Nucflash sts-3

by Keith Douglass

  “Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, this is OPF Bouddica. Respond, please. Over.”

  Still no response, and the Noramo Pride was ten nautical miles off. If they didn’t turn soon, there was going to be a collision. A very large, very nasty collision.

  The BGA Consortium’s Bouddica oil production facility consisted of two separate platforms connected by a partly enclosed bridge suspended fifty feet above the churning black waters of the North Sea. To the north was the command center, Bouddica Alpha, also called “Big B.” South was the drilling platform, Bouddica Bravo, or B-2. Each structure was enormous; together, viewed as a single complex, they were titanic, a small city rising on stilts from the depths of the North Sea. At night, illuminated by twin galaxies of white and yellow and green lights gleaming like Christmas tree lights from the dark and thickly tangled branches of both structures, and by the bright orange flare atop the burn-off stack above Alpha’s processing center, the center took on the aspect of some fantastic, far-future city from some science-fiction movie, an eerie and not quite believable sight.

  The facility was brand-new, five years in the making and only brought into full production last September. The British-German-American Consortium — BGA for short — had invested hundreds of millions of pounds, marks, and dollars in this facility, which rested in just under 250 feet of water squarely atop one of the most recently discovered of the dozens of large oil deposits of the central stretches of the North Sea.

  Oil. It had first been discovered in the late 1960s, just after the various countries ringing the coasts of the North Sea had arrived at an agreement neatly carving up the sea and its resources for exploitation. Bouddica had been constructed just west of the dividing line sundering the British claim from the Norwegian.

  Bouddica was not entirely British, however, even though most of the personnel serving aboard were British nationals and the platform itself was technically British soil. These were the 1990s, and the oil that had been so astonishingly plentiful and easy to reach in the early seventies, transforming the economies of those countries able to draw upon it, was long gone. Rigs like Bouddica had been constructed in much deeper water — the depth increasing with each advance in the technology that shaped the raising of these structures — and were correspondingly far more expensive. The BGA Consortium had been formed as a means of pooling the resources — technical, personnel, and economic — of three important oil prospecting nations: the British, who owned the claim to the area of the North Sea where Bouddica had been built; the Germans, who’d made astonishing advances in the technology of oil drilling and production; and the Americans, who were bankrolling the lion’s share of the project… just as they would take the lion’s share of the oil once it was pumped to the surface and refined.

  Though most of the structure was invisible to Kirk in the darkness and the rain, she knew precisely what it looked like, having approached it by helicopter or by service ship dozens of times, in all weathers, in all lights. The eastern side of Alpha looked like a displaced apartment building, with smooth walls and neatly spaced rows of windows. Built on the leeward side of the structure where it was sheltered from the worst of the wind in a North Sea blow, it housed the living quarters for the 312 men and women who lived and worked on Bouddica for two-week stretches at a time. The structure’s large heliport was perched atop the apartment complex like a graduate’s mortarboard cap. To the west were the gas and oil processing facilities, a vast, roughly cubical tangle of girders and struts, towers and pipes, conduits and storage tanks, all nestled together beneath the three-hundred-foot thrust of the burn-off tower and its flaring tip of orange flame. The whole enormous, brilliantly illuminated structure was perched atop four pillars that rose like sequoias from the sea, growing thicker toward their tops to support Alpha’s 615-million-ton mass.

  South, across the bridges, Bravo appeared much smaller, a box-shaped affair of girders and steel much like her larger sister’s production facility, but less than a third as massive and far less imposing. The single largest structure aboard was the drilling tower, most of which was enclosed to protect the machinery from storms and salt spray. Unlike Alpha, the platform was supported by a spidery forest of pylons that held its deck forty to fifty feet above the waves, depending on the winds and tides.

