Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  But there were no other sounds, and McGarvey approached the doorway with caution, careful not to step in the blood, and he looked inside. The control room was deserted, the SSB radios had been destroyed, leaving only a short-range VHF unit intact, exactly what he’d hoped to find.

  He stepped inside, sweeping the Franchi left to right, when Wyner stepped out from a dark corner. The merc was badly wounded, and barely able to stand, blood frothing from a hole in his chest. He held a small pistol, what McGarvey recognized as a 5 .45 mm Soviet-made PSM semiautomatic, but his aim kept wavering, as if simply holding the weapon was at the extreme limit of his strength.

  “The son of a bitch left me,” he croaked.

  “He left all of you,” McGarvey said. “It was his plan from the beginning.”

  “We’re sinking. Why the hell did you come back? You can’t call for help, we shot the radios all to hell.”

  “Not the VHF,” McGarvey said, his shotgun steady. “I need to call the tug, tell them to back off.”

  Wyner shook his head. “They’re all dead. Tug’s on autopilot.”

  It was a possibility McGarvey had considered. If this had been his operation it’s exactly what he would have done.

  A small, sharp explosion went off below on the main deck, and Wyner looked toward the window. “She made it,” he said, a touch of admiration in his ragged voice, and he had to hold on to the port radar cabinet to remain standing. “Tough broad. Knows what she’s doing.” He turned to look at McGarvey and he let the pistol drop to the deck. “Get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.”

  “I’ll take you out of here, maybe you can make a plea bargain,” McGarvey said. “We’ll want to find DeCamp and you can help.”

  Wyner shook his head again. “Even if I survived, which you and I both know is impossible without medical help right now, there’s no way in hell I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

  “Why?” McGarvey asked, even though he knew the answer.

  “I’m a merc because it’s what I do. How about you? You’ve killed a fair share this evening.”

  “It’s what I do,” McGarvey said.

  Wyner smiled. “Too bad you’re on the wrong side,” he said. “We could have used you.” He crumpled to the deck, and before McGarvey could reach him his breathing stopped.

  The rig slipped a few feet to the right, as if it were an airliner suddenly hitting a downdraft, but then it stabilized, but at a greater angle of list.

  McGarvey first made sure that Gail had gotten Eve’s people out of the pipe locker and was hustling them below to the lifeboats, then he switched the VHF radio to channel sixteen, the calling and emergency frequency. “Any vessel hearing my voice, I’m aboard the Vanessa Explorer. We’ve have casualties and we are abandoning the rig. Please relay a Mayday for us.”

  “Vanessa Explorer, this is Holy Girl , we copy. The Mayday has been sent. Coast Guard Tampa has advised they are sending the helo out along with a cutter. We’re standing by to take on your survivors.”

  “Thank you,” McGarvey said. “You’ve won. Shut off your horns and whistles.”

  Another voice came on. “Not until that godless abomination is on the bottom, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Oh, yes, we know you. And your harlot. We pulled her out of the water, like a dead fish.”

  “Mr. McGarvey, this is the Holy Girl. No harm will come to Dr. Larsen, or any of your people. We’ll take you aboard from your lifeboats. But I suggest you get clear as quickly as possible.”

  “Have Dr. Larsen ready to be transferred to our lifeboats,” McGarvey said. “We don’t want to interfere with your celebration because of the people who lost their lives tonight. We’ll wait for the Coast Guard.”

  “You don’t understand,” the man said, but McGarvey had already turned and was out in the corridor, racing for the lifeboat deck.

  SIXTY-NINE

  As the lifeboat approached the fifty-foot twin flybridge cruiser Holy Girl out of Mobile, Alabama, McGarvey stood up above the open hatch and waved at Eve who was at the stern, a blanket over her shoulders. She waved back.

  All eleven of the survivors from Eve’s team were aboard one of the motorized lifeboats. They were frightened and elated and sad and subdued all at the same time, some of them looking back at the spectacle of the badly listing oil exploration platform.

