The Ares Decision (40 page)

Now
1°19´
N, 7
°43´
E
Gulf of Guinea, 260 Miles South of Nigeria, 180 Miles West of Gabon

V
egas Rules,” said Janet Hatfield, captain of the
Amber Dawn
. Her three-thousand-ton offshore service vessel was running up the Gulf of Guinea on a black night, pitching and rolling in following seas. Her voice rang with quiet authority in the near silence of the darkened pilothouse. “What you saw on
Amber Dawn
stays on
Amber Dawn
.”

“You already swore me to Vegas Rules when we sailed from Nigeria.”

“I’m not kidding, Terry. If the company finds out I snuck you aboard, they’ll fire my ass.”

“And a lovely ass it is,” said Terrence Flannigan, MD, nomadic corporate physician, globetrotting womanizer, world-class snake. He raised his right hand and gave Janet Hatfield a sleepy-eyed grin. “Okay. I swear, again, to keep my mouth shut about
Amber Dawn
, about oil in general and deep-water petroleum exploration in particular, cross my heart and hope to die.”

The captain, a solidly built blonde of thirty-five, turned her back on the snake and ran an uneasy eye over her radar. For the past several minutes the screen had been throwing out a ghost target. The mystery pinprick of light fading and reappearing was too dull to be another ship, yet bright enough to make her wonder what the heck was out there. The radar was a reliable unit, a late-model Furuno. But she had the lives of twelve people in her care: five Filipino crew, six American petroleum scientists, and one stowaway. Thirteen, if she counted herself, which she tended not to.

Was the hot spot only sea clutter? Or an empty oil drum bobbing in the heavy seas, topping crests, hiding in troughs? Or was it something bigger, like an unreported, half-sunken hulk that she did not want to run into at fifteen knots?

It glowed again, closer, as if it were not merely drifting, but moving toward her. She fiddled with the radar, adjusting range and resolution. Otherwise, the sea looked empty, except for some large oil tankers a safe twenty miles to the west. A single land target at the top of the screen marked the summit of Pico Clarence, the six-thousand-foot volcanic mountain at the center of Isle de Foree, tonight’s destination. “Foree rhymes with moray,” she told visiting company brass new to the Gulf of Guinea oil patch. “Like the eel with the teeth.”

She glanced at her other instruments. Compass, autopilot, and a wide panel of gauges monitoring the diesel generators that powered the twin three-thousand-horsepower electric Z-drive thrusters all gave her standard readings. She stared intently at the night-blackened bridge windows. She grabbed her night-vision monocular, shouldered open a heavy, watertight door, and stepped out onto the stubby bridge wing into equatorial heat, humidity she could slice with a knife, and the brain-numbing roar of the generators.

The southwest monsoon was blowing from behind, swirling diesel smoke around the house. The following seas had gathered ponderous momentum rolling three thousand miles up the African coast from Cape Town. They lifted the ship’s stern and plunged its bow nearly to the foredeck. The heat and humidity had the captain sweating in seconds.

Her night-vision device was an eighteen-hundred-dollar birthday splurge to herself to help spot navigation buoys and small craft. It did not magnify, but it pierced the dark dramatically. She glassed the sea ahead. The 2G image intensifier displayed everything green. Nothing but whitecaps swirling like lime chiffon. Probably just a barrel. She retreated back into the cool quiet of the air-conditioning. The red glow of the instruments reflected in Flannigan’s come-here smile.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned him.

“I am merely offering to express my gratitude.”

“In four hours you can express your gratitude to the ladies of Porto Clarence’s massage parlors.”

Low-rent Eastern European and Chinese cruise ships had discovered the capital city. A mix of poverty, an embattled dictator desperate for cash, and the legendary beauty of Isle de Foreens’ West African and Portuguese bloodlines had sex tourism booming in the old colonial deepwater port.

Terry paced the pilothouse. “I’ve been company physician on enough oil jobs to know to keep my trap shut. But this voyage is the most secret I’ve ever seen.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You spent the week towing hydrophone streamers and air guns. When was the last time your OSV was Rube Goldberg–ed into a seismic vessel?”

