Power Down

by Ben Coes

  A lone man atop the great dam clenched a cigarette and struggled to get his lighter to work. A yellow patch with the word WHITE written on it was sewn into the right chest of a heavy-duty, bright orange Patagonia winter parka. On the left chest of the coat, the letters KKB spread austerely in black thread.

  It was past midnight. Jake White stood at the precipice of the three-thousand-foot wall of granite and steel and looked out at the black waters of the Labrador. He took a drag on his cigarette. He smoked too much, he knew, but he’d already lived enough for two men, having survived for so long in this monster of his own creation. Savage Island Project, White’s audacious vision, had beaten and bloodied him, not into submission, but into an altogether different state of mind. He’d beaten himself into a place even more desperate and lonely, a place you go not when defeated but after you’ve accomplished all you’ve set out to do and there’s nothing left.

  For two long decades, Savage Island Project had been his singular obsession, the pursuit of which had destroyed his marriage, his relationship with his two sons, and any ties he’d had with life back in Ohio. But here he remained, surrounded by the noise. It penetrated the air with a steady pulse of metallic friction, penetrated it, then surrounded it and pulsated down, then back up; it was everywhere. This was the din that results when you build a wall of cement, granite, and steel more than half a mile high, in a place it’s not supposed to be, an awe-inspiring spectacle designed to hold back endless waters meant to flow free. This was the deafening, inhuman sound of man triumphing over nature; of turbines and technology; of all that you must create when you decide to build a wall whose sole purpose is the taking of God’s waters for society’s use, for a company’s profits, for power.

  This was the roar of Savage Island Project, the largest hydroelectric facility in North America, a $12.5 billion monolith constructed over a punishing decade in the far northeastern reaches of Canada, in the Nunavut, 575 miles from the last outpost of modern civilization.

  Savage Island Project was everything and more than White had dreamed it could be, a massive powerhouse of perpetually renewable electricity. It generated enough energy to power a large section of the eastern United States. Enough energy to make its builder, KKB of New York City, the second-largest energy company in America.

  Savage Island had been White’s idea, and no one had agreed with him. Not his brother. Not his wife. None of the corporate jackasses at company headquarters. Nobody except for Teddy Marks, at the time a young KKB executive. He had believed. He’d convinced his bosses. Now the dam was complete. Marks was CEO. And the jackasses were gone.

  And the noise was everywhere.

  As he stood atop the dam, upon an iron stanchion that served as the observation deck, White glanced for a moment behind him, at the outflow area where the water poured in a controlled river after passing through one of the two hundred jet engine–sized turbines of the dam. It was an amazing sight, a full half mile above the man-made dark harbor below. Its edges were lined by a spectrum of small white houses built for the six hundred permanent Savage Island workers and their families.

  White turned from the calm waters below back to the unruly sea. It was an astonishing contrast, the ordered valley spread out behind the dam, and the angry Labrador Sea whose whitecap crests pounded at the granite of the dam not more than fifty feet below where he stood. It was this contrast, between man and nature, between unbridled chaos and controlled order, that had come to him some twenty years ago in a waking dream.

  He was a manager at KKB’s Perry Nuclear Power Plant outside of Cleveland. He’d written his idea down one month after returning from a fishing trip to the Nunavut, near Frobisher Bay, a brutal stretch of rocky coastline at the edge of the Labrador Sea that suddenly notched southward in a unique rivulet more than a mile wide near a stretch of rocks known as the Lower Savage Islands. White had written it down on a napkin as he sat eating lunch in the cafeteria one bland, forgettable day at work.

  Now it was real.

  White shook his head, took a last drag on the cigarette, and flicked the stub of it into the wind. He walked to the end of the granite walkway that crossed the apex of the dam to the entry door that would take him to the operations center. It was nearly 1:00 A.M. He’d take a last look at turbine performance data before he took the elevator down and then walked to his house in the village below.

  As he reached for the door, a solitary figure stepped from the shadows. White looked up, momentarily startled as the dark figure moved swiftly to his left. A hand thrust out, too quickly for him to react or to even begin to understand that he was being attacked.

