North Star

by Hammond Innes

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me on board and my life’s at risk. Get dressed now and come to the messroom. I’ll do the talking, but you’ll be there, and you’ll go with them up to the derrick floor. You understand?’

  He nodded, accepting it slowly. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ And he began to dress. It was incredible, under orders the blankness had left his eyes.

  I told Hans to get every single man on board into the messroom. As an outsider, with Villiers standing there, I thought I could do it. And I did. It was, in fact, easier than I had expected. They weren’t seamen, but most of them had lived with the sea long enough to understand its power, and they weren’t fools. They could hear the wind, feel the seas thundering against the base of the structure. They were ready for action.

  It took almost an hour to get them all up to the derrick floor, with their lifejackets on and the rig submerged to depth. Hans stayed with the ballast control engineer, insisting that it was his duty. It meant two lives at risk instead of one, but they both made it, though they were caught by a wave on the catwalk above the pipe deck and Hans was swept against a crane and badly bruised.

  In that hour, before the rig was down to maximum depth, the galley staff had managed to get food and drink up to the derrick floor, Lennie had collected his first aid kit, and blankets, clothes, bedding, the welders had got their equipment up. Every department had thought for themselves and brought whatever they considered necessary. The divers had even dragged their inflatable up. And in that wind it was remarkable that they achieved so much without loss of life, for the work went on after the ballast tanks had started to flood.

  In the end, of course, the quarters were left deserted and Sparks closed the radio room. After that we had no means of communicating with the outside world. But somebody had brought a portable up and we huddled round it, listening to the one o’clock news describing the build-up of tugs and ships and aircraft, all waiting to get out to us as soon as the storm had passed. The wind was westerly now. I don’t know what the force was. High up on that platform, I felt it was beyond anything I had ever experienced. The forecast had not been specific – hurricane force winds with speeds over 100 knots. The depression had now deepened to a shattering 938 millibars; worse still, its rate of movement had slowed and it was not expected to clear the north of Shetland before midnight.

  The derrick floor, normally a demoniac centre of activity with drawworks roaring, winches screaming, the clatter of tongs and the turntable turning, was now still and packed with men. But not silent. There was more noise on that platform than ever there had been when North Star was drilling, the wind roaring through it, howling at the doors, banging and slamming at the corrugated iron shelter sheets, tearing them loose, whirling them away. And below us, the pipe deck, even the helicopter deck, a welter of foam as the combers roared and broke aboard.

  The toolpusher’s office was the first to go, the sea breaking it into matchwood, the wind picking it up and hurling bits of it past our refuge. Pipe, and great lengths of casing, were swirled back and forth till the guardrails were torn out of the steel deckplates and they went over the side. The catwalk was buckled and curled up like the slide in a giant child’s playground. And all the time we worked to keep large pieces of equipment from breaking loose, to shore up and fasten the flapping shield of iron sheet that was all the protection we had. Everything chaos, and the thuds of the waves thundering beneath the rig, crashing against it, could be felt through our bodies, the movement sickening. The half-submerged rig had a dead feeling. It was like a rock awash.

  One of the roustabouts, a man called Wally, was the first to sight land. That was shortly after two o’clock and he only caught a fleeting glimpse of it. I didn’t doubt him, because it was downwind of us, just where it should be, and he said it was low-lying. The wind was still westerly by the handbearing compass I had brought with me, and on my calculations, we would go ashore on the West Burra coast, possibly just south of it. I thought perhaps it was Havras Island he had seen, and I wished Johan was with us. He would have known, because the Havras marked the entrance to Clift Sound and the Duchess’s home voe of Taing. But, in fact, it must have been St Ninian’s Isle.

  That brief sighting, the knowledge that we were so near to disaster, finally decided me on a desperate course of action – something I had wanted to do, but had not dared for fear it would kill us all. I looked at Hans, leaning over my shoulder staring at the chart and helping me to hold it flat on the oil-scummed floor. ‘The tide turns in just over an hour,’ I said, and he nodded, knowing what was in my mind. I knew what he was thinking, too – if only we had that spare anchor, if only we could use it now, now that we were in shallower water. It could have held us till the tide turned.

  But then, of course, we could never have got it over the side. There was no electric power, and anyway, the crane nearest to No. 4 winch had already been forced off its mountings, the jib leaning at a drunken angle and banging to and fro. I got up and lurched across to Villiers, who was working with a gang of men to shore up the sides of the driller’s office. I told him what I wanted, and he nodded, cheerful and seeming almost to be enjoying himself. ‘Okay. Go ahead.’ And he turned and continued with his work, seemingly indifferent to the risk and the ultimate cost if we survived.

  It seemed an age that the two welders were hanging in their chairs, held by ropes as they worked with their torches to cut through the windward legs of the derrick. They cut them one at a time, and as they worked on the second, the rig was slowly turning. There was a moment when I was sure I had made a terrible error of judgment and that the whole hundred-odd feet of steel would collapse on top of us. Standing there, watching them, I could see in my mind the ghastly result as the weight of the crown wheel crashed down on to the packed group of men around me.

