Buried At Sea (14 page)

"Flying, hell," Will gasped a laugh. "I'm dying. You're killing me."

"You'll miss me when I'm gone."

He vaulted back on his own bike and pedaled as if he were climbing Mont Blanc and super-biker Lance Armstrong was the only racer still ahead of him. Flying. Eating the hill. Form: knees in line, chest up, shoulders down, hands relaxed. Shannon was right. The once-in-a-lifetime voyage had changed his life. He was stronger, surer. First thing he was going to do when he got home—second thing—was start swimming outdoors. To hell with the pool: he would swim every day in triathlon conditions. His heart was pounding, he was maxing out now, but his form was true, his body efficient, his effort sublime.

He felt the crazy tug of an endorphin high seeping into his brain. The music sounded unbearably beautiful. The strobe on the sails showed off the boat as the splendid creature she was. God, she'd been good to them. The endorphins were surging now, a tidal flow of joy juice. The sea glowed. He looked over at Will. The long voyage and all its hassles had been a crucible of friendship. Like team racing, or going to war together. He could hear a loud thudding—his heart—a powerful whomp, whomp, whomp. A smile grabbed his face, a sob tugged at the corner of his mouth, involuntary tears warmed his eyes, and he felt a potent mingling of sensations, like laughter, weeping, and orgasm, all at once.

The thudding grew louder, thundering, and quite suddenly, something was very wrong. A blinding light from above seared his eyes. He heard Will yell. The thundering shook the bike and the decks, and a hard gust smacked the sails.

A ship, Jim thought. We're being run down by a ship. Where was the collision alarm?

An amplified voice roared like the voice of God: "What

are you all doin' down there?" Jim realized that a helicopter was hovering close overhead, beaming a light down on the sailboat.

"Douse that goddamned light!" Will yelled back through the loud-hailer. "You're blinding us."

The helicopter drew back fifty feet. In a thick American Gulf Coast drawl, the pilot demanded, "What the hell is wrong with you, blinking your 'mergency strobe when there ain't no 'mergency?"

"What the hell are you doing so far offshore?" Will bellowed back.

"You all need rescuin' or not?"

The helicopter's searchlight probed the decks and lingered on the bikes. Will shouted to Jim, "Oil company rig tender. Way off base out here."

The searchlight locked onto Jim and Will dripping in their workout shorts.

"You all pansies?"

"Hey, pal," Will shot back. "You want to come down here and say that to my face? No?

Then be a good ol' boy and patch me through to Mr. Kenyon?'

"Who?"

"Steve Kenyon. Your boss."

"Kenyon? Kenyon's not with the company no mo'." "What? Where'd he go?"

"Home, I guess. Hell, Kenyon hasn't been here fo' two, three years."

"Okay, get me Rick Hite!"

"Never heard of 'im."

The helicopter veered away and thundered toward the invisible coast leaving them in utter darkness.

"Bloody hell?" muttered Will. "Bloody, bloody hell." As his eyes recovered from the glare of the searchlight, Jim looked over at Will. The old man was staring north at the red glow.

"I thought Kenyon was your buddy?'

"Biggest honcho in the oil patch."

"But he's been gone three years."

"We haven't kept in touch.. . . Damn, damn,

"Will, when were you out here last?"

" 'Ninety-six."

"That's a long time ago."

Will plucked a spotlight from its charger and inspected the sails. Then he motioned to Jim to take the helm. "Keep out of eyeball range of the platforms. I want to check the charts."

When word came in on the sat phone that Will Spark had been spotted sixty miles off the Bonny River in the Niger Delta, Andy Nickels was airborne in the wrong direction. He immediately ordered a one-eighty and instructed the McVay Foundation pilots to plot fuel and relief-crew stops for the long haul to Nigeria.

Then he woke an American operations superintendent in Port Harcourt whose responsibilities--and primary headaches—entailed security for offshore oil rigs, terminals, pumping stations, submarine pipelines, storage tankers, and wellheads. Nickels offered no apologies for the late-night call. From the point of view of the operations superintendent this would sound like the McVay Foundation was doing him one big favor.