  The assailant grabbed him by his left hand. Twisting with trained, precise force, the killer pulled his arm behind his back and snapped it. The sound of White’s scream was loud enough to rise momentarily above the noise of the dam. But it was soon muffled by the killer’s gloved hand covering his mouth. Pushing him to the edge of the deck, the killer dropped White’s broken left arm and moved his gloved hand to his leg. White tried to fight but it was useless. The man lifted him up. With a grunt, he hoisted him to the railing. His right arm slipped off of White’s mouth.

  “No!” White screamed. He twisted his head around and tried to get a glimpse of the man. He clawed with his one good arm but only scratched air. His struggles were in vain. In the dull light, he saw a face. Oh, my God, he thought. Recognition came in the same instant he understood he was about to die.

  With a last grunt, the killer brought White to the edge of the deck and forced him over the brink. The ocean pounded violently against the dam, close enough to soak both men with spray. The killer let White fall. Screaming helplessly, the architect of Savage Island dropped into the watery oblivion.

  3

  CAPITANA TERRITORY

  The next morning, they prepared Mackie for burial at sea. Everyone knew the drill. If you were badly injured aboard Capitana, they would bring you to the hospital in Buenaventura, the nearest city to the territory, a day’s trip by boat. But if you died, the ocean owned you forever. You signed a document when you became an employee. Religion didn’t matter; there were no special ceremonies, no cremations, no special rites if you died aboard Capitana. If you listed family on your sheet, the company would send a letter to them, along with a month’s salary, accrued vacation time, and a “memorial bonus” of $10,000. Either way your body belonged to the dark depths and the hungry sharks. That’s the way it had to be when you worked 290 miles from civilization.

  At six o’clock in the morning, the corpse was brought from the infirmary to the lower deck, wrapped in green tarpaulin, tied tightly then anchored with weights. They placed it atop the launch platform riser, a steel shelf that could be tilted by turning a winch.

  Dewey descended the stairwell down to the deck, where sunrise pushed away the gray of night. A strange pinkish haze sat across the humid morning air. Four men attended the body. Three were friends of Mackie’s. The other was Chaz Barbo, Capitana’s physician. Barbo, by trade, was a welder, but he’d spent six months in medical school in Grenada before being expelled. Aboard Capitana that was enough to make you the authority on all medical issues.

  Dewey walked to the body and knelt over the word MACKIE written on the tarp. He had liked Jim Mackie. He thought of Sally, who’d long ago gotten used to not having a husband around. Still, she’d be devastated. Dewey stood up and looked at Mackie’s friends.

  “You want to say anything?” asked Dewey.

  Erin Haig stepped forward. He was a driller, with big, hairy hands, popular like Mackie. Normally he wore an easy smile for his buddies. Today his face looked as sullen as stone.

  He knelt next to the corpse of his dead friend. “We’ll miss you, Jim. God protect you on your trip. Amen.”

  “How about you?” Dewey asked the other men.

  They shook their heads.

  He turned to Barbo and nodded.

  Barbo reached up and began turning the winch.

  Dewey looked up. On the ma
in deck, the rails were crowded with men, some coming off the night shift and others reporting for day shift. That was good. He wanted it that way. It was important that the men aboard Capitana understand the implications of letting hatreds boil over. It didn’t take a veteran gang chief to sense the rise in tensions aboard the rig. An incident like this created rival factions, and Dewey worried that would mean more blood.

  Mackie’s body began to slide. It careened quickly down and slid smoothly into the sea.

  Dewey said nothing and walked back toward the steps. He ascended the stairwell to the main platform. He went to the cafeteria to have some breakfast, a bowl of raisin bran with a banana sliced in it. He ate quickly then drank a glass of orange juice. As he stood to leave, he saw Barbo having coffee at another table. He waved him over to have a word.

  “How’s Serine?” Dewey asked.

  “Getting worse. I thought the rest would help, but something must’ve happened to his head. We need to get him to a hospital.”

  “Radio for a chopper. I’ll be by to see him in a few minutes.”

