“Sir, I’d prefer you stayed away from there. One misstep . . .”
Parker straightened. “Is there anything on this rig that isn’t dangerous?”
Kate laughed. She realized that as she had taken them around the rig, she had pointed out one thing after another that was capable of catching fire, blowing up, or collapsing onto someone or chopping them in half. “Honestly? Not much.”
Parker looked up at the derrick. “Ever work on the drill deck yourself?”
She nodded. “My father was an independent oil man. He made and squandered a couple or three fortunes drilling in Texas. While I was in college, he went broke for the fourth time, so I had to get a job as a roustabout and then as a diver to pay for my final two years of college.”
“That must have been an adventure.”
“I like to think I pulled my weight.”
“I bet you did,” he said.
She led the group through the innards of the Wellhead Service Platform, showing them the sleeping quarters, the chem lab, and the rec room.
“We’ve got a crew of sixty-eight,” she said as they entered the mess. It was a small room, six long tables crowded together like in an elementary school cafeteria. “Everybody works ten-day stretches, twelve hours on, twelve off. In addition to the drilling crew, we’ve got electricians, welders, a mud engineer, various equipment technicians. We’ve also got two fulltime chefs, a two-person lauds Ñ€ndry staff, a maid, a medic . . .”
“It must feel a little claustrophobic sometimes,” Parker offered.
“You get used to it,” she said. She felt a slight tremor beneath her feet, smaller than the ones she’d felt earlier, then realized with some small relief that it was Big Al tromping toward them on the gridded steel floor. “Sorry to interrupt, Kate, but the news crews are arriving.”
“Let’s head back up,” Kate said. “Not to be unfriendly, but the sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can get back to pumping oil.”
The chopper that landed on deck was at least twice as large as the State Department Sikorsky that was still hovering overhead. Kate was a little surprised at the number of newspeople that had come. She counted twenty of them. Mohan only had one national television station. Some Indonesian and Malaysian crews had arrived, too. They must really be starved for news to attend something as trivial as this, she thought.
Several crews were busy dragging steel equipment cases across the deck. They were all dressed as you’d expect news professionals to dress— blue jeans, clean tennis shoes, polo shirts emblazoned with the logos of well-known Western brands. Because they worked for the government news channel, they wore skullcaps, which identified them as Muslims.
But something about them seemed odd. They were all fairly young— twenties and early thirties—which was not odd in itself—but each one of them seemed unusually fit. Professional men in Mohan generally didn’t work out the way Americans did. If one of them had looked like an athlete, it wouldn’t have seemed so unusual. But twenty of them?
One cameraman was setting up on the far end of the chopper deck. Another pair were rolling a steel case the size and shape of a coffin across the deck. She couldn’t imagine what kind of camera equipment required a box that big. Before she could think much more about it, she noticed one more man who’d emerged from the chopper and was now beelining toward her, conspicuous because he was the only Caucasian. He wore a dark suit, a laptop computer case slung over one shoulder.
“Miss Murphy?” he asked, although his inflection didn’t sound like a question. “I’m Cole Ransom.”
Kate was a little surprised by his appearance. The several times they had talked, she had imagined him as kind of a geek, but he moved with the fluid grace of an athlete. And behind the neatly trimmed beard of an academic, he had the face of a cop or a soldier—hard and impassive.
“I really want to get started on the retrofit, but I need to take care of this nonsense first,” she said apologetically, indicating the surrounding crews. “Frankly, I was blindsided by all this. Hopefully it won’t take long.”
Ransom nodded curtly. He sure didn’t give off a friendly vibe. Their phone conversations and e-mail correspondence had been lively and animated, but in person the guy had about as much personality as a fireplug.
She was puzzling over this when she noticed the embassy press attaché, Tina, directing several of the cameramen to set up on the deck.
“Dr. Ransom, one of my people will show you to your cabin down on B Deck. Will you ex>
Without waiting for an answer from Ransom, Kate rushed over to the press attaché, shouting over the roar of the State Department chopper, which was circling slowly past the rig a few hundred yards away. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t film your news conference here.”
“Why not?” the press attaché said.
“Because it’s not safe,” Kate said, flashing her eyes angrily.
The attaché gave her a bright, slightly condescending smile. “Oh no, we have to do it here.” She formed a rectangle with her thumbs and fore-fingers, framing the derrick rising above the deck. “See? It’s perfect.”
Kate shook her head. “Wait a minute—”
But Tina was already looking past her, at a reporter who was calling over to her. “Sorry, I have to get this,” the attaché said, offering another calculated smile before rushing off to the other side of the deck.
Safety regs were nonnegotiable on an oil rig. You stepped foot on a rig, you put on a hard hat. Period. Too many things could go wrong when you started bending the rules. This was quickly turning into a highly unsafe situation. And to make matters worse, the chopper deck had no railings along its perimeter to prevent some careless reporter from falling eighty feet into the sea.
Kate waved sharply at one of her roughnecks, who was standing near the stairs. “Eddie!” she shouted. “Come here, please.”
Seeing her urgency, Eddie trotted over. “Get these people off this deck now. And I want hard hats on every damn one of them.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said.
“Starting with those guys right over there.” She pointed at the camera crew on the far end of the rig.
“Sorry, Tina,” Kate said, catching up to the press attaché. “I know this is a great photo op, but I cannot and I will not permit this to happen up here. It’s too dangerous.”
“Don’t force me to go over your head, Miss Murphy.”
“Listen to me carefully, Tina.” Kate gripped the press attaché with a firm hand, her voice low and intense and nonnegotiable. “On this rig, my head is the only one that counts. Now get your damn news crews below deck—” Kate stopped suddenly when she saw what was happening.
How it happened, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t see the event itself. All she saw was the roughneck, Eddie, falling backward over the edge of the deck, away from the camera crew, his face a mask of horror and surprise. He clawed at the air as he toppled backward, screaming. Kate saw him through the steel mesh deck, tumbling toward the surging sea below, his arms and legs circling. There was a strange, dreamlike quality to his fall. For a moment she couldn’t believe it was happening. Then he disappeared, her vision cut off by a section of the rig below the chopper deck.
Kate started to move, but by then it was too late.
At the far end of the chopper deck, one of the cameramen had opened a case, pulled out a sh toрort, stubby tube, and flipped up some kind of eyepiece. The State Department chopper was still circling overhead when a rush of flame erupted from the stubby tube. Something belching white smoke shot from the tube and tore through the air toward the chopper.
A missile.
The trail of the missile stretched out like white taffy. Then there was a loud whump, and what had been a helicopter was now a ball of flame, spewing randomly shaped black debris that slammed into the steel superstructure of the Obelisk. Within moments the chopper hit the water, rolled once, then disappeared, swallowed by a twenty-foot wave.