Charon's Landing - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  Aggie was trembling, and it wasn’t only the cold air causing it. Both of them could be dead within the hour. For Mercer, it was a feeling he’d experienced before but had not grown used to. But it was something that went far beyond Aggie’s realm of experience. Her beautiful face was pale, and her pouting lower lip quivered. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

  “We’re going to make it, Aggie,” Mercer said. “We have to.”

  She nodded up at him and could not resist kissing him, pressing herself against his body, wrapping her arms around him. It could be the last embrace either one would ever experience, and they made it special, something beyond fear and beyond a physical touch. A current passed between them in the frigid pump room, something tangible that neither could, or wanted to, deny. If they survived the next hour, it was something they both wanted to explore together.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Let’s do it,” Aggie replied, steeling herself.

  Mercer settled himself on the raft, his head and feet in perfect position, his grease-slicked hands slipping through the loops of tape he’d made as handholds. The toolboxes under the framework would allow water to creep up underneath the raft and float them free. Otherwise, the raft would have simply filled with water as the cavernous chamber flooded.

  Aggie went to the controls, pressing several rubberized buttons in succession, each motion bringing another pump online. The noise of the huge turbine pumps built quickly, echoing off the steel walls in a shrieking cry as four thousand gallons per minute were forced through each one.

  “The noise will die after the pumps are submerged,” Aggie screamed, closing the watertight pressure doors that housed the electronic controls. “We’ve got about ten minutes before the water reaches this level.”

  “Get into position now,” Mercer said from the floor. “We can’t afford to be surprised.”

  Aggie lay down on top of him, her back pressed to his chest, her bottom cupped around his waist almost sexually. He shook under her to dislodge her.

  “Not like that. Stay on your back but turn around so your head is on my thighs, your legs around my head. That’ll distribute the weight better.”

  She did as he ordered, shifting nimbly. Their position afforded Mercer a view of the mysterious place between her spread thighs. He quickly purged his mind of those thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

  The wait was interminable. They lay quietly, not speaking to each other even when the pumps were finally submerged and their piercing whine was dulled to a low whoosh. The water was rising so fast they could feel the air being pushed ahead of it in an icy gale, a tease of the true cold to come. Minutes dragged by. Mercer kept glancing to the side, expecting to see the water rushing through the floor grates in a frothing roil. Yet it would not come.

  Every second felt slower than the previous, expectation and fear bringing them both to the point where neither could lie still. They nervously scratched at imaginary itches or twisted to get more comfortable. Mercer was breathing so deeply that the motion of his lungs forced Aggie to bend even farther in an already uncomfortable position.

  The sound of the rushing water was getting louder, the wind blowing more fierce. It would happen at any moment. Mercer turned once again to look to their left. Just then the water came like a geyser.

  “Here we go!” he shouted over the din. They were lifted up off the toolbox cradle even before he had finished speaking.

  Like a kite caught in a brutal updraft, the makeshift raft was plucked from the deck in a gut-wrenching swoop. Water splashed over the side at an alarming rate, drops hitting their exposed faces like needle jabs. Within seconds, six inches of icy saltwater were pooled around Mercer’s bent waist, inches from soaking into Aggie’s buttocks. If any more came aboard and drenched her, she would be dead before they reached to the top of the caisson.

  But Mercer couldn’t dwell on that now; he had something more immediate to worry about. His weight, plus hers pressing down on him, was almost too much for him to bear. The straps he’d fashioned for his hands dug into his flesh, wrenching his arms painfully. It would take them thirty minutes to reach the top and he was already afraid he couldn’t hold on for another thirty seconds.

  The eddying water twisted the craft around, spiraling it on a tight axis. The raft was surprisingly stable considering the turgid water, but as they spun, more water slopped over the side. Mercer could feel it against the survival suit in the few areas where the insulation had been lost. The cold was biting. It numbed him so that his thigh felt as though it had been burned. And that was through the waterproofing of the Sterns suit and his jeans. If water got against his skin, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than a few minutes.

