Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  Right after 9/11, Seceretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld told a group of journalists, who wanted to know how such a thing could have happened, that our entire nuclear arsenal had been of no use to us. This was a different sort of war and different ways of defense were needed. Problem was, no one had figured that out yet.

  FIFTY

  McGarvey and Gail spent a couple of hours poking around the rig, checking the two satellite dishes on the roof of the control center, access to which was ridiculously easy, either through a pair of corridors and up one flight of stairs or outside up stairs attached to the side of the superstructure like fire escapes. And getting to the legs beneath the lowest deck was nearly as simple. The platform was just too big and too complicated to easily defend, nor had it been designed to withstand an attack.

  Standing at the south edge of the main deck, looking at the massive oceangoing tug, Tony Ryan, Gail brought up her earlier point. “What about the tug’s crew? At the first sign of trouble up here, her skipper is going to call for help. And it’s going to get hell of lot more complicated when Schlagel’s people show up in force.”

  “There’ll be a lot of confusion,” McGarvey said. The huge cable harness connecting the tug to Vanessa was slack. But when the platform was actually under tow a tremendous strain would be taken up and any small boat that happened to stray anywhere near would be in serious trouble. If something like that were to happen, especially late at night, or very early in the morning before dawn, it wouldn’t matter what was going on aboard the rig, the tug’s crew would be engaged in a rescue operation.

  “Do you think Schlagel is a part of this?”

  McGarvey had considered it, and there were plenty of reasons for such an alliance to be possible, chief among them the reverend’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in two years. He was, in his own words: “The architect of the new back-to-fundamentals program that made this country great in the first place.”

  “I don’t think he or his people would be so stupid to be a part of the attack, but they’d make great witnesses. When this platform went to the bottom he’d be able to say ‘I told you so.’”

  Gail looked at him, a wry expression on her lips. “You don’t watch enough television to know how popular Schlagel has become since Hutchinson Island. People are frightened that things are going to be taken away from them by a power or powers they can’t understand. Everyone’s afraid of nuclear war and yet rich corporations want to keep building nuclear power plants. It’s tough enough as it is to make a decent living, yet the same corporations give their CEOs multimillion-dollar bonuses. It’s obscene. Gas prices keep going up, health care costs are bankrupting the country, but nothing is being done. Essentially it’s the lobbyists who’re running everything. And we’re selling our souls to the Saudis for oil and sending all of our manufacturing jobs to China.”

  “It’s the world we live in,” McGarvey said, not meaning to sound as callous as that. But it was the truth.

  “Yes, and it’s a world that we made,” Gail said passionately. “We’re either a part of the problem or a part of the solution, and our hands aren’t clean, Kirk.”

  “Mine especially,” McGarvey said, a flood of dark memories overtaking him. He looked at her. “But we’re not going to turn away from this. The Coast Guard’s not along for the ride because no one wants to piss off big oil, especially the Saudis and the rest of OPEC, and no one wants to get in the way of the handful of heavy hitters making big money with derivative funds and credit default swaps.”

  “They buy the lobbyists.”

  “That’s only a part of it. These people fund armies, insurgents, soldiers for God, al-Quaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, al Muhajiroun, Jamat e-Islami. The list goes on. Nuclear research in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. We’re in a war, and have been since the eighties, and certainly since Nine/eleven. Not about religious freedom, not about territory, but about oil and money and power. And the jury’s still out.”

  “We’ll end up a second-class country,” Gail said bleakly.

  “It’s certainly possible, unless we can give the Eve Larsens of the world the time to change the tide.”

  They had dinner in the practically deserted mess hall one level up from the main deck. Oil rigs were usually worked around the clock, and the kitchen was always open. Oil men in general had large appetites, and when they were hungry they expected to be fed. None of Eve’s people were there. “It’s not just the Eve Larsens, it’s the nuclear people, too,” Gail said. “There’re thirty applications for new generating stations, and even if every one of them were to be approved today not one kilowatt of power would be produced for at least ten years, and probably longer.”

  “We can’t wait that long.”

  “I worked at Hutchinson Island long enough to understand that we’re facing a crisis right now, and no one knows exactly what to do about it. Everything’s so fabulously expensive that it’s almost impossible to make any sort of a decision for fear of losing billions of dollars.”

  “If Schlagel gets his way, and it looks like he might, nukes will be out. Which brings us back to Eve Larsen’s project.”

  “We can’t let it fail,” Gail said with some passion. She did not want to be on the losing end of an operation twice in a row. “But it makes you wonder about Washington, and what sort of collusions are going on.”

  Have always been going on, McGarvey wanted to say, but he didn’t.

  * * *

  Schlagel’s God’s Flotilla, as Fox News was dubbing it, started arriving at the platform just after dawn. At first only a pair of shrimp boats, but by eight in the morning dozens of boats, some of them as large as the 120-foot ex-Japanese fish factory ship now named the Pascagoula Trader , refitted three years ago, according to Rencke, as a private yacht belonging to the Reverend Wilfred Sampson, head of the Mississippi-Alabama Baptist Alliance. A small Bell Jet Ranger helicopter was tied down on an afterdeck.

