by Wilbur Smith
In Houston, it was past nine in the evening and Tom Nocerino was putting the finishing touches to his newsletter, before sending it upstairs for final approval. The section on the Magna Grande oilfield of Angola was looking all right now, he thought. He’d finished with Hector Cross’s quote, boiled down to three short, snappy sentences, bam-bam-bam: “It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be hard work. But we’re going to get the job done.”
You can’t beat a good old-fashioned triad, Nocerino thought, sipping a cup of coffee as he gave the draft one last read-through.
The only section he was worried about concerned another big, new venture Bannock was undertaking. Once again it was an offshore field, but in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, off the north coast of Alaska: about as far removed as you could get, in terms of both distance and environment, from Angola. The Bannock board had sanctioned the purchase of a drilling barge, the Noatak, whose double-hulled construction was specially designed to withstand the pressures of Arctic pack ice. Resistance to compression also dictated that she was shaped like a giant steel soup bowl, 250 feet across. The Noatak was about as mobile in the water as a soup bowl, too, since she possessed no engines of her own. The board of Bannock Oil had decided that the multi-directional thrusters that would have provided the barge with the power to move and manoeuvre were too expensive to fit. They were, in any case, an unnecessary extravagance since Bannock had already acquired a $200-million icebreaking supply tug, the Glenallen, which was purpose built to tow huge, floating oil rigs into the waters off the North Slope of Alaska, anchor them in place and then keep them supplied with everything that the rigs or the men aboard them might need, under any conditions. She was more than 350 feet long, weighed almost 13,000 tons and her four Caterpillar engines produced more than 20,000 horsepower. Why buy more engines when those monsters were already available?
There was just one thing stopping Tom Nocerino from spinning the story of a weird but wonderful drilling barge and a state-of-the-art icebreaking tug into the kind of upbeat story that the investors’ newsletter demanded. After a spring and summer of exploration, Bannock Oil’s vessels and personnel had yet to find any oil under their particular patch of the Beaufort Sea. The geologists’ reports were unequivocal. There were billions of barrels down there somewhere, it was just that they hadn’t yet found the right place to drill for them. But now, though the Noatak’s entire reason for being was that she could keep working through the winter, the Glenallen was towing her back around the far north-western corner of Alaska, en route to the mooring off Seattle where she would spend the next several months.
This ignominious retreat was being made to evade the levies that the state of Alaska imposes on any oil-drilling operations present on its territory or in its waters on 1 January of any given year. Tom Nocerino had to find a way of changing “We spent hundreds of millions of bucks, we couldn’t find any oil, so now we’re getting out before they tax us” into “Alaska—it’s going great!”
It wasn’t going to be easy, but he’d been seeing an incredibly hot tax attorney for the past couple of weeks and he was certain this would be the night she’d agree to have sex with him. So he was going to find the right words, get them approved by Bigelow and press “Send” on the newsletter mailout before he left work, or die in the attempt.
High above the Arctic Circle, the Glenallen was towing the Noatak through the Chukchi Sea, the body of water that lies between the Beaufort Sea and the Bering Strait that separates the westernmost point of the United States from the far eastern tip of Russia. The two ships were harnessed together by hawsers thicker than a fat man’s waist, held by a massive, solid steel shackle aboard the Glenallen. In the calm waters that had prevailed so far, they had maintained a slow but steady progress during which the fact that the barge weighed more than twice as much as the tug that was towing her had not been an issue. But now the barometric pressure was dropping, the wind was rising and the ocean swells were building. The crew of the Glenallen didn’t need a weather forecast to tell them that a storm was coming: that much was obvious. What they didn’t know, however, was what would happen when it struck. Left to her own devices, the Glenallen had the size, strength and power to cope with almost anything the oceans could throw at her. But now she was handicapped by the huge, graceless, helpless craft that followed in her wake. The men on both ships just had to pray that handicap wouldn’t prove fatal.
