They had been so absorbed that they were the last off the airplane, carrying only small shoulder bags with notes, drawings, and specification lists, plus small video cameras, because their visit to the rig would only be for a couple of hours. Afterwards they were flying directly back to Princeton to gather and brief the same eleven techs who’d been with them on the Big G, and who would be installing and testing their scientific gear on the way down the Gulf.
A very large man, even taller and huskier than Bob Krantz, was waiting for them in the baggage claim and car rentals hall. Dressed in khaki slacks, a light blue business shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker with InterOil’s logo, a four-pointed star on the breast, he was the most serious-looking man Eve had ever seen. And he did not seem pleased to see them.
“Doctor Larsen, Doctor Price, welcome to Biloxi,” he said, his voice deep-pitched and southern. They shook hands. “I’m Justin Defloria, Vanessa Explorer’s OIM — offshore installation manager. I’ll be running the rig for you across the Gulf.”
“We’re happy to be here,” Eve said. “Can you take us out there now, or do we need to be briefed first?”
“I have a helicopter standing by over at the general aviation terminal. Vanessa is about twenty-five miles offshore, so the flight out takes about twenty minutes, plenty of time for me to go over a couple of things. We’ve pulled most of the exploration and pumping equipment off, and we’ve already started work on getting her ready for your people and their gear, plus the tow. But a lot is going on, and a rig in this kind of transition can be a dangerous environment.”
“Have there been any accidents?” Don asked.
“Not yet,” Defloria said tersely. “As I understand it you have a flight to catch this evening, so if you’ll follow me we’ll get started.”
Outside they got into a big Cadillac Escalade SUV and Defloria drove them around to the general aviation terminal where a very large Sikorsky S-61N helicopter capable of carrying thirty passengers plus two pilots was warming up on the tarmac. The machine looked old and banged up, the paint on its fuselage deeply pitted and the interior shabby, most of the upholstered seats worn and dirty. But Defloria didn’t seem to notice, nor did the pilot who lifted off as soon as the hatch was closed and everyone was buckled in.
The chopper swung around to the west as it gained altitude, and once over Highway 49, it headed south over the port of Gulfport, across the Mississippi Sound and the barrier islands, and they were out over the open Gulf of Mexico, nothing but water dotted with ships and farther out to the horizon what looked like the edge of a forest of oil rigs.
It was noisy in the helicopter, but once the pilot throttled back to cruising speed of 120 knots, they were able to talk.
“Do you have a timetable?” Eve asked Defloria.
“That depends somewhat on you, Doctor,” he said. “And the tolerance level of your people.”
“Tolerance for what?”
“Discomfort,” the rig manager replied, baiting her as so many men did.
“We’ll manage as long as we have something to eat, a place to sleep, bathroom facilities, and space to install our monitoring equipment as well as the cable heads for the four impellers.” She smiled. “Hopefully you won’t have us camped out on deck in tents.”
“No, but we’d ask that your scientists and technicians remain below decks as much of the time as feasible. There’ll be a lot of welding and cutting, mostly getting rid of the last of the oil exploration systems and structures, and even a hard hat wouldn’t be much protection if a fifty-pound piece of steel girder fell on someone’s head.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Eve said. “Besides Dr. Price and myself, I’m bringing a crew of eleven people, all of them accustomed to working while at sea.”
“Will you need separate dormitories?”
And Eve smiled inwardly. The man was old-school southern, maybe even a gentleman ordered to do a disagreeable job, but he was concerned that he could provide propriety and decorum aboard the rig. “That won’t be necessary, though separate showers would be nice.”
“I think if you can give me until you return from Oslo, the rig will be ready for your people to come aboard and we can start the tow.”
That was more than a month out and Eve was brought up against the simple fact that she would have to actually travel to Norway to pick up the Prize, which meant more dealing with the media, rounds of cocktails parties and dinners, that just about every Nobel laureate before her had detested. She’d gone online and looked up something of the frenetic ceremonies that led up to the presentation at Oslo’s city hall, and then had put all of that out of her mind until this moment. To her the Prize had become a separate thing from the ceremony. And although she’d endured the half-dozen news conferences in Washington and Princeton, she hadn’t enjoyed them. They’d interfered with her work. And Oslo would be the biggest intrusion of all.
She’d tried to explain something of her discomfort to Don, but he’d laughed at her.
“You know what you’re doing, of course,” he’d said.
They were in the computer lab on a CAD program with Vanessa Explorer’s blueprints up on the big tabletop monitor. “What do you mean?”
He was exasperated with her. “For Christ’s sake, Eve, you’ve won the goddamned Nobel Prize and it sounds like you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
She wanted to smile just then, she wanted to laugh but she shook her head. “I’m frightened,” she admitted.
“Of what?” Don had practically shouted.
They were alone in the lab, otherwise she wouldn’t have said anything. “I might be wrong.”
For a moment Don had been struck dumb. But he too shook his head. “Trust the data, isn’t that what you’ve been telling us all along, drumming it into our heads? But look for the anomalies, the errors will show up in the odd bits. But we’ve seen nothing like that.”
