by Bear Grylls
CHAPTER 37
The door shut behind them with a clang. Their feet rang on the steel floor as they were led along passages, up and down staircases, further and further into the heart of the rig. There were several more electronically locked doors, all opened with swipe cards. Beck remembered, from the paper that Abby had planted on Steven, that people weren’t even supposed to talk about the existence of Island Alpha.
Let alone be on it.
This place was pretty darn secret.
The entire rig hummed with working machinery. A deep bass rhythm pulsed through the structure. Beck wondered if it was the sound of the drill.
One final staircase, one more swipe, and then they were in what must be the control room. It was lined with flatscreens that were ablaze with coloured graphics. About twenty white-coated men and women sat in front of computer monitors and keyboards. One wall was taken up with computer racks and servers. There was a quiet background hubbub of techno-babble that meant nothing to Beck – not until he heard the words ‘controlled eruption’.
‘Controlled what?’ he murmured.
James and Abby were already waiting in the room: Abby was in conversation with one of the crew; James had been left sitting on his own, swinging his feet awkwardly. He glanced up as Beck and Farrell were brought in, then quickly looked away again.
Beck noticed that Abby and James had thrown their lifejackets down in a corner in a wet heap. The guards pushed him and Farrell into the same corner to wait. They looked at each other, and then pulled off their own lifejackets to join the pile.
They obviously weren’t going to get a chair, so Beck sat cross-legged on the floor. After a moment Farrell joined him. The guard stood watch, staring sternly at them. No one else paid them any further attention. Once again, Beck looked around. What could they do? There was only one way out – the door they had come in by. Say they managed to get past its electronic lock somehow. They could make a break for it. Then they would be alone on the rig with nowhere to run to.
Maybe they could even take one of the lifepods that he had seen from the helicopter. The hurricane would strike and they would be thrown about like pebbles in a tin can, but they would be away from this place.
Farrell nudged him and Beck turned round. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t noticed James sidling over to them. The other boy was wide-eyed and sweating. Beck regarded him coldly and waited for him to speak.
‘They’re . . . they’re all real busy with this controlled eruption . . . It’s just a safety measure, you know, so we aren’t sitting on top of a bomb when the storm hits . . .’
‘You didn’t come to talk to us about controlled eruptions,’ Beck said.
James swallowed. ‘No. If you were born into this family too . . . if you knew . . .’ James’s face crumpled as if he was about to burst into tears. Farrell turned away in disgust.
Beck made his own voice firm but kind. They badly needed an ally. And who was he to judge? Could he say he wouldn’t have turned out the same, if Abby Blake had been his mother, and Lumos his family’s business?
‘James, you don’t want us to get hurt, do you? You never really wanted to kill us, did you?’
James shook his head urgently. ‘No. No. It was just . . . Mum said . . . But— Look, if you do get away, could you . . . you know, could you . . . take me?’
‘Where would you go?’ Beck started.
‘James!’ Abby’s voice cut across the room. ‘Get away from them!’
James gave them a final pleading look and quickly returned to his chair.
‘Nice try, son,’ Farrell muttered.
‘He’s terrified,’ said Beck. ‘Of his mum and his granddad.’
Farrell grunted. ‘That’s what makes him dangerous. We can’t rely on him. His mum twitches her eyebrow and he’s back on her side.’
Beck shifted uncomfortably. The metal floor of the control cabin was cold and hard. He reached for the nearest lifejacket in the pile behind them and pulled it over so that he could use it as a cushion. ‘But do you think we can get away?’
‘I sure don’t plan to hang around for Granddad, son. I’m pretty sure he won’t have the guts to face us alone. Not without a lot of backup – guys with guns, and bullets that move a whole lot faster than you or me.’ The captain glanced over at the control room’s single door. One of the crew was just swiping the sensor to let herself out. ‘Plus, everything’s security controlled, so even if we got out of here somehow, we’d come up short at the next door we reach, and that would be that.’
