Charon's Landing (52 page)

He jerked his head sideways when the chopper pitched violently, amazed to see blood drooling from the corner of the pilot’s mouth. Kerikov glanced down and saw a matching stain on the back of his hand. He had no recollection of striking the man. The pilot regarded him with shocked fear, and Kerikov smiled in response. He turned to see how his passenger was doing.

Mercer sat between Kerikov’s bodyguard and Jan Voerhoven. He was bound and gagged with silver duct tape, yet there was a defiance to him and a fathomless look in his eyes. As Kerikov watched, Mercer winked, and behind the thick gag, he was sure the geologist was smiling at him. Trussed and under armed guard, totally helpless, Mercer was mocking him.

Unbelievable.

“There it is,” the pilot said timidly after a few minutes.

In the darkness, the true size of the
Petromax Prudhoe Omega
could not be fully appreciated, especially when she was not in production, her two-hundred-foot-long flare stack dim, her deck lights all but extinguished. Only a few of her eight hundred portholes were lit, and these were so spread apart that they looked like they were on different structures. The red warning strobes atop the cranes were separated by five hundred feet and towered two hundred feet above the helicopter. Yet even the barest outline of the rig demanded awe and respect.

Nearing the
Omega
, the chopper gained enough altitude to reach one of the two helidecks cantilevered off the side of the living module. The crew’s living quarters was a boxy structure the size of a city block, able to accommodate six hundred men, and yet was the smallest of the four modules that made up the rig’s superstructure. The others, the utilities, the production, and the drilling modules, independently built and attached to the rig before it was towed to Alaska, were many times larger. In the glow cast by the chopper’s landing lights, the upper works of the rig gleamed whitely, contrasting with the red decking and the spindly yellow stalks of her cranes and flare boom. The Petromax Oil logotype was stenciled on the landing pad, a grate that allowed the down blast of the rotor to pass through and ease landing operations.

The chopper flared for its landing, the retractable gear just kissing the steel deck. Two workers rushed forward to secure blocks around the tires. The turbine spooled down, and the rotor slowed until it turned with little more effort than a tired ceiling fan. Kerikov was the first to jump from the craft. He opened the passenger door and grabbed Mercer by the shoulder, dragging him out of the chopper and across the windswept deck. His dark mood had been eclipsed by a brittle cheer that was just as dangerous.

Duck-walking his bound prisoner, Kerikov led Mercer to the edge of the landing pad. Without pause for the dramatic effect of standing one hundred feet over the frigid water, he shoved at the small of Mercer’s back, and Mercer flew out into space.

With his hands tied and his mouth gagged, Mercer couldn’t even scream as he began to fall. His gray eyes went wide with fear and dismay. A second later, he hit the safety netting slung around the landing pad, one leg falling through the thick ropes, his headlong plummet arrested after a drop of only six feet. He was high enough above the waves crashing against the caisson legs to hear Kerikov’s deep laughter over his head.

“Did you shit your pants, brave man?” the Russian called down joyfully. “I bet when my men get down there to pull you off the net, they’ll have to hold their noses.”

He hadn’t soiled himself, but it had been a near thing. Lying on the net, Mercer’s breath came in painful draws through his nose, his heart hammering against his ribs. The suddenness of the push had panicked him more than the drop itself. It had been so quick, so unpredictably violent. As two men came to roll him off the netting and onto a narrow catwalk, Mercer knew that before the night was over, he would be going over the edge again, and the next time there would be no safety net.

He was right.

ALTHOUGH the title Tool Pusher connotes a hardened, hands-on type job, one involving the very heart of drilling operations, right at the rotary table and elbow deep in gushing crude and drill mud, it is in fact bestowed on the foreman of the drilling crew. On a rig as large as the
Omega
, the job was largely bureaucratic in nature. Therefore, the cabin reserved for the Tool Pusher was large and quite comfortable, much like an executive suite in a luxury hotel.

Ivan Kerikov was sitting on a deep green couch with a glass in his hand and a fresh cigar glowing amber in his right fist, when Mercer was brought into the room. The lights in the cabin were harsh compared to the gloom of the helicopter, but it took his eyes only a second to adjust. There was no sign of Jan Voerhoven. Kerikov’s face still registered the pleasure he’d felt pushing Mercer off the platform.

