Reckoning (9 page)

The work was hard, dirty and dangerous. The work clothes, gloves and boots of the men handling the slippery pipe were coated
with mud. One false move could result in a broken bone or worse. The men hosed the mud off the hot pipe, and the metal steamed
in the cold sea air. The hole was nine thousand feet deep, and the heat down there was about twice that of boiling water.

At last the drill bit was brought to the surface. It was quite small, with a gold-painted top and bright metal teeth, many
of them worn down. The new bit was attached, and now the whole process was reversed, with three-length sections of pipe being
screwed on and sent down the hole.

Avedesian went to study instrument readings and collect core samples and chippings. Dartley followed after a while. He passed
the sealed wellheads of the holes already drilled. They expected to send down between twenty and thirty wells from Brent Alpha,
radiating out like the roots of a tree beneath the seabed 450 feet below. Each wellhead was sealed with a block of solid steel
called a Christmas tree because of all the red and yellow pipes and dials and nozzles sticking out of it. These pipes allowed
the flow and pressure inside the well to be controlled. The noise everywhere was unbelievable. Dartley was so used to the
banging and
clanking that, for him to notice it at all now, the decibel level had to be painful.

When he looked outside and saw fog drifting in, he cursed. This rig would not be a very comfortable place to be marooned on
with poor visibility, and on the North Sea it was nothing to be stuck for days on an installation because of the weather.
He went in search of Avedesian to tell him to move his ass so they could get back to the flotel before the fog closed in.

“He’s gone,” a dour Scotsman informed him over the noise.

“Gone where?” Dartley asked suspiciously.

“None of my business.”

Dartley pushed him back against a steel bulkhead. “Find out. Fast.”

The Scotsman had knocked the back of his head against the bulkhead, which caused him to bite his tongue. He saw that this
crazy Yank was ready to slug him. He was tired, and this wasn’t worth fighting about. “There was one seat left on a chopper
back to the flotel. He had to radio in some important findings to Aberdeen, so he took it. There’ll be another chopper in
half an hour. You’ll get a seat if you go up to the helideck now.” Then he grinned suspiciously. “If the fog don’t catch you
here.”

The news was good. Nicholas Avedesian had put his reputation on the line with some of the forecasts he had made. Now here
was data to back him up! Like everyone else in the oil exploration business, he had
had his share of dry holes. No one expected Brent Alpha to be dry, but more than a few had disagreed with Avedesian’s estimates
for the site. All the initial measurements coming in were backing his predictions. Avedesian was not a man with a whole lot
of pleasures in his life. Being occasionally dead right, in the face of knowledgeable opposition, was the greatest sweetness
that he knew.

He couldn’t wait to contact Aberdeen, from where the numbers would go to London. He could almost see the look on certain people’s
faces. They would hem and haw and light their pipes, but they couldn’t fight numbers. When it looked like fog was coming in,
he did what he had to do—grabbed his chance to get back to the flotel radio room. He could have radioed from Alpha, but technical
messages often got garbled in being relayed. This was one message he wanted to send loud and clear. He didn’t have time to
tell Dartley—who would no doubt have objected and perhaps knocked him unconscious. Dartley was a psycho. There were times
when Avedesian feared him more than the mysterious assassin who would hardly be dumb enough to come out to isolated installations
from which he could not escape after killing somebody.

Avedesian beat the fog back to the flotel. He went straight to the radio room and heard for himself Aberdeen confirm all the
numbers correctly from the other end. Feeling elated, he went to the coffee shop in hope of talking with someone about these
developments. Most of the men here were technologists or roughnecks, and
surprisingly few had much knowledge of or even any interest in the geology of oil-bearing rocks—at least not on a level interesting
to Avedesian. He was wary about talking to the British about any achievement since they liked to accuse Americans of being
boastful. In Avedesian’s opinion, many of them just spitefully waited for an opportunity to have their prejudices confirmed.
There was one American in the coffee shop—he had been told that the man was a mud engineer from Wyoming—but as usual this
man deliberately looked away from him in an unfriendly manner. In the claustrophobic society of an offshore oilfield, it was
an unwritten rule to leave someone alone who showed signs of wanting to be left alone.

