Reckoning (6 page)

“He’d be wrong. Hank, I don’t think you fully realize the scale of operations on the offshore-rigs. Thousands of men work
there. Hundreds come and go every day. Technicians, specialists, management, civil service inspectors, foreign observers,
reporters, roughnecks, tool pushers, you name it, come and go by the hour from all over the world. If something happened,
we could certainly trace back and find out who was not a genuine expert, but we can’t act in a preventive way by stopping
or slowing the flood of visitors. They can’t be left sitting in Aberdeen or on the Shetlands while we check into their backgrounds.
So long as their papers seem in order, they come aboard and it’s business as usual.”

“The oil must flow.”

“That’s right,” Penrod said, cheerful that Dartley was going to be reasonable about it. “Now, I’m not going out there with
you, because it might bring too much attention to you. It will do no harm for us to be seen together at Aberdeen and on the
Shetlands. I’m known as a head office man, and they think you’re an efficiency expert we’ve brought over from America. That’s
not going to make you very popular, I’m afraid. Anyone who sees us together now will presume that I’m giving you a list of
complaints—although the truth is, we’re very happy with how things are going at Brent.”

“Avedesian knows I’m coming?”

Penrod nodded. “No resistance. I’ve never met the chap and we’re all a little puzzled in London by his attitude. I suppose
you’ll want to spend time with him. I’ve no idea exactly what you, ah, see your duties as.”

Dartley smiled politely. “Hard to say until I get out there. As you’ve just pointed out, I don’t fully grasp the scale of
operations offshore.”

“Well, it’s not a direct concern of mine so long as things go smoothly. I hope we can depend on that.”

“Absolutely.” To Dartley, this meant no blood, no corpses showing up. Not too much to ask for, if that was what Penrod meant.

“As an efficiency expert, you will have complete clearance to visit every part of every rig at any time. You are answerable
to nobody, so long as you follow the general regulations for everyone. That’s the most I can do for you.”

The plane touched down at the Sumburgh airport, and the passengers walked across the tarmac to the large terminal. Dartley
noticed that their plane was the only one on a runway. Inside the terminal building, there was hardly anyone to be seen, apart
from a few people behind counters.

“Looks like a neutron bomb was set off here,” Dartley remarked, his voice echoing in the huge empty spaces. “What happened
to everybody?”

“Bit of a white elephant, I’m afraid,” Penrod said. “The government built this place and expected all the oil companies to
use the field. It turned out cheaper for them to fly direct from Aberdeen with CH-47
Chinook choppers, so this place became nearly obsolete. We’ll see some more flights in before you leave.”

Dartley could see that the man was anxious to be rid of him and on his way back to his office in London. “I can manage from
here,” Dartley offered, but the oil company executive insisted on staying to see him off, rather like a dutiful relative.

Small groups gradually assembled in clusters distant from one another on the vast floor. To pass the time, some read the notices
warning in detail against alcohol, drugs and weapons. At last Dartley’s flight was called. He shook hands with Jeremy Penrod,
collected his boarding pass and joined a small line to be assigned a survival suit. The bright orange suits hung on a wall,
and the man handing them out looked over each passenger critically before selecting a suit for him. Then he went on in a long
monotone about what all the zips and flaps and pullcords were for.

The rubber-lined suit was heavy and stiff. Dartley had some trouble getting into his, and gave up any idea of trying to follow
what the purpose of everything was. The main thing was, if the chopper went into the water, he would not die of cold quickly
in the icy North Sea. A strobe light was attached so he could be found at night or under conditions of poor visibility. Thick,
awkward gloves were attached to the sleeves.

Dartley followed the other bright-orange-clad men to a Sikorsky S-61 on the runway and ducked under its whirling rotor blades.

A computerized chart above the radar screen tracked the Sikorsky’s flight path. Dartley could see it from where he sat. The
pilots were looking for a needle in a haystack—an oil rig somewhere in the continuous thick bank of fog beneath them. Some
of the passengers were grumbling, expecting that the flight would have to return to Sumburgh. One disagreed, claiming that
their two pilots never allowed the fog to beat them and would get them in somehow.

After a while the helicopter circled slowly and lost altitude. One moment they were in the bright sunshine above the soft
layer of mist, and the next they were lost in a swirling fog so thick it blocked out much of the daylight. The pilots sat
erect and tense, talking rapidly into their headsets. Even the most bored and hardened oilmen on board stared out through
the fog uneasily. Dartley knew that there were four giant rigs on the Brent field—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie
and Delta. They were looking for Delta. These enormous steel structures were somewhere nearby, hidden in the fog.

The pilots continued to set the chopper down slowly through the grey swirls of mist, peering to make sure the rig did not
suddenly materialize immediately beneath or in front of them. Dartley found himself staring intently, ready to yell a warning
about any ominous shape emerging from the fog. They seemed to spend a long time hovering slowly down in the noisy, vibrating
machine. Then the fog thinned enough for them to see the grey cold seawater about twenty feet beneath them. Staying close
to the sea surface in order to take advantage of the layer of lighter fog there, the pilots cautiously advanced, checking
their instruments and squinting ahead and to the sides.

A huge concrete leg loomed out of the fog directly ahead. The chopper paused in its forward motion and began to lift, revealing
giant diagonal and horizontal crossbeams leading away from the concrete leg and disappearing into the vapors. Some of the
passengers cheered the pilots, who could not hear them because of their headsets. Dartley looked up and saw the installation’s
enormous superstructure still high above them. Other supporting legs and structural framework were not visible. A great sheet
of flame flapped like a flag above the installation.

The helicopter did not land on the Brent Delta installation, but on a flotel moored next to it. The flotel
was a semi-submersible—four stories of superstructure fixed to two monstrously long floats which were almost completely submerged.
The flat top supported two helidecks, a small hangar and two large cranes for unloading ships.

