‘I know the feeling,’ Stratton said.
‘This has the new periscope system, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it’s no good in these waters. We don’t need it, anyway.’ Stratton checked the navigation system and the distance to the Morpheus. ‘This tide is moving.’ He plugged Jason’s voice cable back in. ‘You ready back there?’
‘We’re ready.’
‘In one minute Jackson’s going to stop the props. We’ll drift with the tide and be relatively stopped. We’ll have two minutes to clear the sub before Jackson will have to start the props again and get out of the track or hit the rig. I’m going to join you at the door. Hand me the grapnel launcher. You take the ladders and snag line. We’ll all go straight to the surface. You happy with that, Jason?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jackson?’
‘Yes.’
‘The signal to surface on completion of the task?’
‘Two thunder bombs.’
Stratton checked the navigation system again. ‘Okay. Put your tail to the platform and kill the speed.’
Jackson manoeuvred the vessel while Stratton pulled on his fins, disconnected the communications cable, removed his breathing apparatus and replaced it with the breather attached to the bottle strapped to his side. He eased out of the cockpit, a far less complicated exercise than climbing in, and moved along the casing to the cabin opening. The four scientists crammed inside the dark chamber looked at him. He indicated for them to exchange their breathing systems. They felt for the portable breathing teats.
Smithy had spent every second since leaving the helicopter in a state of abject fear. The jump had been bad enough but since the scramble into the sub all he’d been able to think about in the cramped dark cabin was Stratton’s comment about the climb up the platform.
When he received the signal to change from breathing off the submarine to his own air bottle he made one of the classic mistakes when it came to the procedure. He removed the sub’s breathing mouthpiece from his lips, let go of it and felt around for his own portable breathing set. When he did not find it immediately he tried to find the mini-sub mouthpiece again. He failed. Panic quickly set in.
He became hysterical in his efforts to find either mouthpiece. He didn’t think to find the bottle attached to his body and follow the tube from the end of it to the other end and the mouthpiece. He would soon have to take another breath, which would be all water, and he would die in that dark, cold and claustrophobic container.
When Stratton saw the stream of bubbles from the released mouthpiece and Smithy grabbing frantically at anything he knew immediately what was happening. The danger was not just to Smithy himself. His actions placed the lives of the others at risk. A drowning person had the strength of ten in their final acts of desperation and was more than capable of taking others with them. A grabbing hand would rip at anything - such as other people’s breathing tubes.
Stratton did the only thing he could. He reached inside the cabin, grabbed hold of the frenzied diver by his harness and, planting his feet against the outside casing, ripped the man out of the sub and released him into the ocean. Smithy continued to kick and panic, the water’s fluorescence lighting up around his beating limbs. He went into the blackness. Stratton had no idea whether he had gone up or down. But a second afterwards it no longer mattered. Not then, at least. It was done and they had their own lives to look after.
The incident had cost precious time that Jackson needed to avoid running into the rig. Stratton grabbed the grapnel launcher and beckoned the others to hurry. They were swift in their response and all three of them were soon out of the sub. As the propellers burst back into life the team headed towards the surface and the sub moved away into the gloom, the sound of its electric motor disappearing with it.
Stratton broke through to the surface first, the others a few seconds behind him. All of them stayed breathing from their air bottles, which would last another half-dozen minutes. The enormous rig stood several hundred yards away, lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. A giant factory on legs, high above the storm waves. The sight of one of these towering structures never ceased to impress Stratton.
The others too looked in awe at the monstrous construction.They were unprepared for the sight of it so high above them in the water, in the dark. For a brief moment they forgot everything as they took in the suspended city. It looked almost alien to Jason, as if they were floating in a vast emptiness between planets and the platform was a twinkling space station.
Stratton suddenly thought of Smithy and as he rose up to the crest of the next wave he turned around in search of him. Rowena appeared to be doing the same. Neither of them could see the scientist and they forcibly removed him from their thoughts. There was too much to do to keep themselves alive.
Stratton removed his mouthpiece and slung the strap of the grapnel launcher over his head. He finned hard to keep his chin above the water. ‘Where’s the snag line?’ he shouted.
Jason removed his mouthpiece and held up the thin, neatly coiled nylon cord that had a collection of karabiners attached to it.
Stratton took the line and hooked one of the karabiners to Jason’s harness. He held another, connected by a metre-long line to Jason’s, and looked for Binning who was drifting away from the group, staring up at the oil platform as if mesmerised by it.
‘Binning!’ Stratton shouted.
The man came out of his reverie, took out his mouthpiece and finned hard to rejoin them.
Stratton attached the karabiner to his harness. ‘You two swim that way. Stretch the line tight between us. Move it.’
Jason detected anxiousness in the operative’s voice but a glance at the rig revealed why. They were closing on it with surprising speed. It was getting bigger by the second. The four of them dropped down the side of a steep trough as if sliding down the side of a hill.
Jason and Binning began to fin as hard as they could away from the others.
Stratton unceremoniously grabbed Rowena, snapped the remaining karabiners to her harness and his own and swam away on his back, yanking her along. Her head went under for a moment and she surfaced coughing and spluttering. She fought to control her reaction to the swallowed water and finned hard to keep up with Stratton. The thought of being a liability to the SBS man horrified her almost as much as the possibility of drowning did.
The pairs quickly moved apart as they closed on the Morpheus’s four huge black-steel piles.
Stratton singled out the leg he wanted to snag, gauging their approach. That was the tricky part, or the latest in a series of them. As the powerful tide pulled them towards the leg it became obvious to them all that if they got it wrong and missed, or even bounced off and were unable to get a pair either side, then they would sail on into the black ocean beyond. They would fail.
The current took the team in a wide curve rather than a straight line. Stratton calculated that they were too far to one side. ‘Fin!’ he shouted and Rowena responded. They lay on their backs and climbed the side of another huge swell and finned as hard as they could. The line went tight as the pair went over the peak. Stratton followed it to where it disappeared into the next wall of water. He hoped that Jason and Binning had made the same calculation. Suddenly the line went slack, indicating that they had. ‘More!’ shouted Stratton and they gave it another hard effort. They stopped to reassess their track and Rowena spat out salt water, her face cold but her body warm inside the rubber suit.
They were back on target and as they reached the peak of a swell Stratton took a second to study the levels of the platform still a couple of hundred metres away. He could see a haze of lights and not much else. If there were people outside, he couldn’t see them. Yet he had the same advantage. Even an alert enemy couldn’t see him. For now.
He had another advantage: the hijackers had no idea when they were coming. The enemy could watch the water constantly for any sign of a swimmer but it would be difficult to spot one. With such a large area to observe, at night in particular, it would be almost impossible to find a black-suited target in the rolling water. Night-vision goggles would reveal little unless they were trained directly on the swimmer. The same went for a thermal imager - the team’s cold faces gave off hardly any heat and the rubber dry-suits masked their body warmth. A watcher on the exposed lower levels would struggle to make them out in these conditions.
But they needed to be lucky. If the watcher was there and did somehow see them he could pick them off with relative ease from one of the lower spider decks if he had a rifle.
