Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  I forgot about Jablonsky. He could take better care of himself than any man I’d ever known. I had enough troubles of my own coming up that night.

  The last traces of the brilliant red sunset had just vanished over the wine-dark gulf to the west and the stars were standing clear in the high and windless sky when I saw a green-shaded lantern on the right of the road. I passed it, then a second, then at the third I turned sharp right and ran the Corvette down on to a little stone jetty, switching off my headlights even before I coasted to a standstill beside a tall, bulky man with a tiny pencil flash in his hand.

  He took my arm – he had to, I was blind from staring into the glaring white pool of light cast by the Corvette’s headlamps – and led me wordlessly down a flight of wooden steps to a floating landing jetty and across this to a long dark shape that lay rocking gently by the side of the jetty. I was seeing better already, and I managed to grab a stay and jump down into the boat without a helping hand. A squat, short man rose to greet me.

  ‘Mr Talbot?’

  ‘Yes. Captain Zaimis, isn’t it?’

  ‘John.’ The little man chuckled and explained in his lilting accent: ‘My boys would laugh at me. “Captain Zaimis”, they would say. “And how is the Queen Mary or the United States today?” they would say. And so on. The children of today.’ The little man sighed in mock sorrow. ‘Ah, well, I suppose “John” is good enough for the captain of the little Matapan.’

  I glanced over his shoulder and had a look at the children. They were, as yet, no more than dark blurs against a slightly less dark skyline, but there was little enough to let me see that they averaged about six feet and were built in proportion. Nor was the Matapan so little: she was at least forty feet long, twin-masted, with curious athwartships and fore-and-aft rails just above the height of a tall man’s head. Both men and vessel were Greek: the crew were Greeks to a man and if the Matapan wasn’t entirely Grecian, she had at least been built by Greek shipwrights who had come to and settled down in Florida just for the express purpose of building those sponge ships. With its slender graceful curves and upswept bows Homer would have had no trouble in identifying it as a direct lineal descendant of the galleys that had roamed the sunlit Aegean and the Levant countless centuries ago. I felt a sudden sense of gratitude and security that I was aboard such a vessel, accompanied by such men.

  ‘A fine night for the job in hand,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’ The humour had left his voice. ‘I don’t think so. It is not the night that John Zaimis would have chosen.’

  I didn’t point out that choice didn’t enter into the matter. I said: ‘Too clear, is that it?’

  ‘Not that.’ He turned away for a moment, gave some orders in what could only have been Greek, and men started moving about the deck, unhitching ropes from the bollards on the landing stage. He turned back to me. ‘Excuse me if I speak to them in our old tongue. Those three boys are not yet six months in this country. My own boys, they will not dive. A hard life, they say, too hard a life. So we have to bring the young men from Greece … I don’t like the weather, Mr Talbot. It is too fine a night.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously. ‘Too fine. The air is too still, and the little breeze it comes from the north-west? That is bad. Tonight the sun was a flame in the sky. That is bad. You feel the little waves that are rocking the Matapan? When the weather is good the little waves they slap against the hull every three seconds, maybe four. Tonight?’ He shrugged. ‘Twelve seconds, maybe every fifteen. For forty years I have sailed out of Tarpon Springs. I know the waters here, Mr Talbot, I would be lying if I say any man knows them better. A big storm comes.’

  ‘A big storm, eh?’ When it came to big storms I didn’t fancy myself very much. ‘Hurricane war ning out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you always get those signs before a hurricane?’ Captain Zaimis wasn’t going to cheer me up, somebody had to try.

  ‘Not always, Mr Talbot. Once, maybe fifteen years ago, there was a storm warning but none of the signs. Not one. The fishermen from the South Caicos went out. Fifty drowned. But when it is September and the signs are there, then the big storm comes. Every time it comes.’

  Nobody was going to cheer me up tonight. ‘When will it come?’ I asked.