He confirmed Lloyd McVay's earlier warning to the superintendent's boss that Greenpeace fanatics were headed for the Bonny River in a sailboat and added that the Greenpeacers intended to hook up with local dissidents to shut down oil production.

"You've been told we'll take custody'

"You're welcome to 'em."

The oilman alerted Bonny River Joint Security, which maintained a fleet of high-speed patrol boats funded by several oil corporations working the Niger to protect their ships and terminals from pirates, protesters, insurgents, and renegade government soldiers. Dealing with the locals, whom you could usually buy off, was pain in the tail enough. But no one bribed Greenpeace. You had to stop them before their

PR machine got cranking. Thank the good Lord for small favors: this bunch on the sailboat had made the mistake of coming in the dark—which meant they'd be leaving in the dark.

J I M STAYED IN Hustle's cockpit, where he watched for ships and workboats and steered around oil platforms and the bright patches lit by burning gas glares. He was excited. The boat was moving quickly, carried shoreward by the wind and the heavy swell. Each of the rolling waves was shoving him closer to an airport and home. The closer they got, the more lights speckled the night, red and green and white, and the brighter burned the flares that lit the sky. In the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, it looked like thousands of people were working the oil wells. Not true, Will told him when he brought him tea—at least, not one person for every light. It wasn't a city. It was more like a highly automated factory. "It's good for us. They're too busy to notice us:'

"Did you work here?"

"No, I sold them equipment, a seismograph I had some people develop for siting wells. We ought to see the fairway pretty soon—look for a couple of sea buoys. Four-second red blinker and a four-second green. How are you holding up?"

"I'm getting a little tired."

"Coming in is always tough. Bobbing around by yourself for months, you're just not used to close-quarters intensity?'

"I'm surprised you trust me alone for so long in these conditions."

"I've been watching on the radar."

Five thousand miles to the west, Andy Nickels's plane rocketed out of Miami Airport, refueled and freshly crewed.

Greg had reported in. He and his boys were heading into Lagos from Freetown. They'd land in an hour and Greg was already dickering on the radio for a Nigerian army helicopter to make the pickup. Nickels sat-phoned the captain of a McVay-funded geological research vessel drilling off Isla de Bioko and asked him to steam out of Guinea's territorial waters and clear his helipad for a dawn landing. The captain protested that he had a thousand meters of cable over the side.

"Would you like Mr. McVay to confirm your orders?'

Nickels knew he should catch some sleep. He'd been running flat out thirty hours, the last ten on enough coke to choke a horse. It was either sleep or drop some big E. He decided, with a grim smile, to do the mature thing and just close his eyes—arrive refreshed for the interrogation.

Joint Security's private navy was fanning out across the Bonny estuary. Their maneuverable semirigid shallow-draft boats crisscrossed at will the flats and creeks that led from the sea. Gunners and radar/infrared operators scoped the channels.

"What the hell is that? Hey, bright eyes, see there? What do you see?" Jim looked where Will was focusing his night glasses. "I see white. . . :' It looked like a feather blowing along the orange horizon.. "I think it's moving."

"It's a small boat throwing spray .. . going like a bat out of hell."

"A rig tender?"

"Too small . . . lost him. . . . You know what worries me? Who told that cracker we were coming?"

"What cracker?"

"The helicopter pilot."

"What are you talking about? He saw our flasher beacon. He thought we needed help."

"Forty miles from the nearest oil rig?"

"Will, I see three white lights on top of each other."

"That's a tug towing barges—look way back behind it. See that red light? That's the barge. Don't get between them. The tow wire will cut you in half. And the barge will run over what's left."

"I see a green flasher." Jim counted, "One . . . two . . . three . . . four-second green flasher! It's the sea buoy."

"Find me the red. It should appear a hair to the left of the green."

"I lost the green."

"There's a barge blocking it. . .. There!"

"I got the red."

"Good—what the hell is that?"

Jim saw another tiny splash of white whipping across their path. "Is that the same boat?"

"No, too far away. Jesus, there's another." Will leaped through the hatch. Jim picked up the binoculars and focused on the movement. He saw a spidery shape skitter through a light patch.

When he looked down the hatch, he saw Will hunched over the radar screen. A second later he came boiling up the companionway, shouting, "Head up! Douse the sails! They'

re all over the place!"

