Pandora's Temple (6 page)

Once the map was assembled, Ocean Bore should have pored over the data in search of sandy layers of sediment under domelike caps of shale. These normally signified the location of a potential reservoir since oil rises through permeable sediment to the highest point it can go, collecting under unyielding shale mounds. And that’s what was bothering Basmajian here. As far as he could tell, millions of dollars spent to create a cartoon rendering that would make Walt Disney himself proud had yielded little or no evidence of those telltale sandy sediment layers.

As assistant operations manager, Basmajian almost never left the rig in its long duration at sea, and he wasn’t ordinarily expected to be able to comprehend such sophisticated technology. But he was also no ordinary industry executive, having learned every phase of the business from the ground up, just as he’d insisted in the military on learning all facets required of the Special Forces team he was a part of. He had never expected to put all that knowledge to use, but it certainly helped him better understand the challenges the other members of his team faced. His problem was that his job as assistant operations manager left him no real recourse, no magic 800 number he could dial to get his questions answered at Ocean Bore headquarters in Houston. The only people he could talk to were those who’d commissioned the studies and planted the
Deepwater Venture
here in the first place.

But if Ocean Bore wasn’t looking for oil in the deepest well ever drilled, what exactly did the company expect to find once their platinum-tipped rotary drill with fluid desanders, shale shakers, and desilters broke through the earth’s crust?

That question wasn’t just unsettling Basmajian any longer, it was scaring him in a way he never thought he’d feel again after boarding a helicopter for the last time in Vietnam.

The
Deepwater Venture
was a sixth-generation rig, nearly four hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty in width. It could operate in depths up to seventy-five hundred feet and in sustained winds of seventy knots accompanied by a ten-second wave period. But field tests had shown the rig capable of also operating in hundred-knot storm winds that brought twelve-second wave periods with them—unheard of even by the most ambitious of modern standards, again thanks to its TLP system. The rig’s quarters, located on the shaded levels below the main deck, housed a hundred and fifty workers, staff, and support personnel in closet-sized spaces with fold-down cots that would’ve been nearly impossible to sleep upon had the workers not been so beat at the end of their fourteen-hour shifts. They were normally too exhausted to take advantage of the
Venture
’s fully equipped gym, game room, or media center.

Those stepping off the telescopic gangway that linked the rig to barges and supply ships for the first time were immediately struck by the lack of open space on deck. Every square inch on all five levels, with the power module alone taking up a large portion of the lowermost one, was accounted for, space at such a premium that none could be wasted. That’s what amazed Basmajian about the celebration about to commence. Many of the men were separated from the next closest by distances of up to six feet and often hidden from sight by some piece of equipment or the superstructure itself.

In the event a rapid evacuation or quick insertion was required, the rig was outfitted for not one, but two helipads perched on raised platforms that looked like trampolines from the sky. Though affixed to the superstructure, the platforms actually extended out over the water on the north and south ends, watched over by the twin massive cranes bracketing the derricks. Add to that the most sophisticated emergency escape system known to the industry, and Basmajian often mused that this was the safest place to be on the planet.

So why didn’t he feel that way right now, with history on the verge of being made? Maybe it had something to do with the female crewmember, administrative assistant to the mostly absent operations manager, who had slipped off the rig on the same supply ship that had brought the nonalcoholic champagne earlier that morning. Security personnel confirmed she boarded the supply ship, but that carrier claimed to have no knowledge of her either being on board or exiting when they returned to port in New Orleans. Port security had proven similarly clueless.

“Attention! We are now one hundred feet from history!”

Amid the hoots and hollers around him, Paul Basmajian leaned against a deck rail to steady himself, certain somehow that they were a hundred feet from something else as well.

Basmajian noticed his chief engineer, George Arnold, standing off by himself on the main deck, no bottle of champagne in hand with which to celebrate, looking detached and disinterested.

“Do I look as bad as you?” Basmajian asked him.

“Worse.”

“Something feels wrong about this, Arnie.”

