The Rig 1: Rough Seas

THE RIG:

ROUGH SEAS

The Rig Trilogy Book 1

by

STEVE ROLLINS

Acclaim for Steve Rollins:

“An absolute blast! Steve Rollins is my new go-to guy for action and adventure. This is pure genius!”

—
K.T. Tomb
, bestselling author of
The Minoan Mask and The Holy Grail

“Steve Rollins is a lot of writer...and a rising new star. Inventive, fast, witty. Great stuff.”

—
J.R. Rain
, #1 bestselling author of
Moon Dance
and
Silent Echo

“Suspense and action mingle in one of the finest debut thrillers I've read in a long time. The Rig is a lot of fun.”

—
H.T. Night
, #1 bestselling author of
The Fourth Sunrise
and
Vampire Nation

“Lightning fast. Sweeping storytelling. This is everything an action adventure should be. Mr. Rollins, I am your new fan.”

—
J.T. Cross,
author of
Lost Valley and Beneath the Deep

OTHER BOOKS BY STEVE ROLLINS

STANDALONE BOOKS

The Jade Dagger

THE RIG THRILLERS

The Rig: Rough Seas

The Rig: Storm Warning

The Rig: Eye of the Hurricane

MAX HARPER ADVENTURES

Jerusalem Gold

The Peaches of Wang Mu

The Sorcerer's Stone

ALLAN QUATERMAIN ADVENTURES

The Road to Shambhala

The Seal of Solomon

The Shroud of Turin

The Rig: Rough Seas

Published by Steve Rollins

Copyright © 2014 by Steve Rollins

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The Rig: Rough Seas

Prologue

The project was conceived the moment that surveyors suspected the presence of an oil field off the coast of California. A massive oil rig was to be placed thirty-three miles off the island of San Clemente. The US government would foot the bill for it and in a great public-private partnership with Chevron they would begin mining the field, if they could strike oil.

But then the environmentalists of California got involved and protested against the rig, which, they said, would be a great risk to marine wildlife in Southern California, not to mention how much a spill would affect their beautiful coastline. The project was delayed as the senators and the president tried to salvage the situation from the Hollywood celebrities and the Silicon Valley billionaires.

In the end it was one of those same Silicon Valley billionaires who saved the project. He proposed that the drilling platform be a completely self-reliant city. The place would be a testing ground for the technology that could be used to rebuild all cities if global warming wiped them out.

Most people in the media, and consequently across the general public, suddenly thought the project was one of the greatest ever devised by any member of the human race. And it would not be attempted if it were not for William Portis.

Portis was the inventor of a major PC operating system and he was worth billions. For a while he had stepped back from his company and focused on philanthropy. He spent a lot of money on charity work and
,
together with his wife, Chloe, he was a major campaigner for better education, vaccinations for children and controlling climate change. But as his company had expanded into the Smartphone market and that of wearable technology, he had stepped back into it. Immediately his worth and his influence grew again.

And there were few people outside of William Portis who could have gotten that project going. His connections with the high and mighty, built through his many charitable works helped a great deal. His economic might did the rest. He easily won over one of the big voices of the campaign against the project through sheer economic power. Senator Jacobs of California was in need of money, and so were many of his projects.

A few million dollars changed hands and Portis bought a large stake in the prison system across the US. Jacobs had needed a reform and an investment and Portis had been only too happy to do it. Running the US prisons was a big money spinner anyway. Jacobs had managed to bully most of the opposing senators and congressmen into finally supporting the building of the rig. He was the most loyal supporter of Portis' project and he would stand or fall by it. Neither knew which it would eventually be.

***

For three years the ports and shipyards north of San Diego were a hive of activity as the various parts of the rig were built. Other parts were built by companies near Seattle and gradually parts of the rig were floated south. After three years, ‘The City’ was assembled off the coast of San Clemente and floated to the place where the drilling would begin.

