Reckoning (8 page)

It was true. The crane operator, from Birmingham, liked to give Yanks a hard time in a joking way. He had been kidding this
mud engineer from Wyoming about which of them was the more important on an offshore rig. He had told the Yank to climb up
the crane some day if he had the nerve, not expecting him to ever do it. Now here he was.

“You need clearance to come up here,” the crane operator tried.

“I got it,” Dockrell said, knowing the man could not stop unloading the ship in order to check this out.

“All right then, don’t distract me and I’ll show you what I’m doing.”

Dockrell stood next to him in the glass-walled control cabin and watched him play with the row of short knobbed levers that
controlled the boom and hook. The supply ship looked tiny from up here. Its cabins and bridge were at one end, leaving nearly
all the deck as stacking space for freight containers. By
means of signals, one seaman indicated which containers were to be lifted. The crane boom swung out, rotating the whole cabin
platform with it. At a certain point the operator touched one lever and cable played out until the hook hung just above the
container. The ship was pitching from prow to stern, yawing from side to side and going up and down with the swells. While
this went on, two seamen clambered over the containers and slipped the crane hook into a steel cable sling around the container.

At a signal, the crane operator used another lever to pick the containers off the deck, spinning and swaying in the breeze.
From up this high, it looked like a children’s toy, but Dockrell knew he was watching a steel box of several tons in weight
dancing on the end of the crane string. The operator set the container down easy on the flotel platform, where crewmen freed
the hook.

Dockrell stood watching so quietly that the crane operator almost forgot he was there. Choppers came and went from the helidecks.
The control cabin was fairly close to the gas flare—close enough to feel its heat—and the choppers gave them both a wide berth.
Dockrell took his eyes off the crane controls to watch each Bell disgorge its passengers. His gaze remained fixed on Avedesian
when he emerged. He expected him to hurry to a gangway leading down into the flotel superstructure, to escape the chopper
engine noise and the downdraft of its rotors. Instead, he walked to the edge of the helideck, followed by the American named
Hank Washington. They appeared to be shouting and arguing. Dockrell wasted no time.

The crane operator was a big man, heavily muscled and wearing a hard hat. Coming at him from behind, by surprise, Dockrell
was fairly sure he could immobilize him without attracting attention. But with a very strong man, like a construction worker,
in prime condition, he just couldn’t be sure, and he needed to be. He was in a glass-walled box, observable to anyone who
cared to stare up, and he needed to move fast. The crane operator had just set a container on the Hotel platform and the crewmen
were freeing the hook.

Dockrell pulled out the Glock 17 from an inside pocket of his coat. The 9 mm pistol, manufactured by the Austrian company
of Gaston Glock, near Vienna, was almost totally plastic. Only the barrel, slide and one spring were steel. Dockrell had broken
these down and scattered them in his luggage so they would look meaningless on an X-ray. The plastic gun itself neither showed
on an X-ray nor set off a metal detector. The cartridges had been his main problem. He had put eighteen in the container for
his electric razor and had no trouble in Washington, London, Aberdeen or Sumburgh.

The crane operator glanced around as he heard the pistol being cocked. Dockrell shot him once, just above the left eyebrow,
quickly pocketed the gun and caught the man before he fell forward out of his chair onto the control levers. Avoiding the
blood trickling down one side of the man’s face, Dockrell eased him out of the
chair and onto the floor. Because of the lack of space, he had to curl him on his side around the base of the chair like a
large sleeping dog.

Dockrell sat in the operator’s chair and looked down. Only one man was looking upward, and that was the seaman making signals
up to him from the ship’s deck far below. At the angle of his view, the floor of the control cabin would have prevented him
from seeing what had happened. He was now waving his arms for the hook to drop, puzzled by the delay. The crewmen on the flotel
platform were too busy logging in the last container—entering the long string of numbers on its side into forms on clipboards—to
pay any heed to the pause in the work. Avedesian and Washington were still arguing together off to one side of the helideck.

Dockrell prided himself on his fast learning. This was going to be a test of what he could do. A major performance with no
rehearsal. He wound the levers to swing the boom out over the side of the platform. He saw the container on the ship’s deck
that the seaman was signaling toward. He estimated when the tip of the crane’s boom was nearly over it, waited for the vessel
to sink in a trough and begin to rise on the next swell, then worked the lever to drop the hook. It fell into the sea about
two container lengths aft of the ship’s stern. Dockrell cursed. Clearly this was going to be even trickier than he had guessed.
His steep view down distorted distances for him.

He had to try twice more and even then was lucky to land the hook on the container’s top. By this time the
seaman was signaling so ferociously, he looked like he would tie himself in a knot. The other two deckhands got the hook in
the cables, jumped clear and Dockrell got the signal to lift.

Things went badly again. Instead of being picked clean and fast off the ship’s deck, the container rose slowly and swayed
at the end of the crane cable. As Dockrell fought with the levers to raise the container quickly, the ship pitched on the
crest of a wave. Its stern section rose sharply and the sloping deck hit one end of the container suspended above it. The
force of this blow knocked the container out of Dockrell’s control and it slammed into another container in front of it.

Dockrell caught a glimpse of the deckhand desperately trying to get out of the way. He knew the man wouldn’t make it.

“I can’t live my life like this!” Nicholas Avedesian was shouting at Richard Dartley above the roar of chopper engines on
the helideck. “Fuck it! I might as well be dead already, having to live out here all the time, being shadowed by someone like
you. You hear me? I said I might as well be dead!”

“You may not have long to wait,” Dartley told him coldly.

