"In short," said Sparke, "there is a massive storm approaching, a volcano has erupted just over the horizon and the best ships afloat for major rescue missions in the region are all playing chicken with each other in the disputed waters. That about right?"
It was still the right thing for Taiwan to do when they pushed the panic button and brought you in," said Markus.
"I know, when there is a situation that there is no plan for, in the end you need to rely on people."
"Peter," said Markus, "about the way you left the company. Everyone felt terrible about it. We have had some people leave the team already. Lynn from HR quit the week after you went."
"Lynn left? She built that team."
"No, Peter, you built that team, and people are staying partly because they want to live up to the standards you set."
Sparke stopped and stared at Markus. "Those people are in their jobs because they are the best in world at what they do. It was nothing to do with me."
"If I thought you believed that I would be angry. You know that the team would have done anything for you."
He was used to thinking quickly, to processing mountains of information in an instant, but this was a new type of data for Sparke.
They were standing in a room that, until yesterday, had been an empty office, but now resembled some sort of high tech military campsite. Computer screens, micro servers and communications equipment lay scattered around in what looked like chaos, but Sparke knew was a carefully prepared pattern. He remembered long days of planning and practice with Markus and the team, preparing exactly how this space would look during a remote site incident.
"Markus," said Peter, but he was interrupted by Markus, holding up his hand.
"Yes," Markus said into his headset, "Mr. Sparke is now on site. He is with me now...of course," he flicked a switch on his screen and held up a phone towards Sparke.
"The client. He wants to speak to you."
Sparke had to almost physically stop himself from taking the phone.
"Tell him I am here, I am fully updated on the situation, but that you are the incident manager, I am here as an advisor. Give him your update and your assessment, then I can speak to him if he feels he still needs to."
Markus looked at Sparke, then spoke to the client firm for several moments. Spark watched the conversation and slowly realized that he was seeing the passing of something. Even though he had lost his job months ago, it was only now, watching someone else do it, that he actually felt a rush of emotion. Gradually, he realized that what he was feeling was grief, not the guilt or anger that had been with him since he had read the letter of his dismissal, signed by Dieter from Compliance on behalf of the firm, but genuine sadness at the loss of something, and a group of people that he had brought together.
Markus looked over to Sparke.
"Our client is comfortable with my update and assessment," he said, the stress clearly showing on his face. "He has asked me to pass you a request." Sparke nodded. "He feels, and I agree with him, that this has been an almost unique set of risks," said Markus, "he asks that you conduct an immediate tour of the offshore facilities to assess how well his people responded and to compile a report of lessons to be learned."
"You did an outstanding job there, Markus," said Sparke, "there is no more demanding customer in the industry and now you are someone he is happy to deal with. This is weird, but it might actually be the high point in my career." Sparke smiled and Markus laughed out loud.
"I think there were other high points too," Markus said.
"Maybe so," said Sparke, "anyway, to work. What do you need me to do?"
"They have an exploration rig, a deep-sea driller, at the furthest point from land. They have an open well and have held of breaking the link for as long as possible. The client has asked that we assess their preparedness and processes."
Sparke peered at one of the screens, "This one here?" he said.
"Husker One is the name they have given it," said Markus, "in quadrant six. It is well out of the path of the Epsilon storm and will not be impacted by the volcanic ash for over twenty four hours. Still open to chopper traffic."
"Great, another long helicopter ride to the middle of nowhere. Still, this looks like being my last ever incident, so at least it will be one to remember."
Two hours later, Sparke found himself in the familiar, and deeply uncomfortable position of being strapped into a hard helicopter seat, dressed in an immersion suit, listening to a safety officer running through processes that he had heard countless times before. He thought back to his first ever helicopter ditching training in Aberdeen, Scotland, and the first times he had experienced he noisy thumping ride of a long range helicopter out to a rig.
The flight was bumpy, but not terrifying. Outside, the sky was dark blue in the last hour before dawn and the sea was black, lit only by the occasional point of light from the last support vessels and fishing boats running for the safety of the coast. The pilot, American and an Australian both knew what they were doing and skirted around the worst of the weather, until, almost three hours later a voice boomed through Sparke's earphones. "Landing at point Husker One in four minutes, four minutes to landing, Husker One. Check belts and exits."
The heavy chopper touched down onto the rig and, despite the growing wind it was a textbook landing.
As every helicopter passenger does, Sparke bent to avoid the spinning blades, even though they were far above his head, and he ran to the passenger access doorway with the clumsy gait which his survival suit and heavy bag forced him into.
He straightened up inside the over-lit interior of the rig, dropping his kitbag and running his hands through his hair. There were two things that Sparke was sure of; this was the last time he would ever have to do this, and this last trip would be a milk run.
Mistakes and Aims
Salvatore had made many mistakes. The work of the ironsmith and the wheelwright were true to his specifications and the timber cuts from the workmen at the yard were close, but everywhere that the three sets of components met failed to match.
