Wishing and hoping, though, weren’t going to change the fact that those who hadn’t died had been captured and turned over to the Venezuelan government, which made them as good as dead, anyway. Joshua knew he was all alone, with only his anger, his need for revenge, and a half-baked plan.
On a rig like this, however, one person could cause a lot of damage.
There were enough explosives strapped to his body to create a substantial disaster. Given good placement and a lucky break, he would be able to rig the explosives and get away from theValhalla before his fireworks display turned the rig into a seaborne version ofThe Towering Inferno . He was determined to accomplish his goal at all costs, but this was no deliberate suicide mission. A lot had happened in the last few months that he needed to mull over. Selene Trujold’s death, the loss of Terris McKendry, Frikkie’s betrayal.
After shucking his dark rain cloak so that it would not hinder his movements, Keene stole across the metal decks. He moved toward the cluster of fractionation pipes. Ahead of him he could see the closeddown electrical and mechanical workshops, the crew change rooms, circuitry lockers, and mudrooms that surrounded the smelly drill floor around the main wellhead. He looked up and saw business offices; they looked like tiny cubicles on a spaceship.
During the two months it had taken him to gather the explosives he needed, Joshua had studied as much as he could about production rigs and their numerous vulnerabilities. He ignored the optimistic and reassuring press releases from Oilstar and other major petroleum companies, instead paying particular attention to the infamousPiper Alpha disaster of July 1988 in the North Sea just off Aberdeen, Scotland.
A smoldering fire in one of the modules had built up until it set off a small explosion in an adjacent chamber, which had then triggered another explosion, tearing apart half of the giant oil platform. Rig workers had been trapped in the habitation module as fire and smoke spread. Emergency sprinkler systems had failed. Radiomen had called “Mayday” repeatedly until finally they had to abandon the communications offices as the fire and smoke advanced.
Some crewmen had been stranded by the advancing flame front while they raced to lifeboat stations; others were trapped high above the turbulent and cold North Sea. Given no choice, some men had leaped sixty-eight feet from one of the decks into the water. A handful of desperate, doomed workers had even jumped from the heliport, faced with either being burned to death in the advancing fire or dying as they plunged from skyscraper height to the sea. Several crewmen had climbed down knotted ropes or hoses to reach sea level as explosion after explosion rockedPiper Alpha .
Rescue crews had raced in boats and helicopters from nearby drilling platforms, but the fire was so bad that few of them could even approach the burning rig to fish survivors out of the water. The debris from one explosion killed half the crew on an approaching rescue craft.
In all, 165 people had died onPiper Alpha, making it one of the worst disasters in oil-drilling history.
Keene tried to imagine seeing the same inferno on theValhalla . In front of the vision in his mind he saw Selene’s face, heard her last words as she died beside him in the clearing near the Green Impact encampment. The fires grew brighter in his imagination.
Yes, he thought, that would just about do it.
38
Oilstar’s security squads grudgingly did what their boss had ordered, but McKendry noticed without surprise that they walked their routes together, sticking to the brightly lit decks, chatting with late-shift crewmen—in other words, going out of their way to avoid anywhere that trouble might occur.
The big man patrolled the darker ways himself, slipping through the claustrophobic and tangled pipe forests and chemical-storage areas, letting a sixth sense prickle his skin.
He felt uneasy.
Looking up into the dark and moonless sky, he was positive this uneasiness wasn’t his imagination.
Of course, he had been just as positive month after month, ever since the night Joshua Keene had died.
His doubts ended when he reached the fourth deck and stopped, feeling electricity go up his spine. Someone—perhaps a survivor from Green Impact—was here on theValhalla platform.
His flashlight beam revealed no movement in the dark corners; not that he expected any. No professional would have waited around. Then he discovered that one of the access hatches leading up from the support legs and the distant water was open. It was near the central wellhead and the shut-down mechanical shops. When he examined it more closely, he saw that one of the naked yellow lightbulbs had been smashed. Crumpled in the shadows, he found a lightweight black cloak—the kind he himself would have chosen for camouflage.
Whoever had been here, or was still here, apparently thought that security on board was as lax as it had been in the past.
He directed the beam of the flashlight all the way down to the water. Though the beam diffused, he saw something dark tied up to the ladder attached to the wide concrete leg. Running to the nearest lift platform, he descended to water level, where he studied the unobtrusive black boat tied to a ladder rung. The single rubber raft could have carried only a few of the terrorists, but even a small group could cause extreme damage to the rig if they knew what they were doing.
McKendry took out a knife and, with a quick motion, slashed the rope holding the Zodiac in place. He shoved with his foot so that the raft drifted into the water.
Whoever had come to his rig wouldn’t get away now. He’d have them cornered on theValhalla platform, where he could deal with them in his own way.
Creeping across the decks and ducking the rig’s still laughable security, Keene found a set of lockers that contained Oilstar work clothes. Diligent practices on the rig had been increased, and he thought he saw more guards on patrol, but they didn’t appear to be doing a better job than before. They talked loudly and walked in packs, making it easy for him to elude them.
From one of the lockers, he pulled on a greasy, thick jumpsuit that had the hand-lettered name Virata written on the left breast in bold strokes with a black Magic Marker. The jumpsuit smelled like grease and piss, but he’d endured worse. He found a hard hat adorned with crudely placed racing decals and snugged it against his hair.
Walking away from the lockers he was less stealthy, and instead walked as if he belonged on the rig. The explosive packs strapped to his chest and legs, as well as the packages he carried in one hand, made him look bulky and cumbersome, but if all went well, he wouldn’t have them for long.
Outside the mechanical rooms and shop offices, he found the central pipes and controls for the fire-suppression systems and alarms. He was relieved to see that the safety valves were split into two systems, one of which went toward the habitation quarters to protect the crew complement. An independent set dealt with the production facility, the pipes and chambers and machinery of the production rig itself.
He shut down, then permanently disabled the alarms, sprinklers, and safety systems in the production portions ofValhalla . Once the explosives went off, the alarms and sprinklers would activate inside the habitation module, getting the snoozing off-duty teams out of bed. That would give the crew members a chance to get away, but nothing would stop the flames in the production area. These sleepy South American crewmen certainly wouldn’t try to save the rig. They’d rush to the lifeboats, which would drop like padded sledgehammers into the water far below.
Keene supposed that kept him from being a cold-blooded murderer; now he qualified as just a warm-blooded one.
He worked for ten minutes setting up his explosives against a thirty-foot-high distillation tank connected to three systems that led to the heavy-gases storage chambers and out to the flame boom. His examination of design blueprints of theValhalla had showed that even his token amount of explosives would ignite this one tank. Once it blew, it would set off the second, which would set off the third, and so on like red-hot dominoes until nothing was left of the oil rig’s production facilities.