by Chris Angus
“Tom! Thank God you’re okay.” She scanned the darkness behind him. “Where’s Garrett?”
Tom tried to get out of the boat and nearly fell into the water, he was so sore and stiff. “I don’t know where he is. When the weather deteriorated, we got separated in the dark. He’s got to be way out to sea by now, if he hasn’t turned over.”
The color drained out of Sarah’s face. “That … that’s why I called in the authorities. I thought you’d be in trouble once the wind picked up. The hurricane has moved closer to shore than anyone expected.”
Tom weaved a little as he tried to get his land legs. Arthur Parmenter, his counterpart on the Eastern shore, came over and pulled the boat up for him. “I’m ready to go out, Tom,” he said. “Though I’m not happy about it. Air/sea has also been notified and will send out a plane.” He looked quickly at Sarah and said softly, “Be a miracle if we find him.”
“I’m going with you,” Tom said.
Arthur looked at him. “You sure? You look all in …” But he could read the determination in the man’s eyes. “All right, Tom. We can use your GPS coordinates to give us a direction.”
“I can get us to the last point when he was with me,” said Tom. “Then it will be guesswork, but he was already pretty tired. He would have soon had to turn and let the wind take him, so we can follow the wind out to sea. I hope to God he remembers he has an emergency flash beacon in the boat. If he sets it, we should be able to see him.”
He looked at Sarah. “Any word on the girls?”
She shook her head. “It’s a night for disasters,” she said. “But if they’re in the city they should be all right for a while. Certainly in less danger then Garrett is. I’m going with you on the boat.”
Arthur started to say something, then thought better of it. He’d known Sarah for a long time. There was no way she was going to be put off.
23
GARRETT SHIVERED SO FIERCELY, HIS titanium foot rattled against the side of the kayak. His slicker leaked water down his back and into his clothes. The lower half of his body rested in frigid water taken in during his struggles with the sprayskirt. He knew he was dangerously close to hypothermia.
Damned ignominious way for a Mountie to die. He could imagine Tuttle using him as an example to recruits for the rest of his career. Always prepared was Tuttle’s Mountie mantra. Garrett could hear the lecture: no backup, no communications, no detailed weather reports, out in the North Atlantic in a twelve-foot plastic boat in a hurricane. This man deserved to die, Tuttle would expound.
And Garrett would have to agree with him. It was a stupid way to die.
He kept his paddle balanced on the gunnels, dipping the blades as needed to keep the wind at his back, the boat running straight. He wiped his soaking sleeve against his eyes to counteract the stinging salt. When he looked up again, he saw lights on the horizon.
“Can’t be Ireland already,” he said out loud. “What the hell is that?”
The wind was blowing him straight down on the lights. There was something strange about them. Several appeared to be right at water level, while others floated high in the sky. Was it a ship? Some kind of optical illusion? Whatever it was, it was massive, a huge freighter or oil tanker maybe. He couldn’t tell which direction it was moving, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be run down by whatever it was. Another nice chapter for Tuttle’s lecture: no lights.
Well, he could do something about that. He fiddled inside the cockpit and managed to mount and turn on his emergency beacon. Maybe the skipper of the ship would see him. He almost laughed out loud. The ship captain would be riding a hundred feet above him, looking straight ahead. He’d never see a small light bobbing in the waves at sea level.
He continued to be blown toward the lights and began to paddle to try to get out of the ship’s path. But she didn’t seem to be moving at all. It was almost as though the ship was at anchor. How could that be possible out in the middle of the North Atlantic?
Then he got close enough to see what the lights were illuminating. He couldn’t believe his eyes. It wasn’t a ship at all. It was an oil platform, one of the ones Tom had told him had been put close to the mainland against fierce environmental opposition. At that moment, he was ready to shake the hand of the chairman of Exxon or whoever had won that argument.