Beck nodded knowingly.
He was used to surviving in the wild. But surviving in the midst of all this technology seemed to require a whole new set of skills that he just didn’t have.
He tried to think logically.
OK, he thought to himself. Use the same principles of survival . . . just in a different environment. Protection. Rescue. Water. Food. OK, Protection – and this floor is freezing cold. Let’s deal with that first, Beck Granger.
He spread out the lifejacket and arranged it so that the straps and buckles wouldn’t stick into him. His thumb brushed against something hard under the plastic surface. Whatever it was, it was in the front pocket. He looked down and thought he saw a familiar outline. Suddenly his heart was pounding, because he was pretty certain he knew what it was.
He slid his fingers in to retrieve it, and they came upon a cold metal loop. Slowly, not drawing any attention to himself, he withdrew Abby’s ring. On his advice she had taken it off and put it in the pocket of the lifejacket, so as not to attract sharks. And here it was now.
He gave Farrell a nudge and briefly held the ring out in the palm of his hand, before closing his fingers around it again.
The captain seemed unimpressed. ‘Very pretty.’
‘Yes, but don’t you remember . . .?’ Beck dropped his voice to a whisper, though it would have been difficult for anyone to overhear them anyway. ‘This is how she sabotaged the ship’s systems! It’s a microcomputer, remember? It could work again. If we crash the rig’s systems, maybe the doors will open?’
Farrell suddenly looked very interested. He shot a glance at the banks of computers. They were on the other side of the control room.
‘Any place like this will have a failsafe,’ he said; ‘something goes wrong and everything unlocks so no one gets trapped. You think we could do it here?’
‘Maybe,’ Beck whispered.
‘And then what?’
‘Try and make it to a lifepod. Maybe even the helicopter.’ Beck honestly didn’t know, and he hated not having a plan. But the one thing he did know was that anything was better than sitting around waiting for Granddad Blake to deal with them.
‘How did she make it work? On the ship?’
Beck screwed up his face, trying to remember what had happened on the ship’s bridge that night. He was sure Abby hadn’t done anything.
‘She just . . . kind of . . . stood there. James said it’s a Bluetooth computer. Maybe it just picks up the nearest computer automatically and does its stuff.’
‘Nuh-uh.’ Farrell shook his head. ‘She’d be wiping out computers left, right and centre just by walking past them. There has to be more to it than that.’
‘But she did,’ Beck insisted in frustration. ‘She just stood there and tapped . . .’
And then he saw it, clear as day. She had tapped – once, twice, three times – and then the screens had gone dead.
‘It’s the tapping. It has to be. Some motion-sensitive detector inside sets it off.’
‘Maybe.’ Farrell still looked sceptical. ‘Sounds like our only chance. But the nearest computers are on the other side of the room.’ He nodded over at them. ‘They won’t let us near them.’
‘So we need a diversion.’ Beck knew just the thing. Slowly, casually, not attracting anyone’s attention – including the guard who now had his back turned to them, watching the technicians – he dug into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out the second of t
he lifeboat’s two flares. Abby had used one of them to attract the helicopter. He had the other.
Farrell’s eyes lit up. ‘Son, I do like the way you think.’ He gave a final look around. ‘No time like the present.’
‘Nope,’ Beck agreed.
He aimed the flare at the roof, took a deep breath, and pulled the tab.
CHAPTER 38
The flare went off with a noise like a shot that echoed off the metal walls.
A mini fireball brighter than the sun, it ricocheted from the roof, bounced down to the floor, skidded across the room, struck a wall, and then bounced back again.
Red smoke started to billow out like a mini power station on steroids.
Crew and technicians jumped and scrambled out of the way with shouts of alarm. The flare burned images into the eyeballs of anyone who looked straight at it. One glimpse was enough to blind anyone for the next thirty seconds.
