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ONE

The telephone call came when I was down by the big circular pool chatting up the two frauleins I had cut out of the herd. I didn’t rate my chances too highly. They were of an age which regards any man of over thirty-five as falling apart at the seams; but what the hell, it was improving my German.

I looked up at the brown face of the waiter and said incredulously, ‘A phone call for me?’

‘Yes, sir. From London.’ He seemed impressed.

I sighed and grabbed my beach robe. ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised, and followed the waiter up the steps towards the hotel. At the top I paused. ‘I’ll take it in my room,’ I said, and cut across the front of the hotel towards the cabana I rented.

Inside it was cool, almost cold, and the air conditioning unit uttered a muted roar. I took a can of beer from the refrigerator, opened it, and picked up the telephone. As I suspected, it was Geddes. ‘What are you doing in Kenya?’ he asked. The line was good; he could have been in the next room.

I drank some beer. ‘What do you care where I take my vacations?’

‘You’re on the right continent. It’s a pity you have to come back to London. What’s the weather like there?’

‘It’s hot. What would you expect on the equator?’

‘It’s raining here,’ he said, ‘and a bit cold.’

I’d got used to the British by now. As with the Arabs there is always an exchange of small talk before the serious issues arise but the British always talk about the weather. I sometimes find it hard to take. ‘You didn’t ring me for a weather report. What’s this about London?’

‘Playtime is over, I’m afraid. We have a job for you. I’d like to see you in my office the day after tomorrow.’

I figured it out. Half an hour to check out, another hour to Mombasa to turn in the rented car. The afternoon flight to Nairobi and then the midnight flight to London. And the rest of that day to recover. ‘I might just make it,’ I conceded, ‘but I’d like to know why.’

‘Too complicated now. See you in London.’

‘Okay,’ I said grouchily. ‘How did you know I was here, by the way?’

Geddes laughed lightly. ‘We have our methods, Watson, we have our methods.’ There was a click and the line went dead.

I replaced the handset in disgust. That was another thing about the British – they were always flinging quotations at you, especially from Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland. Or Winnie the Pooh, for God’s sake!

I went outside the cabana and stood on the balcony while I finished the beer. The Indian Ocean was calm and palm fronds fluttered in a light breeze. The girls were splashing in the pool, having a mock fight, and their shrill laughter cut through the heated air. Two young men were watching them with interest. Goodbyes were unnecessary, I thought, so I finished the beer and went inside to pack.

A word about the company I work for. British Electric is about as British as Shell Oil is Dutch – it’s gone multinational, which is why I was one of the many Americans in its employ. You can’t buy a two kilowatt electric heater from British Electric, nor yet a five cubic foot refrigerator, but if you want the giant-sized economy pack which produces current measured in megawatts then we’re your boys. We’re at the heavy end of the industry.

Nominally I’m an engineer but it must have been ten years since I actually built or designed anything. The higher a man rises in a corporation like ours the less he is concerned with purely technical problems. Of course, the jargon of modern management makes everything sound technical and the subcommittee rooms resound with phrases drawn from critical path analysis, operations research and industrial dynamics, but all that flim-flam is discarded at the big boardroom table, where the serious decisions are made by men who know there is a lot more to management than the mechanics of technique.

There are lots of names for people like me. In some companies I’m called an expeditor, in others a troubleshooter. I operate in the foggy area bounded on the north by technical problems, on the east by finance, on the west by politics, and on the south by the sheer quirkiness of humankind. If I had to put a name to my trade I’d call myself a political engineer.

Geddes was right about London; it was cold and wet. There was a strong wind blowing which drove the rain against the windows of his office with a pattering sound. After Africa it was bleak.

He stood up as I entered. ‘You have a nice tan,’ he said appreciatively.

‘It would have been better if I could have finished my vacation. What’s the problem?’

‘You Yanks are always in such a hurry,’ complained Geddes. That was good for a couple of laughs. You don’t run an outfit like British Electric by resting on your butt and Geddes, like many other Britishers in a top ranking job, seemed deceptively slow but somehow seemed to come out ahead. The classic definition of a Hungarian as a guy who comes behind you in a revolving door and steps out ahead could very well apply to Geddes.

The second laugh was that I could never break them of the habit of calling me a Yank. I tried calling Geddes a Scouse once, and then tried to show him that Liverpool is closer to London than Wyoming to New England, but it never sank in.

‘This way,’ he said. ‘I’ve a team laid on in the boardroom.’

