The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

2

It had been an hour past midnight when they took off from Cairo, so that only a few anonymous winking lights in a black carpet served as a parting glimpse of the land of the Pharaohs and their considerably less glamorous successors. It was soon after an orange-colored dawn when they landed on the outskirts of the formless sprawl of habitation that is Basra. And it was dazzling beige high noon, after sundry inevitable delays, as the shuttle DC-3 from Basra slanted down towards the landing strip of Qabat.

Leaning over Mr Usherdown to get a partial bird’s-eye view through the porthole, Simon Templar wondered philosophically if there would ever be a limit to the cockeyed places he could be dumped into by his constitutional inability to turn down anyone who looked helpless enough in the toils of a sufficiently unstereotyped predicament.

“The whole place only runs to about eight hundred square miles,” Usherdown had told him, “and the only town, if you can call it that, would rate about four gas stations back home. But for a few years it produced enough oil to’ve supplied half of Europe.”

“And I never heard of it.”

“No reason why you should. It didn’t last long enough to get talked about much outside the trade. Then the flow started to dry up, and the big companies moved their main operations down to Kuwait and Bahrain. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a geologist. But apparently the experts decided that Qabat was only on the shallow edge of the underground oil pool, or something like that, and they decided to move on and drill somewhere else.”

“Which made Joseph rather unhappy.”

“You can’t blame him too much for that. His royalties’ve been dwindling away until last year they only came to about sixteen million dollars.”

“Thank God for technological progress. The stains from my bleeding heart will rinse right out of this Dacron shirt.”

“I know, it sounds as if I was trying to be funny. But you have to remember that in the same length of time, the Emir of Kuwait’s income has gone up to over three million dollars a week.”

At a figure like that, even Simon Templar was awed.

“If some Texans I’ve met heard about him, they’d blow their brains out,” he remarked. “So I suppose every time Joe thinks about that, it burns him to a crisp.”

“He’s about convinced himself that it’s only because the oil companies have a personal grudge against him, because he was the first sheik they made one of those fabulous percentage contracts with. He made up his mind he’d prove that their geologists were liars. First he hired some independent experts for himself. But eventually they gave him the same report. That only convinced him that they were afraid to buck the big companies. Then somebody must’ve told him something they’d read about me, and he thought I might be the answer.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Look, a dowser can’t make oil—or water, or anything else,” said Mr Usherdown, with a rather forlorn remnant of asperity.

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