He was no stranger to eccentricity. His profession attracted oddballs, misfits and eccentrics like wasps to a jampot. But Tom Sutterby was undoubtedly the oddest geologist he had met in ten years of exploration on three continents, and the circumstances of their first meeting in Iran were bizarre in the extreme.
It was the beginning of the seventies, the Shah was still on the throne, and Iran felt to him like a magical kingdom – a land of arid mountains, improbable salt deserts and remote dun-coloured cities where the tiled domes of the mosques seemed to float between minarets like turquoise-tiled balloons. At sunset doves swirled skywards on the long echoes of the evening call to prayer and the night sky was deep velvet strewn with stars.
He left the desert city of Kerman at midday in a short-wheel base Land Rover driven by Majid, a pleasant-faced man whose English was even more limited than his pidgin Farsi. As they drove south, he watched the barren landscape unfold. In a rubble-strewn valley cave-like stone dwellings appeared to have grown from the rock. Beyond this, in the far distance, a pointed mountain range reminded him of a picture in a child’s fairy book. For an hour they crossed a barren plain on arrow-straight asphalt where the oncoming trucks, headlights blazing, played chicken down the centre of the highway. Two hours south of the city they turned toward the pointed mountains on a sandy track which divided again and again where previous drivers had tried to find firm going in the shifting sand. By then his buttocks were numb, his sweat-soaked shirt was stuck to his back, and he sneezed repeatedly as dust filled the cab. Finally, the multiple tracks became one again, and beside the desiccated carcass of a camel, they swung off into a rocky cleft. After an hour of grinding up a boulder-filled riverbed they emerged into a steep valley where half a dozen black woven tents were pitched along the valley floor. A fire burned in front of each tent. The inhabitants looked up as they passed but did not wave. He turned to Majid with an unspoken question.
‘Nomads,’ Majid said.
‘Ah.’ He nodded.
A hundred yards beyond the tents they pulled up at a walnut grove where a large orange tent was pitched. A fire smouldered outside it. He got out of the vehicle, groaned and stretched, easing his back with both hands. ‘Hello?’ he called, his voice echoing across the valley. ‘Hello-oh.’ The only the sounds were the wind rustling in the walnut trees and the ticking of the Land Rover’s engine as it cooled. He looked in the tent – nobody. He went and stood by the fire and was warming his hands when something made him look up. There, perched high in the branches of a walnut tree was a thin, bearded man wearing a woolly bobble hat and field boots. ‘Hello,’ the thin man said. ‘You’ll be new geologist. My name’s Sutterby.’
Six months later he sits between Sutterby and Majid as they rattle and bounce across another desert, in the same Land Rover, but this time eight hundred miles north of Kerman and four hours’ drive east of Tehran. He knows Sutterby well by now and is accustomed to the man’s foibles, his bluff Yorkshire manners and general oddness – how even in their mountain camp, he insists on hot plates for hot food, how he eats breakfast fully dressed for the day’s work, parka, woolly hat and all, pacing the tent and berating the boy cook if his meal isn’t exactly to his liking. One morning he watched amazed as Sutterby stood over the boy, lifted the omelette from his plate and wrung the cooking grease from it in the boy’s fearful face, shouting in Farsi, ‘Dodollah, oil is not necessary.’ To be fair, today, at an early breakfast of flat bread, curd cheese and caviar in the Semiramis Hotel in Tehran, he neither upset the staff nor strode around as he ate, although he kept his hat on.
They crest a slight ridge and there below them lies their destination – a solitary, barren hill rising some hundred metres above the desert floor. They are here at the bidding of the company Chairman who has been told by the Iranian Minister of Mines that this isolated hill is composed entirely of green malachite, a rich copper ore. For two million dollars to be paid to the Minister’s friend by the end of the week, the Company may mine the hill rather than spending years and many more million dollars traipsing over the mountains exploring for copper. The hill is called Char Far’sang which Sutterby, who speaks near fluent Farsi, says means “milestone”. As they descend towards it, they see a pick-up truck parked at the dark portal of a tunnel dug into the flank of the hill.
Sutterby eyes the hill. ‘Bloody long way for nowt if you ask me. If that were copper ore, it would have been mined already. Anyway, thank Christ – me back is killin’ me.’
Majid parks the Land Rover next to the pick-up and they climb out. The driver of the pick-up gets out too. He is wearing plastic shoes, baggy black trousers, a blue-striped nylon shirt and a black waistcoat. He gives a slight bow to each of them, right hand on his chest. He speaks to Majid who turns to Sutterby, who nods. ‘Says he’s the owner’s representative. Name’s Bijan. Says he’ll help us sample. I don’t think so. Let’s get the gear out.’
They go to the back of the Land Rover and unload hard hats, cap lamps, canvas sample bags, cold chisels and their geological hammers. They put on the hard hats and carry everything else to the mouth of the adit, leaving Majid and Bijan squatting in the desert gossiping. A pile of pale green rubble sits at the mouth of the adit. Sutterby kicks it over, hits a rock with his hammer and picks up a flake. He studies it with the hand lens strung on a cord around his neck. ‘Fookin’ waste o’time,’ he mutters.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘People think that ’owt green is malachite. This maybe green but it ain’t malachite, no matter what Minister says.’
‘Another copper mineral? he suggests.
‘I don’t think so.’ Sutterby shakes his head, picks up another rock fragment, peers at it and throws it away. ‘Char Far’sang? Char Fuckall, I reckon.’