  ‘Eight hours, forty-eight hours, I do not know.’ He pointed due west, the source of the long slow oily swell. ‘But it comes from there … You will find your rubber suit below, Mr Talbot.’

  Two hours and thirteen miles later we were uncomfortably nearer that still-distant storm. We had travelled at full speed, but full speed on the Matapan was nothing to write home about. Almost a month ago two civilian engineers, sworn to secrecy, had bypassed the exhaust of the Matapan’s engine to an underwater cylinder with a curiously arranged system of baffle plates. They’d done a fine job, the exhaust level of the Matapan was no more than a throaty whisper, but back pressure had cut the thrust output in half. But it was fast enough. It got there. It got there too fast for me, and the farther out we went into the starlit gulf the longer and deeper became the troughs between the swells, the more convinced I was of the hopelessness of what I had set out to do. But someone had to do it and I was the man who had picked the joker.

  There was no moon that night. By and by, even the stars began to go out. Cirrus clouds in long grey sheets began to fill the sky. Then the rain came, not heavy, but cold and penetrating, and John Zaimis gave me a tarpaulin for shelter – there was a cabin on the Matapan, but I had no wish to go below.

  I must have dozed off, lulled by the motion of the boat, for the next I knew the rain had stopped spattering on the tarpaulin and someone was shaking my shoulder. It was the skipper, and he was saying softly: ‘There she is, Mr Talbot. The X 13.’

  I stood up, using a mast to support myself – the swell was becoming really unpleasant now – and followed the direction of his pointing hand. Not that he needed to point, even at the distance of a mile the X 13 seemed to fill the entire sky.

  I looked at it, looked away, then looked back again. It was still there. I’d lost more than most, I didn’t have a great deal to live for, but I did have a little, so I stood there and wished myself ten thousand miles away.

  I was scared. If this was the end of the road, I wished to God I’d never set foot on it.

  FIVE

  I’d heard of those off-shore rigs before. I’d even had one of them described to me by a man who designed them, but I’d never seen one before and now that I did I realized that the description I’d had had been on the same level as my imaginative capacity to clothe with flesh the bare bones of facts and statistics.

  I looked at the X 13 and I just didn’t believe it.

  It was enormous. It was angular and ungainly as was no other structure I’d ever seen before. And, above all, it was unreal, a weird combination of Jules Verne and some of the fancier flights of space fiction.

  At first glance, in the fleeting patches of dim starlight, it looked like a forest of huge factory chimneys sticking up out of the sea. Halfway up their height those chimneys were all joined by a deep and massive platform through the sides of which those chimneys penetrated. And, at the very right hand side, built on the platform itself and reaching up into the sky, mysterious and fragile in the spiderlike tracery of its slenderly interwoven girders, twice the height of the chimneys and outlined against the night sky in its fairy-like festoon of white and coloured operating and aircraft warning lights, was the oil-drilling derrick itself.

  I’m not one of those characters who go about pinching themselves to convince themselves that things are real, but if I were I would never have had a better opportunity or reason to pinch than right then. To see that weird Martian structure suddenly thrusting itself up out of the sea would have had the most hardened topers in the country screaming to climb aboard the water wagon.

  The chimneys, I knew, were massive tubular metal legs of almost unbelievable strength, eac
h one capable of supporting a weight of several hundred tons, and on this rig I could count no less than fourteen of those legs, seven on each side, and there must have been a stretch of four hundred feet between the outer ones at the ends. And the astonishing thing was that this huge platform was mobile: it had been towed there with the platform deep-sunk in the sea and the legs thrusting high up almost to the level of the top of the derrick: arrived at the right spot, those legs had dropped right down to the floor of the sea – and then the whole huge platform and derrick, maybe four or five thousand tons in all and powered by huge engines, had risen dripping from the sea till it was safe beyond the reach of even the highest of the hurricane-lashed waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

  All this I had known; but knowing and seeing weren’t the same things at all.

  A hand touched my arm and I jumped. I had quite forgotten where I was.

