He tore down a flight of open metal stairs two at a time, cradling his bad arm with his good to lessen the impact. Down this deep the rig was an industrial forest of massive cross braces, bulkheads, and thick columns. The floor was bare metal coated in a thin layer of spilled crude that had congealed to the consistency of tar. It was slick and sticky at the same time.
“Linda?” he roared, and in the silence that followed his fading echo he thought he heard something. He called her name again, louder.
There!
It was muffled and indistinct, but he heard a response. He raced toward the sound of a woman screaming for help. In the far corner of the space was a closed-off room without windows. A wedge had been rammed under the door as an added precaution, though the handle was locked from the outside.
“Linda?”
“Is that really you?”
“Galahad to the rescue,” he said, and dropped onto his butt to hammer at the wedge with his artificial leg.
“Thank God!” Linda breathed. “You have to get us out of here!”
“Us?” Juan said between blows.
“Soleil Croissard has been a prisoner here for weeks.”
Even as he worked to free them, Cabrillo’s mind went into overdrive. There was no logical reason for Roland Croissard to imprison his daughter and then try to kill her. She was here as a hostage and thus leverage to get him to do someone else’s bidding. Smith? He didn’t seem the type. He was a henchman, not a mastermind. Someone else entirely. They’d spent untold hours tearing into Croissard’s life, only there weren’t any clues to his goals because they weren’t his goals at all. Some other person was offstage pulling all the strings, and they had no idea who. And if getting the mysterious item out of the jungle temple had been the goal, Croissard was most likely dead, leaving the Corporation with nothing.
The wedge finally popped free and skittered away. Cabrillo got to his feet and ripped open the door. Linda Ross came at him in a rush, ignoring his slinged arm. She wrapped her arms around him in a hug that for Juan was equal parts pain and joy.
Behind Linda was another woman, who in the weak glow of the penlight and after so many days of deprivation still managed to be stunningly beautiful. Her raven hair was raked back into a ponytail, exposing large brown eyes.
“Miss Croissard, I’m Juan Cabrillo.”
“Oui, I would have recognized you from Linda’s description.” Her accent was charming.
“We need to get out of here, like now.”
With Cabrillo in the lead, they made their way back up through the labyrinthine oil platform. Juan was on automatic pilot, trusting his memory to find the straightest route out to freedom, while another section of his mind worried over the identity of whoever was behind the enigmatic John Smith. He’d pump Soleil for information later. Maybe she had an inkling of what was happening, but, for now, Cabrillo looked at the problem with just the facts he knew.
He tried the walkie-talkie now that they were closer to the main deck. “Max, can you hear me?”
After a squelch of static he thought he heard, “’Ta ’ere.”
“Max?”
“ ’Et outta ’ere ’ow.”
“We’re almost clear.”
As they kept rushing up the final set of stairs, the reception improved. “Juan, Gomez is standing by on the pad, but you have less than a minute. We can’t hold her any longer.”
“Max, listen carefully. Put an armed guard on MacD Lawless. If he tries to get to a phone or radio, shoot him.”
“What? Why?” Hanley’s incredulity made his voice crack.
“I’ll explain when I see you. Do it.”
The last steps were so slanted, it was like running through a fun house, and when they finally burst out the door to the catwalk suspended over the sea, all three of them crashed into the railing because they couldn’t stop their onward rush. Running along the walkway, with the Oregon’s deck one hundred feet below them and at a twenty-plus-degree angle, made them all realize that Max’s promised minute was overly optimistic. They had seconds before the rig toppled.
Gomez Adams held the 520 over the helipad, one skid touching the deck, the other hovering over a massive gap. He was level. It was the platform that was skewed. The tips of the rotor blades on one side of the chopper thrummed dangerously close to the deck.
“Go! Go! Go!” Juan shouted.
Below them, the rig screeched once again as gravity pulled it closer to the tipping point. The Hercules’s rail was buried in the sea, and a gap began to show under the uphill side of the platform as it started going over.
In the Op Center Eric Stone redirected the drive-tube nozzles and put on a burst of speed, redlining the engines in a desperate bid to get the ship clear of the steel avalanche crashing toward them. Aboard the capsizing heavy-lifter, Eddie, Linc, and Mike had no choice but to hold on to any solid surface they could find, so they clung to the topside railing with everything they had.
Cabrillo unceremoniously shoved both women into the chopper as Adams started lifting clear and leapt in after them as the rig slid the rest of the way off the deck. The stress was too much for the platform’s spindly drill tower and it broke free, twisting steel wrenched apart as though it were a balsa wood model. The rig moaned like amplified whale song.
The helicopter’s tail boom cleared the helipad with inches to spare, its three passengers staring agog at the destruction they had just escaped. The platform crashed into the ocean scant feet from the fleeing Oregon’s jack staff and created a titanic wave that lifted the ship like a toy in a bathtub and nearly drove her bow into the swells. Eric deftly steered them across the wave front like a surfer peeling down the face of one of the big ones off Oahu’s North Shore.
The top-heavy rig turned turtle as soon as all of it was in the water, upending so that the air-filled pontoons were pointed at the sky. It bobbed almost merrily. Unburdened of so much deadweight, the Hercules pendulumed back until she was almost straight, before the inertia of water sloshing in her tanks returned her to a deadly list. The three men holding fast to the rails were thrown violently but managed to maintain their grip.
When they let go, each slid across the deck on his backside, maintaining a safe speed by pressing gloved hands and shoes against the plating. When they came up against the lower rail, all three simply stepped into the ocean and started swimming away. Adams maintained a hover over them to direct the rescue launch racing from the Oregon’s amidships boat garage.
The RHIB reached them just moments before the Hercules succumbed to the inevitable and rolled ponderously onto her side, her barnacle-scaled bottom exposed to the sun for the first time in her long career. Air trapped in the hull burst out through portholes and vents, spewing and sputtering as though the old ship was fighting her fate.
And then he remembered that this wasn’t the end of the affair but the very beginning, and all thoughts of humor vanished.
“Gomez, get us back to the ship ASAP.”
MacD Lawless had betrayed them from that very first night in Pakistan, and Cabrillo wanted answers.
No sooner were they down and the RHIB back up the ramp in the boat garage than he ordered the Oregon to stand off the platform and rake its waterline with the ship’s 20mm Gatling gun. The depth here wasn’t optimal—the Hercules’s crew must have been rushed after all—but they were over the continental slope, and, with luck, the J-61 would tumble down the undersea cliff and end up in the crushing depths of the abyssal plane.
Juan wanted no evidence that this act of sabotage hadn’t gone off as planned. The heavy-lifter wouldn’t last another ten minutes on the surface, and once they’d peppered the rig’s floats with a couple thousand holes it would join the ship on the bottom.
