Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  Police vehicles and Morales’s other Jeeps drew even with the bus on either side, pouring an endless stream of fire inside that was returned by McCracken to one flank and Wareagle to the other.

  “Fuck this,” Belamo said under his breath and proceeded to whipsaw the bus from side to side, playing demolition derby with the cars alongside it until he forced them both all the way off the road. “And fuck you too!” he screamed out his window.

  “Four miles, Sal!” McCracken yelled up toward the front.

  “We’ll never make it on this road!” And then Belamo spotted a turnoff just up ahead. “Like I was saying . . .”

  Belamo jerked the wheel hard to the left, sending McCracken and Wareagle banging against that side. The bus wobbled, seemed on the verge of tipping over on its underinflated tires when it found purchase on flattened gravel lining the outskirts of Juárez’s slum-dominated residential zone. Both the old and new sections of the cities appeared in the narrowing distance as animals and pedestrians alike scattered from the path of the onrushing school bus that coughed more glass with each thump and rattle.

  The chase vehicles tore after it, able to follow only in single file through the narrow winding streets, allowing McCracken and Wareagle to more easily match their firepower. Their bullets took out another Jeep, then two more federale police cars, losing a single back tire in the process and leaving the bus to thump and buck along the narrow roads. Its rear end dragged along the higher points, spitting ravaged rubber, the stench of which flooded the interior like burning sulfur as sparks flew backward.

  Sal Belamo took out several clotheslines, a picnic table, three food pushcarts, and a skate wheel platform on which a boy had balanced four jugs of water, the impact sending liquid splashing up and over the bus’s frame. McCracken and Wareagle exchanged two more empty rifles for fresh ones and opened up anew on their pursuers. Through it all, the smell of raw sewage rising from the cluttered slums that still lacked running water dominated the air, the bus drifting in and out of pockets of the stench.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me. . . .”

  McCracken swung back toward the bus’s front to see the pair of motorcycles that had spooked Sal Belamo pulling ahead of the trailing convoy and risking fire to charge forward in line with the bus. Wareagle shot one of the drivers and then the second, but not before that second managed to fire a series of rounds at the bus’s gas tank, puncturing it and sending a flood of diesel fuel spreading backward in the bus’s wake.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking, Indian?” McCracken raised, returning the fire of the lead-most chase vehicles.

  Wareagle had grabbed the second rocket launcher, the old city’s once-thriving commercial district fast approaching. They had just surged into the clutter of shops, stores, kiosks, and pushcarts when he fired—not for any vehicle, but downward for the road. The rocket skimmed the surface, shredding itself apart. The resulting friction created sufficient sparks to ignite the fuel left in the bus’s wake. Then the rocket exploded, the force of the heat wave blowing a long line of flames down the road as far as McCracken could see and consuming every vehicle in its fiery path. A final Jeep and police car emerged from the glow, their undersides aflame.

  But the flames didn’t stop there. They continued chasing the bus, igniting spilled diesel and drawing dangerously close to its ruptured tank.

  “Step on it, Sal!”

  “What the hell you think I’ve been doing?”

  Giving the bus more gas caused it to shed its ruined tire altogether, just a heavy steel rim dragging across the gravel now before Belamo felt smooth pavement beneath him. The flames were catching on the frame’s underside, when he tore across the parking lot of a car wash, scattering workers in all directions. Belamo drove into one of the bays, slamming into a car currently being bathed in jet spray water and shoving it forward as the water doused the flames in a cloud of hissing steam.

  The bus pushed the car the rest of the way from the bay, then aside, and struggled on, sputtering, the sound of the wheel dragging across pavement like fingernails down a chalkboard.

  “Next time, don’t forget the wax, Sal,” McCracken said.

  CHAPTER 7

  Juárez, Mexico

  “Bridge is dead ahead, boss!”

