by Chris Ryan
'That's illegal,' said Li firmly. 'Isn't it?'
'Too right it is,' Mara agreed bitterly. 'The government has to give permission for drilling. You need to do environmental checks, consult with the locals—'
Amber interrupted. 'What happens if a company doesn't?'
'They're fined,' said Danny, 'by the Clean Caribbean Consortium.'
'Whatever they're fined,' said Amber darkly, 'I bet it isn't as much as they could make if they just started drilling at once. How long would it take to get approval through the proper channels?'
'A few years,' said Danny, 'wouldn't it, Mara? They have to go through all sorts of committees and public consultation. It's not just about the environment, it's about people's livelihoods.'
Hex stretched. His back and neck were still aching from digging in the sand. 'Well you can see why they'd just rather get on with making money.'
Carl spluttered, 'You can bet your boots they make money. Even a small field brings in a profit of more than half a million dollars a day.'
Mara frowned. 'I wonder who could be doing this? It can't be ArBonCo. They always seemed to be one of the better oil companies. They always went through the proper channels, consulted properly, listened to the locals. They haven't put the environment in danger before. ABC Guardians have never had any problems with them.'
Amber shrugged. 'I suppose some corporations are just in it for the money.'
Alex brought them back to focus on the task. 'OK, well it seems someone has been trying to drill in secret, and the hole has leaked and given them away.'
'It will be very interesting when they analyse the black box,' said Mara. 'I'll ask about it next time they put me on TV.' She scribbled a note and stuck it to her computer.
'You don't have to,' said Hex. 'Amber and I found the ship was set to full speed when it crashed.'
'And we saw it,' added Li. 'It was going straight for the cliffs. It didn't try to take any evasive action. I think they must have crashed the tanker deliberately to cover up what they're doing with the drilling.'
The room went silent.
Lynn began to talk very fast. 'We've got them. Mara, you can take this to the Clean Caribbean Consortium and maybe they can stop this before it goes any further. I'll get the other dive schools, the restaurants, the hotels and we'll go to the local chamber of commerce—'
'Yes, once they look at the black box—' began Mara.
'Whoa, whoa.' Paulo put up his hands. 'They could still claim it was an accident. They already said on the news that the captain was ill. They'll just say he went loco. We've only got one piece of evidence and that's the two types of oil.'
'Well, we'll take that to them,' said Danny. 'They'll have to take notice if enough of us go—' He stopped.
Amber was shaking her head. 'They can say that's nothing to do with them. Coincidence. We have to prove where it came from. And we have to get it soon, before they realize we're on to them.'
Mara spread her hands in exasperation. 'How? It could be anywhere.' She sighed. 'I'll call the Clean Caribbean Consortium in the morning and tell them what we've got.'
The five members of Alpha Force glanced at each other. If Mara presented the evidence too soon the oil company might explain it away and then they'd have lost any chance of making a difference.
Alex took a deep breath. 'Carl, you're from Canada. Do you remember Usher Mining Corp?'
Carl frowned. 'Usher Mining Corporation . . . Yes! Something about dumping cyanide in the north.'
'I remember that,' said Mara darkly.
Alex said quietly, 'They'd wriggled through every loophole . . . but we got them.'
Mara was looking at Alex with new respect. She nodded quietly. 'Good catch. Daniel Usher was running for governor too, wasn't he?'
Alex returned her gaze enigmatically.
She decided to change the subject. 'If we're really going for it,' she said, 'the best evidence of all would be filmed evidence, and the location of the drill site.'
Amber yawned and stretched. 'Better get some sleep then. We've got a lot of thinking to do tomorrow.'
Hex looked at his watch. 'Today. It's well past midnight.'
Amber gave up the struggle to sleep and opened her eyes. Moonlight streamed into the room. For a moment she expected to be able to float up off the bed around to the wardrobe and then the bathroom. It was like being back exploring the tanker.
'Li,' she hissed, 'are you awake?'
'Yes.' Li's voice didn't sound at all sleepy. Maybe she'd been lying awake too.
'I've been thinking about how we find the drill site. Can we get any clues from the kind of seabirds that have been washed up? Where their feeding grounds are; where they might have picked up the mudslick?'
Li sat up. 'Hmm. Let me think. Quite a lot of the birds nest and feed on the coast, but some build their nests on the coast and feed in the open water. And some spend the whole time at sea once they're mature . . .'
'Hmm. It was sounding promising until you said that last bit. I just thought that if we found a kind of bird that would never go more than a certain distance from its nest, we might know how far out the slick was.'
Despite Amber's reservations, Li's voice became excited. 'Let's get Carl to check what breeds we've found. That's brilliant, Amber.'
'No, it's not, it's rubbish. Forget it.' Amber turned over and tried to get comfortable. At least she'd got the idea off her chest. Maybe now she could get some sleep.
'Hex, are you awake?'
'No, he's not, but I am,' replied Alex's voice.
'Yes, I'm awake,' said Hex crossly.