“It’s ironic.” Kerikov waved for one of the guards to unwrap the tape binding Mercer’s mouth. “Had you not identified yourself as a geologist, I would have killed you on the spot, never guessing that the man I wanted most in the world was before me. Granted, I would have lost the pleasure of watching you die slowly, but it would have spared you hours, maybe days of torture. Your humor is going to cost you more pain than you thought possible.”

The tape came away like searing water poured across his lips, and Mercer gasped. While he had wanted to come across Ivan Kerikov again at some point in his life, Mercer would have preferred the circumstances to be reversed. But he wasn’t about to show that his current predicament bothered him much. “Tell me, that rock you crawled out from under, are you sure it didn’t move away from you on its own?”

“Always the wit, eh? Is this to be the great verbal duel between the villain and the hero, the forces of good and evil speaking before the final confrontation?”

“If that’s what you want, I’m game. Me, I’m just stalling until the army arrives with a couple dozen gunships and reduces this oil rig to scrap.”

“Like those choppers I destroyed tonight? I don’t think so.

Not this time.” Kerikov sipped his drink, his face and voice calm, conversational. “You haven’t had enough time to mount even a rudimentary counterattack. Tonight’s minor annoyance was the best you could come up with. Considering your reputation, I expected a little more from you.”

“Give me some credit.” Mercer smiled with mock modesty. “I did dodge two assassination attempts in the past week.”

“Amateurs hired in haste, nothing more,” Kerikov dismissed. “My mother could have handled them in her sleep.”

“Remind me never to piss off your mother,” Mercer muttered quietly. “Does PEAL know that Alyeska will have the line back in service within a few months?”

“Trust me, they won’t. While our little ecologists believe that their acts are designed to clog the pipeline, I assure you it is going to burst in about eighty places and spill around five hundred thousand barrels of oil.” Kerikov paused. “That’s about twenty-one million gallons of crude, roughly double what the
Exxon Valdez
lost in 1989.”

“Freezing the oil in the line won’t crack the pipe. The steel liner is over a half inch thick, and there’s not enough internal pressure to split it,” Mercer pointed out.

“You’re right, but when I say so, there’s going to be more than enough pressure to see oil scattered a couple of miles from the line.” Kerikov gave him a greasy smile.

Suddenly, Mercer was afraid for much more than his own life. There was little doubt that Kerikov was telling the truth. He had a way of bursting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline like an eight-hundred-mile-long balloon. As someone who’d worked in some of the more pristine places on the planet, struggling to balance the needs of mankind with the delicacy of nature, Mercer didn’t want to think about the devastation such a catastrophe would create. The state of Alaska would be bisected by a black line of crude, an ugly stain that would take years to clean, assuming it was possible to fully erase so much damage. He couldn’t believe, no matter how radical and dangerous PEAL was, that they would condone such a heinous act in order to further their cause. This situation made as much sense as a Palestinian terror group using a nuclear bomb on Jerusalem. Groups like PEAL wanted to garner attention to their cause, not destroy the very thing they strove to protect.

They would readily agree to freezing the oil, shutting down the TAPline for a couple of months or forever if that’s what they’d been led to believe. That would be a great victory for their cause. But to actually destroy it? Spill the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil it contained? They would never agree to it.

He tried to imagine Aggie Johnston being part of something so repugnant, something that went against every law of nature and man, and he felt that she never would. There was no way she would sit idle while her group destroyed Alaska, leading Mercer to believe that she knew nothing about Kerikov’s ultimate goals. And if she, Jan Voerhoven’s girlfriend, knew nothing, then it was certain that the rank and file of the organization had been equally duped. Anger welled within him, anger at Kerikov and anger at himself for not realizing the danger sooner, for not sounding the alarm when he first found the
Jenny IV
.

