Charon's Landing, page 44
She did as he asked, digging her boots into his shoulders, her shoulders pressed against his shins so that when she shifted, arcing in a parody of orgasm, the strain was taken up by his bones rather than muscles. He gasped as her weight came off of him, his back and stomach relaxing for the first time in twenty minutes. The position was now as painful for her as it had been for him. She bore it as long as possible, her body made supple and strong through years of fencing and exercise, but after only a few minutes, she had to lower herself against him again.
“I’m sorry,” she panted. “That’s the best I can do.”
“I’m all right now,” he lied. “Besides, we’re almost there.”
Deep below the rig, in the black waters of the Sound, buried under eighteen feet of silty mud, the five huge anchors restraining number three support jacket were losing their mooring integrity as the leg began sinking, pulling at the fifteen other anchors holding the rig in position. To maintain their strength, the mooring lines must be rigid at all times. Aggie had been forced to take the automated tensioning hydraulics off-line in order for her to flood only the one leg. As more water filled the support, the catenary lines began to sag beyond their fracture points, and one by one they parted. The seven-inch-thick steel wires sheared cleanly, the anchored ends dropping silently into the gloom, the remainder hanging from the underside of the rig like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish.
The other plow-shaped Delta Flipper anchors were so well placed that they hadn’t dragged, and their tension was so strong that the rig began to pendulum back. Rather than listing toward the filled support leg, the Omega swung one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Though the dynamics of the entire anchoring system was measured in the thousands of tons, the rig was now so unbalanced that every gallon of water cycling through the pumps and into the support column shifted the structure just a little more.
The twenty-knot incoming tide rushing past the platform was the only thing keeping the rig upright, pressing just enough against the legs to keep them stable. But the delicate balance of force, counterforce, weight, buoyancy, and drag wouldn’t last as the pumps continued to fill the Omega’s buttress.
“Only a couple more feet,” Aggie announced in amazement.
“How far are we from the elevator opening?” Mercer asked grimly. The proximity of their goal couldn’t overcome his pain and the numbness that had spread through his lower body.
“We’re coming up right below it. Your feet are only a couple of inches from the cable.”
“As soon as we get close enough to the door, you have to jam the screwdriver between it and the casing. There should be a mechanical release to open it in case the automatic system doesn’t work and someone is trapped in the car.”
“Like in the movies?”
“Exactly.”
Aggie tried to extend her arm, simulating the motions she would need to pry open the door. As soon as she moved her hand, she fell off Mercer’s chest with a scream.
She hit the water pooled on the tarp and began to thrash, ripping through the plastic, and destroying the raft. Mercer let go of the struts, falling into the water with Aggie. The survival suit kept him buoyant, and he grabbed Aggie as she flailed. He pulled her close, trying to calm her before she drowned from her own panic.
“Oh, my God, it hurts. Oh, sweet Christ, I can’t, I can’t . . .” Her lips were blue as the freezing water seeped around the tape Mercer had used to cover her. “Mercer, please, oh, God, I’m going to die.”
“Aggie! Aggie!” Mercer shouted, looking into her eyes but seeing he’d already lost her to fear. She stared back vacantly and he feared she’d gone into shock. He barely noticed or cared that the Sterns suit had failed and that he too was soaked to the skin. He had to get them out of the water in the next few seconds.
Just then, four of the twenty-ton anchors securing the offshore platform were wrenched from the seabed in clouds of drifting silt, tearing huge furrows through the mud, relinquishing their combined thousand tons of counterforce. There was no stopping the Omega now. She was going to flip. There was too much weight on one corner of the rig, and without the anchors, the buoyancy of the other three legs would capsize her in minutes. Of the eleven anchors still holding fast, only three more had to fail before the platform upended and vanished beneath the waves.
The effects within column number three were instantaneous. One moment, Aggie and Mercer were struggling just below the elevator door, and the next second, the rig had dipped and rushing water forced them into the empty elevator vestibule. They were pressed to the very ceiling by Mercer’s survival suit, totally submerged and held helpless by water pressure.