  Stretched taut between the two structures was a steelgirdered causeway that sang and danced ominously during any blow of more than about thirty knots. Most of the bridge was taken up by a massive cluster of meter-thick pipes that channeled oil from Bravo to Alpha, and gas recovered from the processing plant back the other way. Bouddica used an expensive and modern gas-injection system that forced natural gas back into the oil deposits below, increasing the oil recovery to better than fifty-five percent of what was in the field. The wire-mesh enclosed walkway running along the top of the pipeline cluster looked like something designed for insects rather than men.

  As massive as a small city, which, in fact, was as good a definition for the twin structures as any, they were nevertheless vulnerable. Though they were built to withstand the worst winds and winter storms the notoriously savage North Sea could fling at them, the threat posed by the off-course Noramo Pride was greater by many orders of magnitude than any storm.

  “Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, this is Bouddica. Respond, please. Over.”

  She’d already sent for the facility’s senior manager, but it might be some minutes before he reached the control center. One distinct disadvantage to working aboard Bouddica so far as its inhabitants were concerned was the structure’s sheer size and complexity. At four in the morning, Brayson ought to be in his quarters just across from the center and down one level in the apartment complex… but the man had something of a reputation among the female employees aboard Bouddica. He might well be in someone else’s quarters tonight instead of his own.

  “James?” she asked the officer of the desk. “Shouldn’t we call Brayson up here over the Tannoy?”

  James Dulaney was one of Bouddica’s assistant plant managers. The son or the nephew or some such of some BGA poobah, he was young for his position aboard the facility… and he was obviously having some trouble with the responsibility that attended it. He looked up from the radar, his face creased with worry and indecision. “You mean… wake everybody aboard!”

  “Damned straight I mean wake everybody. Send someone down to Brayson’s cabin to make sure he heard my call buzzer.” With a facility this new, there were endless teething problems. Possibly the buzzer simply wasn’t working. “And if he’s somewhere else, maybe he’ll hear the loudspeaker.”

  Dulaney considered this. “But we don’t know if this is really an emergency. I mean, the ship is still—”

  “Take my word for it, Dulaney!” Kirk shouted. “It’s a fucking emergency! Now send someone to find the boss… or go down there yourself!”

  Dulaney vanished, leaving Kirk alone on the command center deck. She peered out through the curtains of black rain, straining for a glimpse of running lights, of anything. She decided she would give Dulaney a few minutes to check Brayson’s cabin. If he wasn’t there, she would put out a call over the facility’s loudspeakers herself.

  “Bouddica, this is Noramo Pride,” a voice rasped in her headset.

  Thank God! “Noramo Pride, this is Bouddica! You are off course!” Kirk cried. “You are entering a restricted area and may be on a collision course with this platform!”

  “Bouddica Facility, Noramo Pride,” the voice on her headset said. The accent to the English words didn’t sound American… or British either, for that matter. The man sounded German. “I wish to speak with your senior manager.”

  Yeah, so would I.

  Cutting the circuit on her microphone, she reached for the microphone that served the facility’s loudspeakers. “Mr. Brayson, Mr. Brayson,” she said, and her voice boomed from the overhead speakers with a shrill squeal of feedback. “Please report to the control center immediately!”

  That would bring everyone not worki
ng on the early shift spilling out of their bunks. She opened the ship-to-ship channel once more. “Noramo Pride, our radar has you on a collision course with this facility,” she said. “You must change your course at once.”

  “We seem to be having a bit of difficulty, Bouddica. Please let us speak with your manager.”

  Kirk was certain now that something was seriously wrong. An oil tanker as massive as the Noramo Pride was not a speedboat that could be stopped or turned in moments. Even if she reversed her engines immediately, at her current speed of ten knots it would take her something like five miles before she could be brought to a stop, and turning presented much the same difficulty. The tanker was now just eight miles from Bouddica, moving on a straight-ahead course that would bring her nearly nine-hundred-foot bulk blundering into the complex in about forty minutes. If there was something wrong with the tanker’s steering — her rudder jammed, for instance — then they only had about ten minutes more to do something about it before the Bouddica complex was doomed.

