“So they say. It gives the Apgaks a lot of political clout with the tribes.”
"And Komo Lepaka?”
“He’s the Saka’s adopted son. Is that what Komo told you?” Matt shook his head. “Jesus, the Saka. He must be a million years old by now. Why would Komo want him back? It’ll open a whole new can of worms. Are you going to do it?”
“Komo says I have no choice.”
“He’s probably right.”
At the wheel, Kitty said, “I don’t see any lights.”
Matt stood up, bracing himself against the pitch and plunge of the small boat. “Maybe we’re not close enough yet.”
“Do the local fishermen come this far out?” Durell asked.
“Not often. Sometimes. They don’t like to get out of sight of land."
The day was bright now. They could see the horizon ahead and the last stars had paled away. Durell felt the heat of the morning sun on the back of his neck, and he put on sunglasses against the glare of light on the oily, heaving water. Kitty checked the compass bearing and Matt stood up straighter, scowling at the sea. A low line of cumulus clouds hovered just above the horizon.
‘“There she is,” Matt said suddenly. His voice was thick with relief. “Over there. Lubinda Lady I.”
Durell saw the drilling tower at the same moment. They were still six or seven miles away, and a morning haze clung to the surface of the Atlantic, making the platform seem to flout in the air, as if detached from the sea bottom that supported it. A pair of binoculars swung from the binnacle, and Durell reached around for them to study the rig. There were no other vessels in sight in the early morning light except a distant freighter, far on the horizon. He swept the sea in a full circle. Two triangular red fishing sails were behind them, bearing south along the hazy green coast.
“Let me look,” Matt said.
“In a moment.”
With every minute, the rig became clearer in the lenses. The mast, towering 140 feet above the deck and half as much again above the surface of the greenish sea, seemed intact. The stiff-legged Clyde derrick appeared to be canted a bit on its rotary table. The great tubular platform piers were streaked with rust. He swung the glasses amidships, where a tangle of lines and cables looped down from the jackhouse into the surging swells. To the left wore the metal-sheathed houses for the crew, and then the helicopter deck, beyond the machinery house. The heliport was cantilevered out over the sea from behind the crew’s quarters. He looked again, and then handed the binoculars to Matt Forchette.
“No chopper.”
“I sent the Sikorsky out two hours ago.”
“It’s not there,” Durell said. Matty stared through the glasses at the growing image of the platform for long moments. His mouth drooped grimly.
“Right. No chopper.”
Durell said, “No people, either.”
“I noticed that.”
“Yon said there was a maintenance crew?”
“The weevils might still be all asleep. Nothing much for them to do out here.”
Durell said, “Do you believe that?”
“No.” Matt slowly lowered the glasses. “I‘m just kidding myself. The rig looks a mess. It’s been deserted.”
“You heard no Mayday from the chopper?”
“Nothing.”
The sun was now a blazing scourge above the surging ocean. The platform grew larger by the moment as Kitty held the whaleboat steadily on course. The wind blew from the west, and spray drenched them as the boat beat into the swells rolling toward them. Kitty’s face was pale under her tan. The platform was like a monstrous island, overgrown with mechanical arms, derricks, and loading cranes, covered with a spider’s web of cables and lines that had been left every which way, as if the men detailed to stand watch had abandoned the Lady in a panicked hurry, No sound came from the rig, which loomed higher and wider as they approached.
“Come into the lee,” Durell suggested.
The girl nodded. “I still don’t see a soul.”
Matt, ignoring the girl’s presence, swore in a growling Cajun accent.
Kitty said, “It’s eerie, even in broad daylight.”
The man-made island, with the drilling tower looming high against the hot, pale sky, seemed enormous. As they approached, they heard the crash and push of the sea against the six giant tubular legs that supported the rig on the ocean bottom, more than a hundred feet below. Various creakings, clangings, slappings, and crackings came from the great structure. The decks loomed overhead. Kitty brought the whaleboat around the heliport deck that jutted out beyond the crew’s quarters. Durell noted that some of the deck railing had been broken away. There were scars along the wide steel plates that supported the chopper deck, and a long bright streak where the paint had been gouged away, too recently for the ocean rust to have set in. The smell of smoke lingered the leeward air beyond the platform.
