Gail looked at him, a wry expression on her lips. “You don’t watch enough television to know how popular Schlagel has become since Hutchinson Island. People are frightened that things are going to be taken away from them by a power or powers they can’t understand. Everyone’s afraid of nuclear war and yet rich corporations want to keep building nuclear power plants. It’s tough enough as it is to make a decent living, yet the same corporations give their CEOs multimillion-dollar bonuses. It’s obscene. Gas prices keep going up, health care costs are bankrupting the country, but nothing is being done. Essentially it’s the lobbyists who’re running everything. And we’re selling our souls to the Saudis for oil and sending all of our manufacturing jobs to China.”
“It’s the world we live in,” McGarvey said, not meaning to sound as callous as that. But it was the truth.
“Yes, and it’s a world that we made,” Gail said passionately. “We’re either a part of the problem or a part of the solution, and our hands aren’t clean, Kirk.”
“Mine especially,” McGarvey said, a flood of dark memories overtaking him. He looked at her. “But we’re not going to turn away from this. The Coast Guard’s not along for the ride because no one wants to piss off big oil, especially the Saudis and the rest of OPEC, and no one wants to get in the way of the handful of heavy hitters making big money with derivative funds and credit default swaps.”
“They buy the lobbyists.”
“That’s only a part of it. These people fund armies, insurgents, soldiers for God, al-Quaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, al Muhajiroun, Jamat e-Islami. The list goes on. Nuclear research in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. We’re in a war, and have been since the eighties, and certainly since Nine/eleven. Not about religious freedom, not about territory, but about oil and money and power. And the jury’s still out.”
“We’ll end up a second-class country,” Gail said bleakly.
“It’s certainly possible, unless we can give the Eve Larsens of the world the time to change the tide.”
They had dinner in the practically deserted mess hall one level up from the main deck. Oil rigs were usually worked around the clock, and the kitchen was always open. Oil men in general had large appetites, and when they were hungry they expected to be fed. None of Eve’s people were there. “It’s not just the Eve Larsens, it’s the nuclear people, too,” Gail said. “There’re thirty applications for new generating stations, and even if every one of them were to be approved today not one kilowatt of power would be produced for at least ten years, and probably longer.”
“We can’t wait that long.”
“I worked at Hutchinson Island long enough to understand that we’re facing a crisis right now, and no one knows exactly what to do about it. Everything’s so fabulously expensive that it’s almost impossible to make any sort of a decision for fear of losing billions of dollars.”
“If Schlagel gets his way, and it looks like he might, nukes will be out. Which brings us back to Eve Larsen’s project.”
“We can’t let it fail,” Gail said with some passion. She did not want to be on the losing end of an operation twice in a row. “But it makes you wonder about Washington, and what sort of collusions are going on.”
Have always been going on, McGarvey wanted to say, but he didn’t.
Schlagel’s God’s Flotilla, as Fox News was dubbing it, started arriving at the platform just after dawn. At first only a pair of shrimp boats, but by eight in the morning dozens of boats, some of them as large as the 120-foot ex- Japanese fish factory ship now named the
The media was scheduled to arrive aboard an InterOil chopper from Biloxi at noon, something apparently whoever was in charge of the flotilla knew, because the boats merely circled the platform and its tug, giving both a wide berth, making no attempt to interfere or create a problem. That wouldn’t happen until the cameras were pointed in their direction. Schlagel’s machine was slick and professional.
McGarvey and Gail had walked over to the superstructure that housed Eve Larsen’s lab and operations center and stood outside on one of the lower-level balconies just above the main deck to watch the gathering fleet, still more boats showing up on the northern horizon.
“Your lady scientist knew this was going to happen, but seeing it now like this can’t make her very happy,” Gail said. “She won’t be able to ignore us.”
“It’s not so much her, she came to me for help in the first place. It’s her assistant, Don Price. He’s in love with her.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Gail said. “And you’re her Sir Galahad who’s come to rain on his parade.”
“Might be more than that,” McGarvey said. Rencke had vetted Eve’s people too, and they’d all cleared with flying colors, including Price who held two Ph.D.s, one from M.I.T. in ocean science and engineering and the other from Princeton in oceanography. His paper on the origins of the Gulf Stream and how it controlled climate was, according to Otto, nothing short of stunning, groundbreaking.
“The guy’s probably an asshole,” Rencke had reported after Oslo. “But he’s a smart asshole and from what I can tell one hundred percent devoted to Larsen and her project, even though he could have had his own lab and funding by now.”
“What does he want?” McGarvey had asked. He’d been fishing, because he had nothing solid to go on, only intuition.
“Reflected glory,” Rencke was quick to suggest. “His boss got the Nobel Prize and he was the number two man on her team. Part of the credit goes to him. Pretty good paragraph on a resume.”
McGarvey still wasn’t sure about Price, but it was nothing he could put his finger on. No solid reason for mistrust, only mutual dislike.
“Let’s go up and introduce you and let them know how we’re going to handle today and the rest of the trip,” McGarvey said, and he started to turn toward the door, but Gail put a hand on his arm.
“I just had a thought,” she said. “All these media types, unless they’re just kids, are going to know your face, and they’re going to want to know why you’re aboard, right?”
“So what?”
“No use advertising why you’re here. You went up against Schlagel’s people in New York, and you were there in Oslo, so if your name pops up again he’ll probably think you’ve targeted him. But our contractor will know better. So why don’t we keep you in reserve, as a sort of a nasty surprise?”
“I want to see exactly what the media people are shown, and I want to know if any of them takes a particular interest in anything, especially the communications equipment and the legs.”
“I can do that,” Gail said. “Otherwise why did you bring me along? Let me earn my pay.”
It was penance for her self-perceived failure at Hutchinson Island. But she had a point, and McGarvey conceded it. “You’ll stay in the rear, but use the EQ, I want to know everything.”
“I’ll save you some champagne,” she said, and she glanced toward the door to the corridor and the stairs up to the control room. “Do you want to introduce me now, or should it wait until we’re under way?”
But it was difficult for him. He’d lost some good people in the past, Lundgren at Hutchinson Island, and his family, so that it was hard to let go, hard not to be in the middle of things, in charge, calling the shots. And a part of him, because of his age he supposed and his upbringing by strict fundamentalist parents on the western Kansas plain, made him chauvinistic at times. His first instinct was almost always to open the door for a woman, take her coat, hold her chair, pick up the dinner check. Go into harm’s way first.
“Later,” he told her. “There won’t be any trouble this soon. When it comes it’ll be farther out in the Gulf and it’ll be late at night or early in the morning before dawn. But watch yourself.”
Gail glanced at her watch. “We have a couple of hours, what do you want to do?”
“I want you to find Defloria and tell him that you’re going to tag along on the tour, and in the meantime I’m going to check on something.”
“Anything I should see, too?”
“I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and he turned and headed back along the corridor to the stairs that led to the lower levels of the platform.
