Heaven's Door

by Michael Knaggs

  Grace paused before she spoke. “Okay, what have I done? You’re five minutes late phoning me – I’ve aged about the same number of years in that time just worrying about it.”

  “Sorry,” said Tom, “I was nodding off in the car. The phone woke me up.”

  “Well don’t worry. At least you don’t need any beauty sleep.”

  “I think you’ll find that’s my line,” he said.

  “You’re right. I was lying. You need all you can get.”

  “You can be very wounding at times, you know. And after all I’ve done for you.”

  “For me,” said Grace, in her sexiest voice, “but nothing to me – yet.”

  “Now, Ms Goody,” he said. “You know I’m the champion of family values and all that. You can’t expect me to compromise my position, surely?”

  “Wow! We’ve never got around to discussing actual positions before, compromising or otherwise. This is most encouraging!”

  “Anyway, what have you got lined up for today?” he asked. “A few knee-cappings, a bit of horse-whipping?”

  “Just the whippings. I could fit you in …” she hesitated as if she was checking a list, “… just after lunch, if that’s convenient.”

  “Oh damn, what a shame,” he replied. “I’ve got to change my library book today.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “You just sound a bit different,” she said.

  “In what way?”

  “Not your usual wayward self. Almost respectable. Not sure I like that.” There was silence for a few seconds. “Not had another row with Mrs T-hyphen-B, have you? Has she given you a written warning or something? An ultimatum?”

  “Not an ultimatum, no. Well … nothing … really,” he almost stammered over his response. “No, nothing at all.”

  “There must have been something; I can tell there must have been something.”

  “Well, yes, a sort of clearing the air. That’s all.”

  “Gave you a bad time, did she?”

  “No,” he answered a bit too quickly, instinctively in defence of his wife. “Not really. Well, not at all, actually.”

  “I see.” Grace’s voice was suddenly hard. “So we’re all friends again, are we? Never stopped loving you for a moment, darling, and all that.”

  “Grace, I can hardly refuse when my wife wants to talk to me, can I? And I can’t insist that she only says nasty things. All she said was that she appreciated my asking for prayers for the Exiles today. That’s all. Nothing else.”

  Grace was silent for a long time. When she spoke, the hardness had left her voice, and her tone was flat and neutral. “You’ve never promised me anything, Tom. If you and Maggie get back together again – you know what I mean – then you don’t owe me an explanation or apology. I’m not going to create a fuss or anything. There’s enough going on in my life right now. When you think about it, we don’t have anything to lose, you and I. Just the obscene phone calls.”

  “Nothing’s changed, Grace,” he said. “Look, we’ve arrived now; got to go and get sorted for the press conference. When can I call you? Sometime between midday and two would be good.”

  “One o’clock then.” Her voice was quiet and soft.

  “One o’clock,” he repeated.

  *

  “Hi, Grace, how are you?”

  “Okay,” she replied. “And guess what. I think Brown has settled his differences and made his peace with his wonderful, hyphenated wife. Isn’t that marvellous?”

  “Well, actually, I think it is. Like someone’s just removed the fuse from a powder-keg, don’t you think? The party’s champion of the family unit. Wouldn’t help the cause much if he split with his wife. It appears that he’s a giant step away from his kids already. Good news, I’d say.”

  There was silence for a few moments.

  “I guess,” said Grace, sounding thoroughly miserable.

  “Oh, come on, Grace. You’re not getting too close are you? It’s a job, that’s all.”

  “I guess,” she said again, ending the call.

  *

  The three men on the bridge watched with breathless awe as they approached the gargantuan structure in the hazy early morning light.

  “Your turn to give us the tour, Mike,” said Calum. “How the hell does this thing come to exist?”

  It was so massive that they all thought they had almost reached it long before they were anywhere close, and the platform just grew and grew before their eyes, drawing them towards it until the wonder gave way to a collective feeling of unease.

  “Well, you can see now what it was,” said Mike. He pointed to its four giant cylindrical columns. “It started life as an oil and gas production platform, the largest off-shore installation the world had ever seen.”

  The door behind them opened.

  “Morning,” said Lawrence. “Nearly there, I guess. Christ!” His eyes opened wide as he saw their destination in front of them. “That’s … frightening.”

  “You’re just in time for the lecture, Mr Harding” said Douglas. “Go on, Mike.”

  Mike nodded a greeting to Lawrence and continued.

  “Each column has a diameter of eighty feet and rises 300 feet above the waterline. The area they support used to be the platform’s production deck, now what we call the main recreational deck, which is one hundred and sixty yards square, that’s just over five acres.”

  “And what’s below the waterline?” asked Calum. “Not that much, I’m told.”

  “Certainly not as much as you might think. The columns extend down a further hundred feet to a huge pontoon – like an enormous square dough-nut – which joins them together below the surface like the deck does above it. The whole thing is what’s called a semi-submersible design, which provides a lower centre of gravity and more stability.”

  “It couldn’t look less stable if you ask me,” said Lawrence. “Why doesn’t it bounce about?”

