Charon's Landing (53 page)

“It’s too bad that the computers in Valdez detected a drop in the temperature of the oil moving through the pipeline two weeks ago. One of your nitrogen packs leaked, Kerikov. Alyeska has been following behind your PEAL work crew, removing the packs just as quickly as they were attached.”

Kerikov swiveled around, searching Mercer’s face with an expression bordering on pity. When he spoke he almost sounded sad, as if Mercer’s bluff was too pathetic to warrant a response. “Of course, you’re lying.” He smirked. “I’ve had control of those computers for nearly a month. There hasn’t been a single anomalous reading since I tapped in. I really did expect more from you.”

Gotcha, Mercer said to himself.

Abu Alam jammed the barrel of his shotgun into Mercer’s back, forcing him out into the hallway. For now, his only choice was to allow Alam to lead him into the mechanical decks of the rig, where the brightly lit corridors gave way to a warren of twisting crawl spaces and work shafts whose function Mercer couldn’t even guess.

They walked for nearly fifteen minutes, and even with his strong sense of direction, developed over years of working in labyrinthine mines, Mercer was lost. He knew he was deep within the superstructure of the oil rig, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. The dark serpentine walkways merged from one to another so easily that every new junction resembled the previous. If he had any hope of escape, only Ariadne’s string could save him from this maze.

They stopped in front of a six-foot hatch, its dogging wheel all the way open. It was as unremarkable as the two dozen similar hatches they had passed during their silent march through the
Omega
. Mercer spun, but his captor had already stepped back, the black SPAS-12 held levelly.

“Open it,” Alam barked, and one of his men heaved at the doorway, revealing a tiny room beyond. Alam had his shotgun ready, as if he expected to see someone standing in the phone booth-sized cabin. Mercer realized that he was looking into an elevator car. The drilling rig was so new that the lubricant used to grease the hatch was still a clear yellow, not yet darkened by dirt and grime.

“Inside.” Alam prodded Mercer again.

He stepped into the small elevator, expecting Alam to disobey Kerikov and shoot him in the back, but the blast did not come. Although he knew it was futile, Mercer tried to reason with Alam. “You know you’re not going to get away with this. You’re going to be caught and killed.”

“I pray for nothing more than a martyr’s death fighting the Great Satan,” Alam said, and his two men nodded in agreement.

“Be careful what you wish for; it may come true.” The door was slammed in his face, and the car began to drop.

There was no real elevator car, just a cagelike platform guided by a rail on its back side. It fell sedately into one of the rig’s massive hollow support columns, the walls opening up around Mercer, widening and curving like the insides of a huge grain silo. Looking out over the open edge of the car, he guessed the fall to be about one hundred feet. The bottom of the shaft was just a dark circle from his perspective, no larger than a manhole cover.

Down the platform dropped, the guide wheels passing slickly along its rail, the great open void sucking at him. Mercer had never suffered from vertigo before, but it didn’t seem a good time to push his luck. He kept his eyes fixed on the opposite wall of the featureless shaft. The air was chilled and humid, condensation droplets clinging to the pale blue walls like clear, fat leeches. At one point, Mercer could feel that the elevator had passed below the water line, the temperature plummeting a further twenty degrees. He pulled his leather jacket tighter around his body.

When he finally reached the bottom, it took only a few minutes to cut the tape binding his wrists by rubbing it against the accordion gate affixed to the floor. He located the controls that would send the elevator back to the top of the support leg to his right, but they had been sabotaged. The call buttons dangled from their housing on a few blackened wires. Mercer mashed the green button anyway, pressing it with all of his strength as if sheer force would convince the disabled elevator to begin rising.

Nothing happened. It had been shorted so only the upper controls still functioned. He was trapped in a modern-day version of the medieval pit. Without waiting for the full effect of his predicament to sink in, Mercer began to explore for another way out, starting first with the elevator itself. The cable that lowered the car was his best hope, and he scrambled on top of the open-sided car to examine it more closely.

