by Alex Archer
To distract herself from the crashing menace of the storm, she let loose a question that had been bubbling around in her subconscious for days.
"Why are you helping me, Tex?"
"Huh?" he shouted back over his shoulder. She saw his face ran with sweat, although it was cool in the aircraft despite the efforts of its tiny heater. His shoulders hunched and bunched with effort, he grunted with the strain of fighting the yoke. His brow was folded with concentration, yet his eyes and mouth smiled as if he were having the time of his life.
"Why are you helping me?"
He actually paused. In their brief acquaintance she had seldom seen him do that. He was thoughtful, analytical even, during the downtimes, as she had seen again that afternoon planning their quixotic two-person aerial assault on the oil platform. But in the crunch, when called upon he never seemed to hesitate to speak or act as the situation demanded.
"I can't resist a pretty face?" he called back at length.
Fury surged up inside her. "Don't try to blow me off! Not now. This is important."
At once she felt remorseful, and also stupid. He is risking terrible danger for you and Jadzia, she thought. But Tex answered with regret audible in his words, if scarcely above the booming of the wind and the constant cannonade of thunder near and far.
"You're right," he said, shouting to be heard with his face turned forward again toward their unseen goal. "You deserve a straight answer. When I was a kid I did some things. They may or may not have been illegal. You might say I had official status to do them, in fact. I told myself they couldn't be wrong if duly constituted authority told me to do them. And that they were for the greater good, you know?"
He shook his head. "Later on I found what we'd been told was mostly lies. I watched my buddies die, for lies. And you know, my real reason for it all was that I was a stupid, self-centered kid who thought he'd live forever no matter what. And doing what they told me to gave a dirty, dangerous thrill like nothing else."
"That's why you're doing this? For the thrill?" Again she regretted that the unbearable seethe of emotion inside her, no less tempestuous than the sky and sea outside, had propelled the first thought to pop in her mind straight out her mouth.
"Maybe," he yelled back. "I been chasin' thrills ever since, even though they're all pretty feeble imitations of – of what I used to do. But I feel I've got something to make up for. And I'm grateful for a chance to do something real – something I know is good. Shoot, Annja. It's a little girl out there."
Her right arm shot forward past his shoulder. "Look!" she cried.
A single light glowed in the darkness like a white eye. It was just a few points away from dead ahead.
"Now comes the fun part," Tex said, all business again. He climbed a few scant yards to give them clearance from the thousand avid mouths of the sea, for the plane would lose lift in a turn. He flew level a moment longer, to regain speed. Then he banked the ultralight left.
Out into the open sea.
****
Jadzia stalked down a corridor with greenish enamel coming away from the metal in flakes, leaving splotches of fungus in muted psychedelic colors on the bulkhead. Her assurance of moments before had evaporated. Maybe it was the creepy surroundings, and the horrible ceaseless moaning of the sea, the creaking of the rig, the cannonading of the rising storm.
None of the noises was as terrible as the voice in her head that kept trying to tell her, They're right. She's not coming. You're all alone.
Of course, she'd always been all alone. Alone in a world of stupid people.
Captive though she was, Jadzia was allowed total freedom to roam the platform. It wasn't as if she could escape. There were boats, surely. But she wasn't about to head out at random into the middle of the ocean. Even her fantasy adventure thoughts had their limitations. Nor was she under any illusion she could fly the sleek helicopter tied invitingly to the southwest corner of the platform.
No, Annja was coming for her. Jadzia was sure of that. She had no other option.
On a whim she decided to drop in on the security room. Even creepy company was better than being alone with her fears. It was a level down from the commissary, down a ringing, rattling metal stair.
Inside were banks of monitors showing visual feeds from cameras positioned all about the rig, and a pair of Albanians ostensibly watching them. A Walther machine pistol lay ostentatiously across a table near one of them.
