The Rig 3: Eye of the Hurricane (3 page)

He motioned to Wes and Sheila that they should hurry up and take cover, so they hid behind one of the research submarines. A bullet struck the metal of the hull. Dave fired back at the man and rolled again. He fired from a crouched position and moved further on to find cover behind another crate. He now had a clearer shot at the other shooter and aimed carefully. But the man was not an idiot and he fired once above his head, shooting out the lamp and covering himself in shade. He retreated a bit and moved over to the other side of the corridor. It took away any chance of a clean shot for Dave, who could only fire blindly back at the man in the suit. So he saved his fire, shooting only at the muzzle flashes of the gun.

***

When Joy woke up, she was alone. It surprised her. She did not think Dave would have left her. At least not without a good reason. Slowly she sat up and felt at the back of her head. The wound there had been stitched, but there was a large swelling. She picked up the ice bag and laid it on the back of her head. She tried standing up and immediately fell back onto the bed. Her balance was completely gone. She saw stars dancing in front of her eyes. She closed them tightly and breathed deeply. Her head hurt like hell.

After a few minutes, she tried to stand again. She did not know why, this place was as good a place to be as any, but something had woken her and she wanted to find out what. Her curious nature persisted even now in her unstable condition. She just had to find out what had woken her. Then she heard it. It was a vague noise which echoed through a room below her. It seemed to reverberate through the structure of ‘The City’ and drone on, only to stop for a while and then be repeated. There never used to be sounds like that on this rig, but everything was quiet now. There was only the distant roar of the oil fire and this noise.

She managed to stand up and walked a few steps. Then she had to steady herself, leaning against the wall. The dancing stars came back and twinkled incessantly before her eyes. She squeezed them shut and held on to the door frame. After a few moments, she opened her eyes again. The stars disappeared. Joy walked another few steps and then she was on the stairs. She stepped down one step at the time, resting on each one. It was torture, and she felt herself getting dizzier and dizzier each time. But she managed to get down.

Joy steadied herself against the bar. A look around left her feeling shocked. She knew what had happened, but she did not realize the carnage that had been caused by the blast. She tried to block it out as she made her way out of the bar. But in the Plaza she stopped and felt the tears well up. Friends and acquaintances lay here. Dead and gone because of some idiot’s outrageous and radical ideas.

That sound was fainter here, but it was there. She blinked slowly, trying to snap out of it. It came from the staircase. Skirting the walls, holding on to them as she slowly made her way to the doors, she stepped over debris and sidestepped the bits she was not confident she could step over. Eventually, she passed through the doors and went down the corridor to the staircase. She sat down at the top of the stairs, squeezing her eyes shut again. She felt sick. The stars had come back, as had the dizziness. Then the noise came back, now with a pang and a shattering of glass. Suddenly she knew what she had been hearing.

Joy willed herself to get up again and she slowly descended the stairs. At the bottom she looked ahead, trying to keep her vision as straight as possible. She knew she was swaying like a tree in the breeze, but she managed to get a clear view of what was ahead of her. She noticed the last lamp before the docks was out. And there was someone in the shadows there. She heard another bang. The noise drilled straight into her brain, the flash burned in her eyes. There was a voice in the docks. She could not understand what the voice said, but she knew the voice. It was Dave.

A bullet struck the wall not far from her. She felt she had to do something suddenly. If Dave was down there, there was a chance Wes and Sheila might be there, too. And if this guy was shooting at them and someone was returning fire, they were in danger. She looked around and found a piece of piping that had come away and dropped to the floor. She reached over and picked it up. Slowly and as quietly as possible she went down the corridor. The man took another shot and then she heard a click. A bullet whizzed past from the docks and she suddenly realized what the click was as something dropped to the floor by the man's side. He was changing magazines. She took her chance and lifted the pipe. The man turned as he heard her, but the pipe already came hurtling down to his head.

He slumped to the floor and Joy slumped beside him. “Dave?” she called, shutting her eyes again.

“Joy?” Dave's surprised voice called back. “Joy, what are you doing here?”

But Joy did not answer.

Chapter Three

Elly Boukhari looked up at the window. She had just sent a text message to Helen to say she believed Akhmed had not set off any bomb, that she did not believe he was an extremist terrorist and that she wanted to help her clear his name. There was nothing she could do now but wait. So she stood on the corner between Helen's apartment block and the coffee shop where she worked and did just that.

Helen had turned her tablet and laptop off. She could not bear to hear more about the whole situation. She was constantly bombarded with tweets about how she was the whore of an extremist, how Akhmed was evil, how she was deranged. It was surreal, frightening and depressing. And that was how she felt. She felt frightened and depressed, but somehow the whole situation seemed quite surreal.

Her phone beeped. A text message. Nobody sent her text messages anymore. It all went through social media and Whatsapp. She picked up her phone and opened the message.

“I believe Akhmed's innocent. Got some information from a source about it. Want to talk to me without cameras? Elly Boukhari, CBS.”

Helen thought about it. She really did not want to talk to this woman. It was Elly Boukhari who had first come to find her and who had accosted her as she walked out the door. She was the one who had instigated this. But if she indeed had information, it might be worth going to find out some more from her about it, especially if what she’d found out had made her believe in Akhmed's innocence.

After about half an hour of turning the matter over in her head, she sent a text back with just three words. “Okay. Where? When?”

Elly texted her back within moments. “ASAP. Lunchroom two blocks away. Use the basement door of your building and meet me there.” She left her crew behind and made her way to the indicated lunchroom as soon as she could. She ordered a sandwich and some sparkling water and sat down at a small corner table.

