by Dale Mayer
“Hey, I didn’t get a memo either,” he said. “I just saw them when they arrived.”
Denny looked around his kitchen in a frantic motion; then his eyes lit on the cinnamon buns. He walked over and snagged up the rest of them, taking them back.
Axel reached out and grabbed one before they got too far, but Denny didn’t even appear to notice. As soon as he put them on the counter closer to his side of the kitchen, Daniel walked over and snagged one too.
Denny glared at him. “I have to have something for the company men,” he roared.
“Then make something,” Daniel said. “If you’re lucky, they won’t even come in here.”
“I’m supposed to know whenever they come,” he said. “If I don’t have any notice, I can’t produce any food.”
“Well, I don’t know if they’ll be here for dinner or not,” Daniel said, “but you might want to start considering that.”
At that, Denny turned and muttered as he opened his fridge, studying the contents.
“I’m sure they’ll be easy to get along with,” Troy said. “It’s not like you guys got any warning.”
“Like they’ll give a damn about that,” Denny said. He waved him off. “Take that somewhere else,” he said. “I want my kitchen to myself.”
Daniel gave a snort, grabbed his cinnamon bun and a coffee, and said, “Wait ’til the other guys see my cinnamon bun.”
“Tell them you got the last one,” Denny said smoothly. “Otherwise there won’t be any dinner for you either.”
Daniel shot him a look and took off down the hallway.
Troy looked at Axel. “I guess we can go explore this place.”
Axel gave a half shrug and started toward the doorway.
“I wouldn’t be going too far,” Denny said. “As soon as they’re ready, you’ll be leaving with them.”
“Everybody is real friendly here,” Troy said. “It’s almost like nobody wanted any new crew in.”
“Damn right,” Denny said. “Everybody wants the crew out. It’s dangerous right now, and a skeleton crew is all we need.”
“Maybe,” Troy said, “but we’re here, so you may as well make the best of it.” With that, he turned and left.
Axel and Denny eyed each other carefully for a long moment, until Denny turned his back on Axel.
Hearing the big man come up behind him, Troy turned toward Axel, only to see Daniel leaning against one of the hallway walls. He was polishing off the cinnamon bun. “Well, that’s one way to stop a fight,” Troy remarked.
“It’s a shitstorm around here right now,” he said. “If a cinnamon bun makes me feel better for one moment in time, then I’ll take it.”
“Sounds personal.”
Daniel nodded. “My brother is one of the four who went missing.”
Troy winced. “I’m really sorry. That sucks, man.”
Daniel shot him a hard look. “It sure does.” And he took off down the hallway.
As they stood here, looking at the crossroads of the hallways, wondering which direction to go, Troy heard a sound to the left. He turned to see a tall, lean brunette with her hair stuck in a clip at the top of her head, motioning at him. He walked toward her quietly, Axel pushing him faster. She motioned inside a room and disappeared ahead of them. As soon as they stepped inside, she shut the door behind him.
“Berkley?”
She smiled up at Axel. “Hey, am I ever glad to see you.”
He reached out and gave her a gentle hug, which she seemed more than happy to accept.
Troy was struck by the moment, wondering, and then realized that it wasn’t anything. But because Berkley was a close friend of Tesla’s, she likely knew all of them. Except for him. “And I’m Troy,” he said quietly. “I think we’ve met, but it’s been a while.”
She smiled. “Well, we’ve been at the same parties,” she said, “but I don’t think we met.”
“I’m sorry then,” he said in surprise. “But, if it was at Mason’s, sometimes it can get to be quite a crush.”
“It was, indeed, at Mason’s,” she said, chuckling. “So listen. Things here are ugly.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Axel said.
“First off, you have to understand that you were picked up on cameras,” she said. “That’s the only reason I know you are here. Jonesy has been monitoring the cameras on the rig and caught sight of you. He got pretty agitated and upset about it.”
“Why?”
“New crew,” she said. “Everybody is on edge. Nobody knows what the deal is, what happened, whether it was sabotage or not. Although they’re not talking either.”
“And yet you seem to think it was sabotage?”
“Definitely it was,” she said. She pulled something from her pocket and held it out to Axel.
He looked at it and frowned. “Part of a C-4 package,” he said, and his gaze hardened as he looked at her. “Where did you find it?”
“Heading to the number one drill that blew up,” she said. “It was tucked at the bottom of the ramp.”
“Nobody else saw it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “There was so much chaos, and everybody was racing back and forth. Only later, when I went to take a quiet look, did I see it jammed down on the corner.”
“But how did it get there?”
Berkley shrugged.
Troy studied the paper inside and out. “But any sign of C-4 on a rig like this, especially in one of those drill locations—”
“Exactly,” she said. “And maybe they do keep it around. I don’t know. But there was no need for it to be an open package at the site where we had an explosion.”
“Anything else?” Axel asked, tucking the piece into his pocket.
“I saw in my data,” she said, “that a hacker’s been going through some of the emails. I’m running scans right now to see what files he’s been after. So far it seems innocuous, which makes me very worried.”
