“Security hired by the company,” Defloria said. “None of my people know any differently, so you won’t get any static.”
“Will any of them recognize me?”
“These guys watch television, but mostly sports and the Playboy channel.”
“What about communications equipment?” Gail asked. “What’s aboard and where is it?”
“If you mean internally, there’re the platform’s interphones, and walkie-talkies. For rig to shore, our primary link is via satellite — works with the phones as well as the computers — plus we have a dedicated data system that automatically transmits information back to Baton Rouge.”
“How many satellite dishes?”
“Just the one, plus the dish Dr. Larsen’s people set up. They’re both atop the control room.”
“Sat phones?” Gail asked.
“Al and I share one,” Defloria said.
“Where is it kept most of the time?”
“On Al’s belt, unless it’s in the charger in his quarters,” Defloria said tightly. “What’re you trying to tell me? That we’re definitely going to get attacked and the first thing they’ll try to knock out are our links to shore?”
“Just taking inventory,” McGarvey told him. “What about communications with the tug?”
“Normal VHF intership safety on channel six, or if that’s busy we switch to eight. And there must be a half dozen or more handhelds aboard.”
“Lifeboats?”
“Enough for sixty people, slide launched from A deck. All of them equipped with emergency locator beacons, rations for ten days, and portable water makers.” Defloria shook his head. “I don’t think I want to know about any of this, but I suppose I must. May I share it with Al?”
McGarvey nodded. “But no one else. Especially not Dr. Larsen or her people. We’ll take care of that.”
Defloria wanted to argue, McGarvey could see it in his impatience. Vanessa Explorer was his rig until Florida, but he’d been told that he was no longer in charge — by the company two days ago and again here and now. “What else?” he asked instead.
“We’re probably going to have an escort,” McGarvey said. “Schlagel’s people. And from what we’re seeing they’ll probably be an impressive flotilla.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Not very,” McGarvey said. “And not yet.”
“How many crew aboard the tug?” Gail asked.
“Captain Andresen, his first and second officers — who split the watch — and two deckhands.”
“Have you worked with them before?”
“No, but Andresen has a good reputation in the business. His last job was towing one of our rigs across the North Sea in some pretty bad weather. He knows what he’s doing. Should he be warned that something might be coming our way?”
“Tell him about Jerry Schlagel,” McGarvey said.
Clearly unhappy, Defloria nodded tightly and turned to leave, but at the door he hesitated. “Who the hell would want to hurt us? Environmentalists afraid that we’re going to wreck Florida’s beaches? We’re not going to drill for oil, don’t they understand?”
“It’s not the rig, they’re afraid of. It’s Dr. Larsen’s project.”
Defloria nodded again and left.
McGarvey scanned the personnel files Defloria had given him and sent them to Rencke, who came back in less than ten minutes. “All of them old hands in the business. A couple of troublemakers — the get drunk and brawl sort — but no real badasses, Mac.”
“At least one of them belongs to our contractor,” McGarvey said.
“Eric and I will keep checking,” Rencke promised. “But honest injun, Mac, I feel really bad about this. It’s like I’ve dropped back into the Stone Age.”
“You haven’t and that’s the problem. Our contractor is very careful how he uses the Internet, and so do the people who hired him. They share most of their information face-to-face, something that’s just about impossible to hack into unless you’re right there when they meet.”
“No one can live without a computer,” Rencke said. “He’s left a trace somewhere, and I’ll find it.”
“Still nothing?” Gail asked.
“No,” McGarvey said. “But someone’s aboard who works for our contractor, so from this point on neither of us goes anywhere unarmed or without our comms units.”
“What’s our first move?”
“I want to take a look at the satellite dishes, see just how vulnerable they are, and then the legs, figure out what it would take to destroy them.”
“What about Dr. Larsen and her merry band?”
“We’ll jump that hurdle in the morning, because I think that before the media people arrive at noon, Schalgel’s flotilla will be out here and I think that when her people, especially Price, sees what we’re up against, they might have second thoughts about ignoring us.”
Gail went to her room to get her pistol and comms unit, leaving McGarvey to stare out the window at the oil rigs in the distance. The last century had really been all about oil, the technologies that used it, the countries that had become superdependent on it and the people and governments who’d made trillions of dollars, and wanted very much to guard the status quo. The problem was that the list of everyone who had a finger in the pie, everyone who had a stake in the game, everyone who had something to lose, some terrible price to pay was, if not endless, nearly so. And therein lay the problem. The enemy base was so broad, so far-reaching that there was no practical way of defending places like Hutchinson Island, or experiments like Eve’s aboard Vanessa Explorer.
Right after 9/11, Seceretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld told a group of journalists, who wanted to know how such a thing could have happened, that our entire nuclear arsenal had been of no use to us. This was a different sort of war and different ways of defense were needed. Problem was, no one had figured that out yet.
FIFTY
McGarvey and Gail spent a couple of hours poking around the rig, checking the two satellite dishes on the roof of the control center, access to which was ridiculously easy, either through a pair of corridors and up one flight of stairs or outside up stairs attached to the side of the superstructure like fire escapes. And getting to the legs beneath the lowest deck was nearly as simple. The platform was just too big and too complicated to easily defend, nor had it been designed to withstand an attack.
Standing at the south edge of the main deck, looking at the massive oceangoing tug,
“There’ll be a lot of confusion,” McGarvey said. The huge cable harness connecting the tug to Vanessa was slack. But when the platform was actually under tow a tremendous strain would be taken up and any small boat that happened to stray anywhere near would be in serious trouble. If something like that were to happen, especially late at night, or very early in the morning before dawn, it wouldn’t matter what was going on aboard the rig, the tug’s crew would be engaged in a rescue operation.
“Do you think Schlagel is a part of this?”
McGarvey had considered it, and there were plenty of reasons for such an alliance to be possible, chief among them the reverend’s bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in two years. He was, in his own words: “The architect of the new back-to-fundamentals program that made this country great in the first place.”
“I don’t think he or his people would be so stupid to be a part of the attack, but they’d make great witnesses. When this platform went to the bottom he’d be able to say ‘I told you so.’”
