Lansdale was not only chief engineer and manager of the project, he was its creator. For eighteen years he had dreamed of this custom-built Shangri-La at the edge of the world. It had taken him four years of planning, of fighting in board rooms and lobbying in bars and restaurants, to convince the consortium of four oil companies to take the chance.
What had finally swayed them was the man himself. Harry Lansdale knew oil; knew where to find it and how to get it. He was as tough as the Arctic and as unshakable as the rig he had built, a man who had devoted his life to pursuing the thick black riches bottled up beneath the earth. He had worked on rigs all over the world and, to prove it, had a list of them tattooed proudly down his right arm, like the hash marks on the sleeve of an old-line Army top kick — from Sweet Dip, the old Louisiana offshore rig, to Calamity Run in the North Sea, to the endless, sweeping desert fields of Saudi Arabia they had nicknamed the Sandstorm Hilton.
Oh, it had taken its toll, all right. At forty, his leathery face was craggy with hard-work lines, his hands sandpapered with calluses, his shaggy hair more salt than pepper. But to Lansdale, it was worth every line, every callus, every streak of gray. He smiled, raised the coffee cup and, tapping the porthole lightly, growled in a voice tuned by cigarettes and whiskey and not enough sleep: ‘Happy New Year, storm.’
Even at fifteen fathoms the sea was rough, its swells rolling beneath the six-foot waves on the surface. A thin sliver of light pierced the dark sea, followed by what at first might have appeared to be four banded seals struggling in formation through the grim waters. They were four men in winter wet suits, lashed together like mountain climbers by a nylon band, and pulled through the dangerous sea by an underwater scooter. A box the size of a child’s coffin was attached by nylon Lines to the scooter.
The man leading the small pack held his wrist close to his face mask. He had only one good eye. The other was a grotesque empty socket. He checked his compass and depth watch, constantly adjusting their direction. The narrow beam from his flashlight swept back and forth as he directed the beam into the dark sea. Then one of the men spotted it and his eyes widened behind the glass window of his face mask: a giant steel column sixteen feet thick and still as a mountain, defying the turbulent ocean, as flotsam swirled around it and then rushed on.
The leader steered the scooter up-tide from the column. keeping a safe distance from it, for one heavy swell could throw them against it and destroy both the men and their underwater machine. They hovered twenty feet away as the leader prepared a spear gun and fired the spear so that it slashed through the water past the steel leg before losing its momentum. The tide swept the cable around the column. Then the driver guided the scooter in three or four counterturns around the shaft, forming a taut line between them and the leg before steering the scooter into the tide, keeping the line taut.
The three others detached the coffin-like box and inched down the line toward the column.
Lansdale, making his swing through the installation as he did every night before going to bed, stepped inside the control room and stood watching the skeleton crew at work. It looked to him like the set of some sci-fi movie, its rows of computer readouts flashing on and off as the ingenious station pumped oil from several undersea Wells within a thirty-mile range into storage tanks built into the perimeter of the rig, and from there, through a twelve- inch line that ran along the bottom of the Chukchi Sea to a receiving station. near the village of Wainwright, a hundred and twenty-two miles to the east, where the Alaskan badlands petered out by the sea.
It was a revolutionary idea. And it -was working. For three months now, the station had been cooking like a greased skillet. Lots of little headaches, of course, these were to be expected. But nothing major. Now the Thoreau was operating with a skeleton crew of 102 men and 4 women, a hundred people fewer than normal, all of them volunteers who had passed up their Christmas furlough to work the station during the holidays.
Slick Williams, the electronics genius who ran the computer room, was sitting at the main console, his feet on the desk, sipping coffee and watching the lights flashing. He looked up as Lansdale came in. ‘Hi, Chief,’ he said. ‘Slumming?’
Lansdale laughed. ‘In this sixty-million-dollar toy?’ Around him was possibly the most sophisticated computerized operation ever built. ‘Keep an eye on the stabilizers, it’s getting rough out there.’
‘Check,’ Williams said. ‘Tell Sparks to let me know if it gets too bad.’
‘Shit,’ Lansdale said, ‘I sat Out a hurricane on the first offshore rig ever built. A goddamn wooden platform fifteen years old. You could fit the son of a bitch in this room. Only lost one man. Silly bastard got hit in the head with a lunchbox flying about ninety miles an hour. Broke his neck. Otherwise, all we got was wet.’
Williams nodded. He had heard the stories before.
‘I’ll either be in the bar having a nightcap or in my apartment,’ the Chief said and left, walking down the hall to the weather room. Radar maps covered one wall, their azimuth bars sweeping in circles, covering a four-hundred- mile radius. The weatherman was just a kid, twenty-six, skinny, acned, long-haired, with glasses as thick as the bottom of a Johnnie Walker bottle. But he was good. Everybody aboard was good or they wouldn’t be there.
Below them, the heavy seas thundered mutely against the pillars.
‘We got a bitch comin’ up, Chief,’ said the youthful weatherman, who, for reasons of his own, had nicknamed himself Sparks, after the old-time radio operators.
‘What’s it look like?’
‘Hundred-mile winds, sleet, snow and big, I mean big, seas. And it’s already running four degrees below freezing. Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight, they got about five minutes in that water.’
‘Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight’ll be in Nome before we get a line to ‘em,’ Lansdale said.
‘These storms gimme the creeps.’
‘We been through worse, kid. Why don’t you knock off and catch a movie. They got that Clint Eastwood picture showing, the one with the ape.’ The theatres operated twenty-four hours a day.
‘I’m staying here. There’s no windows and you can’t hear much. I’ll sleep on that cot if I fade out. Besides, I got Cagney keeping me company.’ He pointed to one of more than a dozen monitor screens near the radar maps. The sound was turned down, but there was Jimmy Cagney, running through an oil refinery, shooting up everybody in sight.
‘There was a man,’ Lansdale said. ‘He makes those macho assholes today look like a bunch of Ziegfeld broads.’
Now Cagney was on top of one of the huge refinery globes and the FBI was trying to pick him off.
‘Watch this,’ the kid said. ‘This has got to be the biggest ending ever.’