‘Well, we’ve come all this way. Better sample it. Do as we’re told, eh?’
Sutterby snorts. ‘Aye.’
They spend the next hour inside the adit. The tunnel is about two hundred yards long and goes clear through the hill. The air is musty and dry. In the light of their cap-lamps the walls of the central thirty metres are indeed pale green. This they sample, using hammer and chisel to gouge out a channel along one wall. They put the resulting spoil in the canvas bags. When they have finished, he looks back, shining his cap lamp on the neat row of white bags left at metre intervals along the tunnel. ‘That’s it then.’ His voice echoes in the darkness.
‘Aye, ’tis that. Time to bugger off. Let’s get the samples out. Work from middle outwards, two at a time.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s how it’s done.’
‘Is it? If you say so.’ He shakes his head at another of Sutterby’s eccentricities.
Back outside with a bag in each hand, he stops for a moment, turns to face the sun and breathes in the faint but clean earth smell of the desert. ‘That’s better,’ he says and lugs the samples over to the Land Rover and puts them in. Sutterby is talking to Bijan.
‘Bloke says there’s a better copper working ten ks south.’ He looks at his watch. ‘We got plenty of time. I reckon we should go have a look.’
‘Why not? But what about the rest of the samples?’
‘Bijan can get them out. We’ll pick ‘em up on the way back.’
‘Okay.’
They get into the Land Rover and Majid drives them south along a well-worn track to a small working cut into the side of a gully. Down in the gully they use their hammers to hack at a metre-wide vein of quartz spotted with a grey metallic mineral.
‘Chalcocite?’ he says.
‘Aye, it is. Eighty percent copper. Beats malachite but the vein’s too skinny. Somebody’s worked it though – look.’ He points to a pile of rubble at the base of the face. ‘Anyways, no good to us. Let’s go back.’ Climbing out of the gully, Sutterby slips and gives a yelp of pain. ‘Ow, me fookin’ back. I’ve really done it this time.’
It’s a long and tedious drive back to the hotel in Tehran with Sutterby lying on the back seat shouting in agony every time they hit a bump. They stop in Semnan at a pharmacist and Sutterby comes out with an armful of painkillers. At the hotel he helps him out of the vehicle and up to his room. ‘You be all right?’ he asks as Sutterby lowers himself onto his bed.
‘I got enough drugs to floor a fookin’ horse. Should be okay by morning. Can you get me boots off?’
He unlaces Sutterby’s boots, reeling at the smell as he pulls them off.
Sutterby grins. ‘Thanks.’
‘Good night then.’
Next day, Sutterby does not appear at breakfast, so he goes up to his room and knocks.
‘Come in.’
He lets himself in and sees Sutterby fully dressed lying on the bed just as he left him the night before. The room smells of sweat and dirty socks. ‘You want a doctor?’ he asks.
Sutterby nods. ‘Can’t get off the bed.’ He groans. ‘But you’d best get back to Kerman today with them samples.’
‘Okay. I’ll tell them downstairs you need a quack.’
He flies back to Kerman, the samples with his backpack, hammer and chisels in the hold. His wife, Anna, meets him at the airport. ‘Good trip?’ She kisses him. ‘Where’s Sutterby?’
‘Still in Tehran. Stuffed his back. I’ve got a load of samples that need analysing . . . yesterday.’ Anna runs the company’s laboratory.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘We’ve not got much on with you and Sutterby being away.’
Two days later he is in the geology office at a drawing board sketching a geological map from his field notebook. Sutterby sits at a desk typing a report with two fingers.
‘So, they fixed your back then?’
‘They did. Doctor came, stuck a big needle in. Scared shit out of me but it worked. Anna say when we’ll she’ll have Char Fuckall results?’
‘Today, before lunch.’
Sutterby looks at his watch. ‘That would be now then.’
Jimmy the office manager and Savak agent comes in waving a telex. ‘Message from London,’ he says and gives the flimsy to Sutterby.
‘Telex asking for results urgently. They must be shitting themselves. Two million dollars due tomorrow.’
On cue Anna comes through the door a manila folder in her hand. ‘Char Far’sang’ she says. ‘Looks good.’ She hands the folder to Sutterby.
He opens the folder which contains a single page. He runs a finger down the list of numbers. ‘I fookin’ knew it.’ He looks up at them holding out the page.
‘Knew what?’ he says.
‘It’s a scam. Here, look.’
He gets up from his drawing, takes the page and studies it frowning. ‘Looks pretty good to me. Must average at least seven percent. Did you run checks, Anna?’
‘We did. Ran them all twice.’
Sutterby looks up at them both and grins. ‘Look again. Proper this time.’
He an Anna pore over the list. ‘There’s a gap in the middle.’ Anna says.
‘Bloody right there’s a gap – four metres, no copper, right in middle. Now I wonder why that would be?’
‘Just a barren patch?’ he says.
‘Don’t be thick. Those were the four samples you and I took out of the adit and put in the Land Rover.’
It dawns on him. ‘And drove off with them to look at that prospect while Bijan salted the rest of the samples.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Bugger me.’ He looks down at Sutterby. ‘You set it up, didn’t you?’
Sutterby leans back in his chair and looks back at him with a self-satisfied grin. ‘I did. I thought it was a scam as soon as we got there. When Bijan told me there was another prospect to look at, I guessed he wanted to get at our samples. So, I let him.’ He puts his woolly hat on his head and gets up. ‘Anyone for lunch? On the company, I reckon. We just saved ’em two million dollars.’