It was a massive structure, complete with a Walmart, movies and a theater. One leg of the beast contained hydroponic gardens; another housed the labs where scientists brought in from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands could grow artificial meat. The remaining legs of the great platform contained the laboratories and work floors of the Chevron engineers and the scientists and analysts who would be doing the test drills and the eventual mining of the field. The platform on top held the residential areas, the offices of the companies and the people involved and of course, all the shops, and recreational areas. In the end these also included an Arena Football stadium, and several sports grounds and swimming pools.

There was a glorious opening, with speeches by the tech billionaire, Senator Jacobs and the president. The president joined Portis in switching on the platform's systems and the place began buzzing into life. They had a grand dinner where the manager was presented, a man called Berry Stryker. Stryker had an impressive resume as a manager. He had worked for Portis' own company and had been on the board of directors of several large oil companies. He might have been a lawyer, but he was well-qualified to run ‘The City.’

A year after the platform was installed, it was fully manned and fully inhabited, but it was again the source of controversy. The wind and solar power that was meant to be powering the platform seemed insufficient, and the network was not connected properly, forcing the platform to rely on oil and gas supplies from the mainland for its energy supply. In a reminder of the failure of the German Energiewende, the US government and the Californian government were facing a storm of criticism. They managed to hush most of it up, but anyone who paid any attention to ‘The City’ or to the supply ships that came from the San Diego ports knew the failure of the project. It suddenly became imperative that they strike oil.

Chapter One

“I tell you, he’s perfect,” the man in the cheap black suit told the man at the desk next to his.

“I don’t know,” the man said, staring at his computer screen. “He's got no priors, no experience with any of it and he has no links at all.”

“He's been protesting this project ever since the first day. Look at his Facebook posts on it too. He seems a bit angry about the energy supply being fucked as well.”

The second man looked over the file on the screen. There were many things in there he did not like.

Yes, the man from the file was angry with the project, and his name was good. But he just did not fit the profile. For a start, he was not a Muslim. His father had been, but his mother was not, and he himself was a declared agnostic. He was clever and well educated, well mannered, calm, no criminal record. There was no history of mental illness, not even a hint of instability around the death of his parents that had been in an automobile accident. It just was not the way they normally were. Even his face was handsome. He looked Middle Eastern, but there was nothing by his appearance to suggest he might derail or do something like what they wanted him to do.

“He just doesn't fit the profile,” the second man sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “This whole thing is a nightmare anyway. I don't get why they wanted to do this.”

“You know why,” the first man said as he took a sip of his lukewarm latte. “Besides, we have orders. More than my job's worth to disobey direct orders.”

His partner just shook his head and stared at the screen again.

“Well, I don't see we have anyone else either. If you're sure, we'll just go for it.”

Both men walked out of the office and down into the coffee shop where they bought some fresh coffees. They stepped into a black car and drove to the campus of San Diego State University. Outside the grounds they just sat and waited in their car. They waited for their target to appear and then got out of their seats.

***

Akhmed was tired when he left the university. It had been a long day. The professor who supervised his thesis was not pleased with his progress. He studied meteorology and had spent the past year gathering data to support his thesis that the level of the oceans was in fact rising. But his professor had poked holes in his research within seconds. He could not believe it, but it had been so easy for the man to completely destroy his thesis that he found himself in serious doubt about his project. He had spent his whole afternoon working through the mountains of data he had gathered and trying to find out what could be salvaged from a year’s worth of work.

His morning had not been great either. He had been one of the speakers in a rally on the campus, protesting the enormous oil rig off San Clemente. He had urged the students to stop the tankers that brought oil and gas to the rig from leaving port. But the rally had been broken up by the campus police. He had not understood why. The rally had been peaceful and quiet, but for some reason it seemed to be against university policy now to protest against that rig.

He walked straight to the coffee shop across the street from the campus to get some coffee. He rarely drank coffee, but his brain and eyes craved the caffeine. He ordered a large cappuccino from the barista and he waited for the drink in a zombie-like trance. He barely noticed the red-headed barista trying to flirt with him. She had been attracted to his dark Egyptian face for a long time and liked how enthusiastic he could be about problems that faced the world and helping to solve them. But most of all, she liked his sharp features and his keen brown eyes.