  But the rig kept turning, and suddenly there was a rending sound. Somebody screamed a warning. A rope flew and one of the welders swung across our heads, his torch still burning, to be brought up short by the oxygen hose, and looking up, I watched incredulously as the whole Eiffel Tower structure trembled and began to move, the crown wheel and the traveller swinging dizzily across the scudding clouds. The scream of steel on steel, the whip-crack of metal breaking. And then it was gone, just like that. I don’t think any of us really saw it go. One minute it was there, the next there was nothing over our heads.

  The tide must have turned about the time the derrick went over the side. And I think the absence of it may have made all the difference, for in that force of wind, the air almost solid with the power of it, the derrick must have been acting as a great sail. At any rate, just over an hour later, we began to hear a deep thunderous noise like an artillery barrage. This gradually got louder until it was an appalling, shattering sound. Visibility was poor, rain and spray screaming past us, so that we seemed almost into the backwash surf of the wave breaks before we saw the land. The roar of sound was so great then that we were just standing there aghast, holding on to whatever we were clinging to, frozen into stillness. And then, downwind of us, through the torn and battered iron sheets, there was a darkening of the waterlogged air, a great mass looming up out of the maelstrom of broken water.

  Ever since the barrage of sound had started, Hans and I had guessed what it was – the Atlantic hurricane waves pounding at the near-1,000 foot cliffs of Fitful Head. We both of us knew what that could mean, but now that we could all of us see the towering mass itself, I do not think there was a man among us who did not believe his last hour had come. But though it seemed so near, we were still out beyond the 10 fathom line, and the cliffs were moving, sliding past, the rig being carried south-east by the tide at almost 3 knots. Soon we could see the headland of Siggar Ness, and when the tide swept us past it, there was open sea, wind and tide with us, both carrying us south-east towards Horse Island and the Sumburgh Roost.

  It was almost dark then, and as night fell, nothing to see in the pitch black fury, all our senses were in our ears and in the feel of the rig under our feet. I don
’t know when we hit the Roost. The rig was like a half-submerged wreck and there was such a pandemonium of breaking waves and crashing gear that it was impossible to tell whether the chaos was the effect of the race or shallows. But I didn’t care. We were in the clear, and so long as the pontoons did not strike a reef, I was sure a structure as massive as a rig would survive it. And then, suddenly, Sumburgh light came clear of the land, its revolving beam haloed in the wind-driven spray.

  The light bore roughly 20°, and within a very short time it was due north of us. I knew then that we were in the grip of the great tidal race that streams round the southern tip of Shetland. I remembered reading all about it in the Pilot, and on the Mary Jane I had found an old Admiralty tide book: Ships in it frequently become unmanageable, and sometimes founder. Those words had undoubtedly been written with the fishing boats in mind, but the statement: It should be given a wide berth was as applicable now as then.

  When we entered the race the tidal flow was with the wind, so that we were moving eastward at a considerable speed. But the Pilot, which I had brought with me from the barge engineer’s office, warned that in the Roost the tide only ran eastward for about three hours. There was then a ‘still’ of about half an hour, after which the tidal flow was westward for 9 hours. Thus, we had only a short period of the eastward thrust left. The ‘still’ came and there was less sea, the light on Sumburgh head blurred and almost stationary, bearing roughly 350°.

  That night I was convinced the rig would break up. Shortly after midnight there was a terrible rending of metal, the whole structure shaking to a series of power-hammer thuds. The mud tanks had broken adrift. They went on rumbling and crashing hour after hour as we lay huddled together for warmth, our bodies soaked and shivering with cold. It was a terrible night, and the pounding went on and on.

  They finally smashed a way through and went over the side shortly after four. It suddenly seemed almost quiet. The seas were lessening, too, and Sumburgh Light bore north-east. We were out of the Roost.

  An hour later we were back in it again. The tide had turned and was carrying us eastward. No rain now, and with visibility much improved, we could check our progress by the bearing of the light. In the space of just over one hour it moved from north-east through north to almost north-west. That was when we were finally spewed out of the Roost by the eastward flow and came under the lee of the land. The wind died away, and the sea with it.

  Dawn found us roughly 4 miles east of Sumburgh Head, a battered wreck being carried slowly northward on the tide. An RAF Nimrod came over, flying low, and an hour later the first tug was coming up over the horizon. We raised a cheer as it steamed close alongside. But though we cheered the tug’s arrival, we were too cold, too dazed to do anything about it. The iron staircase to the derrick floor was gone, the pipe skid our only way down. Nobody had the energy to be lowered on a rope, to struggle through the tangled wreckage and get a towline fixed. We had been inactive so long that we clung to inactivity, immobilized by the long, dreadful night, by the memory of our fear, of death so narrowly averted.

  It wasn’t for another two hours, when there were three tugs and a navy ship milling around us, that men boarded us and one by one we were got down from our refuge, lowered into boats and taken on board the destroyer. Villiers was with me in the naval pinnace and I remembered my surprise at the extraordinary resilience of the man, the sudden return of confidence. His square-jawed face was dark with stubble, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot from the shattering force of the wind, and his right hand, lacerated by a piece of flying metal, was still wrapped in the bandage Lennie had fixed. And yet he could talk about the future, about the huge possibilities of the oilfield North Star had found.