  Dewey left the cafeteria and walked to Capitana’s main platform, checking in with his foremen.

  At the time of its construction, Capitana was the largest offshore oil platform in the world. The platform spread was as long and wide as a football field. Since completion, Sinopec, the Chinese state oil company, had built an offshore facility nearly three times as big as Capitana in the waters off Shanghai. But Capitana continued to blow away the new Chinese facility in terms of production.

  Besides the large living quarters, or “hotel” as it was called, which sat in the middle of the platform, the layout was simple. Every fifty feet, a duct unit sprung up from the ocean. A group of six men managed each of the duct units. Oil came up from the seafloor through the ductwork at the seabed to the pumping station, then up the main pipe that spidered off to ductwork just below the water. The flow had to be managed as it hit the platform and directed into one of the forty different duct units, which was then directed into one of the large barges for storage until it was taken away by tanker. It was simple, boring, hard work.

  Dewey made the rounds, walking the outside perimeter of the platform and reviewing production statistics from the night before, displayed on monitors at each station. As he made his way around the platform, he found his crewmen hard at work. This morning, more eyes than usual seemed to glance his way nervously; an uncertain and fragile aftermath in the wake of the fatal fight.

  He stopped to talk with Jonas Pierre, one of his foremen, a blond-haired kid from Chico, California. Pierre had served in the Navy, five years aboard the USS Howard. He was tall, heavyset, and tough. Dewey trusted Pierre.

  “Some night,” Pierre said.

  “Bad one,” said Dewey. “How’s your crew?”

  “Okay. I had to warn a couple of guys who were mouthing off.”

  “Mackie’s crew?”

  “No. Victor and one of the Saudis. Those fucking Arabs, I tell you.”

  “Watch what you say,” said Dewey. “It’s talk like that that’ll start the next knife fight.”

  Pierre nodded and looked away.

  “Get Lindsay to watch your station. I want you in my office in ten minutes.”

  “Got it.”

  Dewey went to the infirmary. Serine lay unconscious on one of the beds. Across the middle of his face, a large bandage had become so saturated that blood flowed from it down Serine’s face and onto his pillow.

  Dewey pulled the sheet down. The boy’s broken arm was set in a temporary cast. Like his pillow, his clothing was drenched in blood. He leaned next to the patient’s ear.

  “Serine,” he said quietly. “Wake up.”

  There was no response.

  Dewey leaned in closer. He pushed the eyelids back on the kid’s eyes. There was no movement or reaction. He grabbed the skin on his neck and pinched it, hard.

  Serine flinched and groaned, a deep, clotted, guttural noise. His eyes slitted open.

  “What was the fight about?” Dewey asked.

  Serine stared at him in silence.

  “What was the fight about?” he asked again, leaning in closer. The eyes closed again.

  Barbo entered the room.

  “Did you radio for the chopper?”

  “Yes. One and a half hours.”

  “You should change his bandages, his clothing too. For chrissakes, everything’s drenched.”

  “I changed it an hour ago. I’ll do it again.”

  Dewey walked across the deck to his office.

  Pierre waited inside, as requested. Like all men aboard Capitana, Pierre was deeply tanned, and his clothing, face, and hair, by this time in the shift, had a thin layer of silt and grease.

  “What do you think?” Dewey asked.

  “There’s going to be more blood,” said Pierre. “I can’t remember tension like this.”

  “Mackie’s boys looking for revenge?”

  “Yeah. And Serine’s. They’re organized.”

  “That’s why I need your help enforcing the peace out there. We need to keep both factions in line. Get them both cooled off until I can ship a few of them off here. Let me handle Mackie’s crew. I know how to handle them. They might do something to retaliate, but I can keep it from spreading. But I need you to come down hard on Serine’s crew.”

  “What’s hard?”

  Dewey put his coffee down.

  “Hard is using your fists when words would do. Force your way into their table at dinner. If you get lip, lock ’em up. That’s what I mean by hard.”

  “Some of these punks have knives. You saw that. He shivved Mackie in the throat.”

