by Jack Du Brul
George Boudette idled the engines down to trolling speed, twisting the wheel so that the Suzy’s Pride started a wide arc around the huge mass of fish roiling just below the surface, driven mad by the predatory sea bass darting through their midst. Steve turned from the sonar, confident that Georgie would handle the bridge duties while he and the two deckhands prepared to cast the seine net around the school of sardines.
“But, Dad,” Josh persisted, “I just heard a Mayday on the radio. It was on 2182.”
It took a few seconds for Steve Hanscom to understand what his son had said. “You heard a call on 2182? Are you sure?” Suddenly the excitement about the shoal beneath them wavered.
“Yeah, a man said Mayday and everything,” Josh replied excitedly, not knowing the consequences of what he was saying.
“Get ready to cast off the purse,” George cried, concentrating fully on the task of bunching the fish onto the surface until the sea was bowed with their tremendous numbers.
Steve hesitated, looking at his son’s eager face, wanting to believe that the boy hadn’t heard a call on 2182 MHz, one of the international distress frequencies. He had to make a decision in the next few seconds or the shoal would disperse, driven off by its swollen size.
“Cast!” he shouted down to the deck where his mates were already prepared, alerted by George Boudette’s foot pounding the deck above the cabin where they slept.
The net was shoved over the back of the boat with sheer muscle power, yards and yards of material and dozens of floats and weights tossed into the water until their own drag helped haul them over the transom. The release was timed precisely with the steady throb of the motor and with the easy circle the boat drew in the water. The net was paid out at the very perimeter of the shoal in order to capture the greatest number of fish.
Normally, Steve would have been on deck assisting in the release, making sure his expensive net didn’t become fouled as it oozed into the Pacific, but he had grabbed his son by the hand and dragged the confused boy back into the cabin, to where the radio transceiver sat on its built-in shelf.
“Show me,” he said, tight-lipped, his body almost quivering.
Scared, Josh powered up the venerable Motorola, avoiding his father’s eyes as the set warmed, its dials glowing whitely in the dim cabin. He scanned the frequencies, zeroing in on 2182 MHz. Nothing came through the speaker except snow — dead white noise. Steve began to breathe again, thankful that his son had been wrong. There was nothing out there tonight; no one was calling for help.
Had there really been a distress, maritime law dictated that the preservation of human life came above any other consideration. Steve would have been forced to cut away the heavy nets paying out behind the vessel and make the best possible speed to render assistance. If that had happened, he could forget ever coming up with the money to replace them. But Josh had been mistaken. There was nothing out there, and Steve had some fish to catch.
He was just reaching to turn off the radio when a loud, clear voice burst from the speakers, so close it sounded as if the person was in the cabin with them.
“Mayday, Mayday. This is the captain of the VLCC Southern Cross requesting an All Ships Signify. Mayday. Mayday.”
Hanscom’s blood went cold. Yet it was not the loss of his own future that frightened him; it was the message itself. He knew enough about ships to know that a VLCC was not some small coastal vessel but one of the supertankers cruising between Alaska and California. He recalled the hours of television he’d watched following the Exxon Valdez disaster. If one of those monsters burst her belly and spilled its poison near Puget Sound, Hanscom would be one of thousands of fishermen who would never work again.
Steve took only a moment to weigh his decision, for he really had no choice. Not only was he obliged to help the tanker if she’d sent a Mayday, he also wanted to go to her aid. If, in some small way, he could prevent a catastrophe, and maybe save the waters leading to the Sound, he had no reservations about cutting away his nets and racing to give any assistance he could.
“Josh, tell Paul to cut the nets and have Georgie power up the engines,” Steve said forcefully. If he was going to lose his boat because of this, he was damned sure it would not be in vain. He checked the numbers of the radio’s direction finder and quickly calculated the course. “And tell Georgie to steer 342 degrees true and burst the engines if he has to.”