"Who?"

"Whole slew of patrol boats. Douse the sails."

Will cranked in the main. Jim furled the jib. Will started the engine and engaged the propeller.

"Told you that goddamned cracker was looking for us." "He saw our flasher."

"Why was a chopper cruising so far from shore? I'll tell you why. Somebody paid him to keep an eye peeled. And now they know we're coming."

Jim couldn't believe this was starting all over again. They were so close. "Will, even if there is somebody chasing you—okay, okay, the poet is chasing you—there's no way he'

s going to know you're on the Bonny River. What is that?"

Something tall and dark loomed nearby, a sight blocked earlier by the sails. Will grabbed the binoculars. Then he tossed them to Jim, spun the helm, and steered toward it. "Good eyes, Jim. Good eyes. Get the mooring lines from the forepeak."

"What for?"

"Do it!"

When Jim returned with the lines, they were close enough to see what looked like the girders of a half-built office tower. "What is it, an oil well?"

"Abandoned rig."

"Where you going?"

"Right inside. Any luck, the patrols won't distinguish us from the rig." They looked back. The lights of the patrol boats were still speeding in the orange dark. As the sailboat motored closer and closer to the looming structure, Jim asked, "You said you were in the oil business?"

"Periphery," Will grunted.

. "So you have a clear idea of what's under these things." "Somewhat." Jim held his breath. The heavy swell was surging between the thick round legs. High overhead, he could see the upper reaches against the orange-lit sky. The three legs of the structure looked twenty stories high, braced by cross girders.

"The mast is going to hit!"

"Optical illusion," Will said coolly. "Listen up. Take a mooring line up to the bow. See that leg with the ladder?" There was enough light from the flaming sky to see the swell sluicing through the steel understructure and a floating dock for the service boats. "I'll get you in close, you loop onto a

mooring cleat—loop, not tie, in case we have to get off quick—and let her fall back on the current."

Hustle's engine echoed against steel as Will nosed the boat carefully between the stiltlike legs. "There you go—secure the line to the boat first!" Jim ran forward, knelt on the foredeck to fasten the line, leaned out of the pulpit, and took a turn around a mooring cleat heavy enough to hold a tugboat. The current swung the stern around and the boat drifted back on her mooring line, hidden under the tower.

"Keep your eyes open," said Will and went below.

Ten minutes later Will called him down to the chart table. He was tense but collected, the way he got when he had settled on a decision.

"Okay, listen up. What we're going to do is head east for the Calabar River."

"What's there?"

"Friends they won't know about:'

The chart showed the narrow Calabar River many miles to the east in the mangrove swamps. So far east that it formed the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. Will had underlined it in the Sailing Directions. They made the town of Calabar itself, forty miles inland, sound like the capital of nowhere.

"How do I get to the airport?"

"My pals will get you to Lagos."

"Why don't we land at the Bonny River, like we were going to? Just long enough to drop me on the dock." Port Harcourt was thirty miles upriver. So what if Will didn't have a " pal" with a helicopter. Port Harcourt looked like a fair-sized city. From there he could catch a train to Lagos, or maybe a ferry through the creeks that connected the rivers of the Delta.

Will answered slowly, as if he were attempting to talk sense to a drunk. "You see the patrols hunting us."

"No. I see patrols. But I don't see them hunting us."

"The chopper pilot told them he saw us. They've probably got a dossier on me as long as your arm, so they'll know

I was connected on the Bonny River. First place they'll look." Jim molded his reasoning to fit Will's fears. "If it's me you're worried about, don't. 'They'

won't bother me if I'm not with you."

"Unless they torture you to death to find out where I am." Jim vaulted past that picture by reminding himself that Will had a gruesome way of drawing him into the circle of his fantasy. The only way around it was to answer Will in his own terms. "They'll know that you dropped me and sailed away. How would I know where you went?"

"I can't take the chance they won't be waiting at the dock."

"All you've got to do is drop me, you can keep going."

"No way. The boat would be in clear view from the time we cross the bar. Look here." Will touched a finger to the chart and traced the channel through shallow banks and breaking seas. "Eight miles from the bar to Peter Point. Nine, nearly ten, to the oil terminal. Two hours to prepare a `welcome.' "