“Last month.” Janet Hatfield kicked herself the instant she admitted it.

Terry laughed. “The ‘captain’s curse.’ You love your boat too much to keep a secret. This isn’t the first time? Are you kidding? She’s an offshore service vessel, not an oil hunter. What is going on?”

“Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have— So it’s weird. So what? When the company makes me vice president of marine services, I’ll ask why. Till then, I’ll drive the boat. Now shut up about it. Jesus, I should have left you in Nigeria.”

“I’d be dead.”

“Roger that,” Janet Hatfield agreed. It was easier than ever to die in the oil-soaked Niger Delta. Militants kidnapped petroleum workers right off their rigs, drunken soldiers strafed their own checkpoints, and fanatics rampaged in the name of Jesus and Muhammad. But catnip-to-women Dr. Terry Flannigan had come close to getting killed the old-fashioned way: a jealous husband with a machete; a rich chief, no less, with the political connections to get away with hacking up the wife-poacher.

“Janet, where did we go wrong?” Terry asked with another soulful smile.

“Our relationship collapsed under its own lack of weight.”

He made a better friend than lover. As a boyfriend he was treacherous, head over heels in love with himself. But as a friend-friend, there was something steady deep inside Terry that said he would take a bullet for you. Which was why Janet Hatfield had not hesitated to bundle him aboard before the angry husband killed him. For ten days she had hidden him from the crew in her cabin, “airing” him when it was her watch.

The bridge and her attached cabin stood in splendid isolation atop a four-story deckhouse near the front of the ship. Under it were crew cabins, mess and galley, and the lounge that the petrologists had taken over as their computer and radio room. The scientists had declared it off-limits to the crew. They even told her that the captain had to ask permission to enter. Janet had informed them that she had no plan to enter unless it caught fire, in which case she would not knock first.

“You know what the petrologists are doing now?”

Terry was staring out the back windows, which looked down on the hundred-foot-long, low and flat cargo deck, empty tonight but for the OSV’s towing windlass, deck crane, and capstans.

“Get away from the window before they see you.”

“They’re throwing stuff overboard.”

“What they’re doing is their business.”

“One of them is crawling around with a flashlight— Oh, he dropped something.”

“What are they throwing?” she asked in spite of herself.

“Computers.”

Belowdecks, jubilant petrologists peeled off their sweat-soaked shirts and did a victory dance in the now empty computer room. They had worked twenty-four hours a day for ten days, trapped on a boat where possession of booze or drugs or even a bottle of beer would get you banned from the oil business for life. Now they were headed for a well-earned party in the brothels of Porto Clarence, having successfully uploaded multiple terabytes of the hottest 3-D seismic data on the planet.

The data acquisition was done, the client’s seismic model refined, the success of what oilmen called an elephant hunt confirmed beyond any doubt. The client had acknowledged receipt of the densely encrypted satellite transmissions and ordered them to throw the computers into the sea. Every laptop, desktop, even the fifty-thousand-dollar subsurface-modeling workstation that took two men to lift over the side of the ship. The monitors went, too, so no one would see them and ask what they were for, as did the hydrophones and air guns and their mil-spec satellite transmitter.

In a few more hours the petrologists would celebrate the discovery of the “mother of all reserves”—billions and billions of barrels of oil and trillions upon trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that would transform Isle de Foree from a remote plantation island trickling oil through a neglected infrastructure into a West African Saudi Arabia.

“Hey, Janet. How many dinosaurs died to make the oil patch?”

“Algae. Not dinosaurs.”

Terry Flannigan stared at the dark ahead of the boat. The big secret could only be about oil. The water was miles deep here, but if you took the long view in eons, eras and epochs, the seabed was actually an extension of the shallow African coast. For more years than there were stars in the sky, the Niger River had been dumping sediment into the Atlantic Ocean. This slurry of mud, sand, and dead plants and animals had filled the troughs, rifts, and clefts of the Atlantic, and had kept spilling across the continental slope into the deep and continued seaward, drifting, filling. A lady petrologist once told him that the compacted fill was eight miles deep.

“What did dinosaurs make? Coal?”

