Charon's Landing

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.”

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 amazement as he smeared a large amount of it on the back of his head, working it through his thick hair, right to his scalp. “Don’t worry, you’re next.”

“What for?”

“Channel swimmers have been doing this for years. The grease prevents the icy water from touching your skin, thus avoiding the greatest threat of the heat loss,” he explained as he stooped before her and raised up her pant leg, smearing the thick grease against her smooth skin, trying hard not to think how erotic it felt.

He did the same to her wrists and neck. As his hands ran slickly over her throat, Aggie mewed almost like a contented kitten. “I wish you were doing this someplace else and the oil smelled like passion fruit, not heavy machinery.”

He kissed her on the forehead and then began using the last roll of duct tape to cover her in long overlapping strips, masking her from head to toe. “Once we reach the top, we’ll have to abandon the raft and tread water until we can open the elevator doors.” He handed her the largest of the screwdrivers, and an eighteen-inch piece of high carbon steel and plastic, a perfect pry bar to force the hatch at the head of the support column.

Aggie was trembling, and it wasn’t only the cold air causing it. Both of them could be dead within the hour. For Mercer, it was a feeling he’d experienced before but had not grown used to. But it was something that went far beyond Aggie’s realm of experience. Her beautiful face was pale, and her pouting lower lip quivered. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

“We’re going to make it, Aggie,” Mercer said. “We have to.”

She nodded up at him and could not resist kissing him, pressing herself against his body, wrapping her arms around him. It could be the last embrace either one would ever experience, and they made it special, something beyond fear and beyond a physical touch. A current passed between them in the frigid pump room, something tangible that neither could, or wanted to, deny. If they survived the next hour, it was something they both wanted to explore together.

“Are you ready?”

“Let’s do it,” Aggie replied, steeling herself.

Mercer settled himself on the raft, his head and feet in perfect position, his grease-slicked hands slipping through the loops of tape he’d made as handholds. The toolboxes under the framework would allow water to creep up underneath the raft and float them free. Otherwise, the raft would have simply filled with water as the cavernous chamber flooded.

Aggie went to the controls, pressing several rubberized buttons in succession, each motion bringing another pump online. The noise of the huge turbine pumps built quickly, echoing off the steel walls in a shrieking cry as four thousand gallons per minute were forced through each one.

“The noise will die after the pumps are submerged,” Aggie screamed, closing the watertight pressure doors that housed the electronic controls. “We’ve got about ten minutes before the water reaches this level.”

“Get into position now,” Mercer said from the floor. “We can’t afford to be surprised.”

Aggie lay down on top of him, her back pressed to his chest, her bottom cupped around his waist almost sexually. He shook under her to dislodge her.

“Not like that. Stay on your back but turn around so your head is on my thighs, your legs around my head. That’ll distribute the weight better.”

She did as he ordered, shifting nimbly. Their position afforded Mercer a view of the mysterious place between her spread thighs. He quickly purged his mind of those thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

The wait was interminable. They lay quietly, not speaking to each other even when the pumps were finally submerged and their piercing whine was dulled to a low whoosh. The water was rising so fast they could feel the air being pushed ahead of it in an icy gale, a tease of the true cold to come. Minutes dragged by. Mercer kept glancing to the side, expecting to see the water rushing through the floor grates in a frothing roil. Yet it would not come.

Every second felt slower than the previous, expectation and fear bringing them both to the point where neither could lie still. They nervously scratched at imaginary itches or twisted to get more comfortable. Mercer was breathing so deeply that the motion of his lungs forced Aggie to bend even farther in an already uncomfortable position.

The sound of the rushing water was getting louder, the wind blowing more fierce. It would happen at any moment. Mercer turned once again to look to their left. Just then the water came like a geyser.

“Here we go!” he shouted over the din. They were lifted up off the toolbox cradle even before he had finished speaking.

Like a kite caught in a brutal updraft, the makeshift raft was plucked from the deck in a gut-wrenching swoop. Water splashed over the side at an alarming rate, drops hitting their exposed faces like needle jabs. Within seconds, six inches of icy saltwater were pooled around Mercer’s bent waist, inches from soaking into Aggie’s buttocks. If any more came aboard and drenched her, she would be dead before they reached to the top of the caisson.

But Mercer couldn’t dwell on that now; he had something more immediate to worry about. His weight, plus hers pressing down on him, was almost too much for him to bear. The straps he’d fashioned for his hands dug into his flesh, wrenching his arms painfully. It would take them thirty minutes to reach the top and he was already afraid he couldn’t hold on for another thirty seconds.

The eddying water twisted the craft around, spiraling it on a tight axis. The raft was surprisingly stable considering the turgid water, but as they spun, more water slopped over the side. Mercer could feel it against the survival suit in the few areas where the insulation had been lost. The cold was biting. It numbed him so that his thigh felt as though it had been burned. And that was through the waterproofing of the Sterns suit and his jeans. If water got against his skin, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than a few minutes.

