Whirlwind Read online

  “You musta been born lucky, Captain,” Rodrigues said, feeling very sick. “Yeah, you must’ve been born lucky. This baby…” He stopped abruptly, listening. So did everyone nearby—Lochart and Jean-Luc, near the HQ hut with Nasiri, the half-dozen Iranian ground staff, cooks, and laborers. It was very quiet. Then again came a burst of machine-gun fire from the direction of the village.

  “Goddamn!” Rodrigues muttered. “What the hell’d we come back to this lousy dump for?”

  ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND—McCLOUD HELIPORT: 5:15 P.M. The great helicopter came down out of the gloaming, blades thrashing, and landed near the Rolls that was parked near one of the rainswept helipads—the whole heliport busy, other helicopters arriving or leaving with shifts of oil riggers, personnel, and supplies, all airplanes and hangars proudly displaying the S-G symbol. The cabin door opened and two men wearing flight overalls and Mae Wests came down the hydraulic steps, leaning against the wind and the rain. Before they reached the car the uniformed chauffeur had opened the door for them.

  “Smashing ride, wasn’t it?” Andrew Gavallan said happily, a tall man, strong and very trim for his sixty-four years. He slipped out of his Mae West easily, shook the rain from his collar and got in beside the other man. “She’s marvelous, everything the makers claim. Did I tell you we’re the first outsiders to test-fly her?”

  “First or last, makes no difference to me. I thought it was bloody bumpy and bloody noisy,” Linbar Struan said irritably, fighting off the Mae West. He was fifty, sandy-haired, and blue-eyed, head of Struan’s, the vast conglomerate based in Hong Kong, nicknamed the Noble House, that secretly owned the controlling interest in S-G Helicopters. “I still think the investment is too much per aircraft. Much too much.”

  “The X63’s as good a bet economically as you can get; she’ll be perfect for the North Sea, Iran, and anywhere we have heavy loads, particularly Iran,” Gavallan said patiently, not wanting his hatred of Linbar to spoil what had been a perfect test ride. “I’ve ordered six.”

  “I haven’t approved the buy yet!” Linbar flared at him.

  “Your approval isn’t necessary,” Gavallan said and his brown eyes hardened. “I’m a member of Struan’s Inner Office; you and the Inner Office approved the buy last year, subject to the test ride, if I recommended it an—”

  “You haven’t recommended it yet!”

  “I am now so that’s the end to it!” Gavallan smiled sweetly and settled back in the seat. “You’ll have contracts at the board meeting in three weeks.”

  “There’s never an end to it, Andrew, you and your bloody ambition, is there?”

  “I’m not a threat to you, Linbar, let’s l—”

  “I agree!” Angrily Linbar picked up the intercom to speak to the driver on the other side of the soundproofed glass partition. “John, drop Mr. Gavallan at the office, then head for Castle Avisyard,” At once the car moved off for the three-story office block the other side of a group of hangars.

  “How is Avisyard?” Gavallan asked strangely.

  “Better than in your day—so sorry you and Maureen weren’t invited for Christmas, perhaps next year.” Linbar’s lips curled. “Yes, Avisyard is much better.” He glanced out the window and jerked a thumb at the jumbo helicopter. “And better you don’t fail with that. Or anything else.”

  Gavallan’s face tightened; the jibe about his wife had slipped under his constant guard. “Talking about failure, what about your disastrous South American investments, your stupid fracas with Toda Shipping over their tanker fleet, what about losing the Hong Kong tunnel contract to Par-Con/Toda, what about betraying our old friends in Hong Kong with your stock manipul—”

  “Betray, bullshit! ‘Old friends,’ bullshit! They’re all over twenty-one and what’ve they done for us recently? Shanghainese are supposed to be smarter than us—Cantonese, mainlanders, all of them, you’ve said it a million times! Not my fault there’s an oil crisis or the world’s in turmoil or Iran’s up the spout or the Arabs are nailing us to the cross along with the Japs, Koreans, and Taiwanese!” Linbar was suddenly choked with rage. “You forget we’re in a different world now, Hong Kong’s different, the world’s different! I’m taipan of Struan’s, I’m committed to look after the Noble House, and every taipan has had reverses, even your God cursed Sir bloody Ian Dunross, and he’ll have more with his delusions of oil riches China. Ev—”

  “Ian’s right ab—”

  “Even Hag Struan had reverses, even our bloody founder, the great Dirk himself, may he rot in hell too! Not my fault the world’s sodded up. You think you can do better?” Linbar shouted.

