Arctic Floor

by Mark Aitken

  ‘Sorry—about Roy ‘n’ all,’ Winter whispered as the engines raised their revs and the Challenger rolled forward. ‘I was laying low, thought Clearmont was perfect.’

  ‘What?’ hissed Gallen. ‘You knew you were being chased? And you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘It was hard to tell one crew from another there for a while.’

  Gallen groaned at the overhead locker. ‘I don’t believe this. How much?’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘How much?’ snapped Gallen, wanting to grab Winter by the throat.

  The Canadian gulped. ‘Twenty-eight mill.’

  The Challenger’s engines went to full pitch and the aircraft catapulted along the slushy runway and climbed into the night, bound for Kugaaruk. Gallen seethed while Winter chewed his bottom lip.

  Calming himself, Gallen looked across at Winter. ‘The Pentagon will put an officer under surveillance for fudging a report—but they’ll tap the family phones and wire the dog if there’s money missing, okay?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So, Kenny,’ said Gallen, ‘for twenty-eight million dollars, they’re gonna make us a lifelong project.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 56

  The Sikorsky’s loadmaster doled out good coffee and donuts as the helo got to its flight path. Gallen took two chocolate-iced donuts and asked for three sugars in his coffee. It was almost five-thirty am and if he was expected to perform at his peak, he needed to hit his system with a big dose of sugar.

  Leaning over Mike Ford—who held the Ariadne schematic on his lap—Gallen went through how he wanted things to work and ensured the new guy, Liam, was happy with the approach, since he would be spending three months on the bottom with the crew.

  The Ariadne was built like a huge steel crucifix, with each of the four arms housing a particular function: lodgings, bathrooms and kitchen in the long wing on the bottom; suit room, dive bell and docking bay in the starboard wing; stores, gas storage, oxygen scrubbers and maintenance workshop in the one opposite; and the control rooms in the forward-facing arm. Each of the shorter wings was a hundred feet long and the size and shape of a 737 fuselage. The dormitory wing was more than one hundred and fifty feet and could house more than a hundred people for months.

  On its underside was a mini power station that supplied not only all the power to keep the occupants alive but also enough to run the fourteen pumping stations that would eventually be running under and on the sea floor, pumping crude oil out of the wells, along the sea bed and onto land.

  The diving shifts would swim out of the pressure-lock in the suit room and do their maintenance or repair sweeps with the aid of the vast system of floodlights that would illuminate the infrastructure.

  It seemed to Gallen’s eyes like an expensive venture, but Florita had claimed it was going to halve the typical costs of retrieving crude in the Arctic. Most Arctic drilling projects were in the shallows and were built on gravel islands; the deeper sites relied on drilling ships but they had to shut down for half the year because of the seasonal ice.

  The Oasis site was deep, at almost one thousand feet, and by putting the pump function on the bottom there was no seasonal shut-down. Once the well was sunk and cased using a drilling ship during the ice-free summer, the site would be sustained by the Ariadne unless more wells needed to be sunk—at which point the ship would be brought back in during the summer months when the ice receded. And the most expensive part of any oceanic oil venture—the rig itself—would not be required. Florita had seemed most proud of that part. That’s where she claimed to be saving a hundred million dollars.

  ‘Sorry, Liam,’ said Gallen, ‘but I need one guy down there for the first three-month rotation. This is an Oasis property and if the captain needs help with these ArcticWatch people, then I need you right there.’

  ‘Got it, boss,’ said Tucker.

  ‘You’ll take a SIG sidearm,’ said Gallen, ‘with three clips. I’ve put a packet of flexi-cuffs in your bag and we have to find you a brig.’

  ‘Brig?’

  ‘Yeah, buddy, you’re the buffer,’ said Gallen, using Navy slang for the person on a ship who locks up the miscreants.

  ‘What about the suit room?’ said Ford, leaning over and putting a sticky finger on the blueprint.

  ‘There’s a lot of gear in there,’ said Gallen. ‘What’s in this compartment next door?’

  ‘That’s the boilers, is my guess,’ said the Aussie.

  ‘Boilers?’ said Tucker. ‘You mean for hot water? We’re not taking that many showers are we?’

  Ford laughed. ‘In the Arctic, they pump boiling water into the gap between internal and external dive suits. We look like sea lions, but it beats having to piss in your wettie.’

  ‘What’s this one?’ said Tucker, pointing at another compartment.

  ‘That’s an emergency diving lock and dock. If the main one ever gets damaged and you need to take people off, bring supplies on, you can switch to this one. They’re usually off-limits. The skipper has the only key.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Gallen. ‘That’s our brig.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 57

  The massive red-hulled vessels loomed out of the fog patches as the pale sun peeked over the horizon. The Sikorsky banked around the Oasis drilling ship—the Conquistador—and aimed for the helipad on the front of the Fanny Blankes-Koen, a twin-hull Dutch service vessel that had carried the Ariadne from the workshops in Rotterdam to its sea trials in Norway, and now to its operational resting place on the sea bed of the Beaufort Sea, in the area between Canada and the North Pole.