Which all suited Beck just fine. The moment he pulled the tab, he had leaped towards the computers. He desperately hoped he had guessed right about how to make the ring work. He was going to look mighty stupid if he was wrong, and the Lumos people would not be in a forgiving frame of mind.
He picked what looked like the most important bit of kit and tapped the ring three times against it. Come on, come on, come on!
He heard someone shout, ‘Hey!’ At the same moment, a row of LEDs that had been green turned suddenly red. Other lights that had been pulsing in a slow, regular way suddenly began to flicker randomly.
The light over the door went out and the noise of a blaring klaxon filled the room. Beck ran towards the door, where Farrell was already waiting.
The guard was running towards the flare still hissing violently on the floor, belching out clouds of coloured red smoke.
Everyone else was clustered around one of the computers and shouting incomprehensible techno-speak at each other. He could only understand a few words:
‘The regulators have gone down!’
‘We have no suppression . . .’
‘Loss of control . . .’
Abby was in the midst of the hubbub. James now stood terrified to one side. Beck’s eyes met his, and he ventured a nervous, admiring grin.
Farrell tugged at Beck’s arm. ‘Come on! We really need to get out of here.’
‘But . . .’ Beck protested. He could still hear James’s desperate plea: Could you take me?
‘No buts.’ Farrell hauled him out of the control room and almost threw him down the corridor in his haste. Beck stumbled against the metal wall, and snatched his hand away in surprise. The metal was trembling. ‘If you remember, those guys back there were in the middle of handling a controlled eruption of the methane hydrate.’
‘Fair point,’ Beck shouted dryly over the noise and confusion.
A klaxon blared out of a speaker above them and an amplified human voice echoed around the rig: ‘All hands brace, all hands brace . . .’
Farrell had to shout over the announcement. ‘And if I understand correctly, they just lost control.’
Beck swallowed. ‘The methane hydrate . . . that’s erupting . . .’
‘. . . is right beneath the rig. Yes. So, come on.’ Beck couldn’t stop to think about what he’d done. Now the whole corridor was shaking. He was aware of a low bass rumble at the very edges of his hearing. Rising above it he dimly heard human voices and shouts of alarm. And then the rig rocked as if a giant hand had struck it. The floor lurched and became a slope. Beck and Farrell found themselves staggering downhill. Then they fell flat on their faces as the floor moved up again. A mighty roar filled their ears. Beck had heard a volcano erupting before: this was louder. He was right on top of the sound. It went on and on and on, and the whole rig shook and shuddered with it. Another noise joined the cacophony – an enormous creaking and groaning of tortured metal. It was like the noises from the depths of the sinking Sea Cloud, but a hundred times worse.
They passed a sign pointing to the lifepods.
‘Uh . . .’ Beck hesitated.
Farrell shook his head. ‘Everyone will be heading for them. We’ll still be in Lumos’s control. We need the helicopter. If it’s still here.’
The klaxon still blasted out its regular, rhythmic alarm call. The same voice spoke again: ‘All hands brace, here comes another . . .’
It was even worse than last time. The floor was snatched away beneath them, and then it slammed back up into them even as they were falling. All the breath was knocked out of Beck’s lungs. His eyes met Captain Farrell’s. Wincing and groaning with pain, they picked themselves up again.
‘All hands abandon rig! All hands abandon rig!’
CHAPTER 39
They were almost knocked flat again when a tide of panicking men and women tore past them down the corridor, heading for the lifepods.
Good luck to them, Beck thought. He wouldn’t want to be in one of those things, pitching and tossing in waves, and then torn apart by a massive underwater explosion.
One more flight of steps, and then they were at a familiar-looking metal door. Farrell shouldered it open and they staggered out onto the helipad.
Beck’s heart sang. The helicopter was still there. The pilot was just climbing in. He looked back, saw them, and gestured abruptly: Hurry up!
