by Dale Mayer
“I don’t quite understand why you felt you needed two extra men here,” Gregor said curiously.
“We’ve potentially got a far uglier situation than we thought,” Troy said. “And, if we have two men the skeleton crew don’t know about, it’s surely possible that other crewmen are here we also don’t know about.”
At that, Berkley gasped. “I guess that’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Troy said. “Think about all the places on a rig where somebody could hide.”
“But what would be the point?” she asked.
“It depends whether Daniel’s kid brother was targeted,” Troy explained, “or whether somebody stayed behind to take care of business or whether it was an accident because somebody was involved in more sabotage. We really have no answers. All we have are more questions.”
“Now that is par for the course,” Nelson said, straightening up. “And the longer we sit in here, the more problems we’ll have.”
“Exactly.” Berkley walked out of the storeroom, stepped into the outer office, and opened the curtained door, where all the crewmen, including Axel, stared at her from the bullpen adjacent to the office. Every last one of them. She tilted her head high and tried to make it look like she’d taken a verbal beating from the bosses as she headed to her computer and sat down. Without a word, she logged on and resumed working.
An uncomfortable silence ensued as everybody studied her.
She let her hair fall over her face as she quickly scanned through the systems. Nobody had logged on to her area since she had been in her meeting, which she was grateful for. She was always worried that the hacker was after something that she didn’t understand. The fact that he was even in her system bothered her.
Could she kick him out? Potentially, yes. But then he’d just get more devious to get back in. At least this way she could track where he was moving.
Jonesy, sitting beside her, leaned over and asked, “You okay?”
She gave him a slight head nod. But she wouldn’t look at him.
“They rip into you?”
She gave another little shrug. “They have every right,” she muttered. “All kinds of hell is going on here.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” he said with a heavy sigh. And then he eased back into his chair and started to work on his computers.
That they were both in the computer field was just part of a bond that they had. He was also the one who had stuck up for her when that idiot Phil, or one of the others, got a little too over-the-top.
The other four in the storeroom filed out and stood, staring at the outer room. Mason talked to Gregor in such a quiet voice that nobody could hear anything.
She didn’t even look up when Axel and Troy left. But she immediately watched them on the tracking system. She looked over at Jonesy. “What are you working on?”
“Pulling the data from that drill,” he said. “We need to save as much as we can.”
“What about the backup?”
“It’s still there,” he said. “Yet I’m sure the bosses want cameras and everything that we can pull from around that area. Even now. And the storm is getting worse out there, so you know that means doing extra backups.”
“Right,” she said. “In case you hadn’t heard, the helicopter won’t be leaving today.” She heard him suck in his breath, and she gave a slight nod again. Then returned to her work. On the monitor he couldn’t see, she brought up the camera system, and, watching where Troy and Axel traveled, she quickly shut down cameras ahead of them, so that nobody would know what exact pathway they took. She roughly understood where they were going and where they would need the cameras off.
Then, just as she thought she had it under control, all the lights in the command central area went down. Groans came from all around.
“What the hell was that?” she asked. Inside, worry gnawed at her.
“I don’t know,” Chucky said. “It’s a shitty night to be out there.”
“Every night out here is like that,” she said in a calm voice. “So tonight it’s no worse, right?”
“Feels like it,” he retorted, then slammed out of the room. Winslow, as always, went with him.
She thought of them as the Bobbsey Twins. Something was off about them. Maybe it was the closeness of their relationship. She didn’t know anyone who had bonded quite like those two. And she wasn’t even sure that Chucky was the leader because it seemed like Winslow was more the silent one, but, when he did speak, Chucky listened.
It gave her a good excuse for all the cameras to be down. She wished she had a way to contact Troy and to let him know what was going on. And then, once she thought about it, she realized that she did. She quickly sent Mason a message—under the pretext of typing as usual at her computer—and, when he looked down and pulled his phone from his pocket, she knew he got it. He didn’t look up at all but sent a message back to her, saying he’d handle it. She closed every program she had running on the side and worked on the backup because, as soon as the power went off, all kinds of systems started going off too.
“Wait until somebody visits Denny,” she said, her voice at a normal pitch.
Idiot stood off to the side. “He’ll be livid,” he said, with glee in his voice. “You just shut down his ovens.”
“I didn’t shut anything down,” she snapped.
“Yeah, says you,” Idiot said, laughing. “You’re the IT person. If you didn’t shut it down, who did?”
“How about Mother Nature?” she said. All the while, she kept checking on the power system, looking for the source of the problem, thankful for the generator power for essential operations. She found nothing on this level, but power was supplied to the levels below as well.
“One level down is fine,” she said. “Something tripped the breaker for up here. And the kitchen is fine,” she said, “so maybe Mother Nature wants us to have dinner after all.”