“Trees made coal,” Janet answered distractedly, her eyes locking on the radar. She switched on the powerful docking lamps. They lit a brilliant hundred-yard circle around the OSV. “Oh, shit!”

“What?”

An eighteen-foot rigid inflatable boat driven by enormous Mercury outboards swooped out of the dark bristling with assault rifles and rocket launchers. Janet Hatfield reacted quickly, grabbing the helm to override the autopilot. The RIB was struggling in the heavy seas. Maybe she could outrun them. She turned
Amber Dawn
’s heels to it, locked the new course, rammed her throttles full ahead, and yanked her radio microphone down from the ceiling.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is
Amber Dawn
,
Amber Dawn
,
Amber Dawn
. One degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven degrees, forty-three minutes east.

“One degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven, forty-three east. One degree, nineteen minutes north,” she said, repeating her position. “Seven degrees, forty-three minutes east.” They couldn’t help if they couldn’t find her.

“Pirates boarding
Amber Dawn
. Pirates boarding
Amber Dawn
. One degree, nineteen minutes north. Seven degrees, forty-three minutes east.”

There was never a guarantee that anyone was listening. But the 406 MHz satellite EPIRB, which was out on the bridge wing in its float-free bracket, would broadcast her position continuously in case of sinking. She pushed through the door again to switch it on manually.

The inflatable was so close she could see eight soldiers dressed in camouflage.
Jungle camouflage on a boat?

They had to be from Isle de Foree, she thought, the only land within the inflatable’s range. But they couldn’t be government troops in that little commando boat. Free Foree Movement rebels? Pirates or rebels, what did they want? The only thing valuable on an offshore service vessel was the crew. To hold hostage or for ransom. So they wouldn’t kill her people. At least not yet.

Muzzle flashes lit the inflatable like a Christmas tree and all the windows in
Amber Dawn
’s bridge shattered at once. Janet Hatfield felt something tug hard in her belly. Her legs skidded out from under her. She pitched backward into Terry’s arms and she almost laughed and said, “You never stop trying, do you?” except she couldn’t speak and was suddenly afraid.

A cargo net edged with grappling hooks cleared the low side of
Amber Dawn
’s main deck, clanged onto steel fittings, and held fast. Seven FFM insurgents scrambled aboard with their assault rifles, leaving their rocket launchers with one man in their boat. They were lean, fit, hard-faced fighters with the distinctive café-au-lait coloring of Isle de Foreens. But they took their orders from a broad-shouldered South African mercenary named Hadrian Van Pelt.

Van Pelt carried a copy of
Amber Dawn
’s crew list.

He sent two men to the engine room. Bursts of automatic fire echoed up from below and the generators fell silent, but for one powering the lights. The men stayed below opening sea cocks. Seawater poured in.

Two others kicked open the door to the improvised computer room. Van Pelt followed with the crew list. “Over there! Against the wall.”

The petrologists, shirtless and terrified, backed against the wall, exchanging looks of disbelief.

Van Pelt counted heads. “Five!” he shouted. “Who’s missing?”

Eyes flickered toward a closet. Van Pelt nodded at one of his men who triggered a short burst, shredding the door. The ship rolled and the body of the scientist hiding there tumbled out. Van Pelt nodded again and his men executed the rest.

A burst of gunfire from the quarters on the levels above spoke the end of
Amber Dawn
’s Filipino crew. Eleven down. Only the captain to go. Van Pelt drew his pistol and climbed the stairs to the bridge. The door was locked and made of steel. He signaled a soldier, who duct-taped a chunk of C-4 onto it. They sheltered halfway down the steps and covered their ears. The plastic explosive blew the door open with a loud bang and Van Pelt vaulted through it.

To the mercenary’s surprise, the captain was not alone. She was sprawled on the deck, a pretty blonde in blood-soaked slacks and blouse. A man was kneeling over her, working with the sure-handed economy of a battlefield medic.

Van Pelt raised his pistol. “Are you a doctor?”

Terry Flannigan was holding death in his hands, and when he looked up from Janet’s riddled chest to the gunman standing in the door, he was staring death in the face.