The Jungle - Cussler Clive - Страница 52

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The flight was tedious, as any flight over water tended to be. No one was in the mood for conversation. Usually there would be banter between the men, a way to alleviate the tension gripping them all, but cracking jokes while Linda Ross’s life hung in the balance wasn’t appealing to any of them. So they flew on in silence. Juan would occasionally scan the sea through his binoculars, even when they were still far outside their target area.

It was only when they were about forty miles out that he and Max started studying the ocean surface in earnest. They worked in tandem, Max looking forward and left, Cabrillo forward and right, both men sweeping the binoculars back and forth, never allowing themselves to be mesmerized by the sun glinting off the shallow waves. They were ten miles from where Cabrillo estimated the ship would be, and just shy of where the continental shelf plunges into the Palawan Trough, when Juan spotted something ahead and off to starboard. He pointed it out to Adams, and the pilot banked around slightly to keep their backs to the sun.

Cabrillo was instantly concerned. They should have found the ship by first spotting her miles-long wake and following it in. There was no wake. The Hercules was dead in the water.

It was an otherworldly sight. The ship itself was nearly twice the length of the Oregon, but what was so remarkable was the towering drill rig sitting astride her open deck. Her four legs were as big around as aboveground swimming pools. The floats beneath them, covered in red antifouling paint, cantilevered a good seventy feet over the Hercules’s rails and were the size of barges. The platform itself was easily several acres in area, far larger than Cabrillo’s initial estimate, and the distance from the deck to the top of the drill tower was more than two hundred feet. All told, the combination of ship and rig weighed in at well over a hundred thousand tons.

“What do you think?” Adams asked. Their plan was to find the rig and immediately return to the Oregon. But with her lying at idle, he was unsure.

Cabrillo wasn’t. “Get in closer. I want to check something.”

Adams dropped them lower until the skids were dancing over the waves. Unless a lookout was stationed at the fantail, they would still be pretty much invisible. It was when they were within a half mile that Juan realized the Hercules had developed a list to port. He wondered briefly if they had miscalculated the load and stopped to adjust it.

But when they came around the back of the ship, he saw heavy steel cables dangling off the superstructure’s boat deck, and the metal arches of her davits were extended. The lifeboat had been launched. At the waterline he could see roiling bubbles caused by water filling her ballast tanks and expelling air. They weren’t readjusting the load—they had abandoned ship because they were scuttling her.

SWING US AROUND THE OTHER SIDE,” CABRILLO CALLED urgently.

As nimbly as a dragonfly, Adams maneuvered the chopper around the heavy-lifter’s bow and along her starboard rail. Like on the opposite side of the ship, the davits were swung out and the lifeboat long gone. However, here there was no indication that the pumps had been activated. They were filling the tanks on only one side so that the Hercules would capsize under the tremendous weight of the J-61 rig.

“Get us down there as fast as you can! We have to stop those pumps.”

“Juan,” Max said, “what if they took Linda with them?”

Cabrillo called the Oregon. Hali Kasim answered right away. “Go ahead, Chairman.”

“Hali, have we received a signal from Linda’s tracker chip in the past hour or so?”

“No, and I’ve got one of my screens dedicated to her frequency.”

“Wait one.” Cabrillo flipped back to the internal helicopter comms channel. “There’s your answer, Max. She’s still aboard. Gomez, get us down there. Hali, you still with me?”

“Right here.”

“We’ve found the Hercules, but it looks like they’re scuttling her. You have our location, yes?”

“I show you eighty-two miles out at a bearing of forty-six degrees.”

“Get here as fast as you can. Bust the guts out of the Oregon, if you have to.” Juan killed the connection. “Change of plans. Gomez, put me on top of the rig, then you and Max try to find a way of disabling the pumps.”

“You’re going to look for Linda?” Hanley asked.

“If all else fails, she and I can jump for it,” Juan said, knowing that his idea was born of desperation and would probably end up killing them both.

The look of concern that flashed across Max’s face told Cabrillo that Hanley thought it was pretty dumb too. Juan shrugged as if to say, what else can we do? He accepted a walkie-talkie that Max had grabbed from an emergency cache kept under the rear seat. Max would carry its twin.

“You don’t want me to get more people from the Oregon?” Adams asked as he lifted the chopper up the towering side of the oil platform.

“I don’t want her slowing for any reason,” Cabrillo told him.

Gomez centered the helo over the landing pad. Cabrillo didn’t waste the time it would take to settle the helicopter properly. He unsnapped his harness, threw open the door, and dropped three feet to the deck, his clothes and hair battered by the rotor’s thunderous downdraft. The 520 peeled away toward the stern, where there was enough deck space to safely land.

The landing jarred Juan’s injured shoulder and sent a stab of pain through his chest. He winced and then ignored it.

At more than two hundred feet up in the air, the slight list they’d seen from the chopper was much more pronounced, and Cabrillo was forced to lean slightly to maintain his footing. He had no idea if the Oregon would arrive in time.

He looked around. It was clear the rig was old. Rust showed through faded and chipped paint. The decks were heavily stained and dented where pieces of equipment had been slammed into it by careless crane operators. There was very little in the way of loose gear sitting around. He spotted a large bin loaded with thirty-foot lengths of pipe called drill string that was threaded together under the derrick and used to bore the hole into the earth. Heavy chain dangled through the drill tower like industrial lace. To Juan, all that was missing to indicate the platform was abandoned was the cry of a coyote and a few tumbleweeds.

Cabrillo made his way to the accommodations block, a three-story cube with the ornamentation of a Soviet apartment building. All the windows on the first level were small portholes no bigger around than dinner plates. He examined the single steel door. He could see that at one time it had been chained closed. The chain was still attached through the handle, but the pad eye had been snapped off the jamb. Now crude beads of solder had been used to weld it shut. He pulled at the handle anyway, heaving until his arm ached, but it didn’t budge even a fraction of an inch.

He hadn’t taken a sidearm with him because this was supposed to be a scouting mission. He looked around for something he could use to smash a window. It took ten frustrating minutes to locate a discarded cover for an oxyacetylene tank. It was roughly the size of a grapefruit and heavy enough to shatter the glass. With his one arm still in a sling, his aim was off, so it took him three tries before he could even hit the window, and that blow merely starred the shatter-resistant pane. He used the metal cover like a hammer and beat the glass out of the frame.

“Linda?” he shouted into the empty room beyond. He could see it was an antechamber where workers could strip out of their oilsoaked coveralls before making their way to their cabins. “Linda?”

His voice was swallowed by the metal walls and closed door opposite him. He bellowed. He roared. He thundered. It made no difference. His answer was silence.

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