by Dale Mayer
Everybody dug back into their food, not wanting to take the conversation any further.
When Troy’s phone buzzed, she heard it, but she didn’t think anybody else did. Although she glanced at Axel, a stillness had come over him. Troy fished his phone from his pocket and glanced at the message that came in. He shoved the last bite of food in his mouth, then asked, “Is there any place to make a phone call around here?”
“With that storm, not likely,” one of the men said. “You can try the office though.”
Troy nodded, shoved his phone back in his pocket, and shot Axel a hard glance. With a gentle nod toward her, he turned and left.
She looked at Axel and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged and reached for another slab of meat loaf. She watched him inhale it and said, “I’ll go back to my office and get some work done.”
He nodded and stood up with her.
“Finish your meat loaf,” she scolded. He looked down and grinned, then cut it and wolfed it down faster than she could have imagined. She walked over to the coffeepot that miraculously seemed to be full right now and poured herself a cup.
Denny came running to her side. “There’s dessert,” he said. “Don’t you want dessert?”
“What are we having?” she asked.
He pulled out trays of puff pastry with some fruit in them.
She looked at it and smiled. “That looks delicious.” Reaching toward a tray, she grabbed two bowls of dessert, one for Troy and one for herself. She looked over at Axel, who nodded, so she grabbed a third one as well.
Finally, with three cups of coffee and three desserts now heaping high with whipping cream, she balanced it all on a clean tray and headed back toward the office. She could hear the other men at the tables moving about, getting desserts for themselves.
Back inside the computer bullpen, she put a dessert and coffee down on the main table, and then headed with hers and Troy’s over to her computer. She sat down and immediately froze. She looked around, logged on to the computer, then called over to Axel. “Come here, hurry.”
He walked toward her. “What’s the matter?”
“Somebody logged onto my computer,” she said.
“When?”
“In the last hour while we were eating.”
“Everybody was in the dining room though, right?”
“Everybody we know of,” she said. “Except for the pilot and God-only-knows whoever else may be here.”
“I get that,” he said, “but we don’t know who could have done this, right?”
“No,” she said. “I’m trying to check right now.”
“Did they hack in? Or did someone use your log in?”
“Good question,” she said. “I’ve been dealing with this one hacker going through the system as it is. But, so far, it’s like he’s just a troublemaker and not really having any plan that I can make sense of.”
“So somebody just starting out maybe, not really understanding what he can do?”
“Maybe. I figured it was an employee getting access, wondering what the company was up to. Or upper management, tracking what we were doing here.”
“Sometimes hackers start that way.”
“Or it’s all a diversion,” she said. “It was my log-in access from my computer, somewhere about the time that I was finished with my plate and that you guys were still eating.”
He looked at his watch. “So about twenty minutes ago?”
She nodded slowly. “I’ll change all my passwords right now,” she said. “Yet, because he went in with my log in, he wouldn’t have had a lot of access.”
“Do you use the same log in for every area of the system?”
“I don’t,” she said. “Depending on where I’m going, I have different log ins.”
“So that would have curtailed where he could have gone then, correct?”
She nodded. Quickly tapping keys and studying her monitors, she said, “Three attempts were made to get into the electronics controlling the pump system. And the drills.”
“And then what?
“Log in failed, and he was locked out,” she said with a note of satisfaction. “Which is exactly why I have it set up that way.”
“But he knew exactly how to get to that area within the computer software?”
“Yes,” she said.
“If your computer test runs say that everything with the drill is fine and dandy, would they go ahead and use it again?”
She frowned. “I would think there would still need to be a manual inspection done. But, if they couldn’t find anything, or they’re not too bothered and think that the damage is minimal, I’d imagine they would do a trial run, yes. Why?”
“I just wonder if they’ll make it look better than it is so that, when they start back up again, another accident happens. Or altering the damage described and, therefore, this is just shutting down the rig and costing the company billions of dollars for nothing.”
“There are all kinds of fail-safes,” she said. “It’s not just a singular system, where one person can do an override, and everything moves forward or shuts down,” she said.
“A repair team should have been here,” Axel said.
“I understood the team was here,” she said, “but instead this skeleton crew is here, and they aren’t a maintenance crew who could do detailed assessments and make repairs.”
“No? So then they’ve still got to bring in more men, correct?”
“I think so but not while the storm is raging. All I’m seeing so far,” she said in frustration, “is that nobody knows anything for sure, and you can hear one thing from one person and something completely different from another.”
“Unfortunately, when chaos like this happens, that’s quite common.”
“For two days,” she said, “all we had were alarms going off, people being packed up in the middle of the night, and booted out of here. It was complete chaos. Lots of guys left gear behind, and some were pretty panicked and wanted to leave in the lifeboats.”
“But it wasn’t that bad, was it?”
“No, but once the rumor started—”
“Got it,” he said.