  “Twenty times!” Gavallan slammed back.

  Now Linbar was shaking with rage. “I’d fire you if I could but I can’t! I’ve had you and your treachery, you tired, old, out-of-date burk. You married into the family, you’re not a real part of it, and if there’s a God in heaven you’ll destroy yourself! I’m taipan and by God you’ll never be!”

  Gavallan hammered on the glass partition and the car stopped abruptly. He tore the door open and got out. “Dew neh loh moh, Linbar!” he said through his teeth and stormed off into the rain.

  Their hatred stemmed from the late fifties and early sixties when Gavallan was working in Hong Kong for Struan’s, prior to coming here at the secret order of the then taipan, Ian Dunross, the brother of Gavallan’s late wife, Kathy. Linbar had been frantically jealous of him because he had had Dunross’s confidence while Linbar had not, and mostly because Gavallan had always been in the running to succeed as taipan one day, whereas Linbar was considered to have no chance.

  It was Struan’s ancient company law for the taipan to have total, undisputed executive power, and the inviolate right to choose the timing of his own retirement and successor—who had to be a member of the Inner Office and therefore in some way, family—but once the decision was made, to relinquish all power. Ian Dunross had ruled wisely for ten years then had chosen a cousin, David MacStruan to succeed him. Four years ago, in his prime, David MacStruan—an enthusiastic mountaineer—had been killed in a climbing accident in the Himalayas. Just before he died and in front of two witnesses he had, astonishingly, chosen Linbar to succeed him. There had been police inquiries into his death—British and Nepalese. His ropes and climbing gear had been tampered with.

  The inquiries finalized with “accident.” The mountain face they had been climbing was remote, the fall sudden, no one knew exactly what had happened, neither climbers nor guides, conditions were only fair, and, yes, the sahib was in good heath and a wise man, never one to take a foolish risk, “But, sahib, our mountains in the High Lands are different from other mountains. Our mountains have spirits and get angry from time to time, sahib, and who can foretell what a spirit may do?” No finger was pointed at any one man, the rope and gear “might” not have been tampered with, just badly serviced. Karma.

  Apart from Nepalese guides all twelve climbers in the party were men from Hong Kong, friends and business associates, British, Chinese, one American, and two Japanese, Hiro Toda, head of Toda Shipping Industries—a longtime personal friend of David MacStruan’s—and one of his associates, Nobunaga Mori. Linbar was not among them.

  At great personal risk two men and a guide climbed down the fault and reached David MacStruan before he died, Paul Choy, an enormously wealthy director of Struan’s, and Mori. Both testified that, just before he died, David MacStruan had formally made Linbar Struan his successor. Shortly after the distraught party had returned to Hong Kong, MacStruan’s executive secretary going through his desk had found a simple typewritten page signed by him, dated a few months before, witnessed by Paul Choy, that confirmed it.

  Gavallan remembered how shocked he had been, they all had—Claudia Chen, who had been executive secretary to the taipan for generations, cousin to his own executive secretary, Liz Chen, most of all. “It wasn’t like the taipan, Master Andrew,” she had told him—an old lady but still sharp as a needle. “The taipan would never have left such an importan
t piece of paper here, he would have put it in the safe in the Great House along with…with all the other private documents.”

  But David MacStruan had not. And the dying command and the supporting paper had made it legal and now Linbar Struan was taipan of the Noble House and that was the end of it but dew neh loh moh on Linbar even so, his foul wife, his devil Chinese mistress, and his rotten friends. I’ll still bet my life if David wasn’t murdered, he was manipulated somehow. But why should Paul Choy lie, or Mori, why should they—they’ve nothing to gain by that…

  A sudden rain squall battered him and he gasped momentarily, brought out of his reverie. His heart was still pumping and he cursed himself for losing his temper and letting Linbar say what should not have been said. “You’re a bloody fool, you could have contained him like always, you’ve got to work with him and his ilk for years—you were also to blame!” he said aloud, then muttered, “Bastard shouldn’t’ve jibed about Maureen…” They had been married for three years and had a daughter of two. His first wife, Kathy, had died nine years ago of multiple sclerosis.

