Technicians locked the five folding rotor blades into place as soon as they cleared the ship’s rail, and Gomez fired the souped-up turbine. When he had greens across the boards, he engaged the transmission, and the big overhead rotor began to beat the sultry air. Because of her NOTAR configuration, the 520 was a much quieter and steadier helicopter as the blades reached takeoff velocities. Adams fed her more power and gave the collective a slight twist. The skids lifted off the deck, and then he goosed her hard, pulling up and away from the Oregon in a blinding climb that kept them well aft of her forest of derrick cranes.
They had to loop far to the east so that they would approach the search area from behind the Hercules. They did this for two reasons. One, they would be coming out of the rising sun, effectively making them invisible to any lookouts. Second, with the big oil platform straddling her cargo deck, the ship’s forward-mounted radar would have a huge blind spot back over her fantail. They would never see them coming.
The flight was tedious, as any flight over water tended to be. No one was in the mood for conversation. Usually there would be banter between the men, a way to alleviate the tension gripping them all, but cracking jokes while Linda Ross’s life hung in the balance wasn’t appealing to any of them. So they flew on in silence. Juan would occasionally scan the sea through his binoculars, even when they were still far outside their target area.
It was only when they were about forty miles out that he and Max started studying the ocean surface in earnest. They worked in tandem, Max looking forward and left, Cabrillo forward and right, both men sweeping the binoculars back and forth, never allowing themselves to be mesmerized by the sun glinting off the shallow waves. They were ten miles from where Cabrillo estimated the ship would be, and just shy of where the continental shelf plunges into the Palawan Trough, when Juan spotted something ahead and off to starboard. He pointed it out to Adams, and the pilot banked around slightly to keep their backs to the sun.
Cabrillo was instantly concerned. They should have found the ship by first spotting her miles-long wake and following it in. There was no wake. The Hercules was dead in the water.
It was an otherworldly sight. The ship itself was nearly twice the length of the Oregon, but what was so remarkable was the towering drill rig sitting astride her open deck. Her four legs were as big around as aboveground swimming pools. The floats beneath them, covered in red antifouling paint, cantilevered a good seventy feet over the Hercules’s rails and were the size of barges. The platform itself was easily several acres in area, far larger than Cabrillo’s initial estimate, and the distance from the deck to the top of the drill tower was more than two hundred feet. All told, the combination of ship and rig weighed in at well over a hundred thousand tons.
“What do you think?” Adams asked. Their plan was to find the rig and immediately return to the Oregon. But with her lying at idle, he was unsure.
Cabrillo wasn’t. “Get in closer. I want to check something.”
Adams dropped them lower until the skids were dancing over the waves. Unless a lookout was stationed at the fantail, they would still be pretty much invisible. It was when they were within a half mile that Juan realized the Hercules had developed a list to port. He wondered briefly if they had miscalculated the load and stopped to adjust it.
But when they came around the back of the ship, he saw heavy steel cables dangling off the superstructure’s boat deck, and the metal arches of her davits were extended. The lifeboat had been launched. At the waterline he could see roiling bubbles caused by water filling her ballast tanks and expelling air. They weren’t readjusting the load—they had abandoned ship because they were scuttling her.
15
SWING US AROUND THE OTHER SIDE,” CABRILLO CALLED urgently.
As nimbly as a dragonfly, Adams maneuvered the chopper around the heavy-lifter’s bow and along her starboard rail. Like on the opposite side of the ship, the davits were swung out and the lifeboat long gone. However, here there was no indication that the pumps had been activated. They were filling the tanks on only one side so that the Hercules would capsize under the tremendous weight of the J-61 rig.
“Get us down there as fast as you can! We have to stop those pumps.”
“Juan,” Max said, “what if they took Linda with them?”
Cabrillo called the Oregon. Hali Kasim answered right away. “Go ahead, Chairman.”
“Hali, have we received a signal from Linda’s tracker chip in the past hour or so?”
“No, and I’ve got one of my screens dedicated to her frequency.”
