The Black: A Deep Sea Thriller

by Paul E. Cooley

  JP was going to need a nap and soon. He doubted Vraebel would pass up the chance to hound and bully one of Calhoun’s team. And since JP was an employee of PPE like the rest of the rig crew, Vraebel was certainly within his rights. Calhoun had made it clear that while they were PPE employees, Simpson had promised them a bit of freedom from the bureaucracy. Vraebel hadn’t gotten that message. Or maybe Simpson had been too chicken shit to explain it. Either way, he’d have to don a wet-suit and get his ass low in the water. He wondered if any sharks were down there. If so, he’d have to inspect more than the rig’s sub-structure.

  #

  The drilling office was still quiet. Catfish was checking his programming, running simulations, and more or less ignoring everything that was going on around him. Calhoun was glad for that.

  He sat in a chair next to Shawna. Her screens were filled with chemical analysis and figures regarding gravity, humidity, and viscosity. When he’d searched for her in the lab, he’d found it a mess. The gravity stand was still foul with oil, beakers were unwashed, and the centrifuge hood was raised. A metal tray covered the test tube stand. Somewhat angry, but more confused than anything else, he’d walked from the lab and headed back up to the crew quarters. When he’d reached her room, he banged on the door with his huge hands. It had opened slowly. Shawna stared out through the crack.

  Calhoun took a deep breath and forced himself to keep his voice barely above a whisper. “Would you like to explain to me why you’re not in the lab? And why it looks like a classroom of second graders have been playing with a chemistry set?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, and then swung the door wide. She stepped out of the way and motioned him in. Eyebrows raised, Calhoun had walked across the threshold. She closed the door behind him without a word.

  Her room was spotlessly clean. Even her damned shoes had been pushed beneath the bed. This was the Shawna he knew. OCD about cleanliness, always looking fresh and ready to attend a dinner party or a prom, Shawna was not one to look disheveled.

  The room may have been squared away, but Shawna wasn’t. Her hair was a mess, eyes puffy, and she wore nothing but a long t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. Her skin was red and raw as if she’d spent an hour beneath a hot shower head. He’d never seen her like this.

  “Shawna? You okay?” he asked. When he saw the look on her face, a tremble of fear mixed with volcanic rage hit his stomach. His fists clenched. “Did one of the crew do something?”

  She shook her head. “No, Thomas. Nothing like that. It’s okay.” She touched his shoulder and his fists unclenched at once.

  “Then, what the hell is going on?” He pointed to the bed and she sat. He pulled a chair from the desk in the corner, flipped it around, and sat with his arms dangling over the chair’s back. “Let’s talk about it.”

  Shawna rolled her eyes and then chuckled. Her voice was small like a child’s. “Can’t explain it,” she said. “I—“ She stopped and then shook her head. “It’s stupid,” she giggled. “And you’re going to fire me.”

  Calhoun grunted. “I don’t see that happening. So why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  She looked up at the ceiling and wiped at her face. Calhoun wasn’t certain, but he thought she’d wiped away a tear. When her eyes drifted back to stare at him, they were red and watery. “I’ve never seen—“ She paused. When she tried to continue, it looked as though her throat had vapor-locked.

  “Take a deep breath,” he smiled. “Let’s start this way. What’s the water content of the oil?”

  “10 ppm,” she said immediately.

  “Gravity?”

  “45 API.”

  Calhoun blinked. He’d planned on asking the stats to get her brain going again, but now his was stuck. “Wait. You said 10 ppm of water?”

  She nodded. “I ran the tests three times. I know it’s still guess-work but—“

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  She laughed. “That’s what I thought you’d say, Thomas.”

  “And the gravity? There’s no way in fucking hell it’s that.”

  “I know,” Shawna threw up her hands. “I’ve got the analyses at my computer if you want to look at them.”

  “Is there any way you made a mistake?” he asked.

  “Sure, of course.” Her fingers clasped together in a giant fist. “But I ran them multiple times and followed the same procedure every time. The numbers are consistent.”