'If you were going to drill for oil,' said Paulo, 'you wouldn't just start drilling, would you? I mean, it would be expensive. You'd have to have an idea that you were going to find something.'
'I see what you mean,' said Alex. 'There might have been some sort of survey programme. Which could have been noticed.'
There was a sound of fumbling near Hex's bed. Then his face was lit up by the glow of his palmtop. His fingers rattled over the keys.
'What are you looking up?'
'Oil exploration for complete beginners,' replied Hex. He speed-read off the screen, mumbling odd words. '"Oil forms in certain geological . . . blah blah blah . . ."' He was mumbling faster now. '"Shallow parts of oceans . . . blah blah."'
'How do you do a survey underwater?' Paulo queried. 'Submarine?'
'Aha,' said Hex. 'Listen. "Locations are assessed from a boat by seismic survey. Blah blah blah . . ." Basically they sail up and down and fire soundwaves at the sea bed.'
'We should get Danny to ask Greg if anything like that's been going on,' said Paulo. 'As coastguard, he'd probably know all about who comes and goes in these waters.'
Hex powered down the palmtop and the room was dark once more.
The sound of his mobile playing Tubular Bells interrupted Neil Hearst's first latte of the morning. He frowned at the display and answered quickly.
'Simon, I told you not to phone me at work.'
'I've seen the results from the labs. I've had to sit on them. You idiot, you got the wrong kind of oil.'
Hearst took a deep breath and swivelled his chair so that he faced out of the window. His office at the ArBonCo headquarters gave a splendid view of Curaçao's capital, Willemstad. The houses decorated in blue, pink, yellow and green, topped with red tiled roofs and rococo gables like iced gingerbread houses, looked like they had been transplanted from fairytale Amsterdam. He liked them. They were quaint and that made him feel in control. 'Yes, I know. I didn't have much time to set it up.'
'You were paying them. What was the problem?'
'I had to find a captain who wanted to retire. It wasn't just a case of crashing the tanker, I had to find a captain with health problems who wanted to be invalided out. There aren't many of those.'
'You'd better do something about it or the deal's off. That tanker's a mine of evidence.'
There was a click and the connection was cut.
Neil H
earst put the phone in his lap and let out a long, thoughtful sigh.
8
SECRET SITE
The vet took the bird from Amber and went behind the screen. Amber looked away. Out in the bay the pink and yellow sorbent booms were already dark brown and the air was filled with hissing as the red-suited figures washed the oil down into the water with high-pressure hoses. Amber was beginning to recognize some of the other volunteers now: the guy who delivered the vegetables from the market; some off-duty staff from the medical centre. The whole community was involved in the clean-up.
The hoses stopped and in the silence Amber heard the chink of instruments and bottles as the vet worked. There was a rasping noise as the bird's oily feathers spasmed against the vet's rubber gloves, like a last-ditch attempt to escape. Then the hoses started again. The vet laid the bird in a black plastic sack.
Amber was about to go back down the beach when she saw Li, Alex and Carl waving to her from inside the bar. She took off her mask and went over to talk to them.
'Did you get anything from Greg?' she asked Alex.
Alex shook his head. 'No records. Only if there had been a mayday call or they'd caused an accident. But—'
There were books lying open on the bar and Amber noticed that some showed maps and others seemed to be ornithology texts. Li grabbed her arm and squeezed. 'Amber, you've cracked it.'
'How?'
'The birds,' said Carl hurriedly. 'We've found a lot of mature tropicbirds. Normally they live way out at sea but they come back to nest – and – get this – they only nest on remote cliff faces.'
'Yes?' said Amber.
Carl continued. 'There aren't a lot of those habitats left now, but there's one place in Curaçao where they're protected.'
Alex pulled out the map and pointed to a spot. 'Here.'
Amber looked. He was pointing to an area not far from the tanker. 'But we thought the mudslick came from further out.'
'Yes,' said Li, 'but here's the clever bit. Although these birds have their nests here on the coast, they fly out to hunt. They'll only go out a limited distance to get food.' She pointed to the map. 'That's where we need to look.'
'Those two have been out there for a couple of hours,' said Alex, indicating Hex and Paulo, who were still outside with the digging party. 'It's time for me and Li to do a bit – but Amber, why don't you join them for a long break on the water . . . ?'
Amber, in shorts and her favourite burgundy bikini, checked that the Fathom Sprinter was securely anchored. Paulo and Hex were clicking away at their dive computers. This would be a great opportunity to practise all they had recently learned about decompression. They were going down deep – to sixty metres.
The boys were kitted up in BCDs, each with two large tanks. The dive computers were chunkier and more complex than the dive computers they had been using so far, and the tanks were dull green instead of the normal yellow because the mix of gases for deep diving was different. They wore full-length wetsuits and hoods, not only for protection but also for warmth because they would be spending a lot of time waiting in the water for their bodies to adjust as they came up. The dive computers would give them precise instructions and they had to obey them to the letter.