It took two days of sanding, trimming and boring until the machine was ready for assembly. Salvatore had the four workmen bolt and hammer the pieces carefully, frequently stopping to make small corrections so that the pieces could move freely. Barrels of linseed oil and ox fat were brought out of the shed and the moving joints were lubricated.
Building the skeleton of the machine was an easy task for the boatyard workers since it was a simple frame, pinned and mortised together. Salvatore allowed himself to be corrected several times by the boat builders as he struggled to make his collection of wood and iron into a whole thing.
The upper section was heaved into place with the aid of ropes and slotted smoothly into the body below so that it now looked like a bare roof frame.
With this in place, the wheels were fitted. This caused some wonder from the workmen as the front two wheels were not attached directly onto the body, but onto a wheeled axle that allowed them to pivot to either side. This done, Salvatore ordered the machine to be pulled back and forth several times. The bogey had another innovation. Around its axel was a fat round wheel, its rim punctured with deep holes at equal distances around its edge. Salvatore took one of the pieces of iron, a long, pole, as thick as a man’s wrist and as tall as he was and slotted it into one of the holes, leaving the other end angled up above head height.
Salvatore spat on his hands and leapt up to grab the high end of the bar. He bounced once on the bar, and then lifted his feet off the ground. His weight on the bar caused it dip and slowly the fat wheel moved. As the sprocket wheel moved, so did the front axle and as it moved, so did the front wheels. With a squeal, the apparatus inched forward. As the bar dipped down towards the ground, he removed it the wheel and placed it in the next slot. This time the machine moved more easily. The third time there was barely a sound.
The watching workmen burst into animated discussion and Salvatore allowed them to take tu
rns repeating his performance as he inspected the movement of the machine.
He had the rear wheels removed and re-greased. The oldest workman, who had seen many Genoan ships which used windlasses, suggested that the axle ends should be smoothed with red hot irons. The wheels moved more freely, but the men were still no wiser as to the machine’s purpose.
"Is it for pulling boats out of the water?" said one of the workmen.
"Fetch the top bars,'" said Salvatore.
It took the rest of the day before the heavy top bar, the largest of all the timbers was in place. It sat across the iron rod which connected the uprights, but was not balanced equally in its center. One quarter jutted into the air, while the rest of the spar lay with its end on the ground.
At the short end, Salvatore attached a heavy basket and had the men fill that with discarded ballast stones until the spar balanced perfectly. He secured the long end of the spar to a wooden spike in the base of the machine with a heavy rope, then had the basket filled completely with stones until the restraining rope groaned.
Waving the men into a corner, Salvatore took a mallet and knocked the spike holding the straining rope loose. Immediately, the heavy weight at the short end fell downward, causing the main spar to pivot, swinging the long end in a massive arc over their heads.
"A catapult," said Dimitrios.
"A trebuchet," said Salvatore.
With the money which Salvatore had given him, Dimitrios paid off the men, all of them happy with the good wages, all also happy with the good story they had to tell about the strange job they had worked on. Nothing they had seen would not be common knowledge throughout the city in a few days, and their gossip could even be an aid to Salvatore's purpose.
With the men gone, Salvatore sent Dimitrios to hire a team of six oxen to come to the yard at dawn for a full day of work.
Alone in the yard, Salvatore now began to bring out some of the barrels from the shed where they had been stored. They contained liquid tar, lamp oil and refined pig fat. He scanned around the yard for a measuring vessel, saw Dimitrios's drinking cup and began ladling the viscous liquids in the buckets.
Next he brought out the uncured ox-hides, the stench from the animal-skins mixing with the stinking miasma of the buckets. He cut the hides into rough squares and bound them over the buckets until they looked like macabre drums.
Dimitrios returned from his errand and mentioned nothing about the state of his yard. "Dawn tomorrow," he said, glancing at his drinking cup, now coated with layers of pitch and animal fat. "An hour before the South Gate opens."
Salvatore nodded.
"The gate will still be closed at dawn," said Dimitrios.
"We are not going into the city," said Salvatore, "so the gate is no concern."
"You need me tomorrow?" asked Dimitrios.
"Only for the morning."
"Then I will go to bed and dream about being a boat-worker again."
Salvatore nodded, and walked to the water end of the yard where ballast rocks lay discarded.
Dimitrios was awakened by Salvatore hammering at his door. "The oxen are here."
The driver of the ox-team was good at his job and did not bat an eye at the unusual task he was being asked to perform. He limbered up his oxen to the machine, then carefully led them through the sleeping streets of the slum-zone outside the city until they came to a spot that Salvatore pointed out to them.
It was a long, barren rocky plateau to the west of the city. Nothing grew there and better routes existed for transport, so there was no road. Being on the landward side of the city, it had no value to anyone. The one notable feature of it was that it was clearly visible from almost every point of the city's massive Eastern walls.
Salvatore had the oxen led away, then sat on his machine with Dimitrios and waited for full light.
"What happens now?" said Dimitrios.
"Take those oil buckets off the machine and keep them well apart from each other," said Salvatore. "You can leave now, but come back with the oxen before dusk."
