Black Gold

by Paul Kenyon

  "Are you, darling?"

  He shrugged. "We get about two barrels of salt water for every barrel of oil. Naturally a little oil goes back into the sea. But we try to keep it as clean as possible."

  "You're an unscrupulous blackguard," she laughed. "I'm glad there's someone to keep you clean."

  "They're a bloody nuisance," he growled. "They've been getting in the way of the supply boats, and they've been getting themselves into trouble by sailing too close. We've wasted hundreds of man-hours keeping the damned fools from drowning themselves."

  The helicopter pilot turned around again. "I'm going to make another try, Lord Cavendish. Hold on."

  The helicopter swooped around on another approach. The wind sock near the landing deck seemed to be holding fairly steady. They began an angled descent toward the big painted target on the deck.

  "You can get a good look from here," Tony yelled. "This is the latest type of semisubmersible rig. Cost me a bloody fortune. See those great big steel legs holding it out of the water? They're resting on a pair of giant pontoons about sixty feet under the surface. There are anchors holding the whole thing to the bottom."

  "How deep is the bottom?"

  "Almost a thousand feet at this point," he said. "Very tricky to drill at that depth."

  "How far down is the drill bit now?"

  "About a half-mile. We're near our limit. Another hundred feet or so, and we estimate that we'll break through into the main oil dome."

  She turned to him, a look of concern on her face. "Darling, you did tell them to stop the drill, as I asked?"

  "Yes, I radioed on ahead to hold everything until we got there." He frowned at her. "Penny, you're costing me a great deal of money. I hope all this is really necessary."

  "I told you, darling, Sir Angus has a confederate aboard your ng. He's supposed to start the drill up at the time the submarine is at the bottom, feeding the bacteria down the shaft." She patted his arm. "Don't worry, Tony, love, as soon as this is over, you can start drilling again."

  "Who the hell can the confederate be? All my men are screened. I'd vouch for any of them."

  Tony couldn't have done a very good job of screening, she thought. Callum had slipped by. And so had Dan Wharton.

  There was another splatter of raindrops against the bubble. The helicopter touched down just in time. A half-dozen men in construction helmets rushed out to tie it down.

  The Baroness climbed down an iron ladder to the companionway leading to the main deck. The platform looked even bigger now that she was on it. It was a couple of city blocks in extent. She peered over the rail to the deck below. The giant hook of a crane dangled over the edge, painted yellow for visibility so that it looked like an enormous curved banana, big enough for four people to sit comfortably in its crook.

  "Goddamn it!" Tony said. "I've told them a thousand times to keep those cables retracted when the crane's not in use!" He turned to Penelope. "An ocean platform is a dangerous place. We lost a man last week when a mudding hose got loose and knocked him overboard. In a high wind that hook could kill somebody. Fall from this height and you're dead. Hitting the water's like landing on cement."

  A gust of water droplets hit her in the face. They had a salt taste. She drew the heavy cardigan more closely around her. Under it she was wearing a warm turtleneck, stretch pants, and crepe-soled shoes with heavy socks.

  "Cold cement, I'd say," she shivered.

  "Come with me to the office. I'll give you a spot of brandy."

  "First I want to see the control board for the drill string."

  He looked at her in admiration. "You're a tenacious one. Very well, come this way."

  He led her along a deck stacked with a vertical forest of drill shaft, thousands of feet of it that would have to be fitted section by section to the string. The hard-bitten oil roughnecks stared at her as she passed. A couple of them whistled.

  "I'll have them reprimanded," Tony said.

  "I enjoyed it, darling. Don't be jealous."

  One of the men who had whistled had been Wharton. He looked big and capable in his construction clothes. The name on his helmet read "Briggs."

  The control board was in a large booth on the lower level. A sunburned man in a windbreaker looked up as they entered.

  "Any trouble, Chester?" Tony said.

  "Not a bit, Lord Cavendish." Chester seemed puzzled by the question. "We shouldn't have shut down the drill, though. We're only a few feet from breakthrough, judging by the stuff we're bringing up."

