The Ark tl-1

by Boyd Morrison

  “Can you isolate the problem? I was messaging someone and got cut off.”

  Hobson paused. More tapping. “The software checks out. Maybe it’s a mechanical problem. Might be the satellite dish. I’ll have to call someone to look at it.”

  “I can do that for you.” Locke was awake now and eager to get the rest of the story from Aiden, so he thought he might as well get some air.

  “You know where it is?”

  “Yeah, Grant and I were working on it a couple of days ago when we were trying to diagnose that electrical problem. If it looks like an electrical glitch, I’ll haul Grant out of bed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  Locke hung up, stood, and stretched. He threw on his jeans and jacket and headed outside.

  The night air was crisp, and the ever-present smell of oil flowed over him with the breeze. Even this late, workers roamed the rig, oil production being a 24-hour job. Visibility was limited to 30 feet. The screech of some sort of grinding tool pierced his ears every few seconds.

  Locke stepped onto the catwalk that led to the top of the habitat module, where the satellite dish was located. Ahead of him, barely visible through the haze, Locke could make out the figure of a man dressed in a black jumpsuit disappearing into the mist toward the lifeboat evacuation stairs. He had something slung over his shoulder, but Locke couldn’t make out what it was before he was gone. Maybe he had already fixed the dish. Locke called out twice, but the man didn’t respond. Must not have heard him over the grinding noise.

  Locke reached the stairs and climbed up to the antenna cluster that formed Scotia One’s communications link. The satellite dish was about six-feet across, pointed at a geosynchronous satellite, and the radio antenna was 30-feet tall, with plenty of power to reach St. John’s 200 miles away. Neither was damaged.

  He trailed the wires leading from the dish, and an iciness knotted his stomach when he saw the problem. The wires had been cut and a section removed. Whoever had done it was skilled. Locke followed the wires from the radio mast and found the same thing. The wires ended in a control box, which had been smashed. Someone didn’t want them in touch with the outside world.

  Locke could think of a few reasons why someone would go to that trouble, and none of them had a happy ending. He rushed down to the control room and burst through the door, startling Hobson, the only man inside it. His thick glasses magnified his eyes to a cartoonish size.

  “We have an emergency,” Locke said curtly. “Someone cut the wires to the antennas and destroyed the control junction.”

  Hobson leaped out of his chair. “What? Who would do that?”

  “Get Finn and tell him there’s an intruder on the platform.”

  “An intruder?” Hobson said, recoiling at the thought.

  “I saw him a few minutes ago. At the time I just thought he was just a rig worker wearing an outfit I hadn’t seen before, a black jumpsuit.” The intruder must have known it wouldn’t take much time for the crew to discover the destroyed equipment, which meant he wasn’t going to be on board much longer. Locke had to catch him before he got away, and for that he needed Grant’s help. For all Locke knew, there were multiple intruders, and they were heavily armed. That notion disturbed Locke, but it would terrify Hobson, so he didn’t mention it.

  “How could anyone get on board?” Hobson asked.

  “Maybe he climbed up. Doesn’t matter. Before you call Finn, get Grant Westfield and tell him to meet me at the lifeboats. Quietly. You know his cabin number?”

  Hobson nodded. “Should I activate the alarm?”

  “No. That’ll tip off the intruder that we know he’s here.” Locke needed to find out why this guy would want to cut off their communications. He wished he could get his hands on a gun, but an oil platform was the last place that they would let him bring his trusty 9mm Glock, and they certainly didn’t stock shotguns on board.

  He had to hope he and Grant would be able to handle the situation. In a battle, Locke preferred staggering force against an overmatched opponent. If there were two armed intruders, he and Grant could handle it. They had been up against worse odds than that before. But if there were three or more, they could have real problems, so some kind of weapon might make a difference.

  Hobson snatched up the phone and dialed. Locke went to the door, but before leaving, he said, “Frank, tell Grant to stop at the tool room and pick up two big, fat wrenches.”

