“No sweat,” the pilot, a fussy-looking man with thinning black hair and a ruddy complexion, said. His name tag read Dyer. “I’ll probably be in the crew’s mess, give me a ten-minute heads-up if you would.”
“Sure thing,” McGarvey said and he patted the pilot on the shoulder. “Good flying.”
The pilot grinned. “Nobody lost their lunch.”
Before Eve headed up to the control room she sought out Defloria, who was in the construction foreman’s space two levels up from the main deck where he and another man were busy on a CAD display of the impeller cabling mounts. They looked up. “You might want to take a look at this, Doctor,” Defloria said.
“Don told me that you might be having a few problems,” Eve said, glancing at the display. “But it doesn’t matter as long as the work is done by the time we get to Hutchinson Island and the impellers are barged down to us.”
“It’s the stress loads they’ll put on the deck. We think they’ll be greater than the specs that the GE engineers gave us, so we’re going to reinforce the underlying structure before we begin welding the restraint tripods.”
“The extra weight won’t matter?”
Defloria shook his head. “Negligible,” he said. “We don’t want to have a repeat of what happened to you at Hutchinson Island.”
“No,” Eve said. “Costs?”
“The company’s picking it up.”
“I’ll go along with whatever you recommend,” Eve said. “Would have in any event.”
Defloria and Eve looked up as McGarvey came in. “I’m surprised to see someone like you here.”
“Do you know each other?” Eve asked.
“I doubt Mr. McGarvey knows me, but he was in the news when he was the CIA director. Are you here to sightsee, or here to tell us something?”
“A little of both,” McGarvey said, immediately liking the man’s straightforward nature.
“Justin Defloria,” the OIM said, shaking his hand. And he looked a little wary, as if he knew he was about to hear something he didn’t want to hear, but could find no way out of it.
“I’ll be topsides with my people whenever you’re ready,” Eve told McGarvey. “Anyone can direct you.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. McGarvey?” Defloria asked when Eve was gone.
“Who’s your delivery captain?”
“Al Lapides.”
“Is he aboard?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to talk to the two of you, and just the two of you right now, if it’s possible.”
“Shit,” Defloria said, but he took a walkie-talkie out of his jacket pocket and made a call.
FORTY-SEVEN
They met in Defloria’s personal quarters, a nicely furnished space about the size of a luxury hotel suite with a bedroom, sitting room, and large bathroom, and broad views of the platform, alive at this moment with workmen despite the nearly gale force winds. A framed photograph of a pleasant-looking woman and two teenaged girls sat on a desk strewn with papers and blueprints.
Lapides, in his midfifties, was a short, very slender man with a large nose and ears, salt-and-pepper hair, and the deeply lined outdoors complexion of a man who’d spent a lifetime on the sea.
Defloria made the introductions and they sat on the couch and chairs in front of the desk.
“Assuming you’re not here merely to continue as Dr. Larsen’s bodyguard, what do you want?”
“If I wanted to send this rig to the bottom of the Gulf, with everybody aboard, how would I go about doing it?”
“Good Lord almighty,” Lapides said.
“You think that someone will try to do something like that?” Defloria asked. “Schlagel and his group of fanatics?”
“They might try to pull a Greenpeace against you, try to stop you from reaching Florida, but there’d be no violence.”
“I’ve dealt with that group before,” Lapides said. “In the North Sea. They’re a pain in the ass, but mostly just a danger to themselves.”
“Who then?” Defloria asked. “And why?”
“This is merely speculation to this point,” McGarvey said. “There’ve been no warnings and we have no solid evidence that anything is going to happen. But I’m going to come along for the ride and mostly keep my eyes and ears open.”
Defloria was angry. “I’m not going to place my people in harm’s way,” he said, his voice tight. “If you think we’re facing a problem call the goddamned Coast Guard for an escort.”
“They’ve refused.”
“I’m pulling my people off,” Defloria said. “Al?”
“Whatever the company wants,” Lapides said.
Defloria got a sat phone from his desk and speed-dialed a number as he walked out into the corridor.
“How do we destroy this rig?” McGarvey asked the delivery skipper.
“Not my area of expertise, I’m just a pilot. Maybe if you had a couple of fighter aircraft, drop some bombs, but even something like that might not do much of anything but superficial damage unless the bombs were very big. Of course, if we were pumping oil a stick or two of dynamite would start a fire. Still might not sink the rig. But why would anyone want to do such a thing? Where’s the gain for them?”
“Some people might want to stop Dr. Larsen’s project,” McGarvey said, and he watched the light turn on in Lapides’s eyes.
“You’re talking about oil people,” he said. “Could make some sense if InterOil hadn’t donated this platform, and wasn’t paying for its conversion and delivery. But the company has made a sizeable investment here, and they’re going to want something in return. At least that’s the way I always thought business was supposed to work.”
“It could be nothing.”
Lapides was troubled. “But you wouldn’t have come out here to warn us if you didn’t think so.” He shrugged. “Justin’s right, we’re not going to put our people at risk. It’s not our project. Maybe you should hire private contractors to come aboard if the Coast Guard won’t help. With a few guns on board it would be pretty tough to hijack something this large.”
“I thought about it,” McGarvey said. “But I don’t want to call attention to what might happen. I just want to make sure that the platform ends up offshore from Hutchinson Island and that no one gets hurt. I’m here for your protection.”
“One man?”
“I’ll have some help.”
Defloria came back, looking a little angry and perplexed, and even more troubled than Lapides. He stood for a moment in deep thought, before he pocketed his sat phone and sat down. “The company thinks that it’s a possibility some of Jerry Schlagel’s people might stage a protest, but we’re not in any real danger. At least not of the sort that Mr. McGarvey’s talking about.”
“So we stay,” Lapides said.
“Spencer said the company spoke with people at the DOE, Commerce and the Coast Guard who gave us the green light,” Defloria told him. He turned to McGarvey. “They were frankly surprised that you were here.”
Those instructions had probably come either from Page or from the White House, who were willing to go along with the suggestion that if an attack on the rig were planned by the same contractor who’d hit Hutchinson Island he wouldn’t go ahead in the face of a show of force. Eve’s worst-case scenario that she would have to hire contractors 24/7 to secure her experiment might become fact. But if he was lured into hitting Vanessa while she