  Belamo never slowed, giving the old bus every bit of gas it had left. It sputtered and coughed across the last stretch of the Bridge of the Americas before grinding to a final halt with its frame straddling the US and Mexican sides of the border. Through the empty hole where the windshield had been, McCracken spotted armed United States Border Patrol agents approaching tentatively with their weapons raised. Then a roar from the Mexican side of the border made him swing round toward the bus’s rear to the sight of an angry mob brandishing all manner of weapons from rakes and baseball bats to pistols and knives, streaming toward the bridge.

  “Indian!” McCracken shouted to Wareagle, who was already easing the rescued hostages from beneath the bus’s faded and cracked seats.

  The door had jammed, so Belamo kicked it open. Wareagle helped two of the boys out and McCracken the other two, Belamo hanging back now with a pistol in one hand and a barely conscious Arturo Morales grasped by the hair with the other. At the bottom of the stairs, one of kids McCracken was hoisting collapsed, a dark swatch of red spreading along his rib cage from what looked like a bullet wound.

  “Oh, shit . . .”

  Behind them the Mexican mob had reached the far end of the Bridge of the Americas, random gunfire starting to split the air, while the armed border agents froze with no idea how to respond, protocol having been thrown out the window.

  That changed when they saw Johnny Wareagle in the lead with a boy slung over each shoulder, McCracken lagging a bit with the bleeding boy feeling heavy in his arms, and the fourth limping alongside him. Sal Belamo continued to hold tight to Morales by the hair, while clacking off rounds from his pistol back toward the surging mob. The border agents met them a dozen yards from the American side of the bridge, rifles fired into the air in the hope that would be enough to turn the mob around. Instead it only incensed them more, McCracken swinging toward Wareagle as they reached the far side of the bridge.

  “Let’s finish this, Indian.”

  “On it, Blainey.”

  In one swift, sure motion Wareagle lowered both boys to the road and stripped a hand grenade from his ammo vest. He hurled the grenade forward, arching it through the air. It hit the concrete and skittered beneath the mangled bus just as the leading edge of the mob drew almost even with the now blackened frame.

  BOOM!

  No matter how often McCracken heard that sound and the screeching twist of metal that followed, he’d never get used to it. The grenade exploded directly beneath the bus’s engine block, igniting the last of the diesel fuel clinging to the line and sending a curtain of flames and steel spreading up and out. The wall of flames and crackle of roasting metal proved enough to turn the angry mob around and send it scurrying back across the Bridge of the Americas toward the Mexican side of the border.

  “Need a medic here!” McCracken yelled out, rising from his guarded position over the bleeding boy and vaguely conscious of Sal Belamo dropping Arturo Morales at the feet of two Border Control agents.

  He saw the kid’s lids were fluttering over dimming eyes, heard him gasping for breath.

  “Goddamn it!” He tore the boy’s shirt back to expose the entry wound. “I need some help here!” he yelled out, easing his finger over the wound to stanch the steady seepage.

  But McCracken knew the real damage was likely internal, even as the kid began to thrash and writhe. His eyes suddenly bulged, terrified, his hand grasping hold of McCracken’s shirt an instant before his gaze locked sightlessly.

  “I need a medic! I need a medic!” McCracken kept repeating, holding the boy tighter in a futile attempt to comfort him.

  Welcome back, Sal Belamo had said just minutes before.

  Shadows danced around him. Hands lowered
and someone began CPR. It was the jungle all over again, the Hellfire as Johnny called it, something McCracken hardly thought of anymore while he never really stopped thinking about it. The dichotomy played itself out before him as Wareagle eased him aside, the coppery stench of blood everywhere by the time the first sirens began to wail.

  He was back, all right.

  CHAPTER 8

  Deepwater Venture, Gulf of Mexico:

  One week later

  “Attention!” a voice boomed over the public address system. “We are three hundred feet from history.”

  Then why am I so goddamn scared? Paul Basmajian asked himself.

