Chameleon

by William Diehl

  Now the winter gale, sweeping with fury across the open sea, assaulted the floating oil rig, one hundred and twenty-two miles from land, screaming through its rigging and snapping at its guy wires.

  Lansdale was not concerned about the rig. It was built to take anything the Arctic furies could toss at them. From the air the Thoreau looked like a giant bug, with its four enormous steel legs dipping down deep into the thrashing sea. The rig was a monster, twice the length of a football field, its deck sixty feet above the water and the superstructure rising almost five stories above that. Its spidery legs thrust down two hundred feet below the surface of the sea and were anchored to the bottom, two hundred feet farther down, by steel cables.

  Lansdale held the flat of his hand against the wall. Not a tremor. Not even the six-foot waves and the brutal winds could shake his baby.

  The Thoreau was indeed Lansdale's crowning achievement; the largest semisubmersible rig ever built, a floating city, its towering concrete blocks containing apartments for the 200-man crew; three different restaurants, each serving food prepared by a different chef; two theaters showing first-run movies; and a solar dish that beamed in ninety different television channels from around the world to 21-inch TV sets in every apartment.

  Everything possible was provided for the crew to make the endless days bearable, for the structure sat off the northwest coast of Alaska, one hundred and forty miles northeast of Point Hope, at the very edge of the polar cap, possibly the loneliest human outpost in the world. And it sat on top of one of the richest oil strikes ever tapped.

  Lansdale was not only chief engineer and manager of the project, he was its creator. For eighteen years he had dreamed of this custom-built Shangri-La at the edge of the world. It had taken him four years of planning, of fighting in board rooms and lobbying in bars and restaurants, to convince the consortium of four oil companies to take the chance.

  What had finally swayed them was the man himself. Harry Lansdale knew oil; knew where to find it and how to get it. He was as tough as the Arctic and as unshakable as the rig he had built, a man who had devoted his life to pursuing the thick black riches bottled up beneath the earth. He had worked on rigs all over the world and, to prove it, had a list of them tattooed proudly down his right arm, like the hash marks on the sleeve of an old-line Army top kick—from Sweet Dip, the old Louisiana offshore rig, to Calamity Run in the North Sea, to the endless, sweeping desert fields of Saudi Arabia they had nicknamed the Sandstorm Hilton.

  Oh, it had taken its toll, all right. At forty, his leathery face was craggy with hard-work lines, his hands sandpapered with calluses, his shaggy hair more salt than pepper. But to Lansdale, it was worth every line, every callus, every streak of gray. He smiled, raised the coffee cup and, tapping the porthole lightly, growled in a voice tuned by cigarettes and whiskey and not enough sleep: "Happy New Year, storm."

  Even at fifteen fathoms the sea was rough, its swells rolling beneath the six-foot waves on the surface. A thin sliver of light pierced the dark sea, followed by what at first might have appeared to be four banded seals struggling in formation through the grim waters. They were four men in winter wet suits, lashed together like mountain climbers by a nylon band, and pulled through the dangerous sea by an underwater scooter. A box the size of a child's coffin was attached by nylon lines to the scooter.

  The man leading the small pack held his wrist close to his face mask. He had only one good eye. The other was a grotesque empty socket. He checked his compass and depth watch, constantly adjusting their direction. The narrow beam from his flashlight swept back and forth as he directed the beam into the dark sea. Then one of the men spotted it and his eyes widened behind the glass window of his face mask: a giant steel column sixteen feet thick and still as a mountain, defying the turbulent ocean, as flotsam swirled around it and then rushed on.

  The leader steered the scooter uptide from the column, keeping a safe distance from it, for one heavy swell could throw them against it and destroy both the men and their underwater machine. They hovered twenty feet away as the leader prepared a speargun and fired the spear so that it slashed through the water past the steel leg before losing its momentum. The tide swept the cable around the column. Then the driver guided the scooter in three or four counter-turns around the shaft, forming a taut line between them and the leg before steering the scooter into the tide, keeping the line taut.

  The three others detached the coffinlike box and inched down the line toward the column.

