Deadly Enterprise will be released next week.

Resuming my promotion activity I decided to post some oilpatch stories -- some funny, some thrilling -- from a book of mine called Oil Gipsy, that was never published. I've rewritten some of the stories from the somewhat pedantic style I had twenty years ago, and I intend to post one a week to my various sites on the Internet. Here, on Book Place, on Facebook, MySpace, and a few other sites. This is the first.


As an oilpatch surveyor, one of my jobs was to mark the route to the locations where we were working, which might be out of a remote town, a desert oasis, or an Arctic island. I started learning how to navigate in trackless wastes in the 1960s, in the Libyan Desert – a northern patch of the great Sahara – and I did it by driving in dead-reckoning straight lines. As much as possible.

An aside here – Sa'hara is the Arabic word for desert, so Sahara Desert is actually . . . well, you've guessed it.

One day in Libya our supply plane had been unable to land at camp because of a local sandstorm, and one of the crew members aboard was needed for work the next day. Our Party Manager figured the plane had probably dropped him off at the nearest oilfield strip, about three hours drive away. He also figured I'd like nothing better after work but to drive over – half the night – to go and fetch him. Since I didn't express a great deal of enthusiasm, he said he'd come along with me, for the ride.

He took the first driving shift, the daylight bit, after supper and started off in my survey Powerwagon with a great smile on his face. We headed down a desert trail to Gicherra, an oasis where most of our Libyan employees came from. No town planning in the desert; Gicherra was a maze of date palms, mud brick houses, rock walled fields, and dusty tracks wending between them. Probably still is.

PM drove happily into the oasis and we began following dusty trails all over the place, looking for the road out. Half the tracks he started down ended at a stone wall or a palm tree. The more he failed to find the road he wanted, the faster he drove. The dust cloud from our passage grew higher and higher. Pretty soon every track we started down bore a fog of fine yellow dust. When I recognized seeing the same broken down donkey cart beside a wall we'd seen several times before, I suggested we might be lost.

He decided to stop beside a group of small boys to ask directions.

If you know small towns, you'll soon realize that our Grand Prix de Gicherra was the most excitement to hit the place in months. PM should have realized this when in answer to his question, "Which way to Gialo?" each of the lads pointed in a different direction.

Instead, he said, "Climb on and show me."

Ours was an old style Powerwagon, with real fenders, running boards, and a stake-bed box. Every inch of space was soon filled with more small boys than you could imagine. Looking out the side windows presented a wall to wall image of dirty faces and gap-teeth grins. We could only see straight ahead because none of them had climbed onto the hood – it was probably too hot. Several hands waved in the windshield, pointing in different directions. PM looked at one of them and set off.

Lap two was even more exciting, because these lads knew far more trails than we had found. We bounced away over ruts and gullies, covered with excited, chattering passengers who lurched and clung tighter with every bump. This time we saw more groves of palm trees, more crumbling walls, more forks in the trail, more shuttered houses, than ever before. Every time we came to a split in the trail loud arguments would ensue as every passenger pointed out his own best option.

"Mist'r. Mist'r. Hekk'i – that way."

Mist'r. Mist'r. Henn'a – this way."

Old men would emerge from dimly seen houses, roused by the confusion and noise, to point in yet another direction.

At times we would speed away out into less habitable and more open regions, but each time some urchin would point out a trail that brought us back again. Several of these excursions seemed to me promising starts of a trail that might take us to open desert, but I was only the passenger. Who was listening to me?

Eventually we went past a certain house for the tenth time and even PM realized he'd seen it before. By this time some of our riders were becoming seasick, or perhaps had their eyes sealed tight by all the dust we were kicking up – so when he stopped at least half of them got off and wobbled away. Taking stock of the guides remaining, PM decided which of them had been more consistent – not that any of them had succeeded in showing us the way out – and told them he would follow their directions. Thus blessed with new authority and status these chosen few rode off grandly with us on lap three, with waves, catcalls and rude remarks to those dejectedly watching from the sidelines.

This time, with fewer conflicting directions, we soon found ourselves on tracks that didn't already bear our tire marks. We had only one guide on each running board, none sitting on the fenders, and perhaps no more than half a dozen in the back to pound on the cab roof and slide forward to peer at us upside down through the windshield. We emerged from all the houses and date palms into an open area of scrub brush. We even followed a trail that looked as if it might lead somewhere. With a promise of open desert before us, we stopped to let off our guides, all laughing gaily and waving the bottles of pop we'd rewarded them with. As they turned away to walk back to Gicherra, we set out on our own again.

After a few miles of circuitous wandering our trail set off in the direction of Egypt. Exactly where we didn't want to go. We stopped on a low rise and climbed into the back to take our bearings. PM was all for driving back to Gicherra to find another trail, but night was falling, so after a short, sharp argument we changed places and I set out across country.

As I mentioned earlier, my favoured method was to aim straight at where I judged my destination to be and hold to that line until I got there. I didn't exactly know where we were starting, except some distance east of Gicherra, and the destination was over the horizon somewhere to the southeast – but I was confident I would be able to find my way there. The only problem would be the oasis of El Erg, that lay somewhere unseen between us.

I held my straight line with ever increasing determination until, at nightfall, we drew closer to the last oasis. The straight line had to give way to detours around palm groves, thickets, and groups of houses. This oasis had the added attraction of patches of salt marsh, that were best avoided if we weren't to become bogged down with our smooth sand tires. But I estimated the extent of each detour and recovered my line at the end of them all. To answer PM's grumbling I even followed trails that appeared mysteriously under our wheels – at least until they diverged too far from the mental line I followed.

In the pitch darkness we found ourselves in the middle of a wide open area of incredibly rough terrain. The Powerwagon headlights were not powerful enough to reveal what was on the other side. On the horizon about us fitful lights would show briefly from distant habitation. PM considered these to be lighthouses calling us toward pleasant refuges. I figured they were more likely to be Sirens, luring us to our doom among mazes of oasis tracks. In bottom gear, clinging on tightly as we were flung about by the hummocks, we ground slowly on into the darkness.

Eventually a line of ghostly palm trees showed up in the farthest faintness of our headlights. We lurched and bounced with incredible toil toward them, Powerwagon groaning and stinking with hot oil and all the collected dust shaken out of its grooves and interstices. As we neared the end, the ground became smooth enough for second gear. I peered forward for any glimpse of a break in the trees wide enough for us to squeeze into.

I took the nearest and even shifted up – we were off again. Sort of. The trees proved to be as big an obstacle as the rough terrain because every time I found my chosen direction the trees would bunch together and send me off on another detour. Winding to and fro between the trees to find a passage we finally met a travelled trail – and houses. Judging by all the closely huddled buildings, this must be the middle of the village. PM was all for stopping to ask directions, but I suggested it might not be a good idea to pound on someone's door in the middle of the night calling out in broken Arabic. I'd prefer to take my chances with trails that wended somewhat in the direction I wanted.

After more and more oasis travel the trails became dustier, wider, more rutted and more heavily used. We emerged from the trees into the wide open space around the decrepit buildings that owned to be the Gialo gas station. There was only open desert now between us and our destination, and the crazily leaning gas station sign waved us goodbye. Only another hour of travel – we would arrive at midnight . . .