Charon's landing

Alam was skeptical. “No one frightens me with idle threats.”

Kerikov ignored his posturing. “Go find our friend Voerhoven and let’s get back to Valdez. When PEAL pulls out from Pump Station 5, they’re going to make the road northward impassable by blowing up several bridges. That leaves us only a few hours before the authorities are finished with the fires in Fairbanks, freeing up helicopters to investigate what happened at the station. How much time do you need to plant the explosives aboard the Hope?”

“Do you want it totally destroyed, or just sunk?”

“I don’t want a piece of debris larger than a postage stamp,” Kerikov intoned.

“Maybe an hour, two at most. I’ve got to be able to get the charges around all the fuel bunkers and, using Primacord, time the detonations so the concussion blows out both sides of the hull simultaneously.” Alam spoke with the competence ingrained in him by years of terrorist training, first in Algeria and later in the streets of Lebanon and the desert bases of Libya, Iran, and Iraq.

Kerikov watched the slight nervous twitch that had developed in Alam’s cheek. It was so subtle and infrequent that had he not been looking for it he never would have noticed. Alam, Kerikov suspected, had orders to kill him as soon as he’d destroyed the Alaskan Pipeline and orchestrated the sinking of a supertanker off the continental coast of the United States. Rufti was going to betray him.

Kerikov had known this would be coming even before he approached Rufti. The Arab was so transparent it was almost sad. Did he really think that Kerikov didn’t have ways of protecting himself from a double cross?

Lord protect us from the ambitions of imbeciles.

MERCER managed only a few words of explanation about his escape plan when Aggie’s face went bright red with fury. “You’re out of your mind. Do you have any idea what that would do? The balance of one of these monsters has to be monitored twenty-four hours a day. When winter hits, even though she won’t be in production, a crew will be aboard to make sure that ice buildup doesn’t affect the rig’s stability. On a platform this size, a two- inch coating of ice weighs something like four hundred and fifty tons and could turtle her if left unchecked.

“And you’re talking about knocking out the balance by a magnitude of a hundred. If the Omega is deck loaded, her pipe racks filled with drill string, her bunkers and drill mud storage ponds full, she’ll flip long before we reach the top of the leg. Remember the 500,000 gallons of diesel I mentioned earlier? That’ll become a slick covering the entire inlet if the rig nose-dives.”

“Aggie, if you’ll just let me-”

She cut him off as if he hadn’t opened his mouth. “Environmental considerations aside, you can’t possibly think we’d survive long enough in the water even if we did manage to make it all the way up. Jesus, it’s just above freezing in here. We’d be hypothermic in twenty minutes and dead five minutes after that.”

She was working herself into a frenzy, and although she had very valid points, Mercer knew it was fear that was making her protest so much. He couldn’t blame her. What he proposed scared the hell out of him too.

“Aggie, for Christ’s sake shut up for a minute and let me finish.” She quieted, pulling at the collar of her anorak protectively. “You know as well as I do it’s the only way. If we stay here, we’re both dead, so why not at least try to escape? And do you think anyone’s going to give a shit if this rig flips and spills its fuel into Cook Inlet when the rest of Alaska is covered by ten inches of crude? If there’s a chance to get out of here, if we don’t die of exposure, if the rig doesn’t flip, and if we can warn Andy Lindstrom at the Marine Terminal, we can stop this whole nightmare before it starts. I know how Kerikov is going to split the pipeline after PEAL freezes the oil. All I need to stop him is a phone or a radio to make a ten-second call.”

She wavered, her fear slowly dissipating as she too saw the larger issues at stake. Either way it went, their lives were over, so why not die trying? He could see it in her eyes when she decided to agree to his plan. “I still think you’re nuts.”

“It’ll work. Trust me.”

“Last time I heard that was from a forty-nine-year-old professor I agreed to go to bed with,” she joked. “It didn’t.”