  Maybe it was nervous reaction, words pouring out of him as he thought aloud, but I couldn’t help admiring him. If he had had phones beside him, he would have been rapping out orders, raising finance. ‘The rig doesn’t matter. If we lost half a dozen rigs, the cost of them would still be nothing. I’d still have merchant bankers falling over themselves to lend me money.’

  ‘If you lose rigs,’ I said, ‘you lose lives.’

  But he brushed that aside. ‘We didn’t lose any. Not during the storm, not one. And the rig is covered by Lloyds. How long do you reckon it will take to get it repaired?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I answered tersely. I didn’t care about the rig. I was worrying about the Duchess, anxious to check that she hadn’t dragged her anchors and been forced to put to sea in that maelstrom of a night.

  He pushed his hand up over his face, rubbing at the caked salt. ‘I have to think of the future,’ he said. ‘What this oil strike means to the company. A lot of reorganization, new management.’ He looked at me then. ‘Room for somebody like you.’ And he added, ‘I owe you a lot, Randall. And you’ve got brains, education, financial training, even shipyard experience. The knack of handling men, too.’ The boat was slowing now, manoeuvring to come alongside the destroyer, and he leaned forward. ‘Would you like to come down to London for a few weeks, get the feel of things?’

  ‘Whatever for?’ I asked dully, thinking of Gertrude.

  ‘I don’t know yet. The rig for a start. Somebody will have to be cracking the whip. Then there’s the Shetland office. That will have to expand fast. It will be first priority, and I’ll need somebody with a Shetland background.’ He was thinking aloud. And then he said, ‘Anyway, you come down to London with me. I’ll be needing men like you.’

  I looked at him then, realizing he was serious. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. But I knew I wouldn’t. Not if I had Gertrude. I might be able to handle it, but I couldn’t see Gertrude fitting into the sort of life he was offering me. And Gertrude was all I wanted. That’s what the night had taught me. She was the rock I was now clinging to. Without Gertrude I would be adrift again. But together, creating something of our own – a service, up here in this wild, beautiful world we both understood. I was thinking of The Taing, that house, the ship lying off and the voe as I had once seen it, in moonlight from the bedroom window. That was what I wanted, my life worthwhile and with purpose. Not something handed to me readymade and only to be managed, something not my own.

  I clambered up the destroyer’s side and asked the lieutenant who greeted us if I could use the ship’s R/T.

  ‘You’re Captain Randall of the Duchess, are you? Your ship will be up with us in about an hour. And I have a message for you. Will you check with Mr Villiers that she is to resume stand-by duty under the terms of the charter.’

  I looked at Villiers, and suddenly we were both laughing.

  Author’s Note

  NORTH STAR is a natural progression from earlier travels in search of background. I was in Canada in 1950 when the discovery well at Leduc was flaring and the first rigs were moving into the Redwater field. The result was Campbell’s Kingdom. Six years later I was ashore in the Oman with the first oil expedition on the Arabian coast of the Indian Ocean and wrote The Doomed Oasis. It was inevitable, therefore, that I should become fascinated by the search for oil off the coasts of my native land.

  I started writing NORTH STAR in the autumn of 1972 with the intention of finishing it late in 1974, but world events caught up with me – the Arab-Israeli war, the oil embargoes, the shortages, the price rises. And in Britain a miners’ strike and the 3-day working week, the unions bringing government down, a general election. Suddenly North Sea oil was on everybody’s lips, the one bright spot in the prevailing gloom. In these circumstances, I felt it essential to bring the book forward, and if any errors have crept in, then this is the reason.

  However, I have had a great deal of technical help. Primarily I am indebted to Shell, and to Sir David Barran, who made me free of their Staflo rig on a long tow down from the Brent to the Auk. Later Tammo Appelman, their seabed expert, cleared up many questions of technical detail. Tricentrol’s chief exploration manager, A. F. Fox, was most helpful in pinpointing the location for North Star’s drilling west of Shetland, and I
am also indebted to him for a final check on drilling technicalities. And in the north-west of Scotland Sir Reginald Rootes introduced me to the little Port of the North opposite his house.

  North Star was the name of my rig, and also my title, right from the first page of writing, and here I ran into difficulty. At a late stage I discovered that there was, in fact, a real rig called North Star. It was of the jack-up type drilling in the Persian Gulf and owned by The Offshore Company of Houston, Texas. However, their President, W. H. Moore, raised no objection when I wrote to him of my problem, and I would like to express my appreciation of his understanding and emphasize that there is no connection between the semi-submersible North Star rig of my story and his jack-up.

  Finally, I would like to thank Charles Forret for his help over details of speech in Shetland, Mike Burton of Newington Trawlers and the Lowestoft Fishing Vessel Owners Association and Captain Meen for clarification of equipment and lay-out of the Duchess, Jim Mitchell of the Hull Daily Mail for court background, and many others who have been of assistance to me during the very concentrated period of writing this book, including all those on Staflo who gave me of their time and knowledge.

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  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448156900

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2013

  Copyright © The Estate of Hammond Innes 1974

  First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1974