by JE Gurley
MEGALODON
Feeding Frenzy
J E Gurley
Copyright 2016 by J E Gurley
1
September 14, 2017 Drillship Global Kulik, Chukchi Sea, Arctic Ocean–
For good or bad, the world runs on oil. Almost since that fateful day in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake sank the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, countries have fought over it. Men die for it. Intrepid explorers battle jungle insects, endure swamp-borne fevers, brave desert heat, and ply the frozen seas and tundras for crude oil. Until solar, wind, and other alternative power sources become reliable and affordable, oil will remain king. Even then, the world will still need oil.
Just over fifty percent of crude oil is refined into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, or lubricating oil. The remainder becomes chemicals, plastic, ink, insecticide, dentures, and denture adhesive. The tires on our vehicles and the asphalt upon which they ride come from crude oil. Environmentalists decry the rape and pillage of the earth’s resources and global warming through carbon emissions while using resources derived from oil. Greenpeace ships run on oil. Oil is essential in the manufacture of the Zodiac boats they use to blockade whaling ships.
Emotions run high on both sides of the subject of oil—how we get it, where we get it, and who pays the ultimate cost for it. For good or bad, the world runs on oil. Companies comb the ends of the earth in search of the black liquid that lubricates bearings and powers engines. For that reason, Global Standard Petroleum had come to the Chukchi Sea, 230,000 square miles of frigid, mostly frozen water north of the Bering Sea.
* * * *
Asa Iverson snubbed out his cigarette on the icy railing as if trying to brand the steel with a red-hot ember. He focused all his frustration on the butt; then, with grease-stained fingers, he flicked the crushed butt into the sea thirty feet below. The wind grabbed the still-smoking wad and sent it tumbling along the side of the ship until the churning waves snatched it from the air and swallowed it. The same bitter wind bit into his chaffed cheeks and cracked lips. He pulled the hood of his parka over his head and stepped away from the railing.
“God damned cold is killing me,” he bitched.
“No one said it would be easy,” his companion, engineer Mick Robbins, replied in a deep basso profundo voice muffled by the fur-lined parka hood pulled so tightly together that only his eyes remained visible through the narrow slit.
“Easy enough for you to say,” Asa replied. “Two more weeks and you’ll be in the South Pacific—sunny days, warm breezes, cold beer, and hot native women, while I’ll still be stuck here freezing my nuts off.” Asa grabbed his crotch with his gloved right hand to emphasize his point.
Robbins shrugged, a gesture almost lost within the confines of the heavy parka. “Oil is oil. It’s no easier to find on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean than it is here in the Chukchi Sea.”
Asa cracked a grin and wished he hadn’t. It was too cold to smile. “Yeah, but in Micronesia, your dick doesn’t freeze off when you piss over the railing.”
Robbins’ chuckle erupted from deep in his chest, loud and spontaneous, like the man himself. “There is that. Why not contact Global’s HR rep again? Maybe the paperwork got lost or fouled up.”
“Two months!” Asa growled. He felt as if he was choking on Global red tape. Every e-mail he had sent had elicited a request for further information or returned with another form to fill out. “Two months I’ve been hammering them for a transfer to the Global Challenger, and I’ve heard nothing. It’s beginning to suck big time.”
“Look, you’re a master mechanic. I’m sure your transfer will come through soon.”
“Not soon enough.” His body shuddered as another cold chill racked his body. “God, it’s cold.”
“Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee in the galley. You can dunk your nut sack in it until they’re nice and toasty.”
Asa shook his head. He needed something warm to fight the chill, but in his stomach, not on his balls. “Mmm. Sounds lovely, Mick, but I can’t. I’ve got too much to do. The aft port thruster is acting up. Can’t you feel the rig wobble between waves?”
“In a ten-foot swell?” Robbins questioned. “My sea legs aren’t that developed. You’re the mechanic. Me? I’m just an overpaid paper shuffler.”
