Power Down (2 page)

On the shelf below, a small wooden frame held a grainy black-and-white photograph. He hadn’t looked at the photo in a long time. He glanced at it, looked away, then took another large swig from the bottle. Slowly and against his better judgment, he picked up the photograph and put the whiskey down.

Holding the frame in his left hand, he wiped the dust away from the glass with his right elbow. The photo showed a much younger Dewey with a pretty blond-haired woman and a young boy. Behind them, a large, ornate sign read
DISNEYLAND
. A statue of Mickey Mouse stood to the side. The boy sat on Dewey’s lap, a big smile on his freckled face. The edges of his mouth were decorated with the remnants of a chocolate ice-cream cone.

Dewey had a military uniform on, his Ranger tab visible on his shoulder, white thread around its edges, before he’d been asked to try out for Delta. His hair was cut short, his large arm wrapped around his young wife. She looked tiny against him; protected, beautiful, and happy.

Dewey didn’t like to think about his past. Most of the time he didn’t have to. He went about his work and when thoughts of his old life crept in he simply worked himself and his men harder. More than a decade had passed since it all ended, and he’d spent those years working as hard as he could physically to escape what haunted him mentally. The sight of his old uniform always jolted him, a combination of intense pride and deep hatred, hatred for what they’d done to him, the crimes he’d been falsely accused of, and for the small-minded people who’d driven him from Delta, from the armed forces, from the country he loved. He’d learned to blot it out, to erase the memories, the history, everything, from his mind.

Oil had been his savior; oil and the anonymous, brutal Darwinism that was the life of a platform man.

He took his big, callused right index finger and rubbed it across the small black-and-white face of the boy in the photograph. He held the frame close to his face, a couple of inches from his nose. Robbie was
so young then. He was so perfect. He loved Robbie like he’d never loved anything in his life. He thought of how he used to hold his young son, with the boy’s head on his arm and his legs in his hands. Dewey closed his eyes. He could almost feel Robbie there with him.

With his other hand, he picked up the bottle and took another swig, then put it down. He walked to the other side of the small office. He placed the bottle on the desk and sat down in the metal chair. In front of him, he held the photo, staring. A gentle smile, the first in a long time, creased the edges of his mouth as he looked at the grainy photo of what was once his family. He closed his eyes one more time and tried to remember. It had been so long; the memories were harder and harder to find.

A sudden noise came from the deck. Shouting. He stood up, walked down the corridor to the deck, and opened the large steel door that led to the outdoors.

On the deck, men were gathering quickly. In the middle of the crowd, two roughnecks were squared off against each other. The fight had already begun. The crowd around the edge of the fight numbered more than twenty and was growing, the yelling getting louder as the roughnecks egged the fighters on. One of the men in the fight was Jim Mackie, a drill team manager who’d worked Capitana for years. Dewey had hired Mackie after working alongside him on a British Petroleum platform in the North Sea. The other man was a young tanker guide from Egypt named Serine.

Mackie and Serine were squared off, Serine’s nose and chin flowing blood. Serine was shirtless. His muscles, like most of the workers aboard Capitana, were ripped. A silver knife appeared in Serine’s hand and flicked forward, leaving a large gash in Mackie’s thigh. Blood coursed down Mackie’s leg to the crimson-splattered deck. Around the two combatants, the crowd continued to grow quickly. By the time Dewey reached the outer edge of the scrum, at least fifty men had gathered.

Dewey pushed his way through to the center of the human ring. As he came to the front, he encountered resistance as men fought to hold their prime place at the edge of the fight.

The crowd was excited and tense, hyped by the fight’s rising stakes.
As Dewey pushed through, a big man on his left turned quickly in anger. Seeing that it was Dewey, he recoiled and moved aside. The man next to him, an even stockier roughneck, didn’t bother to look; he felt Dewey nudge his arm and swung on him. Dewey caught the dirty fist with his right hand. With his left he hammered a fast, crushing blow into the man’s rib cage. The man doubled over in pain, but managed to return a blow to Dewey’s stomach. Dewey did not even flinch. He delivered another shot with his left as he held the roughneck’s fist in his right. This swing landed dead-center on the man’s nose, collapsing it and sending him down for good.