  ELEVEN

  Locke crept down the stairs until the lifeboats were in view. He felt naked. No gun. No situational intelligence. No plan. Although he could improvise with the best of them, he’d rather put together a well-thought-out plan of attack that — like all Army operations — went to hell after the mission started. Instead, he’d already skipped to the second part, which made the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention.

  Through the fog, he saw the man in the black jumpsuit hunched over the hatch of the rightmost lifeboat, attaching to something to it. He was in his thirties, dirty blond, medium build, no visible tattoos. A silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun hung from his shoulder by a strap. He seemed to be alone. Visibility was now over 30 feet, and lot of open space separated him from Locke. It would be almost impossible to sneak up on him.

  Locke felt a tap on his shoulder. Fists up, he whirled around to find Grant crouching behind him. For a big man, he was as light on his feet as Fred Astaire. Locke was glad Grant was on his side.

  Grant was carrying two heavy pipe wrenches, both two feet long. Big enough to be good weapons, but not so large that they’d be unwieldy. Good man. Grant handed one to Locke, who rested it on his shoulder.

  Bad guy, Locke signed to Grant using American Sign Language. We need a distraction.

  What did you have in mind? Grant signed back.

  Locke’s grandmother was deaf and had taught him ASL soon after he learned to talk. When he joined his combat engineering unit, Locke saw how useful it could be in situations requiring stealth and added it to their normal repertoire of tactical hand gestures. Grant had picked it up quickly.

  I just need a few seconds, Locke signed. Get around to the other staircase and act like you’re talking to someone. At least he now had a plan. Not the most elegant plan, but the intruder wouldn’t expect that he’d been discovered, so it should work.

  Give me 30 seconds, Grant signed and went back upstairs. Locke got a firm grip on the wrench.

  The intruder finished his task at the lifeboats and moved to the railing, where Locke for the first time saw a claw hooked to the side of the rig. The intruder started to climb over the railing, then stopped. Locke heard Grant stomp down the stairs, his voice animatedly raised in some nonexistent argument. So did the intruder, who turned to see who was coming.

  He looked at the railing again as if considering whether he could make a quick getaway. Then he looked back at the staircase and seemed to decide against it. The submachine gun came off his shoulder and pointed in Grant’s direction. He raised the weapon to his eye and waited. With the intruder’s attention distracted, Locke saw his chance.

  He padded down the stairs, careful not to make a sound, and tiptoed up to the intruder. When he was still six feet behind the intruder, Locke raised the wrench over his head, but he hadn’t thought to tighten its jaw. The loose mechanism rattled with an audible clink. Locke froze, but it was too late. His plan had already gone to hell.

  The intruder spun around. Locke, his surprise attack up in smoke, rushed him. The intruder pulled the trigger as he swung the gun toward Locke, intending to cut him down in a scythe of bullets. Nine-millimeter ammunition ricocheted off the surrounding metal. Shell casings rattled off the grating. Locke was close enough to smell the gunpowder puffing through the silencer’s baffles.

  Before the intruder could get the barrel of the gun all the way around, Locke parried with the wrench. The muzzle was so close to his head that he could feel the hot gases singe his hair. Even silenced, the gun was roaring like a jac
khammer in his ear; without the silencer, Locke would have been deaf for a week.

  Locke knocked the gun aside. The intruder lost his grip, and it dangled from his shoulder. Locke tried to grab it, but it dropped to the grating. The intruder kicked it, and it fell over the side to the sea below.

  So far, the encounter had lasted all of three seconds. Grant by now had raced to help Locke. With the wrench, he swung at the intruder from behind, but the man saw Grant at the last second and ducked to take the impact with his left shoulder. That move alone told Locke the intruder was something special, probably ex-military, but it didn’t keep the bone from cracking. The intruder howled with pain.

  The force of Grant’s hit threw both the intruder and Locke to the railing. The intruder’s right hand dropped to his side and retrieved something from his pocket. Locke expected a knife or a pistol, but the intruder held a cylinder with a button on the end. A detonator.