Asa opened the hatch into the superstructure, relishing the gust of warm air hitting his face. The ship breeze carried the familiar odor of lubricating oil, drilling mud, and sweat. Four months aboard ship had made them a part of everyday life. However, the aroma of baking bread from the ship’s galley a deck below cleaved through the less appealing smells like an icebreaker through an ice floe, enticing his nostrils with its heady, yeasty fragrance. His stomach rumbled a complaint. His body had burned off the meager calories from his quick breakfast of coffee and a sweet roll in fighting the intense cold. In spite of his enormous appetite and the excellent quality of food aboard the ship, he had lost seven pounds. For a moment, he reconsidered; then, the ship lurched to port, reminding him the thruster required his attention.
The seven-hundred-fifty-foot-long drillship Global Kulik remained in position above the test well site using eight static anchor lines and six thrusters spaced along the keel—two large aft thrusters and four retractable thrusters amidships. The waterjet thrusters used streaming GPS data and onboard computers to compensate for the effects of wind, waves, and current, but sudden swells were more difficult to control. A weak thruster suddenly failing could place undue strain on the flexible riser pipe through which the drill reached the seabed one-hundred-fifty feet below.
“Sorry. Gotta go,” he said to Robbins and hurried down the stairs ahead of him.
“Yeah, later,” Robbins called after him
Along the maze of corridors, necessary because of the moon pool directly beneath the drilling derrick comprising the center of the ship, he passed the cramped crew’s quarters housing the twenty-year-old drillship’s sixty-five-man drilling section in four-bunk cabins. As a maintenance mechanic, he shared a tiny cabin with another mechanic, but it beat listening to the snores and smelling the farts of four others. Space aboard ship was at a premium, sometimes requiring hot bunking, when two men shared the same berth on different shifts. With a drilling crew of forty roughnecks, twenty-five drillers and crane operators, twenty scientists and medical personnel, forty technical and supervisory staff, a catering staff of fifteen, and thirty roustabouts, stewards, and cleaning crew, the corridors and passageways were usually as crowded as the inside of a mall at Christmas. A few off-shift personnel sat in the lounge watching television or playing cards. The company tried to provide various modes of entertainment for the crew, but after four long months at sea, boredom had set in.
The drillship now bored its twenty-seventh test hole, running in a straight line from the shallows of Hanna Shoals to the north, to their present position one-hundred-eighty nautical miles north of Point Hope, Alaska, and two-hundred-fifty miles west of Barrow. The twenty-six previous holes had all been dry. A few had been promising, but so far, they had not discovered a pool of oil large enough to be profitable. Number twenty-seven would be different. Asa could feel it in his bones. Seismographic readings indicated a series of fluid-filled caverns less than a thousand feet below the sea bottom. The engineers predicted a rich mixture of oil and natural gas that could supply the world’s oil needs for decades. Asa had grown weary of dry holes. Any bit of good news offered hope.
He passed through the mudroom with its six large pumps sending chemical slurry through hoses down into the borehole to prevent a blowback from gas pressure. He waved at the roustabouts dumping fifty-pound bags of chemical into the mixing hoppers, conversation being impossible in the noisy compartment. Each man wore soun
d-dampening headphones. Asa preferred the more comfortable lightweight inserts he wore in his ears or kept on a cord around his neck. His milieu, the thruster control room, was much quieter than the mudroom pumps or the engine room.
Stu Macklin, the Dynamic Positioning Officer in charge of keeping the ship on station, saw him enter the control room and waved him over to the main panel. As usual, potato chip crumbs littered the top of the panel from an empty bag sitting beside a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Asa cringed. Each time he saw Macklin with an open cup of coffee near the panel, he expected a short circuit that would shut down all the thrusters, sending the Kulik into a tailspin, but the Senior DPO didn’t seem to mind, and Asa didn’t believe in making waves. Macklin pointed to the readings displaying data on the aft port thruster and frowned.
“I know, I know,” Asa said. “I’ll fix it.”
