Athabasca (2 page)

"No complaints." Dermott smiled. "Not that we require much care. There the food counter, here Mackenzie. The wateringhole 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 waistline -- "

"Your colleague's waistline 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 Center. 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 oil field. 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 gray. 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 travelers stranded in an Alpine blizzard and a St. Bernard lolloping toward 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 VIPs. One would assume you qualify under that heading?" Thoughtfully, he mopped melting ice from his beard. "Though frankly, I never heard of your organization 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 toward 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 recognized 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 first 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, BP, 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 setup 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 makes 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 oil field 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 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 worldwide. And, above all, you have to be an oilman."

"And you gentlemen are oilmen." It was a statement, not a question.

"All our working lives," Dermott said. "We've both been field operation managers."

"If your services are in such demand, how come we should be so lucky as to jump to the head of the queue?"

Dermott said, "As far as we know this is the first time any oil company has received notification of intent to sabotage. First real chance we've had to try out our preventive medicine. We're just slightly puzzled on one point, Mr. Finlayson. You say you never heard of us until a couple of days ago. How come we're here, then? I mean, we knew of this three days ago when we arrived back from the Mideast. We spent a day resting up, another day studying the layout and security measures of the Alaskan pipeline and -- "

"You did that, eh? Isn't it classified information?"

Dermott was patient. "We could have sent for it immediately on receiving the request for assistance. We didn't have to. The information, Mr. Finlayson, is not classified. It's in the public domain. Big companies tend to be incredibly careless about such matters. Whether to reassure the public or burnish their own image by taking thorough-going precautions, they not only release large chunks of information about their activities but positively bombard the public with them. The information, of course, comes in disparate and apparently unrelated lumps. It requires only a moderately intelligent fella to piece them all together.

"Not that those big companies, such as Alyeska, who built your pipeline, have much to reproach themselves about. They don't even begin to operate in the same league of indiscretion as the all-time champs, the U. S. Government. Take the classic example of the declassification of the secret of the atom bomb. When the Russians got the. bomb, the Government thought there was no point in being secretive anymore and proceeded to tell all. You want to know how to make an atom bomb? Just send a pittance to the AEC in Washington and you'll have the necessary information by return mail. That this information could be used by Americans against Americans apparently never occurred to the towering intellects of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, who seem to have been under the impression that the American criminal classes voluntarily retired en masse on the day of declassification."

Finlayson raised a defensive hand. "Hold. Enough. I accept that you haven't infiltrated Prudhole Bay with a battalion of spies. Answer's simple. When I received this unpleasant letter -- it was sent to me, not to our H.Q. in Anchorage -- I talked to the general manager, Alaska. We both agreed that it was almost certainly a hoax. still, I regret to say that many Alaskans aren't all that kindly disposed toward us. We also agreed that if it was not a hoax, it could be something very serious indeed. People like us, although we're well enough up the ladder in our own fields, don't make final decisions on the safety and future of a ten-billion-dollar investment. So we notified the grand panjandrums. Your directive came from London. Informing me of their decision must have come as an afterthought."

"Head offices being what they are," Dermott said. "Got this threatening note here?"

Finlayson retrieved a single sheet of notepaper from a drawer and passed it across.

"'My dear Mr. Finlayson,"' Dermott read. "Well, that's civil enough. 'I have to inform you that you will be incurring a slight spillage of oil in the near future. Not much, I assure you, just sufficient to convince you that we can interrupt oil flow whenever and wherever we please. Please notify ARCO.'"

Dermott shoved the letter across to Mackenzie. "Understandably unsigned. No demands. If this is genuine, it's intended as a softening-up demonstration in preparation for the big threat and big demand that will follow. A morale-sapper, if you will, designed to scare the pants off you."

Finlayson's gaze was on the middle distance. "I'm not so sure he hasn't done that already."

"You notified ARCO?"

"Yup. Oil field's split more or less half-and-half. We run the western sector. ARCO -- Atlantic Richfield, Exxon, some smaller groups -- they run the eastern sector."

"What's their reaction?"

"Like mine. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst."

"Your security chief. What's his reaction?"

"Downright pessimistic. It's his baby, after all.

"If I were in his shoes, I'd feel the same way. He's convinced of the genuineness of this threat."

"Me too," Dermott said. "This came in an envelope? Ah, thank you." He read the address. "'Mr. John Finlayson, B.Sc., A.M.I.M.E.' Not only punctilious, but they've done their homework on you. 'BP/ Sohio, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.' Postmarked Edmonton, Alberta. That mean anything to you?"