Despite all they had to remember, the two boys looked excited as they made their calculations. They were the most mathematically adept of the group and were the natural choice to be first to try the activity.
'With decompression we need to stay down ninety minutes in total,' said Paulo. 'So that leaves us with about fifteen minutes to get there and fifteen minutes to video the site.'
'That's not much time to find it,' said Amber. She then wished she hadn't said anything because the look on Hex's face was just a little too smug.
'It isn't if you have to search for the site,' he grinned. 'But if you have a genius who can look up the currents and calculate where the slick is and where it's likely to have come from—'
Paulo interrupted. 'What games have you got on your dive computer, Hex?' He wasn't joking; the dive computers had games to help them while away the time on the way up.
Hex pulled a face. 'They're really naff. I'm not going to look at them.'
'They're better than nothing,' protested Paulo.
'They're crude,' said Hex. 'I don't want to rot my brain with that rubbish. They're hardly Half-Life.'
'Well, it looks like you'll be counting fish for an hour,' said Amber. 'Try not to fall asleep.' She kneeled down and clipped their fins on while they did a final kit check. Then she settled back on a cushion with a good book and a sunhat.
Hex checked the video camera was fully charged. Then the boys moved from the central bench to the one around the edge of the boat. The boat sank alarmingly on that side: the kit was really heavy. Hex put his regulator in his mouth, then tipped over backwards into the water, followed by Paulo.
The sea out here was different from that in the shallows. There were fewer creatures, and the bottom was invisible, with the water below them dimming to black before they could see any signs of the sea bed. Paulo and Hex turned their torches on and headed down. It was eerie. Hex tried not to think about it but, being naturally claustrophobic, he felt as if he was being swallowed by a vast, cold blackness and he was very glad Paulo was with him.
A school of barracuda followed them in a menacing silver cloud. Paulo knew they were just attracted by the lights and wouldn't attack but it was still unnerving. One swam beside him, a long thin strip of silver with a grim face like a mouth carved into a rifle bullet.
They descended and left the barracuda behind. It was colder, a vast expanse of black. They kept checking their dive computers – to keep a sense of direction and to make sure the currents weren't taking them off course.
The bottom loomed up palely, like an area of fog, then became solid.
Paulo's torch beam caught a bubble of oil. He turned to Hex and pointed. They must be close. They could feel the current pushing against them. Another bubble went past. The current was definitely going north.
They would have to swim against it.
The bottom was bare rock like the surface of the moon, with no sign of a drill site. Hex checked his dive computer. They were slightly off course. They had drifted after all. He pointed with his torch. Paulo followed him.
The drill site loomed up like everything else, as a blur that gradually became solid. Something upright that didn't look like the moonscape elsewhere became a dull red metal pipe fifty centimetres long, sticking right up out of the sea floor. When they got up to it, they could see how big it was – a good two handspans wide. About five metres away was another, and after that another. It reminded Paulo of a plantation of trees. There must have been at least eight boreholes – and possibly more that they couldn't see. But one was clearly leaking – oil bubbling out into the sea like a black tongue.
There was debris scattered between the boreholes – more big lengths of pipe – as though someone had dismantled some scaffolding on the sea floor and just left it there. Hex filmed it: filmed the collar of cement that held the borehole in place, the dark oil swelling out of the top and breaking into bubbles. He filmed Paulo scooping the oil into Mara's sample tubes. Then he reached for Paulo's wrist and filmed the compass on his dive computer – that way they would have a grid reference to show exactly where the boreholes were.
Paulo looked at the borehole. How could it have been left like that? Surely there must be some sort of cap. He shone his torch in the top of the borehole and saw a big metal cap inside the pipe. It had been sealed, but not very well. He swam over to the next one. So had that. They all had. The oil that was coming onto the shore must be stuff released during the actual drilling and sampling and the residue left on this equipment. Although there was still some oil dribbling out where the seals were weak, the original leak had been plugged and the oil would soon stop coming ashore. To crash a tanker ArBonCo must have wanted to cover up what they'd been doing very badly. Maybe they didn't want anyone to know how much oi
l was there; how big an operation the drilling would be.
He looked at his dive computer again. One more minute and they had to ascend to their first decompression stop. Hex was swimming around the site, making sure he'd filmed all the evidence. The pictures would be astounding – the site was much bigger than they'd thought.
Hex looked at his dive computer too. Time to go up. He clicked off the video camera and hung it on his BCD. His computer gave him his first instruction: go up to thirty metres and stay there for six minutes. As Paulo signalled Up, Hex pushed away strongly from the bottom. But something pulled him back—
He dropped his torch. It swung from its cable, bouncing light around the dark water. Something had him. He didn't even know what part of his body had been caught, just that he couldn't move. His breathing rasped in his ears, bubbles streaming out of his regulator. He kicked furiously. His legs. It was like they were being held by some long-armed creature. In the dark all he could feel was this . . . thing. His hands flailed to catch his torch.