by Jon Land
Landsdale did but was of no mind to repeat it.
“‘Energy Is Power.’ Perfectly fitting, don’t you think? And your green energy is now part of my power. Seventy-five percent of current market value. Yes or no?”
Landsdale started to nod, but stopped.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Mr. Pierce is waiting with the paperwork for you to sign. Leave here without final execution and I’ll bankrupt you instead. Your choice.”
There was a buzz, and Roy moved to an intercom built into a wall of the lavish chamber.
“I told you not to interrupt me,” he said.
“We have the latest report from the Gulf, Mr. Roy,” Pierce reported. “You need to hear it. Immediately.”
Roy detected the undercurrent of excitement in Pierce’s voice, restrained but undeniable. “Fine. Mr. Landsdale and I were just finishing up, weren’t we, Mr. Landsdale?”
Landsdale just stood there, watching Roy from across the room.
“Weren’t we, Mr. Landsdale?” Roy repeated. “Why don’t I give you that Minoan jar you found so captivating as a token of our mutually beneficial dealings? The simplest item in my collection to remind you of how simple life is when it’s reduced to a single choice.”
Landsdale stiffened. “I don’t want anything from you.”
“How about a pen to sign the paperwork? It shouldn’t take too long and then you can be on your way back to your simple, pedestrian life. When you die, no one will even remember your name while mine will be part of everyone’s life when they flip a switch, turn on a burner, or fire up the furnace.” Roy steadied himself with a deep breath, that sound wet and labored. “Leave me now. Our business is done. Mr. Pierce is waiting.”
Landsdale started for the door.
“Pierce,” Roy said toward the speakerphone, “Mr. Landsdale is ready to sign the paperwork. Please make sure it’s ready for him. Then come in here and tell me what happened in the Gulf.”
PART TWO:
THE STORM
CHAPTER 25
Deepwater Venture
The last few yards were the worst, McCracken stiffening at the uncertainty of exactly what his feet were going to touch down upon. He could feel the increasing winds buffeting him and billowing his hazmat suit. He’d expected his descent to be greeted by any number of noxious odors, from the residue of whatever had transpired here if nothing else. But McCracken smelled nothing through his soft helmet’s respirator, and that was strange indeed, because there should have been something.
The main deck of the Deepwater Venture looked like a football-field-sized platform riddled with debris. McCracken thought again of his boyhood Erector set rendered unrecognizable. Nothing was left standing, from the derricks that had once spiraled toward the sky, to the bridge and command center, cranes, and storage tanks that had housed water and propane. An offshore oil rig was like a submarine in that space was at a premium, none to be wasted. The clutter that defined the deck in normal circumstances had turned into a serpentine junk pile of unrecognizable elements, as if the component pieces of the Venture had been dumped into a blender on high and then poured back out. The only objects to survive whole—a helicopter, some emergency evacuation rafts and life pods, and a forklift—were floating in the waters around the rig itself. McCracken had yet to view the damage on the sublevels, identical in design to the main deck but each constructed with a different set of tasks in mind, including storage and housing for the crew. Ultimately, the efforts of more than a hundred crewmembers spread among all levels combined on massive subsea deepwater rigs like the Venture to create a constant din of energy and activity.
But not today.
The latest generation of subsea rigs like the Venture boasted four massive floating leglike support columns. From a distance the columns looked more like monstrous pillars rising out of the water. Segments of multicolored piping descended from the support legs, all still intact according to the Coast Guard’s report.
McCracken had been around danger more than enough times to know it carried its own signature, something that alerted the most primordial segments of the brain to a threat so instinct could lay in the proper defensive measures. But no such signature seemed in evidence here, as if that had been sucked out of the very air along with any scents. He felt a profound eeriness intensified by the fact that at the very least there should be bodies in evidence. Yet there were none, the crew having vanished into some unknown ether.
Thunk.
McCracken’s pliable hazmat boots touched down as his eyes were still sweeping the deck, trying to make sense of the sights that up close defied it even more. He unbuckled the harness and watched the winch hoist it back up, then flexed his knees as if to make sure the world was solid beneath him. He’d wait for Johnny Wareagle to be winched down before making any other additional survey. His thoughts turned to Paul Basmajian being among the victims of whatever had happened here and the heightened edge he felt vanished, replaced by the grim awareness of loss and somber realization that someone would have to pay.
Because in McCracken’s experience, nothing ever just happened.
A heavy gust of wind shook the platform, storm clouds now growing thicker to the south and east, as McCracken reached up to steady Wareagle’s legs for the last of his descent.
“Welcome to the party, Indian,” he said after Wareagle had touched down, his words echoing inside his helmet.
Captain Merch tossed them a wave from the Bell 430, which then banked in the air and soared away toward the Coast Guard cutter Nero that was now cruising the perimeter where it would wait until the time came to extract them.
“Something here you need to see, Blainey,” Wareagle was saying.
He knelt down and ran a gloved hand about the steel surface of the deck. McCracken mimicked his motions, his hand feeling uneven patches along the steel that felt flat underfoot.
