Under such conditions, a structure is built to last or it is built to be immediately disposable.
Global B-82 was one of the most formidable and technologically advanced oil rigs ever constructed. Standing empty, the gravity base structure, or GBS, weighed more than half a million tons. Added to this were four hundred thousand tons of iron ore ballast that had been poured into the GBS before grafting the structure to the seafloor. The combined weight of the five topsides modules and support elements was another thirty-three thousand tons, which still did not include the storage capacity for over a million barrels of crude oil in the reservoir set inside the GBS.
The comparatively fragile yet invaluable interior structures of the GBS were protected from the sea by a five-foot-thick concrete external ice wall. This included the lifeblood of the rig itself: the three cells of the oil reservoir surrounded two drill shafts, a utility shaft, and a riser shaft that carried oil to and from pipes run along the seafloor the offshore loading system, or OLS.
High-tensile concrete had been poured into an outer wall of sixteen sharply angled, outward-facing teeth designed to withstand collisions with pack ice and bergs by distributing the force of the ice impact.
This design could easily withstand the impact of a million tons of ice without sustaining structural damage and as much as ten times that amount without suffering irreparable harm.
As an additional measure, B-82 also had a state-of-the-art ice monitoring system and was fully equipped for ice wrangling and deflection if necessary.
Ice deflection was constantly necessary.
Matt Charon awoke without an alarm clock exactly on time, rinsed his head under a jet of cold water, dressed, and made his way to the galley, stopping only long enough to fill his heavy mug with black coffee. Even at fifty, Charon looked as though he could effortlessly do two hundred push-ups or single-handedly wrangle the sway collars on a drill head. In fact, he did both on a daily basis. Moving up the corridor, he strutted more than walked, with the majority of his body’s mass pushed up and forward of his center of gravity like a two-legged bulldog.
He wasn’t tall, but he was broad. The seams of his flannel shirt threatened to burst under the strain of his ample biceps and thick forearms. He had a wide, sharply defined jaw and a broad skull covered with a receding turf of graying hair. His eyes were as black as Louisiana crude oil and his sense of humor, known only to few, was blacker and cruder still.
There was not a soul aboard B-82 who did not know Charon or note his heavy approach on the metal deck plating. As the crew chief moved through the topsides from his cabin, past the mud module to the process module, every single crewman nodded a silent good morning. Then they quickly turned and dropped their eyes in hope that their boss had no specific need to detain or reprimand them. Charon’s attention to detail and his sudden, volcanic temper were legendary on the rig.
Rumor had it Charon could be a helluva nice guy jovial even if you could outlast the granite facade he usually presented, and if you didn’t screw up your assigned job. Hardly anyone on Global B-82 really knew Charon, but they certainly knew of him. His demeanor was measured less in terms of personality or intelligence than degrees Fahrenheit or the number of hornets currently buzzing up his tightly wadded ass.
Charon himself would have wanted it no other way. On a good day, he could count the words he had to speak on one hand without needing the thumb. What his crew thought of him was irrelevant; what he thought of them was what kept Global B-82 running.
B-82’s service module, or the hotel as it was known, had room for 250 men; 210 were shift-work employees, which left forty beds for visitors to the rig. On the roof of the hotel, jutting out over the main lifeboat station, was the helideck, where someone had spray-painted the slogan OPEN FOR BUSINESS 24-7-365 below the Global Oil logo. Someone else had added, in parentheses, DOES NOT INCLUDE OVERTIME. Charon himself was certain there was a twenty-fifth hour in every day and an eighth day in every week. Finding it was only a matter of discipline.
Charon’s next stop was his office, an elevated, glass-walled enclave that overlooked the utility module, the rig’s command center. From this location, he could monitor all the essential functions of the rig at a single glance. A small bank of closed-circuit television monitors allowed him to peer into any of the rig’s modules. E-mail, voice mail, and radiophone kept him in touch with his employers and a compact satellite dish brought 150 channels of boredom relief to the crew in the hotel. A computer uplink to the latest GOES and HRPTN weather satellite data let him see what the weather had in store for B-82, though it hardly mattered. The rig was a world unto itself.
The encrypted message tagged as private had come to Charon’s inbox overnight via satellite. Charon read the message once, twice, then re encrypted it and flushed it through the scrambler.
There was going to be a break in the routine. Shit. There was going to be an interruption and a whole lot of yakking to endure.
“Dust off the welcome mat,” he said to the deck supervisor, Lucas Stimson. “Ten hundred hours today.”
Stimson scowled.
“Three hours. D’you think they gave us enough warning this time?” he asked sarcastically. “It better not take long. I’ve got an air-hockey game scheduled for noon.”
Charon did not comment. It was not up to them to prepare anything — they were expected to be in a state of constant preparedness.
Nonetheless, he took the opportunity to reread all of B-82’s progress and activity reports for the past week, then tried to anticipate the kinds of information he would be expected to distill, encapsulate, and report. It was nearly 9:30 a.m. the next time he looked, but he was ready to face whatever was coming up.
At 10:02 A.M.” B-82’s warning Klaxon sounded, calling all hands to their ready stations. The corridors and ladders were suddenly alive with activity as crewmen hurried through their frantic but well-drilled assignments. Charon left the processing module, pulled on a parka, then followed his men down the ladders and across the topsides, which stood just fifty feet above the water. Most days the surface of the frigid ocean was as placid as a lake.
The sun had just lifted itself fully above the southern horizon, casting the scene in a pale, refrigerated light. A thick haze was drifting across the broken ice pack, a combination of airborne dust, salt, and ice that blurred the features of the landscape within sight of the rig.
Now Charon noticed that the wavelets coursing past his platform had begun to flatten, the first indication that their guests had arrived.
Moments later, the 320-foot, matte-black shape of the submarine’s hull rose from the depths. The magnificent machine gracefully parted the floating fragments of surface ice with its diving planes and bulbous nose, rising into view less than one hundred yards from the landing platform. The silent behemoth drifted easily into its mark, wake swirling forward over the sail and foredeck and the temporary dock B-82’s crew had lowered.
From his position at the foot of the topsides, Charon could make out the hull number of the submarine: SSN-666. The USS Hawkbill, a Sturgeon-class nuclear attack sub. First commissioned in the 1960s as one of three dozen sophisticated, ultra quiet attack submarines, the Hawkbill had eventually been assigned to polar patrols and defense activities. The end of the Cold War, however, had seen the data gathering potential of SSNS used with increased frequency for public research projects. The refit of the Hawkbill had been a major accomplishment in this endeavor: the submarine had taken on an impressive array of sonar, seismic equipment, and a battery of other electronics intended for use by academic and governmental researchers.