above the waves crashing against the caisson legs to hear Kerikov’s deep laughter over his head.
“Did you shit your pants, brave man?” the Russian called down joyfully. “I bet when my men get down there to pull you off the net, they’ll have to hold their noses.”
He hadn’t soiled himself, but it had been a near thing. Lying on the net, Mercer’s breath came in painful draws through his nose, his heart hammering against his ribs. The suddenness of the push had panicked him more than the drop itself. It had been so quick, so unpredictably violent. As two men came to roll him off the netting and onto a narrow catwalk, Mercer knew that before the night was over, he would be going over the edge again, and the next time there would be no safety net.
He was right.
Although the title Tool Pusher connotes a hardened, hands-on type job, one involving the very heart of drilling operations, right at the rotary table and elbow deep in gushing crude and drill mud, it is in fact bestowed on the foreman of the drilling crew. On a rig as large as the
Ivan Kerikov was sitting on a deep green couch with a glass in his hand and a fresh cigar glowing amber in his right fist, when Mercer was brought into the room. The lights in the cabin were harsh compared to the gloom of the helicopter, but it took his eyes only a second to adjust. There was no sign of Jan Voerhoven. Kerikov’s face still registered the pleasure he’d felt pushing Mercer off the platform.
“It’s ironic.” Kerikov waved for one of the guards to unwrap the tape binding Mercer’s mouth. “Had you not identified yourself as a geologist, I would have killed you on the spot, never guessing that the man I wanted most in the world was before me. Granted, I would have lost the pleasure of watching you die slowly, but it would have spared you hours, maybe days of torture. Your humor is going to cost you more pain than you thought possible.”
The tape came away like searing water poured across his lips, and Mercer gasped. While he had wanted to come across Ivan Kerikov again at some point in his life, Mercer would have preferred the circumstances to be reversed. But he wasn’t about to show that his current predicament bothered him much. “Tell me, that rock you crawled out from under, are you sure it didn’t move away from you on its own?”
“Always the wit, eh? Is this to be the great verbal duel between the villain and the hero, the forces of good and evil speaking before the final confrontation?”
“If that’s what you want, I’m game. Me, I’m just stalling until the army arrives with a couple dozen gunships and reduces this oil rig to scrap.”
“Like those choppers I destroyed tonight? I don’t think so.
Not this time.” Kerikov sipped his drink, his face and voice calm, conversational. “You haven’t had enough time to mount even a rudimentary counterattack. Tonight’s minor annoyance was the best you could come up with. Considering your reputation, I expected a little more from you.”
“Give me some credit.” Mercer smiled with mock modesty. “I did dodge two assassination attempts in the past week.”
“Amateurs hired in haste, nothing more,” Kerikov dismissed. “My mother could have handled them in her sleep.”
“Remind me never to piss off your mother,” Mercer muttered quietly. “Does PEAL know that Alyeska will have the line back in service within a few months?”
“Trust me, they won’t. While our little ecologists believe that their acts are designed to clog the pipeline, I assure you it is going to burst in about eighty places and spill around five hundred thousand barrels of oil.” Kerikov paused. “That’s about twenty-one million gallons of crude, roughly double what the
“Freezing the oil in the line won’t crack the pipe. The steel liner is over a half inch thick, and there’s not enough internal pressure to split it,” Mercer pointed out.
“You’re right, but when I say so, there’s going to be more than enough pressure to see oil scattered a couple of miles from the line.” Kerikov gave him a greasy smile.
Suddenly, Mercer was afraid for much more than his own life. There was little doubt that Kerikov was telling the truth. He had a way of bursting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline like an eight-hundred-mile-long balloon. As someone who’d worked in some of the more pristine places on the planet, struggling to balance the needs of mankind with the delicacy of nature, Mercer didn’t want to think about the devastation such a catastrophe would create. The state of Alaska would be bisected by a black line of crude, an ugly stain that would take years to clean, assuming it was possible to fully erase so much damage. He couldn’t believe, no matter how radical and dangerous PEAL was, that they would condone such a heinous act in order to further their cause. This situation made as much sense as a Palestinian terror group using a nuclear bomb on Jerusalem. Groups like PEAL wanted to garner attention to their cause, not destroy the very thing they strove to protect.
They would readily agree to freezing the oil, shutting down the TAPline for a couple of months or forever if that’s what they’d been led to believe. That would be a great victory for their cause. But to actually destroy it? Spill the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil it contained? They would never agree to it.
He tried to imagine Aggie Johnston being part of something so repugnant, something that went against every law of nature and man, and he felt that she never would. There was no way she would sit idle while her group destroyed Alaska, leading Mercer to believe that she knew nothing about Kerikov’s ultimate goals. And if she, Jan Voerhoven’s girlfriend, knew nothing, then it was certain that the rank and file of the organization had been equally duped. Anger welled within him, anger at Kerikov and anger at himself for not realizing the danger sooner, for not sounding the alarm when he first found the
Kerikov watched as the change swept through Mercer. He was a good enough judge of moods and character to almost read the thoughts of those around him. It was a gift that had served him well throughout his career in the Soviet Union. “You are just beginning to see the enormity of what I’ve done,” he sneered. “Consider this: What happens here, the destruction of the line and the devastation to the precious ecosystems, is nothing more than a sideshow for my true aims. It’s only one tine in a three-pronged operation. Had Russia ever had the balls to use it, Charon’s Landing would have ended here in Alaska, but I’ve expanded it, adapted it to the world today and made it astronomically profitable. You would be amazed at the number of people who want to see the United States still dependent on imported oil,” he chuckled harshly. “And you’d be surprised to learn that many of them are Americans themselves.”
“Charon’s Landing? That’s the name of this little adventure?”
“Originally it was a Cold War scheme to slow American oil production while our forces launched a lightning attack into Western Europe. The plan called for a combined commando assault against the pipeline and the terminal facility. The planners envisioned the region around Valdez turning into a conflagration of mythic proportions, so they named it after the site where the mythological ferryman, Charon, docked his boat after leading the souls of the dead across the River Styx.”
“Hell.”
“Precisely.”
“Why don’t you tell me your other fronts,” Mercer invited as casually as possible. “What do you have to lose?”
As soon as he’d spoken, Mercer knew he’d made a mistake. Kerikov’s entire carriage changed. No longer did he slouch in his seat. He set his cigar in the glass tray on the table to his left and put down his drink, taking a few seconds to arrange it on a previous water stain. Kerikov’s face, brutal at its best, was absolutely deadly when he turned back to his prisoner, his thick eyebrows pulled tightly together as if to keep his eyes from bursting from their sockets.
“Just because I’ve found you wanting as an adversary doesn’t mean I’m going to get stupid with you.” Kerikov’s voice was chilling, dredged up from some deep well of hatred. “Alam, get in here!” The paneled door swung open and Abu Alam, “Father of Pain,” entered, the Franchi SPAS-12 semi-auto shotgun hanging from its special rig against his lean flank. There was a dangerous edge to him that Mercer could feel from across the room.
“Can I have him now?” Alam asked.
“No. I want him locked up with the other, and I don’t want either of them touched until later. We have a