“Wait one.” Cabrillo flipped back to the internal helicopter comms channel. “There’s your answer, Max. She’s still aboard. Gomez, get us down there. Hali, you still with me?”
“Right here.”
“We’ve found the Hercules, but it looks like they’re scuttling her. You have our location, yes?”
“I show you eighty-two miles out at a bearing of forty-six degrees.”
“Get here as fast as you can. Bust the guts out of the Oregon, if you have to.” Juan killed the connection. “Change of plans. Gomez, put me on top of the rig, then you and Max try to find a way of disabling the pumps.”
“You’re going to look for Linda?” Hanley asked.
“If all else fails, she and I can jump for it,” Juan said, knowing that his idea was born of desperation and would probably end up killing them both.
The look of concern that flashed across Max’s face told Cabrillo that Hanley thought it was pretty dumb too. Juan shrugged as if to say, what else can we do? He accepted a walkie-talkie that Max had grabbed from an emergency cache kept under the rear seat. Max would carry its twin.
“You don’t want me to get more people from the Oregon?” Adams asked as he lifted the chopper up the towering side of the oil platform.
“I don’t want her slowing for any reason,” Cabrillo told him.
Gomez centered the helo over the landing pad. Cabrillo didn’t waste the time it would take to settle the helicopter properly. He unsnapped his harness, threw open the door, and dropped three feet to the deck, his clothes and hair battered by the rotor’s thunderous downdraft. The 520 peeled away toward the stern, where there was enough deck space to safely land.
The landing jarred Juan’s injured shoulder and sent a stab of pain through his chest. He winced and then ignored it.
At more than two hundred feet up in the air, the slight list they’d seen from the chopper was much more pronounced, and Cabrillo was forced to lean slightly to maintain his footing. He had no idea if the Oregon would arrive in time.
He looked around. It was clear the rig was old. Rust showed through faded and chipped paint. The decks were heavily stained and dented where pieces of equipment had been slammed into it by careless crane operators. There was very little in the way of loose gear sitting around. He spotted a large bin loaded with thirty-foot lengths of pipe called drill string that was threaded together under the derrick and used to bore the hole into the earth. Heavy chain dangled through the drill tower like industrial lace. To Juan, all that was missing to indicate the platform was abandoned was the cry of a coyote and a few tumbleweeds.
Cabrillo made his way to the accommodations block, a three-story cube with the ornamentation of a Soviet apartment building. All the windows on the first level were small portholes no bigger around than dinner plates. He examined the single steel door. He could see that at one time it had been chained closed. The chain was still attached through the handle, but the pad eye had been snapped off the jamb. Now crude beads of solder had been used to weld it shut. He pulled at the handle anyway, heaving until his arm ached, but it didn’t budge even a fraction of an inch.
He hadn’t taken a sidearm with him because this was supposed to be a scouting mission. He looked around for something he could use to smash a window. It took ten frustrating minutes to locate a discarded cover for an oxyacetylene tank. It was roughly the size of a grapefruit and heavy enough to shatter the glass. W
ith his one arm still in a sling, his aim was off, so it took him three tries before he could even hit the window, and that blow merely starred the shatter-resistant pane. He used the metal cover like a hammer and beat the glass out of the frame.
“Linda?” he shouted into the empty room beyond. He could see it was an antechamber where workers could strip out of their oilsoaked coveralls before making their way to their cabins. “Linda?”
His voice was swallowed by the metal walls and closed door opposite him. He bellowed. He roared. He thundered. It made no difference. His answer was silence.
“Linda!”
* * *
MAX JUMPED FROM the 520 as soon as its skids kissed the deck and ran crouched under the whirling disc of its rotors. He had two football fields to cover before he even reached the fortresslike superstructure. He knew after the first dozen steps that he was woefully out of shape. Yet he kept moving, his stout legs pumping, his arms sawing back and forth. Behind him, Gomez settled the chopper and cut the turbine.
