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This level, Cabrillo discovered, was mostly offices as well as changing rooms for the roughnecks. There was no sign of Linda, so he set off once again, descending into the guts of the rig, his tiny light unable to do more than push at the murky gloom.
A screech of steel on steel boomed and roared through the platform like the shriek of a speeding train slamming on its brakes. Juan felt the whole structure shift and then stabilize. The list increased another couple degrees in as many seconds.
They were running out of time.
* * *
ERIC STONE PUSHED the Oregon mercilessly. Rather than take the command chair in the middle of the Op Center, he remained in his customary seat at the helm, where he had a better sense of how the ship was responding to the waves and therefore could make minute adjustments to eke out the most speed.
The tramp freighter had never let them down before and she was delivering again, cutting across the sea like an offshore powerboat, her bows slicing cleanly through the water while a boiling wake astern marked her passage.
They covered the eighty miles to the Hercules in record time, but when they arrived, he knew immediately that they were too late. The heavy-lifter was so far over that she looked ready to capsize at any moment. The towering oil rig astride her deck leaned far out over the water, casting a long shadow that darkened the sea. He imagined only its tremendous weight was keeping it glued in place.
“Well done, lad,” Max’s booming voice came over the ceiling-mounted speakers. He was in the MD 520N, heading back to the ship to pick up men and supplies that were already waiting.
“What do you want me to do?” Stone asked, secretly relieved that he wouldn’t be responsible for the rescue attempt.
“Lay her right up under the rig and shove with everything she’s got,” Hanley said without pause.
“What?” Eric couldn’t believe his ears.
“You heard me. Do it.”
Stone snapped on the ship’s intercom. “Deck crew, lay out every fender we’ve got along the portside rail.” He wasn’t worried about ruining either ship’s paint scheme but was concerned about staving in hull plates.
Afraid that making waves near the Hercules would send her plummeting into the depths, Eric coaxed the Oregon alongside the ship like she was a skittish colt, all the while ballasting her down so that her rail would slip under the rig’s projecting pontoons. The J-61 loomed over them like a castle on a sinking foundation.
“Chopper is down,” Max announced as Stone made tiny corrections to their position.
The two ships came together as gently as a feather falling to earth, the thick pneumatic fenders compressing and easing the contact even further. When the vessels were pressed against each other as snugly as possible, Eric slowly ramped up the Oregon’s athwartship thrusters and cranked the directed-thrust drive-tube nozzles to ninety degrees.
The effect was immediate. Burdened by tens of thousands of gallons of water flooding her starboard tanks, the Hercules was over nearly twenty degrees, but as soon as the power came up, the Oregon managed to shove her eight degrees closer to vertical. The forces in play were titanic but so carefully balanced that the slightest mistake on Stone’s part would send the twenty-thousand-ton oil platform tumbling off the Hercules and crashing down, and ultimately through the Oregon. The worst part was that unless they could shut the heavy-lifter’s sea inlets and pump her dry again, this was a delaying action at best.
Max’s dangerous ploy bought them time. Just how much was anyone’s guess.
* * *
NO SOONER HAD THE HELICOPTER settled onto the deck than Hanley, with his back aching, practically fell out of his seat in an effort to get out quickly. Julia Huxley was waiting with a wheelchair, her lab coat billowing around her in the rotor wash. Max was grateful for the chair but had no intention of allowing her to wheel him to the infirmary. He locked the wheels with his hands and watched as Mike Trono, Eddie Seng, and Franklin Lincoln—the men who had planned on spearheading the armed takedown of the Hercules—load up gear they would need to breach the ship’s superstructure and stave off a disaster. They couldn’t simply jump aboard the sinking vessel because there was too much of a gap caused by the rubber fenders sandwiched between the two ships.
In order to save even more time, Eddie would fly over to the ship clipped to the chopper’s winch so he could be lowered onto the pilothouse directly. Three minutes after he landed, Gomez Adams ramped up the engine and lifted away, mindful of his friend dangling beneath the helo’s belly.
He flew up and over the Oregon and came down again seconds later, peering though the Plexiglas at his feet in order to put Eddie on target. He deftly lowered Seng onto the pilothouse roof just inboard of one of the jutting bridge wings.
Eddie unclipped himself from the winch, threw a wave, and leapt down to the catwalk.
Adams then set the chopper down on the forward pontoon, where he’d had to rescue Max moments earlier. Mike and Linc tossed out their gear and jumped free so that Gomez could fly up to the oil platform’s chopper pad and wait for the Chairman to make his appearance.
* * *
EDDIE HIT THE FLYING BRIDGE in a tuck roll, springing to his feet an instant after landing. He didn’t bother with the lock but crossdrew a 9mm, shot out the glass half of the door, and leapt through. He hit the deck in another roll and came up next to the navigation console, a massive piece of electronics that spanned almost the entire width of the pilothouse. The room was nearly two hundred feet wide, spartan, and, he quickly discovered, dead. There was no power. All the flat panels were blank, the controls inoperable, and the readouts unlit. It wasn’t only that the crew had killed the engines, but they’d taken the battery backup off-line. The Hercules was truly a ghost ship.
“Max, you there?” he radioed.
“Go ahead.” He was halfway to the Op Center.
“We are seriously screwed. Main propulsion is down. Auxiliary is down, and it looks like they pulled the feeds off the backup batteries.”
“Do you have anything?” Hanley asked.