  The media was scheduled to arrive aboard an InterOil chopper from Biloxi at noon, something apparently whoever was in charge of the flotilla knew, because the boats merely circled the platform and its tug, giving both a wide berth, making no attempt to interfere or create a problem. That wouldn’t happen until the cameras were pointed in their direction. Schlagel’s machine was slick and professional.

  McGarvey and Gail had walked over to the superstructure that housed Eve Larsen’s lab and operations center and stood outside on one of the lower-level balconies just above the main deck to watch the gathering fleet, still more boats showing up on the northern horizon.

  “Your lady scientist knew this was going to happen, but seeing it now like this can’t make her very happy,” Gail said. “She won’t be able to ignore us.”

  “It’s not so much her, she came to me for help in the first place. It’s her assistant, Don Price. He’s in love with her.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gail said. “And you’re her Sir Galahad who’s come to rain on his parade.”

  “Might be more than that,” McGarvey said. Rencke had vetted Eve’s people too, and they’d all cleared with flying colors, including Price who held two Ph.D.s, one from M.I.T. in ocean science and engineering and the other from Princeton in oceanography. His paper on the origins of the Gulf Stream and how it controlled climate was, according to Otto, nothing short of stunning, groundbreaking.

  “The guy’s probably an asshole,” Rencke had reported after Oslo. “But he’s a smart asshole and from what I can tell one hundred percent devoted to Larsen and her project, even though he could have had his own lab and funding by now.”

  “What does he want?” McGarvey had asked. He’d been fishing, because he had nothing solid to go on, only intuition.

  “Reflected glory,” Rencke was quick to suggest. “His boss got the Nobel Prize and he was the number two man on her team. Part of the credit goes to him. Pretty good paragraph on a résumé.”

  McGarvey still wasn’t sure about Price, but it was nothing he could
put his finger on. No solid reason for mistrust, only mutual dislike.

  “Let’s go up and introduce you and let them know how we’re going to handle today and the rest of the trip,” McGarvey said, and he started to turn toward the door, but Gail put a hand on his arm.

  “I just had a thought,” she said. “All these media types, unless they’re just kids, are going to know your face, and they’re going to want to know why you’re aboard, right?”

  “So what?”

  “No use advertising why you’re here. You went up against Schlagel’s people in New York, and you were there in Oslo, so if your name pops up again he’ll probably think you’ve targeted him. But our contractor will know better. So why don’t we keep you in reserve, as a sort of a nasty surprise?”

  “I want to see exactly what the media people are shown, and I want to know if any of them takes a particular interest in anything, especially the communications equipment and the legs.”

  “I can do that,” Gail said. “Otherwise why did you bring me along? Let me earn my pay.”

  It was penance for her self-perceived failure at Hutchinson Island. But she had a point, and McGarvey conceded it. “You’ll stay in the rear, but use the EQ, I want to know everything.”

  “I’ll save you some champagne,” she said, and she glanced toward the door to the corridor and the stairs up to the control room. “Do you want to introduce me now, or should it wait until we’re under way?”

  But it was difficult for him. He’d lost some good people in the past, Lundgren at Hutchinson Island, and his family, so that it was hard to let go, hard not to be in the middle of things, in charge, calling the shots. And a part of him, because of his age he supposed and his upbringing by strict fundamentalist parents on the western Kansas plain, made him chauvinistic at times. His first instinct was almost always to open the door for a woman, take her coat, hold her chair, pick up the dinner check. Go into harm’s way first.

  “Later,” he told her. “There won’t be any trouble this soon. When it comes it’ll be farther out in the Gulf and it’ll be late at night or early in the morning before dawn. But watch yourself.”

  Gail glanced at her watch. “We have a couple of hours, what do you want to do?”

  “I want you to find Defloria and tell him that you’re going to tag along on the tour, and in the meantime I’m going to check on something.”

  “Anything I should see, too?”

  “I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and he turned and headed back along the corridor to the stairs that led to the lower levels of the platform.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Kirk McGarvey was cut from a different material than any other man Eve Larsen had ever met, and yet there’d been the brief moment in New York and again in Oslo, where she thought that she’d known him all of her life. In several ways she’d been reminded of her father’s strength and unshakable self-assurance that what he was doing, that the direction his life was leading, was correct. And yet, like her father who’d understood his place as a low-paid mill worker, and had accepted his lot in life, even though he didn’t like it, there was a sadness in McGarvey’s eyes that Eve was familiar and even comfortable with.

  Standing at one of the large plate-glass windows looking down at the flotilla — Schlagel’s flotilla — that had started gathering three hours ago, she thought about him, and wondered where he was and why he hadn’t warned her. He’d come aboard yesterday but she’d been too busy, too excited, even a little overwhelmed by the progress they were making to take much notice until this very moment.

  “They’re buffoons,” Don said at her side.

  She looked at him. “Enough of them to easily take over this platform. Even Kirk and whomever he brought with him wouldn’t be able to stop them.”

  Don glared at her. “Those fools out there don’t intend to hurt us. They’re making their stupid mumbojumbo fundamentalist points by calling us names. And the only reason they came out here this morning is because of the news conference. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the networks tipped them off. The bastard is gathering sound bites, and once the TV guys are gone, the mob will head home, and we can finally get underway.”

