The Sons of Adam (68 page)

Strange how a man can settle.

Tom had first set foot in Texas in 1924. He’d been just thirty-one years old, but had already had enough experience to fill a lifetime twice that long. Since joining the British Army in 1914, he’d never been in the same place longer than a couple of years. He’d been with scores of women. He’d fought, been wounded, captured, and nearly starved. He’d never owned a home. He’d worked at so many jobs, he couldn’t even count them.

And yet he’d settled. Arriving in Texas had felt like a homecoming. Even before the Nellie Holling oil strike, Tom had known that Texas would always be his home. Since then the feeling had grown. In addition to Norgaard House, his mansion on the outskirts of Houston, he’d bought himself a ten-thousand-acre cattle ranch, with fine mountain trails where he and Mitch could ride and shoot. Meantime, each trip out of state felt like a journey to another country. He and Lyman Bard privately divided their oil operations into ‘Domestic’ and ‘International’, meaning Texan and everything else.

But if even Louisiana and Florida felt foreign, then Washington DC felt like a whole new continent.

Another explosion.

Another brilliant flare-up against the night sky: red and green this time, with a centre of pink stars that hissed and moaned as they fell downwards to the Potomac.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Rebecca, floating up alongside him in her long silver gown. ‘I do adore fireworks.’ Her lovely dark hair had been taken prisoner by fashion, and it had been cut short and tightly curled at the back, a style that didn’t really do her justice. Her face shone. The ball had been thrown by the Association of American Jews as a way of thanking America for all it had done for the Jewish people. Now, in October 1939, the importance of saving Jewish refugees could hardly be more obvious. There were many people to thank, but chief amongst them was Rebecca, the undisputed queen of the ball.

Tom smiled crookedly. ‘They’re pretty, I guess. But I’ve had my fill of explosions for one lifetime.’

‘Oh, Tomek, I am sorry. I should have thought.’

He shrugged. ‘This time no one’s trying to explode me.’

There was another loud bang, and the side of Rebecca’s face was lit up in green and purple as the sparks fell glittering to the ground. The oil feud with Alan was over. Dead and buried. The price war had ended. At the gas station pump and the refinery door, rates were back to their old levels, or at least close to them. They had stopped interfering with each other’s labour force or harming each other in any of the other ten thousand ways they’d invented over the years.

Rebecca looked seriously at her husband. He spoke so seldom about the past, she still knew nothing of his former life beyond war and prison camp. ‘Do you want to come inside? I don’t need to watch the rest of the show.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine. It’s finishing anyway.’ He gestured over to a couple of men with expensive suits and professional smiles, who were headed their way. ‘And I think there are a couple of senators who haven’t yet got themselves photographed shaking your hand.’

Her face radiated smiles once again. She hadn’t done what she’d done to get praised for it, but since the praise came free, she didn’t mind collecting it. Tom bent and whispered in her ear, ‘Not bad for a little Jewish girl from Lithuania.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘Thank you, Tomek.’

She advanced on the two senators, who did indeed have a tame photographer in embarrassingly close attendance. Tom watched as his wife won two more hearts that evening. The fireworks blazed their last. He sipped champagne.

Then: ‘Mr Calloway, I believe?’

There was a voice at his left elbow. Tom spun round. A tall silver-haired gentleman with something courtly in his manner was standing there.

‘Yes, indeed, I –’

‘May I introduce myself? My name is Cordell Hull, Secretary of State.’

‘Mr Secretary.’ Tom shook hands.

‘Allow me to congratulate you and your wife. It’s a fine thing the two of you have done.’

Tom had grown cynical enough of Washington politics that he virtually looked around for the camera, but there wasn’t one. ‘Thank you. It’s all my wife’s doing. I just loaned her the chequebook.’

‘Well, the chequebook’s important too.’

There was something sincere in Hull’s manner and Tom accepted the praise with a smile. He
was
proud of himself. Thousands of Jews had had their lives saved by Rebecca’s energy and Tom’s generosity. If they could possibly manage it, they’d continue their charitable efforts right through the war in Europe. Wherever and whenever the Nazis threatened, he and Rebecca would aim to snatch their prey out from under their noses. Their achievement already had been colossal. It was nothing compared with what they still intended. Not bad for a gardener’s boy from Hampshire.

‘I introduced myself partly to congratulate you,’ said Hull, ‘but mostly because I wanted to ask you a favour.’

‘Yes?’

Tom couldn’t think for the life of him what favour Hull could possibly want. He remembered reading something of Hull’s background. He’d been raised in a log cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee. He’d become a judge. He’d fought in the Spanish-American war. He’d become Congressman, Senator, now Secretary of State. What could Hull possibly want of Tom?

‘You will be aware that we – the administration, the President, all of us – are deeply concerned about Japanese aggrandisement in the Pacific? The war on China, the build-up of armaments.’

‘Uh.’ Tom’s answer was almost a grunt. He’d been through one war in his life. He wanted nothing to do with another.

‘The situation is becoming exceptionally serious,’ persisted Hull. ‘We know that Japan wants to make itself economically independent of the United States, because it fears that excessive dependence might cripple it in case of war. The Japanese are concerned about a number of things, but most of all they’re concerned about oil.’