Josh ran from the cabin, his high, clear voice shouting excitedly but with the authority of a man on a mission. Steve picked up the hand mike. “This is the master of the trawler Suzy’s Pride, reading you strength four. Please amplify your signal. I am running at top speed to your location. Verify your position and state your emergency.”
Relief washed over Lyle Hauser with the fever of sexual release. “Thank God you’re out there, Captain. I didn’t think I would be close enough to shore for my signal to be picked up for another ten hours. My ship has been taken over by terrorists who were working with some of my crew. I’m adrift in a life raft approximately two hundred and fifty miles north-northwest of Bellingham. I can’t give a more accurate position fix.”
Steve thought he was hearing something out of Mutiny on the Bounty. A ship seized and its captain set adrift in a lifeboat? This was the dawn of the twenty-first century. That sort of thing didn’t happen anymore. It defied belief. Was this some sick hoax?
But the Suzy’s Pride was well beyond the range of nearly all shore-based radio sets, and the direction finder said that the signal was coming from somewhere out to sea. It could be true. Jesus, he thought, terrorists in control of a supertanker?
“You must relay a message to the authorities,” continued the voice from the speakers, “but under no circumstance are the owners of my ship to be informed. I fear that they may be involved with the terrorists.”
“I don’t understand. Please clarify last transmission. Captain, I cannot radio shore this far out; my set isn’t powerful enough. I will reach your position in a few hours.” Steve felt his boat gaining speed.
“Negative. Make your quickest landfall and report what’s happened to the Coast Guard. They must stop the Southern Cross. The tanker should be close to Seattle by now, and I believe they intend to destroy her in Puget Sound.”
Steve snapped on the overhead lights and pulled a chart from the cabinet under the radio, anchoring its corners with two empty coffee cups and a navigation reference book he’d been using to teach Josh. He scanned it quickly, making a few rough estimates before responding.
“Captain, I am equidistant between Port Hardy and Bamfield, British Columbia. I can rescue you and still make quickest landfall. Say again, I will be at your position in about” — Steve calculated an approximate distance using the signal strength and power of his radio, factoring in atmospheric conditions as well — “five hours, and we’ll be within radio contact with Port Hardy another three hours after that. It’s the best I can do.”
“Understood, Captain,” Hauser replied, realizing he’d drifted much farther out into the open Pacific than he’d thought and understanding just how lucky he’d been that someone was monitoring a radio this late in these usually quiet waters. They were almost two hundred miles from the nearest sea lanes.
“We’ll monitor this frequency until we have you visually. Suzy’s Pride out.” Steve set the mike back onto its cradle.
He climbed back up to the wheelhouse. George Boudette stood behind the wheel, riding the waves that were starting to buck against the boat’s blunt prow. Josh stood next to him. Steve noticed that George had the engines throttled back an inch or so away from their maximum stops. He reached over and slammed the twin handles all the way forward. The diesels under the deck bellowed harshly in reply, and the ship started to vibrate. To run at this speed for more than a few hours would cause permanent damage to the engines and prop shafts.
“If the bank ends up with my boat after this, I’m going to make damned sure she isn’t in working order when they get her.”
Co
ok Inlet, Alaska
From the dawn of civilization, man has demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for making use of the common natural elements found near his earliest settlements. But since the time of Sumer and Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, humans have had few uses for the black sticky resins that bubbled up from deep within the earth. While some civilizations used the tarry substance for road construction and caulking boats, and Egyptian embalmers wrapped bitumen-soaked linen around mummies, the true potential of oil would remain unknown for millennia.
It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the wheels of the Industrial Revolution began grinding together, that man returned to the stinking, slick pits of oil dotting the globe. This naturally skimmed oil was refined to make ideal industrial lubricants. At the same time, commercial whaling fleets were decimating the world’s cetacean population, driving up the prices for whale oil until it was no longer a viable option for illuminating homes and factories. Again an oil derivative, kerosene, stepped in to fill this niche, ringing the death knell for New England’s whalers. For approximately sixty years, as the oil companies refined kerosene, they burned off the waste products, most notably a highly flammable but useless product called gasoline. Untold millions, possibly billions, of gallons were put to the torch.
