Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

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.