The Final Cut. Michael Dobbs
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Название: The Final Cut
Автор: Michael Dobbs
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Исторические приключения
Серия: House of Cards Trilogy
isbn: 9780007405978
isbn:
He turned back to the computer screen and reexamined the seismic cross-sections that had started coming in from the survey. There seemed to be little of interest, everyone knew there was nothing in the seas around Cyprus – TNOC wouldn’t have bothered buying in the seismic had Cypriot waters not abutted Turkey’s own. All other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to have oil; not only the Turks but the Libyans, Syrians, Egyptians, even the damned Greeks – everyone except little Cyprus, who perhaps needed it more than most. Dry as dust. God’s mystery. A desert amidst a sea of black gold. Such is the oil business.
He looked again. They all laughed at him, old Hakim the Forgotten, but he had the patience for the tedious work of analysis, not like these youngsters whose only interest was in football and fu— he stopped. He experienced a strange tingling in his fingers as they hovered over the keyboard, a sensation that he had been here before, or somewhere much like it. A long time ago. Where could it have been? He polished his glasses, giving himself time to remember. These were sedimentary rocks, that was for sure, but sedimentarles bearing oil were like Greeks bearing gifts. Rarely genuine. What type might they be?
Then he understood. He had not only seen it on geological logs, he’d even stuck his hand in the bloody mud. Thirty years ago, as a student at the Petroleum Institute, when they had visited an exploratory well being drilled near the sea border with Cyprus. It had pulled up all the right geological formations, the sandwich of spongy sandstones that in theory might have held a billion barrels of oil but had yielded not a single drop. Now he thought he knew why. One of the seismic lines from the recent survey had been shot up to the site of the dry well and went straight through what was obviously a fault plane, a slippage in the earth’s crust that played hell with the geology.
He started coughing again, nerves this time. Somewhere he reckoned he still had a copy of his Petroleum Institute report and its detailed findings from the old well. The document cupboard. The thin metal door squealed in protest as with shaking fingers he began ransacking the contents – no skeleton guarding the pirate’s doubloons but ancient treasure nonetheless. It was in his hands, a slim ring-bound document that trembled like leaves in an autumn wind as he turned the pages.
It was all there. The right structures. Traces in the drill cuttings of residual oil. But no accumulation, the raw wealth drained by some unknown action.
And the screen yelled at him. ‘Fault!’
Without the seismic revealing the fault plane there had been no way thirty years ago to understand why such suitable sandstones had been bone dry. And without detailed knowledge of the sandstones revealed by the well, there was no way to understand from the seismic alone what the structures might portend.
But Hakim the Geophysicist knew, and he was the only soul in the world in a position to know.
The fault plane had fouled up everything. Trashing all the logic. Tilting the geological structures. Draining the sandstones dry.
And Hakim thought he knew where a billion barrels of oil had gone.
I regard being called a hypocrite as something of a compliment. It means I can see both sides of the question.
‘I hate memorial services. The cant. The falseness. The empty phrases and hollow praise. I hate memorial services.’
Urquhart was in one of those humours again. He had stamped impatiently as he had waited at the east door of St Margaret’s Church to be escorted by the rector, and his face had been set in stone while walking to his appointed pew, past the acquiescent, nodding faces with their spaniel smiles and synthetic sympathies worn above black ties and scarves. They had thought his countenance denoted sadness, distress at the loss of such a good friend and colleague as Freddie, Baron Warburton, and indeed his emotions were fractured, but not in pity for others.
The turbid mood had begun the previous night when he had opened his red box to discover that his press officer, thinking it might be appropriate, had enclosed a few of old Freddie’s obituaries. The bloody fool. Reading that Warburton’s passing marked ‘the end of an era’ and that he had been ‘the last of F.U.’s dirty dozen’ had done little to enhance the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm about either the press or his press officer.
‘Can’t stand it, Mortima. They hound a man into the grave then, soon as he’s dead and gone, reach for their sopping tissues and try to prove what a great man he was, how his loss somehow threatens culture, the country, civilization as a whole. The only reason I kept Freddie was because he followed like a lamb. Everybody knew that. But now he’s a dead lamb they speak of him as a lion. Not a single mention anywhere that his veins had been swept quite clear of blood by alcohol. Nor of that little tangle in Shepherd Market, when two ladies of the night abandoned him without either trousers, wallet or his Downing Street pass.’
‘He was loyal, Francis.’
‘I had his balls in a vice, Mortima, of course he was loyal!’ Urquhart brought himself to a sudden halt, closing his eyes. He’d gone too far. He should be used to honouring the dead at Westminster, there had been so many over the years, but such memories only brought out the worst in him. ‘Forgive me. That was unnecessary.’
‘Forgiven.’
‘It’s just that…what will they say about me, Mortima? When I’ve gone?’
‘That you were the greatest Prime Minister of the century. That you rewrote the record books as well as the law books. And lived a long and contented retirement.’
‘I doubt that. How many great leaders have ever truly found contentment in retirement?’
She searched for a name, but none came to her.
‘I don’t want to grow old and bitter, after all this has gone. I just don’t have a vision of myself retiring, being replaced. Ever.’ He waved a hand at her. ‘Oh, I know I’m being pathetic but…retirement for me isn’t filled with long summer evenings but endless nights dancing with ghosts. The ghosts of what might have been. And of what once was.’
‘I understand.’
‘Yes, I know you do. You’re the only one who does. I owe you so very much.’
She sat beside him now, in the church of St Margaret’s at Westminster, which stood in the lee of the great Abbey, as they listened to the choristers singing a plaintive anthem. Mortima’s eyes were fixed on the young treble soloist, a boy of perhaps twelve with fair hair falling across his forehead and the tender voice of an angel that filled the church like the rays of a new sun. What a difference it might have made, he considered, if they had been able to have children; it could have touched their lives with a sense of immortality and brought music to their souls. Yet it was not to be. She had bound the wound until it scarred and toughened, never complaining, though he knew the hurt at times cleaved her in two; instead she had invested all her emotional energy in him and his career. Their career, in truth, for without her he could not have succeeded or sustained. For Mortima it had been a barren crown, a sacrifice in many manners far deeper than death, and all for him. He owed her everything.
The choir had finished and she looked round at СКАЧАТЬ