He didn’t resist, happily undoing his shirt in anticipation as he was towed towards the bedroom. They loved and teased with joy and tenderness. John stroked and kissed the swollen incubator of their rapidly growing child. Soon love and passion merged into a tender all-consuming embrace. Eventually they lay together, wallowing in the afterglow of their mutual bliss.
“Please come home soon my darling. Every time you’re away I worry about the past catching up with us, you know what I mean?” Nancy said, gripping his hand until it hurt.
“I’ll be back just as soon as the contract is complete — after all, where else can I find loving like that?” he teased.
She reacted with a vicious thump with a clenched fist on his chest. “You date anyone else John Lawrence and you’ll never be loving anyone again!” Her hand slithered down and grabbed his now deflated “passion stick” as they had lovingly named it. She held it without actually hurting the softened tender organ, the fingers of her other hand miming the cutting action of a pair of scissors.
“Fear not my love,” he replied in mock horror and pulled her close. She nuzzled her head on his shoulder. “In any case, I could only cope with one lover as passionate as you!”
She thumped his chest again, “Too much for an old man eh?”
He did not reply, just lay holding her close and secure.
The following morning every man reported in good time to sail with the tide at nine o’clock.
“The weather is set fair so we should make good time,” Big J confidently predicted as they headed for the open sea.
Ahead of them was a two thousand five hundred mile journey through some of the most difficult and treacherous waters in the world; at an average of sixteen knots it meant at least seven days at sea.
At dawn one week later, exactly as estimated, they arrived at the disabled oilrig; work started almost immediately. The first two days was spent carefully assessing the hugely complex problem and another full day was needed to assemble the array of equipment they would need to replace part of the damaged wellhead.
The sturdily constructed platform easily survived a battering by a heavy oil tanker in a severe storm but by some freak, the heavy mooring chains, kedged out in the attempt to keep the tanker away from the platform, dragged and tangled with the valves at the wellhead, seventy metres below the surface.
The valves are connected by a giant manifold, which in turn is clamped onto the numerous deep oil drills at the seabed. One of these connections had been almost completely pulled away and would have to be resealed — in addition to replacing at least two of the huge valves.
Crude attempts to free the cables by the drilling rigs own crew had resulted in even more damage. Big J was surprised that the immense pressure was still being held back.
Initially the rig crew had called for assistance from their own Oil Authority but already over-stretched, mainly through lack of trained crew, trying to repair three or four other damaged wells, they were in no position to help and so were reluctantly obliged to contract out this particularly difficult repair.
The Chinese authorities believed that they could also use the opportunity to train more of their own desperately needed divers, thus avoiding having to trade with the “Capitalist Oil Corporations” in the future.
Six Chinese novice divers had already been sent to the rig to participate in the repair.
“You will be learning advanced critical techniques from the Australians,” they had been told — but the three youngest and least experienced had not waited for Big J and his team to arrive. Impatient and determined to prove that their skills were at least as good as those of the decadent westerners, they free-dived to the site, intending to make their own assessment of the damage.
With only compressed air to breath, however, the time they could spend at that depth was limited. It was cold and murky at seventy metres; they knew they should not spend more than one or two minutes at that depth, if they were to surface without a long decompression and seriously risk their lives through the bends and narcosis.
Undeterred, they sank gracefully towards the bottom in a cloud of bubbles as the air slowly released from their buoyancy aids, allowing their lead weights to take them down. Two of them stayed close together as they had been trained to but the other, ignoring the words of his mentor, drifted away and descended ahead of the others. The pressure built up in his sinuses; he tried to squeeze his nose and blow to ease the pain but it wouldn’t clear. The agonising pain increased — he could think of nothing else — and suddenly he hit the top of the rusting steel manifold. Stunned and disoriented in the murky water, he slithered down the side of the slippery metal wall and sank into the silt, kicking up a great cloud of mud.
At that moment the blood vessels in his nasal tract burst and his facemask was splashed with a mixture of blood and mucus. Beginning to panic now, he nervously gulped at the compressed air but could not pull enough through his regulator. His brain seemed to be swelling inside his skull. Desperately he tried again to clear the pressure and clear his mask; pushing his thumb up inside the seal he gingerly let in some water, it was only partially successful.
He was breathing too fast; the nitrogen pumped into his adrenalin-filled blood far too quickly. With his brain starved of oxygen, his body and mind were in turmoil. Suddenly the panic left him and he felt calm. Somehow he knew that he was not going back to the surface but he didn’t seem to mind as the inevitable narcosis permeated into his deranged mind. Everything had stopped spinning now; as he just floated and relaxed he was suddenly aware of how beautiful it was relaxing in the half-light.
A small fish drifted up to his visor. He could see that it was panting for air. He knew that he could save it. Removing his mouthpiece, he offered it to the gulping creature but it backed away. He tried to follow as it moved but he had become tangled in the safety line, so he couldn’t catch up with the silly fish. He held out his hand as far as he could to offer the life-saving mouthpiece. He tried calling but no sound emitted from his purple lips. The water flowed softly into his lungs, it soothed the pain, and soon he could rest. His final thoughts were of that stupid fish, “If only he’d accepted the air! He didn’t need to drown.”
