Drilled

by Cole, Cassie

  So our plan was to arrive at the drill site, watch from a concealed distance while the shift change occurred, and then nail them when the new shift began drilling.

  The North Dakota scenery was dull and dreary. It was this way in every season, but late winter especially so. The terrain became more beautiful the farther west one went, into Montana especially, but for now it was as boring as could be.

  “What do y’all think Lexa’s doing right now?” Tex wondered out loud.

  “Probably sitting behind her desk,” Jason said. “Finishing up her cover letters. Then daydreaming about one of us.”

  “Ahh, but which one?” Cas said from the driver seat.

  “I think I’ve been with her the most,” Tex said. “So naturally, I’d be the winner.”

  “Quality beats quantity,” Jason said with a laugh. “If she’s daydreaming about anyone, it’s me, bro.”

  “The way to a woman’s heart is through the stomach,” I announced. “None of you can defeat me in this regard.”

  “You haven’t even been with her yet!” Jason said.

  “All the more reason for her to daydream about what she has not yet had, correct?”

  “I think he’s got you there,” Cas said. Jason waved a hand dismissively.

  I daydreamed about her while watching the terrain pass by. Her easy smile, always showing her white teeth. The way she flipped French toast on a pan, haphazardly but with confidence. The way her work clothes hugged her hips, showing off the curve of her ass…

  I was only mildly jealous that the others had been intimate with her and I had not. But it only made me want her more.

  I could not wait to see what the future held. Hopefully many more mornings of French toast.

  Cas pulled off the interstate and then drove down a service road for 10 minutes. Finally the drill site appeared in the distance, but Cas pulled off the road and took a wide berth around it. Only when we reached a small outcropping of rock did he park.

  We got out and looked at the site from a distance.

  Even from a mile away, I was bombarded with emotions from the day of the accident. The site layout was nearly identical, especially from this distance. I could still feel the heat of the fire on my skin, the frantic shouting from the workers as they tried to put out the fire.

  Tex put a hand on my shoulder. “You alright, pal?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Tex stared at me until I was forced to say more.

  “I am okay,” I said. “It is not easy. It has not been easy.”

  The past week of site visits with Cas had been especially difficult. Whenever we approached a site, my hands began shaking violently, and I broke out with sweat. Cas was kind enough to allow me to take notes from outside each site while he went inside, but that was not the plan today. Today, I would be going inside.

  “If you can’t do it,” Tex said quietly so only I could hear, “just let me know. Alright?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Cas approached the outcrop of rock and raised some binoculars to his face. I checked my watch: it was almost 11:00. The shift would soon start.

  Now we wait, I thought.

  42

  Cas

  I was more nervous than I’d ever been.

  The site visits last week were minor. We wrote up small infractions when we saw them, but there was nothing huge to note. Just stuff you’d find at any site on any day. Worth noting, but not enough to reflect poorly on a company as a whole.

  This one, not insulating drilling equipment? This was a much bigger deal. A smoking gun. Especially if we could nail why the shift manager was allowing it. If he was one of the workers given the Berlin drilling technique message from HQ, then we had Blackrock Energy dead to rights. Evidence of their actions from the top all the way down.

  We were so lucky to have found Lexa. For so many different reasons.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes, then cursed. We were at a higher altitude here than the site, but the exterior walls still blocked our view of most of the drill. All I could see was the very top part, which didn’t tell us anything. We wouldn’t know if the anonymous tip was true until we went inside. But from here we could see all the worker vehicles parked outside, and the tendril of dust and smoke rising from inside the compound where drilling was occurring.

  “It is 11:05,” Kai said. “The shift should have changed by now.”

  “Huh,” I said. A shift change would be marked by halting of the drill, and workers leaving out the entrance and driving away in their cars. But everything was continuing on like normal.

  “Perhaps we have the wrong time?” Kai said.

  It was a possibility. Individual drill sites had the leeway to choose their own hours and shift changes, depending on the contracting companies, but it always varied by just an hour. So the question became: was the shift going to change at 12:00… Or had it already happened an hour ago?”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “We could go in now,” Jason suggested. “An hour after shift change is still catching them red-handed.”

  “And if they haven’t switched yet?” I said. “Then we’re catching them at the very end of their shift, and the entire thing is ruined.”

  “Then we wait an hour,” Tex said. “See if they change at 12:00. If not, we move in. Not as good as catching them right after a new shift starts, but still enough to put the screws to the manager.”

  “I agree with that assessment,” Kai said.

  We didn’t have any choice, so I nodded.

  The next 30 minutes passed agonizingly slow. Dust and smoke continued rising into the air, and occasionally we could hear the sound of the drill drifting across the landscape when it hit a particularly difficult section of rock. Standing there, watching from a mile away, felt like we were missing out on our opportunity. That the smoking gun was being covered up.

  But then a car appeared on the service road driving toward the site. Two more followed soon after.

  New workers arriving for the next shift.

  None of us said anything, but we all relaxed. We weren’t too late after all.

