by Rob Sangster
Gano nudged Jack. “That Barbas dude thinks big. Must have some Texas blood in his veins.”
Pretty much what Jack was thinking. He’d badly underestimated the scale of Barbas’s operation and felt . . . not intimidated exactly, but impressed and a shade cautious. That was a damned big deal down there.
Two red circles at one end of the main deck marked chopper landing areas. Near them, three more choppers were secured to the deck with chain tie-downs. One was a twin of the one they were aboard. The other two, partially covered by tarps, were twice as big.
Their chopper came in hot and dropped to the deck. Barbas was nowhere in sight.
“No surprise,” Jack said. “He’s reminding me he didn’t want me aboard.”
“I’M JORGENSON,” said a man in his fifties who had the rough-hewn look of a lumberjack. “Mr. Barbas told me to show you around our floating palace. Follow me.”
He took them straight to the deck below, the counterpart to the hanger deck of a carrier, and started talking and pointing. “Down there is the accommodation block of 140 double cabins, all of them better than on any platform I’ve worked before. Plus a damn good galley and dining room. Food as good as anything in Astoria.” Then he showed them a game room, library, fully-equipped gym with sauna, and a basic hospital. “Back down that way”—more pointing—“are offices, laboratories, and storage spaces.” He didn’t offer to take them there.
Next stops were mechanical spaces, including the engines driving the twelve thrusters capable of moving the platform. There were generators, tool sheds, and a warehouse with racks of parts. They stopped at the base of the drill tower where the drill string passed through the moon pool straight down to the waves far below.
“One of the lads got careless and tripped into the moon pool. Sixty feet down. Hit the water spread-eagled. Flattened him like a pancake. Could happen to anyone,” he said with a sly grin, “especially when they first come aboard.” Next he pointed out huge containers filled with ore waiting to be offloaded onto conveyor belts through a thirty-foot wide hatch to where a cargo ship would be waiting below.
Back on the main deck, Jorgenson talked about multibeam sonar, sub-bottom echo sounders, electrohydraulic control systems, and fiber optics for downhole monitoring, as if they all understood. Jack got more and more restless as they walked. It was obvious they were being showed only what Barbas wanted them to see. It was a dog-and-pony show, but he’d stick with it to see where the pony stopped.
Out of curiosity or boredom, Gano wandered off from time to time. Jorgenson didn’t bother to call him back because every door that wasn’t on the tour was locked.
Near one end of the main deck of the platform, Jorgenson showed them a structure whose walls were translucent panels. “That’s a greenhouse where Renatus grows orchids . . . something about fiddling with genetics. Someone told me he’s trying to create the perfect orchid, whatever that means. They say he’s going to name it Esperanza. He may be a genius, but he’s a world-class weirdo for sure. When he’s working on one of his personal projects he wouldn’t take down his ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign even if the platform was sinking.” He pointed again. “And over there is where we store remotely operated vehicles when we bring them to the surface for maintenance. One of my mates told me Renatus had an ROV modified to bring microbes and other small creatures up from the depths. Now what has that got to do with mining, I ask you?”
“Well, that’s it, Jack.” Walking up from behind them, Barbas cut Jorgenson off and waved him away. “I’m sure Jorgenson showed you how my Chaos Project operates.”
“No doubt Mr. Jorgenson did exactly what you told him to do,” Jack said, keeping sarcasm out of his voice. He waited while Barbas took Debra’s hand in his. “And this is our colleague, Mr. Gano LeMoyne.” Barbas’s mouth tightened, and he didn’t offer to shake.
Gano lifted his yacht cap and smiled broadly as if they were old friends. “You called this your ‘Chaos Project,’” he said. “That’s an unusual name.”
“My inside joke,” Barbas said to Debra rather than Gano. “It’s the name of the Greek goddess of the gap between Heaven and Earth. She’s the air humans breathe.”
“And she’s also called the Mother of Darkness,” Debra said, drawing a frown from Barbas. Unfazed, she pointed at an eight-wheel contraption. “What’s that? Looks like an undersized Caterpillar backhoe.”
