Charon's Landing (54 page)

Alam was skeptical. “No one frightens me with idle threats.”

Kerikov ignored his posturing. “Go find our friend Voerhoven and let’s get back to Valdez. When PEAL pulls out from Pump Station 5, they’re going to make the road northward impassable by blowing up several bridges. That leaves us only a few hours before the authorities are finished with the fires in Fairbanks, freeing up helicopters to investigate what happened at the station. How much time do you need to plant the explosives aboard the
Hope
?”

“Do you want it totally destroyed, or just sunk?”

“I don’t want a piece of debris larger than a postage stamp,” Kerikov intoned.

“Maybe an hour, two at most. I’ve got to be able to get the charges around all the fuel bunkers and, using Primacord, time the detonations so the concussion blows out both sides of the hull simultaneously.” Alam spoke with the competence ingrained in him by years of terrorist training, first in Algeria and later in the streets of Lebanon and the desert bases of Libya, Iran, and Iraq.

Kerikov watched the slight nervous twitch that had developed in Alam’s cheek. It was so subtle and infrequent that had he not been looking for it he never would have noticed. Alam, Kerikov suspected, had orders to kill him as soon as he’d destroyed the Alaskan Pipeline and orchestrated the sinking of a supertanker off the continental coast of the United States. Rufti was going to betray him.

Kerikov had known this would be coming even before he approached Rufti. The Arab was so transparent it was almost sad. Did he really think that Kerikov didn’t have ways of protecting himself from a double cross?

Lord protect us from the ambitions of imbeciles.

MERCER managed only a few words of explanation about his escape plan when Aggie’s face went bright red with fury. “You’re out of your mind. Do you have any idea what that would do? The balance of one of these monsters has to be monitored twenty-four hours a day. When winter hits, even though she won’t be in production, a crew will be aboard to make sure that ice buildup doesn’t affect the rig’s stability. On a platform this size, a two-inch coating of ice weighs something like four hundred and fifty tons and could turtle her if left unchecked.

“And you’re talking about knocking out the balance by a magnitude of a hundred. If the
Omega
is deck loaded, her pipe racks filled with drill string, her bunkers and drill mud storage ponds full, she’ll flip long before we reach the top of the leg. Remember the 500,000 gallons of diesel I mentioned earlier? That’ll become a slick covering the entire inlet if the rig nose-dives.”

“Aggie, if you’ll just let me—”

She cut him off as if he hadn’t opened his mouth. “Environmental considerations aside, you can’t possibly think we’d survive long enough in the water even if we did manage to make it all the way up. Jesus, it’s just above freezing in here. We’d be hypothermic in twenty minutes and dead five minutes after that.”

She was working herself into a frenzy, and although she had very valid points, Mercer knew it was fear that was making her protest so much. He couldn’t blame her. What he proposed scared the hell out of him too.

“Aggie, for Christ’s sake shut up for a minute and let me finish.” She quieted, pulling at the collar of her anorak protectively. “You know as well as I do it’s the only way. If we stay here, we’re both dead, so why not at least try to escape? And do you think anyone’s going to give a shit if this rig flips and spills its fuel into Cook Inlet when the rest of Alaska is covered by ten inches of crude? If there’s a chance to get out of here, if we don’t die of exposure, if the rig doesn’t flip, and if we can warn Andy Lindstrom at the Marine Terminal, we can stop this whole nightmare before it starts. I know how Kerikov is going to split the pipeline after PEAL freezes the oil. All I need to stop him is a phone or a radio to make a ten-second call.”

She wavered, her fear slowly dissipating as she too saw the larger issues at stake. Either way it went, their lives were over, so why not die trying? He could see it in her eyes when she decided to agree to his plan. “I still think you’re nuts.”

“It’ll work. Trust me.”

“Last time I heard that was from a forty-nine-year-old professor I agreed to go to bed with,” she joked. “It didn’t.”