  Before Locke or Grant could wrestle it from him, the intruder pushed the button. Bright flames gushed on the hatches of the four remaining lifeboats. Locke and Grant tackled him to the catwalk grating and wrapped their arms over their heads to shield themselves from the heat. The intruder struggled, but Grant put an end to that with an elbow to the gut. After a few seconds, the flames died down.

  They pinned down the intruder’s arms and legs, but he no longer resisted.

  “Who are you?” Locke demanded. “What are you doing here?”

  Despite the pain, the intruder smiled. “God only knows.” Then he bit down hard.

  “Poison!” Grant yelled. He jerked the intruder’s mouth open and pulled out the capsule, but it was too late. In seconds, the man was dead. Cyanide.

  In the sudden silence, Locke heard a motor revving below them. He went to the railing but couldn’t see the boat, which sounded like a Zodiac, speed away. Locke noted that it was in the direction of the yacht he had seen earlier.

  Grant wasn’t breathing hard like Locke was, but he could see the fire in Grant’s eyes. His friend was juiced.

  “What the hell is going on?” Grant said.

  Locke shook his head. “Don’t know. But whatever it is, we better find out quick. I don’t think what he came here to do is finished yet. You search him. I’ll take a look at the lifeboats.”

  Locke kept his distance as he inspected the damage. The hinges and latches on all of the lifeboats were still glowing, melted shut by an incendiary, probably Thermate-TH3. There was no way to get into them now. From a professional standpoint, Locke admired the guy’s work. Fast, efficient, effective. On a personal level, Locke wanted to wring his neck, not only for wrecking the lifeboats, but for killing himself before answering Locke’s questions.

  “Why go to all this trouble to disable the lifeboats?” Locke said.

  “I think I know why,” Grant said. “Quick. You need to look at this.”

  Locke turned and saw Grant holding a large plastic case.

  “What is it?” Locke said.

  Grant opened it. The inside of the case was lined with foam. There were three slots in the foam. All three were empty.

  “Smell,” Grant said, holding it up. Locke sniffed the foam insert. He recognized the smell immediately. The chemical DMNB and a hint of motor oil. The odor reminded him of his Army days. His stomach did a somersault. Suddenly the cheeseburger wasn’t sitting so well any more.

  “At least now we know,” he said.

  “Think they used timers?” Grant asked, his customary humor gone. So was Locke’s.

  He nodded. “Got to. Remote detonators would be too unreliable and might be set off by equipment on board the rig.”

  If the intruder had used timers, he would want to make sure he was off the platform before…

  Locke reached down and picked up the dead man’s wrist. As he feared, the intruder’s digital watch was counting down.

  “We’ve got exactly thirteen minutes left to find them,” Locke said, synchronizing his own watch.

  DMNB and motor oil were the volatile components of composition C-4, a plastic explosive manufactured in the US and used by the military. Somewhere on the oil platform, the dead intruder had planted three bombs.

  TWELVE

  Leaving the dead intruder behind, Locke and Grant bolted for the control room. Locke couldn’t help sneaking a few peeks at the timer ticking inexorably down on his watch. He almost tripped during one glance, which reminded him that he hadn’t disarmed a bomb since his Army service. When they did find the bombs, one stupid little mistake like that, one moment’s distraction, and he’d be wouldn’t have time to say “oops” before he was blown into tiny pieces. He had to stay focused.

  In the control room, they found Finn badgering Hobson, who had his head turned to avoid the spittle showering his face. When Finn saw them enter, he let up on Hobson and shouted at Locke.

  “What’s all this about the antenna wires being cut, Locke? And what’s going on with the lifeboats?”

  “The lifeboats are crippled,” Locke said. He looked at the watch again. “We’ve now got exactly 12 minutes and 25 seconds to find three bombs somewhere on this rig.”

  Finn nearly tore his hair out. “Bombs? Are you serious?” Locke could sympathize. First a helicopter crash, now this, all in one day. It was a ridiculous coincidence. Then it hit him. It wasn’t a coincidence at all. This was about Dilara. Someone wanted her dead, just like she’d claimed, and now Locke felt like an idiot for not believing her.