"I think I will stay," said Dimitrios, making himself as comfortable as he could on the wooden war-machine.
Pressure
The skeleton crew of Husker One consisted of four men who, in effect, had nothing to do except trigger a series of actions that would send the entire structure into hibernation and separate the rig from the oil well below. It was an act reserved for only the most extreme eventuality, as it would cost days of lost production and hundreds of thousands of dollars to carry out the reconnection.
After a short conversation with the crew leader, Sparke ordered the well severed and sealed, assumed responsibility for the rig and ordered the men to evacuate to the mainland aboard the chopper that had brought him in.
A pick-up chopper was scheduled to arrive for him in two hours, leaving him plenty of time to carry out his evaluation of the rig's state of preparedness.
He watched the chopper pull itself into the sky and bank steeply away from the rig's superstructure. Then he walked through the echoing passageways up to the main control deck, whistling to himself, happy to be able to savor the smell and familiar noises of the sleeping monster alone.
His touched the button on his headset and Markus's voice came through his earpiece immediately.
"On board Husker One," said Sparke. "Last of the crew evacuated."
"You have the place to yourself," said Markus.
"Only for the next two hours, then they will pick me up. Anything new?"
"Only one anomaly. The deep-sea weather buoy nearest to Ashoka has gone down, but the meteorologist team thinks it is due to the ash cloud."
"Right oh," said Sparke. "I will be working through the evaluation for a while. Call me if anything interesting happens."
"Quiet as a church at the moment," said Markus.
The weather buoy was built to withstand winds over one hundred knots and seas up to sixty feet. It had been in place for five years and in that time it had never once failed, despite the worst that the China Sea and the Western Pacific had thrown at it. All that remained of it now were a few shards of shattered plastic, floating on the surface of the sea.
Far to the east, Volcano Ashoka had lapsed into a sullen silence during the night. Far below the earth's surface, a crust formed over the molten magma, creating a pressure cap. The longer the cap held, the greater the buildup of pressure below and in a contest between an immovable object and an unstoppable force there was only one outcome. The cap began to split.
As it crumbled, the pressurized liquid rock below spewed like a fire hose, expanding the gap it had created. More lava rushed through, tearing huge chunks from the cap, and these were in turn hurled upwards, scouring the inner channel of the volcano, sending rocks the size of houses high into the air.
Even so, the main lava channel was too narrow to cope with the built-up pressure and the whole mountain expanded imperceptibly outwards like a cake rising in an oven, shifting and unbalancing the structure of the steep-sided hill. The displaced earth destabilized the hillside and millions of tons of rock and stone shifted, collapsing downwards.
The entire west side of the hill began to slip into the sea, slowly at first, and then, as the disintegration fed on itself, with increasing speed.
At the sea's edge, the first rocks simply pushed the water to one side, but as the landslide gathered momentum the inertia of the water responded to the pressure by pushing back against it, creating a counterforce. This pressure barrier blocked the water from moving aside and as more land slid down, the water had nowhere to go, so it went upwards, creating a bulge in the surface of the sea.
Water always seeks its own level and, with the pressure behind it, the growing mound of ocean began to collapse forward. As fast as this was happening, the mound was reinforced by new water pushed out by the accelerating landslip. The mound became a wave and the wave began to move, constantly falling forwards.
Within four minutes of the first rocks hitting the surface, a wall o
f water eighty feet high began moving outwards from the volcano like a massive ripple on a pond.
The leading edge of the storm had scattered the ash cloud so thoroughly that there was nothing in the air to see this happen. The storm alert and the incident in the disputed waters had cleared the ocean of almost all vessels and now there was nothing in the path of the titanic wave except the weather buoy, Husker One and a lone Korean freighter, whose English name was the SS. Elkhorn, cutting through the danger zone in a rush to reach its destination on time and to save expensive fuel.
The Elkhorn's navigation officer was on radar watch when the wave appeared on the ship's system. He peered at the screen as a solid line moved in from the east. He checked and reset the system to make sure that it was not reading a weather front then called the captain. The two men peered at the monitor, then checked the latest weather report.
There was no bad weather reported apart from the tropical storm in the opposite direction, although the output from the nearest meteorology buoy had ceased. The radar system was checked and working.
The captain had never seen a tsunami, but there was nothing else he could image this solid line being. He ordered the ship about so that whatever was coming towards them would come at them from their stern. In heavy seas a ship has a choice of meeting it head on or stern first. If the ship was moving at full speed away from it, the impact would be lessened, but the risk was that the unprotected stern could ship water more easily than the better protected bow. It was the captain's choice and he chose to run.
The orders had just been given for the maneuver when the watch officer's voice echoed through the ship’s sound system, calling the captain to the bridge. The wave was now a thick black line across the horizon, extending as far as the captain could see in each direction. Even as he watched, the line thickened and became darker as the wave approached. His ship heeled round away from the wave, turning so fast and so tightly that it leaned outwards on the curve. They had just completed the turn when the wave hit.
The Templar Thief: Peter Sparke book 4 Page 9