“Wondering if it’s a cover for a Trojan or something more devious?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not the only one working on electronics here. We have a programmer, Bruce, who’s been tracking the electronics controlling the pumps and doing analyses on those. And then we have Jonesy, who’s not necessarily a programmer, but he’s been doing a lot of the same work I was doing, prior to me arriving. So he’s kind of stuck himself to me as my friend, but I think he’s sticking close to see what I know.”
“In order to take your job? Or to see what you might find and whether or not he’s in trouble?”
“No real way to know,” she said. “There are six crewmen total, plus Daniel, the foreman, and Denny, who does the cooking, and I’m the ninth on the rig.”
“I’m surprised you were allowed to stay.”
“I’m the one who needed to stay,” she said. “I definitely found hacking throughout the system.”
“What could a hacker do on a rig like this?” Troy asked, puzzled.
“Cause the chaos he already did,” she said.
“And yet C-4 could easily have caused the chaos anyway.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So, no, I don’t have any answers. What I do know is that somebody has been into the computer files, and somebody blew up one of the drills on this rig.”
“Okay, do you have any suspects?” Axel asked.
“There’s one guy. I call him Idiot but not to his face. His name is Phil. He’s one of the guys here who gives me a lot of trouble,” she said.
“What kind of trouble?” Axel asked.
She took a deep breath. “He’s, … well, he’s the female-beating kind,” she said, “but he’s also one of those power-mad people, who thinks that nobody else can do a job but him. He feels that my job is useless, and, since I’ve been here and haven’t found anything regarding the explosion, I should just take myself off the rig.”
“Outside of personal feelings,” Troy interrupted, “does he have access to do any of the hacking stuff?”
“Anybody with a laptop could gain access,” she said mildly. She glared at him. “And it’s not personal. This guy is one freaky dude.”
“Big, mean, tough?”
“Slimy, skinny, sleazy. But something’s dead in his gaze.”
At that, Troy stopped and slowly nodded. “I’ve known guys like that,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want to know any more,” she said. “Honestly, the worst thought in my mind is that they’re all part of it somehow.”
Troy let out a slow whistle. “That would be a pretty major conspiracy theory.”
“Maybe,” she said, “and I get that it’s probably not fair to everybody here, but Chucky and Winslow are both oddballs. They’ve been working the rigs for fifty years, I swear to God. Probably only forty, I guess. But, listening to them, it’s been at least seventy.”
Axel cracked a grin at that. “And we all know guys like that too,” he said, “but what benefit does anybody get out of blowing up the rig?”
She took a deep breath. “The company was bringing in a new management control team. They would get rid of a lot of people here who were troublemakers.”
“What kind of troublemakers?”
She winced.
“Come on. Fess up. Let’s hear it all,” Troy said impatiently.
She glared at him. “You forget,” she said, “that I’m an outsider. I’m not one of the crew and a part of things.”
“And you’re female,” he said.
She gave a clipped nod. “Exactly. Three other women were on board, but they’re all gone now.”
“Why did they leave?”
Her glare upped in wattage. “Sexual harassment and—well—rape.” Her words landed into a heavy silence in the small room.
Chapter 3
Berkley took a deep breath. “One of them was my friend,” she said. “And I know for a fact that she was assaulted in the shower.”
“Is she okay?”
“No! Of course she’s not okay!” She glared at Troy. “Will she eventually come out of this okay? Yes. At least I hope so. Was she physically damaged? No. And she wasn’t murdered afterward. Although I fear she wishes she had been. Getting her off the rig seemed like the least I could do.”
“Did she go to management?”
Berkley nodded. “Yes, she did. And that’s part of the reason behind this change of this whole male-only culture.”
“So, a lot of the old guys would get the sack?”
“Well, let’s just say, they would all get investigated. All three women claimed rape. All three women have been shipped off, and all the men say it was the women’s fault. All the men say it’s not an atmosphere where women are welcome. The men say it had nothing to do with them, that this should have been a male-only culture, not a mixed culture.”
“A lot of oil rigs have great success with coed cultures.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “This one is full of old rednecks who grump a lot about it and say it has nothing to do with them and that the entire crew was being treated as guilty.”
“But wait, couldn’t the women ID the men?”
“I’m not sure about the others, but my girlfriend said she was blindfolded, but she does know it wasn’t just one guy.”
Troy sucked in his breath at that. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said gently. “That’s difficult for everybody.”
“It’s particularly difficult being the only female left behind,” she said boldly. “Not only is there a large group of the men who resent me for being female—because it reminds them of the change of management coming in and the investigation happening—but also another large group of men were protective, but all those protective men are gone,” she said.
“Are you in danger now?” Axel’s tone was harsh and raspy. Even as Troy watched, his partner’s big hands clenched into fists.
She smiled up at him. “Well, now that you’re here, I expect you to pound them all into the ground as needed,” she said with a laugh.
“Just point him out to me,” he said. His words were a promise.
