Charon's Landing, page 41
“Understood, Captain,” Hauser replied, realizing he’d drifted much farther out into the open Pacific than he’d thought and understanding just how lucky he’d been that someone was monitoring a radio this late in these usually quiet waters. They were almost two hundred miles from the nearest sea lanes.
“We’ll monitor this frequency until we have you visually. Suzy’s Pride out.” Steve set the mike back onto its cradle.
He climbed back up to the wheelhouse. George Boudette stood behind the wheel, riding the waves that were starting to buck against the boat’s blunt prow. Josh stood next to him. Steve noticed that George had the engines throttled back an inch or so away from their maximum stops. He reached over and slammed the twin handles all the way forward. The diesels under the deck bellowed harshly in reply, and the ship started to vibrate. To run at this speed for more than a few hours would cause permanent damage to the engines and prop shafts.
“If the bank ends up with my boat after this, I’m going to make damned sure she isn’t in working order when they get her.”
Cook Inlet, Alaska
From the dawn of civilization, man has demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for making use of the common natural elements found near his earliest settlements. But since the time of Sumer and Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, humans have had few uses for the black sticky resins that bubbled up from deep within the earth. While some civilizations used the tarry substance for road construction and caulking boats, and Egyptian embalmers wrapped bitumen-soaked linen around mummies, the true potential of oil would remain unknown for millennia.
It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the wheels of the Industrial Revolution began grinding together, that man returned to the stinking, slick pits of oil dotting the globe. This naturally skimmed oil was refined to make ideal industrial lubricants. At the same time, commercial whaling fleets were decimating the world’s cetacean population, driving up the prices for whale oil until it was no longer a viable option for illuminating homes and factories. Again an oil derivative, kerosene, stepped in to fill this niche, ringing the death knell for New England’s whalers. For approximately sixty years, as the oil companies refined kerosene, they burned off the waste products, most notably a highly flammable but useless product called gasoline. Untold millions, possibly billions, of gallons were put to the torch.
Except for Edwin Drake’s use of an old brine-well drill in Titusville, Pennsylvania, there were very few innovations in oil exploration and recovery during this time. His simple drilling rig and the collection of surface oil easily kept pace with the growing demand for kerosene. Necessity had no need to nurture invention, until two German engineers, Nikolaus Otto and Gottlieb Daimler, combined their respective inventions: one, a four-stroke internal-combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and the other, a carburetor device that injected a fine spray of fuel into engine cylinders. Daimler’s idea had actually come from his wife’s perfume atomizer.
In conjunction with Edison’s development of the electric light in 1879, the automobile shifted refinery production from kerosene to gasoline. The race was on to supply the unparalleled demand for fuel that kept the new automobiles on the roads.
The oil industry, as we know it today, was born.
By 1901, the modern rotary drilling rig was in use at Spindletop in Texas, and within a year there were nearly four hundred wells in the area. Very quickly, the hunt for oil began reaching out into the oceans. H. L. Williams’ early experiment in drilling for oil from specially built wharves in Summerland, California, led to freestanding drill platforms built on log pilings driven into the silty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The demand for oil forced companies to push deep into the realm of discovery and invention as well as search geographically. By 1930, a worker could almost walk across Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo on the huge number of drilling rigs.
The search pushed farther into areas where man was an outsider, an unwanted interloper who, without modern technology, wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving, let alone recovering the huge amounts of oil society was now demanding. The drilling rigs went deeper, one hundred feet, two hundred, a thousand, three thousand. The search would end only when the oil ran out. Yet depth wasn’t the only obstacle needed to be overcome by these offshore platforms.
Such is the capriciousness of nature that she placed some of her greatest oil reserves in her most inhospitable spots: the Persian Gulf, where searing temperatures turn lubricants to water; the Gulf of Mexico, where Africa’s great sandstorms eventually became two-hundred-mile-per-hour hurricanes; the North Sea, where the full fury of the North Atlantic batters the European coastline. And now, oil companies were making their first tentative forays into the ice-choked waters of Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Ocean, defiantly building structures designed to withstand the crushing pressure of the polar ice sheet.