* * *
Just after three, Defloria pointed out the rig standing by itself, its nearest neighbor at least ten miles away. Two barges were tied up alongside, and as they approached from the southeast a crane on the platform’s main deck swung out over one of the barges and lowered a section of steel as big around as an oil barrel and perhaps twenty feet long. As they got closer Eve could pick out workmen on deck dressed in dark coveralls with white hard hats. She counted at least a dozen, and at various other parts on the rig, above and below the main deck, points of light from cutting torches were bright even in the daylight.
From a quarter mile out the rig looked like nothing more than a pile of rusted-out junk in someone’s backyard pond, nothing like the blueprints, and especially not the photographs InterOil had sent her to study, and her heart sunk a little. Discomfort, indeed.
“She’s a semisubmersible rig, which means when she’s in position her four legs are lowed to a depth of fifty meters and partially filled with ballast water to keep her stable,” Defloria said. “If the sea gets up we can pump out some of the ballast water to raise the level of the main deck above the highest waves.”
“Wouldn’t that make it less stable?” Eve asked.
“If it gets too bad we evacuate the rig,” Defloria conceded “But understand that this isn’t the same as a North Sea platform where it’s always rough. And its primary use was for exploration, not product extraction.”
“What about hurricanes?”
“Every rig — no matter how large — is evacuated. Most survive, tattered but afloat; still we lost two during Katrina. Expensive hardware.”
“Once we get to the other coast how do we keep her in place?”
“For the short term we can use dynamic positioning, a lot like bow and stern thrusters on a ship. For the long term she’ll be anchored to the seabed.”
Don had taken out his video camera and was recording images as the helicopter pilot came in just above the level of the main deck and slowly circled the platform until he flared and touched down on the landing pad at the opposite corner from the crane.
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Now that they were actually aboard, and seeing the rig up close, not from a quarter mile out, Eve was even more disappointed in its condition, but excited too. Some rust and trash wouldn’t detract from the real technology that was going to happen from this piece of equipment. And the real science of actually modifying the planet’s weather for the good.
“We’ll make this work,” she said, mostly for her own benefit.
“Is the Ping-Pong table still aboard?” Don asked.
“It’s still here, along with the pool table and a pretty good library — mostly of video games,” Defloria said.
“Princeton cafeteria food is horrible, any chance of hiring your chef?”
“One of our catering staffs will come aboard, and we’ll even stock the pantry. At some point we’ll contract your project manager to find out if any of your people have any special dietary needs.”
Eve was surprised again and it showed.
“This will be a turnkey operation for your people until we get you settled off Hutchinson Island,” Defloria said. “At that point you’ll need to hire an OIM and a half-dozen other platform crew plus your own stewards, and I’m assuming electrical engineers. Once there InterOil will turn the operation over to you.”
“We may need help finding the right people,” Don said.
“In this job climate the word will spread. You’ll have no problem.”
* * *
Defloria handed Eve and Don hard hats before the chopper’s hatch was opened and they stepped out onto the deck, and instantly Eve was struck by the sheer volume of noise — whining cutting tools, heavy pieces of metal clanging against each other, other tools that sounded like jackhammers and buzz saws and drills, plus the waves against the four buoyancy control legs, the wind that had gotten up to at least twenty-five knots, and men shouting, and here and there the sounds of music, mostly country and western, blaring from boom boxes.
Another impression that struck her the moment her feet hit the deck was the size of the platform. This was no 225-foot research ship; the platform measured more than 600 feet from the bases of the fully extended legs to the helicopter deck, and during drilling or exploration operations the drilling towers, which had already been partially dismantled and barged to shore, might rise another 200 feet. Bigger than a football field, the platform’s three decks were crammed with living and working structures, stacked like some fantastic building blocks at one end of the platform, while gigantic tanks and hundreds of miles of color-coded piping and electrical cables snaked in and around an incomprehensible maze of individual pedestals, rising sometimes from the main deck and in other places from one of the lower decks, which held pieces of machinery, some that looked like pumps, others that looked like electrical generators and still others whose purpose Eve could only guess.
And everywhere, it seemed, rough-looking men were working at what seemed at first to Eve to be a measured, even indolently slow pace, until she realized that they were simply being careful. This indeed was a dangerous place.
“By the time your people come aboard we’ll be finished with all the heavy lifting,” Defloria said, and he had to shout. He led them down steep metal stairs and through a hatch into a corridor that seemed to run the width of the platform. Suddenly they were out of most of the noise, though the clatter of metal on metal rang out as if they were inside a giant bell.
“Is it always this noisy?” Eve asked.
“Sometimes worse during a drilling operation. But it shouldn’t be as bad when your crew are aboard, though I don’t know what noise level your impellers and gensets will transmit up the cables.”
“There wasn’t much noise aboard the Gordon Gunther. ”
“Those were small impellers by comparison to the ones you’ll be testing from this platform. You might want to ask GE’s chief project engineer to study the issue. Probably come up with some damping mechanism.”