“You gonna tell me evil spirits did this, I’m ready to listen.”
“Not quite. But the steel’s ridged, not bubbled,” Wareagle reported.
“Explain.”
“Bubbling steel would require temperatures of, oh, say a thousand degrees or so. These ridges tell me it actually melted and re-formed. That would take temperatures of several thousand.”
McCracken looked at his friend skeptically. “You saw the satellite imagery. No melting we could detect and the only time the rig wasn’t visible was in that mist cloud, or whatever it was.”
“You’re missing the point, Blainey. Steel would take much longer than that to re-form and harden anyway.”
“I’m not missing it, I just didn’t consider it. There was no reason to, since the satellite images were mere seconds apart.”
“How many seconds was it again?”
“Six, I think.”
Wareagle just looked at him.
“You’re suggesting the steel melted and re-formed in six seconds?”
“Or less.”
McCracken studied Wareagle’s expression, trying to see on it what he wasn’t saying out loud. “What is it, Johnny? What do you feel?”
Wareagle seemed to be sniffing the air, watching everything around him at the same time. “We’re not alone, Blainey.”
“Indian?”
“There’s something still alive here.”
“Not that I can see.”
Wareagle rotated his eyes around the deck, the foreboding and concern on his expression visible even through his faceplate. “That’s the problem.”
CHAPTER 26
Deepwater Venture
McCracken felt another gust of wind slam into him and looked toward the southeast and the approaching storm.
“That storm hits with the kind of wallop it looks like . . .”
“We lose the evidence we need to figure out the truth,” Wareagle completed for him.
“Means we’re on the clock here, Johnny. What do you think we’re talking about for temperatures at the thirty-two-thousand-foot depth their drill had reached?”
“At the earth’s core itself, eighteen hundred miles down, temperatures can reach ten thousand degrees—as hot as the surface of the sun. That level of heat holds fifty thousand times more energy than all global oil and natural gas on the planet. Untapped geothermal energy contained beneath miles of prehistoric rock that runs straight to the earth’s core.”
McCracken scratched at his scalp through his soft helmet. “You suggesting that’s what killed Paul Basmajian?”
“No,” Wareagle told him, “because the effects and force of that kind of geothermal burst, even if the Venture’s line had been able to contain it, would look nothing like what we’ve got here. First off, you’d have remains in some form, except for the fact that the integrity of the entire structure would have been compromised to the point of collapsing into the sea.”
“So this wasn’t temperature.”
“Not temperature alone, Blainey.”
McCracken joined Wareagle in gazing about the deck. The remains of the two-hundred-foot-high derrick, the bottom half, had toppled over. The bases of the lifting cranes bracketing it on either side were visible, but the orange extensions were gone, as if shorn off and dumped into the sea, absent of a cut, sheer or otherwise. The other structures on the main deck had collapsed, though not in a pile of refuse-strewn rubble. Just flattened, as if crushed by something bearing incredible weight. In the satellite photo arrays and real-time motion shots, they’d been intact in the moments before the white cloud enveloped the Deepwater Venture, then essentially gone afterward.
Even through his faceplate, Wareagle looked suddenly and atypically hesitant.
“What’s on your mind, Indian?”
“I’m wondering if there’s a weapon capable of doing something like what we see before us.”
“Realistically or theoretically?”
“In our experience they’re usually the same.”
“The answer’s no, in either case.”
Wareagle started to shake his head, then stopped. “Thirty-two thousand feet below the surface. . . . Baz and his crew sucked something up never seen in this world before.”
A rumbling sound broke into their analyzing, and both men looked up to see another chopper, a Sikorsky, hovering overhead. A man wearing a tattered leather vest and Grateful Dead T-shirt over his hazmat suit emerged from inside clinging to the sides of a rescue basket.
“Maybe he can tell us what,” said McCracken.
Captain Seven had arrived.
CHAPTER 27
Deepwater Venture
McCracken had no idea what Captain Seven’s real name was, only that he had gotten this one thanks to behavior, eccentricities, and intelligence that had led one military commander to call the tech whiz a visitor from the seventh planet from a distant galaxy. “Captain,” accordingly, wasn’t a real military rank. Even though he’d never spent a day in boot camp or wearing a uniform, his efforts along with his scientific knowledge and creativity had saved countless lives. Captain Seven had been one of those on the forefront of using technology as a prime weapon against opponents of all levels. Though he’d pioneered work with aerial surveillance and mapping, his true strengths lay in weapons analysis and development, both of which might well be required here after his trip to the Florida panhandle in search of jellyfish toxin was cut short.
Captain Seven’s respect for the mysteries filling the world around him came with one special caveat: understanding was the greatest weapon against the unknown. But it had to be an understanding based on that very unknown’s terms, not currently applied ones. That’s where the fluidity in his approach came in, along with the need to write new rules to come to grips with new challenges.
“Dude,” Captain Seven said, as soon as McCracken helped him from the basket, “how am I supposed to toke up through this helmet?”
“Don’t tell me you brought . . .”
