Jake felt better, the pure oxygen having done its job. But he wasn’t a hundred per cent. He’d just reached the top rung after a sixty-metre ascent to the lowest floor of the platform, level with the accommodation block, where the staff ate and slept when not working their twelve-hour shifts. He was out of breath, his heart hammering. He hauled himself up, parked his back against a concrete wall, and tried not to pant.
Greaves came up smoothly, as if he’d just walked up a single flight of stairs. ‘You okay?’
‘I’ll survive,’ Jake said. But his arms and legs were tingling. No big surprise after such a dive, playing with gases like that. He made ready to get up again.
‘How do you want to play this one, Jake?’ Greaves was looking down at him, his face neutral. Jake figured Greaves knew he needed a break to recover, and so was giving him an excuse. A good team player.
‘Kill him on sight,’ Jake said.
‘What if he has someone holding Nadia hostage somewhere?’
‘Same thing if he captures one of us. Kill him on sight.’
Greaves smiled. ‘Good. Same page.’
Jake was about to get up when he remembered something. ‘There may be a problem. I may be a problem.’
Greaves’ smile faded. ‘Because of the deep dive?’
‘Well, there’s that, but no.’ Jake pointed to his right temple. ‘Salamander operated on me.’ Greaves knelt down to get a closer look, though the lighting was crap.
‘Can’t see anything.’
‘I can. Or rather, there’s a patch I can’t see.’
‘So?’
‘So … he put something in there.’ He stayed calm about it. No point in going too wild on the conspiracy theories.
‘Maybe a GPS.’
‘Could it be a camera?’ Jake considered putting a patch over his eye.
Greaves examined his eye up close. ‘Not sure that would work. Maybe one day with nanotech, but not yet. The eye’s a pretty sophisticated piece of kit. Something else, maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe we should split up, though, just in case.’
Jake had a better idea. He got up, feeling stronger again, his heart and breathing back to normal, though the tingling persisted. He ignored it.
‘Agreed. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but he’s likely to be at the drilling area. You circle around from the other side, I’ll go straight from here.’
Greaves gave him a measured stare. ‘You’re using yourself as bait, to draw him out.’
Jake nodded. ‘So you can shoot him in the back.’
‘What if he shoots you first?’
‘You’d better get moving, then.’
They made their way up two levels to the main deck. It was night, and although there was the constant, grinding noise of machinery, interrupted by the occasional hushed boom of the flare stack letting off a little pressure from the well, it was surprisingly deserted. Except the drilling area, which was a hive of activity, lit up like an operating theatre.
Jake watched the team of four men in their brown overalls as they winched the drill-pipe up, segment by segment, using large powered clamps to unscrew each length of pipe and then stack them in vertical racks reaching half way up the derrick. The team were good. Ultra-efficient, poetry in motion.
He scoured the area for any sign of Salamander. After all, he wasn’t hard to miss. But he was nowhere to be seen. There was a small room with thick wire mesh over the windows, which he presumed was the local control room for the drill floor. No sign of the big man in there either; and the men certainly wouldn’t be so relaxed if Salamander was watching them. Yet he was convinced this was Salamander’s target. Jake had installed a device down below, and whatever it did, it would affect operations here. Which meant these men were in danger.
Jake smelled it before they did, a bad case of rotten eggs. He held his nose just as the alarm went off, a horn blast that made him jump. The men froze, stared at each other for two seconds, then dropped everything and ran. Two guys from the control booth followed suit, donning portable gas masks as they dashed away. Jake had been offshore once before. On a drilling platform, rotten eggs usually meant hydrogen sulphide. Nasty stuff. Not flammable, but lethal in the concentrations you got on rigs, and a natural risk when drilling. But why wasn’t he affected? And why had he smelt it first rather than those standing on the drill floor? It should have come straight up with the drill-pipe, a pocket of the stuff probably siphoned from below by pulling the drill shaft out of the hole. Jake dared to inhale. No violent coughing. No tears. No burning in his throat. Not hydrogen sulphide, then. Salamander had released something that smelled similar, to distract everyone, to clear the drill floor.
He was coming.
Jake didn’t know where Greaves was. Better that way. The horn kept blasting, but Jake noticed something. The winch sprang into action, pulling a section out of the hole faster than before. Then it rammed the shaft back down again. Then it pulled. And rammed. And pulled. Like someone trying to unblock a sink with a plunger. It began raining, but it wasn’t water. Oil and mud, from about halfway up the derrick, like a fountain. The kick had begun. Salamander clearly wanted to coax it into a full-scale blowout. But where was he? Jake spotted him in the booth. Must have come through a back door. His head was down, working the controls. Probably the plunger action wasn’t enough to cause a kick, so he was doing other things, Jake didn’t know what, but he needed to stop him. He came out from his hiding place and stalked towards the booth. A mistake. His rubber boots, great for diving, had little traction. He slipped and fell in the oil slick. Great. All he needed now was a naked flame, and he’d become a human torch. He tried to get up, slipped again. Fuck. This was impossible. Slide, then.