“The output pressure has fallen by thirty percent,” Macklin replied; then, wiped a potato chip crumb from his beard. “Maybe it sucked up some trash from the drill rig. You know how those drillers can be.” Macklin’s frown turned to a grimace. His constant harping to the Tool Pusher about the drill crew tossing trash over the side of the ship had made him no friends among the roughnecks or of the Safety Officer.
“I might as well check it out now, while I have the time. The way the sea’s picking up, we can’t afford to lose it.”
Macklin nodded. “Good idea. Do you need help?” he asked.
Asa grinned and held out his hands. “Hey, I’m the best, right? If I can’t fix it, it can’t be fixed.”
“Yeah, I keep forgetting, although you remind me often enough. Get on it. If this hole doesn’t pan out, we might be moving again, maybe even shut down for the winter.”
Asa sighed. “So much for lucky hole number twenty-seven.”
Asa wanted oil. Every worker on an oil rig did, but if the Global Kulik shut down operations for the winter and returned to port, it might improve his chances at a slot on the Global Challenger. It looked as if he might be joining Robbins in the Pacific after all.
Every cold-ass cloud has a warm silver lining.
Passing through the port engine room, one of two engine rooms on the ship, he spared the twin 10,000-horsepower Cummins diesel engines a wary glance, feeling like Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk fame, sneaking between sleeping giants on his way to steal the Golden Goose. He had helped the other mechanics tune the engines to peak efficiency, but he preferred working on the smaller engines. It allowed him a little privacy and solitude on the crowded ship. The now quiescent engines, in conjunction with the steel-reinforced bow, endowed the ship with the attributes of an icebreaker, capable of plowing through the thinning ice pack during spring break up, allowing the drillship an early jump on good weather and its competitors. However, with winter fast approaching, the pack ice would soon close in around them, growing thicker every day. The drillship could not withstand the relentless pressure of miles of sea ice. The season would be over until spring thaw, and unless number twenty-seven panned out, Global might give up on Chukchi oil altogether.
The thruster sat in its own little compartment one level below the engine room. The forty-one-inch intake for the 1500-horsepower waterjet thruster was located on the ship’s keel. A diverter on the water exhaust pipes channeled flow through either the twenty-nine-inch stern nozzle or the port nozzle. Asa detected something amiss as soon as he stepped into the compartment. The steady high-pitched hum of the impeller had taken on the warbling tone of a drunken contralto. The pressure gauges read too low on the exhaust lines, but the intake pressure needle edged into the red danger zone. Before shutting down the engine, he radioed Macklin to compensate with the other thrusters. He then pulled the access panel to check the impeller, expecting to see shards of metal from a worn impeller. Instead, he found a wad of what looked like stringy, pale gray feces–baby poop.
Hoping some wandering walrus had not taken a dump beside the intake; he scraped the stinking muck from the impeller and examined it with his screwdriver and a flashlight; then, took a cautious sniff. The strong, unpleasant odor did not smell like what he thought walrus shit would smell like.
At first, he thought it might be algae. A few years earlier, a ship had encountered a massive algal raft floating in the sea, and it seemed the logical conclusion. However, on closer inspection, he decided the stuff looked more like pulped Kombu, but unlike any kelp that he had ever seen in a bowl of dashi, one of his favorite Asian dishes. He decided to take a sample to the biology lab. It would give him a good excuse to see Ilsa Thorin, the biologist working on her doctorate aboard the Kulik.
On shore, Ilsa’s moderate attractiveness would not make her stand out in a crowd, but aboard the Kulik with a dearth of women and over one-hundred-eighty males, she reigned as the Queen of Sheba. Her mousy appearance gave lie to the myth that all Swedish women were buxom blondes. She was too skinny for Asa’s taste, but of the fifteen women on the drillship, she topped his list.
He replaced the access panel and powered up the thruster, watching the gauges until satisfied it worked properly. The gauges remained steady and the hum of the drive shaft maintained an even note.
“Singing like a soprano,” he said aloud. He radioed Macklin. “Port thruster’s back on line. You can add it to the mix.”