The wind blew him straight toward the base of the thing, where he could see lights delineating some sort of platform at water level. A landing platform, he assumed. His little craft banged against the steel frame and the boat rose and fell a dozen feet with every swell. Each time he crashed against the structure, he came close to turning over. He tried to time the swells and finally managed to ride one right over the top of the platform. As the water retreated, the kayak sat firmly on the heavy-gauge grating.
Aching from every pore, he pulled himself out of the boat and stood, wobbly, for the first time in many hours. He tied the boat off fore and aft to the platform and looked up. A steel ladder rose fifty feet above him. Damn! More stairs. Worse. A ladder.
His titanium foot seemed stiff and unresponsive. The brains in his foot had been seriously compromised by the cold salt water. Slowly, he began to climb. When he finally pulled himself onto another platform, he collapsed from the effort and looked up to see two men staring at him like he was a ghost from Davey Jones’s locker.
“Hey there, mate. Where the bloody hell did you come from?”
“I’m glad to see you too,” Garrett said, his voice shaking from the cold. “I was blown out to sea by the storm. Thought I was done for till I saw this place.”
“Blooming miracle you washed up here. You look exhausted, all right. And cold. Don’t worry. You’re in good hands now.” They helped him to his feet. Garrett tottered on his bad foot. One man started to put an arm around him, but Garrett motioned he could walk on his own.
The other man said, “Take him to one of the bunks near the workmen’s galley. Looks like he could use some food and shuteye. I better tell Craig what’s happened.” He met the other man’s eyes. “Good thing it’s a slow night.”
“I wasn’t sure anyone would be here at all,” said Garrett. “Don’t they usually close you guys down when a hurricane’s approaching?”
Again, the men exchanged looks. “Just a skeleton crew here, mate,” said one. “To make sure things stay buttoned up and to pull wayward kayakers out of the drink. We’ve had one blow after another this year. Busiest hurricane season in decades. This storm wasn’t expected to come so close to shore, or there would have been no one here at all.”
The first man led Garrett to a small bunkroom. “Take a load off,” he said. “You look like you could use some sleep.”
“Any chance I could make a phone call? There are probably some pretty worried people wondering what happened to me, and I was with another man who might still be out there somewhere.”
“If he’s still out there, I don’t like his chances,” said the man. “Two miracles in one night would be pretty unlikely. Anyway, our phones and radio have been knocked out by the storm. We’re on our own, I’m afraid.”
It struck Garrett as odd, both that there would still be men on the rig and that they had no working communications, but though the thought nagged at him, he was too exhausted to think straight. The man left and Garrett tiredly removed his prosthesis. He placed it near a heater to dry out the electronics. Ever hopeful. Then he fell into bed and was asleep in a moment.
When he woke, the fury of the storm seemed not to have abated. He lay in the bunk listening. It felt like it was still the middle of the night. There was a throbbing in his phantom foot, which was probably what woke him.
He decided to get up and see if he could find some painkillers. He strapped on his foot and wandered down what seemed like innumerable corridors, up ladders and through various work areas lined with equipment. Apparently he’d been put at a far end of the rig from where others stayed. He found no other bunkrooms, kitchens, lounge areas or even bathrooms.
&n
bsp; The rig was huge and an utter maze of pipelines, cranes and steel catwalks. At one point, he found himself outside on a platform that must have been a helicopter landing pad.
Then he was back inside again, in an obviously more luxurious living space. Floors were carpeted, which seemed a bit bizarre in a place where men had to walk around filthy and covered with grease and oil virtually all the time. He tried a door off the carpeted corridor, found a light switch, and then stood, stunned at what lay before him.
Spread out in front of him was a private living space that could have been something straight out of Club Med. The room was large and had a sliding glass door that led to a balcony and a bar recessed into one wall. There was a king-sized bed facing floor-to-ceiling mirrors, leather chairs, and a couch. Maybe he’d stumbled upon the boss’s private digs, though it was hard to imagine even Bill Gates requiring accommodations like these on a working oil rig.
