Charon's landing m-2

by Jack Du Brul

  Reaching it, he didn’t take the time to set Aggie onto the deck. Instead, he slung her over his shoulder and pulled at the handle securing the hatch. It lifted easily, and the hatch swung inward. Lights in the pod automatically snapped on and heaters began warming even as he unceremoniously tossed Aggie onto the padded bench that lined the sides of the raft. He dove in after her, twisting as he landed so he could resecure the hatch. Next to it was a small control panel with two buttons. He pressed the one marked Launch.

  It seemed to take forever but actually happened in less than ten seconds. Hydraulic pistons lifted the pod off the deck, but the rig was angled too steeply. The underside of the escape pod hung up on the railing, balancing almost perfectly. The davits started to unspool the lowering lines. The pod teetered for a second, then started to fall back toward the deck. Mercer and Aggie would be trapped aboard the Omega when she went over. Mercer had felt what was happening and reacted instantly, diving across the pod and slamming himself against the outside wall, his weight tipping the forty-foot craft the other way.

  The pod slipped from the railing, and as he’d predicted earlier, Mercer was free-falling off the rig once more. Enough cable had unwound from the davits for the pod to fall twenty feet before being yanked short, almost wrenching itself from the lines. It danced against the restraint, tossing Mercer and Aggie around the enclosed cabin ruthlessly.

  Without warning, the escape pod smashed into the waters of Cook Inlet, inertia and weight driving it below the surface before it pluckily burst back up, throwing off water like a hunting dog after a retrieve. Mercer lay stunned on the floor of the raft, Aggie on top of him, her head resting against his chest as if she’d merely fallen asleep. He had to get up, unhook the pod from its shackles, and motor them away from the doomed rig, but he couldn’t move. He just wanted to stay where he was, cradling Aggie until all the pain went away.

  The last anchors finally gave way, stressed far beyond what their manufacturers ever dreamed possible, and the Petromax Prudhoe Omega lurched violently. The crane towers and flare stack snapped off cleanly, falling into the water only a couple dozen yards in front of the escape pod. Four hundred lengths of drill string in bins atop the production module came pouring off the rig like a log slide, followed closely by countless drums of chemical drilling mud.

  As the platform toppled, it began breaking apart. The living module sheared off, the entire thirty-thousand-ton structure falling into the sea in a catastrophic explosion of water and debris that flung Mercer and Aggie’s escape pod to the very limit of the lowering line, but they still remained attached to the swiftly sinking module. The upper decks hit the water next, and as they did, the number two support leg lifted completely out of the water before breaking away to fall independently from the rest of the platform.

  Diesel fuel poured from ruptured storage tanks, making contact with one of the many electrical fires already raging, and ignited in a wide sheet of flame, black smoke lifting high into the air. As the rig settled into the water, it pitched and bucked as more pieces fell clear. It sank slowly, fighting almost as if it were a living creature that realized it was drowning. Explosions rumbled from deep under the flaming water.

  Throughout the final moments, Mercer lay still, his breathing settling as he soaked up the warmth that blasted from the pod’s multiple heaters. He knew that there was something he had to do, something that compelled him to get off the floor, but he could no longer remember what it was. Yet he forced himself from the floor and moved to the stern where the motor and steering controls were housed in an economical dashboard. He was working on getting the engine started when he remembered that he hadn’t unshackled the pod from the living module!

  Cook Inlet was two hundred and seventy feet deep where the Omega had been temporarily moored, and the lines securing the living module to the escape pod were only one hundred and fifty feet long. He raced back to the davit controls, just reaching a hand outward when the module sank beyond that one-hundred-and-fifty-foot tether. The lines came taut, then the little craft was capsized in a fraction of a second, hauled down toward the murky bottom, condemned to a watery grave.

  Once again Mercer and Aggie were thrown violently, falling to the ceiling as the raft tipped upside down and was yanked below the surface in a headlong plunge. While it had been designed to be watertight in the most adverse surface conditions, the pod’s fiberglass hull was not designed to survive a prolonged submergence. In seconds, the seams where the upper-works and hull joined were creaking and popping, a tiny jet of water shooting from around one of the gasketed mounting bolts.