The storm came roaring out of the Arctic in a fury of wind and ice, whipping the waters of the Chukchi Sea into a maelstrom. The waves piled one upon another, reaching higher and higher into the sky as if they were trying to grab the snow-laden clouds and pull them back down into the depths from which they’d come. These were conditions whose elemental savagery mocked the puny efforts of humankind to survive, let alone master the forces of nature. The air was cold enough in itself, some twenty degrees centigrade below freezing. But the winds that surged as high as eighty miles per hour made it feel more like fifty below. No man could look barefaced into the teeth of such a storm and survive, for the blast of freezing air laden with water droplets that had frozen as hard as buckshot would shred his skin and pulp his eyes. Yet somewhere out on the heaving black wastes two unlikely vessels, tied to one another like blind mountaineers in an avalanche, were making their slow, desperate way through the tempest.
Without the Glenallen, the Noatak was completely at the mercy of the ocean beneath her and the weather above, yet her size and helplessness were now in danger of destroying the very craft on which her own survival depended. As the Glenallen tried to climb up each successive, towering wave, the deadweight of the Noatak pulled against her, dragging her stern so low that water flooded over it, cascading down into the body of the hull. Then, as the tug rushed down the far sides of each foaming wall of water, so the barge charged after her, looming out of the snow-filled darkness like a runaway express train.
The Glenallen’s skipper could not cut the umbilical cord between his ship and the Noatak, for then the barge would be swept away on the waves and it would surely be lost, along with its fifteen-man skeleton crew. Yet if the link were kept, the Glenallen might go down too, for the high, triangular drilling tower at the dead center of the barge was acting as a combination of sail and metronome. The flat metal panels that shrouded the bottom third of the tower caught the wind, which thereby pushed the barge before it. And as the Noatak sped forewards, so the forces of wind and water made the tower swing back and forth in an ever-increasing arc, taking the hull with it. Meanwhile the snow and sea spray dashing against the metal structure of the tower froze in layer after thickening layer of ice, which became heavier and heavier, exaggerating the effect of each metronome swing, plunging the decks of the barge beneath the churning water. With every extra degree of motion, the top of the tower came closer to the water surface, hastening the moment when the Noatak would be unable to bob back to the surface after each successive wall of water had crashed over her. And should the barge go under, the Glenallen would be dragged down with her to the grave.
It was left to Mother Nature to cut the Gordian Knot with a succession of surging waves that caused the tether between the two ships to be pulled tight in a sudden, convulsive jerk, then to sag as the tug and barge were drawn together, only to be snapped tight again as they were pulled apart. The first time this happened, the shackle held firm against the incredible force exerted by the barge. But with every successive tightening the force on the shackle increased and the mountings holding it to the Glenallen’s aft deck juddered and loosened, only by fractions of a millimeter at first, but then more and more until they snapped.
The shackle—120 tons of steel—smashed its way along the deck, leaving a trail of damage in its wake until it finally flew off the tug’s stern and plunged into the depths of the Chukchi Sea.
The barge was swept away like a cork in a rushing stream, picked up by the waves and carried in the direction that the nor’westerly wind was driving them, straight toward the Alaskan sh
oreline. There was absolutely nothing that the fifteen men aboard the Noatak could do to fight the waves or steer away from the coast. All they could do now was pray for a miracle to deliver them, knowing that if it did not come they were surely doomed.
When the shackle had been torn from the Glenallen’s deck, and with it the cables that linked her to the drilling barge Noatak, the tug’s skipper had sent out a distress call. It had been picked up by the Munro, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was on patrol, more than 150 miles to the northeast. There was no way that the Munro could reach the stricken barge in time to rescue the fifteen crewmen who were still aboard her. But she did have a Dolphin search and rescue helicopter that might be able to make it. Heedless of the danger of even attempting to fly through a storm of this magnitude, the chopper’s four-man crew raced to their aircraft and took off into the wild and merciless night.