“Hardly. That’s one of my ROVs that work under immense pressure seventy-two hundred feet down, scooping up chunks of seabed and transporting them to a processing plant on the ocean floor. Japan, China, Russia, and the U.S. have nothing anywhere near as sophisticated.”
Barbas eyed Debra, ran his fingers through one side of his beard, and seemed to make a decision. “All right, since you’re going to be working for me, I’ll explain a little about what’s going on down there. Seawater at just above freezing percolates downward through the seafloor into the Earth’s crust, getting much hotter as it goes deeper. At very high temperatures, it reacts chemically with rocks and picks up minerals from them. When that hot water rises, it comes out the chimney of the HTV and collides with icy seawater. Presto! The metals precipitate out and rain down onto the seabed. That’s why I target my mining to the vicinity of this HTV while my so-called competitors are ripping up miles of ocean floor.”
Jack watched Barbas closely. He wasn’t the same champagne-drinking playboy figure he’d been aboard Excalibur. Here, he still had his swagger, but he was much more intense.
“Those guys are like the old wildcatters who had to see oil pooled on the ground to know where to drill.” Barbas’s tone was contemptuous. “On Chaos, I have reverse MRI technology that measures the magnetic resonance of hydrocarbon atoms, and we send out robot scouts with instructions about what to look for. When they find it, they notify other equipment to come get it. The minerals are brought up here to the platform in insulated tubes run by a row of suction pumps in that building over there. The end of each tube is equipped with lights and cameras and has small water jets to direct the mouth of the tube where we want it.”
“It must take incredible suction to bring all that rock to the surface,” Gano said.
“It would, so we don’t do that. We built a totally automated primary processing plant that rests on the seabed. As we collect mineral nodules, they’re fired into the processor where they’re crushed and run through water jets that flush mud and sand back into the ocean. The slurry that remains is much easier to suck to the surface. After more processing aboard this platform, we dump about eighty percent of that material back into the water. The valuable minerals are offloaded to ore carriers to be delivered upriver from Astoria.”
“Doesn’t all that dumping screw up the ocean big-time?” Gano asked.
Barbas scowled. He’d clearly developed a dislike for Gano. “To the contrary, Mr. LeMoyne, we’re very careful about that. What we release from the platform is highly diluted and disperses quickly. When we finish with an area on the bottom, our machines are programmed to level the site and leave it pretty much as we found it.”
To Jack, Barbas sounded like a West Virginia coal mine owner who tears off a mountain top, dumps the toxic debris into the water supply, and then explains how good it is for the economy. Jack pointed to the tall box-girder structure between the two hoists. “That looks like an oil drilling rig.”
“We’re not drilling for oil or anything else,” Barbas snapped. “I use that tower to send mechanical eyes and hands to the seafloor that can repair anything down there.”
When Barbas turned aside to answer a question from a foreman, Gano spoke softly in Jack’s ear. Jack nodded. He’d been thinking about the same thing. When Barbas finished with the worker, Jack said, “I’ve been wondering about the buildings on this deck and the spaces in the superstructure we didn’t visit. What are they for?” He was prying, so he watched carefully to see how Barbas wou
ld react. He didn’t, not even a twitch at the corner of an eye.
“I allow no visitors inside the superstructure. Most of the top level is my suite. I keep it private except for special invited guests.” His expression was somewhere between a smile and a leer. “The 02 level, that’s the middle one, is full of proprietary equipment and what I call Command Central. From there I control all underwater operations. On this deck, I built lots of extra space for expansion. Nothing to see.”
Total brush-off. He was about to explore that when he noticed that Barbas’s fists were clenched.
“Jack, come with me to the bridge. I have something important to tell you.”
Chapter 10
July 14
1:30 p.m.
Chaos platform
BARBAS UNLOCKED the door and preceded Jack into a space that ran the full width of the third level of the superstructure.