“I’m out here with my friends!”

“You’re out here with men you don’t know from Adam. They leave and arrive by the hour from all over the world. You’re about
as safe as a herring in a fish
net. I’m not even sure I can save you. Out here, I don’t think anybody can. I want you back on the beach.”

“No!”

Dartley knew he had already lost the argument but went on shouting anyway. Some yelling and cussing at each other would let
some steam off for both of them, and no one could possibly hear them with the racket on the helideck. Avedesian felt emotionally
secure and physically isolated on this oilfield, and he was hiding here like a hermit crab in an old whelk shell. No doubt
he could see the logic of Dartley’s objections, but when a hunted man feels safe someplace, for whatever irrational cause,
he is slow to leave. Dartley let him rant on above the sounds of the engines and waves. It was good for him.

As Dartley listened, he watched a container rise on a crane cable, swinging wildly and missing the edge of the flotel platform
by mere inches. Dartley was used to the stylish performance of the crane operators, who often liked to show their skill by
putting a huge steel container through its paces. But this looked like it was out of control, spinning and swaying.

Something caught Dartley’s eye. A man was clinging to one end of the container moving through the air. As it spun about, Dartley
glimpsed him splayed out like the letter X, his hands holding on above his head, his feet spread apart. The container swung
over the helideck, not many feet above the whirling rotors of one chopper. The crane operator had to be out of his mind. As
it passed overhead, Dartley saw that the man was not
holding onto one end of the container, but had been squashed flat against it.

Dartley’s right fist caught Avedesian under the left jawbone and he went out like a light. Before he collapsed, Dartley slung
him over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift and ran from the container as it dropped from the crane, crashing into the
deck. He didn’t make it by much, maybe fifteen feet, and wouldn’t have made it at all if he had waited to explain things to
Avedesian.

The container hit the helideck hard enough to shake the entire flotel and deform some of the steel deck structure. Dartley
kept running until he reached a gangway. He dumped the now half-conscious Avedesian on the floor of the first cabin he came
to and headed back to the flat top. It took him a little time to get from the helideck to the base of the crane.

He climbed the rungs fast to the crane’s control cabin. He slid open the sliding steel door and looked inside. A man he had
seen before was lying on the floor, a bullet hole above his left eyebrow, a trickle of drying blood down his cheek. In his
right hand, he loosely held a plastic pistol.

“You really believe that crane operator was the assassin and that he committed suicide when he failed to kill you with the
container?” Richard Dartley asked Nicholas Avedesian incredulously.

“Those Scotland Yard men ruled his death a suicide and said he probably went berserk for some reason,” Avedesian replied defensively.

“Those detectives acted out here like they were walking on the moon. They were bug-eyed at all the strange stuff on these
installations. I was the same way for the first few days until I got used to things. If they had found that body in someone’s
kitchen back on the beach, in surroundings more familiar to them, they might not have been so quick to say suicide.”

“No one saw anybody else, there were no other fingerprints, the gun was in the man’s hand,” Avedesian said. “What more do
you want?”

“He tried to kill you with that container, and me
along with you. The man had a three-year faultless work record on the Brent field, a family with young children, no criminal
record, good pay and benefits. It doesn’t fit. I think he was killed first, and the seaman was killed accidentally because
the killer didn’t know how to operate the crane properly. Remember, my attention was drawn to that container in the first
place because of the clumsy way it was being handled. If it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have pushed us out of the
way in time.”

“You didn’t have to hit me.”

“I’m tired of your bitching and complaining, Avedesian. You’d better hear a few facts, then I’ll say nothing more. You can
go on fooling yourself if it makes you feel better. First thing you should know is that, for reasons I’m not going to tell
you, I think one man has killed your six buddies. He’s a skilled pro—a mechanic, a high-priced executioner. He scares me,
and I got a lot less to worry about than you. Sticking your head in the sand isn’t going to make him disappear into thin air,
Avedesian. He’s taken one crack at you, and although he missed, he managed to cover his tracks well enough to fool Scotland
Yard. He’s going to take another shot at you real soon, and he’s right here with you on this flotel. You intend to stay?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t recommend it,” Dartley said.

“I know. I appreciate what you say but I still feel safer out here than back on the beach. If I can’t survive
out here on the North Sea, I don’t believe I’d stand a chance on dry land.”

“That’s stupid, Avedesian.”

“Maybe. It’s the way I feel.”

“All right,” Dartley conceded. “So long as you’re clear about what I think the risks are—”

“I understand.”

“He’ll have figured by now that I’m here to protect you from him, if he ever had doubts about it,” Dartley said. “From now
on, he’ll be looking for an opportunity to separate us and bag you real easy. You’d better cooperate with me in coordinating
our movements. You haven’t been making much of an effort up until now. You don’t want this gator to catch you alone.”

“He won’t,” Avedesian said.

“I wish I could believe that.”

When Avedesian heard over the radio that they were changing a drill bit at Brent Alpha, he wanted to see how things were going.
He and Dartley were ferried there on a Bell 212. The roughnecks were well into pulling up the drillstring by the time they
arrived. The five-inch-diameter pipe was screwed together in thirty-foot lengths. The roughnecks hauled the pipe out three
lengths at a time, ninety-foot sections that whipped like bamboo. Every three lengths, they clamped the pipe ends and unscrewed
them with a rotary table. The man on top of the derrick threw a noose of steel cable around the tip of a ninety-foot section
after it was
unscrewed. When this three-length section was released, he leaned it upright against the derrick along with others. Then the
next three-length section of five-inch pipe was drawn up.