A strong wind whipped against their faces – the precursor of the coming storm. The sea around Island Alpha foamed and heaved as they hurried across the lurching platform. The rig tilted, and tilted again, and this time showed no sign of stabilizing. The forces below the surface were taking chunks out of its metal legs. The man was already clambering back into the cockpit. The helicopter’s powerful turbines fired up – a high-pitched whine that rose and rose as the rotors began to turn. If Beck remembered right, it took about a minute before a helicopter’s engines were fully up to speed so that it could lift off. It was going to be a long minute.
His foot was on the step up into the cabin when he stopped and looked back.
Farrell stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Beck? What’s the problem?’
‘James . . .’ Beck gasped. ‘He asked us to take him with us.’
‘James can look after himself— Where are you going?’
Beck took a couple of steps back towards the superstructure. He just couldn’t leave like this. Farrell was right about James – he was weak, and afraid. Half of what had happened could have been avoided if the boy had just stood up to his mother and grandfather. But James had asked Beck to take him, and that must have taken every atom of courage he had. He had said what he did because he knew Beck – he had read about his adventures, and now he had survived one with him. James had trusted Beck to do something. Beck just couldn’t betray that trust.
The door ahead flew open, and Beck felt a huge grin start to spread across his face, because there was James. A sense of relief gushed through him like a spring of cold water.
But James was stumbling forward, and there, behind him, was Abby. One hand clutched the collar of her son’s shirt. Her eyes were wild and her face was contorted with hate. But Beck’s attention focused on the gun that was waving about in her other hand.
She saw Beck and her eyes narrowed. She pointed the gun straight at him and fired.
CHAPTER 40
Beck threw himself to one side.
The bullet pinged off the metal deck several metres away. Abby was firing single-handed. The gun’s recoil and the shaking rig meant that it was very unlikely she could actually hit anything more than a few metres away.
‘No!’ James cried out and threw himself at his mother, spoiling her chance of taking another shot. She struck out with the handle of the gun and he dropped to the deck, clutching his face. She took aim again. This time she used both hands, feet apart, aiming like a professional marksman.
Beck was staring straight down the barrel. His heart pounded and he felt time slow down. He couldn’t jump faster than a bullet. He would have to leap just before she pulled the trigger . . .
Jus
t then, as if by Divine intervention, Island Alpha shook with the worst blow yet. Tortured metal shrieked in protest. A cloud of spray and steam erupted through the grating of the helipad. Beck and Abby both fell to their knees, and Beck heard another shot go wild. Beneath the pad, chunks of the rig were falling away, tumbling down into the heaving water as if in slow motion.
Metal from the rig’s drilling tower fell onto the deck, clanging and grinding. Beck’s eyes went wide as he caught something moving rapidly down in his peripheral vision. A metal strut had sheared away from the superstructure. He opened his mouth instinctively to shout a warning, but it was too late. Abby cried out, a high-pitched scream of pain, as the strut smashed into her, pinning her to the deck, sending the gun skidding away. Her face was contorted with agony as she lay with the strut across her hips.
‘Mum!’ James cried. He grabbed the free end of the strut and tried to lift it. He turned a pleading face to Beck. ‘Help! Please!’
Beck could only wonder at the emotions that must be tearing James apart inside. He was hurting, his soul bent and twisted by his upbringing, just wanting to be free . . . but he was also a son who couldn’t bear to see his mother in mortal pain.
And neither could Beck. He hurried forward to lend his strength to James’s – though he took the precaution of kicking the dropped gun over the edge of the platform first.
Abby must have been in agony. Beck could see from the way she lay that her pelvis must be broken, the bones probably cracked in at least a couple of places. But apart from that one cry when the strut hit her, she didn’t make a sound. Her face was sheet white and drawn, but the fury still blazed in her eyes.
She fixed her hate-filled gaze on Beck. ‘You did this,’ she hissed.
It was like she was trying to inject poison into his mind. To drag him down into her world of guilt and suspicion. For half a second it almost worked. Thoughts began to crowd in on Beck. This rig, about to be torn apart by explosions that he had caused because he had sabotaged the computers . . .
