the very beginning, Constantin Demiris showed an uncanny gift for business. He earned extra money doing odd jobs after school, and at sixteen he had saved enough money to open a food stand on the docks with an older partner. The business flourished and the partner cheated Demiris out of his half. It took Demiris ten years to destroy the man. The young boy was burning with a fierce ambition. He would lie awake at night, his eyes bright in the darkness. I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be famous. Someday everyone will know my name. It was the only lullaby that could put him to sleep. He had no idea how it was going to happen. He knew only that it would.
On Demiris’s seventeenth birthday, he came across an article about the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and it was as though a magic door to the future had suddenly opened for him.
He went to his father. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I’m going to work in the oil fields.”
“Too-sou! What do you know about oil fields?”
“Nothing, father. I’m going to learn.”
One month later, Constantin Demiris was on his way.
It was company policy for the overseas employees of the Trans-Continental Oil Corporation to sign a two-year employment contract, but Demiris felt no qualms about it. He planned to stay in Saudi Arabia for as long as it took him to make his fortune. He had envisioned a wonderful Arabian nights adventure, a glamorous, mysterious land with exotic-looking women, and black gold gushing up out of the ground. The reality was a shock.
On an early morning in summer, Demiris arrived at Fadili, a dreary camp in the middle of the desert consisting of an ugly stone building surrounded by barastis, small brushwood huts. There were a thousand lower-bracket workers there, mostly Saudis. The women who trudged through the dusty, unpaved streets were heavily veiled.
Demiris entered the building where J. J. McIntyre, the personnel manager, had his office.
McIntyre looked up as the young man came in. “So. The home office hired you, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever work the oil fields before, son?”
For an instant, Demiris was tempted to lie. “No, sir.”
McIntyre grinned. “You’re going to love it here. You’re a million miles from nowhere, bad food, no women that you can touch without getting your balls chopped off, and not a goddamned thing to do at night. But the pay is good, right?”
“I’m here to learn,” Demiris said earnestly.
“Yeah? Then I’ll tell you what you better learn fast. You’re in Moslem country now. That means no alcohol. Anyone caught stealing gets his right hand cut off. Second time, left hand. The third time, you lose a foot. If you kill anyone you’re beheaded.”
“I’m not planning to kill anyone.”
“Wait,” McIntyre grunted. “You just got here.”
The compound was a Tower of Babel, people from a dozen different countries all speaking their native languages. Demiris had a good ear and picked up languages quickly. The men were there to make roads in the middle of an inhospitable desert, construct housing, install electrical equipment, put in telephone communications, build workshops, arrange food and water supplies, design a drainage system, administer medical attention, and, it seemed to young Demiris, do a hundred other tasks. They were working in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, suffering from flies, mosquitoes, dust, fever, and dysentery. Even in the desert there was a social hierarchy. At the top were the men engaged in locating oil, and below, the construction workers, called “stiffs,” and the clerks, known as “shiny pants.”
Nearly all the men involved in the actual drilling—the geologists, surveyors, engineers, and oil chemists—were Americans, for the new rotary drill had been invented in the United States and the Americans were more familiar with its operation. The young man went out of his way to make friends with them.
Constantin Demiris spent as much time as he could around the drillers and he never stopped asking questions. He stored away the information, absorbing it the way the hot sands soaked up water. He noticed that two different methods of drilling were being used.
He approached one of the drillers working near a giant 130-foot derrick. “I was wondering why there are two different kinds of drilling going on.”
The driller explained. “Well, son, one’s cable tool and one’s rotary. We’re going more to rotary now. They start out exactly the same.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. For either one you have to erect a derrick like this one to hoist up the pieces of equipment that have to be lowered into the well.” He looked at the eager face of the young man. “I’ll bet you have no idea why they call it a derrick.”
“No, sir.”
“That was the name of a famous hangman in the seventeenth century.”
“I see.”
“Cable tool drilling goes way back. Hundreds of years ago, the Chinese used to dig water wells that way. They punched a hole into the earth by lifting and dropping a heavy cutting tool hung from a cable. But today about eighty-five percent of all wells are drilled by the rotary method.” He turned to go back to his drilling.
“Excuse me. How does the rotary method work?”
The man stopped. “Well, instead of slammin’ a hole in the earth, you just bore one. You see here? In the middle of the derrick floor is a steel turntable that’s rotated by machinery. This rotary table grips and turns a pipe that extends downward through it. There’s a bit fastened to the lower end of the pipe.”
“It seems simple, doesn’t it?”
“It’s more complicated than it looks. You have to have a way to excavate the loosened material as you drill. You have to prevent the walls from caving in and you have to seal off the water and gas from the well.”
“With all that drilling, doesn’t the rotary drill ever get dull?”
“Sure. Then we have to pull out the whole damned drill string, screw a new bit to the bottom of the drill pipe, and lower the pipe back into the hole. Are you planning to be a driller?”
“No, sir. I’m planning to own oil wells.”
“Congratulations. Can I get back to work now?”
One morning, Demiris watched as a tool was lowered into the well, but instead of boring downward, he noticed that it cut small circular areas from the sides of the hole and brought up rocks.
“Excuse me. What’s the point of doing that?” Demiris asked.
The driller paused to mop his brow. “This is side wall coring. We use these rocks for analysis, to see whether they’re oil-bearing.”
“I see.”
When things were going smoothly, Demiris would hear drillers cry out, “I’m turning to the right,” which meant they were making a hole. Demiris noticed that there were dozens of tiny holes drilled all over the field, with diameters as small as two or three inches.
