The tanks for both suits were fully pressurized — he would walk to the Rushmore if he had to, then begin lying his ass off until his unemployment insurance kicked in.
He climbed into the fallen suit, then tugged on the massive, dome shaped helmet.
Through its portholes Charon could see the room beginning to flood.
Moments ago the room had stood fifty feet above the ocean’s surface; now the platform had been so radically bent by the explosion that the deck would soon be underwater.
Icy, grease-filled water began to pour into the suit as Charon’s fingers struggled to find the collar locks. Within seconds the suit would become a fluid-filled casket.
Paralyzing fatigue began to claim him. His arms seemed to be moving slower, losing ground against the coming flood. Worse, his brain began to fog from the effects of hypothermia as he lay immersed in the water, only a few feet from the sanctuary of the deployment portal. He tried to crawl over to the hole in the deck in his ungainly, four hundred-pound carapace.
The lights went out around him and the room was plunged into darkness.
Charon wondered if it was all in his imagination.
“No goddamn way am I going up in this weather.” Roger Tibbits, the designated pilot for the Rushmore’s helicopter, stood before Garner with his arms crossed.
His eyes narrowed beneath a boyish shock of unruly red hair.
“I’m just not that keen on dying today, Commander.”
“Neither am I,” Garner assured him. “But I have to get a team onto the rig to stabilize it and check for any leaking oil. We can’t take a launch over there while the whole thing could topple over onto us.”
“And you think flying over it is any safer?” Tibbits scoffed.
“I don’t think flying over anything is safe but we don’t have a choice,” Garner insisted. “Meet you on deck in five minutes. That’s an order.” However accurate under the circumstances, the words that’s an order felt alien to Garner even as he uttered them.
“Thanks for acknowledging my concerns, sir,” Tibbits called back to Garner as he turned and headed off down the corridor.
The Sikorsky was in the air less than fifteen minutes later with Tibbits, his copilot Brian Dunlop, Garner, and a squad of eight SEALS equipped to locate and treat the rig’s survivors. The helicopter rocked and whined as it rose into the snowstorm, but the hands of the pilots were steady on the controls.
From an altitude of two hundred feet, sliding out of the greatly reduced visibility, the burning oil rig cast a surreal profile. One entire corner of the platform had been blown away, sending a geyser of flaming crude onto the topsides as it twisted and hung suspended ever lower over the water. Explosions continued to rock the structure as oil-covered surfaces ignited and melted away, dropping pieces of the platform into the sea. Thick black smoke boiled into the air, mixing briefly with the snow flurries and the steam created by the firefighting equipment before being carried away by the wind.
“Here you go,” Tibbits shouted above the thudding of the rotors. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Far below, the platform’s helipad was nearly cleaved in half by the collapsed swing boom.
Garner’s stomach was churning as much as the sea below as he unbuckled himself from his seat and was clipped into the sling harness suspended from the helicopter’s hoist. He exchanged a thumbs-up with the operator, then the line was away, lowering him quickly toward the burning platform.
The helicopter swung around in the westward wind, dropping Garner through a swirling cloud of oily smoke and setting him heavily on the deck. He quickly scrambled out of the harness as the SEALS descended behind him. The structure continued its catastrophic groaning as the men made their way across the topsides, looking for any sign of Charon and his men.
Below the helideck, the crew quarters were destroyed. The rescue team could now see that one of the fuel cells below was filled with burning crude oil, though the GBS had apparently contained most of its inflammable contents. Leakage of oil into the sea appeared to be minimal, with most of the immediate hazard coming from the blackened shards of the rig itself. The utility shed and control room were completely missing, while the communications van had been torn from its foundation, taking the trigger console, and possibly Charon’s team, along with it.
“Where do you want to look?” one of the SEALS shouted over the tortured sounds of the dying rig.
“Deck to deck until we find six bodies,” Garner said grimly.
They managed to climb down to the bottom deck of the topsides, which was now nearly half submerged in the water. Garner was the first into the dive room, where he found the bodies of Stimson and one of Charon’s lieutenants sloshing in the icy water, both dead, apparently from gunshot wounds to the head.
The string of bizarre events was becoming clear to Garner.
“Looks like we’ve got a sabotage on our hands.”
“Charon?” someone asked.
“Or one of the others,” Garner said, though he doubted anyone but Charon was in a position to orchestrate this disaster. “We know Charon was alive to push the button, but not if he knew about the oil in the GBS.”
“We’re still missing four bodies,” another SEAL remarked.
Garner surveyed the rest of the room, tilted precariously on its end and angled into the sea.
“And one JIM suit,” he observed.
In the remnants of the rig’s control room, Garner’s team could find no way to see what was going on below. None of the closed-circuit cameras around the GBS or the plug were showing images. Either the connections to the monitors had been severed by the blast or the cameras themselves had been destroyed. Until the cameras on the submarines could be redeployed, the JIM suit was the only way to determine whether the rig was leaking oil beneath the surface. It was also the only way to find out whether the saboteur had escaped in the other suit. With the help of the SEALS, Garner climbed into the second JIM suit and asked for thirty minutes on the bottom before they reeled him back up.
“Any longer than that and we may be joining you down there,” someone joked tersely. “Keep your head up, sir.”
With the helmet closed securely over him, Garner allowed the others to heave the suit into position and gently slide him into the water. A moment later, the suit lost its out-of-water awkwardness and Garner was sinking to the bottom on the end of his umbilical and safety tether. On the way, he activated the suit’s lights and comm link, then reconfirmed that all the suit’s life-support systems were up to full power. He had been in a JIM suit only once, years before during a Navy deep-sea rescue course. The design of this suit was more refined, but it didn’t take him long to figure out how to manipulate the legs and the twin fingered pincers on the end of the arms. He hoped he wouldn’t be down long enough for the amount of air in his tanks to become a concern, but the suit’s regulator didn’t seem to be providing a proper flow of air.
He angled his lights onto the reinforced concrete ice wall of the GBS as he descended it appeared to be intact all the way to the bottom.
Even if the blast had ruptured one or more of the fuel cells, he hoped the external integrity of the GBS would keep the oil from escaping the reservoir.
He landed on the bottom directly beside the GBS. His helmet lights illuminated fresh piles of twisted and charred debris raining down from the rig above. Most of it had fallen straight down, while the rest was carried sideways over the lip of Thebes Deep. Garner walked slowly along the base pad for a few more minutes as he inspected the GBS, then retraced his steps so that the umbilical did not become wrapped around some new obstruction.
He was about to continue his inspection in the opposite direction when something heavy crashed onto the back of the suit, making him stumble.