Reluctant to go back outside in the cold to complete the next task on his daily list, replacing a winch motor bearing on the starboard crane amidships, he sat back to enjoy another cigarette where he wouldn’t freeze his ass off. Pall Mall Reds that cost him $5.33 per pack in his hometown of New Orleans, cost $9.80 in Anchorage, almost enough to make him quit smoking. At thirty-one, he had smoked two packs a day since sixteen years of age, and his body suffered the consequences. Climbing the eleven flights of stairs from the engine room to the bridge winded him. The last time he had visited the bridge to repair a faulty weather seal on a window, he had stood outside in the corridor for two minutes catching his breath.
The throb of the thruster and the soothing smoke filling his lungs slowly worked their magic on him, easing the tensions of the day. Maybe Robbins was right. He would try HR one more time. If the Kulik rolled snake eyes on hole twenty-seven, his chances of transfer to the Pacific were good. After half an hour, he figured he had milked the job for all the leisure time he could and decided to get moving before he fell asleep. He remembered the strange substance he had scraped from the filter, placed it in the cellophane wrapper from his cigarette pack, and took it with him.
The labs and infirmary in the superstructure took up most of deck eight. The black-and-white linoleum tiled floor always looked as if the cleaning crew had just mopped it, and the air smelled of disinfectant and alcohol. He had no idea of the function of most of the hi-tech equipment in the various lab compartments, but since he didn’t work on it, it didn’t concern him. He found Ilsa sitting behind a microscope in the biology lab, amid a clutter of specimen bottles filled with seawater. She had swept her long, reddish-blonde hair into a tightly braided ponytail that draped over her right shoulder. Her thick glasses, not needed for viewing the slides, lay on the table beside her. When she looked up at his approach, he noticed the twin furrows above her too-thin nose and the intense look of concentration in her jade green eyes. He laid his prize on the desk before her like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its master.
“What’s this, Mr. Iverson?” she asked, somewhat irritated at his interruption of her analysis.
Asa shook his head and offered her his best smile. “Asa, please. Mister sounds too formal.” So far, their relationship had been no more than an occasional exchange of pleasantries in the cafeteria or a game of chess in the ship’s lounge, but he hoped for something more. “I hoped you could tell me. I found it gumming up the works in the port thruster.”
She sighed, but took a fresh slide from a box, and with a pair of tweezers, dropped a sample of the substance on the slide, before placing it beneath the lens. After almost two minutes, he began to think she had forgotten about him
; then, she glanced up at him with a puzzled expression.
She cocked her head to one side and asked, “Where did you find this?”
“It was clogging the intake on the aft port thruster. What is it?”
She took another glance through the microscope. “I’m not sure.”
Her uncertainty surprised him. Ilsa had never been afraid to express her opinion on matters, even at the cost of drawing hard looks from her fellow scientists. “Please tell me it’s not walrus shit.”
She frowned at him. “No, but it is definitely organic. It looks like kelp, but of a variety that I’ve never seen before, at least not living. It looks,” she paused and frowned, “ancient. If I’m right, this genus of kelp hasn’t been around for at least fifteen million years.”
Asa swallowed hard to keep from choking. “Fifteen million …”
“Years, yes,” she finished, “since the later part of the Middle-Miocene Epoch.”
“That’s crazy,” burst out of his mouth before he could catch himself.
To his surprise, she nodded in agreement. “It would be, except I’ve been examining seawater samples collected over the last two days.”
“And,” he prompted when she fell silent.
“I’ve identified living phytoplankton and crab larvae thought extinct for twenty million years.”
“That’s …” he almost said crazy again, but caught himself. He stared at her, trying to judge if she was attempting to pull his leg. She had never displayed an active sense of humor, but her remark sounded like the punch line of a joke. Her face betrayed no telltale signs of amusement. In fact, she looked frightened. He did not doubt her findings—she would not have been aboard the drillship if she weren’t a competent biologist. Global Petroleum only hired the best. Still, he had to ask. “Are you sure?”
She sighed. “Of course, I’ll send samples to the biology department at the Alaska Pacific University for verification, but, yes, I’m fairly confident of my identification.”