The diver relaxed. He was warm and contented.
When the other two divers found him he was floating with his mouthpiece held out firmly in front of him. They tried to make him breathe but it was already too late. They tried to pull him to the surface but his safety line was hopelessly tangled with his legs and some broken metal debris. They tried to cut him free — but both fumbled in their distress, dropping their knives within seconds. In mild panic now, and aware that their own submerged time had been significantly exceeded, they abandoned their comrade and rushed to the surface without stopping to decompress at any level. They broke the surface, ripping their masks off and gulping greedily at the air. They were pulled onto the safety boat and craned up to the rig where both were found to be suffering from severe shock and, even more seriously, having surfaced far too quickly, showed symptoms of the “bends”. There were no decompression facilities on the rig to support them.
Far beneath the waves, the body of the diver, still attached by the safety line, drifted alongside the wellhead where it dangled like bait on a fishing line.
When Big J met the other Chinese divers (all of whom spoke English, having originated in Hong Kong he was relieved to note) the first thing they excitedly reported was the desperate condition of their two young comrades and the tragic and unnecessary death of the third.
Big J was angry.
“What’s the matter with you people? You should know better than trying to show-off underwater. Nobody’s fucking politics can ever bend the rules of nature and diving rules are sacred with me. Get those buggers across here pronto! We’ll have to waste precious space in our chamber now.” He stomped away angrily then shouted down to his own crew, who had casually assembled at the sound of the excitement.
“I won’t have heroes in my team. Remember, we work as a team. Clever buggers like those stupid sods cause more trouble than they’re worth. So just you look at this bunch and remember!”
He pointed towards the ailing divers as they were being carried across to the tug.
“And don’t any of you forget, I don’t write letters to no weeping widows.” He paused looking seriously down from the bridge, a few seconds ticked by. “I can’t bloody write anyway,” he grinned at his men.
There were a couple of patronising guffaws but none was really amused. They were all too well aware of the thin line between life and death beneath the surface of the sea.
“OK let’s get some work done?” He turned to John standing at his side. “How long has he been down there?”
“About ten hours I guess?” John replied with a grimace.
“Not good, not good,” Big J repeated, shaking his head. “It’s not that deep so I suppose we’d better get the small dive chamber ready first and send a couple of the boys down on helium. Three minute dives only.” He stopped pacing. “Wait, perhaps a better idea would be to send Jake — he’s got the strongest stomach — and the other two Chinese divers; we’ll let them recover their own mate or what’s left of him.” He looked through the screen to the men busying themselves on deck. “It should teach them a lesson in following the rules!” He walked away shaking his head. “What a bloody waste,” he mumbled in despair.
The three divers entered the cramped pressurised capsule, where normal atmospheric pressure would be maintained, and were lowered to the seabed.
The divers would be able to leave the pressure vessel and, by breathing a sophisticated mixture of gases be able to spend just a few minutes at a time on the outside, without any risk. In this way the whole crew would be able to surface quickly and without decompression.
The remote video camera scanned the murky water for the wellhead and the lost diver. Within seconds, the slimy metal side of the vast manifold came into view. They manoeuvred slowly along the metal wall; suddenly they came across a great army of crabs piled up in a pyramid. As the sphere got closer the crabs began waving their arms and claws in protest. The object of their attention suddenly became sickeningly clear. According to the survivors the diver had been tangled in some kind of obstruction. The lure of dead flesh had soon attracted hoards of predators to a welcome feast.
The sharks had on this occasion paid little attention to the bait. It lacked the excitement of life’s final struggle and the absence of blood. The crabs, however, immediately sensed the potential banquet. It had been a struggle for them at first, trying to get to the body as it swayed gently from the safety line but, when the current changed, the body nudged into the buckled angle iron brackets, allowing them to quickly scramble aboard to gorge on their prize.
In the circumstances, the divers chose not to exit the protection of their pressure sphere. Instead, using the robotic arm, they tapped the seething mass of shells, attempting to frighten them away. Some took the metallic hint but a significant majority chose to ignore the intrusion, probably believing it was a challenge for their lunch. Jake banged even harder, dislodging more of the prehistoric-looking carnivores. Eventually, he was able to grab the diver’s weight belt. He tugged on the arm and called to the winch man to raise them a metre. The crabs fell away in a tangled heap, revealing the air tanks, the weight belt and tattered remains of the neoprene suit. There were no hands nor head; all that remained of the body was inside the suit. To add to the macabre scene, the suit moved and bulged periodically as smaller crabs inside it continued unhindered to strip the remains of the skeleton.
There was a tense silence in the confined sphere. The two Chinese divers looked away from the screen and covered their faces, forcing back the bile. The true horror of the pathetic remains seeped slowly into each of the observers’ minds. Even Jake, the toughest and most experienced of all of Big J’s divers, swallowed several times.
“Come on then,” he growled eventually, “lets get the fuck out of here!”