Just then the door opened and in walked Troy. “Good. Glad to see you guys are here.”
“What was your phone call about?” she asked.
“It wasn’t a phone call,” he said. “It was a text from our crew. They found the pilot.”
His tone of voice had her gasping. “Dead?”
He shook his head. “He’s alive but with a head injury.”
“We need to make sure he’s okay.”
“Our crew has him,” he said. “He’s awake, but he doesn’t want to join us. He’s pretty damn sure somebody came up behind him and hit him over the head.”
She stared at him in shock. “But why would somebody do that?”
Troy and Axel looked at each other with wry smiles. “So that nobody else could get off. Without a pilot, nobody’ll be flying out of here.”
“That makes no sense,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a heavy storm, so nobody’s getting off this rig anyway.”
“Good point,” Troy said cheerfully, “but this way nobody’s getting off at all.”
*
Troy had spoken to the pilot, who was pretty fervent about being hit over the head. He’d been inside his helicopter, checking to make sure everything was lashed down, given the storm coming. He was heading back into the main part of the rig under cover, when he thought he heard something. He turned, saw a shadow, and then got smacked on the side of the head and knocked out. He didn’t want to join anybody else. He was more than happy to stay with Mason’s secret crew and was happy they were here.
In his own words, he said, “Something really weird is going on in this place.”
As Troy stood in the bullpen, listening to Berkley explain about somebody using her log in to get into the system, he shook his head. “This is all just Mickey Mouse stuff, as if somebody is a complete amateur and doesn’t know
what he’s after.”
“And that’s a good thing,” she said in a joking manner. She got up and walked around, picking up a cup of coffee and a bowl and handed it to him. He looked at her in surprise.
“You left without dessert,” she said, “so I brought some for you.”
He smiled and said, “Great service.”
“Well, if you look after me,” she said lightly, “I’ll look after you.”
At that, he burst out laughing.
“That was a good move, letting everybody know that you knew us beforehand,” Axel said. “That’ll help take the pressure off, and it seems like it already has.”
“Ever since I found out about three women being assaulted,” she said, “I look at these guys and wonder if they were one of them. We don’t know who the rapists were or even how many of them were involved.”
“Did Winslow and Chucky show up for dinner? I didn’t notice them.”
She nodded. “Yes, but they sat at the end of a table by themselves and were pretty quiet.”
“Makes sense. They’d like to get off this rig damn fast too.”
“I think everybody would,” she said quietly. “Me included.”
“Have you had any contact with your company?”
“Everything I do, everything I investigate, is recorded. Once I’ve added my notations, it’s automatically transmitted to my company,” she said. Both men stopped and looked at her. “Yes, that’s how I knew that somebody had gotten into my computer while we were eating.”
“Because that information was transmitted back to you?”
“Because I get a record of everything that happens on my computer,” she said. “Every keystroke. It’s the only way I can keep track if somebody else is going through my programs.”
“Interesting,” Axel said. “I don’t pretend to understand, but, as long as you do, that’s all good for me.”
She smiled up at him. “What’s the matter? You don’t have the brains like Tesla does?”
“I’m not sure anybody has brains like hers,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s scary smart.”
At that, Berkley burst out laughing.
Troy grinned at her. “Obviously you are too,” he said. “Particularly if you’re friends with Tesla.”
“Tesla’s in a land all her own,” she said. “Any more on where that C-4 came from?”
“Not yet,” Troy said with a frown. “Military surplus can be bought all over the place, but C-4 usually isn’t on the list of things you can buy just anywhere.”
“Do you ever have anybody here from the military bases?” Axel asked her.
She shrugged. “I guess if they left the military, and this was their second career. For all we know, somebody here is purchasing from the base that you’re on.”
“We’ve had that happen a time or two,” he said. “We also have war games in this area a fair bit. So we can’t be sure that something didn’t come from there.”
“Is there a way to track that specific C-4 back to a navy base?”
“They’re on it. But nothing so far,” Axel said.
“There were war games not far from here and not very long ago,” she said. “I think they lasted about three weeks.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “I wasn’t here yet, but I think some of the military men came over to the rig on one of their days off to see how the rig operated.”
Both men froze and turned to look at her. “Wait. What?” Troy asked.
“No way,” Axel said.
She shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t here at the time, so I don’t know for certain. But you could probably talk to Gregor and see what he has to say.”
“Or Denny,” Troy said thoughtfully. “He’s the one who seems to keep track of numbers.”
“He does, pretty carefully actually. He has to justify all the food he goes through on the rig, so he keeps track of how many he’s feeding all the time.”
“Time for a little talk with Denny,” Troy said. He looked over at Axel and asked, “You okay to stay with her?”
“Well, I can, but I’m not sure Denny will talk to you,” Axel said. “Either you may need the company men for muscle or you might need her to sweet-talk him.”