As he expected, the finely braided steel cable was slick with grease. It was so slippery that he was barely able to grasp it and knew it would be impossible to climb. Yet he had to try, and just as he gathered himself to begin pulling himself upward, a voice from the gloom warned him.

“When I tried that, I fell and almost broke my leg.”

“Aggie?” Mercer couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly, but it was her voice echoing inside the huge cylinder. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He looked around the dimly lit space at the bottom of the support leg. The circular room was enormous but spartan. Half of it was occupied by machinery that looked as if it had come from the nightmares of a demented plumber. It was impossible to completely trace the twisting path of even one of the hundreds of pipes with their countless valves, gauges, and spurs. A low counter with storage doors and a near-empty tool rack stood a little way off from the tangled steel forest. The deck was mostly solid plating, but there were several large grates that would give access to even lower levels.

“Rereading
War and Peace
— what do you think I’m doing? I’m a prisoner just like you.” Aggie stepped from around a large watertight cabinet and into a dim pool of light given by a low-watt bulb.

Mercer jumped back to the floor, crossing the distance between them in a few quick strides. He gathered her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers, feverishly kissing her as if nothing else mattered or ever would.

A moment later she stepped back, breathless. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know,” Mercer replied with a sheepish smile. “But you can’t deny it felt good.”

“You won’t hear me complaining, but you haven’t picked a very romantic spot to demonstrate your affection.” Her eyes were a bright, rich green, although the rest of her was ragged, worn by whatever ordeal she had undergone.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded. Mercer asked how long she’d been on the rig.

“I was grabbed in the parking lot of your hotel just after I left you. Two men attacked me. They killed some poor hotel guest and then drove me away in a van. They drugged me, and when I came to, I was here.” Her voice was strong and filled with determination, but she looked delicate and frail, like a child. At the same time, she was such a woman that Mercer was distracted from his current predicament and stole a minute to just look at her, to drink her in. Aggie became self-conscious almost immediately, raking her hand through her short hair in a nervous gesture.

“What?” she said. “Don’t look at me. I’m a mess.”

“No, you’re not. You’re beautiful,” he breathed, embarrassed by his emotional response to her presence. He broke eye contact, looking around the space quickly. “We’ve got to find a way out of here and stop them. Do you have any idea what your group is about to do?”

“I didn’t until I talked with that sick Russian bastard. He told me about how he and PEAL are going to freeze the oil in the pipeline.”

“That’s only half of it. He plans to split it wide open and spill five hundred thousand barrels of crude all across Alaska.”

Aggie turned pale, her deep sense of love for the environment shaking her to the core. “God, no, he can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid he can and will, unless we can stop him. And another thing. Your boyfriend has been in the thick of this thing since the very beginning.”

“No way,” Aggie defended Jan Voerhoven automatically. “I believed Kerikov when he told me Jan helped attach the liquid gas canisters, but there is no way he would allow the pipe to be cut and its contents spilled. He would die first.”

“It’s possible he doesn’t know all of Kerikov’s plans,” Mercer admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not a willing accomplice to the largest act of sabotage in history. Now, I want to see if I can get that elevator working.”

“I already tried. The power’s been cut to the controls down here, and there’s nothing we can use to jumper the circuits.” She spoke with authority. “It’s my bet that the breaker was shut off at the topside box.”

Mercer felt a twinge of chauvinism, thinking that she probably didn’t know anything about electronics and that he could somehow sort out the jumbled wires hanging from the control. He looked at them briefly, then turned back to Aggie. She watched him with an almost patronizing smirk. “I thought you had a degree in environmental sciences or something?”

“That was my master’s. My father demanded that I do my undergrad studies in mechanical and electrical engineering.”

“Really?”

“It was all part of his grand plan to get me ready to take over Petromax. He knew I never would, of course, but he still had hopes that I’d give up environmental activism.”