  Poor old Kathy, he thought sadly, what bad luck you had.

  He squinted against the rain and saw the Rolls turn out of the heliport gate and vanish. Damn shame about Avisyard, I love that place, he thought, remembering all the good times and the bad that he had lived there with his Kathy and their two children, Scot and Melinda. Castle Avisyard was the ancestral estate of Dirk Struan, left by him to succeeding taipans during their tenure. It was rambling and beautiful, more than a thousand hectares in Ayrshire. Shame we’ll never go there, Maureen and I and little Electra, certainly as long as Linbar’s taipan. Pity, but that’s life.

  “Well, the sod can’t last forever,” he said to the wind and felt all the better for the saying of it aloud. Then he strode into the building and into his office.

  “Hi, Liz,” he said. Liz Chen was a good-looking Eurasian woman in her fifties who had come with him from Hong Kong in ’63 and knew all the secrets of Gavallan Holdings—his original cover operation—S-G, and Struan’s. “What’s new?”

  “You had a row with the taipan, never mind.” She offered him the cup of tea, her voice lilting.

  “Dammit, yes. How the hell did you know?” When she just laughed he laughed with her. “The hell with him. Have you got through to Mac yet?” This was Duncan McIver, head of S-G’s Iran operations and his oldest friend.

  “We’ve a laddie dialing from dawn to dusk but the Iran circuits are still busy. Telex isn’t answering either. Duncan must be just as anxious as you to talk.” She took his coat and hung it on the peg in his office. “Your wife called—she’s picking up Electra from nursery school and wanted to know if you’d be home for dinner. I told her I thought yes but it might be late—you’ve the conference call with ExTex in half an hour.”

  “Yes.” Gavallan sat down behind his desk and made sure the file was ready. “Check if the telex to Mac’s working yet, would you, Liz?”

  At once she began to dial. His office was large and tidy, looking out on the airfield. On the clean desk there were some framed family photographs of Kathy with Melinda and Scot, when they were small, the great Castle Avisyard behind them, and another of Maureen holding up their baby. Nice faces, smiling faces. Just one oil painting on the wall by Aristotle Quance of a corpulent Chinese mandarin—a gift from Ian Dunross to celebrate their first successful landing on a North Sea rig that McIver had done, and the start of an era.

  “Andy,” Dunross had said, beginning it all, “I want you to take Kathy and the kids and leave Hong Kong and go home to Scotland. I want you to pretend to resign from Struan’s—of course you’ll still be a member of the Inner Office but that’ll be secret for the time being. I want you to go to Aberdeen and quietly buy the best property, wharfs, factory areas, a small airfield, potential heliports—Aberdeen’s still a backwater so you can get the best cheaply. This’s a secret operation, just between us. A few days ago I met a strange fellow, a seismologist called Kirk who convinced me the North Sea’s over an enormous oil field. I want the Noble House to be ready to supply the rigs when they’re developed.”

  “My God, Ian, how could we do that? The North Sea? Even if there’s oil there, which sounds impossible, those seas are the worst in the world for most of the year. Wouldn’t be possible, all the year round—and anyway the expense’d be prohibitive! How could we do it?”

  “That’s your problem, laddie.”

  Gavallan remembered the laugh and the brimming confidence and, as always, he was warmed. So he had left Hong Kong, Kathy delighted to leave, and he had done everything asked of him.

  Almost at once, like a miracle, North Sea oil began to blossom and the major U.S. companies—headed by ExTex, the enormous Texas oil conglomerate, and BP, British Petroleum—rushed in with huge investments. He had been superbly positioned to take advantage of the new El Dorado and the first to recognize that the only efficient way to service the vast discoveries in those violent waters was by helicopter, the first—with Dunross’s power—to raise the massive funds needed for helicopter leasing, the first to shove major helicopter manufacturers into size, safety, instrumentation, and performance standards undreamed of, and the first to prove that all-weather flying in those foul seas was practical. Duncan McIver had done that for him, the flying and developing the necessary techniques quite unknown then.

