Assignment Black Gold (23 page)

Madragata fired again. The muzzle flame made
long red flashes nearby. Something tugged at Durell’s shoulder.

He dived forward for the stairs.

Matty shouted something. He felt the cold grip of the staircase
rail, let his momentum carry him down and around to the back of it. He crashed
into human flesh, hard muscle; he smelled panic breath, sweat, food
exhaled between the faint gleam of white teeth.

Another explosion shook the drilling platform.

Madragata made a squealing sound of fear. Something hit
Durell in the stomach, then smashed at his throat. He grabbed at the man’s arm.
tore it loose as the platform lurched. They went rolling over and over down the
blackness of the corridor.
Crashings
and hangings
echoed from everywhere as more equipment broke loose. Durell thought he heard
Matty yell something. It did not matter. Madragata’s gun was now the sum of the
universe, the end of everything.

They brought up hard against the wall beyond the staircase.
Madragata grunted, wriggled, heaved aside to break free. Durell hit him in the
throat, at the side of the neck, and missed a third blow that ended on the deck
plates, jolting pain through his hand and up his arm. He still had his
rifle. He swung it up, caught the muzzle in the other hand, brought it
forward, crushingly, into Madragata’s throat. The Apgak kicked him low in the
belly. Everything seemed to break loose inside him. But he did not let go of
his grip, He had the man’s head pinned to the deck plates.

Under them, the platform lurched and shuddered again. Madragata’s
gun went off beside his ear, deafening him. He slammed it aside, his head
ringing. He had to loosen his grip on the rifle. Madragata got halfway up,
stabbed fingers at his face. Durell caught the man’s free hand, slammed
it back against the steel wall. Bones broke. The man squealed again. He
wriggled free, scrabbling up the canted deck for the stairway. Matty yelled and
came sliding down toward them, his leg bumping loosely as if it were broken.

Light suddenly shone down the stairwell.

Madragata was already crouched halfway up the treads, his
hair a wild screen across his face, through which his eyes gleamed like a
hunted animals

The light came from an emergency battery lantern.

It framed Betty Tallman’s figure at the head of the steps.
She was carrying the Remington that Durell had left with Kitty. He shouted to
her, started to climb up the sloping corridor. his stomach heaving from the
blow Madragata had gotten at his belly. He could have shot Madragata then and there
with the heavy rifle, His finger tightened on the trigger. Then he
didn't have to do anything about the Apgak.

Betty Tallman‘s face was in the shadow, the lantern behind
her. She leveled the gun downward at Madragata. Her mouth drooped strangely.
She looked as if she were crying. Madragata put a hand upward, fingers
splayed, as if to ward off something. Then the woman began to fire, very
carefully, very methodically, at the man reaching up to her.

With each echoing, racketing shot that overrode the groaning
of the platform, Madragata jerked and stepped backward. When Madragata fell,
hands high in the air, Betty still kept firing. The body jumped and
jerked in the light of the emergency lantern.

“Betty!” Durell called.

She looked dazed.

“Betty, he’s dead. Stop it.”

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

"Oh."

Chapter 21.

“Where is Hobe?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Kitty?”

“Somewhere.”

“Why did you kill Madragata like that?”

“Because he made me—because he and I—we made Hobe go crazy.”

“Why did Kitty give you the gun?”

“I took it from her.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“No. Yes. I don’t think so.”

Matty crawled up the incline from the foot of the slanted
stairway. He trailed a small snake of blood from his injured leg. His teeth
clamped together in a grimace that was not a grin. He looked at Madragata’s
body in the dim light.

“Sam, listen. We’ve got to stop Hobe. He'll kill us all. He’ll
sink the Lady.”

“The platform will float, if necessary, won’t it?”

“Not like this. Not with the legs still down. And all the pumps
are knocked out. We’re listing at about thirty degrees now. Everything, all of
us, will just slide into the sea.”

“Stay here with Betty,” Durell said. “Don‘t let her out of
your sight.”

“Sure.”

Durell held out his hand for the Remington that Betty Tallman
still gripped. She stared as if hypnotized at Madragata’s bloody body. “Give me
the gun, Betty. Matt?”

“
Yo
.”

“Where do you keep the explosives aboard?”