  “What about sulfur?”

  Shawna shrugged. “Didn’t get to run that test. But I can tell you this much—it doesn’t have a smell.”

  Calhoun’s mind raced. The figures she cited weren’t just improbable, they were damned near impossible. Oil without the stench of aromatics? He’d never heard of crude that sweet or clean. Especially offshore. If she was right, they’d struck more than a gold mine. It might as well be an ocean floor filled with diamonds. “That’s, um, that’s incredible.”

  She nodded. “That’s not all.” She stood from the bed, walked to the porthole, and looked out over the ocean. “There’s something in the oil, Thomas.”

  “Well, yeah, I expected that.” He turned his head and felt like a lech. He could see her perfectly shaped ass through those shorts. “What’s the ratio?”

  Shawna shrugged. “Didn’t finish the analysis.”

  Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t?”

  She turned to him and leaned back against the bulkhead. “No.” She laughed and her voice shook. “I got a little wigged out.”

  “Wigged?”

  “It’s stupid,” she said. “It’s a fucking hydrocarbon and it freaked me out!”

  Calhoun flinched in his chair. He’d never seen her act like this. Cursing? Yelling? What the hell was going on here? “Shawna, calm down.”

  “I am calm,” she said. “I can’t explain it. It makes no sense.”

  “Okay,” he said and stood. “Get dressed. You need a spot of lunch followed by an old man’s ear.” He headed to the door and opened it. “I’ll be waiting outside.”

  “Thomas, I’m not—“

  “Yes,” he said turning around, “you are. You are coming with me for some food and then we’ll look at this together, okay?”

  She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. She managed a nod.

  “Good,” Thomas said. He walked out the door and closed it behind him.

  He’d only had to wait a few minutes before Shawna appeared. Her hair was tousled, eyes clear, and she looked normal. Then he’d taken her to the commissary. She explained about the bubbles in the oil. He tried to follow and understand what had freaked her out so badly, but couldn’t quite get a bead on it. The readings were odd, sure, and no oil he’d ever heard of bubbled without a heat source, but that was no reason for her to get so spooked.

  Sigler was the best geologist/chemist he’d ever worked with. She rarely cracked jokes inside the lab and was a consummate professional. More than that, she had the same passion for her work he had for his. She was the perfect partner when it came to drilling for oil and predicting refinery needs. No one in the industry was better. So seeing her this bent out of shape was chilling to say the least.

  He stared at the screen in front of them. They’d been talking over the numbers for the last twenty minutes and neither of them was smiling.

  “We need to figure out what those bubbles are,” Thomas said.

  Her hand moved the mouse to a menu and clicked. A strangely colored image appeared on the screen. “That’s a UV picture.”

  “Yes,” Calhoun said with impatience. “You always take those. Just in case.”

  “Right,” she said. The beaker of oil was solid black except for thousands of tiny red dots. “And what the hell are those?”

  Calhoun frowned. “I have no idea. You think those are what’s causing the, um, bubbles?”

  She nodded. “No other explanation. But I checked for heat signatures. The oil was normal. No radiation. No other chemical markers.”

  He
clucked his tongue. “Has to be a faulty sensor somewhere.” Shawna said nothing, but tapped her fingers on the desk. Thomas knew what that meant. “Okay, spill it.”

  Her hand drifted to a lock of hair and pushed it away from her face. “We can test the sensors all we want. But this many failures? I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “More possible than that,” he said, index finger pointing at the UV image. “That makes no sense at all.”

  “The AUVs would have picked up any radiation,” she said.

  Catfish’s head swiveled toward them. Calhoun fought a grin. Catfish always pretended to not pay attention to the conversations around him and frequently acted as though he had no idea what was going on. But the man’s ears somehow managed to catch every word. “I’ve checked the sensor logs over and over. All five AUVs are operating fine on the sensor front.”

  “Even Number 5?” she asked.

  Catfish nodded. “Yeah, even my problem child.”

  Thomas chuckled. “Okay, so we’re kind of back to square one here. The downhole tools would have picked that up anyway.”