Mercer’s plan was born of desperation but was, in theory, incredibly simple. He intended to flood the hollow support column of the
Petromax Omega
. Using the manual override on the auxiliary pump controls, they could fill the entire two-million-cubic-foot cylinder with seawater. He and Aggie would float on the surface of the rising water until they reached the elevator doors one hundred feet above. As Aggie pointed out, the greatest danger was unbalancing the entire rig as thousands of tons of ballast filled one support while the others remained empty. For that, Mercer could only hope for the best. As to her other concern, hypothermia, Mercer had a plan to keep them dry. While he got busy building an improvised raft, one in which his own body formed the bottom, Aggie worked on the bewildering forest of pipes, valves, and controls that made up the pump units. The pumps, six in total, were located a farther fifty feet below them, but all their controls were here. At Mercer’s prompting, she explained the system as she worked.

“Each jacket — that’s what these legs are called in the oil industry — is computer linked from the primary pump control in the Operations Center, so each one can be individually ballasted depending on the conditions. In heavy seas, the entire rig can be lowered until the main deck is almost awash, or she can sit one hundred feet above the waves. The catenary mooring lines run through hydraulic lifts so that their tension is never reduced and the anchors remain firmly bedded, no matter what the attitude of the rig.

“My father,” she admitted with a trace of pride, “was instrumental in the development of the entire system. His initial sketches were the basis of the entire forty thousand pages of the rig’s blueprints.

“The weakest link, apart from your little raft capsizing, is the anchors themselves. I suspect they’re Flipper Deltas built by the Dutch company Ankar Advies Bureau. They must be at least twenty tonners, which gives each anchor about four hundred tons of reactive force against the drag of the rig. That type is perfect for the soils around Prudhoe, but I’m not too sure about here in Cook Inlet. This is only a temporary anchorage for the
Omega,
and dead-on stability is not as critical as when she’s in production. When the rig begins to dip with the added weight, and the kinematics angle of the anchor lines changes by as little as ten degrees, those anchors are going to lose about thirty-five percent of their efficiency. Push them too far, and they’ll pull free completely.”

Mercer understood maybe half of what Aggie said. He didn’t have the slightest idea what a kinematics angle was nor did he really care. He just wanted to keep Aggie talking, let her calm herself, and him too, just by the simple act of using her voice. She continued on about tripping angles and flukes and palms and about the pump mechanisms themselves. Her knowledge was encyclopedic, her voice brisk yet incredibly alluring.

“Ready,” she announced after nearly a half an hour. “I’ve taken the safeties off the flow regulators and depth gauges; the pumps will keep running even past the Never Exceed point. The system will shut down only when the topside electrical panels are shorted by flooding water.”

“What about any warning indicators in the master control room?”

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” Aggie admitted. “Their board will light up like a Christmas tree when the cycloids kick on. We just have to hope that Kerikov hasn’t left enough men on board to monitor those warning panels. If they do, your scheme can be shut down with a flip of a switch upstairs.”

“Then let’s hope they’re in the bathroom right now, because I’m ready to go.”

Mercer had repaired the torn Sterns survival suit, using an entire roll of duct tape to seal the countless rips and punctures in the nylon outer fabric. There was so much of the silver tape he looked like he wore a suit of armor. Almost as important as the suit, he tended himself with the supplies found in the first aid kit, spending almost ten minutes dressing his wounds, stanching the blood that still seeped from some of his deeper cuts and swallowing a couple of the codeine tablets he’d found. He’d need the drugs if he hoped to survive the upcoming ordeal.

His raft rested on several toolboxes and was a creation only Rube Goldberg would love. The four lengths of pipe they had found were taped together in a diamond shape, the tarp spread below it and secured to the framework with more tape. The craft was sized so that when Mercer lay his head at the apex of one corner, his hands could grab two others with his feet hanging over the bottom juncture. The indentation of his body against the loosely strung tarp would create the draft the raft needed to stay afloat and hopefully keep Aggie out of the water. Mercer wore the suit in case some water did slosh over the raft’s low freeboard. With Aggie riding on his chest, she should remain dry. If they were swamped, the few extra minutes of protection Mercer got from the Sterns suit wouldn’t really matter.

He had managed to scrape several large handfuls of grease from the elevator cable. Aggie watched in amazement as he smeared a large amount of it on the back of his head, working it through his thick hair, right to his scalp. “Don’t worry, you’re next.”