“Nickel for your thoughts.”

“What happened to a penny?”

“Have you seen the price of oil lately, Bas?”

Arnold was frightfully thin, his face growing more skeletal by the day when he was crewing a long rotation like this one. All in all, an odd match for the bearlike Basmajian. But that hadn’t stopped them from working together steadily for going on twenty years, watching the industry blossom from jack-up and gorilla rigs to this floating city on the sea.

“Female crewmember fled the rig this morning,” Basmajian told George Arnold. “I’ll be damned if I can figure that one out.”

“But that’s not what’s bothering you.”

“No, that’s not what’s bothering me at all.”

“I want to shut down the drill,” Arnold told him.

“So do I, but we can’t, not mere yards from the record. Company would hang us by our asses from a drilling derrick.”

“Let them. There’s something those fuckers aren’t telling us and you know it.”

“Attention! We are now fifty feet from history!”

“Let me shut down the drill, Bas,” Arnold continued, his voice starting to crack and eyes widening in what was as close to panic as Basmajian had ever seen in him. He kept tugging at his shirt, as if to peel it from the sweat gluing the fabric to his skin.

Basmajian drummed his ring on the deck rail, Arnold left to focus on the two scratched-up letters rising from its center.

“D-S,” he said, as much to distract himself as anything. “All these years you never told me what that means.”

“Yes, I did, maybe a hundred times. ‘Dead Simple.’”

“Not what they stand for, what they mean.”

“George . . .”

“No, I get it. It’s all about the war and you hate talking about the war. What I’m telling you now is I believe you’re gonna have something else you don’t want to talk about if you don’t give the order to shut down that drill.”

“Twenty-five . . .”

“
Now
, Bas, before it’s too late.”

Basmajian looked into Arnold’s eyes and imagined his own being just as full of fear.

“Ten, nine, eight . . .”

Basmajian grabbed the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “Engine room, hold the drill! Repeat, cease operations!”

“
Five, four, three
,” the crew recited in cadence, bottles thrust for the sky.

“Engine room, do you copy? Engine room, come in!”

“Two, one!”

“Engine room!” Basmajian blared again, as the drill continued to churn thirty-two-thousand-plus feet below the surface, breaking the
Venture
’s just established record with each spin as the crewmembers dotting the main deck continued to hoot, holler, and dance about the clutter with history tucked in their pockets. “Engine room, do you—”

Basmajian stopped when the alarm bell began to sound. The celebratory crew fell silent in the next moment, Basmajian and Arnold dodging through them for the elevated bridge. The crew’s reaction might have been momentarily delayed, but they were an experienced lot to a man, each of whom knew his place in an emergency. They scattered in every direction like ants from a fallen rock.

Basmajian and Arnold reached the bridge to find monitor readings dancing in the red and off the charts, and engineering personnel struggling to make sense of them.

“What’s happening?” Basmajian demanded. “Talk to me!”

“We’re losing structural integrity on the line!” George Arnold replied, his eyes sweeping over the readouts and computer monitors. “It’s breaking apart from the bottom!”

“Trigger the blow-out preventer!”

A technician did just that with a hardly dramatic click of the mouse. Basmajian watched him click the mouse again.

“Nothing, sir,” he reported fearfully. “It’s, it’s . . .”

“It’s
what
?”

The technician swung his chair toward Basmajian. “Gone, sir.”

“What do you mean
gone
?”

The technician could only shrug, Basmajian’s attention turning to the four closed-circuit monitors providing varying viewpoints of the seafloor and drilling apparatus from four robotic submersibles, known as ROVs, that could also perform emergency repairs.

All four screens were dark.

“Why are the ROVERs off-line?”

“We lost the signals,” said a marine geologist responsible for analyzing and processing the constant stream of data transferred from the submersibles.

“No,” said a stone-faced Arnold. “If it were a signal issue, we’d have snow. Since the screens have gone dark, something must have taken the ROVERs out altogether.”