“You lost?” asked a voice immediately behind him.
Garrett turned. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He pulled up his pants leg and showed the man his titanium foot. “I was looking for some Tylenol. I get phantom pain in my leg sometimes.” He waved a hand at the room. “Pretty posh accommodations. I guess they really take care of you guys out here.”
The man snorted. “Not at my level, they don’t. Come on, we’re close to the medical room. I’ll get you some painkillers. You shouldn’t be wandering around on your own. Big rig can be a dangerous place if you don’t know your way around. You could walk right off an open-ended platform and fall into the sea. It’s happened before. My name’s Craig, by the way. I’m in charge when they close down for a storm.”
Garrett followed him out and down the hall. “How many are still on board?” he asked.
“Just three. You met the other two. Keeps us pretty busy making sure everything’s battened down during high winds. Shouldn’t bloody be here at all. Too dangerous, but the storm track veered from projections.”
“What happens if the main brunt of it strikes you directly?”
“You don’t want to know. More than one rig has toppled off its piers in a blow like this.”
Like the other two men, Craig wore blue coveralls and a hard hat. He stopped at a cabinet long enough to pull out another helmet and hand it to Garrett.
“Keep this on whenever you’re outside. Things fall from great heights around here even on completely still days.”
“Thanks.”
Next stop was a room that held a small operating table with what looked to Garrett like state-of-the-art equipment.
“Pretty impressive,” he commented.
Craig shrugged. He was a big, muscular fellow, maybe thirty-five years old, not your typical donut-eating security guard, Garrett thought. “We’re only forty minutes by chopper from the hospital in Sherbrooke, but the chopper can’t come in high winds. We have to be ready to treat injuries on our own, everything from acute appendicitis to amputations, if necessary.”
Garrett whistled. “That ever happened?”
“Not on this rig. We’re still pretty new, but I’ve been on other rigs where it has.”
Craig rummaged through a cabinet and came out with a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. “Here you go,” he said. “Now I’ll take you back to your room.”
Though Craig was friendly, even affable, Garrett got the distinct impression the man didn’t want him wandering around on his own. For his own safety? Perhaps. But it felt like something more than that.
24
THE TYLENOL HELPED WITH HIS leg pain and he fell into a fitful sleep. It was still dark when he woke for the second time. He lay listening to the wind howl through the rig’s superstructure. The platform was alive with sounds, the banshee wail of the wind, creaking and swaying metal parts, periodic banging sounds as though loosened panels or walkways were being whipped about and slammed into the steel frame.
It was all disconcerting, yet Garrett felt nothing but relief that he was no longer out in that awful maelstrom in a plastic boat. He got up and strapped his foot on. It seemed to be working more or less normally. The hours in front of a heater had helped dry it out. It was a resilient bit of technology.
He headed out the door to his room, then stopped and went back for his helmet. Craig was right about that. It sounded like parts were falling from great heights all over the rig.
Out in the open, the wind seemed to be decreasing. He made his way to the more luxurious part of the rig that he’d stumbled upon earlier. He’d been unable to reconcile the room he’d seen. It was simply not the sort of thing any oil rig might have. It intrigued him. He wondered how many such rooms there were.
When he reached the higher-class accommodations, he moved along the plushly carpeted halls, looking into one room after another. There were at least a dozen rooms all more or less like the first one he’d seen. It was astonishing. Then he found himself in a large lounge area with thick leather couches, a bar along one wall, and a pool table. Double doors led to a dining room that looked like a miniature version of something out of the Titanic, with a large crystal chandelier and tables set with white linen.
What on earth was going on here? No oil corporation was going to treat their roughnecks to such accommodations. Could it be some sort of show rig, designed to fete high-level oil executives who wanted to tour their facilities?
The first streaks of daylight appeared on the horizon.
He looked at his watch, but it still wasn’t working. The salt water had probably done it in for good. It had to be nearing six in the morning. The storm clouds must be diminishing to allow light to come through.