They looked up and emitted guarded hellos. The younger one smiled; the older man frowned. Like all of the more than twenty personnel Jadzia had encountered on the steel island, they spoke English as the common tongue, and their native language when they fell in with countrymen. They took for granted they were talking secret code that no one else could understand.
That was the reason she decided to stop there. She found Albanian fascinating, though ugly. Though Indo-European, it had no living languages as relatives. It therefore tied in with her love of ancient languages, as well as the weird in general. Plus it gave her something to do.
Apparently the men felt flattered by her presence.
"She fancies me," the younger man said.
"Imbecile," the older man replied. He spoke without heat. He had an air of having been there and having done that. Jadzia's grasp of the niceties wasn't up to telling her whether it was a pose or not.
"Why does she keep sniffing around us, then?"
"Who knows? Perhaps she is a demon, sniffing for your soul."
"Hah," the young man said. But he looked at Jadzia warily.
"What bothers me most," the older man said, "is that while she's here we cannot drink." The monitors were flashing images from around the rig, but the man paid no attention. Clearly, there was nothing interesting to see out on the raging sea.
Jadzia propped her rump against the edge of a table and let her eyes drift lazily over the other monitors.
Then they backtracked quickly. And went wide.
Chapter 15
A squall broke like a dark sheet ripping apart before their eyes. Through the rain-streaked windscreen Annja abruptly saw it. A rectilinear steel castle, its pylons obscured by waves and mist and blowing sheets of rain, seemed to float in the air before them.
It had been a masterful feat of flying by Tex, swinging deliberately wide of the station in order to approach from out to sea, the direction from which traffic was least likely to come, hence least likely to be closely watched. But relief was crowded from Annja's mind by a new throng of fears. The platform looked awfully close.
"Doesn't it take runway space even for Ariel to taxi to a stop?" Annja asked.
"Usually," Tex said.
"And aren't we, well, kind of low?"
"I'm bagging two birds with one cliché," he said.
He had already throttled the engine suspiciously low. The ultralight wallowed in the heavy turbulent air mere feet above the waves like a moth over a flame. Suddenly he pulled the yoke into his flat stomach. Ariel's nose came up. She soared.
The grim gray cliff of steel seemed close enough to touch. Annja braced for impact.
Her muscles taut as piano wires, Annja watched the dark, tangled underside of the platform rushing by outside. Then suddenly they passed the upper edge of the deck. At the same time she felt the airplane lose lift as gravity sucked away its momentum. The nose dropped as a last surge of forward movement carried the craft about ten feet inboard, where it fell on its landing gear with a tailbone-jarring thump and stopped dead.
****
As Jadzia watched, amazed, a tiny airplane, oddly shaped and bizarrely painted in drab squiggly streaks, popped into view like a dolphin jumping from its tank at an aquatic show. It slammed down hard on the steel deck of the drilling platform.
The Albanians were talking animatedly about what bastards Sulin and Marshall were, using plenty of hand gestures. They hadn't seen the aircraft appear on the screen behind them.
Jadzia pushed off from the table, made herself walk deliberately, a
ngling to place her skinny body between the monitor and the guards. A lean man she had never seen before popped out of the tiny craft. A moment later the unmistakable form of Annja Creed scrambled out into rain that surrounded her with a waist-high mist of impact-exploded raindrops.
Jadzia's steps wobbled slightly as the sinews holding her knees together seemed to turn to rubber bands. She reached a hand up to the monitor.
"Hey, girly!" the older man exclaimed in English. "What you do there?"
She had put her whole palm against the screen. It flickered twice and went black with a final-sounding pop.
Hurriedly she grabbed for one of the little knobs at the bottom of the screen and began to fiddle with it furiously. "It started to flicker," she said. "Scan lines all over. But it went out before I could do anything." She turned to them with a shrug and her best helpless-little-girl smile.
She might not have known a lot about people, and especially their complex and irrational emotions. But she had learned early on some pretty significant manipulation skills.