He crawled and slid on the oil-rink towards the drill-shaft. He grabbed the big clamp, crooked his arms over two thick hydraulic tubes, and hauled himself upright. He’d watched the men operate the massive set of pincers, and reckoned he could work it. Pulling a lever towards him, the jaws of the clamp yawned open, like a lobster’s claw. Jake pushed with his feet, slipping, ending up running on the spot because he had so little traction, but slowly the clamp veered towards the siphoning shaft. Close enough. He grabbed another lever and thrust it away from him. He’d already figured this would have consequences, and wasn’t disappointed.
As the clamp’s pincers snapped around the shaft, the whole affair was wrenched upwards. Luckily that tossed Jake away from the drill floor, because the next thing that happened was that it came crashing back down with a sound like a truck pounding into a wall. The entire derrick creaked and groaned, amidst gunshot sounds as rivets popped like bullets. The movement stopped, and so did the noise. But there was something else. A vibration he felt through the floor. Still unable to get up, drenched in oil, Jake watched Salamander look up from his work and stare first at the shaft, then at Jake. And he smiled. The motherfucker smiled.
Salamander exited the booth with a tarpaulin over his head, and walked straight past Jake, who slithered hopelessly, trying to get up. Salamander had his legs bowed as if riding a horse, and was somehow keeping his balance. He made it look easy, as if he was skating. Jake cursed. Even the Bowie knife was no use, he couldn’t reach him, nor aim a decent throw. Snaking his way after Salamander, he finally reached a drier patch. Wiping his hands on the cement floor, he got to his knees, then to his feet. Salamander was gone. And where the hell was Greaves?
And then he guessed where Greaves was. Because Salamander was always one step ahead. Jake could go after Salamander, or … The plan had sounded easy, resolute. Kill Salamander no matter what. He stared down the corridor. He could run, take the big man on. No. He headed back to the drill floor. Two other men had arrived in protective suits and full facemasks, with a single air tank strapped to their backs, upside down, valve at the bottom, fireman-style. They had rods with them, like those sticks tourists use to take selfies, with something on the end. Probes, hydrogen sulphide detectors. They were focused on the drill shaft, taking readings. Jake skirted around the edges of the growing lake of oil, always with something he could hold onto, and reached the grill over the booth window, and squinted to see inside. A man lay on the floor. Greaves.
Jake moved right behind the two men, and had to tap one of them on the shoulder to get his attention. The guy started, then turned carefully, clearly taken aback when he saw Jake, in a drysuit, oil black except for his eyes. The man started saying something inside his mask. Jake did an impression of someone taking a deep breath. The guy got it. Besides, his monitor must already have told him there was no hydrogen sulphide present. He took off his mask, cautiously sniffed the air, then shouted to his colleague, who did the same. Jake pointed inside the booth, and the first guy ventured inside, Jake following.
Once inside, the guy saw Greaves on the floor and started yelling at Jake in Russian.
‘English?’ Jake asked, but received a string of expletives which he vaguely knew from Nadia, so he ignored the guy and knelt next to Greaves, felt for the pulse in his neck, then slapped his face a few times. Greaves stirred, opened his eyes, groggily at first, then he snapped awake. His eyes swept around, landed on the Russian guy who was still shouting, and then he stood up fast, pulled out his pistol and stuck it in the guy’s face. The Russian stopped shouting, and the proximity of the gun’s muzzle endowed him with sudden mastery of English.
‘Friend, I friend, don’t shoot please, your friend.’
Jake took over. He’d worked out what Salamander was aiming to do. ‘Evacuate the platform. There’s going to be a blowout.’
A VHF radio fixed to the wall crackled into life, a mixture of static and Russian pouring forth. He guessed it was the main control room, he could hear a barrage of alarms going off in the background.
‘Tell them to evacuate.’
The guy didn’t, and launched back into his Olympic Russian shouting effort. Jake cut him off mid-sentence, seizing him by the throat, since the motivational effect of a gun there seemed to have worn off. ‘Terrorist,’ he said. He pointed toward the drill floor outside.
‘Terrorist?’ The guy backed into the wall. Keeping his eyes on Jake, his left hand reached for the VHF. He yanked it towards him and clicked it into transmit mode. More Russian. The word terrorist in the word-stream. A pause at the other end. That word repeated in the interrogative.
Greaves whispered to Jake. ‘He thinks you’re the terrorist.’
‘Whatever gets them off the platform.’