“What for?”

“Channel swimmers have been doing this for years. The grease prevents the icy water from touching your skin, thus avoiding the greatest threat of the heat loss,” he explained as he stooped before her and raised up her pant leg, smearing the thick grease against her smooth skin, trying hard not to think how erotic it felt.

He did the same to her wrists and neck. As his hands ran slickly over her throat, Aggie mewed almost like a contented kitten. “I wish you were doing this someplace else and the oil smelled like passion fruit, not heavy machinery.”

He kissed her on the forehead and then began using the last roll of duct tape to cover her in long overlapping strips, masking her from head to toe. “Once we reach the top, we’ll have to abandon the raft and tread water until we can open the elevator doors.” He handed her the largest of the screwdrivers, and an eighteen-inch piece of high carbon steel and plastic, a perfect pry bar to force the hatch at the head of the support column.

Aggie was trembling, and it wasn’t only the cold air causing it. Both of them could be dead within the hour. For Mercer, it was a feeling he’d experienced before but had not grown used to. But it was something that went far beyond Aggie’s realm of experience. Her beautiful face was pale, and her pouting lower lip quivered. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

“We’re going to make it, Aggie,” Mercer said. “We have to.”

She nodded up at him and could not resist kissing him, pressing herself against his body, wrapping her arms around him. It could be the last embrace either one would ever experience, and they made it special, something beyond fear and beyond a physical touch. A current passed between them in the frigid pump room, something tangible that neither could, or wanted to, deny. If they survived the next hour, it was something they both wanted to explore together.

“Are you ready?”

“Let’s do it,” Aggie replied, steeling herself.

Mercer settled himself on the raft, his head and feet in perfect position, his grease-slicked hands slipping through the loops of tape he’d made as handholds. The toolboxes under the framework would allow water to creep up underneath the raft and float them free. Otherwise, the raft would have simply filled with water as the cavernous chamber flooded.

Aggie went to the controls, pressing several rubberized buttons in succession, each motion bringing another pump online. The noise of the huge turbine pumps built quickly, echoing off the steel walls in a shrieking cry as four thousand gallons per minute were forced through each one.

“The noise will die after the pumps are submerged,” Aggie screamed, closing the watertight pressure doors that housed the electronic controls. “We’ve got about ten minutes before the water reaches this level.”

“Get into position now,” Mercer said from the floor. “We can’t afford to be surprised.”

Aggie lay down on top of him, her back pressed to his chest, her bottom cupped around his waist almost sexually. He shook under her to dislodge her.

“Not like that. Stay on your back but turn around so your head is on my thighs, your legs around my head. That’ll distribute the weight better.”

She did as he ordered, shifting nimbly. Their position afforded Mercer a view of the mysterious place between her spread thighs. He quickly purged his mind of those thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

The wait was interminable. They lay quietly, not speaking to each other even when the pumps were finally submerged and their piercing whine was dulled to a low whoosh. The water was rising so fast they could feel the air being pushed ahead of it in an icy gale, a tease of the true cold to come. Minutes dragged by. Mercer kept glancing to the side, expecting to see the water rushing through the floor grates in a frothing roil. Yet it would not come.

Every second felt slower than the previous, expectation and fear bringing them both to the point where neither could lie still. They nervously scratched at imaginary itches or twisted to get more comfortable. Mercer was breathing so deeply that the motion of his lungs forced Aggie to bend even farther in an already uncomfortable position.

The sound of the rushing water was getting louder, the wind blowing more fierce. It would happen at any moment. Mercer turned once again to look to their left. Just then the water came like a geyser.

“Here we go!” he shouted over the din. They were lifted up off the toolbox cradle even before he had finished speaking.

Like a kite caught in a brutal updraft, the makeshift raft was plucked from the deck in a gut-wrenching swoop. Water splashed over the side at an alarming rate, drops hitting their exposed faces like needle jabs. Within seconds, six inches of icy saltwater were pooled around Mercer’s bent waist, inches from soaking into Aggie’s buttocks. If any more came aboard and drenched her, she would be dead before they reached to the top of the caisson.