  “Our manager is on his way,” Kirk told the unseen speaker somewhere out there in the rain and darkness. “Please, please change your course immediately! Over!”

  “We will discuss that with your manager, Bouddica.”

  “Noramo Pride, do you need assistance? Over!” It would be murder getting a helicopter aloft in these winds, she knew, but if the tanker required some special help…

  “Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, do you require assistance? Over!”

  Her only answer were the mingled hissings of static and the wind.

  0421 hours

  U.S. oil tanker Noramo Pride

  The North Sea

  “We have to start slowing the ship now, damn it,” Captain Scott told the blond-haired German with the submachine gun. A whole minute had passed since Adler had stopped talking with the Bouddica complex. “You can’t stop these monsters on a dime, you know. And in these seas, any close maneuvering around that platform’s going to be dangerous as hell.”

  “I am perfectly aware of the capabilities of this vessel, Captain,” Adler replied. “And I have supreme confidence in your abilities as a seaman.”

  “Fuck you,” Scott muttered, half under his breath.

  If Adler had heard the obscenity, he didn’t respond. Instead, he took another long look into the bridge console’s radarscope, as the half-dozen other armed men on the bridge stood by silently, impassively. He still wore a radio headset, however, as though he was expecting to hear again from Bouddica at any moment.

  At last, Adler nodded as if satisfied with what he’d divined from the glow of the radar’s sweep. “You may make all preparations for bringing this ship to a halt. We will be docking at one of Bouddica’s mooring buoys.”

  Even in ports, oil tankers rarely tied up alongside a pier to take on fuel or cargo. Instead, they used mooring buoys offshore, huge, cylindrical drums firmly anchored to the bottom. This was especially true in deeper waters, alongside oil rigs or production facilities far out on the continental shelf, where the water was too deep to anchor. Tankers coming alongside an oil rig to take on crude directly would tie up to a fueling buoy, where hoses could be passed aboard and the oil channeled straight into the tanker’s holds without risking an unexpected swing by a 12,000-ton ship into the facility’s vulnerable supports with a sudden change in the weather.

  Scott peered ahead through the rain-swept forward window, where the windshield wipers were making their fitful scrapescrape-scrape in an almost useless attempt to keep up with the rain. Eight miles. Usually you could see one of these big production platforms ten miles off; at night, with all of the lights and the flare stack going strong, you could see them from fifteen miles out. In shitty weather like this, though, just seeing the running lights up on the ship’s bow was next to impossible. It reminded him again of just how enormous his charge was.

  God in heaven. Did these maniacs plan on ramming Bouddica? It was possible. The Noramo Pride would make one hell of a battering ram, though Scott couldn’t imagine what the terrorists’ motives for such an act could possibly be. Glancing back over his shoulder, he took in the grim expressions of the men under Adler’s command and the weaponry they carried. Earlier, before it had gotten dark, he’d watched from the bridge as several of the invaders unloaded several crates from the helicopter forward. He had no idea of what the crates contained, though his guess was explosives of some kind. Perhaps the PRF terrorists had other weapons in their arsenal besides the Noramo Pride herself.

  He wondered what was going on aboard the platform right now. Knowing only that a tanker was bearing down on them, they must be running scared.

  Scott knew that he for one was damned scared, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  0421 hours

  Oil Production Facility Bouddica

  The North Sea

  John Brayson hurried onto the command center deck, puffing from the long jog from the cabin — not his own — where the loudspeaker announcement had caught him sound asleep. He was a short, soft-voiced, dumpy-looking man who was often underestimated by those who’d never worked with him. His mild, gray eyes and thick glasses gave him the look of an accountant rather than a production rig manager; certainly he didn’t look the part of a man expected to boss a crew of derrick workers and oil hands.

  Still, the economics of a productive drilling project were as hard and as balky and as demanding as any drunken work hand, and Brayson could be just as hard when the occasion demanded it. One look at Sally Kirk’s ghost-pale face when he entered the control center was enough to tell him there was trouble.

