“Are you okay?”
She nodded. Mercer asked how long she’d been on the rig.
“I was grabbed in the parking lot of your hotel just after I left you. Two men attacked me. They killed some poor hotel guest and then drove me away in a van. They drugged me, and when I came to, I was here.” Her voice was strong and filled with determination, but she looked delicate and frail, like a child. At the same time, she was such a woman that Mercer was distracted from his current predicament and stole a minute to just look at her, to drink her in. Aggie became self-conscious almost immediately, raking her hand through her short hair in a nervous gesture.
“What?” she said. “Don’t look at me. I’m a mess.”
“No, you’re not. You’re beautiful,” he breathed, embarrassed by his emotional response to her presence. He broke eye contact, looking around the space quickly. “We’ve got to find a way out of here and stop them. Do you have any idea what your group is about to do?”
“I didn’t until I talked with that sick Russian bastard. He told me about how he and PEAL are going to freeze the oil in the pipeline.”
“That’s only half of it. He plans to split it wide open and spill five hundred thousand barrels of crude all across Alaska.”
Aggie turned pale, her deep sense of love for the environment shaking her to the core. “God, no, he can’t do that.”
“I’m afraid he can and will, unless we can stop him. And another thing. Your boyfriend has been in the thick of this thing since the very beginning.”
“No way,” Aggie defended Jan Voerhoven automatically. “I believed Kerikov when he told me Jan helped attach the liquid gas canisters, but there is no way he would allow the pipe to be cut and its contents spilled. He would die first.”
“It’s possible he doesn’t know all of Kerikov’s plans,” Mercer admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not a willing accomplice to the largest act of sabotage in history. Now, I want to see if I can get that elevator working.”
“I already tried. The power’s been cut to the controls down here, and there’s nothing we can use to jumper the circuits.” She spoke with authority. “It’s my bet that the breaker was shut off at the topside box.”
Mercer felt a twinge of chauvinism, thinking that she probably didn’t know anything about electronics and that he could somehow sort out the jumbled wires hanging from the control. He looked at them briefly, then turned back to Aggie. She watched him with an almost patronizing smirk. “I thought you had a degree in environmental sciences or something?”
“That was my master’s. My father demanded that I do my undergrad studies in mechanical and electrical engineering.”
“Really?”
“It was all part of his grand plan to get me ready to take over Petromax. He knew I never would, of course, but he still had hopes that I’d give up environmental activism.”
“Okay,” Mercer conceded. “What about option two?”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know where we are, except to say we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Aggie took on the persona of a bubbly tour guide. “Before you, we have the auxiliary buoyancy pump controls for support column three of the
“She has accommodations for six hundred men, carries 250,000 gallons of fresh water, 500,000 gallons of diesel for her pumps, drills, and other machinery, and when in full production can provide the total energy needs of a city the size of Rochester, New York.” Aggie smiled saucily. “Anything else you want to know? Don’t forget this is my daddy’s rig. He managed to get me to launch her for him last June before she was towed here for pre-staging and testing. She’s going to be brought to Prudhoe Bay next spring.”
Mercer was impressed. “I’ve always loved a smartass, especially when she’s right. If you know so much, then how do we get out of here?”
Aggie turned quiet again, chastened. “The elevator is the only way, so we’re stuck until Kerikov or that disgusting Arab comes for us. By the way, he was the guy you clobbered in the bar, the one groping me. He was also part of the duo who kidnapped me at your hotel.”
“Reasons two and three for me wanting him dead.” Mercer tried to make that sound light, but his voice was frigid. “Let’s look around, inventory everything that’s down here and come up with a plan.”
Twenty minutes later they had scoured the huge auxiliary control room, pulling tools and other supplies from waterproof cabinets and stowage lockers. When they finished, the pile of equipment was pathetically small, most of it worthless; two boxes of hand tools, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, and the like; four rolls of duct tape; four sections of one-inch pipe, the longest one only six feet in length; and a torn Sterns flotation suit, its safety orange cover blackened by grease and several of its Ensolite foam flotation cells punctured and empty. They found a large blue polypropylene tarp and two empty oxygen cylinders like the type worn by firefighters, but no masks or regulators. The room also gave up a first aid kit, a diver’s flipper, and a container of decayed food forgotten by a worker during the construction of the rig.
“It’s hopeless.” Aggie put a voice to what both were feeling.
A minute passed. Mercer looked at the clutter, then glanced up to the top of the huge cylindrical caisson. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well. Another minute went by until finally he looked at Aggie, his eyes brightening. “You said auxiliary pump controls?” She nodded. “Can you run them?”
“Yes, but what does it matter?”
“I’ll have us out of here in a couple of hours,” Mercer predicted with a devilish smile.
“Are you nuts?”
“No. I float.”
Aboard the Petromax Prudhoe Omega
Kerikov stepped from the shower cabinet, his usually gray skin now pink and glowing, the hair on his chest and back matted down like a pelt. He wrapped one towel around his waist and used another to dry himself. He’d already shaved, using the comforting routine of morning ablutions to revive himself. It was now three o’clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept for nearly thirty hours. The shower had done wonders, almost as much as the second Scotch he’d poured himself before entering the bathroom.
He was just beginning to dress when there was a knock on the cabin door. Abu Alam entered without being invited, swaggering to the couch and eyeing Kerikov’s nudity with a mixture of hatred and sexual interest. The Arab disgusted Kerikov like no one he’d ever met before.
“He’s down in the hole with the woman now,” Alam reported. “I don’t understand why we just don’t kill them both.”
“Because I won’t be rushed in dealing with Mercer. It’s a personal matter. As for the woman, she’s the daughter of one of our principals, and her presence here is to ensure he fulfills his end of our bargain. If Max Johnston decides to expose us after he learns of our double cross, the woman will be yours for as long as you wish, provided we send videotapes of your time together to her father.” Kerikov imagined the young heiress being raped and sodomized to death by Alam and his two assistants. “However, if he fulfills our agreement, she is to be released immediately, and if I hear that she has been touched, I’ll kill you myself.”
