Keene’s watch read one-thirty. Unable to believe that his lighthearted infiltration had gone so smoothly, he descended slowly and carefully into the shadows.
“You dumb son of a bitch!”
McKendry’s words and fist hit Keene simultaneously. Keene reeled and swiped at his nosebleed. “Are you crazy, McKendry? You’ve probably broken my nose.”
“You have about as much sense as a centipede,” McKendry said, clinging fast to the iron rung Keene had used to descend the derrick.
“At least now we’ll have a story to tell next New Year’s Eve.”
“You’ll have a story to tell. I probably won’t make it.” McKendry let go of the rung and sank to the deck. He held one hand over his left ribs. With the other, he pointed at his foot. “Shark,” he said, his voice reduced now to the slightest whisper.
“Oh my God!” Keene fell to his knees. In the dim light, he could see huge, red blotches, leaking around the protection of his partner’s hand and running across his ankle. “McKendry, I’m so sorry. Oh my God!”
“Could you…could you kiss it better,” McKendry whispered.
Keene looked up and into his partner’s eyes.
“And while you’re at it, Joshua, could you…”
McKendry’s voice was so close to being inaudible that Keene had to lean into it. “Anything, buddy.”
“Good,” McKendry said, whimpering. “Then you can kiss my ass.” He wiped one of the red blotches vigorously. It paled as it left a stain on his fingers.
“The red pen,” Keene said.
“The red pen,buddy .”
“You scared the shit out of me,” Keene said.
“I meant to.”
“I’m sorry I…um…pulled your leg.”
“We’re supposed to be looking for Selene Trujold, not running around at two in the morning playing King of the Hill. As long as we find her, we’ll call it even.” He paused. “Since we’re here, I’d like to take another look around. But first, would you mind telling me what possessed you to pull off this dumb stunt and jeopardize the whole mission?”
“I pissed on the world from up there,” Keene said halfheartedly.
“Was it worth it?”
For a moment Keene was quiet. “Yes, it was.” He decided to give an honest answer, though he didn’t expect McKendry to fully understand. “Listen, we’re out here and we’re ready for whatever happens. Right now, everything’s quiet. We’ve already spent weeks sitting around in Caracas, taking canoe trips through the Orinoco Delta, drinking beer in dockside cantinas. I had to dosomething, Terris.”
He raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands innocently, indicating the ghost town of the oil platform.
“Had to find myself a story to tell. Just in case.”
18
Two black Zodiac rafts filled with commandos sped across the channel of the Serpent’s Mouth. They had eased out of one of the many mouths of the Orinoco Delta at midnight; after two hours Selene Trujold could just now make out the shape of theYucatán near the gleaming beacon that was theValhalla platform. There was half an hour’s worth of water still to cross, the last of it with engines off, moving in silence.
Around her in the rafts, the commandos wore dark suits and carried a stash of black-market weapons, rifles, hand grenades, and explosives. They had night-vision goggles to enable them to direct night operations, but she knew that the Caribbean stars would give them all the illumination they needed.
Her Green Impact fighters were well trained and high-strung, keyed up for this assault, which had been a full month in the planning. Their information had proved correct: the tankerYucatán was lashed to theValhalla ’s separate pumping platform during the darkest hours of the night. Though the normal complement of crew members aboard the tanker outnumbered them, Green Impact had both weapons and determination.
And they had a plan, not the least component of which was the element of surprise.
Selene narrowed her eyes and looked around. “We have to time this properly,” she said. “We know their routine. During the day, theValhalla needs all of its two hundred crew members aboard. That’s why the company gives them time for R and R at night. When the tanker pulls up and begins filling, most of the crew will go over to theValhalla to party with the other workers. During the dead of night, there’s only a skeleton crew aboard the tanker. That’s when we strike.”
Quiet and intent, the members of her force nodded and listened, though they had heard this briefing several times already.
“We are going to hijack theYucatán, get rid of the remaining few aboard. We’ll take them prisoner if possible, but don’t waste any precious time. Then we disengage the pump and head out. The load should be mostly full by the time we’re ready to go. Enough to cause the kind of disaster thatnobody will be able to ignore. If you have any questions, ask them now.”
Selene fingered the relic that hung from her neck, wondering yet one more time what it was. Nothing in her knowledge of physics or the related sciences provided any inkling as to its origins. She’d had it embedded in bark and suspended from a strip of leather soon after Manny Sheppard had delivered it and told her of her father’s death. The pendant’s smooth, irregular edges bit into the joints of her fingers. She rubbed the fragment’s slick, strangely greasy surface. It seemed to have a unique combination of heat and ice deep inside it.
Manny’s delivery had also contained a note from her father, telling her of the importance of the contents of the package—and of how Frikkie Van Alman meant to abuse his connections and the resources of Oilstar to exploit the secrets it held. Her father’s words had left her under no illusion as to who had been responsible for his death: he had dared to defy Van Alman, and had paid for that defiance with his life.
While this assault fit well within the parameters of Green Impact’s agenda, she was doing this for him. She was about to cause a financial disaster, a public relations disaster, and an ecological disaster. And it would all be blamed on Frikkie Van Alman. The media would need a scapegoat, and the pompous CEO would be led to the slaughterhouse.
In comparison, theExxon Valdez spill would become a mere footnote in history. And her father would rest more easily.
The Zodiacs roared forward, plowing through the open waters of the Serpent’s Mouth. The charcoal black sides of the rafts were large inflated tubes, big enough that even her largest man would have trouble getting his arms all the way around. The tubes angled up and together in the front, forming a point. Between the tubes, a hard fiberglass hull gave the riders a place to sit, and at the rear, the outboard motor was mounted to the squared-off aft of the hull.
Relinquishing her hold on the pendant, Selene balanced against the rubber eyelets of the black raft. Through the hum of the powerful outboard motor and the whisper of the waves, she could hear her father’s ghost laughing.
She herself wouldn’t laugh until the bloodshed and the horror of the next few hours were done.
Soon enough, the bulwark of the OilstarYucatán loomed up out of the water, surrounded by starlight. Selene and her assault team switched off the motors of their dark Zodiac rafts. From that point on, they approached cautiously and in silence.
The garish display of the monstrous production platform sparkled like the contents of a treasure chest. Selene wished they could do something against that target—thereal target—but her small group had no chance against something as big as theValhalla . There were two hundred people on board. Her group could cause some damage, but they’d all be killed.
On the other hand, if her information was correct and the timing worked out properly, Green Impact could get aboard the tanker and deal with the skeleton crew. Her group would have a chance of survival—and the oil-ladenYucatán would certainly make a sufficient statement for their cause.