  Seconds before the hull imploded, Mercer scrambled back to the controls and pressed the second of the two buttons. Spring clips securing the tethers to the hull snapped open. Free of the plummeting living module, the escape pod rocketed back to the surface of the Sound, surrounded by a champagne fountain of air bubbles. It was launched completely out of the water, like a humpback whale breaching during its annual migrations. Its design was such that it quickly settled on an even keel, even if its two occupants were no longer in any condition to care. It took all of Mercer’s remaining energy to strip himself out of the survival suit and wet clothing and curl up under several of the blankets that had been dislodged from a storage locker, Aggie Johnston held tightly to his chest.

  “We made it, darling,” he mumbled and then remembered that escaping the rig was only half the battle. The real fight was still to come.

  The United Arab Emirates

  The television image was grainy and broke up every few seconds due to atmospheric disturbances as it bounced back to earth from a communications satellite. On the screen, a woman stood in front of the massive facade of Heathrow’s Terminal 4, her beautiful face composed of equal parts of pity and eagerness. As a professional broadcast journalist, this was the type of incident she lived for. The doors behind her were cluttered with swarming rescue workers in heavy flame-retardant gear, uniformed police, and suited members of Special Branch. The incident that had brought them all here had occurred on the other side of the building, out on the huge apron where aircraft had been waiting for clearance from the bomb detection teams. The sound from the BBC Special Report was much sharper than the pictures beamed into Hasaan bin-Rufti’s Hawker Siddeley, now only fifteen minutes from touchdown at Dubai, the closest international airport to the Emirate of Ajman.

  Rufti was seated in the main cabin, his bulk sagging over and around the confining arms of the luxury seat. His fingers and lips were greased with the molten butter dripping from the lobsters he was consuming. He had just finished sucking the pale red meat out of the tiny underclaws of two huge imported Maine lobsters when the report had broken into the financial news he had been watching. The napkin hanging down his chest was the size of a tablecloth and was streaked yellow with butter, like a urine-soaked diaper.

  Although he didn’t pause from his afternoon snack as he listened, his piggy eyes did brighten somewhat.

  “This is Michaela Cooper reporting live from Heathrow, where the terrorist threat has intensified in the most horrifying way. Twenty minutes ago, while the airport was still under a high security alert following a bomb explosion in the main concourse, a refueling lorry was driven, apparently by suicide bombers, into a grounded British Airways Boeing 767.

  “Unconfirmed reports so far indicate that the entire aircraft was destroyed by the collision between the plane and the lorry. A source here has told me that the bodies of the tanker’s real crew were found in a maintenance hangar shortly before the explosion, their throats slit, but again this is unconfirmed.” She glanced down to the notes in her hand, her shimmering blond hair falling around her shoulders. When she looked up, the hair remained draped over the silicone swell of her breasts. “The aircraft was scheduled to depart for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, several hours ago. However, it was halted on the tarmac by the ongoing terrorist threat, now said to be the work of a group called Kurdistan United. They are the same terrorists claiming responsibility fo
r the attack at the British Museum yesterday evening.”

  “So the monkeys did it after all,” Rufti said aloud as he watched the broadcast, bits of lobster dribbling from his liver-shaped lips.

  Having Tariq detonate the grenade in Heathrow’s international concourse and the making of a couple of well-timed phone calls to the airport manager’s office had bought enough time for the suicidal Kurds to set up a proper assault on Khalid Khuddari’s plane. Even as he made preparations to return to the UAE and confront the Crown Prince, Rufti had managed to put together a spur-of-the-moment plan that had worked brilliantly, with no exposure to himself. While he had personally made the two calls to Heathrow, his pilot had assured him that the communications gear aboard the Hawker would prohibit the signal from being traced.

