Though most of the structure was invisible to Kirk in the darkness and the rain, she knew precisely what it looked like, having approached it by helicopter or by service ship dozens of times, in all weathers, in all lights. The eastern side of Alpha looked like a displaced apartment building, with smooth walls and neatly spaced rows of windows. Built on the leeward side of the structure where it was sheltered from the worst of the wind in a North Sea blow, it housed the living quarters for the 312 men and women who lived and worked on Bouddica for two-week stretches at a time. The structure’s large heliport was perched atop the apartment complex like a graduate’s mortarboard cap. To the west were the gas and oil processing facilities, a vast, roughly cubical tangle of girders and struts, towers and pipes, conduits and storage tanks, all nestled together beneath the three-hundred-foot thrust of the burn-off tower and its flaring tip of orange flame. The whole enormous, brilliantly illuminated structure was perched atop four pillars that rose like sequoias from the sea, growing thicker toward their tops to support Alpha’s 615-million-ton mass.
South, across the bridges, Bravo appeared much smaller, a box-shaped affair of girders and steel much like her larger sister’s production facility, but less than a third as massive and far less imposing. The single largest structure aboard was the drilling tower, most of which was enclosed to protect the machinery from storms and salt spray. Unlike Alpha, the platform was supported by a spidery forest of pylons that held its deck forty to fifty feet above the waves, depending on the winds and tides.
Stretched taut between the two structures was a steelgirdered causeway that sang and danced ominously during any blow of more than about thirty knots. Most of the bridge was taken up by a massive cluster of meter-thick pipes that channeled oil from Bravo to Alpha, and gas recovered from the processing plant back the other way. Bouddica used an expensive and modern gas-injection system that forced natural gas back into the oil deposits below, increasing the oil recovery to better than fifty-five percent of what was in the field. The wire-mesh enclosed walkway running along the top of the pipeline cluster looked like something designed for insects rather than men.
As massive as a small city, which, in fact, was as good a definition for the twin structures as any, they were nevertheless vulnerable. Though they were built to withstand the worst winds and winter storms the notoriously savage North Sea could fling at them, the threat posed by the off-course Noramo Pride was greater by many orders of magnitude than any storm.
“Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, this is Bouddica. Respond, please. Over.”
She’d already sent for the facility’s senior manager, but it might be some minutes before he reached the control center. One distinct disadvantage to working aboard Bouddica so far as its inhabitants were concerned was the structure’s sheer size and complexity. At four in the morning, Brayson ought to be in his quarters just across from the center and down one level in the apartment complex… but the man had something of a reputation among the female employees aboard Bouddica. He might well be in someone else’s quarters tonight instead of his own.
“James?” she asked the officer of the desk. “Shouldn’t we call Brayson up here over the Tannoy?”
James Dulaney was one of Bouddica’s assistant plant managers. The son or the nephew or some such of some BGA poobah, he was young for his position aboard the facility… and he was obviously having some trouble with the responsibility that attended it. He looked up from the radar, his face creased with worry and indecision. “You mean… wake everybody aboard!”
“Damned straight I mean wake everybody. Send someone down to Brayson’s cabin to make sure he heard my call buzzer.” With a facility this new, there were endless teething problems. Possibly the buzzer simply wasn’t working. “And if he’s somewhere else, maybe he’ll hear the loudspeaker.”
Dulaney considered this. “But we don’t know if this is really an emergency. I mean, the ship is still—”
“Take my word for it, Dulaney!” Kirk shouted. “It’s a fucking emergency! Now send someone to find the boss… or go down there yourself!”
Dulaney vanished, leaving Kirk alone on the command center deck. She peered out through the curtains of black rain, straining for a glimpse of running lights, of anything. She decided she would give Dulaney a few minutes to check Brayson’s cabin. If he wasn’t there, she would put out a call over the facility’s loudspeakers herself.
“Bouddica, this is Noramo Pride,” a voice rasped in her headset.
Thank God! “Noramo Pride, this is Bouddica! You are off course!” Kirk cried. “You are entering a restricted area and may be on a collision course with this platform!”
“Bouddica Facility, Noramo Pride,” the voice on her headset said. The accent to the English words didn’t sound American… or British either, for that matter. The man sounded German. “I wish to speak with your senior manager.”
Yeah, so would I.
Cutting the circuit on her microphone, she reached for the microphone that served the facility’s loudspeakers. “Mr. Brayson, Mr. Brayson,” she said, and her voice boomed from the overhead speakers with a shrill squeal of feedback. “Please report to the control center immediately!”
That would bring everyone not working on the early shift spilling out of their bunks. She opened the ship-to-ship channel once more. “Noramo Pride, our radar has you on a collision course with this facility,” she said. “You must change your course at once.”
“We seem to be having a bit of difficulty, Bouddica. Please let us speak with your manager.”
Kirk was certain now that something was seriously wrong. An oil tanker as massive as the Noramo Pride was not a speedboat that could be stopped or turned in moments. Even if she reversed her engines immediately, at her current speed of ten knots it would take her something like five miles before she could be brought to a stop, and turning presented much the same difficulty. The tanker was now just eight miles from Bouddica, moving on a straight-ahead course that would bring her nearly nine-hundred-foot bulk blundering into the complex in about forty minutes. If there was something wrong with the tanker’s steering — her rudder jammed, for instance — then they only had about ten minutes more to do something about it before the Bouddica complex was doomed.
“Our manager is on his way,” Kirk told the unseen speaker somewhere out there in the rain and darkness. “Please, please change your course immediately! Over!”
“We will discuss that with your manager, Bouddica.”
“Noramo Pride, do you need assistance? Over!” It would be murder getting a helicopter aloft in these winds, she knew, but if the tanker required some special help…
“Noramo Pride, Noramo Pride, do you require assistance? Over!”
Her only answer were the mingled hissings of static and the wind.