While every innovation in offshore technology is hailed as the latest, state-of-the-art development and is sure to prove to be the last word in design, it is always eclipsed by something newer and better, usually within just a few months. However, sitting in the mouth of Cook Inlet, anchored in the shallow waters and rising like a city above the dark waters, the Petromax Prudhoe Omega would deservedly carry the banner as the latest and best design in oil drilling and production rigs well into the twenty-first century.
Built as a Tethered Buoyant Platform (TBP), the Omega, as her name implied, was the last word in drilling technology. Her rectangular base, called a template jacket, encompassed nearly three acres and was supported by four floating caissons nearly ninety feet in circumference. Each leg was anchored to the seafloor with five pretensioned catenary mooring lines. She loomed two hundred and seventy feet above sea level to the top of her tallest utility crane and weighed roughly 425,000 tons.
In a line that stretches unbroken from the building of the Great Pyramids up to the modern age, the Petromax Prudhoe Omega represented the latest expression of man the builder and his desire to show both his will and ingenuity.
The helicopter carrying Mercer, Ivan Kerikov, and Jan Voerhoven had made good time rocketing southward from Pump Station Number 5. As the sleek craft headed out over the water, the pilot eased the chopper lower, the whirling disk of its rotors now only fifty feet from the flat surface of Cook Inlet.
“Tides,” he said to an uninterested Kerikov, who sat next to him in the cockpit of the executive helicopter, “that’s the real danger of the Inlet. Oh, sure, you get a few big waves coming up from the Gulf of Alaska and occasionally a tall iceberg in winter, but the big danger is the tides. They’ll rise thirty or more feet in ten hours and produce currents that’ll stop a freighter under full steam. That’s why most cargo is dropped at Whittier and trained into Anchorage, rather than struggle up the inlet.”
The pilot hadn’t shut his mouth since leaving the TAPline pump station, and his inane observations were driving Kerikov mad. Despite the capture of Philip Mercer and the few hours remaining before Charon’s Landing’s imminent success, Kerikov was in a black, foul mood. His stomach was knotted tightly, acids eating away at his insides so fiercely that he could feel the rumble even with the helicopter rattling around him. He feared he was slipping into another rage, one of those mindless blank periods where violence and death lurked.
He fought it grimly, the way a passenger on a rough boat fights seasickness, jaw clenched, mind tuned to anything other than the present surroundings. He felt as if there was another person within him fighting to be free, forcing him to struggle to maintain his own identity. The tension of the past year, of his entire life, was finally tearing him apart. He held on doggedly, refusing to give in, refusing to lose himself to his own madness. If only the simpleton flying the helicopter would shut his mouth.
He jerked his head sideways when the chopper pitched violently, amazed to see blood drooling from the corner of the pilot’s mouth. Kerikov glanced down and saw a matching stain on the back of his hand. He had no recollection of striking the man. The pilot regarded him with shocked fear, and Kerikov smiled in response. He turned to see how his passenger was doing.
Mercer sat between Kerikov’s bodyguard and Jan Voerhoven. He was bound and gagged with silver duct tape, yet there was a defiance to him and a fathomless look in his eyes. As Kerikov watched, Mercer winked, and behind the thick gag, he was sure the geologist was smiling at him. Trussed and under armed guard, totally helpless, Mercer was mocking him.
Unbelievable.
“There it is,” the pilot said timidly after a few minutes.
In the darkness, the true size of the Petromax Prudhoe Omega could not be fully appreciated, especially when she was not in production, her two-hundred-foot-long flare stack dim, her deck lights all but extinguished. Only a few of her eight hundred portholes were lit, and these were so spread apart that they looked like they were on different structures. The red warning strobes atop the cranes were separated by five hundred feet and towered two hundred feet above the helicopter. Yet even the barest outline of the rig demanded awe and respect.
