by Dale Mayer
She shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”
He checked the second one, but it was locked. He popped the lock in seconds and stepped in. “This should be one of the managing supervisor’s room,” she said.
He tossed the entire room within seconds, checking under the mattresses, through each layer of the sheets, and then went to the closet and pulled out personal gear, looking for anything that might show some evidence that he’d been involved in anything criminal. They should have done that first when they realized who the bodies were.
With her help, they found his cell phone tucked inside his pillow, among the padding there.
“Why would his cell phone be here?” he asked out loud.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Normally you would think it would be in his pocket.”
“But he didn’t have it on him, so that meant he was here, maybe in his room, when it happened.” He pulled out the cell phone and said, “And it’s not locked.” He quickly checked through it.
“We can also log in to his online account,” she said, “but I highly doubt he would do anything company-wise.”
“No, most of the time people save that stuff in the cloud.” As he went through the emails, he found a folder and opened it. And then he sucked in his breath. He quickly scrolled the photo up slightly.
“Berkley, do you recognize her?”
Berkley stepped over and nodded. “It’s one of the first two women who were raped.”
He let her see the rest of the picture, which showed the woman unconscious on the ground, completely nude, obviously beaten, and male hands were on her.
She immediately clamped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
He nodded. “We need to get this to the authorities.”
“This makes it look like somebody was getting revenge by sharing these photos,” she said. She shook her head. “This guy is a complete asshole, but these women haven’t been here for weeks if not months now.”
“Well, we’ll have to check the timelines to see who was here during the attacks.”
“Well, we need to find out what their alibis are for sure,” she agreed. As he went through the pictures, she winced to see the women in various positions. “At least in this case, she’s unconscious,” she said.
He scanned through them and then stopped. “What about this woman?”
She looked at it and said, “That’s the second woman.”
He nodded and went through them, and finally he said, “I’m not seeing a third woman.”
She could feel a sense of relief inside. “I hope not,” she said. “I think it would absolutely finish Tabitha to think there were photos of her too. She didn’t say anything about being photographed at the time though.”
“I doubt if she knew,” he said. “Remember? She was blindfolded. And these two weren’t, which is interesting.”
“That was probably an added development,” she said caustically.
He slipped the phone into his pocket and quickly searched the rest of the room. But he didn’t find anything. He said, “So one of the managers’ possessions have been searched, and one manager’s room had been gutted, so what else have you got for me?”
She noted that one of the managers had his room nearby but that the doc’s room was coming up next.
Troy nodded. “Let’s check the doc’s room next, then the other guy’s.”
They went to the doctor’s personal quarters. It was larger than the others, but, even though they went from top to bottom, there didn’t appear to be anything to see.
“What about his phone,” she wondered.
“I wonder if it’s still on him,” he said. “You know what? If you find a body—like me, for instance—you’ll find my phone on me,” he said.
She groaned. “I really don’t want to go back down there.”
“What room was the final managing supervisor in?”
She nodded and went back to her database. “I just have his initial assigned room. He had asked for a room reassignment, but it doesn’t say what room he was given.”
They stepped out into the hallway, and Troy checked the room directly across the hall. It was full of gear. “Do you know whose room this is?”
She checked the roster. “It says it’s supposed to be empty.”
“What do you want to bet that this was a manager’s lair? It’s a decent size too.” He quickly went through the stuff and found some personal belongings for a Doug Driscoll.
She nodded. “That is his room then.”
But nothing incriminating was found.
*
Troy led the way back down to the medical clinic.
“Do you really think we’ll find anything here?” she asked, dreading the task ahead.
“Where do you hide stuff if you don’t want somebody to know what it is?”
She looked at him in surprise. “I can’t think of anything I’ve tried to hide.”
He burst out laughing. “That’s because you’ve led a blameless life,” he said with a snicker.
She punched him lightly in the shoulder. “That sounded almost like a criticism,” she said.
“Not at all,” he said with a gentle smile. “Greater to have led your best life than to have led a bad one and then fix it now.”
“I wonder how many bad people try to fix it,” she murmured. She hated the darkness now that it was jet-black outside as well. The angry sea raged outside, with spray coming up every time they had to go outside a door and go back down again.
She stopped and stared at the whitecaps lighting up the world around them. “There’s such savagery to Mother Nature at times.”
He wrapped an arm around her and tucked her up close as she shivered.
“Maybe it’s the water-loving SEAL in me, but I don’t see this as savagery,” he said calmly. “But she never really gives us a chance to ignore that she is truly all-powerful,” he said. “We’re such small ponds in her world, and yet we think we’re the ones who are so powerful.”
“Until there’s a hurricane or an earthquake or rough seas like this,” she said, motioning out there. “Then, just like that, complete devastation in seconds, if she chooses.”
“Unfortunately man doesn’t need any help with destruction,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get you back inside again.”
They moved inside down another level to the clinic.
“There’s an eerie feeling to this place now,” she said. “I won’t be at all sad to leave it.”