  “Well, it’s anchored by sixteen deepwater chains and a number of wire mooring lines. And in case you’re still not convinced, it was originally designed to survive a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, and withstand the hurricanes and ocean currents of the Gulf of Mexico. That’s where it had been in operation for its working lifetime, until your friend at the Home Office acquired it.”

  “Amazing,” said Calum. “So tell us how it got from being that to being this.”

  “I’m glad you asked,” said Mike, “because what I’ve told you so far had nothing to do with me.”

  They smiled and Mike continued.

  “By the time your lot had won the election,” he nodded at Lawrence again, “I’d already presented the basic design. It was nothing special, really; just an apartment complex designed to fit on a five-acre site. The big challenge was timescale. Mr Brown – bless him – had promised everything would be in place in eighteen months. It meant that every week counted.”

  “So they dumped everything they didn’t need in the sea on the way over?” said Douglas, with a smile.

  “Not quite, but it saved us two weeks, which was the time it took to get it from the Gulf to here. You would have loved that, Douglas. You probably know we used the Mastodon to bring it across, the largest heavy-lift vessel in the world. If you ever get chance to see that … Anyway, while we were in transit we removed the twin drilling derricks from the production deck. We dropped them onto rafts and floated them back to the Gulf along with everything else on the deck.”

  “You were on board?”

  “That’s right. Once we’d cleared the deck, my job was to get it ready for the accommodation. In the end, we missed our final deadline by just three months, but it was still an amazing achievement.”

  They looked ahead at the huge box-like structure, tapering slightly inwards as it rose above the main deck. They were close enough now to make out windows in the sides and a collection of wires, panels and masts on the top,

  “There are eight hundred identical apartm
ents completely surrounding the main deck to a height of ten storeys, eighty on each level, twenty along each side. So the whole encloses the deck like the sides of a box. It means there’s no way off the deck except back into the accommodation block.”

  “What are those things sticking out from the sides?” asked Calum, pointing to a number of large metal sheets secured at various angles to the walls of the block.

  “Wind deflectors,” said Mike, “They move in response to changes in wind direction. Just a precaution more than anything, to reduce the impact of the wind on the flat surface of the walls.”

  “And all that stuff on top?”

  “Solar panels and aerials. And, of course, the security fence. I can absolutely guarantee nobody’s going to get over that.”

  *

  Half a mile from the platform, PTV1 slipped inside the ring of fifty-five massive wind turbines that formed a circle round the platform spaced at 100-yard intervals around the circumference.

  “Just about the biggest challenge of all was powering the thing,” said Mike. “And for me probably the highlight of the whole project.”

  “How big are these things?” said Lawrence, craning his neck to look up at the closest one.

  “Three hundred and fifty feet from the surface to the top of their towers and five hundred feet to the tip of a vertical blade. Biggest we could get and, along with the solar panels and wave energy converters, more power than we need. So we’ll be supplying the NTS and the MOD on Hirta once we’re set up to do it, and we can store any surplus. There’s talk of getting a cable to the Long Island in the future. I guess that will depend on how many platforms we end up with out here.”

  They could now clearly see the receiving floor, which was suspended thirty feet below the main deck.

  “That’s the only point of access onto the main structure,” said Mike. “You get across to it from the satellite platform. There’s no other way onto it. Except by parachute, I suppose,” he added.

  At exactly 7.25 am, they passed underneath the massive construction and docked with the lifting deck of the satellite platform. This secondary structure comprised a huge single column, with a 120-foot-square cross-section, rising vertically out of the sea next to the main platform to the level of the recreational deck. Seen from above, it formed the points of an equilateral triangle with two of the columns of the main platform. It was secured to each of these by steel girders every twenty feet of its full 300-foot height. The satellite platform was essentially a lift-shaft from sea level up to the level of the receiving floor. The thirty feet of the column above that comprised a two-storey service building housing a medical centre, communications facility and the control hub for the wind farm, solar panels and wave power modules.

  Douglas McLeod, edged his vessel skilfully between two enormous projecting arms, positioned at sea level and sticking out from the lifting deck like the blades of a giant fork lift truck. He cut his engines, and, along with Mike Needham, made himself comfortable on the bridge to watch.

  The arms, designed to hold the vessel steady during the process of disembarkation, clamped its sides like the beak of a monstrous bird. One hundred and twenty horizontal steel rods slid out from each arm to hold the vessel along its full length, all with sensors at the end to ensure that the lightest pressure necessary was applied to avoid any possibility of crushing the hull.

  Once held and locked in place, the computer on the service platform took over control of the disembarkation process. They watched as the vessel’s front ramp was lowered onto the lifting deck. The four parallel lengths of track on the vessel linked and locked with corresponding tracks on the ramp. The left-hand track on the ramp continued straight ahead whilst the others curved into it through a series of points, so that just a single track left the ramp to link with the lifting deck. On the deck itself, the track coiled round in a spiral to accommodate the full length of up to forty cabins.

  A series of red warning lights along the length of the track changed to green.