“Okay,” Mercer conceded. “What about option two?”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know where we are, except to say we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Aggie took on the persona of a bubbly tour guide. “Before you, we have the auxiliary buoyancy pump controls for support column three of the
Petromax Prudhoe Omega
, a TBP built for Petromax Oil by Sosen Heavy Industries in Pusan, Korea, at a cost of $1.4 billion. Commissioned in 1998 and completed eighteen months later by a crew of two thousand men working around the clock. The
Omega
uses every safety device yet developed for offshore structures, from Baldt Moor-Free acoustic detonators on all twenty of the compliant tension cables to no fewer than fifteen lifeboat spaces for every member of the crew. Since she was designed to work in arctic conditions, the
Omega
utilizes an Integral Riser system for all subsurface flow and control lines, pre-tensioned to prevent shearing due to surface conditions or ice buildup. Her multiple blowout preventers are rated at sixty thousand pounds per square inch to keep down hole gas and oil from bursting up to the surface.

“She has accommodations for six hundred men, carries 250,000 gallons of fresh water, 500,000 gallons of diesel for her pumps, drills, and other machinery, and when in full production can provide the total energy needs of a city the size of Rochester, New York.” Aggie smiled saucily. “Anything else you want to know? Don’t forget this is my daddy’s rig. He managed to get me to launch her for him last June before she was towed here for pre-staging and testing. She’s going to be brought to Prudhoe Bay next spring.”

Mercer was impressed. “I’ve always loved a smartass, especially when she’s right. If you know so much, then how do we get out of here?”

Aggie turned quiet again, chastened. “The elevator is the only way, so we’re stuck until Kerikov or that disgusting Arab comes for us. By the way, he was the guy you clobbered in the bar, the one groping me. He was also part of the duo who kidnapped me at your hotel.”

“Reasons two and three for me wanting him dead.” Mercer tried to make that sound light, but his voice was frigid. “Let’s look around, inventory everything that’s down here and come up with a plan.”

Twenty minutes later they had scoured the huge auxiliary control room, pulling tools and other supplies from waterproof cabinets and stowage lockers. When they finished, the pile of equipment was pathetically small, most of it worthless; two boxes of hand tools, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, and the like; four rolls of duct tape; four sections of one-inch pipe, the longest one only six feet in length; and a torn Sterns flotation suit, its safety orange cover blackened by grease and several of its Ensolite foam flotation cells punctured and empty. They found a large blue polypropylene tarp and two empty oxygen cylinders like the type worn by firefighters, but no masks or regulators. The room also gave up a first aid kit, a diver’s flipper, and a container of decayed food forgotten by a worker during the construction of the rig.

“It’s hopeless.” Aggie put a voice to what both were feeling.

A minute passed. Mercer looked at the clutter, then glanced up to the top of the huge cylindrical caisson. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well. Another minute went by until finally he looked at Aggie, his eyes brightening. “You said auxiliary pump controls?” She nodded. “Can you run them?”

“Yes, but what does it matter?”

“I’ll have us out of here in a couple of hours,” Mercer predicted with a devilish smile.

“Are you nuts?”

“No. I float.”

K
erikov stepped from the shower cabinet, his usually gray skin now pink and glowing, the hair on his chest and back matted down like a pelt. He wrapped one towel around his waist and used another to dry himself. He’d already shaved, using the comforting routine of morning ablutions to revive himself. It was now three o’clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept for nearly thirty hours. The shower had done wonders, almost as much as the second Scotch he’d poured himself before entering the bathroom.

He was just beginning to dress when there was a knock on the cabin door. Abu Alam entered without being invited, swaggering to the couch and eyeing Kerikov’s nudity with a mixture of hatred and sexual interest. The Arab disgusted Kerikov like no one he’d ever met before.

“He’s down in the hole with the woman now,” Alam reported. “I don’t understand why we just don’t kill them both.”

“Because I won’t be rushed in dealing with Mercer. It’s a personal matter. As for the woman, she’s the daughter of one of our principals, and her presence here is to ensure he fulfills his end of our bargain. If Max Johnston decides to expose us after he learns of our double cross, the woman will be yours for as long as you wish, provided we send videotapes of your time together to her father.” Kerikov imagined the young heiress being raped and sodomized to death by Alam and his two assistants. “However, if he fulfills our agreement, she is to be released immediately, and if I hear that she has been touched, I’ll kill you myself.”