Nearing the Omega, the chopper gained enough altitude to reach one of the two helidecks cantilevered off the side of the living module. The crew’s living quarters was a boxy structure the size of a city block, able to accommodate six hundred men, and yet was the smallest of the four modules that made up the rig’s superstructure. The others, the utilities, the production, and the drilling modules, independently built and attached to the rig before it was towed to Alaska, were many times larger. In the glow cast by the chopper’s landing lights, the upper works of the rig gleamed whitely, contrasting with the red decking and the spindly yellow stalks of her cranes and flare boom. The Petromax Oil logotype was stenciled on the landing pad, a grate that allowed the down blast of the rotor to pass through and ease landing operations.
The chopper flared for its landing, the retractable gear just kissing the steel deck. Two workers rushed forward to secure blocks around the tires. The turbine spooled down, and the rotor slowed until it turned with little more effort than a tired ceiling fan. Kerikov was the first to jump from the craft. He opened the passenger door and grabbed Mercer by the shoulder, dragging him out of the chopper and across the windswept deck. His dark mood had been eclipsed by a brittle cheer that was just as dangerous.
Duck-walking his bound prisoner, Kerikov led Mercer to the edge of the landing pad. Without pause for the dramatic effect of standing one hundred feet over the frigid water, he shoved at the small of Mercer’s back, and Mercer flew out into space.
With his hands tied and his mouth gagged, Mercer couldn’t even scream as he began to fall. His gray eyes went wide with fear and dismay. A second later, he hit the safety netting slung around the landing pad, one leg falling through the thick ropes, his headlong plummet arrested after a drop of only six feet. He was high enough above the waves crashing against the caisson legs to hear Kerikov’s deep laughter over his head.
“Did you shit your pants, brave man?” the Russian called down joyfully. “I bet when my men get down there to pull you off the net, they’ll have to hold their noses.”
He hadn’t soiled himself, but it had been a near thing. Lying on the net, Mercer’s breath came in painful draws through his nose, his heart hammering against his ribs. The suddenness of the push had panicked him more than the drop itself. It had been so quick, so unpredictably violent. As two men came to roll him off the netting and onto a narrow catwalk, Mercer knew that before the night was over, he would be going over the edge again, and the next time there would be no safety net.
He was right.
ALTHOUGH the title Tool Pusher connotes a hardened, hands-on type job, one involving the very heart of drilling operations, right at the rotary table and elbow deep in gushing crude and drill mud, it is in fact bestowed on the foreman of the drilling crew. On a rig as large as the Omega, the job was largely bureaucratic in nature. Therefore, the cabin reserved for the Tool Pusher was large and quite comfortable, much like an executive suite in a luxury hotel.
Ivan Kerikov was sitting on a deep green couch with a glass in his hand and a fresh cigar glowing amber in his right fist, when Mercer was brought into the room. The lights in the cabin were harsh compared to the gloom of the helicopter, but it took his eyes only a second to adjust. There was no sign of Jan Voerhoven. Kerikov’s face still registered the pleasure he’d felt pushing Mercer off the platform.
“It’s ironic.” Kerikov waved for one of the guards to unwrap the tape binding Mercer’s mouth. “Had you not identified yourself as a geologist, I would have killed you on the spot, never guessing that the man I wanted most in the world was before me. Granted, I would have lost the pleasure of watching you die slowly, but it would have spared you hours, maybe days of torture. Your humor is going to cost you more pain than you thought possible.”
The tape came away like searing water poured across his lips, and Mercer gasped. While he had wanted to come across Ivan Kerikov again at some point in his life, Mercer would have preferred the circumstances to be reversed. But he wasn’t about to show that his current predicament bothered him much. “Tell me, that rock you crawled out from under, are you sure it didn’t move away from you on its own?”
“Always the wit, eh? Is this to be the great verbal duel between the villain and the hero, the forces of good and evil speaking before the final confrontation?”
“If that’s what you want, I’m game. Me, I’m just stalling until the army arrives with a couple dozen gunships and reduces this oil rig to scrap.”
