Offshore (30 page)

“
Much. Thanks.”

“
Scary isn’t it?”

He
nodded silently.

“
Happen a lot?”

He took
off the mask. “Not for a while, not since the–” He touched his
stomach. “It started then. I thought I’d got over it.”

“
But this trip, with everything that’s been going on, the
tremendous strain you’ve been under, it’s been slowly
building?”

Eddie
coughed, to shift both the hoarseness from his voice and the
dryness from his mouth. “Aye.”

“
Why didn’t you say something sooner? Talk to me? We could
have done something to nip it in the bud and stop it before it got
this bad.”

“
Because I didn’t want anyone to know–”

“
That you’re under stress? Aren’t we all?”

“
I'm supposed to be above it all though,” Eddie said. “To
keep a cool calm head on my shoulders at all times, but I can’t –”
He lifted the mask and took a quick whiff of the cool gas. “I’m in
over my head, Lydia. I’ve no business being here. I’m not up to the
job. People are dying and it’s my fault –”

“
Don’t be silly.”

“
And I know exactly what they’re thinking back at HQ. Good
old Capstan - can’t organise a piss up in a brewery, but he’s
really good at killing off his crew. What is it now? Three in eight
weeks, must be a new record –”

The short sharp breaths began again and Lydia clamped her
hands around his face, holding him steady, her eyes inches from his
own, her voice a low even drone. “You’re getting hysterical Eddie,
so put the mask back on and take a deep breath in for me, and stop
talking this total and utter
bullshit
, okay?”

It did
the trick. Taken aback by the force of her hold, the strength of
her words and the intensity of her gaze, not to mention her use of
bad language, he placed the mask to his face and sucked in a
lung-full of oxygen, held it, and let it out in a slow controlled
breath. She made him do it twice more for good measure.

“
Sorry,” he said on his final exhalation. “I got a bit
carried away.”

She let
go of his face. “That’s okay.”

He
rubbed his hand over his brow and made to get up. “I’m okay now.
I’ve got work to do.”

She
pulled him back down. “Not yet. Sit a while. We need to talk about
this.”

He
sucked in another deep breath, once again filling his lungs to
capacity, and blew it out to the last puff. “I don’t have time. I
have another call to make. Another nail to hammer into the coffin
of my career.”

I want to go home
.

Lydia
held onto his sleeve, holding him down. “There’s plenty of time.
Tell me … how many times have you changed your socks today,
Eddie?”

He
stared at her, then swallowed. “What gave it away?”

She
laughed lightly. “I’ve done my turn in the laundry remember, and
I’ve never seen one man be in possession of so many socks; all
exactly the same, all hardly worn. I didn’t think too much of it at
the time, but in light of what’s just happened, it’s obvious. So …
how many times?”

Eddie
drew out the pause until, like a piece of overstretched elastic, it
snapped. “Three, so far,” he admitted.

“
A safety valve? Using the time it takes to change them to
calm down, to regroup your thoughts, to paint on your mask of
control?”

“
Aye.”

“
And this is what happens when you run out?”

He
raised a weak smile, embarrassed at his shortcomings laid bare.
“Apparently so.”

“
I think we need to find you another coping mechanism, don’t
you?” She took his large hand in hers, small and birdlike and as
gentle as a flower, and they sat in silence together on the floor
until he felt ready to take command once again.

He made
the call to Longdrift reporting Jock McAllister missing, to find
that Oliver Skeffington, for whatever reason, had ‘forgotten’ to
inform them of Reynolds’ death.

They
promised to scramble a helicopter and evacuate the platform … just
as soon as the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions
improved.

Chapter 33

Two more
days passed with no sign of Jock McAllister, dead or alive, and no
sign of evacuation either.

Longdrift continued to blame the unseasonably bad weather for
closing the harbour and grounding all the helicopters for the
foreseeable future.

There
was nothing anyone could do and they promised faithfully they would
get to him just as soon as they practically and safely could. A fob
off if every he heard one. Desperate and frantic, Eddie once more
gave serious consideration to bypassing Longdrift altogether and
calling out the Coastguard, or the Lifeboat.

Would
they come? Yes, of course.

But was
it fair to put those brave men’s lives at risk to save his motley
crew who were, if he were honest with himself, safe enough where
they were at the moment?

His reluctant answer was,
no
. In all conscience, he would not, could not, call
on their services. The storm raged on, teasing them with spells of
calm, sometimes with a shaft of sunshine and a lessening in the
swell of the water, before the skies once more darkened and the
water built to a savage roiling, dashing hopes of an early
release.

By day
four everyone’s nerves were stretched almost to breaking point. The
foul weather meant they had to work indoors where they could,
although little meaningful work got done.

Cooped
up like battery chickens, always in sight of one another, unwilling
to be separated lest they too disappear, nobody slept or ate
properly, and tempers frayed and occasionally snapped, resulting in
frequent arguments and occasional fights.

The only
one unaffected by the claustrophobic conditions and growing anxiety
levels was Brewer, maintaining a presence of eerie calm as he made
copious notes in his book.

Eddie
paced the floor of the control room awaiting news, stopping
occasionally to stare out of the window. Now and then spume from
the waves breaking against Bravo’s legs would rise above the safety
rails, spray the deck with salt water and patter against the
window, and he sent up a silent prayer for those poor souls on the
ships out there who had no choice but to ride out the
weather.

At least
he and the crew were relatively dry and warm indoors, and so far
still numbered six.