  "I'll explain later," Tony said. "I'll tell you when we can start up again. We won't want to lose any more time. Is the next section of shaft in position?"

  "Right. All I have to do is pull the switch."

  He gestured at a big circuit breaker in the "off" position.

  The Baroness took a little steel alloy chain from her cardigan pocket and wrapped it around the handle of the switch, passing it through the fork and attaching it to the console rail. She snapped a little lock in place and pocketed the key. Chester stared at her, his eyes wide with surprise.

  "What did you do that for?" Tony said.

  "We can't take any chances, can we?" she said. "Sir Angus' accomplice could be anyone. Even Chester." She paused. "Even you."

  He laughed. "Penny, you're a wonder. Come on, let's have that brandy."

  They were sitting in his office, sipping a fine cognac, when the door burst open. A man in work clothes stumbled in, propelled by a push in the back. Wharton came in behind him, a .45-automatic in his hand.

  "Here's your man," Wharton said. "His name's Campbell. I've been watching him for a couple of days now. He's no oil roughneck. He's been snooping around, acting suspiciously. I caught him just now in the control booth. He sneaked in just as soon as the two of you left. I gave him a few minutes and followed. He knocked out the engineer, Chester. The chain on the drill switch was just about sawed through. I found this."

  He tossed a hacksaw on Tony's desk.

  "One of your chaps?" Tony said, nodding at Wharton.

  "One of my chaps," the Baroness said.

  "Amazing!" Tony laughed. "Well, I'm glad he got past my hiring foreman."

  "Listen to me…" Campbell said. He was a big, tough-looking man with a jaw like granite.

  "I'll be very interested in listening to you," the Baroness said. "You knocked out Chester, did you?"

  The man scowled. "I'm not saying anything," he said.

  Tony got up. "I'd better see to Chester. I'll be back as soon as I can, and we can have a go at questioning this chap. I'm afraid we won't be able to get the authorities down here until the weather lets up. We're in for a storm."

  He got up and left. A gust of rain showered in before he closed the door behind him. The Baroness turned to Campbell.

  "Sir Angus is finished," she said. "Castle Bane's been cleaned out, and Biotikum UberGesellschaft's had its back broken. Sir Angus can't do anything without help from the rig. So why don't you talk?"

  "I don't know any Sir Angus," Campbell said. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  Wharton sighed. "You want me to make him talk?"

  Penelope said, "It isn't necessary. We'll just hold him till we can get him ashore."

  Campbell seemed to hesitate. Then he said, "All right. My cover's blown, anyway. I'd better tell you, so you can keep an eye on Chester after he comes around."

  The Baroness leaned forward. "Tell me what?"

  "I'm from MI5. I was working with Fenshaw. We were about out of leads, so we put a man on board every oil rig in the British sector. I drew the Caledonian rig." He frowned. "There was nothing to go on, hut Fenshaw was murdered in the Caledonian office. We had to assume that there might be some connection." Abruptly, he grinned and turned toward Wharton. "Actually, I was keeping an eye on you. You didn't seem quite the innocent roughneck yourself."

  "What's this about Chester?" the Baroness said.

  "I was listening outside the control booth," Campbell said. "I heard wh
at you said about the switch. I went in and found Chester sawing away at the chain with that hacksaw. I tapped him. You won't have to worry about him for a couple of hours, at least."

  They all heard it then — a clanking sound of enormous machinery. The floor vibrated beneath their feet.

  "The drill," Wharton said. "Somebody's activated the drill!"

  They looked at one another. "Cavendish!" Campbell said.

  The Baroness was the first out of the door. She charged down the deck, bowling over startled roughnecks, Wharton and Campbell hard behind her.

  When she got to the control booth, Chester was still slumped on the floor, unconscious. The chain was almost sawed through, but the switch was still in the "off" position.

  "He must have had a bypass circuit somewhere," Wharton said. "It'll take us hours to find it, if we can find it at all. Probably isn't even here in the booth."

  "Dan," the Baroness said urgently, "you've been working on this rig. How long before that drill bit goes through?"

  "I don't know. Half-hour, maybe. But, Baroness, first he's got to wrestle another section of shaft onto the string. I saw it in position on the derrick this morning."