Captain Seven winked, his shock of matted-down wild gray hair visible through his faceplate. “How you expect me to get through the day without a little ganja to stimulate my creative juices?”
“And you’re how old now, Captain?”
“A day older than yesterday, a day younger than tomorrow. Beyond that, I don’t think much about it.”
If the eerie surroundings or bizarre circumstances bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. Then again, Captain Seven had been solving impossible technological riddles dating all the way back to Vietnam, though his work since had linked him more with a man McCracken judged to be pretty much a younger version of himself.
“How’s Kimberlain, Captain?”
“The Ferryman’s never been better or busier. No shortage of monsters to take to their deaths these days.”
“Nice T-shirt, by the way,” McCracken said, smiling through his mask at the design featuring a peace sign with MAKE LOVE above it and NOT WAR below. “Especially since war’s what you’ve helped the Indian and me make a whole bunch of times.”
“Yeah, I’m a portrait in irony. Thing is, life hasn’t been nearly as good since Jerry Garcia finally bought the farm. Hey, I know it was a long time coming, but my world just isn’t the same. But when we crack this case, I’ll smoke you boys up with high-end homegrown. What you say to that, big fella?” Captain Seven asked Wareagle. “I hear Indians are veritable master growers born with an herbal thumb.”
“You mind if we get started, Captain?” McCracken prodded. He knew Captain Seven was a long way from home in the form of a pair of linked train cars parked in Sunnyside Yard in Queens, not far from New York’s Penn Station, leaving him to wonder how the captain could grow anything at all. “There’s a storm brewing.”
“In more ways than one, MacNuts,” Captain Seven said, using a nickname reserved only for him.
“What’s that mean?”
“Not sure yet. But if I’m right,” the captain continued, touching an unrecognizable hunk of debris formed of fused-together portions of the rig, “we might not make it until the storm.”
Captain Seven had an overstuffed backpack strapped to his shoulders, containing the various technological tools of his trade that would help decipher whatever had happened to the Deepwater Venture. Since none of the machines or technology aboard the rig were likely to be functional anymore, they could only rely on what they could carry, which for the captain was considerable.
“How much do you know?” McCracken asked him, his faceplate starting to mist up ever so slightly.
“I could write books about what I know.”
“I’m talking about what happened on this rig.”
Captain Seven looked about, as if realizing where he was for the first time. “I’m guessing pretty much the same as you. They hit something thirty thousand–plus feet down that apparently took things personally. And the only thing left alive on this thing, apparently, is us. Speaking of which, any of your friends in uniform do thermal-imaging scans?”
“Several. Flatlines on the readouts.”
“Like I was saying.”
With that, Captain Seven began unpacking the contents of his backpack, starting with a small satellite dish.
“Need a wireless relay to connect up with the mainframes at NSA,” he explained.
“Didn’t know you’d been granted access,” McCracken noted.
Which drew a wink from the captain. “Who said I was granted access? I’ve been making their system my own since the IBM 360 Model 90 was state of the art. Anything we need to help us solve this mystery will soon be a click away.”
Once the satellite array, looking like a high-tech version of an old-fashioned rabbit ears antenna, was set up, McCracken and Wareagle helped Captain Seven lay out a varied group of sensors and analytical tools that would help them determine what had transpired here and what exactly had befallen the missing crew. The first device he assembled looked like the kind of metal detector wielded at beaches in search of lost change and jewelry.
“Seems a bit low tech by your standards, Captain,” McCracken noted.
“I made all
these myself, so appearances can be deceiving. Know what this one is?” the captain asked him, holding the waist-high wand that looked like a metal detector.
“Nope,” McCracken told him.
“Basically, it’s an organic materials sensor capable of homing in on organic matter, like hair, blood, as well as flesh and bone residue, in the hopes of uncovering the remains of the crew. Even a blast hot enough to melt and re-form steel would leave some of that organic residue behind, and following the trail of it should allow me to trace the final moments of the Deepwater Venture’s missing crewmembers.” Captain Seven hesitated long enough to meet McCracken’s gaze through his faceplate. “One of them was a friend of yours.”
“Somebody tell you that?”
“Nobody had to.”
McCracken took a deeper breath, letting it out slowly. “Indian thinks we might not be alone up here.”
Captain Seven stiffened briefly, then relaxed again. “We’ll know soon enough,” he said with uncharacteristic evasiveness.
“What is it you’re not saying, Captain?”
“I’m not saying.”
Next McCracken and Wareagle watched Captain Seven assemble a similar-looking device with a smaller, flatter head.
“’Nother one of my techno concoctions. A minerals and elements analyzer to better help figure out what got done to the rig in those missing six seconds.”
“We’ve got confirmation that whatever did this is localized to the rig,” McCracken said, as the captain tested the assembled devices to make sure they were fully operational. “No evidence of any similar phenomenon anywhere in the Gulf, surrounding barrier islands, or land. No reports from any other ships or rigs. But there is a vague report of an undersea seismic disturbance below us right around the same time.”
“Seismic disturbance?” Captain Seven echoed, as if it bore some special significance to him.