Gideon's War/Hard Target (7 page)

The remaining jihadis scrambled toward the wheel of their driverless boat, but not before the boat slammed onto the little island and flipped. The men pinwheeled in the air before falling in heaps on the sandbar or splashing down into the water. One landed in a small tree and was impaled by the sharp end of a leafless limb. His body convulsed for a brief violent moment, then hung lifeless, like some horrible twisted fruit.

And then Monkey’s boat was around the bend, and the jihadis were gone.

Monkey shook his head, eyes big as shot glasses. “You messed them people up,” he said, his expression a mixture of fear, gratitude, and amazement.

The entire episode had taken less than a minute. Gideon expected to feel some kind of remorse over the horrific deaths he’d caused. And yet he didn’t. He realized, too, that he hadn’t felt any fear, just a sense of total absorption in the moment, of utter commitment to the fight.

Then, when the emotion finally came, he was surprised by what he recognized was an almost giddy sense of well-being, even a kind of elation. Men had tried to kill him, and he had survived by ghtÁ€killing them. Simple as that.

He felt his teeth bare in a brief, feral smile.

My God, Gideon thought. What’s wrong with me?

Gideon turned to Monkey and started to talk, but his mouth had gone dry. He licked his lips and tried again. “How long before we reach my brother?” he asked, his voice cracked and hollow.

Monkey reached inside his shirt and scratched himself nervously. “Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE WIND HAD STIFFENED by the time Kate came up onto the chopper deck. Beneath her hard hat, her hair whipped at her neck. The State Department chopper was struggling to get onto the deck. Pilots who weren’t used to it didn’t like landing on rigs. She didn’t blame them—especially not in this kind of wind. Anything above thirty knots and they shut down chopper landings. It wasn’t thirty knots yet—but the gusts were probably getting close to that.

After a minute of tilting and bouncing, the chopper finally settled onto the deck and its rotors wound down.

Kate moved toward Big Al, who was staring toward the eastern horizon. She knew what he was looking for. If the typhoon changed direction, it would come from the east. The sky was still clear and blue, but a thin dark smudge had appeared threateningly along the horizon.

Big Al turned toward her, covering his concern with an admiring smile. “You clean up nice, chérie.”

“Thanks.”

“While you were getting all pretty, we got a call . . .”

“From?”

“The White House. The president wants Mr. Parker to call him.”

Kate raised an eyebrow, then followed Big Al’s nod toward the idling Sikorsky. A small man with a face that reminded her of a bloodhound was now emerging from the chopper, followed by a Secret Service agent. Behind him was the U.S. ambassador, Randy Stearns, a large, red-faced man wearing a bespoke suit. Stearns was nearly as big as Big Al. He’d played pro football for the Vikings, Kate knew, because on all three occasions that she’d met him, he had made a point of telling her. He was talking to a slim woman with hair that was dyed one shade too blond, whom Kate recognized as his press attaché. Her name was Tina. Or Tara. She couldn’t remember which.

Two more bodyguards followed, and as soon as they cleared the rotors, the chopper rose into the air again, as though the pilot had had enough of sitting on a tiny platform a hundred feet above the sea.

Kate extended her hand to the man with the bloodhound face. “Mr. Parker, I’m Kate Murphy, the rig manager.”

“Call me Earl.” If not for the bodyguard who sh33; D‡adowed him, you’d never have known he was a man of any importance.

Ambassador Stearns leaned in to kiss her cheek without her offering it. “How you doing, hon?” he said. “Good to see you again. You remember Tina.”

Kate gave the ambassador a noncommital nod, then turned back to Parker. “Sir, the president wants you to call him right away. If you need privacy, you can use the observation room.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “Soon as I’m done, I hope you can show us around.”

“Of course,” Kate said, before leading Parker to the glass-walled observation room. She remained outside with Parker’s security man, watching through the window as Parker raised his satellite phone to his ear. But the disapproving glare of the Secret Service agent prompted her to turn away. Before she did, though, she could see Earl Parker’s expression darken and his ramrod-straight posture give way to what she could only imagine was some kind of bad news.

Following the reception at the UN, President Diggs had spent the night at the Park Avenue apartment of Cameron Stack, an investment banker who’d been one of the leading fund-raisers during his campaign. Stack had declined a cabinet position, preferring to remain an unofficial economic advisor. They had talked well into the night, discussing the sobering economic challenges facing the nation, from rising unemployment to price competition from China, all of which caused the president to sleep fitfully. He’d returned early the next morning to Washington, when he learned what had happened to Gideon’s convoy. It took another hour before he was finally able to reach Earl Parker, who’d just landed on the Obelisk. The president’s chief of staff, Elliot Hammershaw, held out the encrypted satellite phone.