The younger man jumped from his seat. "Could she have sabotaged it?"
"Relax," the older man said, playing the role of seasoned vet. "These sets are old. It must have burned out a tube. And anyway, if anything happens, it's not going to happen on that side of the platform!"
****
"Let it all out," Tex said, killing the engine and unfastening his safety harness with calm dispatch. "It's good for the soul."
Annja had screamed like a teenage girl on a roller coaster. She didn't feel bad about it, either.
"Didn't you cut it a little close there?" she shouted.
He grinned back at her from outside in what was a pouring rain that bounced a good two feet off the steel decking. "Yep. What else are we doing here? Now, move."
"Couldn't they feel us hit?" she asked shakily as she clambered out.
A wave hit the rig and drenched the left side of her body. The platform, big as it was, shivered and swayed perceptibly. "Oh, my God!" Annja said.
"See, the storm turned out to be helpful after all," Tex said, reaching for the bag of armaments. "Given that we, you know, lived and everything."
They crouched uncomfortably on the seaward side of the plane, so that even if they were spotted their enemies wouldn't get a good look at them. It was a pretty weak reed, Annja knew, but she was just as willing to grasp at anything resembling advantage as Tex. She quickly stuffed spare magazines into the vest she had worn since takeoff from Papa Westray, a lifetime ago. The pistol rode in a spring-loaded break-front holster on her right hip.
"You don't mind, ma'am, I'll take this," Tex said, briefly hefting the shotgun. "You have the magical close-combat weapon."
Annja winced slightly at the term "magical." But she nodded.
"Wait here one," Tex said. Before she could assent or refuse, he was running bent over toward the helicopter parked forty yards south along the western edge of the platform. Annja crouched behind the ultralight, which had been spray-painted in irregular streaks of blue, gray and green. It seemed to break up the silhouette pretty well, and certainly didn't magnetize the eye the way the brilliant pristine white of the plane's original paint job had. She fleetingly hoped Ariel could be restored to her jovial and doting owner as good as new. Sadly, she doubted it.
A wave broke against the side of the platform and, as if in petty revenge for its inability to grab her and bear her back down to the depths, thoroughly soaked the back of her jeans.
"Great," she said aloud.
Tex came sprinting back, holding his slung shotgun with one hand to keep the butt from pounding him in the kidneys. "What was that about?" Annja shouted to him. Raising her voice seemed like poor noise discipline, but as a practical matter, she wasn't sure anybody would hear if Tex emptied the shotgun out here.
"Quick inspection." He jerked his head toward the superstructure, pierced irregularly by yellow lights. "Let's get going."
****
"See, I figure I'm the Al Leong character," the young Asian sentry said in a California surferdude accent. His words echoed up the stairwell into which they had retreated in defiance of orders. They figured if they got caught their bosses would just have to understand. A North Sea gale changed everything.
His German partner grunted. He was a big burly guy with long, almost platinum-blond hair.
"Al Leong was in all these movies," the Asian kid went on. "He was always super cool. But nobody ever, like, recognized him. He was just an Asian guy with long hair and a mustache."
The German grunted.
"He never got any credit. He never got a shot at the big roles. It was total discrimination."
"Uh-huh," his partner said.
"But the other thing about Al Leong was, his character always got taken out first. You know, it's always the Asian dude who dies first. I figure that's why they hired me. I'm basically the canary in a coal – "
His words ended in a strangled noise. His partner turned to frown at him.
A fierce-looking woman was embracing the Asian kid from behind with an arm around his throat. The kid's eyes were rolling up in his head. Since that was plainly impossible, the German just stood a moment with his jaw falling slowly, trying to sort things back into proper order.
That was interrupted by a sharp impact to the rear of his skull and a shower of dazzling pyrotechnics. The world fell suddenly away from him.