The cheering grew louder. Serine had drawn blood again, laying Mackie’s cheek open with his blade.

Serine had been hurt as well. His nose looked badly damaged and his left arm was clearly broken, hanging awkwardly at his side. Blood trickled from his left ear, an injury to the head that made him stumble dizzily as he moved.

Dewey had learned long ago to let fights go. It was better to let tensions on the rig settle once and for all than to let them fester, only to explode later on. It was the promise of physical harm, after all, that kept an oil platform stable, not meddling from a supervisor. But this fight would end soon. Mackie was covered in his own blood, the wound on his cheek gaping and wide. Dewey could see the edge of his cheekbone. Serine looked desperate, circling like a maimed animal bent on survival. Dewey stepped forward, toward the two fighters, to break it up. But as he did, Serine’s arm flew up wildly at Mackie. Before Mackie could dodge, the knife entered his throat at the larynx. The bigger man stumbled back and away, his chest already soaked in scarlet gushing from the opening in the throat. Mackie attempted in vain to stop the flow and fell to the deck.

As Dewey reached him, Mackie’s legs kicked the ground in violent spasms and he began to lose consciousness. Dewey quickly applied pressure to the neck wound, but it was futile, blood gurgled from Mackie’s mouth as he struggled to speak.

“A rag, Chief,” said one of the men from behind Dewey, handing him a dirty blue cloth.

Dewey stuffed it into the wound and maintained the pressure, but it was no use.

“It’s okay,” Dewey lied to Mackie. “You’re gonna be okay.”

Mackie’s eyes fluttered and found him. He tried to say something. Dewey leaned closer, his ear inches from the dying man’s lips.

“Sally.” Mackie coughed. “I love her.”

“I know.” Dewey’s mind flashed on Mackie’s wife, back in Cork. “I’ll tell her.”

Mackie shut his eyes for a moment. He was fading quickly. Then his eyes opened and he moved his lips again.

“Serine,” he gurgled. “I found something.”

Dewey cradled Mackie’s head and stared into the fading gray pools of his eyes. “It’s all right, Jim.”

Mackie jerked his head back and forth, using the last of his energy. “I found . . .”

“What?” Dewey asked.

“It’s them. On the rig . . . they’re here.” Mackie’s voice trailed off and his eyes shut for the last time.

SAVAGE ISLAND PROJECT
LOWER NUNAVUT, CANADA
ON THE COAST OF THE LABRADOR SEA

Two continents away, more than four thousand miles to the north, in a remote part of Canadian frontier, the roar of turbines in North America’s largest hydroelectric facility joined gale force winds in an overwhelming wall of sound.

A lone man atop the great dam clenched a cigarette and struggled to get his lighter to work. A yellow patch with the word
WHITE
written on it was sewn into the right chest of a heavy-duty, bright orange Patagonia winter parka. On the left chest of the coat, the letters
KKB
spread austerely in black thread.

It was past midnight. Jake White stood at the precipice of the three-thousand-foot wall of granite and steel and looked out at the black waters of the Labrador. He took a drag on his cigarette. He smoked too much, he knew, but he’d already lived enough for two men, having survived for so long in this monster of his own creation. Savage Island Project, White’s audacious vision, had beaten and bloodied him, not into submission, but into an altogether different state of mind. He’d beaten himself into a place even more desperate and lonely, a place you go not
when defeated but after you’ve accomplished all you’ve set out to do and there’s nothing left.