I knew most of the men there, and when Geddes said, ‘You all know Neil Mannix,’ there was a murmur of assent. There was one new boy whom I didn’t know, and whom Geddes introduced. ‘This is John Sutherland – our man on the spot.’

‘Which spot?’

‘I said you were on the right continent. It’s just that you were on the wrong side.’ Geddes pulled back a curtain covering a notice board to reveal a map. ‘Nyala.’

I said, ‘We’ve got a power station contract there.’

‘That’s right.’ Geddes picked up a pointer and tapped the map. ‘Just about there – up in the north. A place called Bir Oassa.’

Someone had stuck a needle into the skin of the earth and the earth bled copiously. Thus encouraged, another hypodermic went into the earth’s hide and the oil came up driven by the pressure of natural gas. The gas, although not altogether unexpected, was a bonus. The oil strike led to much rejoicing and merriment among those who held on to the levers of power in a turbulent political society. In modern times big oil means political power on a world scale, and this was a chance for Nyala to make its presence felt in the comity of nations, something it had hitherto conspicuously failed to do. Oil also meant money – lots of it.

‘It’s good oil,’ Geddes was saying. ‘Low sulphur content and just the right viscosity to make it bunker grade without refining. The Nyalans have just completed a pipeline from Bir Oassa to Port Luard, here on the coast. That’s about eight hundred miles. They reckon they can offer cheap oil to ships on the round-Africa run to Asia. They hope to get a bit of South American business too. But all that’s in the future.’

The pointer returned to Bir Oassa. ‘There remains the natural gas. There was talk of running a gas line paralleling the oil line, building a liquifying plant at Port Luard, and shipping the gas to Europe. The North Sea business has made that an uneconomical proposition.’

Geddes shifted the pointer further north, holding it at arm’s length. ‘Up there between the true desert and the rain forests is where Nyala plans to build a power station.’

Everyone present had already heard about this, but still there were murmurs and an uneasy shifting. It would take more than one set of fingers to enumerate the obvious problems. I picked one of them at random.

‘What about cooling water? There’s a drought in the Sahara.’

McCahill stirred. ‘No problem. We put down boreholes and tapped plenty of water at six thousand feet.’ He grimaced. ‘Coming up from that depth it’s pretty warm, but extra cooling towers will take care of that.’ McCahill was on the design staff.

‘And as a spin-off we can spare enough for local irrigation and consumption, and that will help to put us across to the inhabitants.’ This from Public Relations, of course.

‘The drought in the Sahara is going to continue for a long time yet,’ Geddes said. ‘If the Nyalans can use their gas to fuel a power station then there’ll be the more electricity for pumping whatever water there is and for irrigating. They can sell their surplus gas to neighbour states too. Niger is interested in that already.’

It made sense of a kind, but before they could start making their fortunes out of oil and gas they had to obtain the stuff. I went over to the map and studied it.

‘You’ll have trouble with transport. There’s the big stuff like the boilers and the transformers. They can’t be assembled on site. How many transformers?’

‘Five,’ McCahill said. ‘At five hundred megawatts each. Four for running and one spare.’

‘And at three hundred tons each,’ I said.

‘I think Mister Milner has sorted that out,’ said Geddes.

Milner was our head logistics man. He had to make sure that everything was in the right place at the right time, and his department managed to keep our computers tied up rather considerably. He came forward and joined me at the map. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘There are some good roads.’

I was sceptical. ‘Out there – in Nyala?’

He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you haven’t been there yourself, have you, Neil? Wait until you read the full specs. But I’ll outline it for you and the others. After they got colonial rule their first president was Maro Ofanwe. Remember him?’

Someone made a throat-slitting gesture and there was a brief uneasy laugh. Nobody at the top likes to be reminded of coups of any sort.

‘He had the usual delusions of grandeur. One of the first things he did was to build a modern super-highway right along the coast from Port Luard to Hazi. Halfway along it, here at Lasulu, a branch goes north to Bir Oassa and even beyond – to nowhere. We shouldn’t have any trouble in that department.’

‘I’ll believe that road when I see it.’

Milner was annoyed and showed it. ‘I surveyed it myself with the boss of the transport company. Look at these photographs.’

He hovered at my elbow as I examined the pictures, glossy black-and-white aerial shots. Sure enough, there it was, looking as though it had been lifted bodily from Los Angeles and dumped in the middle of a scrubby nowhere.

‘Who uses it?’

‘The coast road gets quite a bit of use. The spur into the interior is under-used and under-maintained. The rain forest is encroaching in the south and in the north there will be trouble with sand drifts. The usual potholes are appearing. Edges are a bit worn in spots.’ This was common to most African tarmac and hardly surprised me. He went on, ‘There are some bridges which may be a bit dicey, but it’s nothing we can’t cope with.’