  She wanted to believe it was that simple. But the incident in Oslo had deeply shaken her, and made her wonder how the situation might have turned out if McGarvey hadn’t been there. Jacobsen, who would recover, had taken the bullet for her, but it was McGarvey’s fast action, pushing her down to the walkway and covering her body with his, that may have saved her life.

  “The man’s a magnet for trouble,” Don said as if he’d read her mind. “I looked him up online, what little there is that makes any sense involves him in at least a half-dozen incidents in which there was a shooting, and in one case the car bomb a few years ago in Georgetown. Yet he was actually picked to head the CIA — which proved what I’ve always said about Washington — and we had Nine/eleven.”

  “There were larger issues than just one man,” Eve argued. She was no politician, though it was something she would have to become if her project really did blossom after the Vanessa Explorer experiment, because she was going to need funding — government funding on a very large scale. And neither was Don, politically savvy, even if he believed otherwise. But she felt a surge of affection for him, because he was just trying to be worldly for her sake. An arm around her shoulder to assure her that everything would turn out all right.

  The rig’s interphone buzzed, and Josh Taylor, a gangly grad-school tech from the U.P. Michigan, picked it up. He was working on his doctoral thesis, under Eve’s supervision, on saline variations in the Gulf Stream and their effects on energy distribution among eddy currents compared with industrial- and farm-produced dust concentrations in the atmosphere and their effects on low-pressure systems in the prevailing westerlies across the North American continent. He held up the phone. “For you, Eve.”

  “Anyway, he’s been a help to me,” Eve told Don. “So try to be at least civil to him, okay?”

  He managed a brief smile. “You’re the boss,” he said. But it looked like he was angry or maybe just as frightened as she wanted to be, but trying to hide it.

  Defloria was on the phone. “The helicopter is twenty minutes out.”

  “Any last-minute no-shows?” Eve asked.

  “No such luck, Doctor. And you can bet that the first questions they’re going to ask won’t be about your work, but about the circus outside.”

  “I’m starting to get used to it, but I’ll depend on you to answer their questions about the platform.”

  “No problem,” Defloria said. “The reception area has been set up on the main deck in front of the housing superstructure. The wind shifted, so we had to switch sides. We can start and end there, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Just fine,” Eve said. “I’ll need about ten or fifteen minutes for my opening remarks and initial questions and then we can either come directly up here, or head below.”

  “We’ll start at the top and work our way down,” Defloria said. “See you on deck in about fifteen minutes?”

  “Yes,” Eve said. “Have you seen Mr. McGarvey this morning?”

  “No. Would you like me to find him for you?”

  “Not necessary,” Eve said a little too quickly, and when she hung up she saw Don looking at her.

  * * *

  Defloria’s people had set up two dozen folding chairs facing a small podium equipped with a portable PA system out of the wind in the lee of housing. All work aboard the rig, except for normal maintenance, had been suspended for the afternoon, and the platform was eerily quiet so that when Eve came out on deck she heard the heavy chop of the incoming InterOil helicopter from Gulfport.

  She had decided to change into clean white coveralls rather than a blazer and the khaki slacks she’d worn for her presentations despite Don’s objections.

  “You’re a good-looking woman. People appreciate it.”

  “I’m a scientist, not a Rockette,” she’d countere
d, and now glancing up at the control-room windows, she saw her techs watching her, but Don wasn’t with them, and she was a little disappointed.

  Defloria came out of a hatch with a slightly built and attractive woman and they walked over to where Eve was standing next to the podium. “Don’t think you’ve met,” he said, introducing her as Kirk McGarvey’s partner at the NNSA. “Ms. Newby will be tagging along for the tour.”

  They shook hands and Eve got the distinct impression that the woman was carrying a chip on her shoulder; she seemed to be angry about something, but was keeping it just beneath the surface. Her smile was forced.

  “I don’t think we have,” Gail said. “But Kirk has certainly told me a lot about you.”

  “All of it good, I hope,” Eve said in an effort to keep it light. “Will he be joining us?”

  “No, Doctor, it’ll just be me. And as far as the media is concerned I’m just one of Mr. Defloria’s gofers.”

  “Are you expecting trouble?” Eve asked, but instead of letting her off the hook Gail merely shrugged.

  And approaching the platform from the northwest, the InterOil helicopter flared above the landing pad, and they watched as it touched down. Several of Defloria’s people were up there to meet the media people, hand them hard hats, and then guide them down to the corridor that led across the rear of the platform.

  “Do you want me to introduce you?” Defloria asked.

  “No need,” Eve said, and although she’d done dozens of these things she was still nervous, her Nobel and the UAEIBC funding notwithstanding. Thankfully this would be her last media event until the Hutchinson Island experiment either succeeded or failed. “The damn thing works,” Don’s comment aboard the Big G had become the team’s mantra, and a comfort just now because she felt a little unbalanced that Kirk wouldn’t be here. She needed him, and although she knew that she was being irrational about it, she was vexed that he hadn’t felt it, hadn’t read her mind.