“How you doing?” he managed to ask, his teeth clenched from the stress of holding his body rigid.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Aggie cried.

“That’s what the Wright brothers said to each other.” Mercer tried to put a little cheer in his voice.

“They failed the first time.”

“We don’t have that option.”

While at first the ascent up the support leg seemed quick, the little raft rising alarmingly, their perception changed as the true nature of the challenge unfolded. Aggie was within a couple inches of being submerged by the water flooding onto the tarp, and there was nothing they could do about it. Mercer needed to keep a vise grip on the scaffold to maintain the raft’s stability so he couldn’t try to bail, and Aggie was having a hard time just holding her precarious balance. The first ten minutes were an absolute agony, and there was no reprieve as they continued.

Mercer’s arms began to tremble as his strength waned, his body unconsciously sinking farther against the tarp, Aggie coming that much closer to hitting the water. She noticed the dip and cried out. He tightened up once again, his stomach and back knotting in great bunched cords. The strain was only slightly less than the gymnastics maneuver called the iron cross. It was forty-two degrees in the column, and he was sweating, salty sheets running down his face.

Aggie could sense his struggle. “Is there anything I can do to make this easier?”

It took him a few seconds to gather the strength to reply — he was tapping out and they still had another sixty feet to the top of the shaft. “Go on the fastest crash diet in history.”

Slowly, too slowly, the water level rose, and the surface calmed considerably from those first frightening moments when they were caught in the initial upwell. The weld seams on the walls marked their passage, each weld another ten feet of progress, another ten feet less until the torture was over. The top of the caisson still looked impossibly out of reach, a shadow high over their heads, a dim goal that got darker as another of the lights strung along the circular walls submerged.

At first, Mercer thought the pain that suddenly shot through his upper thigh was a sharper stab of muscle cramp. A second later, he realized that his suit was leaking. The near-freezing water had found a way in through a tear he had missed, or more likely the tape was beginning to fail. The water felt like acid.

He cried out, his pain echoing over the sound of the pumps and the bubbling water.

“What is it?”

“Hole in my suit, the water’s getting in.”

“Is it bad?”

“It ain’t good,” he moaned as more of his skin was doused in icy water. So strong was the urge to try and rub some warmth back to the spot, he had to shut his eyes and concentrate to maintain his grip on the scaffold. They had thirty feet to go. “Aggie, you’ve got to arch your back, take your weight off of me. I can’t take this much longer.”

She did as he asked, digging her boots into his shoulders, her shoulders pressed against his shins so that when she shifted, arcing in a parody of orgasm, the strain was taken up by his bones rather than muscles. He gasped as her weight came off of him, his back and stomach relaxing for the first time in twenty minutes. The position was now as painful for her as it had been for him. She bore it as long as possible, her body made supple and strong through years of fencing and exercise, but after only a few minutes, she had to lower herself against him again.

“I’m sorry,” she panted. “That’s the best I can do.”

“I’m all right now,” he lied. “Besides, we’re almost there.”

Deep below the rig, in the black waters of the Sound, buried under eighteen feet of silty mud, the five huge anchors restraining number three support jacket were losing their mooring integrity as the leg began sinking, pulling at the fifteen other anchors holding the rig in position. To maintain their strength, the mooring lines must be rigid at all times. Aggie had been forced to take the automated tensioning hydraulics off-line in order for her to flood only the one leg. As more water filled the support, the catenary lines began to sag beyond their fracture points, and one by one they parted. The seven-inch-thick steel wires sheared cleanly, the anchored ends dropping silently into the gloom, the remainder hanging from the underside of the rig like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish.

The other plow-shaped Delta Flipper anchors were so well placed that they hadn’t dragged, and their tension was so strong that the rig began to pendulum back. Rather than listing toward the filled support leg, the Omega swung one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Though the dynamics of the entire anchoring system was measured in the thousands of tons, the rig was now so unbalanced that every gallon of water cycling through the pumps and into the support column shifted the structure just a little more.

The twenty-knot incoming tide rushing past the platform was the only thing keeping the rig upright, pressing just enough against the legs to keep them stable. But the delicate balance of force, counterforce, weight, buoyancy, and drag wouldn’t last as the pumps continued to fill the Omega’s buttress.

“Only a couple more feet,” Aggie announced in amazement.

“How far are we from the elevator opening?” Mercer asked grimly. The proximity of their goal couldn’t overcome his pain and the numbness that had spread through his lower body.

“We’re coming up right below it. Your feet are only a couple of inches from the cable.”

“As soon as we get close enough to the door, you have to jam the screwdriver between it and the casing. There should be a mechanical release to open it in case the automatic system doesn’t work and someone is trapped in the car.”

“Like in the movies?”

“Exactly.”

Aggie tried to extend her arm, simulating the motions she would need to pry open the door. As soon as she moved her hand, she fell off Mercer’s chest with a scream.