“So far I’ve been fine,” she said, with a shake of her head. “I’ve never had any trouble any of the times I’ve been here. And the fact that eight men are on board with me, well, it makes the odds not that great in my favor, but it’d be a lot easier to pinpoint who was causing the trouble now than to have a full crew on this rig.”
“So, back to the other two women, you don’t know if they could identify their attackers?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. One left almost immediately, and a lot of secrecy surrounded her exit. I presume she went straight to the top of the line and said she needed to get off. Her accusations came afterward, so I think she just ran first.”
“So, of course, no rape kits or anything like that for the medical team were here to process either, right?”
“No,” she said. “The doctor said he didn’t have any. It wasn’t something that he’s expected to stock.”
“But he could have done something in the meantime,” Axel said. “Just because he didn’t have an actual rape kit doesn’t mean he couldn’t take semen samples and photographs.”
“I took photographs,” she said quietly. “And, with my girlfriend’s help, we did swab for semen.”
“Good,” he said, “and did they get to a lab?”
“I pulled some strings, and they’ve gone to a private lab, yes.”
“Does anybody know you did that?”
“I hope not,” she said cheerfully, “because I’m pretty sure I’m in more danger if they do.”
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that. Well, this is not exactly what we expected to hear.”
“Of course not,” she said, “nobody does. You come here, and it’s all about a rig blowing up and potential sabotage.”
“Maybe,” Axel said. “But, at the same time, it’s not necessarily what’s going on.”
“Would somebody blow up a rig in order to stop an investigation into the rapes?” Berkley asked.
“Well, it got them out of being part of the investigation, so quite potentially, yes,” Axel said.
“So hang on,” Berkley said. “These guys rape three women, know that they’ll get in trouble over it all, so they blow up a drilling rig, and manage to get off when all the crew is taken away? Now they just aren’t available to come back for work and don’t answer their phones when the investigators call them?”
“Quite possibly, yes,” Axel said.
“But didn’t four men die while this rig got blown up? Or went missing?” Troy asked.
“If so, those rape charges just escalated to murder,” Berkley stated.
“And the only reason for that to happen is if somebody really didn’t want to get caught, as in somebody with a powerful position or somebody who already has a rap sheet and knew he would have the book thrown at him, like a third-strike thing or something?” Troy frowned.
“All of which is possible,” Axel said. “And unfortunately so are half a dozen other options we have yet to think about.”
“Really sucks,” she said. “But, first off, we have to take out those cameras.”
“What will that do?” Troy asked curiously.
“You can search the place,” she said.
“I can search it anyway,” he said. “I just hack into the system and get to the security cameras to choose which ones we need on, which to turn off.”
She stared at him, feeling a sense of disquiet. “Are you that good?”
“We both are,” he said with a smile. “Remember. You called us for help. We’re not here to make your life more difficult. We’re here to make sure you get off this rig safely and that this doesn’t happen again.”
“I hear you,” she said, looking worried. “I was planning on disabling the cameras, but you’re telling me that I shouldn’t?”
“It will make things a whole lot more suspicious if you did it,” he said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “We’ve got so many electrical issu
es now, stuff is going offline all the time.”
“They should be coming back online, if you’ve got a repair crew.”
“I’m not sure how much of a repair crew these guys are,” she said. “Honestly I think they’re just sitting around, eating and drinking, watching what’s going on.”
“Interesting,” Axel said. “A full analysis should be going on here. Tell us who is doing what roles here so that, when we get hooked up with the company men, we’ll know more of what’s going on.”
At that, she cracked a smile. “Mason looks good in the suit.”
Axel gave a tilt of his head. “So, who is what?”
“Chucky and Winslow are drillers. Between them, they’ve got at least a century of experience,” she said with an eye roll. “They were supposed to see what work was needed for the repairs. Jonesy is part IT, but he’s one of the machinists. So he’s supposed to be reporting on what machinery needs to be fixed and what’s involved. And then there’s Idiot—Phil. He’s, … well, he’s one of the engineers,” she said with a shrug, “but, along with the foreman, they were supposed to be doing studies to check the status on the other drills’ pressure and do an overall security system analysis.”
“And Denny is just the cook?”
“Cook and first aid,” she said, with a nod.
“Okay, so we need to find out where these supposed reports are.”
“I can tell you that I haven’t seen any one of them typing a report yet.”
“Do they not care?”
“I think they expect the new management will come in and will put their asses out anyway, so why bother.”
“Why bother? Because they need to,” Troy said. “They were told to do a job, and they damn well better do it. That right there tells us a lot about them.”
*
As soon as they slipped away from Berkley, they headed to the lower levels. Troy wanted to see the accident site for himself. The weather was building up to an ugly nightmare outside. As soon as they went outside—which they had to do each time they went from one level to the next—they lost the ability to speak to each other.
By hanging on to the railings of the rig, they made their way through to where the damage was. The fact that the two other drills were compromised, but one was still operational but shut down, was an interesting tactic, if it was intentional. Now the company had to decide if they would pour millions into fixing this or if they would completely walk away from it. But that would be almost impossible. These weren’t million-dollar rigs; billions were involved.