Dartley climbed out of the chopper, picked up his bag after it was unloaded from the back and made his way across the steel
deck covered with rope mesh work. The noise was tremendous. The roar of the Sikorsky’s engine competed with those from heavy
machines aboard the nearby installation, the waves crashing against the concrete legs far below, the hiss and flapping of
the gas flare above the rig and the ring and din of pipes. He followed his orange-suited fellow passengers, hauling their
duffel bags, down the metal steps of a passageway. He handed in his chopper flight pass and was given another in exchange
which listed his lifeboat station and cabin number. He shucked off his survival suit and went, as directed, to his lifeboat
station and placed his card in a slot in a board there. In an emergency, every man went to his lifeboat station, pulled his
card and put on a lifejacket. Once the board was cleared of cards, all hands attached to that lifeboat station had been accounted
for.

He had an upper bunk in a four-bunk cabin. Nicholas Avedesian had the other top bunk. Only one occupant was present when Dartley
arrived.

“We’re all packed in like fucking sardines here, mate,” he said to Dartley in a Cockney accent.

Dartley looked around at the tightly designed cabin
which left a minimum of space—certainly not enough for three or four men to be out of their bunks at one time. “It’s like
a submarine.”

“You were in them?”

Dartley shook his head. “Army.”

“Me too. British army. All I did was march and stand at attention for hours in the bloody rain. At least if I’d been in a
submarine, I’d have been dry.”

Dartley laughed.

“You a fooking spy on us then?” the man asked.

“Sort of.”

“Well, you better take good care then. We have a lot of industrial accidents out on these rigs. You wouldn’t want to step
in anyone’s way while you was doing your spying.”

Dartley said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Be sure you do.”

The man with cropped fair hair and broad shoulders was instantly at attention when he heard the name Dockrell over the airport
announcing system. John Dockrell. He relaxed. His real name was Douglas Dockrell. He wasn’t traveling under that name, of
course. It was just that hearing the last name while he waited for his flight gave him a start—nothing visible to an observer,
since he hadn’t allowed a muscle to flicker. He was from Summerside, on Prince Edward Island, a small town with a name more
cheerful than it was. Lobsters, oysters, rolling potato fields, dairy farms and
tourists gawking and guzzling in the short summer season had been the limits of his world on this rural conservative island
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He had made some big changes since he left. Now Douglas Dockrell no longer existed. He never
used his real name anymore. Yet it still made him jump inwardly to hear his last name over the airport system.

He was sitting in Aberdeen’s Dyce airport, waiting for his helicopter flight to be called. A thin young man with thick eyeglasses
sat next to him. Dockrell was suspicious of him because he looked so different from the roughnecks and engineers crowded in
the lobby. The man seemed nervously self aware of this, and Dockrell sensed he wanted to start a conversation with him.

“Headed for the Forties field by any chance?” he finally asked in a very proper English accent.

“Fraid not.”

“Too bad. I’m a reporter with the
Daily Telegraph
and I have this beastly report to do on oil, which I know less than nothing about. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“I don’t know much about British operations. I’m an American.”

“Marvelous. Where from?”

“Wyoming.”

“Never been there, I’m afraid. What do you do on the oilfields?”

“I’m a mud engineer.”

“Good Lord.” The Englishman looked amazed.
“I never heard of such a person. You must tell me what you do, but keep it simple because I’m the sort who knows that oil
is really rotten vegetable matter buried in rock. I don’t see why it’s so difficult to find. You’d think lots of dead leaves
must have collected down there over the years.”

Dockrell decided that this was a genuine reporter trying to get him talking. He had done his homework on drilling muds and
saw that he would remain less conspicuous in going along with this man’s questions than in rebuffing him.

“Sure, there’s a lot of decayed vegetation in the ground,” Dockrell said in a passably good imitation of a Wyoming accent.
As a Canadian, Dockrell prided himself on being able to pass as an American or an Englishman. He was also proud of the fact
that he could read up on a subject in a matter of hours and sound to non-experts in that field like he knew what he was talking
about. “The stuff becomes mostly soil, with some peat and then coal. The part that becomes oil must first of all be buried
so that air can’t reach it, and after that it must be kept at a temperature very close to that of boiling water for at least
a million years. Too much heat or too much cold and the oil is destroyed. That’s why there’s not a lot of it around.”

The reporter was scribbling notes on a pad. Dockrell waited for him to catch up before going on, “Another problem is that
oil doesn’t always stay where it is formed. It seeps through nearby rocks until it comes to
a barrier it can’t pass through, where it forms in a pool or reservoir. Guessing where the oil might have migrated is just
as important as guessing where it formed, since it may no longer be there.”

“Do you think much remains to be discovered?” the thin Englishman asked.

“Sure. But in the past fifty years, we’ve burned up a big percentage of all the oil on earth. Since 1975 we’ve been using
oil faster than we’ve been discovering it.”

“So it’s only a matter of time before supplies run out?”

“When things get tight, we’ll switch to other technologies,” Dockrell assured him.

“Tell me about mud engineers. It sounds like fun.”

“You mean it sounds weird. Something we Americans do.”

“Perhaps,” the reporter said.

“Let me tell you how weird it is. In the last century, pioneer wagon trains crossing Wyoming would get bogged down, after
a rainstorm, in mud so slippery and deep their horses could not wade through it and their wagon wheels would spin around,
finding no traction. They called the mud gumbo, and it could be a problem about anywhere in the Wyoming basins and flatlands.
Supposedly a number of settlers died from exhaustion while trying to struggle through the gumbo after rain. And they say Indians
used to drive buffalo into it and kill them there.”