“Bellissima, this is JeanLuc. Do you read?” Rig Bellissima was the highest of the chain, exactly at twelve thousand four hundred fifty feet above sea level. The base was perched on a ledge just below the crest. The other side of the ledge the mountain fell away seven thousand feet, almost sheer, into a valley ten miles wide and thirty miles long, a vast gash in the surface of the earth.
“Bellissima, this is JeanLuc. Do you read?” Again no answer. JeanLuc switched channels. “Zagros Three, do you read?”
“Loud and clear, Captain,” came the immediate answer of their Iranian base radio op Aliwari. “Excellency Nasiri’s beside me.”
“Stand by on this frequency. The CASEVAC’s at Bellissima, but we’ve no radio contact. We’re going in to land.” “Roger. Standing by.”
As always at Bellissima, Scot was awed at the vastness of the earth’s convulsion that had caused the valley. And, like all who visited this rig, again he wondered at the enormity of the gamble, labor, and wealth necessary to find the oil field, select the site, erect the rig, then to drill the thousands of feet to make the wells profitable. But they were, immensely so, as was this whole area with its huge oil and gas deposits trapped in limestone cones between seventy-five hundred and eleven thousand feet below the surface. And then the further huge investment and more gambling to connect this field to the pipeline that straddled the Zagros Mountains, joining the refineries at Isfahan in the center of Iran to those at Abadan on the Gulf - another extraordinary engineering feat of the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now nationalized and renamed IranOil. “Stolen, Scot, laddie, stolen’s the correct word,” his father had told him many times. Scot Gavallan smiled to himself, thinking about his father, feeling a warm glow. I’m bloody lucky to have him, he thought. I still miss Mother but I’m glad she died. Terrible for a lovely, active woman to become a helpless, chair-ridden, palsied shell, still with her mind intact even at the end, the best mother a guy could have. Rotten luck, her death, particularly for Dad. But I’m glad he remarried, Maureen’s super, and Dad’s super and I’ve a smashing life and the future’s rosy - plenty of flying, plenty of birds and in a couple of years I’ll get married: how about Tess? His heart picked up a beat. Bloody nuisance Linbar’s her uncle and she his favorite niece, but bloody lucky I don’t have anything to do with him, she’s only eighteen so there’s plenty of time…
“Which way will you land, mon vieux?” came through his earphones. “From the west,” he said, collecting himself.
“Good.” JeanLuc was peering ahead. No sign of life. The site was heavily covered with snow, almost buried. Only the helipad was cleared. Threads of smoke came up from the trailer huts. “Ah! There!”
They saw the tiny figure of a man, bundled up, standing near the helipad and waving his arms. “Who is it?”
“I think it’s Pietro.” Scot was concentrating on the landing. At this height and because of the position on the ledge there were sudden gusts, turbulences, and whirlwinds within them - no room for mistakes. He came in over the abyss, the eddies rocking them, then corrected beautifully as he swooped over the land and touched down.
“Good.” JeanLuc turned his attention back to the bundled-up man he now recognized as Pietro Fieri, one of the “tool pushers,” next in importance to the company man. They saw him motion with his hand across his throat, the sign to cut engines, indicating the CASEVAC was not an immediate takeoff situation. JeanLuc beckoned the man to his side window and opened it. “What’s up, Pietro?” he shouted over the engines.
“Guineppa is sick,” Pietro shouted back - Mario Guineppa was the company man - and thumped the left side of his chest. “We think it may be his heart. And that’s not all. Look there!” He pointed aloft. JeanLuc and Scot craned to see better but could not see what was agitating him.
JeanLuc unbuckled and got out. The cold hit him and he winced, his eyes watering in the eddies caused by the rotors, his dark glasses helping only a little. Then he saw the problem, and his stomach twisted nastily. A few hundred feet above and almost directly over the camp, just under the crest, was an enormous overhang of snow and ice. “Madonna!”
“If that goes, it’ll avalanche the whole mountainside and maybe take us and everything into the valley along with it!” Pie-tro’s face was bluish in the cold. He was thickset and very strong with a dark grizzled beard, his eyes brown and keen but squinting now against the wind. “Guineppa wants to confer with you. Come to his trailer, eh?”
“And that?” JeanLuc jerked a thumb upward.
“If it goes, it goes,” Pietro said with a laugh, his teeth white against the darkness of his oil-stained parka. “Come on!” He ducked away from the rotors and trudged away. “Come on!”
Uneasily JeanLuc gauged the overhang. It could be there for weeks, or fall any second. Above the crest the sky was peerless, but little warmth came from the afternoon sun. “Stay here, Scot, keep her idling,” he called out, then followed Pietro awkwardly, the snow very deep.
Mario Guineppa’s two-room trailer was warm and untidy, charts on the walls, oil-stained clothes, heavy gloves, and hard hats on pegs with an oilman’s paraphernalia scattered about the office/living room. He was in the bedroom, lying on his bed fully dressed but for his boots, a big tall man of forty-five with an imposing nose, normally ruddy and weathered, but now pallid, a curious bluish tinge to his lips. The tool pusher from the other shift, Enrico Banastasio, was with him - a small, dark man with dark eyes and thin face.
“Ah, JeanLuc! Good to see you,” Guineppa said wearily.
“And you, mon ami.” Very concerned, JeanLuc unzipped his flying jacket and sat beside the bed. Guineppa had been in charge of Bellissima for two years - twelve hours on, twelve off, two months on site, two off - and had brought in three major producing wells here with space to drill another four. “It’s the hospital in Shiraz for you.”
“That’s not important, first there’s the overhang. JeanLuc, I wa - ” “We evacuate and leave that stronzo to the Hands of God,” Banastasio said. “Mamma mia, Enrico,” Guineppa said irritably, “I tell you again 1 think we can give God a hand - with JeanLuc’s help. Pietro agrees. Eh, Pietro?” “Yes,” Pietro said from the doorway, a toothpick in his mouth. “JeanLuc, I was brought up in Aosta in the Italian Alps so I know mountains and avalanches and I th - ”
“Si, e sei pazzo.” Yes, and you’re crazy, Banastasio said curtly. “Nel tuo culo.” In your ass. Pietro casually made an obscene gesture. “With your help JeanLuc, it’s easy to shift that stronzo.”
“What do you want me to do?” JeanLuc asked.
Guineppa said, “Take Pietro and fly up over the crest to a place he’ll show you on the north face. He’ll drop a stick of dynamite into the snow from there and that’ll avalanche the danger away from us.”
Pietro beamed. “Just like that and the overhang will vanish.” Banastasio said even more angrily, his English American-accented, “For crissake, I tell you again it’s too goddamn risky. We should evacuate first - then if you must, try your dynamite.”
Guineppa’s face screwed up as a spasm of pain went through him. One hand went to his chest. “If we evacuate we have to close everything down an - ” “So? So we close down. So what? If you don’t care about your own life, think of the rest of us. I say we evacuate pronto. Then dynamite. JeanLuc, isn’t it safer?”