Everybody laughed and joked at that. The power did go off enough times in the main housing areas, and, as long as it wasn’t affecting the power sent to the drills, they didn’t think much about it. Two other men got up and left to go check.
That left her here with the three men in suits, plus Jonesy at his station next to hers, and Idiot, who sidled a little bit closer to the suits. She looked over to see the company man, Gregor, with Mason and Nelson, heads together. She looked over at Jonesy. “What do you think the company men are discussing?”
He shot them a hard look. “Whether we keep our jobs or not, most likely,” he muttered.
“Wow, is that even on the table?”
“A place like this? It’s always on the table,” he said. “We heard about a lot of heavy shuffles going on from the top all the way down.”
“Well, something like this makes everybody do a reevaluation too,” she said, “so I hope not for your sake.”
He looked at her in surprise and then realized. “Of course that’s not your issue is it?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that you’re on contract. Your job isn’t dependent on this.”
“Well, it’s not like I’ll have a job if, everywhere I go, disaster strikes,” she said.
“Good point,” he said, with a grin. “Has it ever happened before?”
“Has what ever happened before?” she asked, distracted by the data scrolling on her screen. She narrowed her gaze as she watched her hacker move through the system. If he was moving right now, was he on the rig? Or had he hacked in remotely?
“Have you ever been on a rig that basically self-destructed like this?”
“No,” she said in surprise. “Have you?”
He shook his head. “No, never.”
“Besides, it’s only one of the drills that’s permanently damaged,” she said. “We haven’t got further reports on the two others, have we?”
“Nope, not yet,” he said, “but it won’t be long before we know how bad this really is.”
*
Troy and Axel
were on the bottom level, working their way closer to the rendezvous spot, when the power went out. They both froze, then turned to look around, and Troy said, “Man-made or …”
“It’s hard to say. Like they said, they’re still getting issues from the original damage.”
“She was taking out the cameras, but now she doesn’t have any control over the cameras,” he said smoothly.
“You think somebody shut down the power in order to stop her from helping us?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised about anything at this point in time,” Troy said. “Absolutely nothing is what it seems around here.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Axel said. “Including us.”
They made their way along the far side. There was no way to know if the power would come back on, but Troy could see that the level above them was dark, yet the next level up had electricity; those lights reflected outward. “So we’re on the water level,” he said. “We have no power, but at least some of the levels above us do.”
“It could be random,” Axel said.
Troy shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”
Keeping a close eye and their weapons handy, they headed to the rendezvous position. There they found the second SEAL team. They smiled, helped the two men on board, and quickly secured their vessel in a nearby storage room.
“Rough trip?” Troy asked Dane, who’d headed the underwater trip.
“Just slightly,” Dane said. “Rough waters and it’ll only get worse.” He studied Troy. “You guys got any intel for us?”
“Yeah, but good luck figuring it out. All we’ve got is a lot of questions and mass confusion.” Troy quickly filled them in on it all. “Now nobody is to know you guys are here. Currently this level has no power, but the next level up does. We’re not sure if that was deliberate or a random outage.”
“We’ve got the blueprints,” Dane said.
Troy nodded. “Then you know what to do. We’ve got a lot of dead bodies right now.”
“Good to know,” he said. “What we want to do first is take a look at the accident site and see what we can come up with.”
“Go for it,” Troy said. “Particularly right now while we’ve got power issues. Should the power come back on, we can shut down the cameras on the side where we’ll be,” he said.
Very quickly the four of them were at the accident scene. Dane had brought France, a heavy-duty mechanic with Red SEALs credentials, someone who’d trained on oil rigs, so he knew his stuff.
France studied the area, bending to inspect the explosion site and the damage to the various metals, spending at least an hour. Troy looked at his watch and turned to Axel, who just shrugged. When France was done, they gathered to hear his assessment.
“These explosions were definitely man-made,” he said. “It wasn’t weakness in the steel. It wasn’t pressure from the inside of that drill,” he said. “This was man-made, and that’s a real shitter.”
“Billions of dollars of damage and all these lives lost,” Dane said.
“I know,” Troy said. “Keep up covert security on this level for now. We’ll run food and coffee down as we can.”
“We brought supplies,” France said. “You guys better go back before you’re missed.”
“Will do.” Troy headed up to the level above. With Axel at his side, he said, “I want to make a thorough inspection of every room. No power is on here, so, in theory, nobody should be here.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Troy said. “I can only hope I recognize it when I see it.”
Moving slowly and methodically, they went through every locker and every bunk room, looking for something. When they came back around to where all the spare life jackets and boats were, he realized that the crew had set up a simple system. They could hook up to the outside hoist and slip personnel and boats off to the side and out into the water without any problem.
He looked at that and nodded. “That’s a really easy way to get these out there.”
