Kate gawped. She had been looking for signs of this exact sort, and she had seen none. Mason had good eyes.
“Where do they go?”
“They go up to the rocks, there. After that, it's anyone's guess. We can track them, though. Don't you worry about that.”
Kate pushed past him and began looking for more clues. She wandered for a few minutes, ending up in one of the shacks with open doors. The interior was as primitive as the exterior: metal walls, rusted shelves, and rotted rubber flooring. A layer of concrete had been lain beneath the rubber, its mix so rough that she could feel the irregularities through her shoes. A lone hook dangled from the ceiling cryptically, its purpose lost in the years. There were no signs of life. Nor were there notes, ledgers, or records from the earlier time. Like the docks, the place was dead.
She was about to head back outside when she spotted a rectangle of cloth on the ground. It had once been red, but had darkened with the passage of years. She picked it up and unfolded it, wishing she had had the foresight to bring gloves. When the flag dropped to its full length, she recoiled. The symbol in the center, as old and decrepit as it was, stirred more emotions in her than she would have thought possible.
“Boss!”
At the sound of the shout, she dropped the flag and rushed outside, her nerves tightening. Looking towards the hills, she saw Christian had returned and was beckoning them from beyond the shacks.
“You find my chopper?” Mason called. He had been doing some exploring of his own, but from the looks of things, he hadn't done any better than she had.
“No sir.”
“Did you find the path?”
“Here,” he said, pointing.
When they saw it, they could only stare. The entry that had once served as a passageway to the other side of the island was overgrown with Carrion tentacles. They had grown so thick as to be impenetrable, dripping moisture onto the soft black earth.
“More of those things from the platform,” Mason said. “Guess we're not getting through this way. Time to head back.”
Kate felt her breath quickening. “No. There's something here.”
“There's nothing here.”
“There is.” She could feel it. The ground here was old, and there had been people in the long ago. Not oil workers and not men from the company, but soldiers of a different age. If they had fallen victim to the same fate as The Aeschylus, she had to find the survivors before it was too late.
Mason looked at the ground. He picked up a rock and hocked it, watching as it hit one of the tentacles and bounced off. “We're too late for this, you know. I think whatever happened has happened already.”
“And the footprints? Your chopper? What about them?”
He only stared.
“I want to know what happened to those people. If you won't take me, then I'm finding a way through myself.”
The look he gave Christian was not one of anger, but amusement. “Well it's your funeral, honey. And I was only kidding anyways.” He checked his weapon. “Your daddy would be proud of you, you know.”
“The next time you have a thought about him, just keep it to yourself.” He was right though, and Kate knew it. She knew it, and she was glad.
“We go around. The water is shallow all around the beach, so we'll use the perimeter.”
Kate girded herself. She wasn't afraid of a little water.
2
There were a lot of days AJ had tried to forget over the years. The last time he had ridden with Black Shadow was one of them. The day he knew his marriage was over was another. But the one he just couldn't shake was the day he got fired from his last real job. That particular affair had sucked out his humanity like snot through a straw. That's when he had started drifting. That's when he had lost his faith in the whole goddamned lot. Now, he was starting to realize just what that day meant, and how wrong he had been to try to push the memory away.
“You got that look in your eye,” Dutch said.
The pair of them were walking through the mid level of the platform, assessing the damage done to the drilling machinery. With Reiner and Marten missing, Mason and Vytalle gone, the Black Shadow team was spread so thin that no one was watching them. Or so he thought.
AJ stopped and looked at the remains of the drill shaft in the center of the walkway. He'd seen it when it was under construction, but out here in the flesh, it was incredible. Protected behind steel girders and mesh, the shaft extended up out of sight to the derrick above, and it dropped all the way down to sea level below. From there, it extended several hundred feet and into the ocean bottom. The crude would be pumped up through a network of piping, and it would end up in storage tanks near the bulkheads at the spar base. “They built this all on land, you know. You ever been out to one of the construction sites? It makes the mining machinery we work with look kids' toys.”
Dutch didn't really look interested. “What's on your mind, buddy?”
“This wouldn't be here right now if I had my way, Dutch. That's why they got rid of me. You remember?”
“I know, you told me once. I remember.”
“It's eating at me, Dutch. I didn't want to show it in front of the girl, but being here and seeing this stuff… it's got me thinking.”
Dutch shifted. “Hold on, friend. No way this business is your fault. You can stop that shit right now, if that's what you're thinking.”
“Nah, it's not what I'm thinking. But that stuff the doctor said makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it? What if all this goes even further back? What if they never should have put the platform here in the first place?”
Dutch shrugged. “I wasn't there. Can't tell you, good buddy.”
AJ didn't want to repeat the story of his dismissal, but he didn't think he had to. He believed Dutch when he said he remembered.
When The Aeschylus was green lit, it needed sign off from a lot of people: from the board, from the budget committee, from the CEO, from international projects, from engineering, from legal, and from security. Yeah, that last had posed a problem. He had posed a problem. When you allocate two billion dollars to a new facility, you damn well better see it gets built, objections or no objections. The only holdouts were him and the geologists, and the geologists had caved.
In the end, the scientists had agreed the temperature readings of the water were consistent with their predictions of a payload beneath the crust. That was true. But what they didn't push was the fact that the temperature readings were whacked out all around the island as well. What they didn't push was that the temperature of the water between the island and the location of the facility had increased so suddenly over the past ten years that it would point to an entirely different geological phenomenon. AJ thought it might be a shift in the South American tectonic plate. Or the eruption of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Or some kind of biochemical waste that had made its way from Argentinian power plants into the south sea. Hell, he didn't know. It wasn't his job to know. But when you go sniffing around and you find something out of the ordinary, there is usually a reason. So, he had pushed for a delay. Him. A man with no stake, no claim, and no expertise. To their credit, certain people had marked it as noteworthy, just not two billion dollars noteworthy. In the end, they proceeded anyways, and AJ was let go.
The question that was eating him now, however, wasn't why he had been dismissed. That was clear enough. The question that was really eating him, was why they would bring him back. Because now shit had hit the fan, and he sure as hell wasn't looking at a hydrothermal vent problem.
“You heard the doc say he kept all of the files he could get his hands on, right? I haven't seen anybody go back to the kitchen, have you?”