“Like those choppers I destroyed tonight? I don’t think so.
Not this time.” Kerikov sipped his drink, his face and voice calm, conversational. “You haven’t had enough time to mount even a rudimentary counterattack. Tonight’s minor annoyance was the best you could come up with. Considering your reputation, I expected a little more from you.”
“Give me some credit.” Mercer smiled with mock modesty. “I did dodge two assassination attempts in the past week.”
“Amateurs hired in haste, nothing more,” Kerikov dismissed. “My mother could have handled them in her sleep.”
“Remind me never to piss off your mother,” Mercer muttered quietly. “Does PEAL know that Alyeska will have the line back in service within a few months?”
“Trust me, they won’t. While our little ecologists believe that their acts are designed to clog the pipeline, I assure you it is going to burst in about eighty places and spill around five hundred thousand barrels of oil.” Kerikov paused. “That’s about twenty-one million gallons of crude, roughly double what the Exxon Valdez lost in 1989.”
“Freezing the oil in the line won’t crack the pipe. The steel liner is over a half inch thick, and there’s not enough internal pressure to split it,” Mercer pointed out.
“You’re right, but when I say so, there’s going to be more than enough pressure to see oil scattered a couple of miles from the line.” Kerikov gave him a greasy smile.
Suddenly, Mercer was afraid for much more than his own life. There was little doubt that Kerikov was telling the truth. He had a way of bursting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline like an eight-hundred-mile-long balloon. As someone who’d worked in some of the more pristine places on the planet, struggling to balance the needs of mankind with the delicacy of nature, Mercer didn’t want to think about the devastation such a catastrophe would create. The state of Alaska would be bisected by a black line of crude, an ugly stain that would take years to clean, assuming it was possible to fully erase so much damage. He couldn’t believe, no matter how radical and dangerous PEAL was, that they would condone such a heinous act in order to further their cause. This situation made as much sense as a Palestinian terror group using a nuclear bomb on Jerusalem. Groups like PEAL wanted to garner attention to their cause, not destroy the very thing they strove to protect.
They would readily agree to freezing the oil, shutting down the TAPline for a couple of months or forever if that’s what they’d been led to believe. That would be a great victory for their cause. But to actually destroy it? Spill the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil it contained? They would never agree to it.
He tried to imagine Aggie Johnston being part of something so repugnant, something that went against every law of nature and man, and he felt that she never would. There was no way she would sit idle while her group destroyed Alaska, leading Mercer to believe that she knew nothing about Kerikov’s ultimate goals. And if she, Jan Voerhoven’s girlfriend, knew nothing, then it was certain that the rank and file of the organization had been equally duped. Anger welled within him, anger at Kerikov and anger at himself for not realizing the danger sooner, for not sounding the alarm when he first found the Jenny IV.
Kerikov watched as the change swept through Mercer. He was a good enough judge of moods and character to almost read the thoughts of those around him. It was a gift that had served him well throughout his career in the Soviet Union. “You are just beginning to see the enormity of what I’ve done,” he sneered. “Consider this: What happens here, the destruction of the line and the devastation to the precious ecosystems, is nothing more than a sideshow for my true aims. It’s only one tine in a three-pronged operation. Had Russia ever had the balls to use it, Charon’s Landing would have ended here in Alaska, but I’ve expanded it, adapted it to the world today and made it astronomically profitable. You would be amazed at the number of people who want to see the United States still dependent on imported oil,” he chuckled harshly. “And you’d be surprised to learn that many of them are Americans themselves.”
“Charon’s Landing? That’s the name of this little adventure?”
“Originally it was a Cold War scheme to slow American oil production while our forces launched a lightning attack into Western Europe. The plan called for a combined commando assault against the pipeline and the terminal facility. The planners envisioned the region around Valdez turning into a conflagration of mythic proportions, so they named it after the site where the mythological ferryman, Charon, docked his boat after leading the souls of the dead across the River Styx.”