The icy water beat against Mercer’s temples, sharp stabbing pulses that made him nauseous. His mind was nothing but a swirling gray cloud of pain. His reserves were gone. He’d failed. They were going to die.
Aggie’s movement was so slight that he almost didn’t feel it, yet unbelievably she pressed on his hand, opening his fingers and placing something against his palm. He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to open his eyes to the saltwater, but something forced him on. He glanced down and saw in the watery light that somehow, through her thrashing and her fear and her proximity to death, Aggie had maintained her grip on the screwdriver and had the presence of mind to place it in his hand.
He plunged the tool at the door, missing the seam by a good six inches with his drunken lunge, but the angle of his attack forced the flat point of the screwdriver to gouge along the door and lodge firmly in the crack. The tip found the release on the pressure bar. He hauled back on the handle and the door swung free, pushed outward by tons of water.
Aggie and Mercer burst through the narrow door in a rush, like the life-giving spill of birth, borne along the hallway by thousands of gallons of water, careening off the bulkheads and tumbling forty feet before smashing against a twist in the corridor, water surging around them in a diminishing torrent.
Both of them retched until their lungs ached, shivering in the steel hallway as water continued to gush past. They needed to stop, to take time to recover and strip out of their soaked clothing, but they couldn’t. The Petromax Omega was bobbing like a pleasure boat caught in a rough storm, the tensioned mooring lines stretching beyond their maximum tolerances yet amazingly still holding. But each swing against them was stronger and stronger, as the top structure of the platform arced fifteen degrees against the gracefully swooping catenaries.
“We have to move,” Mercer gasped, his jaw chattering like a jackhammer. “Can you walk?”
Aggie didn’t respond — she had slipped into unconsciousness.
Ignoring his own needs, Mercer took the time to strip Aggie out of her clothing, yanking off her sodden jacket, sweater, and T-shirt and peeling her wet jeans from her legs, gaining a few more minutes before she froze to death. He looked down the corridor, closing his eyes for a moment, thinking back to the winding journey he’d taken to this spot while under guard by Abu Alam. He closed his mind to everything — his pain, the cold, the imminent destruction of the rig — and reconstructed the route corner by corner.
After defeating the Minotaur in Greek mythology, Theseus used a string to guide him back out of the labyrinth. Mercer had only his own clouded mind. Carrying Aggie, he ran through the empty passages, his feet pounding the steel battle deck as he backtracked the tortured path. Yet unerringly he negotiated intersections and stairs and doorways, making the correct decisions every step of the way, instinct driving him on. Had he stopped to think, he would have been lost in moments. The stark corridors of the rig’s underworks were indistinguishable from one another. There were no remarkable objects to remind him of the proper route, yet still he ran, covering the distance back to the living module in half the time it had taken Alam to bring him to the support leg. Utilitarian steel walls gave way to faux wood paneling and thin carpet as he burst through an open hatchway and into the crew’s quarters.
The deck was canted at least twenty degrees now, pushing him headlong down a wide hallway. The paneled doors of individual cabins blurred by as he ran, Aggie lying limply in his arms. He didn’t dare pause to feel for a pulse. Alarms shrieked all along the corridor, red strobe lights pulsing like frantic heartbeats. Over the din, a computer-generated voice was telling all personnel to abandon the rig immediately.
Mercer kicked open an exit door, twisting himself so that Aggie passed through without hitting her head or dragging her legs against the steel frame. The stairs looked like something out of a funhouse, tipped so steeply that they were almost vertical. Mercer started up carefully, cautious to keep his balance as he climbed. It was like trying to scale a cliff face, and every second the rig pitched to a steeper angle. He slogged up two more flights before reaching the main deck and then dashed out into the windswept night.
When sensors had detected that the rig was listing, the computer had activated the emergency lights, bathing the deck in a pink sodium-vapor glow, the flare tower and cranes backlit against the darkness like monuments. Mercer strained through the glare as he searched for one of the yellow escape pods he’d noticed on the chopper ride in. They were slung along the edge of the module like lifeboats on a luxury liner.