Kerikov watched as the change swept through Mercer. He was a good enough judge of moods and character to almost read the thoughts of those around him. It was a gift that had served him well throughout his career in the Soviet Union. “You are just beginning to see the enormity of what I’ve done,” he sneered. “Consider this: What happens here, the destruction of the line and the devastation to the precious ecosystems, is nothing more than a sideshow for my true aims. It’s only one tine in a three-pronged operation. Had Russia ever had the balls to use it, Charon’s Landing would have ended here in Alaska, but I’ve expanded it, adapted it to the world today and made it astronomically profitable. You would be amazed at the number of people who want to see the United States still dependent on imported oil,” he chuckled harshly. “And you’d be surprised to learn that many of them are Americans themselves.”

“Charon’s Landing? That’s the name of this little adventure?”

“Originally it was a Cold War scheme to slow American oil production while our forces launched a lightning attack into Western Europe. The plan called for a combined commando assault against the pipeline and the terminal facility. The planners envisioned the region around Valdez turning into a conflagration of mythic proportions, so they named it after the site where the mythological ferryman, Charon, docked his boat after leading the souls of the dead across the River Styx.”

“Hell.”

“Precisely.”

“Why don’t you tell me your other fronts,” Mercer invited as casually as possible. “What do you have to lose?”

As soon as he’d spoken, Mercer knew he’d made a mistake. Kerikov’s entire carriage changed. No longer did he slouch in his seat. He set his cigar in the glass tray on the table to his left and put down his drink, taking a few seconds to arrange it on a previous water stain. Kerikov’s face, brutal at its best, was absolutely deadly when he turned back to his prisoner, his thick eyebrows pulled tightly together as if to keep his eyes from bursting from their sockets.

“Just because I’ve found you wanting as an adversary doesn’t mean I’m going to get stupid with you.” Kerikov’s voice was chilling, dredged up from some deep well of hatred. “Alam, get in here!” The paneled door swung open and Abu Alam, “Father of Pain,” entered, the Franchi SPAS-12 semi-auto shotgun hanging from its special rig against his lean flank. There was a dangerous edge to him that Mercer could feel from across the room.

“Can I have him now?” Alam asked.

“No. I want him locked up with the other, and I don’t want either of them touched until later. We have a great deal to finish tonight.”

“You promised me, and by the blood of the holymen, I’ll make you pay if I don’t get them.”

Mercer knew that the jittery maniac was afraid that the opportunity to kill him and some other prisoner would be taken away from him. And it was clear he would enjoy the task.

He also saw there was a rivalry between these two. Anyone could tell that the Arab resented taking orders from Kerikov. Without knowing who, Mercer sensed that Alam worked for someone else and that his being with Kerikov was on behalf of this other person. The alliance was one of convenience, nothing more. Not that it really mattered, he thought, considering his circumstances, but Mercer would have loved to know who that other person was.

“We have more important tasks than to worry about our guests.” Kerikov glanced at Mercer, no longer considering him a threat, then looked again at Abu Alam. “Get a few satchel charges from the stores I brought aboard. After we’re finished tomorrow, I guarantee you’ll be able to enjoy yourself with our esteemed doctor here. The other prisoner, well, we have to wait about that for now.”

“It’s time to do away with the activists?” Alam asked brightly.

“It’s time to make the preparations, yes.” Kerikov’s patience with Alam was wearing thin. It appeared to Mercer that he was having trouble reining in the Arab’s desire for death and his love of pain and suffering. “Now take him below, get the explosives, and meet me back here. I want to be off the rig within the hour.”

To Mercer, it sounded as if part of Kerikov was patronizing Abu Alam while some deeper element was in total accordance with the young assassin. Despite Kerikov’s more sophisticated polish, and his more urbane attitude, he was just as sick as the Arab killer. It was like comparing the madness of Hitler to that of his henchman, Joseph Goebbels — darker and lighter shades of the same evil.

Alam yanked Mercer from his chair and shoved him across the room. Mercer calculated the odds of escape and rejected the idea as suicidal. His hands were still bound, and Alam and his two agents had seven visible guns between them. He knew they would love a chance to draw one or all of them and cut him in two, so he allowed himself to be pushed around. The sinking feeling of defeat was overcoming him. He was facing an optionless situation, a trap with no escape, a puzzle with no solution. But he would not let it end here. At the doorway, Mercer turned to look at Kerikov once more. The Russian quietly sipped his drink as if he hadn’t a care in the world.