LITMIR.BIZ

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what the old boy would have thought,” said Dermott. “You might ask him, though.” He indicated a man heading in their direction. “Jack London would have recognised this one right away.”

      Mackenzie said: “More the Robert Service type, I’d say.”

      The newcomer certainly wasn’t of current vintage. He wore heavy felt boots, moleskin trousers and an incredibly faded mackinaw, which went well enough with the equally faded patches on the sleeves. A pair of sealskin gloves was suspended from his neck, and he carried a coonskin cap in his right hand. His hair was long and white and parted in the middle. He had a slightly hooked nose and clear blue eyes with deeply entrenched crow’s feet, which could have been caused by too much sun, too much snow or a too highly developed sense of humour. The rest of his face was obscured by a magnificent grizzled beard and moustache, both of which were at that moment rimed by droplets of ice. The yellow hard hat swinging from his left hand struck a jarring note. He stopped at their table, and from the momentary flash of white teeth it could be assumed that he was smiling.

      “Mr Dermott? Mr Mackenzie?” He offered his hand. “Finlayson. John Finlayson.”

      Dermott said: “Mr Finlayson. Field operations manager’s office?”

      “I am the field operations manager.” He pulled out a chair, sat, sighed and removed some ice particles from his beard. “Yes, yes, I know. Hard to believe.” He smiled again, gestured at his clothing. “Most people think I’ve been riding the rods. You know, hobo on the box-cars. God knows why. Nearest railroad track’s a long, long way from Prudhoe Bay. Like Tahiti and grass skirts. You know, gone native. Too many years on the North Slope.” His oddly staccato manner of speech was indeed suggestive of a person whose contact with civilisation was, at best, intermittent. “Sorry I couldn’t make it. Meet you, I mean. Deadhorse.”

      Mackenzie said: “Deadhorse?”

      “Airstrip. A little trouble at one of the gathering centres. Happens all the time. Sub-zero temperatures play hell with the molecular structure of steel. Being well taken care of, I hope?”

      “No complaints.” Dermott smiled. “Not that we require much care. There the food counter, here Mackenzie. The watering hole and the camel.” Dermott checked himself: he was beginning to talk like Finlayson. “Well, one little complaint, perhaps. Too many items on the lunch menu, too large a helping of any item. My colleague’s waist-line –”

      “Your colleague’s waist-line can take care of itself,” Mackenzie said comfortably. “But I do have a complaint, Mr Finlayson.”

      “I can imagine.” Another momentary flash of teeth, and Finlayson was on his feet. “Let’s hear it in my office. Just a few steps.” He walked across the dining-hall, stopped outside a door and indicated another door to the left. “Master operations control centre. The heart of Prudhoe Bay – or the western half of it, at least. All the computerized process control facilities for the supervision of the field’s operations.”

      Dermott said: “An enterprising lad with a satchelful of grenades could have himself quite a time in there.”

      “Five seconds, and he could close down the entire oilfield. Come all the way from Houston just to cheer me up? This way.”

      He led them through the outer door, then through an inner one to a small office. Desks, chairs and filing cabinets, all in metal, all in battleship grey. He gestured them to sit and smiled at Mackenzie. “As the French say, a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.”

      “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 Texasbased. 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 feeble-minded 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,

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