“This setup can’t even be one level lower—where we came in,” Axel said. “Too much Mother Nature battering it up down there.”
“Exactly. And those hoists allow you to move heavy weights.”
“That they do.” He walked closer to one with a big winch on it. “I wonder if that’s what they were planning for the bodies.”
“I don’t think anybody needs to do anything. They can just drop them overboard at various places, no winch required.”
“But they don’t want any of them coming back,” he said. “That’s a consideration too.”
The two men looked at each other. Troy took several photographs in the dark, trying hard to get something that would give them clarity, but, even with Axel using a flashlight, it wasn’t that easy. And they continued to search.
By the time they were done, Troy still had that sense of looking for something and not finding it. He shrugged. “I don’t know what’s still bugging me, Axel,” he said, “but something is.”
“Well, we’re not quite done here,” he said.
“I know. I just feel like something’s wrong.”
“You want to check another place?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I want to go to the bodies.”
“Let’s go then. We should probably check on them anyway.”
They headed back to the medical bay and into the cooler in the morgue. There were the seven bodies they had left.
“For some reason,” he said, “I was half expecting them not to be here.”
“Where were you thinking they would be?”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
They walked around to one of the freezers here to confirm Lionel’s body remained there as well. As they opened it up, Chucky came bolting out from inside, his body white and the look on his face sheer panic. Troy grabbed him and shook him hard. “What the hell were you doing in there?”
He shook his head and tried to talk, but his teeth chattered too badly to speak at first.
“Where’s Winslow?” Axel asked. He stepped inside the freezer, using his flashlight, but found no Winslow.
“I don’t … know,” Chucky said. “I don’t even know … what I was doing in there,” he said, looking around. “Denny asked me to get something.”
“From down here?”
“Well, I thought so,” Chucky said, looking puzzled. “He said four freezers were here. But they’re all at different temperatures, so one’s used more as a cooler.” Chucky was barely making sense, and it was obvious that he was rattled.
“So how did you get locked in there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I had to go in with my flashlight because it’s so dark, but the door shut behind me. My phone’s battery is almost dead, so I couldn’t even see. I was pounding on the door, pounding and pounding.” He held up his hands, where the pads looked like hamburger meat. He wrapped his hands under his armpits.
“Weren’t you supposed to be checking on why the power is out?” Axel asked suspiciously.
“I was, yes. Then Winslow and I went to check with Denny. He’s got power, but he was worried about the power being off here.”
“It’s so cold that I don’t think the freezers will be an issue,” Troy said.
“That’s what I told him, but he wouldn’t listen. When Denny gets on a roll like that, you can’t even talk to him.”
“So then you came down here?”
“Yes,” he said. “I came down here, and, next thing I know, I’m locked inside.”
“Interesting. And what about Winslow? Did he come with you?”
“No,” he said. “He was drinking coffee and visiting.”
“Interesting,” Troy said again.
“In what way?” he asked aggressively. “It’s not like Winslow doesn’t deserve to have a break.”
“Absolutely,” Troy replied. “But, at the same time, you two never seem to be apart.”
“We are a lot,” he said, defendi
ng his relationship. “However, we’ve been buddies for a lifetime.”
“Yeah, I see that,” he said. “Now, will you be okay? Do you need medical treatment?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, wrapping his arms around himself.
“Do we need to check for whatever it is that Denny was worried about?” Axel asked.
Chucky shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s all okay. Jesus, it’s cold in there.”
“Of course it is,” he said, “with or without the power.”
“But something is wrong in this place right now,” Chucky said. “I don’t know if it’s just bad voodoo or what. But I can’t wait to get the hell off this rig.”
Troy looked at Axel. The thing is, he almost agreed with Chucky. Something was seriously wrong here.
But he doubted the supernatural had anything to do with it.
Chapter 6
Back at her desk, Berkley struggled to work her way through the power issues. When the door burst open, she looked up, and Chucky came in. She frowned. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He shot her an ugly look. “You could say that,” he said. “I was checking on the freezers downstairs for Denny,” he announced.
She caught her breath in the back of her throat because, of course, that’s where Lionel was.
He stared all around the room, his eyes still wild. “Then the door shut, locking me in the damn freezer.”
Jonesy bolted to his feet. “What?”
Chucky nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought. I damn-near busted my hands, yelling and pounding on it, to get myself out of there,” he said. “The two new guys heard me.”
“What were they doing down there?” Idiot asked in a snide tone.
“You know what? I didn’t even give a shit about asking. I was too damn glad to get out.” Chucky stopped and looked at him, then shrugged. “I’ll go see if there’s any food yet or at least some hot coffee. I ain’t coming back to this godforsaken place. At this rate,” he said, “I’ll ask for a transfer out of here permanently.” And, with that, he turned, and he left again.