He didn’t want to annoy his saviors any more than necessary. They’d been good to him. He made his way back to his own room and had been there just a few minutes before there was a rap on the door. He opened it to find one of the first two men he had encountered.
“Breakfast—if you’re interested,” he said.
Garrett followed the man to a small dining room off an even smaller galley. There was no crystal chandelier and no linen. Instead, Craig and the other man sat at a wooden table eating bacon and eggs. Craig got up when he saw them and went into the galley and came back almost immediately with a plate for Garrett. It contained hash browns and a muffin along with the eggs and bacon. He put the plate on the table and nodded at a coffee pot.
“Help yourself,” he said. “Sleep all right?”
Garrett sat gratefully and dug into the eggs. “Like a baby once I had the painkiller. Thanks. Though I guess I woke up a couple of times. There was a lot of noise.”
“You got that right. We’ve been tying things down all night. You’d think they made this bloody rig with parts from Costco.”
“Some of the rooms I saw hardly came from Costco,” Garrett said. “Hilton Hotels maybe.”
The men looked away.
Craig said, “This rig is state of the art. Whole new concept, really. They bring the chief executives here to show it off. I hear the company has received orders for four similar platforms. Two of them are in Colombia.”
Garrett nodded. It was just barely plausible, but he wasn’t buying it. Still, if they wanted to stick to the company line, he wasn’t going to argue.
“Any luck with your communications yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” Craig replied. “I managed to contact the Coast Guard and they’re sending a boat to pick you up. They were pretty excited to hear you were all right.”
“Did they say anything about the man who was with me?”
“Yes, I spoke to him. Name of Tom Whitman. He was pretty relieved.”
As if to affirm the words, they heard the piercing wail of a boat horn.
Craig looked at his watch. “Made good time. Wind must be dying down.”
Garrett followed Craig down a warren of levels and walkways all the way to the ladder leading down to the platform where he had landed. He watched the Coast Guard cutter pull up and tie off. Tom jumped onto the deck, looked up and waved. Garrett saw Sarah
holding onto the boat railing and she waved also.
He went down the ladder quickly, leaving Craig to follow. As soon as Garrett reached the bottom he turned and said in a low voice, “No need to mention I’m RCMP, Tom.” His look took in Sarah and the other boatman, both of whom heard him as well. Tom gave the slightest nod of his head, and then Craig was standing beside them.
“I’ll give you a hand with that,” he said, reaching down and untying the kayak. They passed it onto the boat, where Sarah secured it to the railing.
“Well,” Garrett said, putting out his hand. “Thanks hardly seems adequate. I’d be halfway to Ireland by now … or halfway to Davy Jones’s locker if not for you. Either way, I’m in your debt.”
Craig shook hands and gave him a little salute. “Glad to be of assistance, mate,” he said. “Might check the weather report next time you go for a joy ride.”
“I’ll do that,” said Garrett.
Ten minutes later they were a hundred yards off the rig and Garrett sat on a bench holding Sarah’s hand.
“Hope I didn’t give you too big a scare,” he said.
She squeezed his hand tightly. “I had you in your grave, Garrett. Damned fool thing to do, going out in that storm.” He could see her eyes well up. He leaned in and kissed her. “I know,” he said softly. “We didn’t expect it. The one thing that kept me going when I was exhausted was the thought I’d never see you again.” To Tom he said, “Why don’t you take a GPS reading on the rig?”
Tom took out his device. “You planning a return visit? I’d say you already used up at least eight of your nine lives last night.”
Garrett glanced at Sarah. “I just think it would be nice to put that thing on the charts for the next idiot who comes along.” But he gave Tom a look that suggested a greater explanation was to come.
25
AS THEY APPROACHED THE WHARF, Garrett saw Roland’s scallop boat getting ready to go out. When Roland saw them, he throttled the engine down and retied the boat up against the dock.