  “You’re all welcome aboard,” a short, squat man in jeans, a polo shirt, and a captain’s cap called across. “Plenty of room.”

  “Thanks for pulling me out of the water,” Eve told him. “But I’d prefer to be with my friends.”

  One of the young techs heard her voice and she jumped up. “My God, it’s Eve!” she shrieked

  The Holy Girl ’s skipper gave her a sad look and shook his head ruefully. He glanced up at the bridge where some of his people were watching. “Frankly we’d just as soon not have you aboard. You’re a godless woman who has no conception of the terror your science is about to unleash on the world. And we’re dedicated — I’m dedicated — to seeing you fail.”

  Eve pointed toward Vanessa Explorer. “Including damaging property that’s not yours? Including killing innocent people? Is that what your god tells you to do?”

  The skipper was stricken. “No, we did no harm. We hurt no one.”

  “But you stood by and let it happen!”

  “We didn’t know!”

  “The helicopter that brought over our attackers, the one from which I had to jump to save my life, was off one of your boats!”

  “We didn’t know what was going on. I swear—”

  “You swear to whom?” Eve spat. “Your kind, loving god? Because if that’s the case, you’ve got to be talking to a different god than the one I was raised with in Birmingham.”

  She took off the blanket, tossed it in the skipper’s face, and jumped down into the lifeboat.

  “You’ll rot in hell,” the skipper said.

  “That’s funny, because from my perspective that’s where all of you and your reverend Schlagel already are! Hanging right over the abyss.”

  Gail was operating the lifeboat, and as the techs swarmed around Eve, McGarvey motioned for her to head out to the tug. The engines needed to be shut down before the deeply listing platform was pulled apart because of the stress.

  At one point all of them stopped and stared with Eve at Vanessa, and she glanced at McGarvey and Gail and then back at the rig. “What a terrible waste.”

  “Maybe it can still be salvaged,” McGarvey said.

  Eve shook her head. “I meant all the people, Defloria and Lapides and the men who worked for them. For us.”

  “And Lisa,” one of the techs said. “She never came back.”

  “And Don,” someone else said, sobbing. “He was helping them.”

  An infinite weariness seemed to come over Eve, as if she were on the verge of collapse, as if she could not go on, as if she could no longer see the necessity of going on. “From the start,” she said. “Maybe aboard the Big G. ” And she began to cry.

  McGarvey put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not going to leave you,” he promised. “Not until you’re set up and in business in the Gulf Stream.”

  SEVENTY

  DeCamp had been flying for a little more than an hour at full throttle less than fifty feet from the surface when he spotted the Cuban gunboat stopped in the water off to the starboard where he expected it to be. He’d been running without lights, but he flashed them twice, and when the Cubans responded in kind he throttled back and made a wide, lazy circle around the ship.

  They were in international waters here, about sixty miles northeast of the western tip of Cuba, just far enough away from the Yucatán Channel busy with ships coming from or heading to the Panama Canal to be relatively safe from detection. And the fact that the Cubans had shown up as promised, meant they’d not been illuminated by the radar of an
y American warship.

  As he came to within one hundred yards of the gunboat a small launch headed out to meet him. He unlatched the door, shut down the engines, and released the blades so that they would autorotate. The helicopter immediately lost most of its lift and settled toward the surface of the water, DeCamp carefully maneuvering the collective and cyclic pitch to keep the machine on an even keel so that the tips of its rotors would not hit first and tear the machine apart. It was one of the hardest skills he’d had to learn in the Buffalo Battalion.

  The landing gear touched and the machine settled, water pouring through the hatch, when the rotors hit the surface and came to a stop after only another half turn.

  DeCamp climbed out and swam directly away until he was well out of range as the helicopter settled onto its port side and submerged within a few seconds.

  Five minutes later he was scrambling up the gunboat’s boarding ladder to the deck where a smiling Captain Rodriguez was waiting for him, and they shook hands. “A skillful landing, señor.”