As if to
remind him of their vulnerability the wind grabbed at the unlocked
exterior door and ripped it open, slamming it against the safety
rail at the head of the steps - metal on wet metal - and like a
gladiator spoiling for a fight howled its way indoors, stirring up
papers, ripping the white board from the wall, and twisting the
window blind into a tangled wreck.

Eddie
raced to the gap. Hanging onto the door-frame for dear life and
blinded by salt water blown into his eyes, he wrestled the door
back into place and locked it closed, properly this
time.

The wind
screamed its protest and Eddie, rubbing at his salt burned eyes,
lost his patience and yelled at the tempest. “Come on then, you
bitch! What are you waiting for? We’ve given you the highest point
for miles around. We’re nothing more than a gigantic lightning
conductor, so do your worst. Strike it. Kill us all why don’t you.
I dare you. In fact, I double fucking dare you!”

A
disrespected Mother Nature accepted the childish challenge and took
all of five seconds to deal out her punishment.

The
noise was deafening, the glare blinding as a charge of static
electricity surged through the structure, making every hair on
Eddie’s body stand on end, the fillings in his teeth grew hot and
his nose filled with the rank stench of ozone.

For a
moment he thought his heart had stopped.

“
Jesus Christ,” he murmured, pressing the tips of his
fingers to his neck to check for a pulse. And then, through the
veil of water running down the window, he saw the true extent of
her wrath.

The red
warning light on the tip of the derrick had gone blind and the
cluster of dishes carrying the satellite signals for the telephone,
the internet and the television, for communication with the outside
world, had been left hanging from their moorings by a single
frazzled wire.

“
No! No! NO!”

Eddie
tore himself away from staring out at the dangling wreck to snatch
up the phone, hoping beyond hope to hear the familiar beep of a
signal, only to be met with dead silence instead.

He
jabbed at the connection. On. Off. On. Off.

Nothing.

This
little steel and concrete island in the North Sea was now totally
isolated.

He
rammed the handset back into its cradle and bawled at the ceiling.
“What stupid, silly, sodding IDIOT thought putting satellite dishes
on top of the fucking derrick was a GOOD idea? JESUS CHRIST
AL-fucking-MIGHTY!”

Lightning flashed again, this time accompanied by a
kettledrum roll of thunder. Mocking him. “The same sodding idiot
who thought challenging
me
was a good idea,” it said. “Don’t fuck with what you can’t
handle little man. You’ll never win.”

The
internal intercom buzzed. It took Eddie a while to drag himself
away from the window to hear Matthew Shaw relaying the
complaints.

The TV
had lost its signal, as had the internet. They were all sat about
twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do, and what was Eddie going
to do about it?

He
trudged his way back to where the crew were gathered. “Lightning
struck the derrick,” he explained to the disgruntled assembly.
“Both dishes are down so there’s no phone either. No calls in or
out, to or from Longdrift. As soon as the weather calms down I’ll
shin up there and see what, if anything, can be done, but I don’t
hold out much hope. Until then, we’ll just have to grin and bear
it. Okay? It’s not like it can get any worse, is it?” The lights
flickered, fizzed and dimmed momentarily, before regaining their
full brightness.

Everyone
looked at the lights, at each other, then back to Eddie.

“
You sure about that?” said Brewer, and in his falsely
genial smile Eddie sensed something cold and calculating, and it
scared him to his marrow that whatever ‘it’ might be, it might be
about to get a whole lot worse.

Chapter 34

The
storm, tiring of its constant assault on Bravo, subsided to
intermittent heavy showers, between a pair of which Cameron and
Eddie, on the verge of pissing his pants with terror, climbed the
derrick to examine the broken satellite dishes.

Lacking
the requisite expertise in that field, neither of them could do
anything to repair the damage.

“
I bet Daz could have fixed it with his eyes closed,”
lamented Cameron as they jogged through the latest downpour to
relay their findings to the rest of the crew. “It would have been
right up his street.”

Indoors,
halfway up the first flight of stairs, darkness engulfed them. One
so solidly intense they could almost feel it pressing in on
them.

“
What the hell!” said Cameron, stumbling to a halt and
cracking his shin painfully against the front edge of a step. “Wait
a few seconds,” Eddie said, arms outstretched, feeling for the
safety rail. “Secondary power will kick in. Keep still.”

Ten
seconds passed; then twenty.

Stygian
blackness remained, broken only by the bright rectangle of the
emergency exit sign glowing like a cat’s eye below them, not giving
off enough light for them to navigate safe passage up the stairs
and along the treacherous walkway.

“
Looks like Brewer was right,” said Cameron
glibly.

“
About what?”

“
About things getting worse. Looks like they just
did.”

“
Nothing to do with him. It’s just one more fecking
breakdown in this God forsaken place. We should get to the plant
room. I don’t suppose you’ve got a–” Eddie blinked in the ice white
beam of Cameron’s Maglite torch, pupils contracting to pinpricks as
he screwed up his eyes to cut out the glare. “Not in my face, Cam.
Jeez!”

“
Sorry boss.” The beam dropped to the steps, casting a
dazzling round spotlight, and they picked their way up the rest of
the flight.

“
Wait a mo,” said Eddie when they reached the safety of the
walkway. The tiny green light on his radio lit up his face. “Craig?
You there? Over.”

Static
hiss.

“
Craig, respond. Over.”

“
Here boss. Fit’s deein’? All the decklights just went oot.
Ower.”

“
Power cut. We’re on our way to the plant room to see what’s
what. Where are you? Over.”

“
Stowing my gear in the dog house. Ower.”