****
"Are these actually passive restraints?" Annja asked, kneeling on the young man's kidneys and trussing his wrists behind his back with a pierced plastic strip. She had let him down easy after choking him unconscious.
"Nope," Tex said. He already had the German's wrists secured, having expertly rabbit-punched him with the butt of his shotgun. "Just cable ties from Gannet. Don't fret – they'll work fine."
"I know who Al Leong is," Annja said. "I always liked seeing him in movies."
"I'm with you there," Tex said. "Even when he's wasted in something like I Come in Peace."
"I liked that movie!"
As Annja stuffed a small wadded rag into her victim's slack-lipped, drooling mouth, Tex rolled the German onto his back. The man moaned. His eyes seemed to wander at random in their sockets. Tex grabbed the front of his pea coat and shook him. He barked a question in German. The guard moaned. Tex shook him again.
The German muttered something. Tex asked another question, received a sullen answer. Then he gagged the sentry and stood up. "What'd he say?" she asked. She was glad they hadn't had to kill these two. She also knew they were probably the last she and her partner could afford to extend deliberate mercy to. From this point on it was kill or be killed.
"He says there's at least twenty of their guys on the platform."
"Twenty?"
Tex shrugged. "Looks as if they got some operation going on here other than kidnapping teenage language geniuses. Speaking of which, he says your girl has a compartment of her own up on the top level. But she also has the run of the station. She could be anywhere."
"Great. Does that mean we have to check the place deck by deck, or whatever you call them?"
"Looks like it. We might as well check out the gangways first. If we start poking into all the compartments we'll raise the alarm pretty fast."
They both peered up the stairwell. They saw nothing but darkness. Safety standards did not seem to be foremost on the minds of the rig's current proprietors.
Annja followed Tex up the metal stairs past a tangle of huge pipes dimly lit by sporadic lamps placed by the people who occupied the derelict station. Both moved quietly, but it was probably effort wasted. Between the wind and the sea, the station moaned like a choir of the damned. The stink of petroleum and dead sea life was dense enough to make their eyes water and heads swim.
The first level up was dark. They paused on the railed-in landing outside as Tex peered through the little window in the metal door.
"You don't see in the dark, do you?" he asked her.
"No more
than before all this started," she replied, feeling nettled without quite knowing why.
"We'll have to use our lights. Wish we could've got some night-vision gear. Oh, well. We got what we got. I'll use my light. Try to use yours as sparingly as possible, all right?"
"I know!"
He looked at her a moment, then grinned. "Sorry. Here I am lecturing you, and you're lots more current on doing this run-and-gun stuff than I am."
He went through the door. She slipped through after, easing it shut as noiselessly as possible. She felt bad for having snapped at him. He's helping me, she thought miserably, and here I am getting annoyed because he's good at it.
Tex advanced along the corridor holding his shotgun leveled at the waist by the pistol grip and the long sling around his neck. The little black flashlight he held in his raised left hand was shining out the bottom of his fist.
Holding her penlight unlit in her left hand, she followed. She left the pistol in its holster. Instead, after a moment's hesitation, she summoned the sword. She was comfortable with it. And it was quiet.
Both sides of the passageway had doors. One on the right opened quickly and quietly just after Tex, about a dozen feet ahead of Annja, passed by.
A man stepped out, aiming a black submachine gun at Tex's back.
Chapter 16
Annja slashed the man with the machine pistol across the back. He uttered a gargling scream and fell.
Light poured out from the open door. Tex wheeled. Annja was moving already, whipping around the door frame into the compartment where the gunman had emerged.
Another man in a stained undershirt and dark running pants sat blinking sleepily, his bare feet dangling off the edge of his bunk. His eyes grew wide when he saw Annja. He grabbed for a Beretta lying on a table nearby.
She lunged. The point of her sword passed through his thick unshaved neck. He screamed briefly as his blood splashed against the bulkhead. In the light of a lamp clamped to the bunk it was a blaze of scarlet against shades of gray.