She hit the water pooled on the tarp and began to thrash, ripping through the plastic, and destroying the raft. Mercer let go of the struts, falling into the water with Aggie. The survival suit kept him buoyant, and he grabbed Aggie as she flailed. He pulled her close, trying to calm her before she drowned from her own panic.

“Oh, my God, it hurts. Oh, sweet Christ, I can’t, I can’t…” Her lips were blue as the freezing water seeped around the tape Mercer had used to cover her. “Mercer, please, oh, God, I’m going to die.”

“Aggie! Aggie!” Mercer shouted, looking into her eyes but seeing he’d already lost her to fear. She stared back vacantly and he feared she’d gone into shock. He barely noticed or cared that the Sterns suit had failed and that he too was soaked to the skin. He had to get them out of the water in the next few seconds.

Just then, four of the twenty-ton anchors securing the offshore platform were wrenched from the seabed in clouds of drifting silt, tearing huge furrows through the mud, relinquishing their combined thousand tons of counterforce. There was no stopping the Omega now. She was going to flip. There was too much weight on one corner of the rig, and without the anchors, the buoyancy of the other three legs would capsize her in minutes. Of the eleven anchors still holding fast, only three more had to fail before the platform upended and vanished beneath the waves.

The effects within column number three were instantaneous. One moment, Aggie and Mercer were struggling just below the elevator door, and the next second, the rig had dipped and rushing water forced them into the empty elevator vestibule. They were pressed to the very ceiling by Mercer’s survival suit, totally submerged and held helpless by water pressure.

The icy water beat against Mercer’s temples, sharp stabbing pulses that made him nauseous. His mind was nothing but a swirling gray cloud of pain. His reserves were gone. He’d failed. They were going to die.

Aggie’s movement was so slight that he almost didn’t feel it, yet unbelievably she pressed on his hand, opening his fingers and placing something against his palm. He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to open his eyes to the saltwater, but something forced him on. He glanced down and saw in the watery light that somehow, through her thrashing and her fear and her proximity to death, Aggie had maintained her grip on the screwdriver and had the presence of mind to place it in his hand.

He plunged the tool at the door, missing the seam by a good six inches with his drunken lunge, but the angle of his attack forced the flat point of the screwdriver to gouge along the door and lodge firmly in the crack. The tip found the release on the pressure bar. He hauled back on the handle and the door swung free, pushed outward by tons of water.

Aggie and Mercer burst through the narrow door in a rush, like the life-giving spill of birth, borne along the hallway by thousands of gallons of water, careening off the bulkheads and tumbling forty feet before smashing against a twist in the corridor, water surging around them in a diminishing torrent.

Both of them retched until their lungs ached, shivering in the steel hallway as water continued to gush past. They needed to stop, to take time to recover and strip out of their soaked clothing, but they couldn’t. The Petromax Omega was bobbing like a pleasure boat caught in a rough storm, the tensioned mooring lines stretching beyond their maximum tolerances yet amazingly still holding. But each swing against them was stronger and stronger, as the top structure of the platform arced fifteen degrees against the gracefully swooping catenaries.

“We have to move,” Mercer gasped, his jaw chattering like a jackhammer. “Can you walk?”

Aggie didn’t respond — she had slipped into unconsciousness.

Ignoring his own needs, Mercer took the time to strip Aggie out of her clothing, yanking off her sodden jacket, sweater, and T-shirt and peeling her wet jeans from her legs, gaining a few more minutes before she froze to death. He looked down the corridor, closing his eyes for a moment, thinking back to the winding journey he’d taken to this spot while under guard by Abu Alam. He closed his mind to everything — his pain, the cold, the imminent destruction of the rig — and reconstructed the route corner by corner.

After defeating the Minotaur in Greek mythology, Theseus used a string to guide him back out of the labyrinth. Mercer had only his own clouded mind. Carrying Aggie, he ran through the empty passages, his feet pounding the steel battle deck as he backtracked the tortured path. Yet unerringly he negotiated intersections and stairs and doorways, making the correct decisions every step of the way, instinct driving him on. Had he stopped to think, he would have been lost in moments. The stark corridors of the rig’s underworks were indistinguishable from one another. There were no remarkable objects to remind him of the proper route, yet still he ran, covering the distance back to the living module in half the time it had taken Alam to bring him to the support leg. Utilitarian steel walls gave way to faux wood paneling and thin carpet as he burst through an open hatchway and into the crew’s quarters.

The deck was canted at least twenty degrees now, pushing him headlong down a wide hallway. The paneled doors of individual cabins blurred by as he ran, Aggie lying limply in his arms. He didn’t dare pause to feel for a pulse. Alarms shrieked all along the corridor, red strobe lights pulsing like frantic heartbeats. Over the din, a computer-generated voice was telling all personnel to abandon the rig immediately.

Mercer kicked open an exit door, twisting himself so that Aggie passed through without hitting her head or dragging her legs against the steel frame. The stairs looked like something out of a funhouse, tipped so steeply that they were almost vertical. Mercer started up carefully, cautious to keep his balance as he climbed. It was like trying 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.