Political dynamite?’ Griffiths’s bushy eyebrows lifted. ‘No, he didn’t say anything like that.’ A wary look had come into his eyes. ‘Is that what he says in that letter?’

I nodded. ‘Where’s Colonel Whitaker now? Can you tell me that?’

But he didn’t know for certain. ‘Probably in Saraifa,’ he said. ‘Why?’ His tone was suddenly cautious as though he were a witness under cross-examination, and since I had no intention of telling him the reason for my interest in Whitaker, I asked him about the previous voyage when he’d had David on board as a passenger. ‘Was he going to join his father, do you know?’

But he couldn’t even tell me that. ‘All he said was that he was going down into the Rub al Khali.’ He took out his watch and glanced at it. ‘It was a hell of a time to be going down into the Empty Quarter,’ he added as though glad to escape into generalities. ‘That time of the year the sand is hot enough to burn the tyres off a truck and the soles off your boots.’

‘It was summer?’

He nodded. ‘Early July it would have been.’

And that was the month I’d received the shipping agent’s account. ‘Did you have a seismological truck on board?’

‘Yes.’ He stared at me curiously, surprised that I should know about it. ‘It was deck cargo and we shipped it down to Muscat. I remember that because we had a devil of a job getting it ashore; had to lash four of the local boats together and bridge them with planks.’

‘You don’t think it could be the same truck — the one that was found abandoned?’

But of course he couldn’t tell me that.

‘Did you know he was on loan to his father? Did he say anything about that?’

He shook his head and got to his feet.

‘Did he talk about his father at all?’

‘No, he didn’t mention him.’ He said it flatly as though to discourage any further questions. ‘I must be going now, Mr Grant. Just docked — a lot of things to see to, you know.’

I was reluctant to let him go. ‘One more question, Captain Griffiths.’ I was standing facing him then. ‘You said once that you heard all the gossip out there. Have you heard any rumours about Saraifa?’

‘Rumours?’

That Colonel Whitaker is prospecting for oil there.’

He started to say something, but then he seemed to think better of it and shook his head. ‘A man like that, you never know what’s true and what isn’t. And Saraifa is a long way from the coast. A trouble spot, too.’ He glanced uneasily at his watch again.

I read him The Times Correspondent’s report, the paragraph about David being on loan to his father. But all he said was, The Whitaker Theory. It crops up whenever anybody writes about that man.’ And then he was moving towards the door. ‘Well, I’ve done what I promised, and that’s that.’ He held out his hand. ‘Sad about David Whitaker, very sad. Good boy — lots of character.’ He shook my hand briefly, cast a quick glance at the envelope still lying unopened on my desk and then went to the door. His last words to me as I saw him out were: ‘It’s a tricky business — oil. Lot of money involved; politics, too. And if he was operating anywhere near the Hadd-Saraifa border … Well, you’d understand if you’d ever been out there.’ He said it in a fatherly way as though he were giving me some sound advice.

I was reluctant to let him go. That little Welsh sea captain was stuffed full of all the gossip of the Gulf if I could only have wrung it out of him. But I don’t think he wanted to talk and anyway I was anxious to find out what that envelope contained. The covering letter had given me no real indication.

You helped me once long ago. Now I’m asking you to help me again. He mentioned the envelope then and asked me to put it in a safe place and only open it in the event of his death. You ‘re the only man I feel I can trust with a thing like this. And he added, I should warn you that it’s political dynamite, and if anybody knew it was in your possession it might lead to trouble. He concluded with apologies for bothering me with his affairs, and then these words: Thank you again for helping me to a life that has suited me and that I have enjoyed. It was signed: Yours gratefully — David. I read it through again standing at my desk, and there was no escaping the significance of those final words. For some reason he had believed he was going to die. Had he been ill, suffering from some terrible disease? But that didn’t fit Griffiths’s description of him. Nervous, wrought up, even frightened — yes; but not ill. And why the secrecy anyway?

I picked up the envelope and slit it open. Inside was a typewritten letter, his Will, and two envelopes — one addressed to Sir Philip Gorde at the London Office of GODCO, the other marked: LOCATION AND SKETCH MAP. Location of what? But it wasn’t difficult to guess, for what else but the discovery of oil could be described as political dynamite in the deserts of Arabia?