“I am merely offering to express my gratitude.”
“In four hours you can express your gratitude to the ladies of Porto Clarence’s massage parlors.”
Low-rent Eastern European and Chinese cruise ships had discovered the capital city. A mix of poverty, an embattled dictator desperate for cash, and the legendary beauty of Isle de Foreens’ West African and Portuguese bloodlines had sex tourism booming in the old colonial deepwater port.
Terry paced the pilothouse. “I’ve been company physician on enough oil jobs to know to keep my trap shut. But this voyage is the most secret I’ve ever seen.”
“Stop saying that.”
“You spent the week towing hydrophone streamers and air guns. When was the last time your OSV was Rube Goldberg — ed into a seismic vessel?”
“Last month.” Janet Hatfield kicked herself the instant she admitted it.
Terry laughed. “The ‘captain’s curse.’ You love your boat too much to keep a secret. This isn’t the first time? Are you kidding? She’s an offshore service vessel, not an oil hunter. What is going on?”
“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have— So it’s weird. So what? When the company makes me vice president of marine services, I’ll ask why. Till then, I’ll drive the boat. Now shut up about it. Jesus, I should have left you in Nigeria.”
“I’d be dead.”
“Roger that,” Janet Hatfield agreed. It was easier than ever to die in the oil-soaked Niger Delta. Militants kidnapped petroleum workers right off their rigs, drunken soldiers strafed their own checkpoints, and fanatics rampaged in the name of Jesus and Muhammad. But catnip-to-women Dr. Terry Flannigan had come close to getting killed the old-fashioned way: a jealous husband with a machete; a rich chief, no less, with the political connections to get away with hacking up the wife-poacher.
“Janet, where did we go wrong?” Terry asked with another soulful smile.
“Our relationship collapsed under its own lack of weight.”
He made a better friend than lover. As a boyfriend he was treacherous, head over heels in love with himself. But as a friend-friend, there was something steady deep inside Terry that said he would take a bullet for you. Which was why Janet Hatfield had not hesitated to bundle him aboard before the angry husband killed him. For ten days she had hidden him from the crew in her cabin, “airing” him when it was her watch.
The bridge and her attached cabin stood in splendid isolation atop a four-story deckhouse near the front of the ship. Under it were crew cabins, mess and galley, and the lounge that the petrologists had taken over as their computer and radio room. The scientists had declared it off-limits to the crew. They even told her that the captain had to ask permission to enter. Janet had informed them that she had no plan to enter unless it caught fire, in which case she would not knock first.
“You know what the petrologists are doing now?”
Terry was staring out the back windows, which looked down on the hundred-foot-long, low and flat cargo deck, empty tonight but for the OSV’s towing windlass, deck crane, and capstans.
“Get away from the window before they see you.”
“They’re throwing stuff overboard.”
“What they’re doing is their business.”
“One of them is crawling around with a flashlight— Oh, he dropped something.”
“What are they throwing?” she asked in spite of herself.
“Computers.”
Below decks, jubilant petrologists peeled off their sweat-soaked shirts and did a victory dance in the now empty computer room. They had worked twenty-four hours a day for ten days, trapped on a boat where possession of booze or drugs or even a bottle of beer would get you banned from the oil business for life. Now they were headed for a well-earned party in the brothels of Porto Clarence, having successfully uploaded multiple terabytes of the hottest 3-D seismic data on the planet.
The data acquisition was done, the client’s seismic model refined, the success of what oilmen called an elephant hunt confirmed beyond any doubt. The client had acknowledged receipt of the densely encrypted satellite transmissions and ordered them to throw the computers into the sea. Every laptop, desktop, even the fifty- thousand-?dollar subsurface-modeling workstation that took two men to lift over the side of the ship. The monitors went, too, so no one would see them and ask what they were for, as did the hydrophones and air guns and their mil-spec satellite transmitter.
In a few more hours the petrologists would celebrate the discovery of the “mother of all reserves”—billions and billions of barrels of oil and trillions upon trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that would transform Isle de Foree from a remote plantation island trickling oil through a neglected infrastructure into a West African Saudi Arabia.
“Hey, Janet. How many dinosaurs died to make the oil patch?”
“Algae. Not dinosaurs.”
Terry Flannigan stared at the dark ahead of the boat. The big secret could only be about oil. The water was miles deep here, but if you took the long view in eons, eras and epochs, the seabed was actually an extension of the shallow African coast. For more years than there were stars in the sky, the Niger River had been dumping sediment into the Atlantic Ocean. This slurry of mud, sand, and dead plants and animals had filled the troughs, rifts, and clefts of the Atlantic, and had kept spilling across the continental slope into the deep and continued seaward, drifting, filling. A lady petrologist once told him that the compacted fill was eight miles deep.
“What did dinosaurs make? Coal?”
“Trees made coal,” Janet answered distractedly, her eyes locking on the radar. She switched on the powerful docking lamps. They lit a brilliant hundred-yard circle around the OSV. “Oh, shit!”
“What?”
An eighteen-foot rigid inflatable boat driven by enormous Mercury outboards swooped out of the dark bristling with assault rifles and rocket launchers. Janet Hatfield reacted quickly, grabbing the helm to override the autopilot. The RIB was struggling in the heavy seas. Maybe she could outrun them. She turned
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is
“One degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven, forty-three east. One degree, nineteen minutes north,” she said, repeating her position. “Seven degrees, forty-three minutes east.” They couldn’t help if they couldn’t find her.
“Pirates boarding
There was never a guarantee that anyone was listening. But the 406 MHz satellite EPIRB, which was out on the bridge wing in its float-free bracket, would broadcast her position continuously in case of sinking. She pushed through the door again to switch it on manually.
The inflatable was so close she could see eight soldiers dressed in camouflage.
They had to be from Isle de Foree, she thought, the only land within the inflatable’s range. But they couldn’t be government troops in that little commando boat. Free Foree Movement rebels? Pirates or rebels, what did they want? The only thing valuable on an offshore service vessel was the crew. To hold hostage or for ransom. So they wouldn’t kill her people. At least not yet.
Muzzle flashes lit the inflatable like a Christmas tree and all the windows in
A cargo net edged with grappling hooks cleared the low side of