He bought a coffee and a sticky bun, then joined some British roughnecks he knew. One was going back to the beach next day
and he was taking football pool entries for the others with him. Avedesian knew better than to interrupt such a sacred ritual
as this with his own trivial news of undersea oil. He filled out his own coupon—the idea being to forecast the First Division
soccer games that would end in a tied score next Saturday. It did not occur to him that he might win and that the mention
of his name in the newspapers would lead a killer to him. However, according to Hank Washington or whatever his real name
was, the Iranians knew where he was already.

When the roughnecks broke up to get some rest or go to work, Avedesian bought himself another coffee and returned to the table.
A sheet of writing paper,
folded in half, lay on the table. He hadn’t noticed it before. He picked it up and read the message in hand-printed capitals.

MEET NOW. 225 FT. LEVEL. DELTA SUPPORTING LEG WITH PUMPS. HURRY. HANK W.

It took Avedesian a full minute to figure out what this meant. He had forgotten that one of the concrete legs supporting the
Brent Delta installation on the seafloor contained pumps and other machinery which could be reached at various levels by an
elevator that descended inside the leg. The other concrete legs contained oil pipes in their hollow interiors. Avedesian folded
the paper, tucked it in his pocket and hurried to the walkway that connected the flotel with Brent Delta, the only rig that
had this convenience.

Having descended several gangways through decks of machinery, Avedesian came to a railed platform at the top of the concrete
support leg. He wrote his name with a marker pen on a plastic board next to the elevator doors and picked up an emergency
breathing apparatus. The elevator took its time in coming. Its shaft filled only part of the leg’s interior. The concrete
walls were three feet thick, and the interior was about fifty feet across. A rope safety net was stretched across the top
of the leg, and by leaning over the platform’s rail, Avedesian could look down into it. Deafening noise came roaring out of
it, like a New York City subway tunnel. Way
down he could see lights and machinery on steel decks—and the gray curved concrete interior wall.

In the elevator, he pressed the lowermost button and, as he descended rapidly, he yawned to relieve the pressure on his eardrums.
The elevator doors opened and he walked out onto a steel deck on which huge pumps crouched like great cats, some purring,
others roaring. Avedesian knew they were used to pump oil and natural gas from seafloor reservoirs into the pipeline to the
beach. This was not his area, and he knew as little about it as most people knew about his specialty.

White fluorescent tubes glared over the machines, lighting the dank concrete behind them. The 225-foot level was halfway down
the leg to the seafloor. Immediately beneath this deck were several more, all supporting pumps and connected by gangways.
The elevator ended here. Beneath the lowest deck, the interior of this great concrete pipe was empty except for pipes and
cables. Down at the bottom, Avedesian imagined he could see black water glittering.

There seemed to be no one around. Avedesian wandered past some of the noisy pumps and heard oil thump in the metal pipes that
lead to and from them. Hank Washington had chosen an even better place here than the helideck to bawl him out. He must be
mad as hell to have been left behind on Brent Alpha. But why wasn’t he here? His note said to hurry.

Quite suddenly Nicholas Avedesian felt there was something wrong. He wanted to get out of this place. He turned around and
started quickly walking across the
steel deck toward the elevator doors. It was only then that he saw the Wyoming mud engineer standing back against the curved
concrete wall, keeping absolutely still, looking at him. Avedesian did not need to be told. He knew he had met the assassin.

Avedesian kept going for the elevators. The man came away from the wall to stand in his way. There had to be an emergency
phone somewhere or a fire alarm, something to bring help. Avedesian ran around a big pump, moving farther from the elevator
doors but keeping the machine between him and his potential attacker. Now that the man had not managed a surprise attack,
perhaps he would wait. But Avedesian knew there was no real hope.

The assassin slowly circled the pump as Avedesian edged around it at the same speed. This was one of the louder pumps. Its
pistons worked furiously and reminded Avedesian of the rods that drove the wheels on old locomotives, lacking only wild hisses
of steam. It occurred to him that here he was, with only maybe minutes to live, thinking impractical escapist things.