“Here you go,” the barista said, smiling brightly at him.

“Thanks,” Akhmed muttered.

He wanted to grab his drink and turn away, but just then the barista decided she had the courage she needed to ask him. She pulled the cup away from him.

“You know, I see you here a few times a week and I always often wonder what your name is.”

Akhmed looked at her, slightly disbelieving. His mind was quite far away from something like this. It was far away from normal life.

“Uhm, Akhmed,” he said quietly.

The girl pushed the coffee towards him.

“I'm Helen. Maybe you should ask me out sometime? Because I'd like to go out with you.”

Akhmed nodded and took his coffee.

“Pleasure, Helen.”

He began walking away, but then his distracted mind came back to reality and he suddenly realized what she had said. When he turned back to her, she had begun cleaning the espresso machine.

“Uhm, Helen. Would you want to go out with me sometime?”

She looked back at him and smiled.

“Tomorrow here at seven? We can go for drinks?”

“Sure.”

He winked at her and walked out. Suddenly his headache was gone and his mood turned sunny again.

The tap of the finger on his shoulder shook him. It shocked him awake and made him jump violently.

“Fuck!” he swore, turning around.

Behind him was a blond man in a badly fitted suit. The man was sunburnt and wore dark sunglasses. By his shoulder stood a dark man, also in a suit and wearing sunglasses. This man looked dark, Middle Eastern or Mediterranean perhaps.

“Mr. Akhmed Hussain Abbasi?” the blond man asked, his tone very neutral.

Akhmed nodded.

“Yes?” He tried to look through the sunglasses and discern a trace of emotion in the man's eyes. But the eyes were completely hidden. “Who are you?”

“My name is Smith, John Smith,” the suit said, handing him a business card. “This is my associate, Mr. Garcia. We have something we would like to discuss with you.”

***

Half a year later, Akhmed came back from Helen's place in a brooding mood. He had been seeing her for a while now and they were happy together. They had even begun to talk about moving in together. But there was a big problem. The problem was Akhmed's sour mood swings. He had become so bothered about ‘The City’ that he couldn’t seem to get it off his mind. He felt he had to do something.

In the weeks after getting his degree, he had taken to being even more miserable. There had been a ceremony for the graduation, but he had been stopped from attending. Security had thrown him out the moment he walked in. They had said he was a known trouble maker and would probably seize the opportunity to protest ‘The City’ again. It was then he noticed the signs in the room bearing the logo of the software company owned by the billionaire who had started the project and suddenly it made sense to him why his protests had been stopped.

He had become enraged at that. He was angry with them, and angry with the world. Helen had comforted him and taken him to bed and taken the rest of his worries away. But in the morning, as he left her place to get some clean clothes from his own apartment, his mood had settled in again.

He was convinced the whole affair had been as the men had told him. The Silicon Valley billionaire had the university and some parts of the government in his back pocket. There was no way anyone would ever come out and say the project was a failure. The only thing they cared about was striking oil and making money. There was no consideration for the environment or the lives of the people around the coast. It had made him angry. Angry enough to want to do something about the very existence of the platform.

From his wallet, he withdrew Mr. Smith’s business card and called the number on it without hesitation.

Somewhere else in America, a simple cell phone began to ring.

“Hello,” the man answered sleepily. “Mr. Smith?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Who's this?”

“It's Akhmed Abbasi. We met about half a year ago? You mentioned you might know a way of dealing with that massive oil rig off San Clemente?”

The man sat bolt upright, shaking off the clawing hands of a woman.

“Yes, I remember. You want to accept my proposal?”

“I don't see any other way anymore to deal with this thing. Protests are being silenced, my Senator won't listen and this thing is a massive disaster. I don't think there's another way to stop it operating and to make people understand how dangerous it actually is.”