The Jungle

“ ’Et outta ’ere ’ow.”

“We’re almost clear.”

As they kept rushing up the final set of stairs, the reception improved. “Juan, Gomez is standing by on the pad, but you have less than a minute. We can’t hold her any longer.”

“Max, listen carefully. Put an armed guard on MacD Lawless. If he tries to get to a phone or radio, shoot him.”

“What? Why?” Hanley’s incredulity made his voice crack.

“I’ll explain when I see you. Do it.”

The last steps were so slanted, it was like running through a fun house, and when they finally burst out the door to the catwalk suspended over the sea, all three of them crashed into the railing because they couldn’t stop their onward rush. Running along the walkway, with the Oregon’s deck one hundred feet below them and at a twenty-plus-degree angle, made them all realize that Max’s promised minute was overly optimistic. They had seconds before the rig toppled.

Gomez Adams held the 520 over the helipad, one skid touching the deck, the other hovering over a massive gap. He was level. It was the platform that was skewed. The tips of the rotor blades on one side of the chopper thrummed dangerously close to the deck.

“Go! Go! Go!” Juan shouted.

Below them, the rig screeched once again as gravity pulled it closer to the tipping point. The Hercules’s rail was buried in the sea, and a gap began to show under the uphill side of the platform as it started going over.

In the Op Center Eric Stone redirected the drive-tube nozzles and put on a burst of speed, redlining the engines in a desperate bid to get the ship clear of the steel avalanche crashing toward them. Aboard the capsizing heavy-lifter, Eddie, Linc, and Mike had no choice but to hold on to any solid surface they could find, so they clung to the topside railing with everything they had.

Cabrillo unceremoniously shoved both women into the chopper as Adams started lifting clear and leapt in after them as the rig slid the rest of the way off the deck. The stress was too much for the platform’s spindly drill tower and it broke free, twisting steel wrenched apart as though it were a balsa wood model. The rig moaned like amplified whale song.

The helicopter’s tail boom cleared the helipad with inches to spare, its three passengers staring agog at the destruction they had just escaped. The platform crashed into the ocean scant feet from the fleeing Oregon’s jack staff and created a titanic wave that lifted the ship like a toy in a bathtub and nearly drove her bow into the swells. Eric deftly steered them across the wave front like a surfer peeling down the face of one of the big ones off Oahu’s North Shore.

The top-heavy rig turned turtle as soon as all of it was in the water, upending so that the air-filled pontoons were pointed at the sky. It bobbed almost merrily. Unburdened of so much deadweight, the Hercules pendulumed back until she was almost straight, before the inertia of water sloshing in her tanks returned her to a deadly list. The three men holding fast to the rails were thrown violently but managed to maintain their grip.

When they let go, each slid across the deck on his backside, maintaining a safe speed by pressing gloved hands and shoes against the plating. When they came up against the lower rail, all three simply stepped into the ocean and started swimming away. Adams maintained a hover over them to direct the rescue launch racing from the Oregon’s amidships boat garage.

The RHIB reached them just moments before the Hercules succumbed to the inevitable and rolled ponderously onto her side, her barnacle-scaled bottom exposed to the sun for the first time in her long career. Air trapped in the hull burst out through portholes and vents, spewing and sputtering as though the old ship was fighting her fate.

And then he remembered that this wasn’t the end of the affair but the very beginning, and all thoughts of humor vanished.

“Gomez, get us back to the ship ASAP.”

MacD Lawless had betrayed them from that very first night in Pakistan, and Cabrillo wanted answers.

No sooner were they down and the RHIB back up the ramp in the boat garage than he ordered the Oregon to stand off the platform and rake its waterline with the ship’s 20mm Gatling gun. The depth here wasn’t optimal—the Hercules’s crew must have been rushed after all—but they were over the continental slope, and, with luck, the J-61 would tumble down the undersea cliff and end up in the crushing depths of the abyssal plane.

Juan wanted no evidence that this act of sabotage hadn’t gone off as planned. The heavy-lifter wouldn’t last another ten minutes on the surface, and once they’d peppered the rig’s floats with a couple thousand holes it would join the ship on the bottom.

Because he was covered in gooey oil from his search for Linda, Cabrillo went to his cabin first, while the two women were escorted to the infirmary for a checkup. As much as he longed for a shower, he simply stripped out of the clothes he’d been wearing, balling them up for the trash rather than tossing them into a hamper, and threw on a navy blue jumpsuit and clean boots.

He was down in medical seven minutes after Adams got them safely home.

Max was there waiting, a look of concern on his bulldog face. “First off, glad you’re okay. Second, what the hell is going on?”

“We’re both about to find out,” Juan said, and led him through the door.

“About time I get some answers,” Dr. Huxley said with mild irritation. “Why is my patient under guard?”

“How are Soleil and Linda?”

“They’re fine. Soleil is a little wrung out from her ordeal, but up until they moved the oil platform she was cared for. How about it, Juan?”

“Croissard was duped the same way we were and by the same person.”

“MacD?”

“Nope. But let’s go have a chat with him.”

Juan could see that the guard had taken the added precaution of securing MacD’s wrists to the frame of his hospital bed. Cabrillo dismissed him with a wave and spent several seconds eyeing their newest member turned prisoner.

Cabrillo started, “I’m going to tell a story and I want you to correct me where I get it wrong. If I’m satisfied when we’re finished, I’ll untie you myself. Deal?”

MacD nodded.

“At some time during your most recent posting to Afghanistan when you worked for Fortran, you befriended a local, probably someone younger than yourself.”

“His name was Atash.”

“You told him all about your daughter back home in New Orleans, never considering the kid was part of a terrorist cell and that the information you gave him would be used against you.”

Shame washed over Lawless’s face.

“When they were ready, the cell sent a team to the United States to kidnap her. Proof of her abduction was somehow provided, and you were told that if you didn’t do exactly what they said, she would be killed. You had no choice. They set up a bogus ambush to get you across the border into Pakistan, where you were roughed up a little to make your capture appear legit. On a night they knew we were watching that village you were paraded around, setting us up to rescue you at the same time we nabbed the little boy, Setiawan.

“I always figured our escape out of that town was too easy,” Cabrillo said. “Not the ambush on the road later. That was a separate group that had no idea what was going on. But the people in the village were under orders to let us go with minimum fuss.”

“Hold on,” Max said. “I thought you said they opened fire on the bus.”

“Oh, a couple of Johnny Jihadis shot at us, but they either missed entirely or fired up at the roof so as not to hit anyone. It was a show to convince us that we’d made the greatest escape in history. All hat and no cattle, as the old saying goes. Later, after we escaped the roadblock, we had a Predator launch a missile at us. I never even saw it, but MacD here did, and moved faster than an Olympic sprinter. He saved our lives. It was an impressive feat for someone supposedly beaten half to death by the Taliban and stuffed into the trunk of a car for a few days. No