  "Come on!" the Baroness yelled.

  It took them only a few minutes to get topside. It was raining hard. Visibility was bad. But it was good enough for them to see the little figure at the top of the tower, lowering a fifty-foot section of pipe by a hand hoist.

  They pounded for the base of the tower. Wharton huffed, "We can't climb up there in time to stop him. It'll only take him a couple of minutes to get that in place. Once he does, there's no way to stop the drill from going down the length of the section."

  She peered around through the gloom and mist. Something like a giant banana seemed to be floating in midair, about ten feet past the edge of the railing. It was the yellow hook of the crane.

  "Dan!" she yelled above the howling wind. "Can you operate that?"

  "Yes…" he began. Then he understood what she was getting at. "Baroness, it's suicide in this weather. And he probably has a gun. You'd be a sitting duck."

  "Do it!" she snapped.

  Wharton disappeared without a word. He'd have followed her to hell. Or sent her there, if she'd ordered him to. Campbell stood there, looking at her in wonder.

  She climbed up on the railing, balancing herself like a cat. The wind tried to blow her off, and the rain tried to make her slip, but she stood swaying, estimating distance. She made a great leap and caught the giant banana. She wrapped her arms and legs around it, hanging on for dear life. It swayed back and forth alarmingly. Then it started to rise.

  She got on top of it, straddling it. It was a little like riding a carousel horse, with the curve of the hook under her bottom and her arms hugging the neck of it. The cable passing through the eye of the hook was as thick around as a telephone pole.

  She rose through a gray mist, feeling the spray in her face, listening to the dull pounding — the protesting metallic groans — of the drill. She could see the shaft through the metal fretwork of the derrick as the hook lifted her up, a long shimmering pipe that had pierced the living planet to a depth of a half-mile or more, and that was shoving its way deeper as she watched. The shimmer was due to vibration as the drill string tried to tear itself to pieces. She could feel it, making the cable shiver with it as she soared upward.

  She looked at the figure above her, struggling with the winch to position a final length of shaft. It was Tony, all right. He hadn't noticed her yet.

  There! She was almost level with him. Wharton was turning the crane, bringing her as close as he could. She kicked out with her legs as if she were on a playground swing. The hook swayed in a pendulum arc. She gathered herself for a leap.

  She was at the far end of a swing when Tony turned around and saw her. His face tightened. His hand reached under his jacket and came out with a gun.

  "Don't try it, Penny," he said.

  She stayed on the hook, still swinging. "You've been working with Sir Angus all along, haven't you?" she said.

  "Not all along," he said. "I came in with him a couple of months ago. The Caledonian rig is the key to infecting the main oil-bearing strata in the North Sea. Angus and his German friends dealt me in."

  "Why, Tony, why?"

  His handsome face looked ravaged. She almost felt sorry for him. "My financial position's shaky. It's been shaky for a long time. I was about to lose control of Caledonian. I'm not cut out for a life of poverty, Penny. Much better to go along with SPOILER. I get a share of the take — the entire world's oil revenues. And immunity. We were going to buy a small country somewhere."

  "It's over, Tony. You must know that."

  "I don't think so," he said slowly. "Sir Angus is down there right now. Take a look."

  She glanced downward. She had to peer through a couple of hundred feet of mist, but she could make out the dark torpedo shape just under the surface, just for a moment. Then it was gone.

  "SPOILER'S still in business," Tony went on, "only with fewer partners."

  "You can't make it work, Tony. Not without the BUG organization."

  "Angus and I can still do a lot of damage. Britain's about to lose all its oil. That'll keep the Norwegians in line. And the Arabs will be scared out of their wits. We'll work on them next."

  "Stop it, Tony!"

  He glanced at the whirring shaft. "Nothing can stop it now," he said.

  She kept kicking out her legs, like a child on a swing. "It was you who had Clive Fenshaw killed, wasn't it?"

  "If you want to know, yes. He was on to me. I left some bait in my files and sent MacCaig after him."

  "Are you going to kill me, too?"

  "There's no other way, is there, love?" He raised the pistol.

