Charon's landing

to scale a cliff face, and every second the rig pitched to a steeper angle. He slogged up two more flights before reaching the main deck and then dashed out into the windswept night.

When sensors had detected that the rig was listing, the computer had activated the emergency lights, bathing the deck in a pink sodium-vapor glow, the flare tower and cranes backlit against the darkness like monuments. Mercer strained through the glare as he searched for one of the yellow escape pods he’d noticed on the chopper ride in. They were slung along the edge of the module like lifeboats on a luxury liner.

Out in the open, the tilt of the huge platform was much more apparent. Mercer had thought they had a few minutes, but now saw that in seconds the Petromax Omega would flip onto her side and sink. He could only hope that Kerikov and Alam were still trapped belowdecks, but he knew it wasn’t so. The helicopter that had carried them here was gone.

Aggie was deadweight against him as he lurched toward the edge of the towering platform, slipping on the deck as the rig angled further. The alarm bells were maddening in their insistence. Mercer crashed against the railing, managing to shield Aggie from the blow, his shoulder hitting only inches from an escape pod’s razor-sharp propeller. The upper deck of the pod was a perfect cylinder, while its hull was deeply veed to give it stability in the roughest seas.

Not knowing how to work the sophisticated davits that would launch the raft, Mercer could only pray that the mechanism could be activated from within the pod. He wedged Aggie against the railing, freeing his hands to work the hatch, when suddenly the lifeboat lifted, swung out over the water, and vanished from sight so quickly he felt himself swaying toward the void it had created.

Some of Kerikov’s men must have already been in the pod and used it to make their own escape.

Mercer had wasted time he couldn’t afford. The next pod was twenty feet away. He gathered up Aggie and ran toward it, his hip scraping against the railing as he went; without its support he wouldn’t have been able to keep on his feet. Halfway to the lifeboat, it too lifted, up and away, disappearing as swiftly as the first.

“Shit!”

Pushing himself harder than he thought possible, he sprinted, his feet slipping with each step, the abyss to his right sucking at him constantly. His breath was a ragged explosion every time it burst from his mouth, while his right leg screamed each time he put his weight on it. He ignored the next two pods in a dangerous calculated risk, focusing all of his attention on the last pod on this side of the living module.

Reaching it, he didn’t take the time to set Aggie onto the deck. Instead, he slung her over his shoulder and pulled at the handle securing the hatch. It lifted easily, and the hatch swung inward. Lights in the pod automatically snapped on and heaters began warming even as he unceremoniously tossed Aggie onto the padded bench that lined the sides of the raft. He dove in after her, twisting as he landed so he could resecure the hatch. Next to it was a small control panel with two buttons. He pressed the one marked Launch.

It seemed to take forever but actually happened in less than ten seconds. Hydraulic pistons lifted the pod off the deck, but the rig was angled too steeply. The underside of the escape pod hung up on the railing, balancing almost perfectly. The davits started to unspool the lowering lines. The pod teetered for a second, then started to fall back toward the deck. Mercer and Aggie would be trapped aboard the Omega when she went over. Mercer had felt what was happening and reacted instantly, diving across the pod and slamming himself against the outside wall, his weight tipping the forty-foot craft the other way.

The pod slipped from the railing, and as he’d predicted earlier, Mercer was free-falling off the rig once more. Enough cable had unwound from the davits for the pod to fall twenty feet before being yanked short, almost wrenching itself from the lines. It danced against the restraint, tossing Mercer and Aggie around the enclosed cabin ruthlessly.

Without warning, the escape pod smashed into the waters of Cook Inlet, inertia and weight driving it below the surface before it pluckily burst back up, throwing off water like a hunting dog after a retrieve. Mercer lay stunned on the floor of the raft, Aggie on top of him, her head resting against his chest as if she’d merely fallen asleep. He had to get up, unhook the pod from its shackles, and motor them away from the doomed rig, but he couldn’t move. He just wanted to stay where he was, cradling Aggie until all the pain went away.

The last anchors finally gave way, stressed far beyond what their manufacturers ever dreamed possible, and the Petromax Prudhoe Omega lurched violently. The crane towers and flare stack snapped off cleanly, falling into the water only a couple dozen yards in front of the escape pod. Four hundred lengths of drill string in bins atop the production module came pouring off the rig like a log slide, followed closely by countless drums of chemical drilling mud.

As the platform toppled, it began breaking apart. The living module sheared off, the entire thirty-thousand- ton structure falling into the sea in a catastrophic explosion of water and debris that flung Mercer and Aggie’s escape pod to the very limit of the lowering line, but they still remained attached to the swiftly sinking module. The upper decks hit the water next, and as they did, the number two support leg lifted completely out of the water before breaking away to fall independently from the rest of the platform.

Diesel fuel poured from ruptured storage tanks, making contact with one of the many electrical fires already raging, and ignited in a wide sheet of flame, black smoke lifting high into the air. As the rig settled into the water, it pitched and bucked as more pieces fell clear. It sank slowly, fighting almost as if it were a living creature that realized it was drowning. Explosions rumbled from deep under the flaming water.

Throughout the final moments, Mercer lay still, his breathing settling as he soaked up the warmth that blasted from the pod’s multiple heaters. He knew that there was something he had to do, something that compelled him to get off the floor, but he could no longer remember what it was. Yet he forced himself from the floor and moved to the stern where the motor and steering controls were housed in an economical dashboard. He was working on getting the engine started when he remembered that he hadn’t unshackled the pod from the living module!

Cook Inlet was two hundred and seventy feet deep where the Omega had been temporarily moored, and the lines securing the living module to the escape pod were only one hundred and fifty feet long. He raced back to the davit controls, just reaching a hand outward when the module sank beyond that one- hundred-and-fifty-foot tether. The lines came taut, then the little craft was capsized in a fraction of a second, hauled down toward the murky bottom, condemned to a watery grave.

Once again Mercer and Aggie were thrown violently, falling to the ceiling as the raft tipped upside down and was yanked below the surface in a headlong plunge. While it had been designed to be watertight in the most adverse surface conditions, the pod’s fiberglass hull was not designed to survive a prolonged submergence. In seconds, the seams where the upper-works and hull joined were creaking and popping, a tiny jet of water shooting from around one of the gasketed mounting bolts.

Seconds before the hull imploded, Mercer scrambled back to the controls and pressed the second of the two buttons. Spring clips securing the tethers to the hull snapped open. Free of the plummeting living module, the escape pod rocketed back to the surface of the Sound, surrounded by a champagne fountain of air bubbles. It was launched completely out of the water, like a humpback whale breaching during its annual migrations. Its design was such that it quickly settled on an even keel, even if its two occupants were no longer in any condition to care. It took all of Mercer’s remaining energy to strip himself out of the survival suit and wet clothing and curl up under several of the blankets that had been dislodged from a storage locker, Aggie Johnston held tightly to his chest.

“We made it, darling,” he mumbled and then remembered that escaping the rig was only half the battle. The real fight was still to come.

The United Arab Emirates

The television image was grainy and broke up every few seconds due to atmospheric disturbances as it bounced back to earth from a communications satellite. On the screen, a woman stood in front of the massive facade of Heathrow’s Terminal 4, her beautiful face composed of equal parts of pity and eagerness. As a professional broadcast journalist, this was the type of incident she lived for. The doors behind her were cluttered with swarming rescue workers in heavy flame-retardant gear, uniformed police, and suited members of Special Branch. The incident that had brought them all here had occurred on the other side of the building, out on the huge apron where aircraft had been waiting for clearance from the bomb detection teams. The sound from the BBC