‘Why? Why the hell should there be a war? Who cares if they’re independent?’

‘Everything the Japanese are doing to reduce their dependence makes war more likely. The closest available source of oil is the the Dutch East Indies. If they attack that, they know the United States will declare war. The Pacific Ocean is our western frontier. It must remain free. It will remain free.’

‘You’re telling me the Japs want oil for fear of war, but if they get the oil they’ll get a war too?’

‘That’s pretty much it.’

Tom felt the implacable logic tightening round him, as it had done a quarter of a century before. ‘Mr Secretary, I don’t know about any of this. I’m just a businessman.’

‘Your business is oil –’

‘Right. Just oil.’

‘And oil
is
the business of war. There’s no difference these days. You can’t escape the facts.’

Tom shook his head. ‘You may be right, Mr Secretary. If war comes, I’ll play whatever role my country requires of me, but until then …’

‘Your country needs you now, Mr Calloway.’

Tom shook his head.

‘May I make my request even?’

It was impossible to deny Hull’s gentlemanly persuasiveness. Tom nodded, already half defeated.

‘We need a man, an oilman, of exceptional and penetrating thinking, to assist us with our deliberations. It’s no use leaving this sort of thing to politicians and diplomats alone.’

‘Ah!’ Tom’s exclamation was one of denial. He didn’t want to hear this. He wanted to be back in Texas, among his beloved oil wells, away from the politics of a world he cared nothing for.

‘Oil is at the centre of everything,’ said Hull. ‘We’ve embargoed aviaton fuel exports over a certain octane limit. They’ve responded by buying five times more fuel below that limit. To conserve oil stocks for their navy, they’ve banned their fishing fleet from using oil. We know they’re buying up oil drilling equipment, which can only be because they plan to be in the Dutch East Indies before too long. The biggest policy debate in Washington at the moment is when to institute a total ban on all oil sales to Japan.’

Tom was shaking his head, but Hull persisted.

‘Most of the bigger oil companies have Japanese and Asian businesses, which might confuse their loyalties. Many of them have Japanese-born Americans in sensitive positions. They may have conflicts of interest. We’re coming to you because you don’t. We trust you, Calloway.’

‘Heck, no, Hull. I appreciate the offer. It’s a compliment, really, but no. I have to say no.’

‘You’ll think it over?’

Tom wanted to escape. He hated the sense of being encircled, by a logic and a situation that he wanted nothing to do with. He threw up his hands. ‘I guess. If you really want, but I …’

‘Would it make a difference if I invited you to meet with the President? He knows I’m speaking to you tonight. He was very enthusiastic about the idea.’

‘Jesus, Hull, Jesus …’

‘Of course, you’d need an office here in Washington. We’d pay for all costs associated with the move.’

‘For God’s sakes … Listen, please excuse me, I gotta go.’

Using a glimpse of Rebecca as a pretext, he ran.

He ran from Hull. He ran from war. He ran from a mad world he thought he’d escaped for ever.

The years passed; the terrible years of war.

Tom had failed, of course. However much he had wanted to avoid entanglement, his sense of duty, his deep-down nobility had triumphed, as Cordell Hull had somehow always known it would.

So Tom had served. For two long years in Washington, 1939 to 1941, he’d done everything he could to pull Japan back from the brink. But without success. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had simply consolidated Tom’s position as one of the most vital strategic elements in the American administration.

And Hull had been right. The business of oil
was
the business of war. From the very first, the Americans had understood that better than the Japanese. Take the attack on Pearl Harbor itself. The Japanese planes had hit the American airfields, they’d hit their battleships and cruisers. But they’d missed the one single target that had really mattered.

The oil.

Four and a half million barrels, lying in unarmoured storage tanks, exposed not simply to bombs, but even bullets. Without oil, the whole Pacific Fleet would have been so much junk. Without fuel, the American air bases might as well have been museums. Without oil, the Americans would have had to refuel Hawaii across half a hostile ocean in the teeth of Japanese submarine attack. And the Japanese hadn’t hit the oil, for the simple reason that they’d never even tried.

From that day on, the oil war began to turn in the American favour. Having taken the Dutch East Indies – the source of the oil they so badly craved, the Japanese began drilling. They got lucky. They struck oil in such quantities that they possessed the richest oil field anywhere between California and the Middle East. But the strike was useless.

Finding oil was one thing. Getting it to Japan was another. And they couldn’t do it. At Tom’s strongly expressed insistence, American submarines and American planes concentrated their efforts on the oil tankers running north to the Home Islands. And one by one the tankers were sunk. So effective were the American submariners that the Japanese launched ships virtually certain that they’d be sunk before finding harbour.

The oil noose began to tighten.

The Japanese were brave, resourceful and determined. They never stopped trying to get their tankers through. They found a way to brew gasoline from pine tree roots. They did everything they could – and more. But it was no use. Their ships were squandered for lack of fuel, their air force crippled.

‘Before long,’ said Tom, only one-quarter joking, ‘they’ll have to fly their planes in one direction only.’