Lansdale laughed. ‘Lemme know if anything serious pops up,’ he said and left the weather room. Walking down the tunnel toward the bar, he could hear the heavy seas thundering at the steel legs below him and the wind shrieking in the rigging. He liked the sound and feel of the storm. The Thoreau was as sturdy as a pack mule and as indomitable as Annapurna.
He took the elevator to the second floor and went to the bar. Willie Nelson was lamenting on the jukebox, and there was a poker game in one corner under the head of a giant caribou one of the riggers had bagged on a weekend hunting trip to the Yukon. Lansdale loved it. It was the Old West, the last frontier, it was John Wayne and Randy Scott and Henry Fonda and the OK Corral all rolled up into one. He looked down the bar and saw Marge Cochran, one of the four women on the rig, a red-haired lady in her early forties who was a hardhat carpenter, Hard work had taken its toll on her, as it had on the Chief, but there was still the echo of a young beauty in her angular face and turquoise eyes. The work had kept her body lean and young. But despite the seams of her tanned face, she was a handsome woman, earthy and boldly honest.
The Chief kept watching her for a long time but she paid him no mind. Finally, as he bore in with his stare from the end of the bar, she turned briefly and a wicked little smile flew briefly across her lips.
Tough lady, he thought. Yeah, tough. Like a steel-covered marshmallow.
He ordered a Carta Blanca beer and gulped it down as a handful of technicians strolled in from the evening shift.
‘How about a game, Chief?’ one of them asked.
‘Rain check,’ Lansdale said. ‘1 need some shut-eye.’ And he left and went to his apartment on the third floor.
II
One hundred and fifty feet below Lansdale’s feet, the four men continued their perilous task. As the driver kept the scooter aimed up-tide, one of the scuba divers snapped the cable of the box to a clasp on his belt and shortened the line to twelve inches or so. He was obviously the most powerful swimmer, his biceps straining the thermal Suit as he moved down behind the leader.
The swell was sudden and monstrous, striking without warning out of the murky and violent sea, the tail of a twelve-foot wave on the surface ninety feet above them. It seized the scooter, flipping it up s that, for an instant, it seemed to stand on end, pointing toward the surface, before the driver got it under control. The line slackened for one deadly moment and then snapped tight again. As it did, it jerked out of the hands of the man with the box. The angry sea snatched him away from the line, sweeping him, end over end, and tossing him, like a piece of seaweed, toward the column. He thrashed his powerful arms against the treacherous, silent tide, but he was like a child caught in a deadly undertow, and the giant column was like a magnet. He spun end over end through the water and smacked against the column upside down, his head cracking like a whip against the enormous post. His body shuddered violently, a death spasm, arid a burst of red bubbles tumbled from his regulator and wriggled toward the surface.
The leader glared through his good eye and hauled in the limp form by the life line and peered through the face mask. The injured man’s eyes were half open and only the whites showed. Blood, gushing from his nose, was filling the mask. He shook his head toward the other members of the team and, unhooking the box, let the lifeless form go. The dying man was swept to the end of his life line by the harsh tide.
The leader swung his flippers toward the column and let the sea throw him up against it. The other diver joined him. Together they worked their way down the column until they found a welded joint. Struggling against the vicious sea, they lashed the box to the steel leg while the driver of the scooter tried to keep the machine aimed into the tide. When the box was secured, the leader pulled a handle on the side of it and the top popped off. He aimed his light into the opening in the box. It was a timing device. He set it for four hours and then he and the other diver worked their way back up the column to the steel line. The third diver hung grotesquely below them, his body battering the column. Bubbles no longer came from his regulator.
When they reached the scooter, the leader cut the line holding it to the column with a pair of aluminium wire cutters, and it lunged forward and the three huddled together, their companion, tossed by the undersea waves, dangling behind them at the end of the life line, as the leader checked his compass and pointed the flashlight into the darkness, guiding the scooter away from the deadly column.
They disappeared into the black sea, pulling their macabre bundle behind them.
III
A bank of monitor screens along one wall gave Lansdale a closed-circuit view of the control rooms and the exterior of the Thoreau. Sleet was sweeping through the rigging and almost straight out across the deck.
The wind’s up to a hundred and ten, maybe twenty, knots already, he thought, Gale force and picking up.
There was a tap on the door.
‘It’s open,’ Lansdale said.
Marge came in and closed the door and smiled at him for a couple of seconds and then snapped the lock on the door without taking her eyes off him.
‘You’re downright shameless,’ he said.
‘There’s no such thing on this barge,’ she said.
‘Barge! Jesus, that’s sacrilegious!’ He laughed. ‘You’re just going with me because I’m captain of the football team.’
‘Naw. I wanted to see if hardhats really make love with their socks on.’
‘Depends how cold it is.’
‘It’s about twenty below out there and falling.’
‘Then maybe I’ll keep them on.’
‘The hell you will.’
She walked across the living room, stopping for a moment at his bookcase. Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Franek’s Zen and Zen Classics, French and Spanish dictionaries, copies of Red Harvest and Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett. Through the porthole she looked out over the gray, bleak, endless sea, the waves lashed by sleet and wind.
‘It’s scary,’ she said. And then she turned her back on the window. ‘God, I’ll be glad to get back to civilization where it’s light in the daytime and dark at night.’
He made her a rum and Coke and carried it across the room to her. ‘Why the hell did you stay out here for the holidays anyway?’ he said. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t the bonus.’
‘It helps. Sixty-two fifty a day on top of a hundred and twenty-five. That’s almost a thousand dollars for two weeks. Anyway, one of my sons is someplace in Vermont with the college skiing team, and the other one is at his girl friend’s house in Ohio. What’s to go home to?’
‘That’s it?’
‘Well ... you’re here, too.’
‘I thought you forgot.’
‘Not likely.’
‘Are you divorced?’ he asked. They had never talked about personal things before.
‘Widowed. Married at twenty-two, widowed at thirty- seven.’
‘What happened?’
‘He worked himself to death. Forty-two years old. One day he went off to the office and the next time I saw him he was lying in a funeral home with some creep dry-washing his hands over him, trying to sell me a five-thousand-dollar casket.’
‘A little bitter there.’
‘A little bitter? Maybe. Just a little. It sure turned my life around.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Oh, I ... sure. Sure I loved him. He was a nice man.’
‘Christ, what an epitaph. Here lies Joe, he was a nice man.’
‘His name was Alec.’
‘It’s still a lousy epitaph.’
‘Well, he wasn’t a very exciting man. He was ... comfortable. Alec was wonderfully comfortable.’
‘So how come you end up a carpenter? On this barge, as you put it.’
‘I was into restoring antiques. It got out of hand. Next thing I know I was a full1ledged hardhat. How about you? A master’s degree in engineering and an armful of tattoos. That doesn’t fit, either.’