  ‘What do you think of him, Mr Talbot?’ It was the skipper. ‘You like, eh?’

  ‘Yes. It’s nice. How much did this little toy cost? Any idea?’

  ‘Four million dollars.’ Zaimis shrugged. ‘Maybe four and a half.’

  ‘A fair investment,’ I conceded. ‘Four million dollars.’

  ‘Eight,’ Zaimis corrected. ‘A man cannot just come and start drilling, Mr Talbot. First he buy the land under the sea, five thousand acres, three million dollars. Then to drill a well – just one well, maybe two miles deep – it cost perhaps three-quarters of a million. If he’s lucky.’

  Eight million dollars. And not an investment either. A gamble. Geologists could be wrong, they were more often wrong than right. General Blair Ruthven, a man with eight million dollars to throw away: what colossal prize could a man like that, with a reputation like his, be working for if he was prepared, as he so obviously was prepared, to step outside the law? There was only one way of finding out. I shivered and turned to Zaimis.

  ‘You can get in close? Real close, I mean?’

  ‘All the way.’ He pointed to the near side of the vast structure. ‘You have seen the ship tied up alongside?’

  I hadn’t but I could see her now, a lean dark shape maybe two hundred and fifty feet long, completely dwarfed by the massive rig, the tips of her masts reaching no more than halfway up to the platform deck of the oil rig. I looked back at Zaimis.

  ‘Is that going to queer our pitch, John?’

  ‘Get in our way, you mean? No. We make a wide curve and approach from the south.’

  He touched the rudder and the Matapan swung away to port, heading to bypass the X 13 to the south: to have gone to the north, the right, would have brought the Matapan under the glare of the arc and floodlights that illuminated the big working platform round the derrick. Even at a mile we could clearly see men moving around the derrick and the subdued hum of powerful machinery, like that of diesel compressors, came at us clearly over the darkened waters. So much, at least, was in our favour; it had not occurred to me that work on those mobile rigs would go on twenty-four hours a day but at least the clamour of their operations would drown out the throaty whisper of the Matapan’s engines.

  The boat had begun to corkscrew violently. We were quartering to the south-west, taking that long, deepening swell on our starboard bow and water was beginning to break over the sides of the boat. And I was getting wet. I crouched under a tarpaulin near the rudder, lit a last cigarette under cover and looked at the skipper.

  ‘That ship out there, John. What chances of it moving away?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not much, I think. It is a supply and power ship. It brings out food and drink and mud for the drills and thousands of gallons of oil. Look closely, Mr Talbot. It is a kind of small tanker. Now it brings oil for the big machines, and perhaps electricity from its dynamos. Later, when the strike comes, it takes oil away.’

  I peered out under a corner of the tarpaulin. It did look, as John said, a kind of small tanker. I had seen the same type of ship years ago in the war; the high, raised, bare centre-deck and after accommodation and engine-room of the inshore fleet oiler. But what interested me more right then was John’s statement that it was there most of the time.

  ‘I want to go aboard that ship, John. Can do?’ I didn’t want to go aboard, but I knew I had to. The idea of a vessel more or less permanently moored there had never occurred to me: now that I knew it to be a fact it was suddenly the most important factor in my considerations.

  ‘But – but I was told you wanted to go aboard the rig itself, Mr Talbot.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps. But later. Can you manage the ship?’

  ‘I can try.’ Captain Zaimis sounded grim. ‘It is a bad night, Mr Talbot.’

  He was telling me. I thought it was a terrible night. But I said nothing. Still angling south-west, we were passing directly opposite the middle of one of the long sides of the rig and I could see that the massive steel columns supporting the derrick platform were not so symmetrically arranged as I had imagined. Between the fourth and fifth of the huge legs, on either side, was a gap of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet and here the platform was scooped out to a much lower level than the main deck. On this lower level the thin spindly cigar-shaped outline of a crane reached up as high as the topmost level of the columns: the ship was moored directly below this cut-out well-deck, spanning the gap and a couple of steel pillars on either side of the gap.

