Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Open it,” Alam barked, and one of his men heaved at the doorway, revealing a tiny room beyond. Alam had his shotgun ready, as if he expected to see someone standing in the phone booth-sized cabin. Mercer realized that he was looking into an elevator car. The drilling rig was so new that the lubricant used to grease the hatch was still a clear yellow, not yet darkened by dirt and grime.

“Inside.” Alam prodded Mercer again.

He stepped into the small elevator, expecting Alam to disobey Kerikov and shoot him in the back, but the blast did not come. Although he knew it was futile, Mercer tried to reason with Alam. “You know you’re not going to get away with this. You’re going to be caught and killed.”

“I pray for nothing more than a martyr’s death fighting the Great Satan,” Alam said, and his two men nodded in agreement.

“Be careful what you wish for; it may come true.” The door was slammed in his face, and the car began to drop.

There was no real elevator car, just a cagelike platform guided by a rail on its back side. It fell sedately into one of the rig’s massive hollow support columns, the walls opening up around Mercer, widening and curving like the insides of a huge grain silo. Looking out over the open edge of the car, he guessed the fall to be about one hundred feet. The bottom of the shaft was just a dark circle from his perspective, no larger than a manhole cover.

Down the platform dropped, the guide wheels passing slickly along its rail, the great open void sucking at him. Mercer had never suffered from vertigo before, but it didn’t seem a good time to push his luck. He kept his eyes fixed on the opposite wall of the featureless shaft. The air was chilled and humid, condensation droplets clinging to the pale blue walls like clear, fat leeches. At one point, Mercer could feel that the elevator had passed below the water line, the temperature plummeting a further twenty degrees. He pulled his leather jacket tighter around his body.

When he finally reached the bottom, it took only a few minutes to cut the tape binding his wrists by rubbing it against the accordion gate affixed to the floor. He located the controls that would send the elevator back to the top of the support leg to his right, but they had been sabotaged. The call buttons dangled from their housing on a few blackened wires. Mercer mashed the green button anyway, pressing it with all of his strength as if sheer force would convince the disabled elevator to begin rising.

Nothing happened. It had been shorted so only the upper controls still functioned. He was trapped in a modern-day version of the medieval pit. Without waiting for the full effect of his predicament to sink in, Mercer began to explore for another way out, starting first with the elevator itself. The cable that lowered the car was his best hope, and he scrambled on top of the open-sided car to examine it more closely.

As he expected, the finely braided steel cable was slick with grease. It was so slippery that he was barely able to grasp it and knew it would be impossible to climb. Yet he had to try, and just as he gathered himself to begin pulling himself upward, a voice from the gloom warned him.

“When I tried that, I fell and almost broke my leg.”

“Aggie?” Mercer couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly, but it was her voice echoing inside the huge cylinder. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He looked around the dimly lit space at the bottom of the support leg. The circular room was enormous but spartan. Half of it was occupied by machinery that looked as if it had come from the nightmares of a demented plumber. It was impossible to completely trace the twisting path of even one of the hundreds of pipes with their countless valves, gauges, and spurs. A low counter with storage doors and a near-empty tool rack stood a little way off from the tangled steel forest. The deck was mostly solid plating, but there were several large grates that would give access to even lower levels.

“Rereading War and Peace — what do you think I’m doing? I’m a prisoner just like you.” Aggie stepped from around a large watertight cabinet and into a dim pool of light given by a low-watt bulb.

Mercer jumped back to the floor, crossing the distance between them in a few quick strides. He gathered her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers, feverishly kissing her as if nothing else mattered or ever would.

A moment later she stepped back, breathless. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know,” Mercer replied with a sheepish smile. “But you can’t deny it felt good.”

“You won’t hear me complaining, but you haven’t picked a very romantic spot to demonstrate your affection.” Her eyes were a bright, rich green, although the rest of her was ragged, worn by whatever ordeal she had undergone.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded. Mercer asked how long she’d been on the rig.

“I was grabbed in the parking lot of your hotel just after I left you. Two men attacked me. They killed some poor hotel guest and then drove me away in a van. They drugged me, and when I came to, I was here.” Her voice was strong and filled with determination, but she looked delicate and frail, like a child. At the same time, she was such a woman that Mercer was distracted from his current predicament and stole a minute to just look at her, to drink her in. Aggie became self-conscious almost immediately, raking her hand through her short hair in a nervous gesture.

“What?” she said. “Don’t look at me. I’m a mess.”

“No, you’re not. You’re beautiful,” he breathed, embarrassed by his emotional response to her presence. He broke eye contact, looking around the space quickly. “We’ve got to find a way out of here and stop them. Do you have any idea what your group is about to do?”

“I didn’t until I talked with that sick Russian bastard. He told me about how he and PEAL are going to freeze the oil in the pipeline.”

“That’s only half of it. He plans to split it wide open and spill five hundred thousand barrels of crude all across Alaska.”

Aggie turned pale, her deep sense of love for the environment shaking her to the core. “God, no, he can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid he can and will, unless we can stop him. And another thing. Your boyfriend has been in the thick of this thing since the very beginning.”

“No way,” Aggie defended Jan Voerhoven automatically. “I believed Kerikov when he told me Jan helped attach the liquid gas canisters, but there is no way he would allow the pipe to be cut and its contents spilled. He would die first.”

“It’s possible he doesn’t know all of Kerikov’s plans,” Mercer admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not a willing accomplice to the largest act of sabotage in history. Now, I want to see if I can get that elevator working.”

“I already tried. The power’s been cut to the controls down here, and there’s nothing we can use to jumper the circuits.” She spoke with authority. “It’s my bet that the breaker was shut off at the topside box.”

Mercer felt a twinge of chauvinism, thinking that she probably didn’t know anything about electronics and that he could somehow sort out the jumbled wires hanging from the control. He looked at them briefly, then turned back to Aggie. She watched him with an almost patronizing smirk. “I thought you had a degree in environmental sciences or something?”

“That was my master’s. My father demanded that I do my undergrad studies in mechanical and electrical engineering.”

“Really?”

“It was all part of his grand plan to get me ready to take over Petromax. He knew I never would, of course, but he still had hopes that I’d give up environmental activism.”