“I have him, sir.”

Diggs pressed the phone to his ear and proceeded to tell Parker that General Prang and his men had all been killed during an ambush, but that Gideon’s body hadn’t been found yet.

“Then he may still be alive,” Parker said.

“The Sultan’s troops are sweeping the area, but they’re not optimistic. I’m sorry, Earl, I know how much Gideon means to you. And you know how much he means to me.”

Parker leaned heavily against the communications console. “Mr. President,” he said, hesitating before finishing his thought. “Tillman may have been behind this.”

“Based on what?”

“Tillman and General Prang were the only people who knew Gideon’s itinerary.”

“I realize Tillman’s capable of betraying his country . . . but do you really think he’d try to kill his own brother?”

“Who else could it have been?”

Kate stole another furtive glance into the observation room. Parker was pinching his forehead as he talked to the president. When Parker finally ended the call, he lowered the phone into his lap and remained as still as a statue. Then, suddenly, he turned toward Kate, who averted her gaze, hoping he hadn’t caught her watching him. A few seconds later, he emerged from the room, clearly shaken by whatever news hebroÑ€’d just gotten from the president.

“Is there anything I can do, sir?” Kate asked.

Parker hesitated before he spoke. “You said you’d give us a tour of the rig before the camera crews come.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lead on.”

Kate was keenly aware of Parker’s lingering distraction as he waved for the ambassador and the rest of his entourage to join them. She led the group to a place at the edge of the chopper deck that gave them the best view of the rig. “As you can see, the Obelisk is composed of two structures linked by a small bridge.”

They stood nearly a hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. Only the steel skeletons of the drilling derricks and cranes were higher. Even after all these years working on rigs, being on the deck was still thrilling to her.

“The unit we’re standing on is the Wellhead Service Platform. It includes not only the drilling apparatus, but also the mess, bunk quarters, rec room, laundry, and control room.”

“Why is the rig split into two parts?” Stearns asked.

“There are some structural considerations—but primarily safety. As soon as the oil comes out, we pipe it over to the Bridge Linked Platform. Over there we have the power-generation equipment, storage, and preprocessing. Normally an FPSO—that’s a factory processing and storage ship—is moored a few hundred yards away. It stores and processes the oil and gas prior to transshipment to our onshore facility. Because it’s so far out at sea, the Obelisk was designed to warehouse larger quantities of oil so production can continue if the factory ship needs to return to port in the event of a storm or some other emergency. That allows us to continue pumping while the ship isn’t here. At full production, our operating budget is around a hundred thousand dollars a day. Needless to say, we make every effort to keep production going at all times.”

Except when Washington bigwigs show up to stage some pointless exercise in political theater, she thought.

“Of course, the downside to storing that much oil and gas is the potential for fire. If that happens, we can delink the pipes until the fire is controlled. The idea here is to make even a catastrophic event survivable by the crew.”

She led Parker’s entourage down the stairwell and through a door.

“One of the most interesting things about this rig is that it’s a semi-compliant tower, which means that it sways with the movement of the ocean. Most of the time it’s pretty imperceptible. But in the kind of heavy seas we have today, you can actually feel it. We have systems in place that can both actively and passively dampen those potentially destructive forces.”

Kate pointed to a pair of large pumps in the middle of the room. “These pumps can move water at a rate of over eight thousand cfm— sorry, for you nonengineers, that’s cubic feet of water per minute. Several large nozzles beneath the rig are constantly steadying the structure by automatically countering currents and compensating for other forces, like wind or tectonic movement.”

“What about the passive soseÑ€ystem?” Parker said. “How does that work?”

Kate was surprised that Parker had been paying attention, considering his earlier distraction. “Good question. There’s a four-hundred-ton weight situated about seventy feet below the surface of the ocean. It’s mounted on a sort of gimbal that allows the weight to shift with respect to the rig. Skyscrapers along the Pacific rim are being built with similar systems to counterbalance the forces of an earthquake.” She didn’t see the need to tell the visitors that the passive system was in serious danger of failing, and she quickly led the group out the door and up the next flight of stairs.

“This is the heart of the rig,” she said. “The drill deck.” In the center of the slippery steel floor was a hole, through which the now-idle drill pipe ran down into the sea.