  “Exactly,” Shawna said. She hissed through her teeth. “I just don’t get it. None of this makes any sense.”

  Calhoun turned and faced the topographic maps of the trench pinned to the wall. “When are you going to have a new survey from AUV 5?”

  “As soon as it gets back from lower midnight,” he said. “I made sure that once it gets in range, it’ll start squirting data. By the time it reaches the surface for retrieval, I should have the full picture.”

  Calhoun turned back to Shawna. “Okay, so let’s stop trying to blame the readings. And start fresh.”

  “You mean just accept them?” she asked.

  Calhoun rubbed his chin. “Yeah. So if the sensors aren’t lying and your tests are as perfect as I trust them to be, then what are we looking at?”

  Shawna shrugged. “Shit that’s not just oil. And something no one has ever seen. I find that hard to believe.”

  “Remember,” Calhoun said, “we’ve only had a lot of these sensors and technology for forty years. We’ve been drilling for oil a hell of a lot longer than that.”

  “True,” she said. “But I can’t believe this stuff is that isolated. I mean, it’s probably all over the trench.”

  Calhoun blinked. “Why do you say that?”

  She clicked the mouse a few times and brought up the original seismic scans. The ground penetrating waves showed an incongruous shape beneath the rock and sand. “Because we drilled here,” she pointed to the far end of the shape. “And after thirty meters, we struck the black.” Her index finger followed the shape. “It’s shallower here, and deeper here. But it’s the same. It’s like there’s a giant cavern beneath the surface.”

  Catfish laughed. “Biggest goddamned oil reserve in the world,” he said. Calhoun and Shawna turned toward him. Neither of them were smiling. “Or, um, is that bad?”

  “Don’t know,” Shawna said after a beat. “And that’s what scares me.”

  #

  Lower midnight was still. There was no current, no sign of movement. AUV 5 bounced radar down toward the ground. It didn’t penetrate deep, but it wasn’t supposed to; the AUV had been programmed to map the trench surface as opposed to what was beneath.

  Catfish hadn’t had time to add a differential algorithm against the original readings, so AUV 5 just floated along as it mapped the trench’s rises and troughs. It had analyzed the dimple around the spud site and marked it as anomalous. It was the only area it knew from the original survey and it took hundreds of photos of the ten meter pucker. The sand and rock had surrounded the well-head until it was barely visible.

  AUV 5 snapped pictures as it hovered a few meters above the ocean floor. It swam to and fro in tight parallel lines. When it found itself nearing tube worms, it released a bit of ballast and floated a little higher. It didn’t notice the flattened worm ends reaching for it. Nor did it notice the circle in the center of each bed opening and then closing as it passed.

  The photos caught glimpses, as did the video, but the AUV ignored the movements. It was too interested in the sand and rock formations. That was its job, after all.

  When AUV 5 finished its survey, it emptied the right ballast, but not the left. It took photographs of the entire trench as it rose. The quality wouldn’t be good enough to determine shallow rises or troughs, but it would be enough to get a good feel for the trench’s over all shape. Once the video and photos were finished, it vacated the other ballast and began a quick ascent toward the sunlight.

  As it left lower midnight, the tube worms stopped moving and hung limp. Their prey had left the area. Now they had to wait for more as they had for millennia.

  #

  Dinner was welcome. A dark gloom had replaced the light in the sky. The cloud bank spun off by the storm to the south had finally made its way offshore. Another day or two, and they might get the whole shebang, surge and all. During his time in the military, he’d sailed through plenty of storms. The rig might be small compared to the floating cities of production rigs, but it wouldn’t be any worse than being on an aircraft carrier during a cat 3 hurricane.

  He sat at the table next to Catfish. The tech’s hair was tied back in a braid. He’d devoured an entire half-chicken and was sipping water. JP wasn’t sure, but he thought Catfish was eyeing seconds as another tray of exquisitely spiced roasted chicken appeared.