  Basmajian, the assistant operations manager of the Deepwater Venture offshore oil rig, watched a deckhand lift the last bottle of alcohol-free champagne from one case and immediately dipped his hand into the next. It had been on ice until only minutes ago, but the blast-oven effects of the rig’s steel multilevel superstructure had already bled the cool from the bottles. Baffles and mounts rose from the main deck surface everywhere, fighting for space amid what looked to be a random assortment of stacked clutter when men like Basmajian knew quite the opposite was true. He smelled grease and paint where the deck rails had been given a fresh coat. The pungent odor of a strong industrial solvent laced the air as well, evidence of the decks being recently swabbed down. He caught the sour stench of drilling mud that was actually produced in another area of the rig to be stored in fifty-five-gallon black drums stacked on shelves reachable only by cranes that hovered over the Venture like silent sentinels. The platform was rectangular with several abutments jutting outward over the sea. One held a helipad that was currently empty, twin towering drilling derricks resting atop two more.

  “Have at it, boys,” the deckhand said, passing out the final bottles, “but no celebrating until we get to where no rig worker has ever gone before.”

  We shouldn’t be celebrating, thought Paul Basmajian, the strange sixth sense he’d experienced for the first time in Vietnam alerting him to something amiss. It felt like a cat scratching at the back of his neck and left him patting the area with his fingers as if expecting to come away with blood on the tips. He wanted, needed, this to go smoothly since he planned to take some off-rig time today to meet up with two old friends he hadn’t seen in much too long. There wasn’t much that could distract Basmajian from his work at sea, but a reunion like this has been too much to pass up.

  In a matter of minutes the Deepwater Venture’s main drill was going to reach the lowest depth ever achieved in these or any waters: just past 32,000 feet, 4,000 through water, and another 28,000 through shale and sediment. The Venture was among the largest offshore rigs ever constructed, essentially a floating, self-contained community with its own water, electricity, and sanitary systems. The first time Basmajian’s grandsons had visited the Venture they had eyed it from the sea with wide-eyed amazement, convinced it was some kind of robotic creature lifted from a video game with cranes for arms, a hydraulic drill for its head, and a pair of two-hundred-foot derricks for a body.

  To Basmajian, their critique pretty much summed it up; impressive technical specifications aside, the Venture really was a massive technological toy. In truth it was part of the deepwater subsea class of drilling rigs and the most advanced by a generation, supported by TLP. The tension leg platform was a floating production system. Tension leg platforms were buoyant production facilities vertically moored to the seafloor four thousand feet down by tendons. The buoyancy of the hull offset the weight of the platform, requiring clusters of tension legs to secure the structure to the foundation on the seabed. The foundation itself was kept stationary by piles driven into the very bottom, built that way for the TLP mooring system to allow for horizontal movement with wave disturbances, while eliminating all vertical or bobbing motions.

  That explained why TLPs were the rig of choice in the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. The four yellow support columns were air filled and formed a square, both supported and connected by pontoons. Those columns formed the top, visible part of the TLP system that kept a deepwater subsea rig like the Venture stationary and stable. Strung beneath them were multicolored, spaghetti-like strands of piping connected to the different pumps on the ocean floor.

  Today, the rig was about to make history under the stewardship of a first-generation Armenian American who’d long lost the battle to stop his belly from protruding over his belt. Basmajian had grown up in this business upon returning from a long stint in the army before anyone knew what SPF stood for, leaving his skin a leathery, spotted patchwork of sections that looked stitched together. He figured a pair of tours in Vietnam had probably ruined his complexion forever, so why bother anyway?

  “Attention! We are now two hundred feet from history!”

  But what history was that? Basmajian was well aware the coordinates of this particular location in the Gulf made no sense, because all the seismic studies, analysis, and imagery indicated there were far richer potential oil strikes elsewhere in the endless square miles of water around them. Being capable of drilling down thirty thousand feet–plus opened up a new world of options so vast that anchoring here where all research indicated a dry earth bed below continued to plague him, even with history in the offing.