Out in the open, the tilt of the huge platform was much more apparent. Mercer had thought they had a few minutes, but now saw that in seconds the Petromax Omega would flip onto her side and sink. He could only hope that Kerikov and Alam were still trapped belowdecks, but he knew it wasn’t so. The helicopter that had carried them here was gone.
Aggie was deadweight against him as he lurched toward the edge of the towering platform, slipping on the deck as the rig angled further. The alarm bells were maddening in their insistence. Mercer crashed against the railing, managing to shield Aggie from the blow, his shoulder hitting only inches from an escape pod’s razor-sharp propeller. The upper deck of the pod was a perfect cylinder, while its hull was deeply veed to give it stability in the roughest seas.
Not knowing how to work the sophisticated davits that would launch the raft, Mercer could only pray that the mechanism could be activated from within the pod. He wedged Aggie against the railing, freeing his hands to work the hatch, when suddenly the lifeboat lifted, swung out over the water, and vanished from sight so quickly he felt himself swaying toward the void it had created.
Some of Kerikov’s men must have already been in the pod and used it to make their own escape.
Mercer had wasted time he couldn’t afford. The next pod was twenty feet away. He gathered up Aggie and ran toward it, his hip scraping against the railing as he went; without its support he wouldn’t have been able to keep on his feet. Halfway to the lifeboat, it too lifted, up and away, disappearing as swiftly as the first.
“Shit!”
Pushing himself harder than he thought possible, he sprinted, his feet slipping with each step, the abyss to his right sucking at him constantly. His breath was a ragged explosion every time it burst from his mouth, while his right leg screamed each time he put his weight on it. He ignored the next two pods in a dangerous calculated risk, focusing all of his attention on the last pod on this side of the living module.
Reaching it, he didn’t take the time to set Aggie onto the deck. Instead, he slung her over his shoulder and pulled at the handle securing the hatch. It lifted easily, and the hatch swung inward. Lights in the pod automatically snapped on and heaters began warming even as he unceremoniously tossed Aggie onto the padded bench that lined the sides of the raft. He dove in after her, twisting as he landed so he could resecure the hatch. Next to it was a small control panel with two buttons. He pressed the one marked Launch.
It seemed to take forever but actually happened in less than ten seconds. Hydraulic pistons lifted the pod off the deck, but the rig was angled too steeply. The underside of the escape pod hung up on the railing, balancing almost perfectly. The davits started to unspool the lowering lines. The pod teetered for a second, then started to fall back toward the deck. Mercer and Aggie would be trapped aboard the Omega when she went over. Mercer had felt what was happening and reacted instantly, diving across the pod and slamming himself against the outside wall, his weight tipping the forty-foot craft the other way.
The pod slipped from the railing, and as he’d predicted earlier, Mercer was free-falling off the rig once more. Enough cable had unwound from the davits for the pod to fall twenty feet before being yanked short, almost wrenching itself from the lines. It danced against the restraint, tossing Mercer and Aggie around the enclosed cabin ruthlessly.
Without warning, the escape pod smashed into the waters of Cook Inlet, inertia and weight driving it below the surface before it pluckily burst back up, throwing off water like a hunting dog after a retrieve. Mercer lay stunned on the floor of the raft, Aggie on top of him, her head resting against his chest as if she’d merely fallen asleep. He had to get up, unhook the pod from its shackles, and motor them away from the doomed rig, but he couldn’t move. He just wanted to stay where he was, cradling Aggie until all the pain went away.
The last anchors finally gave way, stressed far beyond what their manufacturers ever dreamed possible, and the Petromax Prudhoe Omega lurched violently. The crane towers and flare stack snapped off cleanly, falling into the water only a couple dozen yards in front of the escape pod. Four hundred lengths of drill string in bins atop the production module came pouring off the rig like a log slide, followed closely by countless drums of chemical drilling mud.