  Thomas and Shawna sat on the other side of the table. She had eaten slowly and quietly. Her easy laugh and trademark smile had rarely put in an appearance even while JP related the story of Belmont. He didn’t quite understand what the rest of the team was so concerned about, but something was on their minds.

  Before going out to capture AUV 5, JP had gone to the bridge to talk to Vraebel. The rig chief had listened to his request, told him he appreciated the heads up, and gave him permission to take Belmont and retrieve the robot. During the trip out, Belmont had been just as tight-lipped and assholish as before. JP couldn’t stand the man. Which was unfortunate, because Vraebel had also approved his request to go on substructure inspection. He hadn’t realized it before, but Belmont was also the diving team lead. It was going to be a long few days. If the storm came at them, the diving would have to wait. No one wanted to be in the water during twenty-foot swells.

  “So,” he said. All three of his team looked up from their plates to him. “Want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  Shawna shrugged. “We told you. It’s strange. Very strange.”

  Catfish took another sip of water, seemed to wince, and then put the glass back on the table. “Beyond fucking strange.”

  “I get that the oil is, well, unusual,” JP said.

  “Try the word ‘unique,’” Calhoun said. “And that’s the least of the problem.”

  “What problem?” JP asked. “We got a huge oil reserve down there. We didn’t have any problems with the test well. The helo is on its way to pick up the sample. I mean, isn’t this what we wanted?”

  “And the ocean floor is changing,” Catfish said.

  JP blinked. “What?” He turned to his friend. “What do you mean ‘changing’?”

  “I mean,” Catfish pushed away his plate, “our topographical survey is fucked. It’s way wrong. Number 5 took a new survey. It’s subtle, but it’s different. Especially around the well-head.”

  The diver studied Catfish’ face for any kind of tell. All of this had to be a joke. They were obviously fucking with him. JP broke into a giggle.

  “Something funny?” Catfish asked. His face was stone.

  JP’s grin faded. “You’re serious.”

  Catfish threw his hands up in the air. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you, asshole. This isn’t some goddamned joke. Something’s going on down there. Something,” he pointed at Shawna and Calhoun, “they can’t explain. And I sure as shit can’t.”

  The diver locked eyes with Calhoun. “Thomas? Can’t we send the maps to
PPE? Ask them what their experts think?”

  Thomas laughed and nudged Shawna. “She is PPE’s expert,” he said. “What you mean is sending these images back to shore for a vulcanologist to take a look.”

  JP’s eyes widened. “Vulcan…You mean we have a fucking volcano down there?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I don’t know. But magma is the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  Shawna shook her head. “If it was magma, our drill string would have been vaporized. Completely. There’s no way it’s something like that.”

  “Well,” JP said, “then what the fuck, man? You telling me we should get the hell out of here?”

  A grin slowly spread across Calhoun’s face. “No. I’m telling you we need to be careful. But I don’t think we’re looking for oil anymore. I think we need to study this.”

  Catfish and Shawna both looked at him. She slowly shook her head. “I don’t want to know.” Her voice was barely audible amidst the noise of the other rig workers.

  “Macully sent me the specs for the tube worms,” Catfish said. “I’m going to send AUV 2 down tomorrow. If Vraebel allows it.”

  “He will,” Calhoun said. “But he and I have to have a chat tomorrow. We need to be very careful on the next well.”

  “Wait a second,” JP said. “We’re going to drill again?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “PPE calls the shots. And I doubt Vraebel’s going to listen to us. He already thinks we’re just talented shitbags that add nothing to his crew. So we do our job. Let’s scan the new topography and see where the safest place to drill is.”

  “My vote is nowhere,” Shawna said. “And you can have Harobin work the next sample. I’m not going near that crap again.”

  The engineer glared at her and then his eyes softened. “Okay. Fair enough. You can analyze the data he gathers.” Calhoun nodded to Catfish. “Get your AUV prepped for tomorrow. And you better get Number 5 and its remaining brethren ready for another drill site. Simpson is having an orgasm over our data. Regardless of the anomalies.”