‘No! Let’s get going — now. Right now.’
At 3:04:58, the thermal explosives attached to the north leg of the Thoreau had gone off on schedule. There were actually two blasts. The first was an implosion, which rent the welded joint of the steel leg and split it open. The second was more formidable. The shock wave from it rippled the water despite the raging waves. It almost finished the job, but not quite. As the terrifying power of the second explosive was released, it split the leg, the crack edging up the column, ten or twelve feet. Air bubbles poured from the wound. The air seal, meant to provide additional buoyancy, was destroyed. The sound was largely drowned out by the storm, but the explosion itself telegraphed up the leg and jarred the rig. The leg, although buffeted by the heavy seas, held valiantly at first. But the joint began to oscillate as the twenty-foot sea wrenched it back and forth. Then it separated, and another tremor riffled up to the station. Still it held, flexing before the storm, the welded seam gradually tearing around the girth of the steel shaft. Above, the wind wailed torturously at the buildings, adding extra stress to the already shattered leg. Then with the agonizing screech of metal tearing, the leg finally surrendered to the sea and separated. It seemed poised for a moment, this spidery shaft tossed by the sea, and then the twenty thousand tons of steel and concrete above it, urged on by the wind, leaned into the ruined column and it plunged, like a needle, toward the bottom, four hundred feet below.
On the surface the Thoreau, mortally wounded, yielded to the storm and as the north leg collapsed it listed, bobbed back and was immediately struck by a mountainous wave. Steel cables snapped like twigs. Its wintery shroud crumbled and shards of gleaming ice, caught in the wind, whistled through the air. Then the Thoreau tipped over. Its north perimeter plunged into the sea and the tower collapsed, smacking the waves and shattering immediately, bits and pieces of it washing back over the partially submerged deck. As it keeled over, the eight lines pumping crude oil into its tanks were torn loose, twisting in the wind like snakes, spewing crude into the wind. Electrical circuits exploded like fireworks, and the raw oil flooded through the cavernous room where the system converged. When the oil reached the hot lines, the room exploded. The six men on duty were roasted as the room blew up in an enormous mushroom of fire that filled it and burst through the side of the building before it was swept away by the wind and sea.
Inside the stricken rig, men were tossed about like toothpicks, crushed under furniture, thrown through smashed portholes. The lights went out. Most of them, trapped in darkness, died in panic and fear.
The Thoreau lay on its side, held momentarily by the other legs, as the sea pounded it and the waves crashed against its five-story superstructure, which now lay sideways in the water.
Lansdale was standing in the doorway of his apartment, urging Marge to hurry, when suddenly the earth seemed to tip crazily underfoot.
‘My God, we’re rolling over!’ he screamed as the floor bounded up at him. When he fell, his legs dangled through the open doorway. He clutched frantically at the walls, which now, insanely, had become the floor, trying to keep from falling back into the apartment. As the Thoreau tipped, there was a crescendo of destruction. Glasses, furniture, anything not tied down, poured through the hallways of the five-story build-
As Lansdale struggled to pull himself out of the gaping doorway he could hear shrieks echoing up through the corridors of the dying structure. He turned back, looking down into the apartment. Marge lay crumpled in the corner, covered by furniture and debris. She was unconscious. Lansdale needed a line to get down to her. Then he heard the oil explode and felt the whole structure tremble. At the far end of the corridor the force of the oil explosion tore the door off and blew away half the wall. Frigid, damp air rushed through the hail. The lights went out. Lansdale turned his flashlight down into the ruined topsy-turvy apartment. The porthole, now submerged in the raging sea, could not withstand the pressure. Its rivets suddenly began popping like champagne corks. The round window burst open and a geyser of freezing water gushed up through it. Lansdale jumped to his feet and started down the hallway. Then the rig rolled again and this time he was thrown against the ceiling, now the floor, of the hallway. And then the sea rushed through the doorways and he saw the mountain of water pour down and engulf him.
The shock of the below-freezing seawater numbed him. He held tenaciously to his flashlight as he was swept along the hallway by the torrent. He clutched at an open doorway, but his fingers slipped away from it and he was trapped in the submerged corridor. His lungs were bursting as he frantically felt the walls, trying to find an opening, anything to get free of this watery trap. But the frozen sea was already taking its toll, and the shock of the icy water robbed him of breath.
My God, I’m drowning, he thought.
And then he was in a glistening underwater wonderland, numbed beyond pain or caring, his lungs wracked with spasms, and as the flashlight slipped from his fingers and tumbled away, its beam diminishing to a pinpoint, he opened his mouth, like a fish in a bowl, and the sea flooded in, and his life, too, blinked
The Henry Thoreau lay upside down. The cables that had held it firmly to the bottom were either uprooted or had snapped. Its once mighty legs pointed straight up. Buffeted by the storm, they bent before the gale and then were torn from their mounts on the deck. Their air pockets burst. The escaping air hissed out. And the Thoreau plunged straight down, four hundred feet, leaving in its wake a trail of bubbles, debris and bodies which bobbed upward, like innocent toys from a stricken dollhouse, toward the raging surface of the Chukchi Sea.
V
The Greek tanker, ploughing through the gale, arrived on the scene forty minutes after the Thoreau had gone down. The tanker’s searchlights swept the area, picking out one life raft with three bodies lashed to it. Three men, all frozen to death. For more than two hours the tanker lay in the troughs of the pounding waves while several volunteers recovered one corpse, then another. When the captain finally decide4 to abandon the search, they had fished fifteen men and a woman out of the sea. There was no sign of the Thoreau.
By eight o’clock the next morning the storm had passed, and the sea, although still running high, had lost its muscle, the storm clouds raced onward, sweeping south toward the Bering Strait and Nome. Winds were down to twenty to twenty-five knots. Three more bodies were recovered. The captain sent a simple message to the Air Force rescue station at Point Barrow, two hundred miles northeast of the disaster area:
‘Henry Thoreau down in 70 fathoms. Location: 72 degrees north, 165 degrees west. Nineteen bodies recovered. No survivors. Holding position. Please advise.’
The Russian air station at Provideniya, just south of the Bering Strait, offered assistance, but three Air Force rescue planes arrived on the scene forty minutes after the tanker’s message and reported no signs of life or the fated oil rig. They thanked the Russians but declined help. One of the planes swept low over the tanker and wiggled his wings in a final salute to the Thoreau and its crew.
‘This is Air Force 109,’ the pilot radioed the tanker. ‘Please drop a marker and you are relieved. Thank you and Happy New Year.’ He banked sharply and joined his formation and the three planes headed back toward