  She stood up in the curve of the yellow hook. Tony tracked her with the pistol, his finger curling around the trigger. The hook was carrying her outward, over the water. He was going to wait until it bore her closer.

  Abruptly she kicked both legs with all her strength.

  She was flying out, out, in an incredible swan dive. The great yellow hook swung, spinning wildly, toward Tony.

  He snapped off two quick shots at her, but in that crucial moment she was eclipsed by the hook. The bullets spanged off the crescent of metal. And then it was on him, a half-ton of solid metal, swinging with irresistible inertia.

  Down below, in the crane cab, Dan Wharton looked up and saw two things. The first was the black-clad figure of the Baroness, tiny against the dove-gray sky, hurtling downward like a stone toward the killer sea below. The second was the toy-doll shape of Tony Cavendish as the bright yellow hook crashed into him, sending him stumbling backward, knocking him off the catwalk into the spinning shaft at the core of the derrick's steel framework.

  Incredibly, the little figure managed to catch hold of the vibrating shaft and hang on. It shook him like a terrier with a rat, and he slid down, down the hundred-foot pipe, as blurred to the eye as a twanged violin string. Wharton had a crazy glimpse of an indistinct face as Tony came level with his eyes, and then Tony's entire bulk was being squeezed through the narrow space around the drill collar. The rotating machinery strained him like mashed vegetables and spit what was left of him down the drill string into the ocean.

  Wharton was out of the crane cab and at the rail just in time to hear a splash far below. The fog closed in, thick and milky. There was no way of telling what had happened to the Baroness.

  Chapter 16

  Strong hands pulled her out of the water. She heard Inga's voice say, "Help me, will you?" Then there were more hands and she was lying on a wooden deck that pitched and heaved in the rough sea.

  She opened her eyes and blinked away the salt water. She was surrounded by a lot of scruffy-looking young people wearing faded denim and army fatigues. An emaciated youth with a scraggly black beard said, "Hey, she's still alive."

  She struggled to sit up.

  "Are you all right?" Inga said.

  T
he Baroness probed at her ribs, felt along her bones. Nothing was broken. "Just got the wind knocked out of me," she said.

  "That was some dive," said a small, dark girl in a man's sweatshirt and ragged denim shorts. "You almost hit the deck of the boat."

  A blonde girl with a nursing baby said, "Are you one of Them?" She glanced belligerently at the towering shape of the Caledonian rig, a shadowy silhouette in the fog.

  "Sir Angus is here," the Baroness said. "He's on his way to the bottom."

  "I'll get the gear," Inga said, and turned to go.

  The bearded youth squinted suspiciously. "Hey," he said to Inga, "do you know her?"

  "I'll tell you all about it later," Inga said, pushing past him to the cabin. She came back with a heavy, bulging rucksack.

  The Baroness was already stripping off her wet clothes. The little crowd of environmentalists stood around, looking bewildered. The girl with the nursing baby gave a look of pure envy as the Baroness' magnificent breasts came free of the bra.

  She stood naked on the pitching deck and reached impatiently for the rubber wet suit that Inga was holding out to her. It stretched over her body like a second skin. She put on the flippers, then strapped the two tiny tanks of supercompressed air to her back.

  "They'll give you a half-hour," Inga said.

  Penelope grimaced. "That'll do," she said. "In a half-hour I'll either be successful or I'll be dead."

  Inga handed her the limpet mines. Duke's eyes goggled when he saw them. "Man, that's heavy stuff!" he said. "You mean you've had bombs aboard all this time?"

  Inga ignored him. "You don't want to be too close when these go off," she said.

  "Let me have the spear gun, too."

  Inga looked puzzled. "What good is a spear gun against a submarine?"

  "You never can tell."

  The Baroness stepped to the rail. The water was the color of mud. There were thick, oily swells. The Crombie Beastie wasn't visible.

  She sat perched on the rail, adjusting her regulator and fitting the mask in place. The limpet mines were slung in a shoulder bag, and the spear gun was in her hand.

  The fellow with the beard stepped forward and demanded, "What's going on?"