As the platform toppled, it began breaking apart. The living module sheared off, the entire thirty-thousand-ton structure falling into the sea in a catastrophic explosion of water and debris that flung Mercer and Aggie’s escape pod to the very limit of the lowering line, but they still remained attached to the swiftly sinking module. The upper decks hit the water next, and as they did, the number two support leg lifted completely out of the water before breaking away to fall independently from the rest of the platform.
Diesel fuel poured from ruptured storage tanks, making contact with one of the many electrical fires already raging, and ignited in a wide sheet of flame, black smoke lifting high into the air. As the rig settled into the water, it pitched and bucked as more pieces fell clear. It sank slowly, fighting almost as if it were a living creature that realized it was drowning. Explosions rumbled from deep under the flaming water.
Throughout the final moments, Mercer lay still, his breathing settling as he soaked up the warmth that blasted from the pod’s multiple heaters. He knew that there was something he had to do, something that compelled him to get off the floor, but he could no longer remember what it was. Yet he forced himself from the floor and moved to the stern where the motor and steering controls were housed in an economical dashboard. He was working on getting the engine started when he remembered that he hadn’t unshackled the pod from the living module!
Cook Inlet was two hundred and seventy feet deep where the Omega had been temporarily moored, and the lines securing the living module to the escape pod were only one hundred and fifty feet long. He raced back to the davit controls, just reaching a hand outward when the module sank beyond that one-hundred-and-fifty-foot tether. The lines came taut, then the little craft was capsized in a fraction of a second, hauled down toward the murky bottom, condemned to a watery grave.
Once again Mercer and Aggie were thrown violently, falling to the ceiling as the raft tipped upside down and was yanked below the surface in a headlong plunge. While it had been designed to be watertight in the most adverse surface conditions, the pod’s fiberglass hull was not designed to survive a prolonged submergence. In seconds, the seams where the upper-works and hull joined were creaking and popping, a tiny jet of water shooting from around one of the gasketed mounting bolts.
Seconds before the hull imploded, Mercer scrambled back to the controls and pressed the second of the two buttons. Spring clips securing the tethers to the hull snapped open. Free of the plummeting living module, the escape pod rocketed back to the surface of the Sound, surrounded by a champagne fountain of air bubbles. It was launched completely out of the water, like a humpback whale breaching during its annual migrations. Its design was such that it quickly settled on an even keel, even if its two occupants were no longer in any condition to care. It took all of Mercer’s remaining energy to strip himself out of the survival suit and wet clothing and curl up under several of the blankets that had been dislodged from a storage locker, Aggie Johnston held tightly to his chest.
“We made it, darling,” he mumbled and then remembered that escaping the rig was only half the battle. The real fight was still to come.
The United Arab Emirates
The television image was grainy and broke up every few seconds due to atmospheric disturbances as it bounced back to earth from a communications satellite. On the screen, a woman stood in front of the massive facade of Heathrow’s Terminal 4, her beautiful face composed of equal parts of pity and eagerness. As a professional broadcast journalist, this was the type of incident she lived for. The doors behind her were cluttered with swarming rescue workers in heavy flame-retardant gear, uniformed police, and suited members of Special Branch. The incident that had brought them all here had occurred on the other side of the building, out on the huge apron where aircraft had been waiting for clearance from the bomb detection teams. The sound from the BBC Special Report was much sharper than the pictures beamed into Hasaan bin-Rufti’s Hawker Siddeley, now only fifteen minutes from touchdown at Dubai, the closest international airport to the Emirate of Ajman.
Rufti was seated in the main cabin, his bulk sagging over and around the confining arms of the luxury seat. His fingers and lips were greased with the molten butter dripping from the lobsters he was consuming. He had just finished sucking the pale red meat out of the tiny underclaws of two huge imported Maine lobsters when the report had broken into the financial news he had been watching. The napkin hanging down his chest was the size of a tablecloth and was streaked yellow with butter, like a urine-soaked diaper.