“As state-of-the-art as the Obelisk is, it still works pretty much the way Anthony Lucas’s drill did when he first tapped Spindletop back in 1901. At a certain point, there’s only so much you can automate. The drilling operation itself is just as dirty and noisy and hands-on as it was a hundred years ago. As you can see, the characteristic derrick structure of an oil rig is right there above us. It’s about sixty-five feet from here to the top of the tower. Hanging from the derrick, that big complicated claw-looking thing is the traveling block.” She pointed to the massive steel claw hanging from chains in the middle of the deck. “It clamps around the drill pipe, screws the pipe into the preceding section. Then that big ram up there drives the pipe through the kelly deeper into the hole.”

Parker stepped up to the edge of the hole and peered down at the ocean.

“Sir, I’d prefer you stayed away from there. One misstep . . .”

Parker straightened. “Is there anything on this rig that isn’t dangerous?”

Kate laughed. She realized that as she had taken them around the rig, she had pointed out one thing after another that was capable of catching fire, blowing up, or collapsing onto someone or chopping them in half. “Honestly? Not much.”

Parker looked up at the derrick. “Ever work on the drill deck yourself?”

She nodded. “My father was an independent oil man. He made and squandered a couple or three fortunes drilling in Texas. While I was in college, he went broke for the fourth time, so I had to get a job as a roustabout and then as a diver to pay for my final two years of college.”

“That must have been an adventure.”

“I like to think I pulled my weight.”

“I bet you did,” he said.

She led the group through the innards of the Wellhead Service Platform, showing them the sleeping quarters, the chem lab, and the rec room.

“We’ve got a crew of sixty-eight,” she said as they entered the mess. It was a small room, six long tables crowded together like in an elementary school cafeteria. “Everybody works ten-day stretches, twelve hours on, twelve off. In addition to the drilling crew, we’ve got electricians, welders, a mud engineer, various equipment technicians. We’ve also got two fulltime chefs, a two-person lauds Ñ€ndry staff, a maid, a medic . . .”

“It must feel a little claustrophobic sometimes,” Parker offered.

“You get used to it,” she said. She felt a slight tremor beneath her feet, smaller than the ones she’d felt earlier, then realized with some small relief that it was Big Al tromping toward them on the gridded steel floor. “Sorry to interrupt, Kate, but the news crews are arriving.”

“Let’s head back up,” Kate said. “Not to be unfriendly, but the sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can get back to pumping oil.”

The chopper that landed on deck was at least twice as large as the State Department Sikorsky that was still hovering overhead. Kate was a little surprised at the number of newspeople that had come. She counted twenty of them. Mohan only had one national television station. Some Indonesian and Malaysian crews had arrived, too. They must really be starved for news to attend something as trivial as this, she thought.

Several crews were busy dragging steel equipment cases across the deck. They were all dressed as you’d expect news professionals to dress— blue jeans, clean tennis shoes, polo shirts emblazoned with the logos of well-known Western brands. Because they worked for the government news channel, they wore skullcaps, which identified them as Muslims.

But something about them seemed odd. They were all fairly young— twenties and early thirties—which was not odd in itself—but each one of them seemed unusually fit. Professional men in Mohan generally didn’t work out the way Americans did. If one of them had looked like an athlete, it wouldn’t have seemed so unusual. But twenty of them?

One cameraman was setting up on the far end of the chopper deck. Another pair were rolling a steel case the size and shape of a coffin across the deck. She couldn’t imagine what kind of camera equipment required a box that big. Before she could think much more about it, she noticed one more man who’d emerged from the chopper and was now beelining toward her, conspicuous because he was the only Caucasian. He wore a dark suit, a laptop computer case slung over one shoulder.

“Miss Murphy?” he asked, although his inflection didn’t sound like a question. “I’m Cole Ransom.”

Kate was a little surprised by his appearance. The several times they had talked, she had imagined him as kind of a geek, but he moved with the fluid grace of an athlete. And behind the neatly trimmed beard of an academic, he had the face of a cop or a soldier—hard and impassive.

“I really want to get started on the retrofit, but I need to take care of this nonsense first,” she said apologetically, indicating the surrounding crews. “Frankly, I was blindsided by all this. Hopefully it won’t take long.”

Ransom nodded curtly. He sure didn’t give off a friendly vibe. Their phone conversations and e-mail correspondence had been lively and animated, but in person the guy had about as much personality as a fireplug.