It was only when he reached the slab-sided pontoon float that Max realized they had made a critical error. The pontoon stretched the entire width of the Hercules’s deck and was as sheer as a cliff, a vertical wall of steel nearly thirty feet tall without a ladder or handhold. The ship’s crew would need access to the aft of the vessel during transit, so he began retracing his steps, looking for a hatch.
“What’s wrong?” Adams asked. He’d ditched his flight helmet and unzipped his one-piece jumpsuit to the navel.
“There’s no way over the float. Look for an access hatch.”
The two men scoured the deck to no avail. The only way to get to the superstructure was over the oil rig’s two enormous pontoons, an impossible feat for either man.
“Okay,” Hanley said, coming up with an alternative. “Let’s get back to the chopper. There must be someplace on the superstructure where you can hover and I can jump.”
Because the engine was still hot, they were airborne a few moments later. The Hercules’s bow was a jumble of equipment and antennae, and the roof of the pilothouse was obscured by the guy wires supporting its radar mast. Gomez Adams had thousands of hours at the controls of nearly every helicopter in the world and could thread a needle with the MD 520N, but there was simply no place large and open enough for Max to safely jump. After five frantic minutes, Adams banked away.
“New plan,” Hanley announced. “Put me on top of the forwardmost pontoon.”
He climbed between the two front seats and rummaged around in the emergency kit for twenty feet of half-inch nylon rope. It wasn’t long enough, but it would have to do.
Adams edged the helo under the soaring platform and just above the rust-red pontoon, the rotordraft buffeting them from above and below. He held the 520 rock steady with its skids just inches above the pontoon so that Max merely had to step out of the craft and onto the rig itself. Gomez pulled away once again and settled the chopper onto the fantail. He throttled down the Rolls-Royce turbine but didn’t cut it completely.
As soon as he was down, Max tied off one end of the rope to a support bracket near the rig’s stout leg and tossed the other end over the side. It hung a good fifteen feet from the deck of the Hercules . He groaned.
“I’m getting too old for this stuff.”
He maneuvered until his legs dangled over the pontoon and slowly lowered himself down the rope, clutching tightly with his thighs because he feared his belly was more of a load than his arms could take. When he reached the rope’s end, he simply let go.
The deck slammed into his feet, compressing every vertebra in his spine and sending electric jolts of pain throughout his body. He hadn’t rolled properly, and that mistake cost him a thrown back. He strung together a run-on sentence of expletives the likes of which he hadn’t uttered since his days in Vietnam.
Slowly getting to his feet, he shuffled toward the rear of the superstructure. But where others would collapse in pain, Max gutted it out, moving like an old man but moving nevertheless.
“How are you coming down there?” The question was tinny and indistinct. Then he remembered the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.
He raised it to his lips. “I threw my damned back out, but I’m almost to the superstructure. How about you?”
“The door to the accommodations block is welded shut,” Cabrillo replied. “I busted out a window and yelled for Linda, but I got nothing back.”
“Can you crawl through?”
“No, it’s just a small porthole. I’m looking around now for another way in. This thing’s built tighter than a castle.”
“Some rescue team we are, huh?”
“We’ll get her back,” Cabrillo said with utter certainty.
Max continued on, a fist pressed to his lower back to ease some of the pain. The superstructure was painted in a dull white that showed the ship’s hard years of operation. Corrosion ate at the metal in places, leaving behind rust streaks that drizzled down her plating. There were two hatches giving access to the interior spaces, and when Hanley reached the first one, he found that it had been locked from the inside. He tried pulling on the handle harder.
The second door was also battened down. He looked up. A catwalk ran the width of the building-sized superstructure, but it was twenty feet above him. Farther up on the bridge deck was a second walkway, and above that loomed two squared-off funnels covered in soot. There were no windows, and no way to access anything forward. Max was trapped, and he had noticed since they’d landed that the Hercules’s list had noticeably steepened.
* * *
CABRILLO WALKED AROUND the accommodations block, searching for any way inside. Two sides of it abutted the edges of the rig and were nothing more than open grilles over the water, with handrails at waist height. There were two more doors, but each was locked from the inside.