Except for Edwin Drake’s use of an old brine-well drill in Titusville, Pennsylvania, there were very few innovations in oil exploration and recovery during this time. His simple drilling rig and the collection of surface oil easily kept pace with the growing demand for kerosene. Necessity had no need to nurture invention, until two German engineers, Nikolaus Otto and Gottlieb Daimler, combined their respective inventions: one, a four-stroke internal-combustion engine fueled by gasoline, and the other, a carburetor device that injected a fine spray of fuel into engine cylinders. Daimler’s idea had actually come from his wife’s perfume atomizer.
In conjunction with Edison’s development of the electric light in 1879, the automobile shifted refinery production from kerosene to gasoline. The race was on to supply the unparalleled demand for fuel that kept the new automobiles on the roads.
The oil industry, as we know it today, was born.
By 1901, the modern rotary drilling rig was in use at Spindletop in Texas, and within a year there were nearly four hundred wells in the area. Very quickly, the hunt for oil began reaching out into the oceans. H. L. Williams’ early experiment in drilling for oil from specially built wharves in Summerland, California, led to freestanding drill platforms built on log pilings driven into the silty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The demand for oil forced companies to push deep into the realm of discovery and invention as well as search geographically. By 1930, a worker could almost walk across Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo on the huge number of drilling rigs.
The search pushed farther into areas where man was an outsider, an unwanted interloper who, without modern technology, wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving, let alone recovering the huge amounts of oil society was now demanding. The drilling rigs went deeper, one hundred feet, two hundred, a thousand, three thousand. The search would end only when the oil ran out. Yet depth wasn’t the only obstacle needed to be overcome by these offshore platforms.
Such is the capriciousness of nature that she placed some of her greatest oil reserves in her most inhospitable spots: the Persian Gulf, where searing temperatures turn lubricants to water; the Gulf of Mexico, where Africa’s great sandstorms eventually became two-hundred-mile-per-hour hurricanes; the North Sea, where the full fury of the North Atlantic batters the European coastline. And now, oil companies were making their first tentative forays into the ice-choked waters of Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Ocean, defiantly building structures designed to withstand the crushing pressure of the polar ice sheet.
While every innovation in offshore technology is hailed as the latest, state-of-the-art development and is sure to prove to be the last word in design, it is always eclipsed by something newer and better, usually within just a few months. However, sitting in the mouth of Cook Inlet, anchored in the shallow waters and rising like a city above the dark waters, the Petromax Prudhoe Omega would deservedly carry the banner as the latest and best design in oil drilling and production rigs well into the twenty-first century.
Built as a Tethered Buoyant Platform (TBP), the Omega, as her name implied, was the last word in drilling technology. Her rectangular base, called a template jacket, encompassed nearly three acres and was supported by four floating caissons nearly ninety feet in circumference. Each leg was anchored to the seafloor with five pretensioned catenary mooring lines. She loomed two hundred and seventy feet above sea level to the top of her tallest utility crane and weighed roughly 425,000 tons.
In a line that stretches unbroken from the building of the Great Pyramids up to the modern age, the Petromax Prudhoe Omega represented the latest expression of man the builder and his desire to show both his will and ingenuity.
The helicopter carrying Mercer, Ivan Kerikov, and Jan Voerhoven had made good time rocketing southward from Pump Station Number 5. As the sleek craft headed out over the water, the pilot eased the chopper lower, the whirling disk of its rotors now only fifty feet from the flat surface of Cook Inlet.
“Tides,” he said to an uninterested Kerikov, who sat next to him in the cockpit of the executive helicopter, “that’s the real danger of the Inlet. Oh, sure, you get a few big waves coming up from the Gulf of Alaska and occasionally a tall iceberg in winter, but the big danger is the tides. They’ll rise thirty or more feet in ten hours and produce currents that’ll stop a freighter under full steam. That’s why most cargo is dropped at Whittier and trained into Anchorage, rather than struggle up the inlet.”