  “Anything on radar?”

  “Nothing of any importance within one hundred and fifty kilometers,” the Cuban said. “But come to my quarters where I have dry clothing and a good cognac, and I can tell you what news we have been picking up on the radio.”

  “Did it sink?” DeCamp asked.

  “Not yet, but it is heavily damaged and in immediate danger of capsizing,” Rodriguez said, no need to ask if that was DeCamp’s mission. “So let’s celebrate at least a partial success, shall we?”

  McGarvey, the single name crystallized in DeCamp’s mind, as he followed the Cuban below decks, and he began to turn over the mechanics of three possibilities open to him: revenge, disappearance, or both.

  That Night

  They had been standing off from the flotilla waiting for Vanessa to capsize, expecting it to, not quite believing that its list had stopped increasing and there was just an off chance that it might be saved, when the Coast Guard showed up. First one of the helos out of Saint Petersburg and then the 110-foot cutter Ocracoke. McGarvey had gone aboard, leaving Eve terrified that he had lied to her. But Gail had remained and she had been a comfort to them all, her hand steady, her words kind, her confidence infectious. “We’ve survived the worst of it,” she’d said. “We’re safe now.”

  This was a major crime scene, and the Coast Guard had taken over, ordering the flotilla to stand well off, and most of the boats had simply turned around and headed home, but the horns and whistles kept up in a sort of angry triumph, because the bodies aboard the Pascagoula Trader had been found. People aboard the oil rig had died, but God’s flotilla had suffered its own casualties for a righteous cause, which in a lot of minds evened the score.

  A couple of hours before dawn the Carnival Cruise Line ship Inspiration on its way back to Tampa from Cozumel had stopped at the Coast Guard’s request to take on survivors. One of her motorized launches had been dispatched and Eve, Gail, and the others had been transferred from the lifeboat to a boarding hatch just above the cruise ship’s waterline. Passengers had gotten up from bed, and in their pajamas lined the rail to stare at the unfolding drama, flash cameras pointed at Vanessa like so many fireflies on a warm summer evening. Under ordinary circumstances Eve would have been irritated by the lack of sensitivity, but she was tired and strung out, and anyway the passengers taking the pictures had no idea of the carnage. They had never met Lisa, and they hadn’t known Don, like she thought she had.

  The crew gave her a pair of white coveralls and sneakers that fit reasonably well, and when they found out who she was, the captain had come down to the ship’s clinic to personally welcome her and the others aboard. They were only a few hours out of Tampa, but they were put up in some nice cabins, Eve and Gail in one of the first-class suites and urged by the doctor to at least try to get some rest.

  He’d offered them a sedative, but Eve had refused, and lying in bed alone with her thoughts, listening to one side of Gail’s sat phone conversation in the sitting room with McGarvey, still working with the Coast Guard on scene, she wondered if her refusal had been such a good idea after all.

  She was having a lot of trouble, for some reason, seeing an image of Don’s face in her head, or to remember what his voice sounded like or feel his arms around her. But she could remember the times he’d been there for her, his steady presence, his precise work; he was a better mathematician than her, and she thought he’d been proud to check her calculations, especially so when he told her that she’d been spot-on, no errors.

  But it had all been a horrible mistake on her part, and she felt like a complete fool. She had failed as completely, probably even more so, with Don than she had with her husband, father, and brothers.

  And with Kirk, she thought, hearing Gail say his name.

  But her science was sound, despite what Don had said to her on Vanessa. And if the rig could be salvaged, which McGarvey had told her was a real possibility, and if she could somehow come up with the money for the salvage operation, and if she could stay out of Schlagel’s sights long enough to get back on track, the damn thing might work.

  Nor could she dredge up Lisa’s face or hear her voice, though she could remember some of the kid’s quips, calling Eve the boss lady, slave driver, or taskmaster, and it bothered her tremendously. It was as if all the lights that had brightened her work had gone out of her head, leaving her with nothing but the cold, hard calculations of her theories, and she was more afraid that she was losing, not her mind, but her interest, her enthusiasm. Which after all, she reminded herself, was all she’d ever really had since she’d fully understood that her family in Birmingham genuinely did not like her. In fact they had been afraid of her, as had the kids and the teachers in school.