The whaleboat rose and fell dangerously near the giant tubular legs that supported the platform.
“Is the Lady officially shut down?” Durell asked.
Matt shrugged. “Hobe was making frames to salvage the casings and plug the borehole with cement, You’ve got to plug it to prevent the migration of different fluids from the underground strata we’ve drilled through. But he couldn’t get permission from the oil ministry in Lubinda to abandon yet.”
“When were you here last?”
“Two days ago, with a shipment of barite—that’s barium sulphate, a mineral we use to increase the specific gravity and weight of the drilling mud. We’ve been using bentonite, a colloidal clay, which swells when wet, and We’d just gotten a new shipment. I’ve been going on as it We weren’t going to shut down, no matter what Hobe says about no oil under this water.”
Something clanged, steel on steel, on the deck high above them. Kitty reversed the whaleboat’s engine and Durell went forward to catch a long loop of cable that hung down from the side of the heliport.
“Blow the horn, Kitty,” Matt said hoarsely. “Someone’s got to be up there. They ought to have shipped the ladder down by now.”
“Maybe somebody’s there,” the girl said, “but I don’t think we’re going to be welcome.”
Durell tied up the whaleboat. “How many of your men are new, Matt? The place looks like a crow’s nest.”
“Hell, they’re all good boys. Picked them myself.”
Kitty sounded the whaleboat’s horn, listened to the strange echoes move away along the shadowed underside of the platform. The boat lifted and fell, splashing. She touched the compressed-air horn again. The raucous
blast was feeble against the immense noise of the heaving seas that rolled under the rig. The clanging and banging of loose equipment sounded even louder now that they were close aboard. Durell spotted a series of pipe ladders going up under the heliport deck, and pulled the whaleboat closer to it so they could step onto the tiny steel platform that was regularly awash at sea level. Kitty tied a quick bowline to secure the whaleboat. She looked uncertain. Fifty feet above, the three-sided deck of the chopper platform jutted over their heads, casting a shadow against the sun at their backs.
“Come on,“ Matt said grimly.
He jumped for the tiny step, slipped. caught at the pipe railing, did not look back as he started to climb hand over hand. Durell checked the girl.
“Maybe you should stay here.”
“Not a chance.” She looked almost as grim as Matt.
“I’ve got to see what’s going on.”
“Brady was curious, too," Durell said. “He had all those charts and progress reports and specifications in his office. And he’s disappeared. So has the standby crew here. And the Sikorsky.”
“I saw the same scars.” She pointed upward. “The chopper missed the landing platform and went into the water, didn’t it? Just about where we are now.”
“Missed, or was shoved over the side,” Durell said.
“Oh, hell. I knew the pilot. John was nice.”
“Stay here,"
Durell said again.
“No. I’m going with you.”
She refused his hand offered in help, jumped nimbly to the foot of the ladder, and climbed up after the chunky figure of Matt, who was already halfway to the lower deck. Durell went up after her.
The smell of smoke was stronger here, clinging to the steel girders supporting the heliport deck. At the top of the ladder, Matt hammered on the steel hatch over his head. After a moment, it gave way and he scrambled up, out of sight. The girl followed. Durell came last.
What had happened was only too evident. The scorching sun on the painted steel deck before them revealed the scars of a bomb blast or explosion, marked by the rubberized streaks made by the choppers wheels as it was pushed and hauled to the edge of the deck. There were more scars at the rail, broken Plexiglas, a yellow wing tip. The heat made waves of air dance over the fiat expanse of steel plate. Matty the Fork pushed stubby fingers through his cropped hair and cursed. His jaw stuck out stubbornly.
“The chopper was pushed overboard,” Durell said.
“Yeah. A lot of money and men," Matt muttered.
“They may not be dead.”