Staring up the blank sides of the structure, he saw that a pulley had been rigged in order to fly a flag off an aerial that rose ten feet above the roof. The metal cord was badly abraded and fraying, but it just might work.
He opened the turnbuckle that converted the wire into a continuous loop and looked around for something to tie off one end. A half-full drum sat a short distance away. Able to use only one hand, he took several minutes to walk it closer to the pulley. He lost more precious time tying off an end of the wire around the middle of the barrel. If the knot failed, he’d probably break his neck, so it had to be perfect.
Then he made a one-foot loop in the other end of the wire. The hardest part was wrestling the metal drum onto its side. He had to get down low and press with his back and legs, straining to tip the barrel until it crashed over with a sloshing clang. He slipped his foot through the loop and pushed the barrel so it was parallel with the rig’s deepening incline.
For a few seconds, his weight was enough to keep him anchored to the ground, so he put his other foot against the barrel and gave it a shove. Gravity did the rest. The drum started rolling across the deck, and, as it did, the wire went through the pulley, and Cabrillo made a stately ascent up the side of the building, his foot in the loop, his good hand clutching the line. He made it to the roof in just a couple of seconds and nimbly jumped clear. The loop jammed in the pulley, arresting the barrel’s journey across the deck.
The top of the block was a maze of looping vents and commercial-grade air handlers. It took Cabrillo a few minutes to figure out which trunk lines went into the building and which were the returns. When he knew which one he wanted, he flicked open a pocketknife. It was an Emerson CQC (Close Quarters Combat) that Linc had turned him on to.
Rather than mess around with the tarred screws securing the two-foot-square ducts, Juan plunged the blade straight through the metal and hacked open a big enough hole like he was slicing paper. There wasn’t a mark on the blade when he was done.
He crawled into the duct, mindful of his aching shoulder, and slithered forward until he came to an elbow that bent down through the roof. The insides of the duct were coated
in a thick layer of dust that clouded around his head with every movement and forced him to sneeze hard enough that he banged his head. Just enough light leaked through the opening and around his body for him to see that the duct dropped away four feet and then bent in another ninety-degree corner.
He muscled his way back out of the duct and reentered it feet-first. When he got to the elbow, he flipped onto his stomach and eased himself over the edge, his shoulder screaming in protest. He felt with his toes until he touched the bottom of the duct and then shifted his weight entirely. The metal popped and echoed as it adjusted.
A minute later he was lying prone in the lower section of duct-work, grinning to himself when he saw light up ahead. He pushed with his feet until he was over a ceiling vent that was easily large enough to crawl through. He’d assumed he’d have to cut his way out of the air-conditioning system. Instead, he pounded out the grille with his heel, oozed his way into the opening, and allowed himself to drop to the floor of the oil worker’s cabin. The room had a single porthole overlooking the ocean and an iron bed frame without a mattress. Whatever else had been in here had been removed long ago.
He stepped out into a hallway beyond, calling Linda’s name as he searched thirty identical rooms and a large space in the middle of the building that had been a rec center or conference room. It was nothing now but bare walls, linoleum floors, and fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling.
The stairwell to the next level down was pitch-black. He pulled a halogen penlight from his pocket and rotated the bezel until it threw a tight shaft of light.
“Linda,” he called when he cleared the stairwell. His voice echoed and crashed back like he had entered a massive space. The air carried the lingering effects of an ozone tang. It smelled of old electronics and burned wire.
He could tell right away that the room had been extensively modified. The dropped ceiling had been removed as well as all the partition walls. The windows had been blacked out, and additional vents in the form of silver collapsible tubes rose up another stairwell and snaked across the floor. What drew Cabrillo’s attention, though, was what else had been added. Floor-to-ceiling racks in tight rows filled the entire space, and on them were rank upon rank of powerful-looking computers, all linked into one massive parallel processor. There had to be ten thousand or more machines all working as a single computer. The amount of processing power boggled the mind. It probably rivaled that of a large university or even NASA. The extra ductwork was to dissipate the heat buildup created when the machines were in operation.
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