  Lansdale, making his swing through the installation as he did every night before going to bed, stepped inside the control room and stood watching the skeleton crew at work. It looked to him like the set of some sci-fi movie, its rows of computer readouts flashing on and off as the ingenious station pumped oil from several undersea wells within a thirty-mile range into storage tanks built into the perimeter of the rig, and from there, through a twelve-inch line that ran along the bottom of the Chukchi Sea to a receiving station near the village of Wainwright, a hundred and twenty-two miles to the east, where the Alaskan badlands petered out by the sea.

  It was a revolutionary idea. And it was working. For three months now, the station had been cooking like a greased skillet. Lots of little headaches, of course, those were to be expected. But nothing major. Now the Thoreau was operating with a skeleton crew of 102 men and 4 women, a hundred people fewer than normal, all of them volunteers who had passed up their Christmas furlough to work the station during the holidays.

  Slick Williams, the electronics genius who ran the computer room, was sitting at the main console, his feet on the desk, sipping coffee and watching the lights flashing. He looked up as Lansdale came in. "Hi, Chief," he said. "Slumming?"

  Lansdale laughed. "In this sixty-million-dollar toy?" Around him was possibly the most sophisticated computerized operation ever built. "Keep an eye on the stabilizers, it's getting rough out there."

  "Check," Williams said. "Tell Sparks to let me know if it gets too bad."

  "Shit," Lansdale said, "I sat out a hurricane on the first offshore rig ever built. A goddamn wooden platform fifteen years old. You could fit the son of a bitch in this room. Only lost one man. Silly bastard got hit in the head with a lunchbox flying about ninety miles an hour. Broke his neck. Otherwise, all we got was wet."

  Williams nodded. He had heard the stories before.

  "I'll either be in the bar having a nightcap or in my apartment," the Chief said and left, walking down the hall to the weather room. Radar maps covered one wall, their azimuth bars sweeping in circles, covering a four-hundred-mile radius. The weatherman was just a kid, twenty-six, skinny, acned, long-haired, with glasses as thick as the bottom of a Johnnie Walker bottle. But he was good. Everybody aboard was good or they wouldn't be there.

  Below them, the heavy seas thundered mutely against the pillars.

  "We got a bitch comin' up, Chief," said the youthful weatherman, who, for reasons of his own, had nicknamed himself Sparks, after the old-time radio operators.

  "What's it look like?"

  "Hundred-mile winds, sleet, snow and big, I mean big, seas. And it's already running four degrees below freezing. Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight, they got about five minutes in that water."

  "Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight'll be in Nome before we get a line to 'em," Lansdale said.

  "These storms gimme the creeps."

  "We been through worse, kid. Why don't you knock off and catch a movie. They got that Clint Eastwood picture showing, the one with the ape." The theaters operated twenty-four hours a day.

  "I'm staying here. There's no windows and you can't hear much. I'll sleep on that cot if I fade out. Besides, I got Cagney keeping me company." He pointed to one of more than a dozen monitor screens near the radar maps. The sound was turned down, but there was Jimmy Cagney, running through an oil refinery, shooting up everybody in sight.

  "There was a man," Lansdale said. "He makes those macho assholes today look like a bunch of Ziegf
eld broads."

  Now Cagney was on top of one of the huge refinery globes and the FBI was trying to pick him off.

  "Watch this," the kid said. "This has got to be the biggest ending ever."

  Cagney was surrounded by flames, riddled with bullets and still fighting back. "Made it, Ma!" he yelled. "Top of the world!" And blooie!—there goes Jimmy and the refinery and half of Southern California.

  "Neat," said the Chief.

  "Neat," echoed the kid.

  "What are you pickin' up?"

  "WTBS in Atlanta, Georgia. They show movies all the time. There's a Japanese station that's pretty good, too, but all the flicks are dubbed. It's weird seeing Steve McQueen talking chinguchka."

  "Okay, kid. Ride it out in here. I like devotion to duty."

  "Shit," Sparks said, "if anybody had told me I'd end up here when I was taking meteorology at the University of Florida, I'd have switched to animal husbandry."

  "You can't make two hundred bucks a day getting cows to fuck, Sparks."

  "No, but it's a helluva lot more fun."

  The Chief laughed. "Well, if you get nervous, gimme a call. I'll come hold your hand."

