The Jungle

15

SWING US AROUND THE OTHER SIDE,” CABRILLO CALLED urgently.

As nimbly as a dragonfly, Adams maneuvered the chopper around the heavy-lifter’s bow and along her starboard rail. Like on the opposite side of the ship, the davits were swung out and the lifeboat long gone. However, here there was no indication that the pumps had been activated. They were filling the tanks on only one side so that the Hercules would capsize under the tremendous weight of the J-61 rig.

“Get us down there as fast as you can! We have to stop those pumps.”

“Juan,” Max said, “what if they took Linda with them?”

Cabrillo called the Oregon. Hali Kasim answered right away. “Go ahead, Chairman.”

“Hali, have we received a signal from Linda’s tracker chip in the past hour or so?”

“No, and I’ve got one of my screens dedicated to her frequency.”

“Wait one.” Cabrillo flipped back to the internal helicopter comms channel. “There’s your answer, Max. She’s still aboard. Gomez, get us down there. Hali, you still with me?”

“Right here.”

“We’ve found the Hercules, but it looks like they’re scuttling her. You have our location, yes?”

“I show you eighty-two miles out at a bearing of forty-six degrees.”

“Get here as fast as you can. Bust the guts out of the Oregon, if you have to.” Juan killed the connection. “Change of plans. Gomez, put me on top of the rig, then you and Max try to find a way of disabling the pumps.”

“You’re going to look for Linda?” Hanley asked.

“If all else fails, she and I can jump for it,” Juan said, knowing that his idea was born of desperation and would probably end up killing them both.

The look of concern that flashed across Max’s face told Cabrillo that Hanley thought it was pretty dumb too. Juan shrugged as if to say, what else can we do? He accepted a walkie-talkie that Max had grabbed from an emergency cache kept under the rear seat. Max would carry its twin.

“You don’t want me to get more people from the Oregon?” Adams asked as he lifted the chopper up the towering side of the oil platform.

“I don’t want her slowing for any reason,” Cabrillo told him.

Gomez centered the helo over the landing pad. Cabrillo didn’t waste the time it would take to settle the helicopter properly. He unsnapped his harness, threw open the door, and dropped three feet to the deck, his clothes and hair battered by the rotor’s thunderous downdraft. The 520 peeled away toward the stern, where there was enough deck space to safely land.

The landing jarred Juan’s injured shoulder and sent a stab of pain through his chest. He winced and then ignored it.

At more than two hundred feet up in the air, the slight list they’d seen from the chopper was much more pronounced, and Cabrillo was forced to lean slightly to maintain his footing. He had no idea if the Oregon would arrive in time.

He looked around. It was clear the rig was old. Rust showed through faded and chipped paint. The decks were heavily stained and dented where pieces of equipment had been slammed into it by careless crane operators. There was very little in the way of loose gear sitting around. He spotted a large bin loaded with thirty-foot lengths of pipe called drill string that was threaded together under the derrick and used to bore the hole into the earth. Heavy chain dangled through the drill tower like industrial lace. To Juan, all that was missing to indicate the platform was abandoned was the cry of a coyote and a few tumbleweeds.

Cabrillo made his way to the accommodations block, a three-story cube with the ornamentation of a Soviet apartment building. All the windows on the first level were small portholes no bigger around than dinner plates. He examined the single steel door. He could see that at one time it had been chained closed. The chain was still attached through the handle, but the pad eye had been snapped off the jamb. Now crude beads of solder had been used to weld it shut. He pulled at the handle anyway, heaving until his arm ached, but it didn’t budge even a fraction of an inch.

He hadn’t taken a sidearm with him because this was supposed to be a scouting mission. He looked around for something he could use to smash a window. It took ten frustrating minutes to locate a discarded cover for an oxyacetylene tank. It was roughly the size of a grapefruit and heavy enough to shatter the glass. With his one arm still in a sling, his aim was off, so it took him three tries before he could even hit the window, and that blow merely starred the shatter-resistant pane. He used the metal cover like a hammer and beat the glass out of the frame.

“Linda?” he shouted into the empty room beyond. He could see it was an antechamber where workers could strip out of their oilsoaked coveralls before making their way to their cabins. “Linda?”

His voice was swallowed by the metal walls and closed door opposite him. He bellowed. He roared. He thundered. It made no difference. His answer was silence.

“Linda!”

* * *

MAX JUMPED FROM the 520 as soon as its skids kissed the deck and ran crouched under the whirling disc of its rotors. He had two football fields to cover before he even reached the fortresslike superstructure. He knew after the first dozen steps that he was woefully out of shape. Yet he kept moving, his stout legs pumping, his arms sawing back and forth. Behind him, Gomez settled the chopper and cut the turbine.

It was only when he reached the slab-sided pontoon float that Max realized they had made a critical error. The pontoon stretched the entire width of the Hercules’s deck and was as sheer as a cliff, a vertical wall of steel nearly thirty feet tall without a ladder or handhold. The ship’s crew would need access to the aft of the vessel during transit, so he began retracing his steps, looking for a hatch.

“What’s wrong?” Adams asked. He’d ditched his flight helmet and unzipped his one-piece jumpsuit to the navel.

“There’s no way over the float. Look for an access hatch.”

The two men scoured the deck to no avail. The only way to get to the superstructure was over the oil rig’s two enormous pontoons, an impossible feat for either man.

“Okay,” Hanley said, coming up with an alternative. “Let’s get back to the chopper. There must be someplace on the superstructure where you can hover and I can jump.”

Because the engine was still hot, they were airborne a few moments later. The Hercules’s bow was a jumble of equipment and antennae, and the roof of the pilothouse was obscured by the guy wires supporting its radar mast. Gomez Adams had thousands of hours at the controls of nearly every helicopter in the world and could thread a needle with the MD 520N, but there was simply no place large and open enough for Max to safely jump. After five frantic minutes, Adams banked away.

“New plan,” Hanley announced. “Put me on top of the forwardmost pontoon.”

He climbed between the two front seats and rummaged around in the emergency kit for twenty feet of half- inch nylon rope. It wasn’t long enough, but it would have to do.

Adams edged the helo under the soaring platform and just above the rust-red pontoon, the rotordraft buffeting them from above and below. He held the 520 rock steady with its skids just inches above the pontoon so that Max merely had to step out of the craft and onto the rig itself. Gomez pulled away once again and settled the chopper onto the fantail. He throttled down the Rolls-Royce turbine but didn’t cut it completely.

As soon as he was down, Max tied off one end of the rope to a support bracket near the rig’s stout leg and tossed the other end over the side. It hung a good fifteen feet from the deck of the Hercules . He groaned.

“I’m getting too old for this stuff.”

He maneuvered until his legs dangled over the pontoon and slowly lowered himself down the rope, clutching