  Basmajian hadn’t been involved in the scouting process aimed at building a cartoonlike animation of the seafloor to home in on the most promising potential reservoir of oils. To create this Disney-like rendering, Ocean Bore Technologies, the rig’s operator, had first deployed ships that cruised through the Gulf popping off air guns, essentially underwater cannons that bounced sound waves off subsurface rock formations. Hydrophones, sophisticated aquatic microphones really, tethered to the vessels taped the response, taking in hundreds of thousands of recordings simultaneously. These allowed the company to determine the composition and shape of the rocks below. Ocean Bore needed to use huge numbers of microphones to compensate for the distortions caused by a layer of salt as jagged as the Swiss Alps beneath the seafloor in the ultradeep regions of the Gulf.

  Once the map was assembled, Ocean Bore should have pored over the data in search of sandy layers of sediment under domelike caps of shale. These normally signified the location of a potential reservoir since oil rises through permeable sediment to the highest point it can go, collecting under unyielding shale mounds. And that’s what was bothering Basmajian here. As far as he could tell, millions of dollars spent to create a cartoon rendering that would make Walt Disney himself proud had yielded little or no evidence of those telltale sandy sediment layers.

  As assistant operations manager, Basmajian almost never left the rig in its long duration at sea, and he wasn’t ordinarily expected to be able to comprehend such sophisticated technology. But he was also no ordinary industry executive, having learned every phase of the business from the ground up, just as he’d insisted in the military on learning all facets required of the Special Forces team he was a part of. He had never expected to put all that knowledge to use, but it certainly helped him better understand the challenges the other members of his team faced. His problem was that his job as assistant operations manager left him no real recourse, no magic 800 number he could dial to get his questions answered at Ocean Bore headquarters in Houston. The only people he could talk to were those who’d commissioned the studies and planted the Deepwater Venture here in the first place.

  But if Ocean Bore wasn’t looking for oil in the deepest well ever drilled, what exactly did the company expect to find once their platinum-tipped rotary drill with fluid desanders, shale shakers, and desilters broke through the earth’s crust?

  That question wasn’t just unsettling Basmajian any longer, it was scaring him in a way he never thought he’d feel again after boarding a helicopter for the last time in Vietnam.

  The Deepwater Venture was a sixth-generation rig, nearly four hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty in width. It could operate in depths up to seventy-five hundred feet and in sustained winds of seventy kn
ots accompanied by a ten-second wave period. But field tests had shown the rig capable of also operating in hundred-knot storm winds that brought twelve-second wave periods with them—unheard of even by the most ambitious of modern standards, again thanks to its TLP system. The rig’s quarters, located on the shaded levels below the main deck, housed a hundred and fifty workers, staff, and support personnel in closet-sized spaces with fold-down cots that would’ve been nearly impossible to sleep upon had the workers not been so beat at the end of their fourteen-hour shifts. They were normally too exhausted to take advantage of the Venture’s fully equipped gym, game room, or media center.

  Those stepping off the telescopic gangway that linked the rig to barges and supply ships for the first time were immediately struck by the lack of open space on deck. Every square inch on all five levels, with the power module alone taking up a large portion of the lowermost one, was accounted for, space at such a premium that none could be wasted. That’s what amazed Basmajian about the celebration about to commence. Many of the men were separated from the next closest by distances of up to six feet and often hidden from sight by some piece of equipment or the superstructure itself.

  In the event a rapid evacuation or quick insertion was required, the rig was outfitted for not one, but two helipads perched on raised platforms that looked like trampolines from the sky. Though affixed to the superstructure, the platforms actually extended out over the water on the north and south ends, watched over by the twin massive cranes bracketing the derricks. Add to that the most sophisticated emergency escape system known to the industry, and Basmajian often mused that this was the safest place to be on the planet.

  So why didn’t he feel that way right now, with history on the verge of being made? Maybe it had something to do with the female crewmember, administrative assistant to the mostly absent operations manager, who had slipped off the rig on the same supply ship that had brought the nonalcoholic champagne earlier that morning. Security personnel confirmed she boarded the supply ship, but that carrier claimed to have no knowledge of her either being on board or exiting when they returned to port in New Orleans. Port security had proven similarly clueless.