Rig

by Bryan Alaspa

  “Fair enough,” Larry said. “We don’t know what happened out there. One of the leading theories is some kind of gas that wiped out the crew. This leads to the idea of a terrorist group. Before we take the time and expense of sending a fully trained crew out there again, we want to make sure the place is safe. For that kind of work, I thought of you.”

  “You’re lying and I can tell,” J.D. said.

  “There are some extenuating circumstances,” Larry said. “I have some tapes you’ll need to listen to, but not here.”

  J.D. finished his drink in one long swallow, grimaced, and put the glass down. “Why not here?”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Larry said, “I’ve got a private plane waiting at the airfield outside of town. You come with me, listen to the rest of the story and the tapes I have to play and then you can decide whether you want the job or not. If you say no, then I’ll personally pay for your flight back here and set you up in a nice room like this one for as long as you need.”

  “I hope you have plenty of space on your credit cards,” J.D. said.

  Larry smiled. “Don’t worry about it.”

  * * *

  J.D. sat on the plane, moments after the tape player was shut off, a fresh Jim Beam in his hand, and his entire body shuddered uncontrollably. He felt as if someone had punched him repeatedly all over his entire body. His stomach felt sick. His head pounded. He had never felt this way before and it was not something he relished in the least.

  “What the fuck was that?” He said, surprised at the weak quality to his own voice.

  “That was the last transmission from rig 42,” Larry said, removing earplugs he had placed in his ears just before pushing play. “That also killed some guys with the Coast Guard and a few folks who heard it on their shortwave receivers. Turned their organs and brains into jelly.”

  “I can believe it,” J. D. said and took another long drink. He was weighing the pros an d cons of pouring another glass. “That isn’t terrorists, Larry.”

  Larry sighed and then nodded to himself. He looked back at J.D. and extended his hands palms up. “I know that. My boss knows that, but the official story, if there has to be one, is that there is the possibility of terrorists.”

  “Why the hell do you want to send me into this?”

  “When I was doing work for the government you were the best guy I had. When I had you on my team I always knew the mission would get done and just about everyone would come back alive. You went willingly into situations so dangerous most men would have fainted at the thought of it. Plus, you always did have a flair for the unusual.”

  “You had me in mind for this before you knew there was anything unusual about it,” J.D. said, seeing right through the words Larry fed him.

  “Yeah,” Larry replied, “from the moment my boss started talking, I knew I wanted you to check out the rig and make sure it was safe before we sent anyone else out there.”

  J.D. sat back and finished off his drink. He closed his eyes and rubbed them until he could see strange colors behind his eyelids. Then he stood, walked over to the bar and poured himself another drink. He sipped this one slowly and mulled what he had just heard over in his head.

  He had done a lot of things in his time. He had joined the Navy at a young age after he lied about how old he was. He found himself in Navy SEAL training at a young age as well. He had taken to the discipline, the intensity and the danger like most men took to breathing. When the day came that the government agents showed up at his post he jumped at the chance to do some work off-the record. When things there led to him being discharged from the Navy he had gone freelance and used the contacts he made while working for the government. J.D. figured he had done work of one type or another for nearly every government on the planet by now. Sometimes he was just out on the periphery and other times he was the one pulling all the strings and doing all the dirty work. He was approaching forty fast now and was amazed at how fast things had happened and how much he had done in his time on the planet. He felt much older than his birth certificate said he was even though his body certainly didn’t show his age.

  Despite all he had done there had always been a curiosity about him. He figured that was what had driven him in the first place. He was curious about life, the world, and what came after this world or what might be beyond this world. The things he had just heard on that tape were definitely not things of this world. Just what had those poor people dug up out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico?

  “Dammit,” he whispered. “You’ve got me. The fee will be three times my normal fee.”

  “I think I can find a way to swing that,” Larry said. “Do you have an idea of the people you want? I can provide you with some names.”

  “There are some people I already have in mind,” J.D. said, taking another drink. “At least two of them will take a lot of convincing.”

  Larry laughed behind him and J.D. turned to look at his smiling face. “How is Karmen these days, anyway?”

  J.D. smiled. It had always been Larry’s gift to see through the bullshit and see exactly what was on someone’s mind.

  “I just hope she doesn’t kill me before I get a chance to talk to her,” J.D. said.

  4

  The woman with the long blond hair tied back in a ponytail rode her Harley-Davidson through the desert which created a rather impressive sandstorm behind her as she drove. Her face showed no emotion. Her thin lips created a tight line across the lower half of her face. Sunglasses hid the dazzling blue eyes and any emotion that might be hidden there. He face was striking, angular, with a perfectly shaped chin, nose, cheeks and ears. When she did allow herself to smile, which was rare, given her line of work, it was a dazzling smile that lit her face up in a way that only improved her looks.