  “How you doing?” he managed to ask, his teeth clenched from the stress of holding his body rigid.

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” Aggie cried.

  “That’s what the Wright brothers said to each other.” Mercer tried to put a little cheer in his voice.

  “They failed the first time.”

  “We don’t have that option.”

  While at first the ascent up the support leg seemed quick, the little raft rising alarmingly, their perception changed as the true nature of the challenge unfolded. Aggie was within a couple inches of being submerged by the water flooding onto the tarp, and there was nothing they could do about it. Mercer needed to keep a vise grip on the scaffold to maintain the raft’s stability so he couldn’t try to bail, and Aggie was having a hard time just holding her precarious balance. The first ten minutes were an absolute agony, and there was no reprieve as they continued.

  Mercer’s arms began to tremble as his strength waned, his body unconsciously sinking farther against the tarp, Aggie coming that much closer to hitting the water. She noticed the dip and cried out. He tightened up once again, his stomach and back knotting in great bunched cords. The strain was only slightly less than the gymnastics maneuver called the iron cross. It was forty-two degrees in the column, and he was sweating, salty sheets running down his face.

  Aggie could sense his struggle. “Is there anything I can do to make this easier?”

  It took him a few seconds to gather the strength to reply — he was tapping out and they still had another sixty feet to the top of the shaft. “Go on the fastest crash diet in history.”

  Slowly, too slowly, the water level rose, and the surface calmed considerably from those first frightening moments when they were caught in the initial upwell. The weld seams on the walls marked their passage, each weld another ten feet of progress, another ten feet less until the torture was over. The top of the caisson still looked impossibly out of reach, a shadow high over their heads, a dim goal that got darker as another of the lights strung along the circular walls submerged.

  At first, Mercer thought the pain that suddenly shot through his upper thigh was a sharper stab of muscle cramp. A second later, he realized that his suit was leaking. The near-freezing water had found a way in through a tear he had missed, or more likely the tape was beginning to fail. The water felt like acid.

  He cried out, his pain echoing over the sound of the pumps and the bubbling water.

  “What is it?”

  “Hole in my suit, the water’s getting in.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “It ain’t good,” he moaned as more of his skin was doused in icy water. So strong was the urge to try and rub some warmth back to the spot, he had to shut his eyes and concentrate to maintain his grip on the scaffold. They had thirty feet to go. “Aggie, you’ve got to arch your back, take your weight off of me. I can’t take this much longer.”

  She did as he asked, digging her boots into his shoulders, her shoulders pressed against his shins so that when she shifted, arcing in a parody of orgasm, the strain was taken up by his bones rather than muscles. He gasped as her weight came off of him, his back and stomach relaxing for the first time in twenty minutes. The position was now as painful for her as it had be
en for him. She bore it as long as possible, her body made supple and strong through years of fencing and exercise, but after only a few minutes, she had to lower herself against him again.

  “I’m sorry,” she panted. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “I’m all right now,” he lied. “Besides, we’re almost there.”

  Deep below the rig, in the black waters of the Sound, buried under eighteen feet of silty mud, the five huge anchors restraining number three support jacket were losing their mooring integrity as the leg began sinking, pulling at the fifteen other anchors holding the rig in position. To maintain their strength, the mooring lines must be rigid at all times. Aggie had been forced to take the automated tensioning hydraulics off-line in order for her to flood only the one leg. As more water filled the support, the catenary lines began to sag beyond their fracture points, and one by one they parted. The seven-inch-thick steel wires sheared cleanly, the anchored ends dropping silently into the gloom, the remainder hanging from the underside of the rig like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish.