  “Okay, Sal. Let’s have it.”

  “Noramo Pride is a tanker, one hundred twenty thousand deadweight tons,” Kirk told him, her words crisp and precise despite her obvious fear. “American registry, no cargo. We noticed she was off course four hours ago. During the past thirty minutes, it became clear that she was on a direct heading toward us, speed ten knots.”

  “How far?”

  “About eight miles. A little less.”

  “You’ve raised them on radio?”

  She furrowed her brow, an expression of exasperation and puzzlement. “Finally. But… he doesn’t make sense. He just wants to talk to the facility manager and won’t discuss what his problem might be.”

  “It’s okay, Sal,” he told the woman. “Let me have it.”

  He took the headset and microphone from the radio officer and slipped them on. “Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride,” he said. “This is John Brayson, the manager of the Bouddica facility. What can I do for you?”

  “Attention, Bouddica,” the voice said. “This is Heinrich Adler of the People’s Revolutionary Front. We have taken control of the American oil tanker Noramo Pride and are holding her crew hostage.”

  Brayson’s heart caught in his throat. Terrorists…

  “As you are no doubt already aware,” the voice continued, as cold and as implacable as the sea outside, “this vessel is on a collision course with your facility. If you do not accede to our demands, we will do what we can to give Bouddica a small nudge. I ask you, Mr. Brayson, to imagine, if you will, a tanker like the Noramo Pride attempting to wedge itself beneath the bridge connecting Bouddica Alpha and Bouddica Bravo. The pipelines carrying natural gas from your refinery to the gas-injection modules would be ruptured. If a spark, or a burst of gunfire, or a rocket from one of the man-portable launchers I have on board the tanker should happen to ignite it—”

  “We get the picture,” Brayson said, his voice dry. “Just what is it you want, Mr. Adler?”

  “Very little, for now,” the voice replied. “First, you will accept a boarding party of my men, who will come over by helicopter. You will conduct them to the command center of your facility, where they will tell you what we require of your crew. Your people are to be instructed to follow their orders precisely, to the letter. Any disobedience, however slight, any attempt to escape or to communicate with the outside by any member of your crew will result in the immediate
execution of five of your people, selected at random. Do you understand that, Mr. Brayson?”

  Brayson licked his lips. God, it was a nightmare… the worst nightmare he ever could have possibly imagined. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Second, you will have your safety tug alerted and standing by, ready to secure us to one of your mooring stations.”

  Whoever Adler was, he knew the layout of Bouddica, and he knew how the facility operated. What the hell kind of game where they playing? “Very well.”

  “My remaining demands will wait until I am aboard your facility. I warn you, however, Mr. Brayson, not to attempt to communicate with your headquarters in England. We are monitoring the airwaves and will know if you radio for help. If you try it, I will ram Bouddica Alpha, and that will cause a great deal of damage and could result in a number of deaths. I also warn you not to attempt any unfortunate heroics, such as hiding armed men in the hope of overpowering my forces after they come aboard. Any attempt at armed resistance will result in the immediate execution of ten of your people, selected at random, in addition to the people who resisted. Your one hope for survival, Mr. Brayson, is to assemble all of your people and assure them that complete cooperation is in their best interest. You are, all of you, salaried employees and have nothing whatsoever to gain by risking the death of yourselves or your coworkers in vain heroics. Do you understand?”

  Brayson could hardly speak. He exchanged glances with Sally Kirk, then realized that she’d not heard anything of this conversation save his responses. She looked afraid, though. Almost as afraid as he felt. She must have guessed at least partly what was going on, simply from the tightness of his voice, and his expression.

  “I understand.”

  “Sehr gut. Do what you are told, and all of you will come through this safely.” He sounded almost considerate. Businesslike. It added to the surreal horror of the moment. “We will talk further when I come aboard. Until then, Mr. Brayson, this is the Noramo Pride, signing off.”