  She thought about Krantz and what he would say to her when she got back to Washington. NOAA was just another governmental agency that could be and often had been swayed by public opinion. It was more than possible that Schlagel’s followers could do just that, especially after their partial triumph in the Gulf. They would be calling the incident God’s will, and it made her skin crawl.

  But it hadn’t been the hand of some God-directed group of terrorists or whatever they were, that had come aboard Vanessa, killed her crew and attempted to destroy the platform and send it to the bottom. They were men, according to Kirk, who did such things for a fee; it’s what they did for a living. Someone had paid them to destroy Vanessa and stop work on the project. Not Schlagel, but someone with a strong financial purpose, for whom Eve’s work was a threat.

  Gail came to the partially open door and knocked softly. “Eve?”

  “I’m awake,” Eve said, sitting up and switching on the bedside lamp.

  “Kirk wants to talk to you,” Gail said, coming and handing the sat phone she’d borrowed from one of the officers to Eve. She smiled and went back out.

  “Hello?”

  “How are you doing?” McGarvey asked.

  “I’ve been better,” Eve said. “I don’t have any idea what comes next, though.”

  “InterOil is sending out a salvage crew, and the Coast Guard people say that it looks like the rig can be repaired.”

  “Back to fund-raising,” Eve said with a little measure of bitterness, though she knew that she should be grateful.

  “The company is picking up the tab,” McGarvey said. “It may take a little longer than you wanted, but your rig will make it to Hutchinson Island.”

  “How?” was all Eve could think to ask.

  “Something about towing a spare leg structure out here, filling it with water so that it can be positioned under the rig and then slowly pumping the water out so that it’ll rise up into the correct position.”

  “They’re smarter than me,” Eve said, and she could hear Stefanato holding his own against Don and the other eggheads.

  “Me, too,” McGarvey said.

  “When will I see you?”

  “Not for a bit, but I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.” />
  Eve suddenly panicked. “What if he comes after us again?”

  “That’s what I’m going to try to prevent. But Gail will hang around to see that you’re okay. She’s good at what she does.”

  “Yes, I think that you’re right,” Eve said. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Not a chance, Doc, you’ve got work to do,” McGarvey told her. “And besides, the media is already all over this thing. The Nobel laureate versus the preacher’s flock. You’ll have a reception committee when you get to Tampa, so I suggest you try to get a couple hours of sleep.”

  “It doesn’t seem real to me. None of it.”

  Later the Same Day

  Anne Marie’s hand shook as she set down her teacup, Parkinson’s the first thought in her head, absolutely terrifying her, all the more because she’d been expecting the first symptoms for years. It was a fear she’d harbored in secret — in secret most of the time even from herself — since a couple of months after she’d buried her father and had lunch with Bob Calhoun, the old man’s longtime personal physician and friend.

  They’d met at the downtown Boston Harvard Club on his suggestion, a bright sunny fall day, Anne Marie’s hedge fund roaring along at the start of the dot-com buildup, the world completely her oyster, and she’d simply not been prepared for what he’d had to say to her.

  “You’ll need to watch for the symptoms, of course,” he’d told her after their second martini and after they’d ordered the boeuf bourguignon.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Calhoun was an old man on the verge of retirement from his GP practice and he gave Anne Marie a patient smile. “Do you know why your father chose to end his own life?”

  “Business reverses.”

  “He was losing his shirt, he and I talked about it. But it wasn’t the real reason he decided to go out that way. He had developed Parkinson’s and he was damned if he was going to end up some doddering old son of a bitch strapped to a wheelchair and drooling. ‘I’m not going to spend my last days with a bedpan strapped to my ass so I won’t shit in my pants,’ his exact words.”