  The other plow-shaped Delta Flipper anchors were so well placed that they hadn’t dragged, and their tension was so strong that the rig began to pendulum back. Rather than listing toward the filled support leg, the Omega swung one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Though the dynamics of the entire anchoring system was measured in the thousands of tons, the rig was now so unbalanced that every gallon of water cycling through the pumps and into the support column shifted the structure just a little more.

  The twenty-knot incoming tide rushing past the platform was the only thing keeping the rig upright, pressing just enough against the legs to keep them stable. But the delicate balance of force, counterforce, weight, buoyancy, and drag wouldn’t last as the pumps continued to fill the Omega’s buttress.

  “Only a couple more feet,” Aggie announced in amazement.

  “How far are we from the elevator opening?” Mercer asked grimly. The proximity of their goal couldn’t overcome his pain and the numbness that had spread through his lower body.

  “We’re coming up right below it. Your feet are only a couple of inches from the cable.”

  “As soon as we get close enough to the door, you have to jam the screwdriver between it and the casing. There should be a mechanical release to open it in case the automatic system doesn’t work and someone is trapped in the car.”

  “Like in the movies?”

  “Exactly.”

  Aggie tried to extend her arm, simulating the motions she would need to pry open the door. As soon as she moved her hand, she fell off Mercer’s chest with a scream.

  She hit the water pooled on the tarp and began to thrash, ripping through the plastic, and destroying the raft. Mercer let go of the struts, falling into the water with Aggie. The survival suit kept him buoyant, and he grabbed Aggie as she flailed. He pulled her close, trying to calm her before she drowned from her own panic.

  “Oh, my God, it hurts. Oh, sweet Christ, I can’t, I can’t…” Her lips were blue as the freezing water seeped around the tape Mercer had used to cover her. “Mercer, please, oh, God, I’m going to die.”

  “Aggie! Aggie!” Mercer shouted, looking into her eyes but seeing he’d already lost her to fear. She stared back vacantly and he feared she’d gone into shock. He barely noticed or cared that the Sterns suit had failed and that he too was soaked to the skin. He had to get them out of the water in the next few seconds.

  Just then, four of the twenty-ton anchors securing the offshore platform were wrenched from the seabed in clouds of drifting silt, tearing huge furrows through the mud, relinquishing their combined thousand tons of counterforce. There was no stopping the Omega now. She was going to flip. There was too much weight on one corner of the rig, and without the anchors, the buoyancy of the other three legs would capsize her in minutes. Of the eleven anchors still holding fast, only three more had to fail before the platform upended and vanished beneath the waves.

  The effects within column number three were instantaneous. One moment, Aggie and Mercer were struggling just below the elevator door, and the next second, the rig had dipped and rushing water forced them into the empty elevator vestibule. They were pressed to the very ceiling by Mercer’s survival suit, totally submerged and held helpless by water pressure.

  The icy water beat against Mercer’s temples, sharp stabbing pulses that made him nauseous. His mind was nothing but a swirling gray cloud of pain. His reserves were gone. He’d failed. They were going to die.

  Aggie’s movement was so slight that he almost didn’t feel it, yet unbelievably she pressed on his hand, opening his fingers and placing something against his palm. He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to open his eyes to the saltwater, but something forced him on. He glanced down and saw in the watery light that somehow, through her thrashing and her fear and her proximity to death, Aggie had maintained her grip on the screwdriver and had the presence of mind to place it in his hand.

  He plunged the tool at the door, missing the seam by a good six inches with his drunken lunge, but the angle of his attack forced the flat point of the screwdriver to gouge along the door and lodge firmly in the crack. The tip found the release on the pressure bar. He hauled back on the handle and the door swung free, pushed outward by tons of water.

  Aggie and Mercer burst through the narrow door in a rush, like the life-giving spill of birth, borne along the hallway by thousands of gallons of water, careening off the bulkheads and tumbling forty feet before smashing against a twist in the corridor, water surging around them in a diminishing torrent.