  Rufti had spent millions of dollars recruiting, training, and arming the Kurdish nationals to attack Khuddari at the British Museum. The operation had been planned down to the finest detail so that nothing could possibly go wrong. But of course it had. It had been left up to him to improvise a new plan to eliminate his greatest rival. With no prior planning and only the barest minimum of time, the Kurds had managed to use the window created by Tariq’s grenade to infiltrate Heathrow’s grounds, overcome the fuel company workers, and slam their truck into the parked Boeing.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered, shaking his fat-swaddled skull back and forth slowly.

  The attack at the museum had been simplicity itself, while launching an assault at an airport already on high-security alert had to be the most difficult operation a terrorist cadre could accomplish. How the Kurds failed at the first but managed the second was a mystery. “Truly unbelievable.”

  The camera view shifted to a long-range shot, a thousand-millimeter lens focusing on the pandemonium on the runways. After the explosion, the authorities had evacuated the rest of the planes immediately. They stood alone on the tarmac, yellow inflatable slides hanging from their exits. The passengers had been bused to a cargo warehouse for temporary shelter, three Fox combat reconnaissance vehicles standing outside the sealed doors, their 30mm Rarden cannons at the ready. The remains of the British Airways 767 were nothing more than a smoking heap on the asphalt, a charred ruin that was the funeral pyre to 165 passengers and crew. The camera sharpened even further, showing fire trucks pumping white foam onto the twisted remains, crews in silver fireproof suits edging as close as possible to the hot aircraft.

  Michaela Cooper’s tone was doleful as she continued her report, but Rufti no longer paid her any attention. Khalid Khuddari had been on that plane, and now he was dead. Rufti had lived up to his part of the bargain with the Iranians and the Iraqis. It was now up to Kerikov to destroy the Alaska Pipeline and sink the tanker off the western coast of America, and within days the maps of the Middle East would have to be redrawn once again. The Saud family would be dead, their huge nation becoming a territory held jointly by Iran and Iraq, Kuwait would be absorbed by her northern neighbor, and he, Hasaan bin-Rufti, would be the new absolute ruler of all the Emirates.

  Rufti was almost giddy. From the jaws of defeat, he had scored a stunning victory, proving himself to his partners. His negotiations with the ministers from Iran and Iraq, stretching over many months but culminating only days before in London, had hinged on both him and Kerikov first accomplishing their parts. Rufti could now settle back and wait comfortably for Kerikov to execute his side of the operation. Once done, the combined armies of the Middle East’s most belligerent neighbors would sweep southward while the United States and Europe sat impotently as their precious oil was taken from them.

  He had to admit that Kerikov was a genius to come up with such an audacious operation, but then remembered that Charon’s Landing had once been a Soviet plan and the credit really went to their Cold War paranoia. It was Rufti’s own doing to include other nations in the coup. Kerikov had been interested only in crippling America’s domestic oil production, increasing her dependence on the Gulf states, thus Rufti’s interest in financing some of the plan. But Rufti had seen this as an opportunity to do much more. With America starved for oil, this was the time to finally rid the Muslim world of Western influence, drive the United States out of Arabia and expose Israel to attack. To make great again the Arab empire that once ruled so resolutely in centuries past.

  “Minister Rufti” — the pilot’s voice broke into his reverie — “we’re on final approach now.”

  He looked at the clock set in the forward bulkhead of the cabin. A few more hours and it would all be over.

  Cook Inlet, Alaska

  When flying to the Petromax Omega, the sea had appeared placid to Mercer, only a gentle swell marking the movement of the surging tides. However, in the small escape pod, caught up in the full motion of the twenty-knot tides, the surface of the Inlet was a steeply rolling plane, rising and dropping with gut-wrenching ferocity. Mountains of water broke over it like avalanches, plunging the craft into the hollows between the waves, giving only an instant’s reprieve before hauling her up to the next crest. White spume crashed against the windscreens as thick as foam. The life raft was a bright yellow dot on an otherwise black, empty sea.

  Mercer woke to the sound of vomiting, a harsh barking that seemed as if its source was tearing its very intestines from its body. As he became more conscious, he realized that he was that source. Bitter bile scored his mouth and throat, pooling under his chin as he lay on the pitching floor. The stifling hot cabin smelled like the bottom of some zoo animal’s cage.