Mercer’s plan was born of desperation but was, in theory, incredibly simple. He intended to flood the hollow support column of the Petromax Omega. Using the manual override on the auxiliary pump controls, they could fill the entire two-million-cubic-foot cylinder with seawater. He and Aggie would float on the surface of the rising water until they reached the elevator doors one hundred feet above. As Aggie pointed out, the greatest danger was unbalancing the entire rig as thousands of tons of ballast filled one support while the others remained empty. For that, Mercer could only hope for the best. As to her other concern, hypothermia, Mercer had a plan to keep them dry. While he got busy building an improvised raft, one in which his own body formed the bottom, Aggie worked on the bewildering forest of pipes, valves, and controls that made up the pump units. The pumps, six in total, were located a farther fifty feet below them, but all their controls were here. At Mercer’s prompting, she explained the system as she worked.

“Each jacket — that’s what these legs are called in the oil industry — is computer linked from the primary pump control in the Operations Center, so each one can be individually ballasted depending on the conditions. In heavy seas, the entire rig can be lowered until the main deck is almost awash, or she can sit one hundred feet above the waves. The catenary mooring lines run through hydraulic lifts so that their tension is never reduced and the anchors remain firmly bedded, no matter what the attitude of the rig.

“My father,” she admitted with a trace of pride, “was instrumental in the development of the entire system. His initial sketches were the basis of the entire forty thousand pages of the rig’s blueprints.

“The weakest link, apart from your little raft capsizing, is the anchors themselves. I suspect they’re Flipper Deltas built by the Dutch company Ankar Advies Bureau. They must be at least twenty tonners, which gives each anchor about four hundred tons of reactive force against the drag of the rig. That type is perfect for the soils around Prudhoe, but I’m not too sure about here in Cook Inlet. This is only a temporary anchorage for the Omega, and dead-on stability is not as critical as when she’s in production. When the rig begins to dip with the added weight, and the kinematics angle of the anchor lines changes by as little as ten degrees, those anchors are going to lose about thirty-five percent of their efficiency. Push them too far, and they’ll pull free completely.”

Mercer understood maybe half of what Aggie said. He didn’t have the slightest idea what a kinematics angle was nor did he really care. He just wanted to keep Aggie talking, let her calm herself, and him too, just by the simple act of using her voice. She continued on about tripping angles and flukes and palms and about the pump mechanisms themselves. Her knowledge was encyclopedic, her voice brisk yet incredibly alluring.

“Ready,” she announced after nearly a half an hour. “I’ve taken the safeties off the flow regulators and depth gauges; the pumps will keep running even past the Never Exceed point. The system will shut down only when the topside electrical panels are shorted by flooding water.”

“What about any warning indicators in the master control room?”

“There’s nothing I can do about that,” Aggie admitted. “Their board will light up like a Christmas tree when the cycloids kick on. We just have to hope that Kerikov hasn’t left enough men on board to monitor those warning panels. If they do, your scheme can be shut down with a flip of a switch upstairs.”

“Then let’s hope they’re in the bathroom right now, because I’m ready to go.”

Mercer had repaired the torn Sterns survival suit, using an entire roll of duct tape to seal the countless rips and punctures in the nylon outer fabric. There was so much of the silver tape he looked like he wore a suit of armor. Almost as important as the suit, he tended himself with the supplies found in the first aid kit, spending almost ten minutes dressing his wounds, stanching the blood that still seeped from some of his deeper cuts and swallowing a couple of the codeine tablets he’d found. He’d need the drugs if he hoped to survive the upcoming ordeal.

His raft rested on several toolboxes and was a creation only Rube Goldberg would love. The four lengths of pipe they had found were taped together in a diamond shape, the tarp spread below it and secured to the framework with more tape. The craft was sized so that when Mercer lay his head at the apex of one corner, his hands could grab two others with his feet hanging over the bottom juncture. The indentation of his body against the loosely strung tarp would create the draft the raft needed to stay afloat and hopefully keep Aggie out of the water. Mercer wore the suit in case some water did slosh over the raft’s low freeboard. With Aggie riding on his chest, she should remain dry. If they were swamped, the few extra minutes of protection Mercer got from the Sterns suit wouldn’t really matter.

He had managed to scrape several large handfuls of grease from the elevator cable. Aggie watched in