  Both of them retched until their lungs ached, shivering in the steel hallway as water continued to gush past. They needed to stop, to take time to recover and strip out of their soaked clothing, but they couldn’t. The Petromax Omega was bobbing like a pleasure boat caught in a rough storm, the tensioned mooring lines stretching beyond their maximum tolerances yet amazingly still holding. But each swing against them was stronger and stronger, as the top structure of the platform arced fifteen degrees against the gracefully swooping catenaries.

  “We have to move,” Mercer gasped, his jaw chattering like a jackhammer. “Can you walk?”

  Aggie didn’t respond — she had slipped into unconsciousness.

  Ignoring his own needs, Mercer took the time to strip Aggie out of her clothing, yanking off her sodden jacket, sweater, and T-shirt and peeling her wet jeans from her legs, gaining a few more minutes before she froze to death. He looked down the corridor, closing his eyes for a moment, thinking back to the winding journey he’d taken to this spot while under guard by Abu Alam. He closed his mind to everything — his pain, the cold, the imminent destruction of the rig — and reconstructed the route corner by corner.

  After defeating the Minotaur in Greek mythology, Theseus used a string to guide him back out of the labyrinth. Mercer had only his own clouded mind. Carrying Aggie, he ran through the empty passages, his feet pounding the steel battle deck as he backtracked the tortured path. Yet unerringly he negotiated intersections and stairs and doorways, making the correct decisions every step of the way, instinct driving him on. Had he stopped to think, he would have been lost in moments. The stark corridors of the rig’s underworks were indistinguishable from one another. There were no remarkable objects to remind him of the proper route, yet still he ran, covering the distance back to the living module in half the time it had taken Alam to bring him to the support leg. Utilitarian steel walls gave way to faux wood paneling and thin carpet as he burst through an open hatchway and into the crew’s quarters.

  The deck was canted at least twenty degrees now, pushing him headlong down a wide hallway. The paneled doors of individual cabins blurred by as he ran, Aggie lying limply in his arms. He didn’t dare pause to feel for a pulse. Alarms shrieked all along the corridor, red strobe lights pulsing like frantic heartbeats. Over the din, a computer-generated voice was telling all personnel to abandon the rig immediately.


  Mercer kicked open an exit door, twisting himself so that Aggie passed through without hitting her head or dragging her legs against the steel frame. The stairs looked like something out of a funhouse, tipped so steeply that they were almost vertical. Mercer started up carefully, cautious to keep his balance as he climbed. It was like trying to scale a cliff face, and every second the rig pitched to a steeper angle. He slogged up two more flights before reaching the main deck and then dashed out into the windswept night.

  When sensors had detected that the rig was listing, the computer had activated the emergency lights, bathing the deck in a pink sodium-vapor glow, the flare tower and cranes backlit against the darkness like monuments. Mercer strained through the glare as he searched for one of the yellow escape pods he’d noticed on the chopper ride in. They were slung along the edge of the module like lifeboats on a luxury liner.

  Out in the open, the tilt of the huge platform was much more apparent. Mercer had thought they had a few minutes, but now saw that in seconds the Petromax Omega would flip onto her side and sink. He could only hope that Kerikov and Alam were still trapped belowdecks, but he knew it wasn’t so. The helicopter that had carried them here was gone.

  Aggie was deadweight against him as he lurched toward the edge of the towering platform, slipping on the deck as the rig angled further. The alarm bells were maddening in their insistence. Mercer crashed against the railing, managing to shield Aggie from the blow, his shoulder hitting only inches from an escape pod’s razor-sharp propeller. The upper deck of the pod was a perfect cylinder, while its hull was deeply veed to give it stability in the roughest seas.

  Not knowing how to work the sophisticated davits that would launch the raft, Mercer could only pray that the mechanism could be activated from within the pod. He wedged Aggie against the railing, freeing his hands to work the hatch, when suddenly the lifeboat lifted, swung out over the water, and vanished from sight so quickly he felt himself swaying toward the void it had created.