  The North Sea had led to the Gulf, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uruguay, South Africa—Iran the jewel in his crown, with its enormous potential, vastly profitable, with the very best connections into the ultimate seat of power, the Court, that his Iranian partners had assured him would be equally powerful enough, even though the Shah had been deposed. “Andy,” General Javadah, the senior partner, stationed in London, had told him yesterday, “there’s nothing to worry about. One of our partners is related to Bakhtiar and, just in case, we’ve the highest level of contracts with Khomeini’s inner circle. Of course, the new era will be more expensive than before…”

  Gavallan smiled. Never mind the added expense and that each year the partners become a little more greedy, there’s still more than enough left over to keep Iran as our flagship—just so long as she gets back to normal quickly. Ian’s gamble paid off a thousandfold for the Noble House—pity he resigned when he did, but then he’d carried Struan’s for ten years. That’d be enough for any man—even me. Linbar’s right that I want that slot. If I don’t get it, by God, Scot will. Meanwhile, onward and upward, the X63s’ll put us way out ahead of Imperial and Guerney and make us one of the biggest helicopter-leasing companies in the world. “In a couple of years, Liz, we’ll be the biggest,” he said with total confidence. “The X63’s a smash! Mac’ll be fractured when I tell him.”

  “Yes,” she said and put down the phone. “Sorry, Andy, the circuits are still busy. They’ll let us know the very moment. Did you tell the taipan the rest of the good news?”

  “It wasn’t exactly a perfect moment, never mind.” They laughed together. “I’ll reserve that for the board meeting.” An old ship’s clock on a bureau began to chime six o’clock. Gavallan reached over and switched on the multiband radio that was on the filing cabinet behind him. Sound of Big Ben tolling the hour…

  TEHRAN—McIVER’S APARTMENT: Last of the chimes dying away, radio reception minimal, heavy with static. “This is the BBC World Service, the time is 1700 Greenwich Mean Time…” 5:00 P.M. London time was 8:30 P.M. local Iranian time.

  The two men automatically checked their watches. The woman just sipped her vodka martini. The three of them were huddled around the big shortwave battery radio, the broadcast signal faint and heterodyning badly. Outside the apartment the night was dark. There was a distant burst of gunfire. They took no notice. She sipped again, waiting. Inside the apartment it was cold, the central heating cut off weeks ago. Their only source of warmth now was a small electric fire that, like the dimmed electric lights, was down to half power.

  “…at 1930 GMT there will be a special report on Iran
‘From Our Own Correspondent’…”

  “Good,” she muttered and they all nodded. She was fifty-one, young for her age, attractive, blue-eyed and fair-haired, trim, and she wore dark-rimmed glasses. Genevere McIver, Genny for short.

  “…but first a summary of the world news: in Britain nineteen thousand workers again struck the Birmingham plant of British Leyland, the country’s largest automobile manufacturer, for higher pay: union negotiators representing public-service workers reached an agreement for pay increases of 16 percent though Prime Minister Callaghan’s Labour Government wants to maintain 8.8 percent: Queen Elizabeth will fly to Kuwait on Monday to begin a three-week visit of the Persian Gulf states: in Washington, Pres—”

  The transmission faded completely. The taller man cursed.

  “Be patient, Charlie,” she said gently. “It’ll come back.”

  “Yes, Genny, you’re right,” Charlie Pettikin answered. Another burst of machine-gun fire in the distance.

  “A bit dicey sending the queen to Kuwait now, isn’t it?” Genny said. Kuwait was an immensely wealthy oil sheikdom just across the Gulf, flanking Saudi Arabia and Iraq. “Pretty stupid at a time like this, isn’t it?”

  “Bloody stupid. Bloody government’s got its head all the way up,” Duncan McIver, her husband, said. “All the bloody way to Aberdeen.”

  She laughed. “That’s a pretty long way, Duncan.”

  “Not far enough for me, Gen!” McIver was a heavyset man of fifty-eight, built like a boxer, with grizzled gray hair. “Callaghan’s a bloody twit and th—” He stopped, hearing faint rumbles of a heavy vehicle going past in the street below. The apartment was on the top floor, the fifth, of the modern residential building in the northern suburbs of Tehran. Another vehicle passed.

  “Sounds like more tanks,” she said.

  “They are tanks, Genny,” Charlie Pettikin said. He was fifty-six, ex-RAF, originally from South Africa, his hair dark and gray-flecked, senior pilot, Iran, and chief of S-G’s Iranian Army and Air Force helicopter training program.