“This is a replica of the admiral’s bridge on the nuclear carrier USS John F. Kennedy, CVN-79. I would love to be in command of that baby. She carries more firepower than was expended by all sides during WWII.”
“Very impressive.”
Barbas slid into the admiral’s pivoting chair. “I never could have built this bridge the way I wanted it if I’d had to conform to government specs.” He picked up a pair of binoculars and twisted the focus rings repeatedly without looking at them. “Thunder Horse, the largest semi-submersible oil drilling platform in the world at the time, was built to government specs. It got knocked silly by Hurricane Dennis. Then Ocean Ranger, a platform as tall as a thirty-five-story building, sank in a storm off Newfoundland, taking eighty-four crewmen to the bottom. Piper Alpha, a gas production platform in the North Sea, blew up, killing 167 men. Both of them were built to government specs.”
Barbas’s nostrils were flaring in outrage. His Greek accent was stronger. “This platform is more than two hundred miles offshore, so the U.S. government had no control over how I built it. Because of that, it’s a technological marvel that laughs at storms. It’s the safest rig ever built.”
The captain of the “unsinkable” Titanic couldn’t have said it better.
Barbas paused, thick eyebrows raised as though daring Jack to contradict him. “I’m a gambler. Have been all my life. The silver spoon in my mouth was my first stake, and I’ve been on a winning streak ever since—until now. I’ve sunk more than a billion dollars into this project, and I’m on the hook for a hell of a lot more. From seabed to processing plant, this operation is costing me $250,000 a day, seven days a week, and we’re not even breaking even. When Wall Street imploded, the world economy locked up and my home country turned out to be built of straw. My international shipping business went on the rocks. Occupancy in my resorts is under thirty percent. This project will break me unless it pays off big—and soon. I can’t let any goddamn bureaucrats interfere.”
Jack had heard many of the people who walked into his office go off on “goddamn bureaucrats” within the first five minutes.
“So far,” Barbas went on, “my platform operations have been free from interference from the Law of the Sea treaty and the International Seabed Authority. I assume you’re familiar with both.”
He should be. He’d taught international law courses for five years. “U.S. regulations can’t touch you,” Jack replied, “because you’re in the Mare Liberum, international waters. And you’re not subject to rules of the 1982 UN Convention on Law of the Sea because the U.S. hasn’t ratified it. The U.S. also refuses to recognize the ISA as having any power over seabed drilling outside territorial waters.”
“If the sons of bitches at the ISA ever get their hooks into me, they’d steal my secrets and blackmail me to keep them from shutting me down. I discovered this site, and no one, no one, is going to tell me what I can or can’t do here.”
Jack was struck by the passion, almost hate, in Barbas voice. “So far at least, you’re unregulated. What’s the problem?”
“I’ll tell you what the damn problem is. In the past, whenever the Law of the Sea was about to come up for ratification, a group of senators announced ahead of time they would vote against it, so the majority leader didn’t bring it up. But now, if that group loses even one member, they can’t stop it. That treaty is scheduled to be brought up again in three weeks. If it’s ratified, the ISA will shut my platform down for years while it conducts studies on whether my mining business might theoretically threaten some deepwater shrimp.”
Jack thought of the Tennessee snail darter that Barbas had dismissed so coolly. “Have you talked with anyone about this?
“Of course I have. I know how the system works.” He twisted the focus knobs faster. “I talked with Ed Cargill, legislative director for the Senate majority leader, and explained that I need to make sure his boss never brings up the treaty for ratification. He said the majority leader appreciated my past contributions, but he wouldn’t commit. I’ve sent notes to him for five months and haven’t gotten one damned response.” He stood, strode to the window, and watched the activity on the main deck thirty feet below. He seemed no less agitated when he sat back in his pivoting chair. “When I call the UN Secretary General, I get a call back the same day, but that pipsqueak Cargill is jerking me around. I’ll make him pay for that, but right now he’s a dead end. I have to find another way to keep that treaty in the deep freeze.”