“You don’t need either,” she said. “He has to enter everything into the computer.” She sat back down again and quickly opened her programs. “Just give me a second,” she said.
She went in under a visitor log in, one that she kept for jobs like this, so nobody would know where she was, then headed into the food services department. There she brought up the meal planners and numbers Denny had entered for the month. “Here’s how many people he fed on a regular basis.”
“When were the games here?” Troy asked.
She brought up his calendar and said, “Looks like a visiting crew came over on the twelfth of last month,” she said. “Ten men were here.”
“Do we have any images?”
“We certainly should,” she said, as she switched to a different monitor and brought up the security system. “Normally they get rid of the security images after thirty days,” she said, “but this is just inside that window. It’s all uploaded and archived.” She quickly brought it up, and, as soon as she caught sight of the day she wanted, she turned the monitor for them to see. “This is when they arrived.”
Both men stood to the side and studied the faces as they came through.
“So these aren’t SEALs, but definitely US Navy,” Axel said quietly. “Two of them were carrying bags, and several men came without gear at all. They all look like they were interested in having a great day trip.”
“I don’t recognize anybody. Do you?” Troy asked, turning to look at Axel.
Axel shook his head. “No, can’t say that I do. Interesting though. We’ve all done things like that. I’ve gone to war games, and, whenever it’s over, there’s a break, and we’re doing more training or sightseeing. In this case it was a great opportunity for them to come here, but how would anyone know ahead of time? Unless circumstances just played into their hands. Whoever used the C-4 might have used it because it was there, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have an original plan in case the meetup didn’t happen.”
“It’s hard to say,” Troy said. “Maybe it was preplanned, but then it would have to be, right? The whole trip itself would have been preplanned.”
“Would they have taken the C-4 off the destroyer?” she asked.
“It’s possible, yes,” he said, scratching his head. “The destroyers are fully loaded for weapons of all kinds because you never know when you’ll need something.”
She nodded quietly. “So, what are the chances that this was an off-the-cuff deal?”
“I don’t know. That leaves a little bit left to be unknown.”
Just then as they watched the screen, another helicopter flew in.
“And there’s our company man,” he said, “the same one who’s here today. Gregor.”
“Interesting,” she said. “He’s got a bag too.”
“Right, but that’s not unusual, is it? He could be here for a day or two occasionally, right?” Axel looked deep in thought.
She nodded. “Yes, I think so. A room’s kept ready all the time for anyone from the company.”
They kept flicking through the days. The navy crew was only here for the day, and everybody appeared to be having a good time, as far as Troy could see. They tracked them through the place, and they were always with the tour. It appeared they were given a full tour of the rig and then a meal. After looking around a bit more outside, they then got on the Zodiacs, heading back toward the destroyers. “So, that was a pretty interesting day, and both men have their bags still.”
“But one’s lighter,” Axel said, tapping the monitor.
“What?” Troy asked, as he looked to see the second one. “Good eye, Axel. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Berkley, can you give us a freeze-frame on that guy’s face?”
She immediat
ely took a screenshot of just the face and sent it to him by email. He sent it to Mason and then sent it to their two-man team secreted downstairs, with a short explanation. When his phone rang, he stepped off to the side. It was Dane from downstairs.
“I know him,” he said. “He’s been in trouble a lot.”
“His bag is noticeably lighter on the way out,” Troy said, “as if they came with something, and then he left something behind.”
“You’re thinking the C-4? Well, he’s certainly in a position to do it. He’s a weapons specialist.”
“Let’s cross-reference this guy with everybody who works here.”
“You won’t have to,” Dane announced. “His brother works here. Been here for years.”
“And who is his brother?”
“Jude,” he said. “Jude Lensly.”
Putting down his phone, he turned to look at Berkley, and asked, “Do you know a Jude Lensly?”
“I know of him,” she said. “Why?”
“He’s the brother of the guy with the lighter bag.”
“Well, that makes sense,” she said. “It could be anything then.”
“True enough,” he said, admitting that.
“It’s not indicative that he brought C-4 with him,” Berkley noted.
“No, but he does have a rep in the navy,” Troy told her. “He’s a troublemaker. And a weapons specialist, by the way.”
“Sounds like we need to get an update on him right now,” Axel said, stepping away, his own phone out now.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “But Jude’s not here,” she said. “I don’t know that he was even here when I arrived this trip.”
Troy pointed to the monitors. “Can you check to see when he arrived and when he left?”
She nodded. “Of course. Give me five minutes.”
Chapter 9
Berkley clicked away through her computer, heading for the administration side in the schedules. As soon as she brought up the last month, she typed in his name. “Well, look at that,” she said. “He was here when I arrived, and apparently he was here right through the explosion.”
“But he’s off now, correct?”
“None of this has been filled out since,” she said. “It was such a panic that everybody took off as soon as they could. I don’t think anybody’s done the checkouts.”