Below them, the sea hissed and rumbled. Loose cables moved in the wind, and metal banged loosely somewhere, as if a bulkhead door was open, although the platform itself was as steady as if built on dry land. All around them, the sea sparkled in emptiness. The two fishing boats with their triangular red sails had vanished toward the invisible shore to the east.
Matt cupped his hands and yelled.
“Connie? John? Ed?”
His voice went forward toward the crew’s quarters, the jackhouse, the drilling mast. No one was in sight. Nobody answered his angry shout.
“Come on,” Matt said. “There‘s something screwy here."
Dangerous was the proper word, Durell thought. He could feel it, smell it in the air of abandonment. The Lubinda Lady seemed empty. Seemed, he repeated to himself. He took nothing for granted. Outward appearances were as deceptive as a spider’s web to an unwary fly. He took his gun from his belt and held it loosely in his hand. A block banged hollowly against a girder. There were small square windows in the back of the crew’s quarters
that faced them. Nothing moved except a small white curtain that flapped through an open sash.
“Matt, go slow,” he said quietly.
There was a neatly stacked pyramid of casing pipe this side of the drilling tower. Crates, boxes, drums of fuel were also neatly ordered beyond the crew’s housing, on the opposite side or the platform from the jackhouse. The wind blew stronger across the deck, smelling of the limitless ocean.
Kitty said, “What’s wrong, Sam?”
“It looks as if the Lady has been pirated.”
They moved carefully to the crew’s quarters. The door was open, swinging slightly in the wind. There was nothing but silence, except for the occasional clatter of loose equipment in the wind and the endless surge and hiss of the sea far below-the platform.
“Stay out here, Kitty,” Durell said.
The girl shook her head. “No, I want to stay with you. Frankly, I’ve got the creeps.”
The bunk rooms were all neatly made up. In one of them, Durell noted the long ash of a cigarette in a tray. He touched it tentatively, but could not tell how long the ash had been there. The galley was another matter. He could smell the burned bacon before they got there. The stainless-steel range, with its assortment of pots and skillets, was still turned on. The burners were hot. A huge pan contained only dozens of small, shriveled black crisps of bacon. Scrambled eggs in another skillet were almost unrecognizable. Durell watched Kitty automatically turn off the power in the stoves with a look of unconscious concern on her fine face. There was still some coffee in the big pot.
“Where is the radio shack?” Durell asked.
“This way,” Matt said.
They went up a spiral stairway to the upper deck of the crewhouse. The door stood ajar. Durell held the others back and pushed at the door with his fingertips. Nothing happened. The radio shack also operated as a miniature control tower for the heliport; its wide windows faced fore and aft. The operator’s swivel chair had been turned to face the door, as if the radiomen had swung around suddenly to greet an intruder. Matt gave a low whistle.
“Look at that."
A crowbar lay on the carpeted deck. Someone had used it to smash the bank of communication instruments into a tangled mass of wires, dials, and twisted plates. Durell started across the green carpet, then checked himself and the others. There were stains on the carpet, a series of bloody drops soaked into the fibers, and a long scuff mark leading to the door where they stood. Durell knelt and tentatively touched the nearest drop. It had just started to coagulate.
“Your radioman was slugged and dragged out of here. It couldn’t have happened more than half an hour ago.”
Matt looked toward the eastward windows facing the invisible coast. “Those two fishing boats we saw—”
“Could be. I want to see the office—the one you and Hobe used.”
“That’s kind of restricted, Sam.”
Durell looked flatly at the foreman. “Do you want to stand on ceremony now? it‘s plain the rig has been hijacked—at least, the crew has been forced oil and the radio smashed and the chopper given the deep six.”
“But—why?” Matt demanded. “We were shut down, We were going to abandon the drilling hole—”
“Why was your switcher loco and yard sabotaged last night?”
“I can’t figure it," Matt grumbled.
“Somebody doesn’t want the Lubinda Lady to strike oil, that’s what it amounts to. Maybe Brady Cotton was working on this and that‘s why he disappeared, too.”