  There was a small scar on her left cheek, maybe an inch long, across the top of the cheekbone. This she had received during one of her extended stays in Russia. It had been after a mission and she was drinking with several of the large Russian men, downing one vodka after another. She had been stone-cold sober but her drinking companion had grown steadily more drunk, and his hands begun to roam freely. When she pushed him away, he got angry. A bottle broke and he lunged. She came away with an inch-long scar on her left cheek. He stumbled away trying to hold his intestines in with both of his hands.

  Karmen Etland was not the type of woman that a man should take lightly, but her blond hair and striking good-looks often made them do exactly that. More than a few of those men had paid for this mistake with their lives. Her years in the Marines had tuned her body into a mass of muscle and her years working for the CIA had made those muscles more dangerous than anyone, man or woman, had a right to be.

  This was all a long time ago. Things had changed for her not that long ago. She decided she wanted to get away from things. She wanted to hide from the world that she had seen too much of the wrong side of. Her small home quite literally in the middle of the desert was as close to peace and as close to paradise as she could imagine.

  Her body was still hard as a rock and her skin was tanned from the motorcycle rides across the sand. She wore a sleeveless shirt that showed off her abdomen, which was also rock hard and tanned. The benefits of living nowhere near anyone was that you could walk around outside with nothing on if you wanted and no one could complain.

  Her legs were clad in army fatigues the color of the sand. Her feet were clad in thick black boots that climbed up her calf. This was a necessity when out here in the harsh environment. Wearing shorts and sandals while driving through the desert was just a bad idea for the skin and really a bad idea when you were on a motorcycle.

  The cycle itself was Karmen’s baby. She had bought the thing in terrible condition at a steal of a price and painstakingly rebuilt it, reworked it and made it into the growling, snarling beast it was now. She sat back and enjoyed the dry, hot wind in her face and watched the scenery with satisfaction. She could just see the dot that was her home approach on the h
orizon.

  She reached the modest home in a few minutes and paused while dismounting to remove the earplugs she wore to keep her hearing. As soon as this act was completed she knew that something was wrong. Her instincts were honed to a keen edge and she immediately knew that someone was in her house. She didn’t pause. She kept moving. She didn’t want to show for more than a fraction of a second that she knew anything was wrong. She removed some of the items she had purchased in town from the storage areas in the motorcycle and walked into her home. She kept the sunglasses on so she could continue to look carefully around without her eyes being seen.

  She walked to the kitchen counter and put the items down. She removed her sunglasses. She turned and put the carton of milk in the refrigerator. When she closed the door movement to her left caught her eye.

  She moved with a speed beyond anything outside the animal kingdom. She reached behind her into the sheath on the back of her belt and removed two four-inch knives. She flashed forward with one knife. Two forearms blocked her hand at the wrist and the knife in that hand fell to the floor. She kicked up with her left foot and caught her attacker in the shadows in the mid-section. Her other hand slashed forward, the knife whicked through the air inches from the head, but the head moved back. Karmen whirled, kicked out, caught the figure in the chest, full on, while still spinning. The figure in shadow flew into the air and landed on the rug in the living room.

  Karmen moved fast, tumbled down, grabbed her lost knife, and came to her feet directly over the figure lying prone on the floor. She knelt down and used her knees to pin the arms down and the weight of her body to knock whatever air might be left in the lungs out of her attacker. She was bringing the knives down to drive into the neck of her attacker when suddenly she realized she knew who her attacker was.

  “J.D.?” She yelled, the blades stopping only inches from flesh.

  J.D. attempted to talk, but nothing came out, his mouth simply moved in the shape of the words. “A – a- aaaiiirrrrrr….”

  “What?” Karmen asked, and then understanding flooded her. “Oh, air.”

  She stood up and removed the pressure from his chest. J.D gasped, coughed, rolled over onto his side and curled slightly to nurse his bruised mid-section and chest. He gasped huge lungs full of air and coughed. He spat unconsciously onto the floor.

  “Jesus,” he said, “this is how you welcome visitors?”

  “Visitors are people I expect to be here,” Karmen said, walking into her living room and sitting down on the sofa. “People who come out at me from the shadows that I am not expecting to be here, yes, this is what they can expect.”

  “Christ,” J.D. said, slowly getting to his feet, massaging his chest. “Guess that explains why you don’t have any alarms.”

  “I completely just kicked your ass, Mr. Navy Seal,” she said.

  “Give me a break,” J.D. said, making his way to the sofa and sitting down, “I’m just a tad jet-lagged. I flew directly here from Thailand.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You know I have sources,” J.D. said. “Besides, I always remembered how you liked the desert. We talked about a place like this.”

  “Did we?” She asked. “I don’t remember anything we talked about. Not anymore.”

  “Well, I do,” he replied.

  “The last time I saw you was almost five years ago,” she said. “As I recall it was Somalia and you were leaving me.”

  “I couldn’t take that place anymore,” J.D. said.

  “You left me there,” she said simply. “I guess that was about that time I started trying hard to forget everything we had talked about.”

  There was a long silence. J.D. put his head back and rubbed his bruised chest. He got his breath back to normal.

  “How did you get here, anyway?” She asked. “I didn’t see any car or any tracks.”

