Artifact

On the night of the August new moon, Terris McKendry stood on theValhalla platform and wondered if he would ever again be able to trust a night of such darkness. To him it seemed that the world was holding its breath, waiting to unleash some hidden terror. His uneasiness had returned each month since the night on theYucatan when he and Joshua had first encountered Green Impact - the night that had cost Keene his life and made him into a cold-blooded murderer who would shoot a woman in the back.



Restless, he walked the metal decks at the wellhead level, high as a skyscraper above the placid water. Level after level, he climbed from one yellow-painted staircase to another, pacing, working off his nervous energy as he stared out into the night.



His heavy boots rang loudly in his ears, even against the hiss and thrum of the ever-working mechanisms of the production platform. The rig was a constant drone of machinery, effluents hissing through pipes, waste-gas flames crackling at the long ends of boom derricks.



McKendry gripped the warm metal railings and peered a hundred feet down to the water.Valhalla produced too much background noise, too much light and sound. It cast a bubble of restless civilization around them, like a campfire driving off predators in the wilderness.



Pacing around to the western corner of the platform, he saw the two exhaust flares extended like spitting dragons into the darkness, bleeding off belches of unwanted gases from the simmering oil well deep under the waters. On the opposite side, the living quarters rested under the helideck. At this time of night most of the workers would be off shift, playing billiards, watching action movies, cheating each other at cards. Separate from the habitation modules, the shack of the radio room was lit; undoubtedly Hercules, the Trinidadian man on duty, was chatting with radio pen pals from across the world.



As his uneasiness built, he strode to one of the phones that allowed communication between the distant parts of the rig and punched in the code for the small coffee room where his security men often took a break. "Gonzales. Get everyone outside. No more breaks this shift. Do your rounds every fifteen minutes tonight, not every half hour. I want all of you to keep an eye out."



"What's wrong, sir?" Gonzales said.



"Just do it. There's nothing wrong with being on your toes." McKendry made sure his men did their jobs, but never bothered to get cordial with any of them. He couldn't imagine why the guards would rather sit in a confined room on plastic chairs drinking sour coffee instead of walking around the rig decks in the warm night and stretching their legs. In the Tropics he had found that some men just plain took pride in their laziness.



On the other end of the line, Gonzales grumbled to the others in the coffee shop, "It's the dark of the moon. Makes him paranoid."



McKendry scowled and said in a gruff voice, "You can complain to Mr. Van Alman if you don't like my orders. I'm sure he'll be happy to let you find another job." Angrily, he hung up. Maybe he was being overcautious, but it only took one mistake, as the captain of theYucatan had discovered.



He walked to the edge of the platform and again scanned the vast stretch of water between the rig and the invisible mainland of Venezuela.



Why did he really care what happened to theValhalla ? Because he'd promised Frikkie that he'd protect the rig? It wasn't as if Frik was much of a friend. After the assault on the Green Impact camp, the billionaire had been concerned only with the recovery of his mysterious artifact. The dead mercenaries on his side and the half dozen dead terrorists on the other didn't matter to the man. All he cared about was that somehow Selene Trujold had gotten away, even though she had been shot.



After what the terrorists did to Joshua, McKendry thought, it matters to me.



Drifting across the water like a black fly on a dark lily pad, Joshua Keene closed the distance to theValhalla platform. He moved without lights, circling his motorized inflatable raft to the Trinidad side of the rig so that he could come in opposite the additional glow of the exhaust flares at the ends of their extended booms.



As he turned the Zodiac toward the rig, he cut the motor. In the ensuing silence he could hear the industrial buzz, even from a distance of more than a mile.



Entering the rich, warm waters around theValhalla, he trailed streamers of potent shark repellent. Though sharks rarely attacked inflatable rafts, he wanted to avoid any commotion at all.



It took a long time for him to paddle the raft up to the elephantine concrete legs that held the huge production rig high above the calm water, but he didn't dare use the puttering outboard. If all went well, he would be calling enough attention to himself in a little while. He tied up to the emergency ladder built onto the closest concrete strut, the same one he and Terris had used the night his friend died. Before climbing out of the Zodiac, he secured all of his weapons around his legs, chest, and back, fastening packages of compact explosives, his igniters, and grenades. He even had the knife that had killed Selene: the most appropriate weapon to use while destroying Oilstar, he thought.