Basmajian felt something sink in the pit of his stomach. There was a dreamlike quality to what was transpiring, the impossible unfolding before his eyes. He actually wondered if he was about to wake up from an experience soon to be lost from memory.

A fresh alarm began to wail.

No such luck.

“Something’s coming up, sir!” a new voice on the bridge blared. “Something in the line!”

“Shut it down! You hear me? Shut the line down!”

More clicks on a different mouse. “System’s not responding, sir! System’s not responding!”

“Go to Failsafe!” Basmajian ordered without hesitation.

The eyes of the half-dozen men in the control room swung toward him, aware that triggering that system would destroy everything they’d laid below the surface, turning $10,000,000 worth of equipment into undersea garbage. Only George Arnold responded by slicing his way to the manual Failsafe trigger switch, yanking open the glass seal and pulling down on a handle.

In that moment, the control room crew thought the subsurface rumble was the result of the Failsafe explosives triggering. In that moment, they felt the drill and all beneath it had been killed, that whatever had penetrated the line on a rapid rise to the surface was gone.

But in the next moment the drill housing exploded in a curtain of white flame, more of a flash that crumpled the nearest derrick and tipped it over toward the main deck. Screams penetrated the bridge with a fury that stole Paul Basmajian’s breath.

Literally.

Basmajian’s last conscious thought was that he couldn’t breathe, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air—no, it was the air itself. The air was . . . gone.

And then the rest of the world around the
Deepwater Venture
followed it into oblivion.

When the
Venture
failed to respond to radio calls in response to its MAYDAY signal, a pair of F-16s were scrambled out of Barksdale Air Force Base for a flyover. Both pilots had been trained in all areas of emergency response, and their jets were outfitted with the latest generation of rotating cameras to capture both motion and still shots and then transmit them in real time to the Pentagon, NORAD, and Washington headquarters of Homeland Security. The pilots could see exactly what they were transmitting on a console-mounted screen in order to provide a verbal report as well.

The F-16s had been ordered to do a series of crisscrossing flyovers, maintaining a safe distance from each other to assure that both of them could not be knocked out from below by a single attack.

“Base, this is Alpha One,” the pilot of the lead jet reported after only a single pass.

“Go ahead, Alpha One.”

“Base, we have confirmation of a Level Six event. Repeat, a Level Six event.”

A pause followed.

“Alpha One, did you say
Level Six
?”

“That’s an affirmative,” the pilot replied, keenly aware that the phrase had never before been uttered in anything but drills.

“Alpha One, stand by for further orders and routing instructions and continue transmission.”

“Roger that, Base. Standing by and continuing transmission.”

“Go with God, Alpha One.”

“Looks like He’s sitting this one out, Base.”

“Something wrong, my friend?”

Roused from his daze, McCracken gazed up at the stout man standing behind the shop’s counter. “Just the usual,” he lied.

“Because today is your birthday, reason for celebration, not melancholy in spite of the milestone.”

“I guess the alternative is worse,” McCracken said, trying to smile.

A week had passed since Arturo Morales had been handed over to American authorities and three college students returned to their parents, while a fourth had been lain to rest two days ago.

“Feast your eyes,” the man behind the counter was saying. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?”

The truth was that McCracken hadn’t, glad for the distraction no matter how fleeting. The samurai sword had been polished to such a shine that he could actually see a blur of his distorted reflection. The sword was a true beauty, expertly restored to its original condition from feudal Japan and presented in
shirasaya
without any ornamental trappings. Just a blade that had almost certainly taken its share of lives at the hands of its original owner.

“It dates back to the time of the great Masamune,” shop proprietor Levander Levy continued, “and it’s signed by a sword maker my historical records indicate was one of the master’s actual disciples.”

McCracken held the sword by its plain wooden handle that someday would be replaced by one fashioned of ivory and shark skin perfectly sized and fitted to its new owner’s hands. Twenty-eight deadly inches and yet it felt feather light in his grasp. Its balance was exquisite, indicative of a truly master sword maker indeed.