  “Oh, Christ,” he moaned. “Talk about adding insult to injury.”

  Having experienced seasickness only once in his life, he’d forgotten just how miserable it could be. His stomach felt like a nest of writhing snakes eager to escape. Knowing it was useless to resist his heaving stomach, he let himself throw up until he felt he would split open. Once purged, he felt a little better, but he knew dry heaves would shortly follow.

  He checked on Aggie as she lay next to him at the stern of the pod, curled into a tight fetal ball. He felt her skin and sagged with relief. She was warm to the touch, her complexion back to its natural color. He tapped at her fingers and she mewed in her sleep. She hadn’t lost any sensitivity in her extremities, so frostbite was no longer a concern. She was in the deep sleep of exhaustion, not a coma as he’d feared.

  He took a second to watch her, thinking about what a remarkable woman she was. They would both be dead now without her. Her levelheadedness on the offshore rig, knowing how to operate the pumps, and being able to do so under pressure had saved them both. Mercer’s life had been saved many times by many people, but never by a woman he felt so… He shut himself off from those emotions. He couldn’t afford to have a bachelor’s catharsis now and turned to more important tasks, first tucking more blankets around her.

  The pod’s engine was purring on idle, the gauges all reading normal, and the compass bolted to the dash indicated that the boat was headed north, toward land. Mercer eased the throttles, and the life raft reacted instantly, meeting the waves more aggressively, shouldering aside the swells as best it could, a slim wake wedging out from her stern. The raft had an autopilot, which he engaged to continue them toward the northern side of the Inlet. According to his watch, they’d been in the raft for fifty minutes, giving them just a few hours to contact Andy Lindstrom at Alyeska and stop Kerikov from destroying the pipeline. While there were more towns on the Kenai Peninsula to the south, Mercer decided to head to the mainland. Landfall was significantly closer, and he hoped to find a radio or telephone at one of the many fishing camps on the Inlet.

  With the raft motoring in the proper direction and feeling moderately human again after his sleep, he investigated the storage lockers, searching through the provisions to see what, if anything, would be useful. From a medical kit he took several Triptone tablets. The anti-motion-sickness pills were most effective before the onset of symptoms, but he figured swallowing a few, if he could keep them down, wouldn’t hurt. He discovered several wool
en jumpsuits and donned one quickly, taking an extra minute to dress Aggie as she slept. She barely stirred. Behind the medkit, tucked between two flashlights, was perhaps his greatest find, an unopened bottle of whiskey. Though he didn’t recognize the label, he thanked the gods it was there. He took a heavy swallow, the spirits hitting his stomach like liquid steel poured from a crucible.

  Expecting to be sick again, he was pleasantly surprised to feel his stomach calmed by the liquor. He considered the amount of whiskey Harry White absorbed daily and realized that his friend might be on to something.

  He mopped up the water and vomit sloshing on the floor with a blanket and covered Aggie with several more, tucking them carefully around her body, running the back of his hand along her smooth cheek. God, she’s beautiful. Again he was assailed with emotions he couldn’t deal with and he turned them aside, concentrating on the reality of their current situation rather than the fantasy of any future they might have together.

  He took his position at the controls and pushed the little craft as hard as possible. As they pounded northward, he activated the automatic distress beacon, the single-ping transponder sending out a repetitive signal on an emergency frequency of 121.5 MHz. He gave a few seconds’ thought to using the radio to call for help but knew there were at least two other life rafts from the Omega making their way toward land. The last thing he wanted was to broadcast that he and Aggie had survived the capsizing of the platform. For now, they were alone, arrayed against an army and totally cut off from help.

  For the next two hours, Mercer fought the sea and his own sickness, the Saab engine under the rear cowling running flawlessly. Aggie remained unconscious during the trip, her exhaustion so complete that even the wild pitching of the escape pod could not wake her. Mercer was not so lucky. The farther they traveled, the worse his stomach reacted. For a while he tried to steer the raft with the outer hatch open to allow fresh air into the stuffy cabin, but too much water poured through the low opening.