About the book: year / The French writer Gilles Perrault has more than a dozen books, the plots of which are taken from modern life. As a rule, he first writes a documentary narrative, and then, “entering the material,” creates a work of fiction on the same basis, remaining faithful to the adventure genre in both cases. This is how Gilles Perrault’s chronicles about the Second World War appeared (“The Secret of D-Day” was published in the weekly journal “Abroad”), and after them, stories (one of them, “In the Footsteps of the Traceless,” about a group of the Resistance movement, was published on pages "Around the World"). After a collection of reports on the search for oil in the Sahara, a story was published, an abridged version of which we offer to the attention of readers. It takes place in the early 60s, when the newly formed Algerian Republic had not yet nationalized the Saharan fields. Oil monopolies of capitalist countries were exploring in the desert. It was a real pursuit of oil with all the attributes of a predatory, competitive struggle: deception, bribery, espionage, etc. Now Saharan oil belongs to Algeria. But events like the ones you will read about are not a thing of the past. They happen in other places, under other skies…