The Noatak was less than five miles from shore when the Dolphin emerged out of the darkness and snow and took up its position hovering like a fragile metal dragonfly over the bucking, plunging, oscillating barge. The best that the helicopter crew could hope for was to lower a man on to the Noatak’s landing pad and pray that he could grab the rig’s crew members one by one as they let go of the rails to which they were clinging and made their way across the fatally unstable pad, perched at the very edge of the barge’s upper deck, with no shelter from the wind as it came howling through the drill tower’s rigging. Should a crewman slip before he was safely clipped to the harness dropped from the helicopter there was nothing but the flimsy railing to stop him plunging into the sub-zero waters where the cold would certainly kill him, even if drowning did not.
One by one eight men ascended from the hell of the barge to the heavenly embrace of the helicopter. But then the pilot signaled that the Dolphin could take no more weight onboard and the helicopter disappeared off into the night. The seven men still left aboard the Noatak had a rational, intellectual grasp of what was happening. The Dolphin was flying to the Glenallen, which had closed to within a mile, and the process would be repeated in reverse as the Noatak’s crew were lowered on to the tug’s landing pad, grabbed by its crew and taken below. But it was one thing to be told that the helicopter would return and another to believe that it could when all the time the coast was getting ever nearer. Even when the Dolphin had taken up its station above the landing pad once again, the tension did not ease for a moment. The swinging drill tower might at any moment strike the helicopter’s rotor blades like a stick shoved between the spokes of a bicycle wheel, but to far deadlier effect. The coast was somewhere out there in the impenetrable night, coming closer and closer all the time, yet the crew of the Dolphin could not rush, for haste would only lead to mistakes.
The last seven men had to wait their turn, beating back the fear that was taking an even tighter grip of their minds and bodies, resisting the urge to fight their way past the men whose turn to be rescued would come sooner than their own. One by one, they rose into the sky. Wave by wave the inevitable impact of the barge against the shore came closer. Finally only the captain of the Noatak remained and he was still hanging in mid-air when the curtain of snow in front of the Dolphin’s cockpit parted for a moment and the light picked out a blackness that somehow seemed more solid than what had been there before. It took the pilot a second or two to compute what he was seeing and then he was pulling the Dolphin up and away, praying that both the helicopter and the men hanging beneath it would miss the rockface that had suddenly appeared before them and now threatened to flatten them like insects against a windshield.
Only seconds later the Noatak smashed into the jagged promontory. Its hull comprised two thick layers of steel, specifically designed to resist the crushing grip of Arctic pack ice. But even that steel proved no defense against the harsh, unyielding rock. The hull ruptured, the water flooded in and the drilling barge Noatak sank beneath the pounding waves, with only the drill tower rising above the water’s surface to mark its passing.
In Houston, John Bigelow, Chief Executive and President of Bannock Oil, had been up all night, following developments in the northern wastes from the comfort of his home office. Shortly after three in the morning he got the call he’d been dreading from Bannock’s office in Anchorage, Alaska.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bigelow, but we lost the Noatak. I assure you, sir, that we did our best, the Coast Guard, too, but this was a helluva storm. For this time of year, we’ve not seen anything like it this century.”
Bigelow maintained his air of unruffled command throughout the next few minutes as he established the extent of the losses, both human and material. There was little environmental damage beyond the wreckage of the barge itself, that at least was something to be glad of. But when the call was finished he walked unsteadily to his drinks cabinet and poured himself a very large Scotch. He took one gulp and then set the glass aside, unfinished, as he slumped into a chair, held his head in his hands and asked aloud, “My God, what have I done?”
The early-morning sun was slicing through the semi-opened slats of the bedroom blinds and Congo was sitting up in bed, watching TV. A young girl lay on the rumpled sheets beside him. She rolled over in her sleep so that her head was level with his naked crotch. Then with one hand she reached out reflexively and cuddled his genitalia.