“Will you come back?”
“Well, it’s not like I really have a choice in some cases,” she said. “It depends on what ends up happening with the company, I suppose. But again, I’m a contractor, and my company sends me all over the place.”
“How much are you gone in a regular week?”
“I usually do a couple trips a month,” she said. “Trips that can last from a couple of days and sometimes a week or two. Depends on how big the problem is. Last year we were short-staffed, so I did a fair bit of traveling, but we’ve hired new staff since. So, with any luck, some of that traveling will calm down now.”
“Good,” he said. “A little hard to date while you’re always out of the country.”
She stopped in her tracks just in time to see him turn and flash her a bright grin.
“That is, if you want to go on a date, when we get out of here and back to some normalcy.”
She smiled. “I’d love that,” she said warmly. “As long as whatever is going on between us isn’t a result of this nightmare.”
“Not even close.” He smiled. “But Mason’s group has got such a dating thing going on where I may have been keeping my guard up a little.”
She laughed out loud. “You’ve heard about that, huh?”
“Heard it and seen it in action,” he said, again with that big grin. He smiled as he watched her navigate the walkway beside him. “You do seem quite comfortable here though.”
“I’ve been here enough,” she
admitted. She stepped in front and led the way to the clinic. As he walked, he kept a careful eye on their surroundings. There was an eeriness, an echoing emptiness to the place, but, at the same time, he knew that more people were here than anyone understood. As they stepped into the clinic, they found Mason and Nelson in there.
She gasped. “What’s the matter?” she cried out.
“Nothing,” Mason assured her. He looked back at Troy. “Why are you guys down here?”
“We just turned over the four dead managers’ rooms to see if anything incriminating turned up, indicating why they were killed,” Troy said. He pulled out the manager’s phone he had found and lifted it up so they could see a couple of the photos.
Nelson whistled. “Now that’s pretty ugly.” He looked back at the body bags in the cooler. “Are you thinking all four of these men might have had something to do with the rapes? All managing supervisors? Because, if that’s the case, that gives us a completely different angle here.”
“Yet,” Troy said, “what are the chances of several different serious crimes happening on the rig, all completely unrelated? Sabotage and rapes. And then murders,” he added.
“And the hacking,” she said.
There was silence in the clinic for several moments as everybody contemplated that line of thought, and then Mason gave a decisive shake of his head. “I don’t buy it,” he said. “Maybe one of these things is unrelated, but, in my book, the chance of them being unrelated is pretty minuscule. I’d say they are all connected.”
Troy was glad to hear that. “That’s my take on it too,” he said, as he looked from Nelson to Mason. “Where’s Gregor?”
“He’s gone to bed,” Mason said. “We would go too, but I wanted to come down and take a look at the bodies myself.”
“And that’s why we came down as well, to check their pockets,” Troy said, “because we couldn’t find any personal information, like phones or wallets in their rooms. Other than this one with the pictures.”
At that, the three men turned to the bodies on the drawers in the makeshift morgue and quickly checked. “No phones, no wallets,” Nelson straightened.
“So what happened? Somebody collected them?” Troy asked.
“It’s possible,” replied Nelson.
“Well, they would have taken this one if they could have found it, but it was tucked inside his pillow.”
“Inside his pillow? That’s different.”
Troy nodded.
“So maybe it’s a private phone and not the company phone that all these guys should have had here. Especially at this level,” Nelson speculated.
“I didn’t think of that,” Troy said, frowning. “But we do have these crimes on his phone, so he was there at the time.”
“But it doesn’t have any photos of Tabitha,” she said to Mason.
“At least not that we’ve found yet,” Troy corrected her. “It could be those photos are still being processed somewhere else, like maybe somebody else took them and emailed them. Could be that they’re being sent a link to look at online, and he hasn’t downloaded them yet.”
She winced at that. “That’s just lovely, isn’t it? So that she can be raped over and over and over again.”
Mason nodded soberly. “I’m sorry for your friend,” he said gently. “Obviously something will need to be done about that. But we also need to know what’s going on with the sabotage. You’re the one who brought us in here. What exactly did you see that had you thinking something was wrong?”
“Lots of things,” she said bluntly. “The explosion for one. It didn’t sound like a drill mishap. It sounded like a blast going off.”
“Well, the condition of the metal certainly seems consistent with that idea,” Troy said. “But you also didn’t trust the men you’d been left behind with, is that correct?”
“I didn’t trust most of them,” she admitted. “But, when I sent out that initial message, we were still all trying to get off. At that point in time, my boss hadn’t yet asked me if I was okay to stay behind with the skeleton crew and to monitor the computer systems until the engineers and the repair crew came in.”
“Why did you stay?” Nelson asked.
She frowned, then shrugged. “I don’t have a good response for that. Except that I felt like I needed to get answers while it was still possible.”
“Answers for Tabitha or answers about the sabotage?”
“All of it,” she said simply. “I’d put out a call to you guys, so I felt responsible, you know? Like I couldn’t just take off and dump the whole thing on you.”