  The lights on the computer readout began to flash.

  "Here comes the report in from Barrow now," Sparks said. He punched out the word "TYPE" on his keyboard and the report immediately flashed on one of the monitor screens.

  "Jesus, Chief, they're reading winds up to a hundred and eighty knots. And waves! They're running twenty to thirty feet along the coast. Temperature"—he whistled through his teeth—"forty-one below. Freezing rain. No shit, freezing rain. What do they expect, a fucking spring drizzle? This goddamn rig is gonna look like Niagara Falls by morning."

  "Your language is getting terrible, Sparks," Lansdale said. "I may have to write your mother."

  "You do and I'll tell her who taught me."

  Lansdale laughed. "Lemme know if anything serious pops up," he said and left the weather room. Walking down the tunnel toward the bar, he could hear the heavy seas thundering at the steel legs below him and the wind shrieking in the rigging. He liked the sound and feel of the storm. The Thoreau was as sturdy as a pack mule and as indomitable as Annapurna.

  He took the elevator to the second floor and went to the bar. Willie Nelson was lamenting on the jukebox, and there was a poker game in one corner under the head of a giant caribou one of the riggers had bagged on a weekend hunting trip to the Yukon. Lansdale loved it. It was the Old West, the last frontier, it was John Wayne and Randy Scott and Henry Fonda and the O.K. Corral all rolled up into one. He looked down the bar and saw Marge Cochran, one of the four women on the rig, a red-haired lady in her early forties who was a hardhat carpenter. Hard work had taken its toll on her, as it had on the Chief, but there was still the echo of a young beauty in her angular face and turquoise eyes. The work had kept her body lean and young. But despite the seams of her tanned face, she was a handsome woman, earthy and boldly honest.

  The Chief kept watching her for a long time but she paid him no mind. Finally, as he bore in with his stare from the end of the bar, she turned briefly and a wicked little smile flew briefly across her lips.

  Tough lady, he thought. Yeah, tough. Like a steel-covered marshmallow.

  He ordered a Carta Blanca beer and gulped it down as a handful of technicians strolled in from the evening shift.

  "How about a game, Chief?" one of them asked.

  "Rain check," Lansdale said. "I need some shut-eye." And he left and went to his apartment on the third floor.

  II

  One hundred and fifty feet below Lansdale's feet, the four men continued their perilous task. As the driver kept the scooter aimed uptide, one of the scuba divers snapped the cable of the box to a clasp on his belt and shortened the line to twelve inches or so. He was obviously the most powerful swimmer, his biceps straining the thermal suit as he moved down behind the leader.

  The swell was sudden and monstrous, striking without warning out of the murky and violent sea, the tail of a twelve-foot wave on the surface ninety feet above them. It seized the scooter, flipping it up so that, for an instant, it seemed to stand on end, pointing toward the surface, before the driver got it under control. The line slackened for one deadly moment and then snapped tight again. As it did, it jerked out of the hands of the man with the box. The angry sea snatched him away from the line, sweeping him, end over end, and tossing him, like a piece of seaweed, toward the column. He thrashed his powerful arms against the treacherous, silent tide, but he was like a child caught in a deadly undertow, and the giant column was like a magnet. He spun end over end through the water and smacked against the column upside down, his head cracking like a whip against the enormous post. His body shuddered violently, a death spasm, and a burst of red bubbles tumbled from his regulator and wriggled toward the surface.

  The leader glared through his good eye and hauled in the limp form by the life line and peered through the face mask. The injured man's eyes were half open and only the whites showed. Blood, gushing from his nose, was filling the mask. He shook his head toward the other members of the team and, unhooking the box, let the lifeless form go. The dying man was swept to the end of his life line by the harsh tide.

  The leader swung his flippers toward the column and let the sea throw him up against it. The other diver joined him. Together they worked their way down the column until they found a welded joint. Struggling against the vicious sea, they lashed the box to the steel leg while the driver of the scooter tried to keep the machine aimed into the tide. When the box was secured, the leader pulled a handle on the side of it and the top popped off. He aimed his light into the opening in the box. It was a timing device. He set it for four hours and then he and the other diver worked their way back up the column to the steel line. The third diver hung grotesquely below them, his body battering the column. Bubbles no longer came from his regulator.