“Not now.” He pushed her hand away. “I’m trying to concentrate, for Chrissakes!”
The girl rolled back to where she’d started and dropped into deep sleep again. Johnny Congo had been awake all night, too jacked up on all the coke he’d snorted to be able to sleep. Now he was curious to know if his escape was still making any waves, so he’d turned the smart TV to CNN, keeping the volume down low because he didn’t want the little bitch beside him to wake up and start whining at him for her money. Next he opened up a screen within the screen to check all his and Carl’s email accounts. And then it wasn’t just the drugs that were keeping him wide awake.
It began with Congo finding a Bannock Oil newsletter that had been emailed to Carl in his role as the sole remaining adult beneficiary of Henry Bannock’s trust fund. The two words “Hector Cross” leaped out of the screen at Congo as if they’d been written in neon the size of the Hollywood sign. There the white Limey bastard was, bragging about how he was going to keep the Bannock installation in Angola safe and sound and Congo found himself laughing aloud at the way his bitterest enemy had delivered himself into his hands.
“Now I know just where to find you, white boy,” Congo murmured happily, his wired mind so filled with random, half-formed ideas about how to revenge himself on Hector Cross that he did not at first pay much attention to the breaking news story about an oil-drilling barge sinking off the coast of Alaska. But then he thought he heard someone say the words “Bannock Oil,” so he put the news on to full-screen, turned up the volume loud enough to hear clearly and focused on the news story as it slowly took shape, each new reporter or talking head adding one more small piece to a puzzle that was still a long way from being completed.
The element of the sinking that most troubled Congo was its possible effect on Bannock stock. Cross’s attack on the palace complex he and Carl had built for themselves in Kazundu had left Carl dead and their buildings in ruins. When Congo had been captured and thrown in jail, the various criminal enterprises he had run alongside Carl all fell to pieces. That left the Bannock Trust as his sole source of cash, but the trust was largely funded by the dividends earned by the company stock that formed the great bulk of its capital value. If Bannock Oil suffered, so would the trust and so would Congo.
Congo felt put-upon, paranoid, convinced that the sinking of a barge in Alaska was somehow, in ways he could not quite work out, part of a scheme to rob him of the money that was rightfully his. Money was what this was all about, so he flicked channels until he got a network that was all about money: Bloomberg.
By this time it was six in the morning. The daily Bloomberg Surveillance show was just starting, and it was opening with helicopter footag
e of a searchlight, sweeping across storm-tossed waters. This had to be the sinking. Congo sat right up in bed and prepared himself to watch the show.
It was eleven o’clock in London and Hector Cross was finishing his third mug of coffee that morning as he worked on his pitch to the Bannock Oil board for the funds he would need to buy a military surplus ship. Aside from the brief glimpses of a kiddies’ TV show that he’d caught while attempting to shovel some breakfast down his little girl’s pretty but uncooperative mouth, Cross had deliberately stayed away from all media or means of communication. He was about to put in a request for several million of Bannock Oil’s dollars and he had to get it right first time, so he didn’t want anything to distract him. Then his iPhone pinged to alert him of an incoming message. Cross ignored it, but a minute later, programed to take offense when ignored, the phone pinged a second time and he could not help himself glancing at the screen. The sender was one of his contacts, named as “JB Private Office,” which meant Bigelow, or Jessica, his senior personal assistant. The message was so brief that it was all contained within the alert. It simply read: “Urgent. Turn on Bloomberg Surveillance NOW. CEO interview re Noatak.”
Cross frowned with annoyance. The word “Noatak” rang a bell, but he couldn’t remember why. Still, if it was important enough for Bigelow’s office to contact him at five in the morning, Houston time, he’d better find out what the fuss was all about. He switched on his office TV, found Bloomberg on the Sky box and saw a middle-aged man whose thinning gray hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and bow-tie gave him the air of a college professor rather than a morning TV presenter.