“Most people would have,” Troy said. He studied her face as she looked up at him, gave him a small quirk of her lips.
“I know, but that’s not me.”
He smiled, really appreciating who she was. The fact that she had made a bold move and had done something in the face of an emergency, then stuck around to see if she could help, said an awful lot about her character.
She looked around and said, “I still don’t understand where Lionel is,” she said. “And what about everybody else? Are they all accounted for?”
“Yes, the pilot is staying with our other two guys,” Mason said, “and they’re covering sentry duty across the whole platform. We’re still looking for Daniel.”
“Making sure there are no more attempts at sabotage?” she asked. “Daniel’s disappearance is disconcerting. I figured he was finally catching up on some sleep or grieving for his brother. It’s not like him to disappear like this. But then there’s not much he can do and he’s got a lot to deal with right now so avoiding us almost makes sense.”
He nodded.
“That’s a lot of area to cover, with just the two of them, and trying to stay in the shadows too,” she noted.
Just then a huge blast sounded, crashing into this area, and they were all picked up off their feet and thrown across the room.
Chapter 12
Berkley sat up, groggy and disoriented, only to see Troy leaning over her, his hands reaching down, helping her to her feet. She gave him a shaken look. “What was that?” she cried out.
“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I want you to stay here though.”
She glanced around the room and found the dead bodies had been forcefully ejected from their drawers and were now on the floor with her and shook her head. “Oh, hell no.”
He gave her a frustrated look and said, “I don’t want you coming into the blast zone.”
She stared at him. “Blast zone?”
He nodded. “We’re pretty sure that was probably more C-4 explosions happening.”
“Then let’s go,” she said. He hesitated. She nodded and said, “I get that you want to keep me safe, but that’s not the point right now. We need all hands to see if anybody else is injured too.”
Nodding, he relented, and they headed off after Mason and Nelson. When they got to the main blast area, part of the platform was damaged, the steel twisted and torn to the side. Mason’s team stood in a circle, staring at the area.
“How much damage did it do?” Troy asked Mason.
“France’s initial assessment shows structural damage to the rig and less to the drills and the operational equipment this time. Our skeleton crew is running more analyses on the stability and the safety of the rig as we speak,” Mason said. “Two field inspectors for the company are supposed to be coming in ASAP. It’s the storm stopping them from being here right now. The initial report says no one has been seriously hurt though, and the blast impact didn’t hit the actual operations of two of the main drills on the rig,” he said.
Just then one of their men, supposedly in hiding, joined him.
“I found C-4 along the rig earlier,” France said, pointing where the wall was still intact. “We’d been through here once, and there was nothing. Once I realized that somebody had gotten in here to plant this C-4, I called Dane to help search this whole area again, and I had just headed back to meet him when it blew.” Dane approached from t
he shadows and stood by France.
“And, if you hadn’t headed back to meet him,” Mason said, his voice rigid with anger, “you’d have been ripped apart in this.”
“Do we know for sure that nobody else has been injured or has been tossed into the ocean?” Troy asked. He walked over to the side, testing the metal as he went. Everything appeared to be solid, from what he could see. Nobody was visible in the waters below.
Axel appeared here suddenly as well. “I don’t know how many others saw Dane and France,” he said, “but, if they need to be kept hidden, we need to keep our numbers down out here.” With that, Dane and France disappeared. Axel stood here, staring at the platform, and swore. “So France did his checks, then somebody came back and planted the C-4, obviously knowing that France had been here. Then France spots the one C-4, disengages it, and goes to call Dane for somebody else to give him a hand with the full sweep. And that’s when another C-4 rips?”
“Exactly,” Troy said. “Now we must search the rest of the platform, especially the area around that one working drill. I don’t know how much C-4 the saboteur may have, but this is a little ridiculous.”
“We found a bunch, right?” Mason asked.
“Yeah, we did. A locker full of it. But we moved that,” Troy said, turning to look at Axel.
“That’s all still right where we put it,” Axel said. “I checked before I came here.”
“So, somebody has another stash,” Mason said. “Dammit.”
“How much was used here?” Troy asked.
“I’m not sure what size the pack was that they found,” Mason stated, “but we need to see it.”
With that, they headed inside and met up with Dane and France, who showed him the small pack of C-4. “This is the one that I took off the side, with these wires,” he said. “I didn’t give it another thought. I removed it immediately, but then, like I said, it’s a big area, and I couldn’t search it all without help.”
“Hey, it would have been much worse if that wall had blown too,” Mason said. “We might all be swimming in the ocean now. It was the right call.” Then he addressed all the men. “I suggest that a full sweep of this floor happen in groups of two,” he said. “One starts at the north end and heads south, while the other starts at the south. We’ll meet at this latest blast site.” Mason turned to his secret team. “Dane and France, take any level that’s dark and do your best to scour it without being spotted. Report back to me after you’ve done each level. Avoid the lit levels. We’ll handle those ourselves.” The two men left with a nod.