The pilot hadn’t shut his mouth since leaving the TAPline pump station, and his inane observations were driving Kerikov mad. Despite the capture of Philip Mercer and the few hours remaining before Charon’s Landing’s imminent success, Kerikov was in a black, foul mood. His stomach was knotted tightly, acids eating away at his insides so fiercely that he could feel the rumble even with the helicopter rattling around him. He feared he was slipping into another rage, one of those mindless blank periods where violence and death lurked.
He fought it grimly, the way a passenger on a rough boat fights seasickness, jaw clenched, mind tuned to anything other than the present surroundings. He felt as if there was another person within him fighting to be free, forcing him to struggle to maintain his own identity. The tension of the past year, of his entire life, was finally tearing him apart. He held on doggedly, refusing to give in, refusing to lose himself to his own madness. If only the simpleton flying the helicopter would shut his mouth.
He jerked his head sideways when the chopper pitched violently, amazed to see blood drooling from the corner of the pilot’s mouth. Kerikov glanced down and saw a matching stain on the back of his hand. He had no recollection of striking the man. The pilot regarded him with shocked fear, and Kerikov smiled in response. He turned to see how his passenger was doing.
Mercer sat between Kerikov’s bodyguard and Jan Voerhoven. He was bound and gagged with silver duct tape, yet there was a defiance to him and a fathomless look in his eyes. As Kerikov watched, Mercer winked, and behind the thick gag, he was sure the geologist was smiling at him. Trussed and under armed guard, totally helpless, Mercer was mocking him.
Unbelievable.
“There it is,” the pilot said timidly after a few minutes.
In the darkness, the true size of the Petromax Prudhoe Omega could not be fully appreciated, especially when she was not in production, her two-hundred-foot-long flare stack dim, her deck lights all but extinguished. Only a few of her eight hundred portholes were lit, and these were so spread apart that they looked like they were on different structures. The red warning strobes atop the cranes were separated by five hundred feet and towered two hundred feet above the helicopter. Yet even the barest outline of the rig demanded awe and respect.
Nearing the Omega, the chopper gained e
nough altitude to reach one of the two helidecks cantilevered off the side of the living module. The crew’s living quarters was a boxy structure the size of a city block, able to accommodate six hundred men, and yet was the smallest of the four modules that made up the rig’s superstructure. The others, the utilities, the production, and the drilling modules, independently built and attached to the rig before it was towed to Alaska, were many times larger. In the glow cast by the chopper’s landing lights, the upper works of the rig gleamed whitely, contrasting with the red decking and the spindly yellow stalks of her cranes and flare boom. The Petromax Oil logotype was stenciled on the landing pad, a grate that allowed the down blast of the rotor to pass through and ease landing operations.
The chopper flared for its landing, the retractable gear just kissing the steel deck. Two workers rushed forward to secure blocks around the tires. The turbine spooled down, and the rotor slowed until it turned with little more effort than a tired ceiling fan. Kerikov was the first to jump from the craft. He opened the passenger door and grabbed Mercer by the shoulder, dragging him out of the chopper and across the windswept deck. His dark mood had been eclipsed by a brittle cheer that was just as dangerous.
Duck-walking his bound prisoner, Kerikov led Mercer to the edge of the landing pad. Without pause for the dramatic effect of standing one hundred feet over the frigid water, he shoved at the small of Mercer’s back, and Mercer flew out into space.
With his hands tied and his mouth gagged, Mercer couldn’t even scream as he began to fall. His gray eyes went wide with fear and dismay. A second later, he hit the safety netting slung around the landing pad, one leg falling through the thick ropes, his headlong plummet arrested after a drop of only six feet. He was high enough above the waves crashing against the caisson legs to hear Kerikov’s deep laughter over his head.