In his pocket he could feel the weirdly curved edges of the strange but unknowably precious piece of the artifact. He kept it to remind himself that Selene had died for it.



Though it made his own movement more difficult, he wrapped a dull black rain cloak around his shoulders, which would keep him all but invisible in the shadows.



Rung after rung, he began to climb; it was eighty feet from the water to the lowest deck of the production platform. It would have been so much easier to use one of the lift platforms, he thought, but he knew the clanking and ratcheting noise would be sure to draw investigation by one of the rig's newly inspired security guards. Now that he had heard so much about the draconian new security chief Oilstar had hired, he expected he'd have to be much more cautious than on his first visit.



Keene reached the first deck, opened the small access gate, and pulled himself up onto the platform. Though he'd thought he had recovered from his wounds, he felt exhausted from the climb, especially with the extra weight he was carrying. Not for the first time, he wished that some of the other members of Selene's team had escaped Oilstar's assault on the jungle base. He would have liked some help in this operation, commandos willing to sacrifice their lives.



Wishing and hoping, though, weren't going to change the fact that those who hadn't died had been captured and turned over to the Venezuelan government, which made them as good as dead, anyway. Joshua knew he was all alone, with only his anger, his need for revenge, and a half-baked plan.



On a rig like this, however, one person could cause a lot of damage.



There were enough explosives strapped to his body to create a substantial disaster. Given good placement and a lucky break, he would be able to rig the explosives and get away from theValhalla before his fireworks display turned the rig into a seaborne version ofThe Towering Inferno . He was determined to accomplish his goal at all costs, but this was no deliberate suicide mission. A lot had happened in the last few months that he needed to mull over. Selene Trujold's death, the loss of Terris McKendry, Frikkie's betrayal.



After shucking his dark rain cloak so that it would not hinder his movements, Keene stole across the metal decks. He moved toward the cluster of fractionation pipes. Ahead of him he could see the closeddown electrical and mechanical workshops, the crew change rooms, circuitry lockers, and mudrooms that surrounded the smelly drill floor around the main wellhead. He looked up and saw business offices; they looked like tiny cubicles on a spaceship.



During the two months it had taken him to gather the explosives he needed, Joshua had studied as much as he could about production rigs and their numerous vulnerabilities. He ignored the optimistic and reassuring press releases from Oilstar and other major petroleum companies, instead paying particular attention to the infamousPiper Alpha disaster of July 1988 in the North Sea just off Aberdeen, Scotland.



A smoldering fire in one of the modules had built up until it set off a small explosion in an adjacent chamber, which had then triggered another explosion, tearing apart half of the giant oil platform. Rig workers had been trapped in the habitation module as fire and smoke spread. Emergency sprinkler systems had failed. Radiomen had called "Mayday" repeatedly until finally they had to abandon the communications offices as the fire and smoke advanced.



Some crewmen had been stranded by the advancing flame front while they raced to lifeboat stations; others were trapped high above the turbulent and cold North Sea. Given no choice, some men had leaped sixty-eight feet from one of the decks into the water. A handful of desperate, doomed workers had even jumped from the heliport, faced with either being burned to death in the advancing fire or dying as they plunged from skyscraper height to the sea. Several crewmen had climbed down knotted ropes or hoses to reach sea level as explosion after explosion rockedPiper Alpha .



Rescue crews had raced in boats and helicopters from nearby drilling platforms, but the fire was so bad that few of them could even approach the burning rig to fish survivors out of the water. The debris from one explosion killed half the crew on an approaching rescue craft.



In all, 165 people had died onPiper Alpha, making it one of the worst disasters in oil-drilling history.



Keene tried to imagine seeing the same inferno on theValhalla . In front of the vision in his mind he saw Selene's face, heard her last words as she died beside him in the clearing near the Green Impact encampment. The fires grew brighter in his imagination.



Yes, he thought, that would just about do it.