The guy listened to an avalanche of Russian, and kept saying ‘Da, da, da.’ Then he clicked it off. He gestured towards the control panel. Greaves lowered his weapon to waist height. Various dials oscillated wildly, flicking in and out of the red zone. Jake sensed the vibration again. A new siren filled in the lull, a wail that rose and descended. Evacuation.
Finally.
The guy didn’t look happy. He pressed here and there, turned switches, but the dials still moved deeper into the red. He turned around and approached a set of four buttons, one green, two yellow, one red. The red was in the middle. Jake thought about it, about the Blowout Preventer at the bottom of the sea, and its three sets of counter-measures: the annulus, two sets of pipe rams, one above the other, with shear rams in between. He glanced outside at the oil drizzle. One spark, that’s all it would take.
The guy pressed the green one, then went back to the dials. Then he came back, staring hard at them.
Jake decided to save him the trouble. He thumped the yellows, and then the red, guessing there’d be no effect, because of what he’d just installed on the BOP two hundred metres beneath his feet. The guy shrieked, holding his hands up, expletives gushing faster than the oil. The guy whirled around to the console again. Every dial was in the red. He waited another ten seconds then said, ‘We must go. Hell coming.’
No kidding.
They hustled outside, kept to the edges again, and got away from the derrick. Before turning the corner, Jake took a last look. Blowing up an oil platform in remote Russia was too small for Salamander. Which meant it had to be some sort of test. Which in turn meant Salamander didn’t need to ignite it. Offshore platforms were as spark-resistant as you could get. The coming blowout would be an environmental disaster, but they could get divers to the BOP within a day, remove the device and shut off the well. Salamander had made his point. Except this was Salamander. Jake reckoned he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge. And he would want to be the one to light the match …
Jake stopped walking, even as others rushed past them. The platform shuddered and the derrick creaked, bolts exploding, fizzing through the night air like shrapnel. Everyone was shouting, making a beeline for the lifeboats.
‘We need to split up again,’ he said to Greaves. ‘Either he’s down below with a flare gun, or he’s still topside.’
‘I’ll st—’
‘No you won’t. I’m the one who disabled the platform’s safeguards.’
‘And you came back for me instead of going after him. While I let the asshole sneak up behind me.’
‘Plenty of blame to go around.’ Jake held out an empty palm.
Greaves sighed, and slapped his pistol into Jake’s hand. ‘Need I remind you you’re covered tip to toe in petrol? You fire this, it might just light you up.’
‘Then I’d better not miss. Besides, one of us has to survive. To help Nadia put the pieces together afterwards.’
‘You mean your pieces. I don’t want to be the one who has to tell Nadia—’
Jake held up a hand. ‘I hear it’s a hell of a ride in those lifeboats.’
Greaves looked pissed off. ‘Okay, I’m going. If he’s down there, I’ll find him.’
A good team player to the end. They both knew where Salamander was.
The Russian shouted to them, half inside the lifeboat, holding the hatch open.
Greaves jogged to it, clambered in, took one last look, then slammed the fibreglass hatch closed. A few seconds later there was a sound like metal wire snapping, and the fully-covered lifeboat rolled off its skid and plunged towards the dark sea below. Jake watched as it hit the water, disappearing under a mushroom of foamy white. It resurfaced and chugged away from the platform.
Jake turned back, scanning the platform lit up by yellow and red lights, sirens and klaxons still blasting the air, and oil spattering every metal surface, like gentle rain. But the floor beneath his feet shook violently, like an earthquake, and a jet of oil roared high into the night sky, gushing outwards from the derrick in all directions, a Christmas tree from hell. He spotted Salamander, far from the derrick, on top of the accommodation module, his arm outstretched, holding some kind of gun. Jake watched the yellow flare sail like a firework towards the derrick, which ignited with a boom. Everything lit up as if sunrise had come early. The scalding hot pressure wave slapped Jake against the wall behind him.
He fell forward, miraculously not yet on fire. Stunned and deafened by the force of the explosion, he staggered closer to the accommodation module. Fireballs rained down over the platform and out to sea, the derrick melting and collapsing, secondary explosions igniting other parts of the platform. A city on fire. Jake recalled a line from a Johnny Cash song about a man riding a pale horse, hell following after him.
Time to take out the trash.
He stood at the end of a roofless corridor, pipes running along both sides. At the other end stood Salamander, not moving. Just like in the Westerns Jake used to watch with his father. A good old-fashioned gunfight. Salamander had something in his right hand.
Greaves had been right. The small explosion from firing the pistol might ignite him, turn him into a flaming torch. But Jake was a diver, and a diver lived by a simple rule. Plan the dive, and dive the plan. And the plan was simple. On seeing Salamander, kill him.
Jake raised the pistol, took aim, and pulled the trigger.