  “There’s a corpse on the lifeboat deck,” Grant said. “That serious enough for you?” He showed Finn the backpack he’d taken from the intruder and pointed to the three empty slots in the case.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Finn said, his face drained of color. He turned to Locke. “Okay. You’re the bomb expert. What do we do?”

  The weight of responsibility came crashing down on Locke’s shoulders, but the Army didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars training him to be a Captain for nothing. They got their money’s worth. He took a deep breath. Precision, calm, decisiveness.

  “First,” he said, “muster everyone to the safety block.” The safety block, located under the helicopter pad, was the last-ditch safe haven for those who couldn’t make it to the lifeboats. It had blast resistant walls and a separate air feed.

  “Done,” Finn said and slammed his hand on a huge red button. Three short horn blasts blared across the rig, followed by the sound of a woman’s voice.

  “This is not a drill. Proceed to the safety block on deck seven. This is not a drill.”

  “Second,” Locke said, “close the sea line valves.”

  “I’m not authorized to do that unless there’s a fire,” Finn said.

  “In a few minutes, there will be unless we find those bombs.”

  Locke could see Finn mentally weighing the consequences of taking that action. Closing the valves that controlled the flow of oil from all of the rig’s well heads to the ocean-floor pipeline was a major decision. It would take days to start production again once they were closed.

  “You’re sure there are bombs?” Finn asked.

  “Positive,” Locke said. He had detonated and defused so many explosives in his life that the smell of C-4 was as recognizable to him as antiseptic was to a doctor. “And you don’t want to find out the hard way that I’m good at my job.” Another glance at his watch. “We’re at 11 minutes and 45 seconds.”

  Finn reluctantly nodded at Hobson. Hobson punched the emergency stop button, which shut off the sea line valves.

  “They’re shut down,” Hobson said, “but we’re still getting gas from Scotia Two. With the radio down, we can’t reach them to tell them to shut it off.” Scotia Two was One’s sister platform 20 miles to the north. Natural gas from Two was fed through One and then on to the pipeline to the coast.

  Now Locke understood why the intruder had first put communications out of action. It would not only make any rescue calls impossible to send, but it would also make them unable to notify Scotia
Two to shut off the gas supply. Any fires that were started by the explosions would be fed by three tons of natural gas per minute, reducing the entire rig to slag.

  The disabled lifeboats were the crucial part of the intruder’s plan. He wanted to make sure no one would survive. Anyone who didn’t die in the initial blasts or resulting fires would be killed by the fall overboard or of hypothermia in the cold North Atlantic. It would look like an accident to investigators when it was all over.

  The intruder knew exactly how to destroy the oil platform so that every single person on board would die, and Locke realized he might have stumbled into some luck. Knowing the intruder’s goal might be the key to finding the bombs before they detonated.

  “This platform is huge,” Finn said. “How can we possibly find three bombs in less than twelve minutes?”

  Locke didn’t respond. Time slowed as he tried to put himself in the head of someone wanting to destroy Scotia One. It was something he had done many times in the Army when he was looking for improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Try to think like the enemy. Where would Locke put the bombs if this were his demolition mission?

  Another glance. 11 minutes and 10 seconds.

  “Okay,” Locke said. “All we have time for is a targeted search. We’ll take walkie-talkies. Grant, you check the Scotia Two gas line, starting with the main valve. If that guy knew that we couldn’t shut down Two’s feed, that would be the best place to start a fire. Finn, the second one is probably at the pumping machinery for the firefighting system. He’d want to disable that at the same time.”

  “What about the third bomb?” Grant said.

  “I’ll take the safety block. If I wanted to kill everyone on board, that’s where I’d put it.”

  “But I just sent everyone there!” Finn yelled.

  “If the third bomb isn’t there, that’s the safest place on the rig. If it is there, it won’t matter where people go.”