Eve hadn’t thought of it, and she admitted as much to Defloria, who nodded.
“Engineering and science aren’t always on the same page.”
“We learned that on the Big G ,” Don said.
“Yes, I expect you did,” Defloria said.
At the far end of the pipe- and cable-lined corridor, Defloria led them through another hatch and up five flights of stairs to a large space with wraparound windows and consoles and empty racks that had once contained the electronic equipment for oil exploration activities. They were at the highest point on the rig, not counting the drilling derricks, and the view was spectacular. From here they could see just about everything happening on the main deck, and out to sea other platforms on the horizon as well as ship traffic.
“This was the chief geologist’s work space,” Defloria explained. “He and his people directed operations from here, and I think it will suit your purposes.”
“During the research phase,” Eve said, the rig in not as bad a shape in her mind as before. This would work.
“What about the housekeeping infrastructure?” Don asked.
“Everything will be up and running by the time your people come aboard. Right now one of the electrical generators is online, while the second unit is being overhauled. The desalination system, which provides fresh water, is just about on its last legs, but it’ll be as good as new within the week. We’re waiting for some spare parts from the mainland.”
“From the mainland?” Eve asked.
“You live and work on these things long enough you get to think of them as islands, versus the mainland where you get your supplies and take your vacations.”
“What about waste disposal?” Don asked, and Eve was glad he was being the practical thinker just now.
“Normally these rigs have sewage processing plants, but we’ve dismantled the system on this platform, too much wrong with it. For now we’re storing our wastewater in tanks that normally would be used for oil storage. Lot of capacity. Once a week it’s pumped into a small tanker and sent ashore. It’s something you’ll have to consider once you get to Florida, though with only a dozen people aboard you won’t generate very much.”
“How about bunks, linens, towels, stuff like that?”
“Your people will have to bring their personal items, of course, but InterOil will supply everything else — as we do aboard all of our platforms.”
“Where will you go afterwards?” Eve asked, suddenly curious about the man who would be in charge of getting her rig to Florida.
“An exploration platform in the Arctic, once we get permission from Canada.”
“You’d rather be there now.”
Defloria laughed humorlessly. “I’m an InterOil employee, Dr. Larsen. I do what the company tells me to do.”
“Fair enough,” Eve said.
“Would you like to see the rest of the rig?”
“Just our living quarters and then you can take us back to the airport.”
THIRTY
The day after the Reverend Schlagel’s fire-and-brimstone speech about Eve Larsen and her God Project and her Nobel Prize, Billy Jenkins, thirty-four, and Terrence Langsdorf, thirty-two, had gathered a few things from their bungalow in McPherson and headed east. Driving nonstop, except to gas up, grab sandwiches and coffee, and make pit stops, they made it to Princeton’s Forrestal campus at eleven the next evening in a high state of excitement and agitation.
“God’s meth formula,” the reverend had said once, referring to his sermons. “A natural high for the work of the just.”
Terry had downloaded a map that pinpointed the GFDL building and Dr. Larsen’s office and lab. And they hoped with all their might that the bitch would be there, working late, so that they would have the blessed opportunity to teach her the real meaning of finding Jesus in your heart; the real meaning of salvation.
McPherson was simply not proactive enough for Billy or Terry, especially not for Billy who’d done three years as an Indiana Army National Guard at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The reverend’s sermons were exciting, no doubt about it, but
that wasn’t enough for either man who’d worked the antiabortion Christian circuit for three years, blowing up abortion clinics, and coming within inches of killing one of the hateful, baby-killing doctors, at which time they had to go deep. Upper Peninsula Michigan at first, then Montana, and finally McPherson.
God had been talking to Billy since he was eight years old in Indianapolis. He supposed it was a defense mechanism against his drunken father who started physically and sexually abusing him about that time, and his mother who cared more about the soap operas on television and gin and tonics then her son’s well-being. But talking with God made him feel good about himself. If Jesus had been able to stand His betrayal and mock trial and torture and the horrible march up Calvary Hill hauling that terrible heavy cross and the crown of thorns and the crucifixion and even the wound in His side not to mention the nails — spikes actually — in His hands and feet, then Billy Jenkins could put up with a little abuse. Because, like Jesus, he figured that one day he too would be resurrected and take his rightful place at the right hand of God Almighty, though sometimes he got a little confused in which order and just where those blessed events might take place.
Terry was just about of the same mind, because he’d come from a very similar background, except that his drunken abusive fathers were the ones he’d encountered on his journey through the Georgia foster home system, and his military service was with the regular army in Afghanistan. He’d received an other than honorable discharge for the use of excessive force against civilian targets. Even his gung ho platoon sergeant compared it to what his old man had told him about a place in Nam called Mai Lai. He’d met Billy on the antiabortion circuit and the two had gone to ground together. Billy was called Bo Peep because wherever he went Terry was sure to follow.
Billy backed into a slot in the rear of the lab, only a few lights showing in the three-story building, and only a handful of cars in the lot. They’d spotted no campus security or local pigs and the ten-year-old Volvo they were driving fit right in.
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