  The drill finally stopped at 11:55. The workers lingering outside the walls went inside, and other workers exited and drove away. At precisely 12:04 the drill resumed its work with the sound of hammering and a new plume of dust.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  We drove back to the service road and roared toward the drill site like soldiers going to war. Kai was humming a tune to himself, one I didn’t recognize. In the passenger seat, Tex drummed his fingers on his leg.

  Drill sites reacted in different ways to a safety audit. Sometimes the workers scrambled like college kids at a party when the cops showed up, hurrying to make sure they were wearing their hard hats and fixing any other obvious safety problems. Other times the workers got angry and cussed at us, insisting we were only delaying their work schedule unnecessarily.

  Today was different. As we parked outside the main gate, one of the workers smoking a cigarette outside only grunted at us. I banged on the gate and someone inside opened it; it slide horizontally three feet before stopping, closing behind us.

  The drill site was like any other. A 20 foot cement wall surrounded the compound, with a stack of trailers on the right three high to give the manager’s trailer an elevated view of the site, with metal stairs leading up to it. All along the left side were huge tanks: filled with water for the fracking, gasoline for the construction equipment, and tanks that would eventually hold the extracted natural gas. Rows of tractors and earth movers were in front of the tanks, all neatly parked. There were even four tankers that would transport the extracted gas to processing centers back east.

  And then there was the drill.

  It was a massive piece of equipment occupying half the site opposite the entrance. The vehicle holding the drill was the size of half a dozen dump trucks, with tires taller than I was. It held the vertical drill out like a giant gripping
a telephone pole. Half the drill was underground, with the other half exposed above ground in the air. The sound it made was a constant hum in the air, and a staccato vibration in the ground that traveled up my boots and into my legs. It filled me with familiar unease.

  Immediately, I saw that the drill and surrounding ancillary equipment was all properly insulated.

  “Cas…” Jason muttered.

  “I see it,” I said. A man with a clipboard was walking down the stairs from the trailer, so I went that way and met him at the bottom. “You the shift manager?”

  Most shift managers demanded to know why strangers were on their site. This guy looked like he was expecting us. He had a droopy face, like someone who had weighed 400 pounds and then lost most of it, but still had loose skin around his cheeks and neck. He looked bored at our arrival.

  “I am.”

  “Herb?” I said, knowing his name from the records we had already pulled.

  “No. I’m Doug.”

  I hesitated. “Where’s Herb?”

  “He’s out sick.” He offered no other information, so I reached out to grab the identification badge hanging from his lapel. Doug Andrews. He only stared at me while I scribbled his name down in my notepad.

  I flashed him my credentials. “We’re performing safety audits on Blackrock Energy drilling sites. We have been authorized by the North Dakota Bureau of Environmental Safety, and have explicit permission by Blackrock Energy itself. We are here to perform an audit of your drill site, and all safety precautions that have been made.”

  He shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  He turned and whistled at the drill operator, who was already looking in our direction. There was a release of pressurized steam, and then the vibration in the ground abruptly stopped.

  Usually, workers grumbled and groaned about a safety audit. It meant they would need to work late to make up on lost time, and wouldn’t be able to keep their drilling timeline on which their bonuses typically relied. So they had good reason to be pissed off.

  But the operator who hopped out of the drill didn’t say a word. He just stood next to the drill with a vape pen like he was grateful for the break, although he had only just started his shift. The other workers grumbled the way I expected them to, sending some sarcastic thanks in our direction, but I had eyes only for the drill operator. It was like he didn’t care.

  Or like he’d expected this. The same way the shift manager was acting.

  Something was wrong.

  I glanced at Tex. He was giving me a look that said he was thinking the same thing.

  “Let’s get started,” I said to the group.

  43

  Tex

  Shit was fucked.

  You know the feeling you got when you walked into a familiar room and could tell something was different? I had that feeling, times a thousand. Nothing was right at this drill site. All my instincts were screaming bloody murder to turn around and drive away. And not just cause our anonymous tip appeared to be wrong.

  I didn’t like any of this.

  Jason put on his reflective vest and hard hat, but Kai hesitated. He was gripping the hat so tight his knuckles were white, and had a thousand-yard stare as he looked up at the drill.

  “You alright?”

  “Ja,” he said, but I knew that was a lie.

  He’d handled the accident over a month ago worse than the rest of us. None of us had talked about it—none of us wanted to talk about it with that kind of intimacy—but we all knew. It was the kind of PTSD I’d seen affect even the strongest men in the Army. It didn’t matter how muscular you were when your brain experienced debilitating trauma. Sometimes the biggest guys had the biggest wounds.

  “Ya know, my hand’s cramping,” I announced. “Kai, do you mind staying here and taking the worker statements for me? You’d be doin’ me a huge favor.”

  “Ja, sure,” he said, clearly relieved. He handed me his hard hat and vest, and I slapped him on the arm.

  “Thanks, pal.”