  Five minutes later the skipper changed course until we were heading due west again, in a direction that would have taken us clear to the south of the rig, but we had hardly time to get accustomed to the comparative comfort of heading straight into the swell when he put the helm over again, and headed north-west. We steered straight in, as it seemed, for the most southerly leg on the landward side of the rig, passing within forty feet of the bow of the ship moored alongside, scraped by the leg with only feet to spare and so found ourselves directly under the massive platform of the oil rig.

  One of the young Greeks, a black-haired bronzed boy by the name of Andrew, was busy in the bows, and as we passed right under the platform and came abreast of the second pillar from the south on the seaward side he called softly to John and at the same time threw a lifebelt, attached to a coil of light rope, as far as he could to one side. As he did so John cut the engine to the merest whisper, and the Matapan, urged by the swell, drifted slowly back past one side of the pillar while the lifebelt came back on the other, so passing the light line completely round the pillar. Andrew picked up the lifebelt with a boat-hook and started pulling in the grass line which had been bent on to a heavier manila: within a minute the Matapan was securely moored to the pillar, with the engine just ticking over sufficiently to give her enough way to take the strain of the rope so that she wouldn’t snag too heavily in the steadily deepening swell. Nobody had heard us, nobody had seen us: not, at least, as far as we could tell.

  ‘You will be very quick,’ John said softly, anxiously. ‘I do not know how long we shall be able to wait. I smell the storm.’

  He was anxious. I was anxious. We were all anxious. But all he had to do was to sit in that boat. Nobody was going to beat his head in or tie rocks to him and throw him into the Gulf of Mexico.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I said reassuringly. Nor had he, compared to me. ‘Half an hour.’ I stripped off my overcoat, snapped the vulcanized neck and wrist cuffs of the tanned twill and rubber suit I was wearing beneath it, slipped an oxygen apparatus over my shoulders, tightened the straps, took the nose and eye piece in one hand and coat, pants and hat under the other arm and stepped gingerly over the side into the rubber raft the crew had already slipped over the side.

  Andrew sat at the after end of this flimsy contraption, holding a line in his hand, and, as soon as I’d settled, let go his grip on the gunwale of the Matapan. The drift of the swell carried us quickly under the gloomy mass of the platform, Andrew paying out the line as we went. Paddling a rubber dinghy in a swell is difficult enough, paddling it in a specific direction against such a swell all but impossible: it would be a hundre
d times easier to regain the Matapan by hauling ourselves back hand over hand.

  At a whispered word from me Andrew checked the rope and took a turn. We were now close up to the side of the ship, but still in deep shadow: the ship lay close in to the massive legs, but the platform overhung those legs, and so ourselves, by a good dozen feet, so that the angled light from the floodlights by the crane on the well-deck above barely succeeded in touching the faraway side – the port side – of the upper deck of the ship. All the rest of the vessel lay shrouded in deep darkness except for a patch of light that fell on the fo’c’sle from a rectangular gap high up in the overhang of the platform. Through this hole was suspended the vertical gangway, a zig-zag set of caged-in metal steps like a fire-escape, which, I supposed, could be raised or lowered, with the ebb and flow of the tide.

  The conditions might have been made for me.

  The ship was low in the water, the ribbed oil tanks standing high but the gunwale only at waist level. I took a pencil light from my coat and went aboard.

  I moved right for’ard in the darkness. Apart from a glimmer from the accommodation aft there was no light at all on board, not even navigation or riding lights: the Christmas tree illuminations of the oil derrick made those superfluous.

  There were deep sliding vertical doors giving to the raised fo’c’sle. I pulled the head and foot bolts on one of these, waited for a slight roll of the ship to help and eased the door back a crack, enough for my head, arm and light. Barrels, paint drums, ropes, wood, heavy chains – it was some sort of bosun’s store. There was nothing there for me. I eased the door back, slid in the bolts and left.