and six crew.”
“Then where the hell are they?”
“What about the pilots?”
Hammer pulled farther ahead until he had a view straight into the cockpit. The windows were clear. Large- jet pilots wear a four-point belt. Even if the pilots were unconscious, the seat belts would keep them upright.
Instead, Hammer saw a disturbing sight. The belts were connected, but slack. The cockpit was empty. If what they were telling him was correct, 27 people had simply vanished over the Pacific.
“LA Control,” he said, hardly believing his own words, “there is no one on board the target.”
“CALIF 32, can you repeat that?”
“I repeat, N-348 Zulu is completely deserted. We’ve intercepted a ghost plane.”
FIVE
Locke’s heart was pounding by the time he reached the Scotia One control room, a state-of-the-art facility that allowed control of every aspect of the rig’s operations, including all the pumps and valves on the platform. It also served as the rig’s communications station.
Three men sat at terminals, busily going through their emergency checklists while Finn barked into the phone. He was a squat man with hair the color and consistency of steel wool, and his voice boomed with the authority of a drill sergeant. Locke listened while he caught his breath.
“We’ve got seven in the water…Yes, an explosion…No, our standby ship left yesterday to help with a spill at Scotia Two. They have survival suits on…When?…Okay, we’ll sit tight until then.” He hung up the phone.
Locke made a beeline for Finn. He heard the urgency in his own voice. “We can’t sit tight.”
Finn nodded at the clock on the wall. “Coast Guard is going to get a rescue chopper into the air in five minutes. At top speed, they’ll be here in another ninety. So we wait until then.”
“The fog is rolling in,” Locke said, shaking his head. “By the time the Coast Guard chopper gets here, visibility will be zero. In those kinds of conditions, the helicopter could fly right over them and never see them.”
“If you have any suggestions,” Finn said with undisguised annoyance, “I’ll be glad to hear them, but I don’t know what else we can do.”
Locke rested his chin on his fist as he thought. He knew that few survivors were found more than an hour after a crash at sea.
“How about the standby ship?” he said.
Finn snorted. “Don’t you think I thought of that? It’ll take over six hours for it to get back from Scotia Two. It’s our only ship.”
Locke thought back to when he was leaning on the landing pad railing. He snapped his fingers. “When I was up on deck, I saw a yacht about five miles away. They should be able to mount a rescue.”
Finn shot an angry look at one of the men. “Why didn’t I know that?”
The man shrugged meekly, and Finn spat into a wastebasket in response. “Send out the distress call,” he said.
The SOS went out on the radio. Seconds passed. Locke listened intently for a voice to respond on the control room speakers, but all he heard was dead air. No reply from the yacht.
“Try again,” Finn said after few more ticks of the wall clock. Still nothing.
“They must have seen the helicopter go down,” Locke said, frustrated by the silence. The yacht was the survivors’ best chance. “Why aren’t they answering?”
Finn threw his hands up in disgust and sat. “Their radio might be out. Doesn’t matter. They aren’t answering. We’ll have to wait for the Coast Guard chopper and hope it can find them in the fog.”
Locke remembered wearing the same survival suit on his flight to the platform. They were Mark VII suits. Capable safety gear, but not the newest. Not good enough.
Locke shook his head again. “The beacons on those suits are only accurate to within a mile,” he said. “That’s not precise enough in pea soup fog. What’s the water temp today?”
“About 43 degrees Fahrenheit,” Finn said. “The suits are rated for up to six hours in the water at that temperature.”
“The suit ratings are for ideal conditions in calm weather,” Locke said, losing his patience. “Those people are probably injured, and they’re being battered by waves out there. If we wait, that chopper won’t find anything but dead bodies.”
Finn raised his eyebrows and gave Locke a look that said,
Locke paused while his mind went into overdrive. He mentally checked off Scotia One’s facilities and capabilities one by one, his head nodding imperceptibly as he thought. He churned through the multiple possibilities but returned over and over to the only choice. He fixed his eyes on Finn.
“You have an idea,” Finn said.
Locke nodded. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Why?”
“We have to go get them ourselves.”
“How? We don’t have any boats.”
“Yes, we do. The freefall lifeboats.”
For a moment, Finn was speechless at the suggestion. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s too risky. They’re only a last resort if we have to abandon the rig. I can’t authorize them to be used that way.”
Scotia One was equipped with six 50-person lifeboats suspended 75 feet above the water. Locke had consulted on their installation on another oil rig and had even seen one launched.
The unique feature of the lifeboats was that they were aimed at a thirty-degree angle facing toward the water. There were no rope davits to lower the lifeboats slowly to the surface of the water. When the lifeboat was full and watertight, the operators pulled two levers, and the lifeboat slid down a ramp and into space, falling all the way to the water below. It was the only way to evacuate a burning oil platform quickly.
Locke bent down and gripped the arms of Finn’s chair, looming over the rig manager. Locke’s build was the product of good genes and a regular regimen of pushups, sit ups, and running, which he could do anywhere in the world he was working. He knew he couldn’t intimidate a hardened guy like Finn, no matter how small the man was compared to him, but he could use his size for emphasis.
With a low growl, Locke said, “Come on, Finn. You know it’s their only shot. If we wait, those people are going to die.”
Finn stood and got in Locke’s face as much as a man six inches shorter could. “I know what’s at stake, damn it!” Finn yelled. “But no one on board has ever launched one of those lifeboats before.”
“I’ve made a drop in one,” Locke said steadily. “That’s what made me think of it.”
Finn looked dubious. “You have? Where?”
“Gordian tested one two years ago. They needed volunteers to try it out.” It was true Gordian had done an open-water evaluation, which Locke had supervised, but he hadn’t actually ridden in the lifeboat. It had been deemed too dangerous at the time.
Finn raised an eyebrow. “Are you volunteering?”
Locke didn’t blink, but his heart was racing. “If that’s what it takes. I signed the waiver just like everyone else, and I saw where they went down.”
Finn looked around the control room at the three operators who stared back at him, then out the window toward the rapidly approaching fog. Finally, he turned back to Locke.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me,” Finn said, putting his hands up in defeat. “We’ll use a lifeboat. How many men do you need?”