  “That’s telling us that we’re ready,” said Mike. “It means the vessel, ramp and platform are locked together. More than locked, in fact; it means they are now, to all intents and purposes, a single rigid structure, which can move with the swell or air turbulence without effecting the unloading operation.”

  As he spoke, the port side line of cabins emerged from the PTV onto the lifting deck, curving round and stopping under cover of its low-profile arched roof, like that of an aircraft hanger or engine shed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Thanks, Paul. See you later.”

  “Have a good day, sir.”

  Tom eased himself out of the car and made his way to Peel Building where the press conference was being held in one of its large meeting rooms. The government press officers had already started shepherding journalists into their designated places after they had passed through the security checks, observing the hierarchical protocol for recognising the main media channels and dailies in the seating plan.

  The headquarters of the Home Office occupies Number 2 Marsham Street in the City of Westminster. The site comprises three buildings connected by a multi-storey bridge, forming part of a corridor, known by the occupants as ‘The Street’, which runs the full length of the buildings. The whole complex is light and airy with many open plan areas and offices, and incorporating natural greenery in three central atria and a number of tiny interior parks.

  The conference started promptly at 8.00 am, with Tom seated at a table covered in a red velvet cloth with three microphones on small stands facing him. Across the table from him was a three-deep semicircle of reporters and seventeen TV cameras. Along each side of the room were around a dozen photographers. Tom was flanked at the table by Paul Webster on one side and one of his Special Branch colleagues on the other. At the back of the room, behind the journalists, a further six officers lined the wall, relaxed but attentive in stand-at-ease positions.

  One notable absentee from the media group was Sylvie Hanker, former Breakfast News anchor and currently the BBC’s chief political reporter, who was watching it all unfold on a TV monitor whilst supervising the arrangements for her one-to-one interview with Tom in his office, due to start in just under an hour’s time.

  *

  “Tuesday, 24th March, 6.05 pm, Delaware.” The detective constable consulted her notebook. “Subject was observed walking towards Mansfield Road and was approached by one Darren Hargreaves, who is well known to us. Brief conversation ensued, developing into quite an argument. It looked like it was going to kick off, in fact, and a few other people looked like getting involved. Anyway, it all calmed down and Hargreaves left.”

  She looked up from her notes. She was in her early thirties; average height, with dark hair cut very short, and was smartly dressed in a black trouser suit.

  “Left where?” asked the detective inspector.

  “Went back across the road and down a side street.” She checked her notes again. “Mill Street, it was.”

  The DI, in his everyday grey suit, stood up and paced back and forth behind his chair.

  “So with this, we’ve got twelve separate incidents, eight different people, six on camera and two live.”

  “And the phone calls, sir.”

  “And the phone calls,” he repeated.

  “Including the guys who are coming in tomorrow to talk to us.”

  “If they ever show up.” He turned to his colleague. “So, what do you think?”

  “I think it’s building up nicely.”

  He sighed and stretched.

  “Nicely is not the word I would use.”

  *

  “Sylvie!” Tom opened his arms wide as he entered his office and the reporter turned towards him. Her mouth twitched a little with just the ghost of a smile, but there was no preamble, no pleasantries, just a formal handshake without the usual proffered cheek – or lips, as was more often the case.

  “Sylvie?” Tom frowned, holding on to her hand. She pulled it aw
ay with some discomfort and embarrassment.

  “They’re waiting to do the sound checks,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “Ten minutes to go…”

  They faced each other in large wing chairs in the corner of Tom’s office across a low table on which Sylvie had placed, immediately in front of her, a single sheet of A4. The technicians finished fitting and testing the radio microphones and the lighting engineer adjusted the filters on the spot lamps. Two cameras were positioned to pick up each of Tom and Sylvie face-on with a third to cover a side shot of both. The actual interview was being broadcast unedited but with a five minute delay, and was being picked up by CNN, most European channels and BBC World Service radio.

  “Ready, folks?” The director stood behind the side camera and counted down. “Four, three, two, one, go.”

  The camera zoomed in close on Sylvie who smiled into the lens. In her late-thirties but looking much younger, she was just above average height, with a trim figure accentuated in all the right places. Her hair was dark blonde in a simple style, just long enough to frame her face, which was round and pretty with full lips and deep brown eyes. She was wearing a dark blue trouser suit over a cream shirt, a change from her usual short dress or skirt.

  “I’m here in the office of the Home Secretary, Mr Tom Brown, to talk to him about his recent first review of the New Justice Regime and put to him questions raised by his speech to the House yesterday. Many of you will have seen the Home Secretary’s morning press conference, which finished just a few minutes ago,” she turned towards Tom. “So, we are very grateful for your giving up more time at what must be a very busy period.”

  Tom nodded, without smiling, and said nothing. Sylvie hesitated for just a moment.

  “Home Secretary, I will not ask you to go through the full list of items again. You’ve done that twice in the past twenty-four hours. I’d like to focus on one aspect of your report or rather an issue, which arises from it. I think you know which one I’m referring to?”