Clive Cussler: The Jungle

He wore heavy-duty coveralls, despite the fact that he wouldn’t see anything much beyond the rig’s administrative office, and he held a plastic hard hat on his lap. As required, his boots had steel-reinforced toes. Wouldn’t want them crushed in a paper avalanche.

The pilot hadn’t said more than ten words to Abdullah since taking off, so when he heard a sound coming through his radio earmuffs he turned to see if the man was speaking to him.

To his horror he saw the pilot clutching at the side of his head. With no one holding the controls, the two-seat chopper started moving violently downward. For a fleeting instant Abdullah thought the pilot, a veteran by the look of him, was having fun at the expense of a newbie inspector, but then the man simply slumped over against his door, his body held somewhat erect by his safety belts.

The Robinson started to rotate on its axis.

Abdullah surprised himself by remembering the rudimentary training he’d received. He grabbed the stick and the collective control down by his side and placed his feet on the pedals. He gently applied opposite pressure on the foot bar to correct the spin and gave the aircraft more power to gain altitude. After about fifteen seconds he had the helicopter somewhat steadier, but by no means was it flying as well as it had under a real pilot’s control.

He glanced at the pilot. The man remained slumped over, and while he had yet to start losing color Abdullah knew that he was dead. The way he’d grabbed at his head made Abdullah think the older man had suffered a massive stroke.

Sweat trickled down Abdullah’s forehead as a lump swelled in his stomach. The rig they were heading for was still thirty miles away, while their base was twenty-five miles behind him. He had no illusions that he could keep the aircraft flying for that long. His only option was to attempt to land on one of the nearby platforms.

“Um, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he called out, not knowing if the radios were set on the right frequency, not even knowing if his headset could access the radio. There was no reply.

When he scanned the instrument panel to see what he could do, he lost concentration momentarily, and the helicopter began to rotate again. Panicked, he overcompensated, losing altitude the whole time. The altimeter showed he was at five hundred feet, but the ocean seemed to surge just below the landing skids. He eased his grip on the controls, remembering that flying helicopters was all about finesse. The light touch, the instructor had said over and over during his two-day tutorial. Though he wasn’t allowed to solo, Abdullah had landed an identical helo exactly twice, and both times the instructor’s hands had never been more than a millimeter from the controls.

Once he had stabilized the chopper, he looked out across the sea for the nearest oil rig. Uniformly, they all had landing pads either on top of the accommodations block or, more commonly, cantilevered over the ocean. To his dismay, he was in one of the few regions of the oil and gas field that wasn’t currently being worked. He saw only one rig, about three miles away. He recognized it as an older semisubmersible. Below its four stout legs, and under the water, were two enormous pontoons that could be filled or emptied via computer control. Such a rig could be towed to any location in the world. Once there, the ballast tanks could be filled to stabilize it, and anchors set on the seafloor to keep it in place. The platform was quite possibly abandoned. He saw no telltale plume of fire spewing from the vent stack, and as he got closer he noted the rust and peeling paint.

It wouldn’t matter, he realized. Once he was down he could devote his full attention to the radio and call for help.

Amid the monochromatic gray paint scheme was a faded yellow circle enclosing a yellow letter H . This was the rig’s landing pad, a steel platform hanging a hundred feet over the water. The pad wasn’t solid but rather was a grille that allowed the chopper’s downdraft to pass through, thus making it easier to land.

Abdullah coaxed the little Robinson closer and closer. There was no movement on the deck, no roughnecks working on the drilling floor, no one coming out of the accommodations block to see who was approaching. It was a ghost rig.

He brought the helo to an unsteady hover, slowly easing off the power so it sank down toward the platform. He praised Allah that there was no wind to contend with. Keeping a helicopter in a hover required the same skill and coordination as balancing a Ping-Pong ball on a paddle. A cross breeze would have been deadly. The chopper waggled and wiggled as he brought it lower. He wished he could wipe the sweat from his palms. They were slick on the controls, and a bead of perspiration dangled from the end of his nose.

When he thought he was about four feet from the landing platform, he chopped the power dramatically. But in his unfamiliarity with judging vertical distances through the Plexiglas bubble at his feet, he was closer to ten.

The Robinson slammed onto the deck hard enough to bounce it into the air again, and, when it did, it tilted over onto its side. The rotor blades smashed into the steel grille and splintered, bits of them peppering the sea far below.

The chopper’s hull crashed to the deck on its side and fortunately remained still. Had it rolled, it would have plunged off the platform. Abdullah didn’t know how to shut off the engines. His only concern was getting out of the aircraft. Everyone who watched as many action movies as he had knew that cars, airplanes, and helicopters always exploded following a crash.

He clicked off his safety belts and climbed over the inert form of the pilot, fear overcoming his revulsion at actually touching a corpse. The four-cylinder Lycoming engine continued to squeal behind the cockpit. He managed to unlatch the pilot’s door and thrust it up and over so that it lay flush with the fuselage. He had to physically stand on the pilot’s hip to get enough leverage to haul himself from the chopper.

Did he smell gas?

A new burst of fear shot through his body, and he jumped free. No sooner had his feet hit the grating than he was running off the landing pad in the direction of the accommodations block, a huge steel building that took up a third of the deck space on the massive rig. Above it all soared the drilling derrick, a spindly network of steel struts that looked like a miniature Eiffel Tower.

Abdullah reached the corner of the block and turned back. He saw no fire, but smoke billowed from the Robinson’s engine compartment, and it thickened by the second.

And then he had the terrible thought that maybe the pilot wasn’t dead. He didn’t know what to do. The smoke grew more dense. He could see into the cockpit though the nose canopy. Was the pilot moving, or was the image being blurred by heat?

He took a tentative step as if to return to the chopper when flames emerged at the base of the column of smoke. It wasn’t the dramatic explosion of Hollywood or Hong Kong moviemakers but a steady fire that quickly engulfed the aircraft. Its roar drowned out the whir of the helo’s engine. Smoke poured into the sky.

Abdullah stood frozen. Already he was thinking that he’d be stuck out here forever. If this was an abandoned rig, there was no reason for anyone to come out to it. He was trapped.

No, he told himself. He didn’t just survive a plane crash to die on a deserted oil platform. The smoke, he thought. Surely someone will see the smoke and come to investigate. Then he remembered that smoke poured off every rig within a hundred miles, and the fire wouldn’t last for very long. The odds that a passing workboat or helicopter would see it before it burned itself out were too long.

But if he saw one coming, he could start another fire to signal them.