“But—who?”
“Apgaks, maybe,” Durell suggested.
“Just to disrupt things?”
“Maybe.”
Durell went out on the catwalk and took the ladder down to the main deck. The morning sun was hotter now. The crewhouse and radio shack were air-conditioned, and the pumps were still running; but now the force of the sun hit them with unexpected strength. The reflections from the sea were all but blinding.
“I’ll take you to the lab,” Matt agreed. “Hobe kept duplicates of all the records there.”
Durell still had a sense of oppressive danger amid the glare and heat of the deck as they walked toward the drilling tower. The tanks of mud, water, diesel fuel, the neat loops of chain and cable, the casing racks, a shack containing small power takeoffs, drilling bits, all presented a maze of equipment that could trap the unwary. Seagulls mewed and soared overhead in the blinding sky. Durell had gone out on ocean rigs before, during his youth on the Gulf, but never on one of these enormous dimensions.
A ladder took them to a lower deck beneath the main. It was a relief to escape the blast of sunlight. But here the swish and rumble of the sea were exaggerated by echoes, and for the first time, Kitty slipped her hand into Durell’s. Her fingers were cold. He headed for the door at the end of the wide catwalk. Fluorescent lights still blazed in the windows visible here. Again, no one was in sight. The maintenance crew had disappeared as it snatched up into the sky or dropped into the deep green sea.
“I tell you,” Matt said loudly, “we were ready to hit pay sand. I could smell it. I had the safety valve ready, the oil string standing by—that’s the final set of casing we put down into a well once we’re sure of production. We’d already hit a gas zone, twice. And then Hobe told us to shut down and get ready to tie into the rig tender and pump up the legs so we could either move to another zone or give it up and get towed away.” Matt the Fork waved a calloused hand. “This whole thing will float, you know.”
The door to the geologist’s office and lab was closed and locked. Matt fumbled in his pocket for a key. The lock seemed stubborn for a moment, then it clicked open.
The interior looked as if a wild animal had gone rabid among the desks, files, cases of core samples, charts, and cabinets. A chair lay
on the floor, its swivel legs upward. There were wash basins in which the technicians had studied the lithographic formations obtained by the drill. The samples were taken either from the bore or from the bailer in cable tool cuttings, and were then washed free of foreign matter, dried, and labeled to show the depths at which they were found. There were thick files or records analyzing the samples for porosity, permeability, angle of dip, fluid content, and geological age. Most of the analysis sheets were strewn like a snowstorm over the floor of the laboratory. Slung against one wall of the long room was a twenty-foot core barrel which was run at the bottom of the drill pipe in place of the bit. Matt the Fork looked around at the mess with utter incomprehension.
“What? What in hell happened?”
“You’ve been raided,” Durell said. “Maybe by the Apgaks, maybe by some competitor who wants to force you out of Lubinda."
“But what happened to the crew?”
“It looks as if they were rounded up and taken ashore.”
“It still makes no sense.”
Durell said, “Where were Hobe Tallman’s records?”
“This way.”
The inner office was finely furnished with a steel desk and swivel chair upholstered in leather, curtained windows, a small mahogany bar, some tribal wood carvings that stood three feet high in the corner—perhaps purchased from Brady Cotton‘s collection. Kitty followed them dutifully from the laboratory. There was a large carton in one corner where some core samples had been dumped in a sludgy mess. Matt shook his head dolefully.
“What’s in there?” Durell asked. He indicated a large metal chart ease, the sort that well-equipped seagoing vessels maintain. Matt shook his head again. “It’s locked, Sam. They’re Hobe‘s private analyses.”
“Don’t you have a key?”
“No. Only Hobe has access to those reports and charts. They go back to the home office in Houston.”
Durell tried the lock handle. He was not surprised when the topmost drawer slid out easily. He looked for Matt’s reaction, but the man showed only surprise.
“Hell, there’s nothing in it!”
“They’ve been cleaned out,” Durell said, opening one shallow chart drawer after the other.
Assignment Black Gold Page 7