Barbas tilted his head back, maybe fantasizing he was a real admiral. His eyes popped open and he said, “My best shot is to get President Gorton to stop it, but I backed the guy who ran against him so I have no line of communication. In asking around, I heard that Gorton wanted you to be his White House legal counsel a few years ago. So it seems reasonable that you can ask him to do a favor for a big client.”
Jack looked across the compass bolted to the deck and out the fortified window of the imaginary admiral’s bridge. Of course! That’s why Barbas had perked up when Debra told him the name of her firm. Barbas had already had him in his sights. That “strong connection” and the “favor” were the real reasons Barbas had invited them for a sail aboard Excalibur. Now he’d finally delivered the punch line.
“And that favor,” Jack said, “would be getting the president to explain to the majority leader that the Law of the Sea treaty and the ISA are contrary to the security interests of the United States and should not be ratified . . . ever.”
Barbas beamed. “Exactly. And if he’s reluctant, tell him I’ll donate five percent of the profits I make from selling minerals, except for gold, to him. Like a tithe, you might call it. How soon can you get that done?”
That was blunt. Barbas called it a tithe, but he was proposing a bribe. Being asked to take advantage of his relationship with the president had happened three times before, and each had made him feel like a lottery winner being hit up for a handout. But he’d brought it on himself. Just before he’d opened the doors of Strider & Vanderberg, he’d asked Gorton to very publicly offer him the prestigious job of White House legal counsel, assuring him that he would not accept. That was at a time when Gorton very much wanted Jack’s good will, so he’d done so immediately. That announcement had pushed the Peck Strider scandal into the shadows, and clients had come pouring in.
Gorton’s offer had been a charade that served both of them, but it did not mean there was any special relationship between them. In fact, because he knew things that could hurt Gorton politically, he was sure the president would always be wary of him.
He noticed Barbas pick up the binoculars again and start fiddling with them, waiting for an answer. Tricky moment. Not the right time to deny the relationship and give away the leverage Barbas thought he had. He decided to waffle. “It’s not a matter of how soon. I haven’t agreed to contact him at all.”
“This is about money, isn’t it?” Barbas’s smirk reeked of condescension. “I showed a little vulnerability, so now you want more than legal fees. Ma
ybe a piece of the action? Listen, I’m Greek. I bargain for a living. I’ll give you one percent of the net from the minerals for three years. That’s not all. When you’re in a deal with me, I’ll introduce you to world-class CEOs, every one of them a potential client.”
Big money, more than he’d ever make practicing public interest law.
Barbas transformed his serious look into a social smile. “Then there are side benefits like access to private jets, my yacht, my clubs, and some beautiful . . . companions. All you have to do is get a commitment from Gorton within, say, a week.”
All that money. Side benefits. Hire more lawyers. Sounded great. Just a couple of problems. The Chaos project was hemorrhaging money and so was the rest of Barbas’s empire. One percent of nothing was nothing. Barbas couldn’t deliver on any of his promises, including the grand delusions he’d spun back on Excalibur when he’d been pressing hard to hire Strider & Vanderberg. The other problem was that, having escaped the path his father had dictated for him, there was no way he’d get back in harness for anyone, least of all Petros Barbas.
“What I do for you”—he heard the stiff self-righteousness in his voice—“will be billed at my rate as a lawyer. Save you a lot of money.”
“That’s chump change. You insisted on coming to Chaos to see what I’m doing. Now you understand what’s at stake. I’m your client, a very big client, and I’m telling you to kill this ratification, whatever it takes.”
Jack looked out at the Pacific—choppy, as if agitated from below. Barbas had created a serious dilemma. He very much wanted—needed—to keep Barbas as a client. But the tour had raised questions. So had Barbas’s intensity about the treaty. What was Barbas so worried about? He played political poker at an international level, so he knew he would be taking a risk by twisting arms in the Senate. Since blocking the ratification was worth that risk, something was going on beyond sucking up nodules through a seventy-two-hundred-foot-long straw.