  Gallen followed the others across the helipad and into the warmth of the guest state rooms. Unpacking in the shared security quarters, he assigned the men different parts of the ship to recce before he joined the executives in Florita’s state room.

  As he entered the large suite, Gallen saw a group of men in blue woollen naval sweaters.

  ‘Gerry,’ said Aaron, jumping up and doing the introductions. ‘Meet Captain Wil Armens—captain of the Fanny Blankes-Koen.’

  Gallen shook a big dry hand.

  ‘Bjorn Hansen, commander of the ship-side operation of the Ariadne,’ continued Aaron, ‘the Ariadne’s seabed commander, Captain Sam Menzies, his chief engineer, John Negroponte, and his XO, Ben Letour.’

  Gallen shook and smiled, getting a closer look at Negroponte.

  ‘Black gang, right?’ said Gallen, referring to the nautical slang for the people who worked in the engine room of ships. He thought it was witty, the way it worked in with Negroponte’s name.

  Negroponte looked surprised; before he could say anything Gallen felt himself being directed towards the board table where Aaron had charts spread out. The operational aspect of dropping the Ariadne to the ocean floor had obviously been canvassed, judging by the checklists and other documents that sat among the schematics.

  ‘Ben,’ said Aaron, ‘Gerry is probably most concerned with who is on the Ariadne, and getting our CEO off her in a timely and safe fashion.’

  ‘Sure, Aaron,’ said Letour, who Gallen judged to be a French Canadian in his mid-forties, probably ex-Navy by the way he kept himself in shape. ‘We thought we’d use a service submersible.’

  ‘Which is a sub, right?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Yes, a mini submarine,’ said Letour. ‘It will eventually live on the ocean floor with the Ariadne, but we can wait for the media to put their cameras away and use it to take Madame Mendes from the dive.’

  ‘So, she doesn’t even get wet?’ said Gallen, warming to the plan. ‘I mean, we can do this without her having to get into a dry suit, swim to the surface?’

  Sam Menzies, a younger American, laughed. ‘That’s what you were worried about? Well, don’t.’

  ~ * ~

  The wind gathered strength from the west as Gallen sucked on his cigarette and turned so the icy breeze hit the back of his red arctic suit and his raised hood. Tucker put his hand out for a smoke and Gallen handed the packe
t and lighter rather than messing around trying to light up for the former Marine.

  ‘That’s one hell of a tin can,’ said Tucker, getting his smoke lit and nodding.

  Above them loomed the bulk of the Ariadne, its pale blue paint looking deathly cold in the sunlight. Men crawled over it in their insulated coveralls, checking the massive hoses that were connected to the top and working over every join, bolt and rivet on the huge structure that was going to support a small town on the sea bed for months at a time. Stevedores scale-lifted bagged cargo and pallets of plastic-wrapped boxes into the main lock, which was an open steel hole with a door swung back on its hinges, like a nose door on a cargo plane.

  From the main hatch on the top of the vessel, men took readings with black boxes the size of field radios and scribbled on their clipboards. Other men yelled into radios, while high above them the main crane of the Fanny Blankes-Koen, which was going to lift the Ariadne into the sea and lower it down, was being prepared to swing the dome-like steel door onto the open hole.

  The divers would come and go via a pressurised air lock on the underside of the Ariadne. This lock entered into the suit room and was large enough to dock two of the service submersibles that would be used on the sea floor.

  Gallen had spent the last ninety minutes walking every deck, passageway and companionway on the Fanny Blankes-Koen, looking for the source of his discomfort. There was something not right about Negroponte and Gallen had worked himself up about it. What was that look from the chief engineer when Gallen had said ‘black gang’? Was it surprise, confusion? Was he hesitating as he worked out the reference to his name? Or didn’t he know what a black gang was? It couldn’t be that, thought Gallen. Every maritime engineer knew what it was; even long after the steam era, the engine room sailors and officers still referred to their work as if it involved a lot of coal dust and shovels.

  Letour walked out of the vessel, giving the go-ahead wave to the crane operators. Beckoning for Gallen and Tucker, Letour ducked back into the vessel as the crane revved up and slowly swung the massive steel bell into place on its hinges.

  The inside of the Ariadne was warm and Gallen pushed back his hood and unzipped the arctic suit. The tour was fast: Letour’s main task was looming in just under an hour, when he took the world’s media through the vessel, and Gallen noted that the Canadian XO had shaved and splashed himself with Old Spice.

  Standing back, Gallen let Letour brief Tucker, whose concentration and attention to detail made Gallen relax slightly. The back-up air lock was a large internal steel hatchway bolted into the hatch like a bank vault door.

  ‘Shit,’ said Tucker, thumping on it. ‘No one’s getting through that once they’re locked up.’

  Letour smiled. ‘It’s designed to stop the ocean entering at three thousand pounds per square inch. It should stop an angry drunk.’

  Letour handed Tucker a red plastic swipe card. ‘That’s yours, but don’t lose it. It’s the only one.’

  Swiping it, Tucker waited for the red light to flash green and then turned the hatch wheel three hundred and sixty degrees. Pushing it open, they looked in at a plain steel chamber with another watertight hatch at the other end and an array of diving equipment, air bottles and suits along the wall.