For two long decades, Savage Island Project had been his singular obsession, the pursuit of which had destroyed his marriage, his relationship with his two sons, and any ties he’d had with life back in Ohio. But here he remained, surrounded by the noise. It penetrated the air with a steady pulse of metallic friction, penetrated it, then surrounded it and pulsated down, then back up; it was everywhere. This was the din that results when you build a wall of cement, granite, and steel more than half a mile high, in a place it’s not supposed to be, an awe-inspiring spectacle designed to hold back endless waters meant to flow free. This was the deafening, inhuman sound of man triumphing over nature; of turbines and technology; of all that you must create when you decide to build a wall whose sole purpose is the taking of God’s waters for society’s use, for a company’s profits, for power.

This was the roar of Savage Island Project, the largest hydroelectric facility in North America, a $12.5 billion monolith constructed over a punishing decade in the far northeastern reaches of Canada, in the Nunavut, 575 miles from the last outpost of modern civilization.

Savage Island Project was everything and more than White had dreamed it could be, a massive powerhouse of perpetually renewable electricity. It generated enough energy to power a large section of the eastern United States. Enough energy to make its builder, KKB of New York City, the second-largest energy company in America.

Savage Island had been White’s idea, and no one had agreed with him. Not his brother. Not his wife. None of the corporate jackasses at company headquarters. Nobody except for Teddy Marks, at the time a young KKB executive. He had believed. He’d convinced his bosses. Now the dam was complete. Marks was CEO. And the jackasses were gone.

And the noise was everywhere.

As he stood atop the dam, upon an iron stanchion that served as the observation deck, White glanced for a moment behind him, at the outflow area where the water poured in a controlled river after passing
through one of the two hundred jet engine–sized turbines of the dam. It was an amazing sight, a full half mile above the man-made dark harbor below. Its edges were lined by a spectrum of small white houses built for the six hundred permanent Savage Island workers and their families.

White turned from the calm waters below back to the unruly sea. It was an astonishing contrast, the ordered valley spread out behind the dam, and the angry Labrador Sea whose whitecap crests pounded at the granite of the dam not more than fifty feet below where he stood. It was this contrast, between man and nature, between unbridled chaos and controlled order, that had come to him some twenty years ago in a waking dream.

He was a manager at KKB’s Perry Nuclear Power Plant outside of Cleveland. He’d written his idea down one month after returning from a fishing trip to the Nunavut, near Frobisher Bay, a brutal stretch of rocky coastline at the edge of the Labrador Sea that suddenly notched southward in a unique rivulet more than a mile wide near a stretch of rocks known as the Lower Savage Islands. White had written it down on a napkin as he sat eating lunch in the cafeteria one bland, forgettable day at work.

Now it was real.

White shook his head, took a last drag on the cigarette, and flicked the stub of it into the wind. He walked to the end of the granite walkway that crossed the apex of the dam to the entry door that would take him to the operations center. It was nearly 1:00
A.M.
He’d take a last look at turbine performance data before he took the elevator down and then walked to his house in the village below.

As he reached for the door, a solitary figure stepped from the shadows. White looked up, momentarily startled as the dark figure moved swiftly to his left. A hand thrust out, too quickly for him to react or to even begin to understand that he was being attacked.

The assailant grabbed him by his left hand. Twisting with trained, precise force, the killer pulled his arm behind his back and snapped it. The sound of White’s scream was loud enough to rise momentarily above the noise of the dam. But it was soon muffled by the killer’s gloved hand covering his mouth. Pushing him to the edge of the deck, the killer
dropped White’s broken left arm and moved his gloved hand to his leg. White tried to fight but it was useless. The man lifted him up. With a grunt, he hoisted him to the railing. His right arm slipped off of White’s mouth.

“
No!
” White screamed. He twisted his head around and tried to get a glimpse of the man. He clawed with his one good arm but only scratched air. His struggles were in vain. In the dull light, he saw a face.
Oh, my God,
he thought. Recognition came in the same instant he understood he was about to die.

With a last grunt, the killer brought White to the edge of the deck and forced him over the brink. The ocean pounded violently against the dam, close enough to soak both men with spray. The killer let White fall. Screaming helplessly, the architect of Savage Island dropped into the watery oblivion.