  When they reached the scooter, the leader cut the line holding it to the column with a pair of aluminum wire cutters, and it lunged forward and the three huddled together, their companion, tossed by the undersea waves, dangling behind them at the end of the life line, as the leader checked his compass and pointed the flashlight into the darkness, guiding the scooter away from the deadly column.

  They disappeared into the black sea, pulling their macabre bundle behind them.

  III

  A bank of monitor screens along one wall gave Lansdale a closed-circuit view of the control rooms and the exterior of the Thoreau. Sleet was sweeping through the rigging and almost straight out across the deck.

  The wind's up to a hundred and ten, maybe twenty, knots already, he thought. Gale force and picking up.

  There was a tap on the door.

  "It's open," Lansdale said.

  Marge came in and closed the door and smiled at him for a couple of seconds and then snapped the lock on the door without taking her eyes off him.

  "You're downright shameless," he said.

  "There's no such thing on this barge," she said.

  "Barge! Jesus, that's sacrilegious!" He laughed. "You're just going with me because I'm captain of the football team."

  "Naw. I wanted to see if hardhats really make love with their socks on."

  "Depends how cold it is."

  "It's about twenty below out there and falling."

  "Then maybe I'll keep them on."

  "The hell you will."

  She walked across the living room, stopping for a moment at his bookcase. Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Franck's Zen and Zen Classics, French and Spanish dictionaries, copies of Red Harvest and Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett. Through the porthole she looked out over the gray, bleak, endless sea, the waves lashed by sleet and wind.

  "It's scary," she said. And then she turned her back on the window. "God, I'll be glad to get back to civilization where it's light in the daytime and dark at night."

  He made her a rum and Coke and carried it across the room to her. "Why the he
ll did you stay out here for the holidays anyway?" he said. "It sure as hell wasn't the bonus."

  "It helps. Sixty-two fifty a day on top of a hundred and twenty-five. That's almost a thousand dollars for two weeks. Anyway, one of my sons is someplace in Vermont with the college skiing team, and the other one is at his girl friend's house in Ohio. What's to go home to?"

  "That's it?"

  "Well ... you're here, too."

  "I thought you forgot."

  "Not likely."

  "Are you divorced?" he asked. They had never talked about personal things before.

  "Widowed. Married at twenty-two, widowed at thirty-seven."

  "What happened?"

  "He worked himself to death. Forty-two years old. One day he went off to the office and the next time I saw him he was lying in a funeral home with some creep dry-washing his hands over him, trying to sell me a five-thousand-dollar casket."

  "A little bitter there."

  "A little bitter? Maybe. Just a little. It sure turned my life around."

  "Did you love him?"

  "Oh, I ... sure. Sure I loved him. He was a nice man."

  "Christ, what an epitaph. Here lies Joe, he was a nice man."

  "His name was Alec."

  "It's still a lousy epitaph."

  "Well, he wasn't a very exciting man. He was ... comfortable. Alec was wonderfully comfortable."

  "So how come you end up a carpenter? On this barge, as you put it."

  "I was into restoring antiques. It got out of hand. Next thing I know I was a full-fledged hardhat. How about you? A master's degree in engineering and an armful of tattoos. That doesn't fit, either."

  "You can thank an old bastard name of Rufus Haygood for that."

  "Rufus Haygood?"

  "Yeah. I was finishing my thesis at the University of Louisiana and these hotshot interviewers from ITT and Esso and AT&T and Bell Labs were giving me all this steam about how good it was gonna be workin' for them, and one day old Rufus comes up to me and says he's ramrodding a wooden jack-up rig out in the Gulf and he says, 'I'll give you ten silver eagles an hour, which is more than you can make dancin' with those goddamn lard-ass bastards, and I'll teach you everything there is to know about the oil game and you can teach me about books'—and I find out, you know, he never went to school. So for the next seven years I dragged around with him from one rig to another and he'd give me shale and blowholes and rigging for an hour or two, and I'd give him Shelley and Coleridge and Hammett for an hour or two back. But I learned about oil, yessiree."