  ‘Emergency lock,’ said Letour, anticipating Gallen’s question. ‘If the main one is damaged, this is how we hook up with our submersibles.’

  Pulling back, Gallen noticed another door in the passageway was opening. As they walked alongside it, the hatchway pulled back and the chief engineer, Negroponte, stepped out, his face flushed. Gallen noticed the hand checking and rechecking the hatchway even as the engineer faced Letour.

  Negroponte had changed into pale blue coveralls with his name on the right breast and he hurriedly rolled down his sleeves, covering what Gallen took to be a military tattoo on the inside of his right forearm. The eagle clutching the laurel leaves made the bottom part of it US Army, which surprised Gallen—he’d assumed US Navy. But he spotted something else as Negroponte covered the tatt. It was an insignia on the man’s arm. Gallen didn’t know it but decided he was going to find out all about it.

  They exchanged small talk for a couple of minutes, then Letour broke off as he checked his watch and Negroponte left them.

  ‘Shall we have a look in the engine room?’ said Gallen, moving to Negroponte’s hatchway. He wanted to have a good recce behind that door.

  ‘Can’t do that, Gerry,’ said Letour.

  ‘Can’t?’

  ‘It’s off-limits to me too,’ said the XO.

  ‘Off-limits?’ said Gallen. ‘But you run the joint.’

  ‘Sure I do, but Oasis has some proprietary technology down there and John is the only one with access.’

  ‘And if John gets sick or goes mad?’ said Gallen.

  ‘They land another engineer.’ Letour shrugged.

  ‘And you’re happy with this?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Not unhappy,’ said Letour. ‘Oasis want this guy to run the power, so that’s who we have. If he wants to shut himself off, hide away like a hermit, then that’s his business, so long as the lights are on, the air’s fresh and the water’s hot.’

  ~ * ~

  Having looked at Tucker’s quarters in the officers’ section, Gallen wandered out of the Ariadne and rezipped his arctic suit against the blast of sub-zero wind. He was due in the officers’ mess room, where the media was going to be briefed in half an hour. Helos were ferrying crews from the airport at Kugaaruk and Gallen watched the reporters running from the Sikorsky to the helipad companionway, stooped over against the shock of the cold.

  Making his way back to his state room, Gallen thought about the insignia on Negroponte’s arm. A guy at sea, sporting an Army tatt? It gnawed at him, and he had an idea.

  Taking off his arctic suit, Gallen took a seat at the fold-down table between two bunks and took a piece of plain foolscap from the writing set. He’d gone through three pieces of paper before he was happy that he’d re-created the insignia. In Force Recon the capacity to commit what you’d seen to a diagram or schema was a skill that had come to some more readily than others. Gallen had taken a while to get it—he’d been a jock at high school, not an arty type, and free-drawing was not his thing. But even with the rise of digital imaging, digital recording and the cut-and-paste age, the US Marines needed its recon operators to be able to demonstrate what they’d seen, and if that meant drawing on the back of a beer coaster with a borrowed ballpoint, then that’s what they wanted.

  Gallen felt that pressure now, the pressure to use his training to pull from his memory the exact shape of that insignia. He looked down at what he had: it looked like an upside-down crucifix with curved bars attached to the cross-piece of the crucifix. It looked like a lollypop, with a cross inside it.

  There were voices at the door and Winter entered, Ford behind him.

  ‘Hey, boss,’ said the Aussie. ‘That PR guy, Dave, is after you. There’s a press conference about to start.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Gallen, checking his G-Shock. He’d lost track of the time. Grabbing his arctic suit, he followed the other two along a wood-panelled passage to the companionway that would take them down one flight to the officers’ mess.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, as Winter grabbed the door handle, ‘either of you recognise this?’ He handed over the paper with the drawing and watched Winter and Ford take their time looking at it. It was a special forces habit: if someone asked you to look at something, you took it all in because you never knew when a higher-up was going to ask you to remember it.

  ‘It’s kinda familiar,’ said Ford. ‘But I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Winter, handing back the paper. ‘What’s it about? ‘

  ‘The chief engineer on the Ariadne. He’s got this tattooed on his right forearm. It’s part of a US Army tatt.’

  ‘I know who’d know,’ said Ford. ‘You want me to fax it?’

  ‘Please,’ said Gallen. ‘Now.’ />
  Following Winter down the stairway, they came out in a passage crowded with milling reporters, photographers and cameramen. Gallen noticed how the media seemed to take up twice the space that their physicality would suggest—what was known in the recon game as a ‘big projector’: someone who seemed to dominate the area around them and therefore stood out. Most recon operators and spies tried to project the opposite: small, inconspicuous, blending with the human traffic.

  Pushing through the scrum towards the mess door, Winter paused and looked down on a man Gallen recognised as being from Fox News. The man decided not to get out of the way until the woman he was talking to suddenly caught a look at Winter and pointed. When the reporter turned, Winter smiled at him like a wolf and the reporter almost fell over getting out of the way.