Matt jerked a thumb upward. “Locked room, next to Hobe’s
office.”

“Fine. Betty?”

He wasn‘t sure about her for a moment. Then, without taking
her eyes from the dead man, she handed him the rifle. Durell tossed it to
Matt. “Hold on, Matty,“ he said.

He turned and climbed the awkwardly tilted stairs. The door
above hung open, pulled down and back by the slant of the crippled platform.
Durell got through, hung onto the doorjamb for a moment, used the battered
lantern to check that he was on the level of the lab and geology offices,
and then snapped off the switch. Some daylight came through the small square windows
in the yellow-painted wall. Rain rippled the image of the main deck.

He saw nothing but chaos out there.

Another stairway led him awkwardly to the level of the main
laboratories. He moved with care, trying to be soundless, although the muddled
roar of the wind and the crash of the sea outside would serve to cover most
normal sounds. Something clanged steadily overhead, a loose piece of machinery
or a cable blowing in the wind.

He paused at the head of the second set of steps. The corridor
slanted away into shadows. Several of the doors to the lab rooms had come ajar
with the tilting of the rig, and light came in through their windows. Footsteps
thudded overhead. Two, three, maybe five men. Apgaks. He stood still and
listened. They went away alt, toward the heliport.

“Hobe?” he called softly.

The door was painted red, with various warning signs stenciled
in white. The tilt of the deck kept this door tightly closed in its steel
frame. Durell put down the Magnum rifle and took the .38 handgun from
under his belt. The room in which he stood had been Hobe’s private executive
office. The desk had slid against the opposite wall, and papers and boxes made
a small heap of trash in the corner. The windows here were wide, overlooking
the well pattern. He could see that the drilling tower was bent halfway to the
top, although the lower sixty feet still stood firm. But the narrowing
girders to the drilling engines above had bent and toppled sidewise, so that
the tower lay caught between the Clyde derrick turntable and the aft port pier
housing. The end of it was awash in the seething gray-green seas.

“Hobe? This is Durell. Come out of there.”

He could hear Hobe moving around inside when he took a
misstep on the canted deck and lurched against the wall.

“Hobe?”

He stepped back, suddenly kicked at the door. It sprung
backward, hung there halfway, and before gravity could slam it shut again, he
charged through. The room reflected chaos. Cartons, metal canisters,
boxes of detonators, and sticks of explosive had tumbled from the shelves and
piled up in one corner. Hobe’s figure was bent over the pile, scrabbling
for various items he was putting aside.

The man turned, stared at him with wild eyes in a round moon
face.

“Hold it, Hobe. No more.”

“Get away from me!”

“Just hold it. Exactly like that.”

“It’s too late. You can’t stop me, Durell.”

“Madragata is dead. His men are in a panic. They have no
leader, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do now.”

Hobe glared at him. “Dead?”

“Yes. Madragata is dead.”

“You’re lying.”

“Betty shot him,” Durell said.

“No.”

“She put at least six bullets in him. I saw it.”

“Now I know you‘re lying. She wouldn‘t. She and Madragata—”

“It wasn’t all true. She was just trying to hurt you.
Because she’s disappointed. Because she hoped for too much. Listen to me,
Hobe.”

“She can’t be aboard?”

“I brought her here with me. And Matty the Fork. And Kitty
Cotton.”

“Why?” the man wailed. “Why did you do that?”

“To stop you from destroying the Lady.”

“But I have to do it. I’m not going to let it all go into Madragata’s
hands. And then the Chinese. He planned everything to cheat me. He’ll never pay
me. He laughed at me, took my wife, went to bed with her, and all the time—”

Hobe paused. His eyes were not sane. His mouth twitched. He
rubbed it with the back of his hand and stared at Durell as if he still did not
comprehend his presence here. There was an ugly bruise on his forehead, as if he
had fallen against something. He had lost his glasses, and his eyes looked
vague and uncertain without them. His white shirt was ripped, and his back was
bloody, as if he had skidded when he fell. His thin hair was plastered wetly on
his red scalp. In his hand, he carried a small timing device and a clutch of
varicolored wires.

“Betty?” he whispered. “Betty killed him?”

“She wants you to take her back,” Durell said.

“It’s too late for that now.”