The assassin leaped on top of the pump and jumped down on top of Avedesian. His body crashed onto Avedesian’s and knocked
the wind out of him against the steel deck. Avedesian felt his arms pinned behind his back, then felt himself forcibly lifted
to his feet by the painful strain put on his arms.

Dockrell shoved him forward, making him stagger. He jammed Avedesian’s head between a steel safety shield and the rhythmically
jerking elbow of a piston.
The pump’s working parts stove in his head like a coconut. Dockrell left him there, after taking the printed note from his
pocket.

The fog was heavy enough to delay flights, if not prevent them. Dartley fumed as he waited on Brent Alpha’s helideck for the
overdue chopper. He was still in the process of touching down at the flotel when Brent Delta went on a yellow alert. Everywhere
on the installations, even in cabins, steady green lights indicated that all was well. When those lights flashed yellow, all
open flames were to be extinguished, all heavy work was to stop, everyone was to stand by for instructions. A red alert meant
stop all work and head for the lifeboat stations. One step beyond that was a flashing blue light and a siren—that meant you
could expect orders to abandon the platform.

No one paid much heed to the yellow alert as far as Dartley could see. He didn’t think about it either, since the lights were
green on the flotel system, until he heard that a man had been caught in a machine down in one of Delta’s legs. Dartley hurried
across the walkway from the flotel to the installation. Fog was closing in heavily now. He ran through the levels until he
came to the elevator doors at the top of the leg and read Nicholas Avedesian’s name on the plastic board. He wasn’t really
surprised.

One other name was written there—that of the engineer who had discovered Avedesian. Andrew McClintock was his name. He was
shouting, “Murdering
bastard is still here. He slipped behind my back into the elevator while I was looking at the body. I threw a switch on the
elevator that stopped it part way up. He climbed out the emergency door at the top, and he was ahead of me for a while on
the staircase around the shaft. I think he’s slipped outside now and he’s below us somewhere.”

“Would you know this man you were chasing if you saw him again?” Dartley asked.

McClintock paused. “Not so I could point my finger at him in a courtroom—I didn’t see his face, but I’d have a good idea who
it was from the way he held himself and the way he moved. He’s out on the outside ladders right now. We can catch him—”

“Leave him to me,” Dartley said. “I’ll go after him. If we both chase him, he’ll be able to cross back to the flotel too easily.
You stand on the walkway and take every man’s name who leaves Brent Delta for the flotel.”

The Scotsman was big and strong. No one was going to get past him too easily. If Dartley could isolate Avedesian’s killer
on Delta, where the number of personnel was relatively small and each man had a reason for being there, he should be easy
to identify. However, if the killer managed to cross the walkway unobserved back to the flotel, he would be just one more
suspect among hundreds who might have done it. The Scotsman was initially reluctant to give up taking an active part in the
chase, but he was a disciplined man and saw Dartley’s point. Only he and Dartley were treating
Avedesian’s death as murder. The others obviously considered it just one more industrial accident, one of the major hazards
of offshore life. The flashing yellow lights had already turned to a steady green. Crisis over. Back to work.

While McClintock went to guard the walkway to the flotel, Dartley descenced the steel stairs on the outside of the installation.
The fog was blowing softly in, and he could only see for about fifteen yards. As he descended, catwalks branched off alongside
pipes, ladders went every which way. He could go up or down or sideways in the maze of pipes, structural beams and girders—it
didn’t make much difference. The fog was too thick to see anything. He heard the waves crashing far beneath him but could
not see the water. Dartley went down as far as he could—to where wave action in the last storm had chewed off the lower ends
of the ladders and catwalks. The twisted rusty rungs just stopped, almost inviting him to step off them into the mist.

Dartley worked his way back up along a different side. There was no question of getting lost in the maze of pipework and girders—all
he had to do was keep climbing and he would reach the installation. It would be child’s play for someone to hide from him
down here. He was relying on coming upon someone by surprise through moving quietly but fast and covering as much territory
as he could. Chances were Avedesian’s killer would not expect a silent pursuit down here.