  Cas looked at the shift manager. “Let’s take a look at the comms system, first.”

  “Uh huh,” Doug said, then started walking to the left. Cas cleared his throat.

  “It’s up in the trailer, right?”

  “Oh, right,” Doug said, turning and walking in that direction. Cas followed him up the metal steps.

  Jason and I shared a look before heading toward our part: the drill itself.

  The exposed part of the drill was obviously insulated the way it was supposed to be, but that didn’t mean the hundred or so length underground was too. In fact, if corners were going to be cut that was an easy place to do it: insulate the top part of the drill, but skip the underground section, since that would have the most wear and tear from the work and would easily fall off during the drilling.

  We took notes as we made our way across the site. Bundles of cable on the ground were properly covered to make sure nobody tripped over them, or that a tire could accidentally snag. There was an area on the left covered with quick-dry dirt. That meant there had been a muddy puddle there, which had been properly filled to keep any construction equipment level while rolling over it, which was important to keep fork lifts carrying material from tilting dangerously. Pallets of equipment were properly shrink-wrapped and organized with room to walk in between, as code required. Everyone we saw wore hard hats and reflective equipment.

  So far, everything at the site was done by the book.

  “Nice of you to help Kai,” Jason said when nobody else was around.

  “We’ve got to look out for one another,” I said simply.

  “Amen to that, bro.”

  We came to a corner where pallets of plastic tubing was stacked and shrink-wrapped. I pointed and said, “That looks like polyvinyl chloride piping.”

  “Huh,” Jason said in agreement. “Sure does. Isn’t polypropylene standard on all sites these days?”

  “Sure is. Far less flammable.”

  I eyed the stacks of pallets. Using PVC instead of polypropylene was an easy cost-cutting measure, but it wasn’t necessarily against regulation. What was against regulation, however, was the way the pallets were stacked here in a row. They should have been stacked over by the concrete wall where the fire extinguishers were mounted. If there was a fire, this would all go up in the blink of an eye and cut the site in half.

  “It’s a nit-picky thing to note,” I said, “but I’ll jot it down for now.”

  “Uh huh.”

  The smell of burned engine grease and dust greeted us as we reached the drill itself. It was a state of the art piece of technology, the kind of drill that could excavate vertically and then turn at a 90 degree angle underground to drill horizontally once they reached the shale level. I made a note of the model. It was noteworthy because lots of sites had to do that part in sections: one drill to make the initial vertical shaft, then bring in another drill to complete the horizontal part.

  I nodded to the drill operator, who was still sucking on his vape pen. I took down his name and badge number, then climbed up inside the drill cockpit. It was like the inside of a tractor trailer, but with three panes of glass giving me a 180 degree view of the site in front of me. Expensive LED screens shows charts of data: drill depth, resistance level, drill heat. One screen showed a geological survey superimposed over the other data. Comparing old data to real-time data. This was good stuff.

  I turned off the drill engine and reached underneath to remove the safety key. It was like the pin to a grenade, except in reverse: when it was removed the drill couldn’t start at all, not even by accident. It was specifically designed so that nothing else could fit inside. You couldn’t just jam a pen into the slot and start the drill if you lost the safety key.

  Outside, Jason waited for me to wave the safety key at him before he approached the drill hole itself.

  Next I inspected the interior of the cockpit. Everything was properly labeled, which was unsurprising on a new drill like this. Sometimes we s
aw visors or sports banners taped up inside, since drill operators practically lived inside their cockpits for weeks at a time. Those were dangerous because they could become loose and snag on levers. It was a minor thing, but it did happen, and when it did it caused accidents.

  But there was nothing like that in here. The drill was as new as could be.

  I heard Cas’s voice sound over the intercom, both outside the drill and on a speaker inside: “Testing. This is a test of the intercom system. You guys hear me down there?”

  I stuck a thumbs-up out the cockpit door. Everything was configured properly.

  After a few minutes checking individual systems at random, I hopped out of the drill. Jason was kneeling over the work hole, which was about 10 feet in diameter.

  “Everything looks good here,” he said. “Proper metal reinforcement around the lip.” He rapped his knuckled on it. “Good diameter. Enough room for the emergency shut-off cap, which they have on stand-by right over there.”

  I looked to where he was pointing, then made a note on my notepad.

  “Cockpit was clean too,” I said.

  Jason rose and brushed off his pants. He leaned in close so the drill operator couldn’t hear and whispered, “Did Cas get the site mixed up?”

  “Cas doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

  “Then maybe whoever made the anonymous tip did.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I pulled a piece of chalk from my pocket and made a line on the drill insulation, then said, “Let’s start looking at the drill itself. Hey, buddy,” I called to the drill operator. “Need you to bring the drill up 10 feet at a time.”

  This was where we usually got push-back from the workers. 10 feet at a time, pausing to inspect the drill before continuing, would take hours. But this operator only put away his vape pen and nodded. I tossed him the safety key, and Jason and I backed up 50 feet.