‘Is your transport contractor happy with it?’

‘Perfectly.’

I doubted that. A happy contractor is like a happy farmer – more or less nonexistent. But it was I who listened to the beefs, not the hirers and firers. I turned my attention back to Geddes, after mending fences with Milner by admiring his photographs.

‘I think Mister Shelford might have something to say,’ Geddes prompted.

Shelford was a political liaison man. He came from that department which was the nearest thing British Electric had to the State Department or the British Foreign Office. He cocked an eye at Geddes. ‘I take it Mr Mannix would like a rundown on the political situation?’

‘What else?’ asked Geddes a little acidly.

I didn’t like Shelford much. He was one of the striped pants crowd that infests Whitehall and Washington. Those guys like to think of themselves as decision makers and world shakers but they’re a long way from the top of the tree and they know it. From the sound of his voice, Geddes wasn’t too taken with Shelford either.

Shelford was obviously used to this irritable reaction to himself and ignored it. He spread his hands on the table and spoke precisely. ‘I regard Nyala as being one of the few countries in Africa which shows any political stability at the present time. That, of course, was not always so. Upon the overthrow of Maro Ofanwe there was considerable civil unrest and the army was forced to take over, a not atypical action in an African state. What was atypical, however, was that the army voluntarily handed back the reins of power to a properly constituted and elected civil government, which so far seems to be keeping the country on an even keel.’

Some of the others were growing restive under his lecturing, and Geddes cut in on what looked like the opening of a long speech. ‘That’s good so far,’ he said. ‘At least we won’t have to cope with the inflexibility of military minds.’

I grinned. ‘Just the deviousness of the political ones.’

Shelford showed signs of carrying on with his lecture and this time I cut in on him. ‘Have you been out there lately, Mister Shelford?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Have you been there at all?’

‘No,’ he said stiffly. I saw a few stifled smiles.

‘I see,’ I said, and switched my attention to Sutherland. ‘I suggest we hear from the man on the spot. How did you find things, John?’

Sutherland glanced at Geddes for a nod of approval before speaking.

‘Well, broadly speaking, I should say that Mister Shelford seems correct. The country shows remarkable stability; within limits, naturally. They are having to cope with a cash shortage, a water shortage, border skirmishes – the usual African troubles. But I didn’t come across much conflict at the top when we were out there.’

Shelford actually smirked. Geddes said, ‘Do you think the guarantees of the Nyalan Government will stand up under stress, should it come?’

Sutherland was being pressed and he courageously didn’t waver too much. ‘I should think so, provided the discretionary fund isn’t skimped.’

By that he meant that the palms held out to be greased should be liberally daubed, a not uncommon situation. I said, ‘You were speaking broadly, John. What would you say if you had to speak narrowly?’

Now he looked a little uncomfortable and his glance went from Geddes to Shelford before he replied. ‘It’s said that there’s some tribal unrest.’

This brought another murmur to the room. To the average European, while international and even intercounty and intercity rivalries are understandable factors, the demands of tribal loyalties seem often beyond all reason; in my time I have tried to liken the situation to that of warring football clubs and their more aggressive fans, but non-tribal peoples seemed to me to have the greatest difficulties in appreciating the pressures involved. I even saw eyebrows raised, a gesture of righteous intolerance which none at that table could afford. Shelford tried to bluster.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Nyala’s a unified state if ever I saw one. Tribal conflict has been vanquished.’

I decided to prick his balloon. ‘Apparently you haven’t seen it, though, Mister Shelford. Conflict of this sort is never finished with. Remember Nigeria – it happened there, and that’s almost next door. It exists in Kenya. It exists throughout Africa. And we know that it’s hard to disentangle fact from fiction, but we can’t afford to ignore either. John, who are the top dogs in Nyala, the majority tribe?’

‘The Kinguru.’

‘The President and most of the Cabinet will be Kinguru, then? The Civil Service? Leading merchants and businessmen?’ He nodded at each category. ‘The Army?’

Here he shook his head. ‘Surprisingly enough, apparently not. The Kinguru don’t seem to make good fighters. The Wabi people run the military, but they have some sort of tribal affiliation with the Kinguru anyway. You’ll need a sociologist’s report if you want to go into details.’

‘If the Kinguru aren’t fighters they may damn well have to learn,’ I said, ‘Like the Ibo in Nigeria and the Kikuyu in Kenya.’

Someone said, ‘You’re presupposing conflict, Neil.’