  “I must have gotten here not long after you left,” he replied. “Helicopter.”

  Her eyes got wide. “Helicopter? Doing work for the government again? I’m not interested.”

  He shook his head. “No, business. I wanted to bring you with me. I’m doing a job for GemCo.”

  “Working for the big businesses now, are we?” She asked. “That’s pretty low, even for you.”

  “There are some extenuating circumstances,” he said.

  Her brow creased and she looked at him, unable to see into his eyes because his head was back.

  “What?” She asked finally.

  He pointed instead. “Go over to your stereo and hit play on the tape player. We’ll talk after you listen.”

  * * *

  Karmen sat on her sofa and nursed a beer. Her hands shook and nothing she did seemed to stop them. She felt sick and her head hurt. She closed her eyes, but somehow, the darkness she found behind her eyelids just made things worse.

  “What the fuck was that?” She asked.

  “That’s just it, no one knows,” J.D. said. “Once you hear it, you find it’s not so bad.”

  “I wouldn’t want to hear that again,” she said.

  “I’ve been asked to go out to the rig and see what’s going on out there,” J.D. said. “I want you to come with me.”

  “Why me?” She asked.

  “Because you are the cynic,” he said. “I’m already flipping through my supply of supernatural explanations for that. I need someone to balance me out, to make sure I think things through before I act. You were always good for that.”

  She looked up at him, unsure of what to say or what he really meant by that. She had never felt so shaken or afraid in all of her life. She could not imagine what would be a reasonable explanation for what she had just listened to.

  “What do you say?” He asked.

  “You have me curious now,” she said, “but I am also terrified.”

  “Me too,” J.D. said. “It’s kind of a new experience for me.”

  “Who else are you bringing?” She asked.

  “I only requested you and one other,” J.D. said. “I want to bring Mark with us.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Why him? He’s not trained like you and me.”

  “I’m hoping there’s nothing out there that will actually require the kinds of things we’ve been trained for,” J.D. said, “ and whatever we just heard needs the kind of expertise that Mark could bring. The rest of the crew, I’ll leave up to you and Larry.”

  “I want to bring Joe with,” Karmen said.

  “Why him?” J.D. said, with just a tinge of jealousy.

  “Because he’s good and he only thinks about completing his orders and the mission,” she said. “I think we’ll need someone like that out there.”

  “Fine,” J.D. replied. “You can find him?”

  She nodded and nothing more was said about that. She looked up into his face again. She could see that he was both excited and, yes, afraid, of whatever was out there. J.D. always had a thing for the unknown, the freaky and the supernatural. This was right up his alley.

  “When do we leave?” She asked.

  5

  The streets of Chicago buzzed with life, in some ways, similar to the way the streets of Bangkok had buzzed. It was a different buzz but when you had been in as many cities in as many parts of the world as J.D. had, at some point they all sort of started to seem the same. Chicago was just another cluster of buildings surrounded by a large cluster of people.

  The area of Chicago known of Lincoln Park was located on the north side of town. There was an actual Lincoln Park which contained a zoo and large open areas near Lake Michigan, however, the part J.D. was in was further inland and was filled with tall, long, but narrow houses piled on top of each other. Exactly why anyone would want to live so close to the person next door to them was beyond his comprehension, but then, much of what Mark West did was beyond comprehension.

  His head throbbed as he stepped from the car and walked the block and half to the house. This was the nearest parking space he could find. All of the flying through
all of the timezones was affecting him. It was just another reminder that he was getting older and not able to hop around the globe the way he once had been able to. He had also had to listen to that recording twice now, and would have to do it again, and that had a way of wearing on you as well.

  The house was tall and white with large windows looking out over the relatively small yard which was, in turn, surrounded by a black iron fence. The lawn was trimmed neatly and the shades were currently drawn. The walkways between this house and the ones on either side were very narrow and long. He opened the gate and walked up the sidewalk to the porch. He climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell.

  From inside the house came the sound of small claws scuttling furiously on the hardwood floors followed by furious barking. J.D. could hear the animal jump against the door and the barks indicated that however vicious the animal imagined itself to be, it was not very big. J.D. heard Mark’s voice from inside, yelling at the dog, telling it to be quiet and from the way the dog doubled its efforts to try and kill J.D. directly through the door the animal evidently thought Mark was encouraging it to try harder.

  The door opened and Mark West stood before him and he attempted to block the way of the white-furred animal with the black nose that tried hard to push Mark out of the way to attack whoever had dared disturb the evening. Mark was about six feet tall with a mop of thick brown hair on his head. He had a thin beard that traced the outline of his face and curled underneath his chin. The hair on his face was trimmed short and kept relatively neat if unbalanced from one side to the other. He had wide shoulders, and more than his share of a gut, but his legs looked curiously strong although right now they were hidden by the dark blue jeans he was wearing. The black T-shirt did make some effort to hide his paunch. The glasses perched atop his nose were narrow, like small windows set in front of his eyes. He smiled widely when he saw J.D. and his teeth showed large spaces and broken teeth.