Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Okay,” Mercer conceded. “What about option two?”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know where we are, except to say we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Aggie took on the persona of a bubbly tour guide. “Before you, we have the auxiliary buoyancy pump controls for support column three of the Petromax Prudhoe Omega , a TBP built for Petromax Oil by Sosen Heavy Industries in Pusan, Korea, at a cost of $1.4 billion. Commissioned in 1998 and completed eighteen months later by a crew of two thousand men working around the clock. The Omega uses every safety device yet developed for offshore structures, from Baldt Moor-Free acoustic detonators on all twenty of the compliant tension cables to no fewer than fifteen lifeboat spaces for every member of the crew. Since she was designed to work in arctic conditions, the Omega utilizes an Integral Riser system for all subsurface flow and control lines, pre-tensioned to prevent shearing due to surface conditions or ice buildup. Her multiple blowout preventers are rated at sixty thousand pounds per square inch to keep down hole gas and oil from bursting up to the surface.

“She has accommodations for six hundred men, carries 250,000 gallons of fresh water, 500,000 gallons of diesel for her pumps, drills, and other machinery, and when in full production can provide the total energy needs of a city the size of Rochester, New York.” Aggie smiled saucily. “Anything else you want to know? Don’t forget this is my daddy’s rig. He managed to get me to launch her for him last June before she was towed here for pre-staging and testing. She’s going to be brought to Prudhoe Bay next spring.”

Mercer was impressed. “I’ve always loved a smartass, especially when she’s right. If you know so much, then how do we get out of here?”

Aggie turned quiet again, chastened. “The elevator is the only way, so we’re stuck until Kerikov or that disgusting Arab comes for us. By the way, he was the guy you clobbered in the bar, the one groping me. He was also part of the duo who kidnapped me at your hotel.”

“Reasons two and three for me wanting him dead.” Mercer tried to make that sound light, but his voice was frigid. “Let’s look around, inventory everything that’s down here and come up with a plan.”

Twenty minutes later they had scoured the huge auxiliary control room, pulling tools and other supplies from waterproof cabinets and stowage lockers. When they finished, the pile of equipment was pathetically small, most of it worthless; two boxes of hand tools, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, and the like; four rolls of duct tape; four sections of one-inch pipe, the longest one only six feet in length; and a torn Sterns flotation suit, its safety orange cover blackened by grease and several of its Ensolite foam flotation cells punctured and empty. They found a large blue polypropylene tarp and two empty oxygen cylinders like the type worn by firefighters, but no masks or regulators. The room also gave up a first aid kit, a diver’s flipper, and a container of decayed food forgotten by a worker during the construction of the rig.

“It’s hopeless.” Aggie put a voice to what both were feeling.

A minute passed. Mercer looked at the clutter, then glanced up to the top of the huge cylindrical caisson. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well. Another minute went by until finally he looked at Aggie, his eyes brightening. “You said auxiliary pump controls?” She nodded. “Can you run them?”

“Yes, but what does it matter?”

“I’ll have us out of here in a couple of hours,” Mercer predicted with a devilish smile.

“Are you nuts?”

“No. I float.”

Kerikov stepped from the shower cabinet, his usually gray skin now pink and glowing, the hair on his chest and back matted down like a pelt. He wrapped one towel around his waist and used another to dry himself. He’d already shaved, using the comforting routine of morning ablutions to revive himself. It was now three o’clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept for nearly thirty hours. The shower had done wonders, almost as much as the second Scotch he’d poured himself before entering the bathroom.

He was just beginning to dress when there was a knock on the cabin door. Abu Alam entered without being invited, swaggering to the couch and eyeing Kerikov’s nudity with a mixture of hatred and sexual interest. The Arab disgusted Kerikov like no one he’d ever met before.

“He’s down in the hole with the woman now,” Alam reported. “I don’t understand why we just don’t kill them both.”

“Because I won’t be rushed in dealing with Mercer. It’s a personal matter. As for the woman, she’s the daughter of one of our principals, and her presence here is to ensure he fulfills his end of our bargain. If Max Johnston decides to expose us after he learns of our double cross, the woman will be yours for as long as you wish, provided we send videotapes of your time together to her father.” Kerikov imagined the young heiress being raped and sodomized to death by Alam and his two assistants. “However, if he fulfills our agreement, she is to be released immediately, and if I hear that she has been touched, I’ll kill you myself.”

Alam was skeptical. “No one frightens me with idle threats.”

Kerikov ignored his posturing. “Go find our friend Voerhoven and let’s get back to Valdez. When PEAL pulls out from Pump Station 5, they’re going to make the road northward impassable by blowing up several bridges. That leaves us only a few hours before the authorities are finished with the fires in Fairbanks, freeing up helicopters to investigate what happened at the station. How much time do you need to plant the explosives aboard the Hope ?”

“Do you want it totally destroyed, or just sunk?”

“I don’t want a piece of debris larger than a postage stamp,” Kerikov intoned.

“Maybe an hour, two at most. I’ve got to be able to get the charges around all the fuel bunkers and, using Primacord, time the detonations so the concussion blows out both sides of the hull simultaneously.” Alam spoke with the competence ingrained in him by years of terrorist training, first in Algeria and later in the streets of Lebanon and the desert bases of Libya, Iran, and Iraq.

Kerikov watched the slight nervous twitch that had developed in Alam’s cheek. It was so subtle and infrequent that had he not been looking for it he never would have noticed. Alam, Kerikov suspected, had orders to kill him as soon as he’d destroyed the Alaskan Pipeline and orchestrated the sinking of a supertanker off the continental coast of the United States. Rufti was going to betray him.

Kerikov had known this would be coming even before he approached Rufti. The Arab was so transparent it was almost sad. Did he really think that Kerikov didn’t have ways of protecting himself from a double cross?

Lord protect us from the ambitions of imbeciles.

MERCER managed only a few words of explanation about his escape plan when Aggie’s face went bright red with fury. “You’re out of your mind. Do you have any idea what that would do? The balance of one of these monsters has to be monitored twenty-four hours a day. When winter hits, even though she won’t be in production, a crew will be aboard to make sure that ice buildup doesn’t affect the rig’s stability. On a platform this size, a two-inch coating of ice weighs something like four hundred and fifty tons and could turtle her if left unchecked.

“And you’re talking about knocking out the balance by a magnitude of a hundred. If the Omega is deck loaded, her pipe racks filled with drill string, her bunkers and drill mud storage ponds full, she’ll flip long before we reach the top of the leg. Remember the 500,000 gallons of diesel I mentioned earlier? That’ll become a slick covering the entire inlet if the rig nose-dives.”