Geddes backed me. ‘It’s not unwise. And we do have some comments in the dossier, Neil – your homework.’ He tapped the bulky file on the table and adroitly lightened the atmosphere. ‘I think we can leave the political issues for the moment. How do we stand on progress to date, Bob?’

‘We’re exactly on schedule,’ said Milner with satisfaction. He would have been pained to be behind schedule, but almost equally pained to have been ahead of it. That would show that his computers weren’t giving an absolutely optimum arrangement, which would be unthinkable. But then he leaned forward and the pleased look vanished. ‘We might be running into a small problem, though.’

There were no small problems in jobs like this. They were all big ones, no matter how small they started.

Milner said, ‘Construction is well advanced and we’re about ready to take up the big loads. The analysis calls for the first big haul to be one of the boilers but the government is insisting that it be a transformer. That means that the boiler fitters are going to be sitting around on their butts doing nothing while a transformer just lies around because the electrical engineers aren’t yet ready to install it.’ He sounded aggrieved and I could well understand why. This was big money being messed around.

‘Why would they want to do that?’ I asked.

‘It’s some sort of public relations exercise they’re laying on. A transformer is the biggest thing we’re going to carry, and they want to make a thing of it before the populace gets used to seeing the big flat-bed trundling around their country.’

Geddes smiled. ‘They’re paying for it. I think we can let them have that much.’

‘It’ll cost us money,’ warned Milner.

‘The project is costing them a hundred and fifty million pounds,’ said Geddes. ‘I’m sure this schedule change can be absorbed: and if it’s all they want changed I’ll be very pleased. I’m sure you can reprogramme to compensate.’ His voice was as smooth as cream, and it had the desired effect on Milner, who looked a lot happier. He had made his point, and I was sure that he had some slack tucked away in his programme to take care of such emergencies.

The meeting carried on well into the morning. The finance boys came in with stuff about progress payments in relationship to cash flow, and there was a discussion about tendering for the electrical network which was to spread after the completion of the power plant. At last Geddes called a halt, leaned over towards me and said quietly, ‘Lunch with me, Neil.’

It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. ‘Be glad to,’ I said. There was more to come, obviously.

On the way out I caught up with Milner. ‘There’s a point that wasn’t brought up. Why unship cargo at Port Luard? Why not at Lasulu? That’s at the junction of the spur road leading upcountry.’

He shook his head. ‘Port Luard is the only deep water anchorage with proper quays. At Lasulu cargo is unshipped in to some pretty antique lighters. Would you like to transship a three hundred ton transformer into a lighter in a heavy swell?’

‘Not me,’ I said, and that was that.

I expected to lunch with Geddes in the directors’ dining room but instead he took me out to a restaurant. We had a drink at the bar while we chatted lightly about affairs in Africa, the state of the money market, the upcoming by-elections. It was only after we were at table and into our meal that he came back to the main topic.

‘We want you to go out there, Neil.’

This was very unsurprising, except that so far there didn’t seem to be a reason. I said, ‘Right now I should be out at Leopard Rock south of Mombasa, chatting up the girls. I suppose the sun’s just as hot on the west coast. Don’t know about the birds though.’

Geddes said, not altogether inconsequentially, ‘You should be married.’

‘I have been.’

We got on with the meal. I had nothing to say and let him make the running. ‘So you don’t mind solving the problem,’ he said eventually.

‘What problem? Milner’s got things running better than a Swiss watch.’

‘I don’t know what problem,’ Geddes said simply. ‘But I know there is one, and I want you to find it.’ He held up a hand to stop me interrupting. ‘It’s not as easy as it sounds, and things are, as you guessed, far from serene in Nyala under the surface. Sir Tom has had a whisper down the line from some of the old hands out there.’

Geddes was referring to our Chairman, Owner and Managing Director, a trinity called Sir Thomas Buckler. Feet firmly on the earth, head in Olympus, and with ears as big as a jack rabbit’s for any hint or form of peril to his beloved company. It was always wise to take notice of advice from that quarter, and my interest sharpened at once. So far there had been nothing to tempt me. Now there was the merest breath of warning that all might not be well, and that was the stuff I thrived on. As we ate and chatted on I felt a lot less cheesed off at having lost my Kenya vacation.

‘It may be nothing. But you have a nose for trouble, Neil, and I’m depending on you to sniff it out,’ Geddes said as we rose from the table. ‘By the way, do you know what the old colonial name for Port Luard used to be?’

‘Can’t say that I do.’

He smiled gently. ‘The Frying Pan.’