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.'