“It’s never too late,” Durell said. “Stop and think about
it. The Lady is still afloat. She can he fixed up, set to drilling
again. You know there’s oil here, don’t you?”

“Yes. Sweet oil. Lovely stuff. Lots of it.”

“But you changed the reports to make it look like a dry hole,
right?”

“That was because—because—”

“Brady Cotton found out about it, didn’t he?”

“It was stupid. He was nosing around. I should have realized
that he couldn’t have known anything really.”

Hobe fumbled in his wet shirt pocket and took out a stubby
cigar. He had a lighter in there, too. He bent his head and worked on getting
the wet cigar aglow. It didn’t want to stay lighted.

“You killed Brady, didn’t you?” Durell said quietly.

“He found out,” Hobe Tallman said. “I had to.”

“Why did you have to?”

“I told you, I couldn’t let Brady tell the truth. He was just
poking around. I thought he had something solid on me. He pretended he did. A
bluff. His mistake. I thought I had to shut him up. He was your man, wasn’t
he?”

“Yes.”

“A K Section man?”

“Yes,” Durell said.

“I should have known. I knew it too late, when you showed up
in Lubinda looking for him.”

Durell said, “Why did you do it, Hobe?“

The man tried to light the soggy cigar again.

“Money," he said.

“You had a good job here. You hit oil. You had it made.”

“But I wouldn't get anything out of it, don’t you see? Just
the same old salary. Another job somewhere else in some other stinking hole,
another jungle, maybe Sumatra, just about anywhere. Betty wanted to go home
rich.”

“Yes. It was Betty.”

“I love her,“ Hobe said. “I need her.”

He looked as if he was going to cry.

He said, “When other men saw me with her, as my wife, they
figured I—they said I was lucky, kidded me about whether I could give her
enough to keep her satisfied. That sort of thing. It was good for me,
though. I needed it.”

“You never had to prove anything to anybody about yourself,
Hobe.”

“I thought I did.”

“Brady Cotton didn’t fool with her, did he?”

“No, no. It wasn’t that. He found out about the money Madragata
had offered me. A million dollars, in the
Banque
Josper
Suisse, in Geneva.”

“A million? For what?”

“To delay announcing the discovery of the oil strike here.
It‘s a big strike. It I reported it, Lubinda would really be on the map.
There’d be all kinds of interests swarming in. And then Madragata’s rebels
wouldn’t have a chance, of course. The government would have too much going for
it, with the prospects of all that national wealth they’d never let it fall
into Madragata’s hands, what with prices so high and the way the industrial
nations knife each other to get their share. You can’t use force in the Middle
East. but you can use it here. That’s what Madragata was afraid of. So he
offered me a million, even more, if I held oil the announcement until after his
coup succeeded.”,

Hobe smiled sadly.

“Not only that. I’d have the job of Minister of Internal Resources
in Lubinda. Betty would have had everything she dreamed of. So I faked the
reports. I went along with Madragata. But Brady found my real log, and I had to
kill him, even though he was my friend."

Hobe looked at his wet cigar and threw it away.

“I want to see Betty,” he said.

“She’s all right.”

“Did she really kill Madragata?”

Someone came into the office behind the explosives storeroom.
Durell recognized the footsteps. He turned to retrieve his rifle, but he
was too late. Kitty Cotton had the Magnum, pointed at him and Hobo. There was
no way to get past her and out of the storeroom.

Fear crossed Hobe‘s round face. He thought the girl was
going to shoot him to avenge Brady.

But Hobe had gone beyond concern for his own life. A strange
sound came from him and he lurched across the room for the girl, trying to grab
at the rifle. Durell did not want to shoot him. He saw uncertainty in
Kitty’s eyes, then surprise and a touch of fear. There came a crashing sound as
the outer office door was smashed open again. Two Apgaks stumbled in, wet with
rain, injured and bloody. They saw Hobe come at them, or thought he was coming
at them, and one of them threw a knife. It made a fine flickering
arc in the dim gray air. The sound as the point hit Hobe in the stomach was a
fiat chunking. Kitty stood frozen. Durell’s handgun jumped, roared,
firing once, then twice. The first Apgak went skittering backward
on legs that no longer supported him, fell against the far wall, slid with his
legs awry to the sloping deck. The second man spun about, a hand to his face,
dead before he fell.