Helen went out the basement. As she walked through the street behind the building, she saw the media vultures had effectively blocked the front and the back door of the building. She put on a pair of aviator sunglasses and made her way to the lunchroom. She went in and looked around. It did not take her long to spot Elly in the corner. She showed her she had seen her by nodding, but went to order a salad first. With lunch in hand, she walked over to Elly's table. “You do have some nerve,” she said.

Elly rose to her feet and smiled at her apologetically. “I'm sorry about that. But I was acting on the information I had. Now, it seems something else entirely is at work here.”

Helen frowned at her and sat down. She took a few mouthfuls of salad and then asked, “Why did you change your mind?”

Elly looked at her sandwich. “I got a call from my uncle. He is the commander of the United States Coast Guard Cutter Hurricane. Right now, he's about five miles away from ‘The City’. He was nearby when the explosion took place.”

“What's that got to do with Akhmed?” There was a hint of annoyance in Helen's voice.

“Well, he phoned me when he was forced to accept an advisor from FEMA on board his vessel. The man said he wanted two FBI agents to get off the rig, but did not intend there to be any other survivors.”

Helen just gazed at Elly. She had no idea what she was trying to say.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean the FBI has agents on board there and Homeland Security does not want anyone to get off that rig apart from those FBI agents. Why would they do that? Unless they have something to do with it.”

Helen frowned and looked down into her salad.

“Akhmed did not write that manifesto. He wasn't a religious guy at all. Agnostic, really.”

Elly nodded.

“Someone planted it. Someone wants to set him up as the terrorist. Someone with the power to do that and to make sure there are no survivors.”

Helen's jaw dropped. “You mean...”

“I mean Akhmed is the fall guy in some sort of conspiracy by someone rather powerful. Either in government, or involved with ‘The City’ in some other way, or maybe both.”

Chapter Four

Dave rushed into the corridor and saw the two bodies slumped next to each other. He kicked the gun away from the unconscious shooter and kneeled down next to Joy. He stroked her hair and hugged her tightly to him.

“Thank you. Thank you Joy...” he muttered to her. He kissed her forehead and she groaned.

Sheila and Wes joined them. Sheila held Akhmed's gun and Wes had taken one of the harpoon guns from the submarine.

“We need to take her back up. She needs to lie down.” Dave said. He motioned to Wes. “Help me out here.”

He pulled Joy to her feet and supported her unconscious body, laying her arm over his shoulder. Wes immediately stepped up and did the same on her other side, so they could half drag, half carry her away. They took her up the stairs, with Sheila constantly looking behind, pointing the gun at the lifeless body of the shooter in the corridor.

Sheila was a bundle of nerves now. She was jittery and each time Wes looked at her, he worried about her handling that gun. But for Sheila, it was the one thing that was giving her confidence at that moment. She was a Texas girl, born and raised a few miles outside Harlingen. The handling of guns was part of her DNA and it was the one thing she felt she could hold onto now. Her belief in the authorities had been shattered by the things that had happened that day. Wes had shown her how so much of what she had been led to believe had been a load of horse manure and she felt she could not even believe in herself right now. So she trusted in the presence and the ability of the Smith and Wesson that was in her hands.

Dave's military training had the opposite effect. All his adult life he had been told to follow orders, yes, but more than that he had been trained to follow his instincts and to find out his own mind. Like most ex-soldiers, he had also developed a healthy mistrust of any form of authority. His peers on the rig had always seen him as a conspiracy theorist, a bit of a looney case. Everyone apart from the Irish bartender, Cillian. He wondered whether the Irishman was still alive. He hoped he was, the man was great company and had been even before ‘The City’. The Irish pub had been on a floor above the Plaza. If Cillian had been by his bar, he would probably have escaped the blast.

“Where are we going?” Wes asked. “Back to the bar?”

Dave thought for a moment. “No. I doubt those bastards are dead; they'll know where we were already. We need another place.”

Sheila looked around, the gun still pointed down the corridor as she walked backwards behind them. “Where do you propose we go? Not many places left.”

“Maybe go to the Irish pub?” Dave muttered.

Wes frowned at him.

“Another bar? We can't get her back on her feet with booze.”

They stepped up the stairs, half dragging Joy with them. Suddenly Wes stopped. “Dave... do you think you could get us into the luxury guest suites?”

Dave pondered it. “If I can get to a computer, I can unlock them, yes.”

“There's a security office on that deck.”

“That'll work.”

It took them half an hour to climb all the way to the luxury residential deck. It was the place where all the big wigs lived when they were at ‘The City’. Sheila helped Dave and Wes set Joy down. She was still out of it. Dave ran into the security booth and started up the PC. His fingers flew over the keys as he looked for a way to access the security system of the suites. All of a sudden, there was a bleep that indicated he was in.

“Any preference for a suite, Wes?” His tone was back to normal.

“Just fucking pick one.”

For a moment, it was as though Dave was back in the control room for a dive and Wes and he were joshing over the radio.

“Number thirty-three good for you?”

“Suits me fine, man.”

Dave hit the enter key and a door further up the corridor opened. Suite thirty-three. He switched off the screen of the computer and then looked around. In one of the drawers was a Taser, and in another was a laptop. He picked up both, found some cables and walked out.

Joy's eyelids were opening and closing rapidly when Wes and Dave lifted her up again. Sheila went ahead of them now and entered suite thirty-three with her gun at the ready. She did a sweep of all the rooms, but found nobody there. It had been empty.

The suite had three bedrooms, each with a king-sized bed. There was a bathroom and even a Jacuzzi. Wes and Dave carried Joy over to one of the beds and laid her down carefully. Sheila shut the door and then came in to close the blind before the porthole. There were no flames around this suite anymore, though there was clear evidence of burning on the porthole. She switched off the light and she and Wes left Dave to take care of Joy.