  “If we tried to get rid of all the weapons out here we’d have to shut down production for two days. The guys we’d actually want to disarm would be the ones who succeed in hiding them. Always works that way. Do you have a knife?”

  “No.”

  From a drawer in his desk, Dewey pulled out a large sheath that held an eight-inch Gerber fixed-blade black combat knife, black hockey tape wrapped around the hilt, serrated upper and lower edges, designed to maximize damage after the knife’s initial plunge into the body. On one side, the letters D.A. were engraved in script letters. On the other side, the word GAUNTLET was engraved in block letters.

  “Here.” Dewey handed the knife to Pierre. “I want it back.”

  “Special Forces issue, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Dewey. “Use it if you have to. Go after limbs. I don’t want any more deaths out here.”

  “What branch?”

  Dewey paused. “Rangers, then Delta. It was a long time ago.”

  “Delta? I didn’t know. What’s ‘Gauntlet’ for?”

  Dewey looked down at the old weapon. Probably his most valued weapon, certainly more so than any gun he’d ever owned. More for sentimental reasons than anything else. He couldn’t remember all of the times he had used it, but there had been many. In the jungles of Panama, cutting the head off a fer-de-lance, then slicing away the poison sacs and storing the rest for food. Slicing a fresh piece of cheese bought at a roadside market in the south of France during his honeymoon. Killing an Iranian diplomat in the dead of night in a seaside bungalow on the coast of Thailand as the man’s wife slept by his side and a small team of guards armed with automatic weapons stood just a room away.

  It had been nearly fifteen years since he’d earned the knife.

  It was the last week of Delta training. As any Delta knows, the last week was high stakes. It’s bragging rights, a fun day for those whose idea of fun is a treetop chute drop followed by a twenty-mile run through the forest with a few hours of hand-to-hand combat mixed in for good measure. They called it “Gauntlet.”

  They dropped you off with a team, a troop of Deltas, sixteen men in all, in the woods starting forty miles from Fort Bragg, one at a time, by parachute. The goal was to get back to Fort Bragg. Only problem was, they dropped in a brigade of regular army soldiers, nearly three thousand men
in all, between the handful of Deltas and Bragg.

  Dewey knew it was an exercise in humility. It didn’t take a genius to realize that. No Delta had ever made it through Gauntlet. It’s supposed to teach you that no matter how smart or how tough you think you are, there’s something called overwhelming force. But just because the odds are stacked against you, doesn’t mean you can convince a Delta he doesn’t have a chance.

  That day, Dewey dropped from the low-hover chopper and landed near the top of a big pine, climbing down to the forest floor. He started hiking in the opposite direction of everyone else, over Mount Greeley, through the dense, unpopulated land in the middle of North Carolina nowhere. Bragg was west; he headed due east. Except for a fifteen-minute stop to rest, he hiked all night.

  Just after sunrise, he came through a thick stand of pine and was at the edge of a neatly mowed field. He walked up to the farmhouse and asked the gray-haired farmer if he could get a ride to Bragg. The farmer, who barely spoke a word, drove Dewey the hundred or so miles back to Bragg. Dewey arrived to a thoroughly surprised corps. Everyone else had been caught within the first six hours. Some thought Dewey might be dead.

  Dewey was the only Delta to ever make it through Gauntlet.

  Some of the uptight pricks thought he broke the rules, but that was precisely the point: there aren’t any rules when you’re at war. The knife was given to him by his fellow class of recruits, a token of their respect for the one who’d made it through.

  Dewey ignored Pierre’s question. “Let’s get out there and put an end to this.”

  Pierre strapped on the knife and turned to leave.

  “Are there any of Serine’s friends you trust?” Dewey asked as he reached for the doorknob.

  “No,” said Pierre. “They’re all rats.”

  “None?”

  “Well, maybe one, Esco. He’s been around a while.”

  “Esco, good thought.”

  “What’s going to happen with Serine?” Pierre asked. “Have you seen him?”

  “He’s in tough shape,” said Dewey. “Chopper’s coming to take him to the hospital in Buenaventura.”