Reckoning (7 page)

The Englishman said, “You are about to tell me that this nineteenth-century curse is now imported into Scotland by us British.”

“Dead right. Today it’s called bentonite instead of gumbo, and of course it’s chemically refined before being used as drilling
mud. It can absorb up to fifteen times its volume in water. It’s pumped down the drill pipe, escapes from holes in the drill
bit and is then forced back up the outer lining of the hole, carrying rock chippings with it. The mud also acts as a coolant
for the drill bit and as a sealant for the drill hole, helping to keep salt water from leaking in through the surrounding
rock.”

“You say Wyoming is covered with it?”

“Ten feet deep in places.”

“Why do they need engineers for it?”

“Because it’s not as simple as I’ve made it sound,” Dockrell said. “For example, in a wellhole two miles deep, the heat and
pressure are very great and a heavy mud with certain characteristics must be used.”

The reporter’s flight was called and he shook Dockrell’s hand and thanked him before hurrying away. Dockrell, pleased at his
performance, lounged back in his seat. He had only twenty more minutes to kill before his flight was due. With any luck, he
might be back in Aberdeen in a few days, his job done. With another two hundred grand earned, tax free. After the job in Vegas,
he had returned to New York City and met the same emissary from the Iranian Mission to the U.N., this time at Grant’s Tomb,
on the Upper West
Side. When he finished here in Scotland, he was to go to London and telephone the Iranian Embassy for a Mr. Rajavi. The following
morning at eleven, an emissary would meet him at the Albert Memorial, on the southern edge of Kensington Gardens. He would
arrive hours beforehand to make sure his own assassination was not being set up rather than assignment to a new job. He wouldn’t
mind taking out a few Iranians. But he wasn’t going to, so long as their money was good.

Dartley was in the flotel cabin alone when Nicholas Avedesian came in. Dartley, lying on his top bunk, immediately recognized
him from photos he had been supplied. Avedesian seemed unaware of his presence in the cabin and turned his back on him to
reach for something on his own top bunk. Dartley leaned across and yoked him. With the crook of his left arm around the man’s
neck, Dartley lifted him by the head several inches off the floor.

Avedesian gasped and choked. His fingers tore helplessly at the iron-hard arm constricting his throat. His bowels loosened
with fright and he soiled himself. But he had bigger things to worry about than that—like slowly choking to death.

Dartley picked up the ballpoint pen he had been using to make notes while lying on his bunk. He held the pen dagger-style
in his right fist and slashed two X’s on Avedesian’s white shirtfront. Then he loosened his left arm and let his struggling,
wheezing victim collapse on the floor.

Avedesian took some time to get his breath back. He looked at the two X’s inked on his shirt, furtively peered upward at Dartley’s
bunk, then slowly began to crawl toward the cabin door.

“Stay!” Dartley rasped.

Avedesian stopped moving and kept silent for a while. He finally whispered, “I know you’ve come to kill me.”

“If I’d come to kill you, you’d be dead by now,” Dartley pointed out reasonably enough. “I’m here to keep you from getting
killed. I can see it’s going to be quite a job keeping a dumb asshole like you alive.”

Avedesian, sitting in a puddle of his own shit, began to sob with shame and rage.

Dartley laughed. “This place stinks,” he said.

Avedesian looked down miserably at himself.

Dartley remarked, “You’re still ahead of the game, champ. You’re goddam lucky you’re lying in that instead of in a pool of
your own blood.”

The Brent Delta installation’s lights blazed in the night, high above the flotel moored next to it. Dartley stood by himself
on the steel grating of the flotel deck, jacket zipped to his chin, staring out into the darkness. The fog had lifted, and
it was a clear night with an icy wind and a strong seawater smell. Delta’s machines hammered and banged. Waves smashed and
foamed against its concrete legs.

Dartley was pleased with how things had gone with Avedesian. The man was terrified of him. He
would do as he was told. The fool had felt safe out here, in surroundings he was accustomed to, doing work with which he was
familiar. He admitted to Dartley that he felt safe with oilmen and had been avoiding anyone visiting the field that he could
not immediately place as an oilfield worker. He had been informed that he was next on the hit list, but had not been told
why. Dartley didn’t tell him either, in case he’d get a talking jag and reveal to the opposition that their mode of operation
had been anticipated. If the Iranians changed the succession, Dartley was back to square one.

Avedesian seemed reasonably convinced now of his own vulnerability. He was still convinced he was safer out on the rigs than
back on the beach, as offshore oilmen referred to dry land. He was divorced. He hadn’t seen his kids in two years. He had
few friends and rarely bothered to keep in touch with them. Unlike nearly all the workers on the Brent field, he did not have
to follow the fixed policy of one twelve-hour, seven-day week of work alternating with a week of freedom on the beach. He
could stay out on the rigs and play with his geology for as long as he liked. He told Dartley he had no fixed plans. Maybe
he’d hide out in an Irish village for a while. Or visit the Soviet Union. He didn’t really know.

Dartley made no recommendations to him. He needed to use him as bait. That was not the kind of thing to tell a person.

The gas flare dancing on top of the Delta rig cast an eerie light on the waves. He could see the lights of Brent Charlie about
a mile to the south, and much farther away, those of Bravo.

Nicholas Avedesian spent most of his time poring over computer-generated data and results from test instruments sent down
the wellholes. Dartley could fairly unobtrusively secure an area for him to study in, and so long as he remained there he
was safe. But Avedesian was a coffee freak, continually shuttling back and forth between the cafeteria and his lab. When he
needed to consult someone on certain figures, he just went and did so, forgetting all caution and security.

Richard Dartley was nobody’s nursemaid. He had set up reasonable security procedures for Avedesian to follow. If the geologist
frequently forgot or ignored them, he was the one who might have to pay the consequences. Each time Avedesian caught sight
of Dartley, he shaped up. But out of sight was out of mind, and Avedesian had by now almost forgotten his mock hanging in
the cabin a few days before.

Frequently Avedesian went on helicopter rides to
nearby installations to review the test instrumentation and to obtain wellhead samples. Dartley always went with him or arranged
to arrive at that installation shortly before or after him. This was not as hard to do as it might seem, or as obvious, because
of the heavy chopper traffic between the rigs. Helicopters were the only means of travel between the flotel and the installations
other than Delta. The twelve-hour workday ran more or less from six to six, in two shifts per twenty-four day. This resulted
in an early morning and an evening chopper rush hour. In between rush hours, the helicopters picked up and delivered freight
and passengers. While the big Chinooks flew the long distance from Aberdeen to Brent, and medium-sized Sikorksys flew from
the nearer Shetlands, small Bell 212s were used for rig hopping.

The flotel had four stories—three of them used for accommodating in excess of five hundred men in two-and four-berth cabins.
There was a mess hall, a coffee shop, two TV rooms, a cinema, a gym, offices, engineer workshops, a radio room and a captain’s
bridge. Yet the flotel was dwarfed by Brent Delta, which was designed to withstand one-hundred-foot waves and winds of 160
miles per hour.

The tallest of the installations rose a thousand feet from the seabed to the gas flare at the top of the derrick, which made
them about the same height as the Eiffel Tower. The water at Brent was about 450 feet deep, and the derricks rose about 300
feet above the water surface, giving them a total height of 750 feet.

Even after days out here, Richard Dartley was still impressed by the monumental scale of everything. Even so, he could see
that it was not all that different from a farmer sinking a well shaft for water back of his farmhouse. A lot of backbreaking
labor went into the manhandling of pipes, fittings, drill bits and so forth. Steel parts rusted and seized, shafts broke,
men made mistakes. There was nothing “high tech” about this side of the work.

While Dartley waited for Avedesian to finish some work before they took a chopper to Brent Alpha—they were traveling in the
same craft—he watched one of the flotel cranes unload a supply vessel. The sea was not very rough, but obviously the ship’s
helmsman was having a problem keeping the vessel close enough to the installation to allow containers to be lifted off without
hitting the hull against it. The crane operator was having a difficult problem. One moment the deck was rising fast on a surge,
the next moment it was dropping twenty or thirty feet, leaving the crane hook dangling far above it. The ship’s crewmen ran
about like crazy to attach the crane hook to a container during the few seconds while this was possible, then got the hell
fast out of the way before the heavy container became airborne.

When Avedesian appeared, both men climbed the metal stairs to one of the helidecks. The wind was lifting white froth from
the tops of the waves, and a few scattered clouds moved quickly across the blue sky. The
sun wasn’t hot enough to warm them, but at least it was there.

“Weather don’t get much better than this,” a helideck crewman told them. “If you ever saw a whole week like this, you’d say
you had a nice summer.”

They could see for miles in all directions. The tall spindly shapes of installations poked high out of the sea all around
them. Some, with the flat tops, looked like distant aircraft carriers.

The crewman named some of them. “That’s Shell-Esso’s Cormorant North, with Dunlin behind it. There’s Conoco’s Murchison and
Britoil’s Thistle. Those two belong to the Norwegians, and these three over here are on Chevron’s Ninian field.” He adjusted
his hard hat and fixed his headphones over his ears as a Bell 212 approached for a landing.

Dartley, Avedesian and two other men watched the helideck crewmen unload the passengers and freight after the chopper landed.
Then they were beckoned to, pushed inside and the doors were secured. They felt a heave in their stomachs as they lifted fast
and saw the flotel shrink beneath them.

Dockrell watched Avedesian and three men board the chopper and leave the flotel. Avedesian was on one of his short hops to
other installations. One of the three men with him was American also, an efficiency expert named Hank Washington. Dockrell
didn’t like the look of him and had taken care to keep his distance from him, as he had from Avedesian. Washington seemed
to
have the same kind of clearance to go anywhere that Avedesian had. Dockrell’s own authorization papers to visit the Brent
field were good fakes, but he didn’t want to bring any unnecessary attention to them by applying for permission to visit many
different installations. It would be best if he could get his work done right where he was, aboard the flotel, where there
were more men and more complex arrangements than on any of the oil-producing rigs.

Hank Washington worried Dockrell. He knew that Washington, on his arrival just before Dockrell’s own, had been assigned to
Avedesian’s four-man cabin on the Hotel. It was natural that two Americans assigned to the same quarters, and with authorization
to go anywhere, should become friendly. Another way of looking at it though, was that Washington was a security man protecting
Avedesian. It was only to be expected that Avedesian should have security. Dockrell didn’t know the exact connection between
Avedesian and the other men he had killed, except that they were all oil geologists who had offended Iran in some way.

If Hank Washington was security, he was good. Dockrell would hand him that. Apart from the fact that Washington and Avedesian
happened to be away from the Hotel at much the same times, there was nothing definite to indicate that Avedesian had himself
a watchdog. Still and all, Dockrell decided to operate as if Hank Washington was a hostile agent. If he needed to whack him
out, he would.

Dockrell climbed a gangway which brought him
near the base of the crane that was unloading a supply vessel. He climbed a line of metal rungs up the side of the crane,
glancing fearlessly down at the water 150 feet below. Hanging onto a rail, he pulled a sliding door to one side and entered
the crane operator’s cabin.

The crane operator flicked his eyes from his work for a moment to see who had entered. “Hey, you, you’re not allowed up here.”

“You told me yourself that you’re the one who does the most skilled work out here. You said I can come up anytime to see a
real man at work.”