AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“TWO MINUTES TO landing.” The chopper pilot’s voice hits my ears through leather headphones.
I keep my head down and finish the last couple of paragraphs of the research paper I’m reading. The conclusion, as with all previous research papers on the topic, is that my father’s cost-cutting was to blame for the Persian Gulf disaster of 2011.
“Bollocks as ever, Dayna,” Arthur says from his seat next to me. “I don’t know why you persist with reading every report.”
Arthur Worchester was my father’s right-hand man and best friend. Now he’s a chief consultant to Subsea Petroleum and my right-hand man since I became CEO.
The helipad draws closer as the pilot brings us down towards Rising Star, my North Sea rig off the coast of Scotland. Already, the smell of oil permeates the chopper. It’s a familiar smell and, in a warped way, kind of homey.
“I have this recurring dream,” I tell Arthur. “I receive a paper that delves into the details of the spill. But unlike every other paper, it’s not an attack on my father, it’s a theory… it’s the truth.”
“Dayna, that’s exactly what it will always be, a dream. We’ll never be able to prove Kahn had anything to do with the spill.”
I scoff. “Spill. Sure.”
It was sabotage.
Caspar Kahn thinks he rules oil in the Middle East. He couldn’t handle the competition from my father’s well, Little Princess. Caspar opened the valves on the rig’s main pipeline and more than four million barrels of oil spilled into the Persian Gulf. That’s the truth. Caspar wanted to bring down SP. He wanted to eliminate his competition.
I fold the paper in half and stuff it into my black Mulberry as the pilot sets us down on the helipad. I take off my headphones, and the loud whir of the propellers assaults my ears. I screw up my face at the sound as I open the door and place my heel-clad feet on the ground. I fully acknowledge my footwear is inappropriate for a rig, but it’s necessary. The guys working offshore are usually tall and stacked, and this is a male-heavy industry. Heels put me on their level physically. In rank, I’m above each and every one of them.
I turn, ducking slightly despite the fact I’m feet beneath the propellers, and hold up a hand to help Arthur. He used to help me out of the choppers, when I was a child visiting my father during school holidays, beside myself with excitement. Lately, Arthur’s ageing legs and increasingly rotund stomach mean the tables are turned.
“Dayna, Arthur, good to see you.” The Head of Health and Safety on Rising Star greets us with handshakes and plants a blue hard hat on top of my long brown hair, which I’ve tied into a low ponytail in readiness. I pull my coat tight across my black dress. Scotland always feels ten degrees colder than London, but in the middle of the North Sea, it’s just bloody freezing. Arthur receives his hat, and we head onto the main section of the rig.
I try to hear the latest H&S statistics being shouted at me above the noise of the offshore drill and the cranks of machines moving the extracted oil. I avoid Arthur’s eye as we listen. He’s not convinced by the hefty sums SP spends on health and safety and contingency planning each year. I confess it’s probably more than every other player in the oil industry. But I won’t let people ever again say that SP was cutting costs. If there’s ever another disaster, people will have to look in a different direction for answers to the root cause.
If they stopped looking in the wrong direction over the 2011 spill, they’d find Caspar Kahn opening pipeline valves. But Caspar was clever; he made sure nobody would ever be able to prove his involvement. Hell, if it hadn’t been for him shooting his mouth off once I became CEO, trying to test my nerves for the industry, I’d probably never have found out the truth.
We sit around a metal table in a large cabin — me, Arthur, my Head of H&S and my Officer in Command on Rising Star.
I cross one leg over the other as I take a sip of godawful vending machine coffee. “I asked you to prepare new figures on the abandonment timeline,” I say. “I’d like to go through those now.”
My commanding officer might be in a position of power on the rig, but his stonewashed jeans and thick, checked shirt couldn’t be less corporate. He’s a roughneck. Down to earth. And one of the most reliable men I have working for me. He pulls a pencil from behind his ear and dangles it between his teeth as he taps on his laptop keys.
“The fall in price per barrel has brought us down to around thirty-six months before we have to fill her in and close up shop,” he says, gesturing to the graph he’s projected against a blank wall. “But it could’ve been much shorter if we didn’t have the new blending capabilities.”
I nod in agreement. The engineers I brought in a couple of years ago to work on SP’s blending infrastructure are clever — like, really bloody smart. If it weren’t for them giving SP the ability to blend more efficiently than anyone else in the industry, we could’ve imploded. Instead, while oil prices are hitting most companies hard, SP is holding its own.
Wincing through the last, and most potent, mouthful of necessary caffeine, I ask the team to talk me through the exit strategy for shutting down the rig three years from now.
BACK ON DRY land, Arthur and I sit on the heated seats of a Mercedes, me picking off the low-hanging fruit in my inbox and sending replies, him reading TheGuardian. The beauty of Arthur is that we can sit in comfortable silence. He’s ten years my father’s senior, and I’m certain he would have retired by now if he didn’t feel a sense of obligation to look after his best friend’s daughter. He’s like a father, a grandfather and a business adviser, all wrapped up in one sixty-five-year-old bundle. While I’m independent and I like to think things through on my own, I don’t mind admitting he’s the one person I really rely on in business. I was still training when I was catapulted to CEO of SP. Many days — no, most days — I think I was too young for the role at twenty-five. Now, at twenty-nine, I’m still too young. SP is a heavy burden to carry. But I wouldn’t have it another way. I wouldn’t have let anyone else take control of what my father built.
Arthur’s mobile rings. I can tell from the twinkle in his eyes when he looks at the screen that the caller is Teddy.
“Son, how are you?”
“Tell Teddy I say hi,” I whisper.
Almost as soon as the message is relayed, Arthur holds out the handset for me to take. “He wants to speak to you.”
“Fred,” I say when I press the mobile to my ear.
“Snot Face.”
It shouldn’t be funny at our age, but we both laugh. When I was growing up, Teddy was always around. Arthur and his wife, Evelyn, adopted Teddy when he was five. I was three at the time. Once, Evelyn allowed us to watch Drop Dead Fred on VHS. We proceeded to watch that VHS until all that was left on the screen were grey-black squiggles. We’d act out the scenes — Teddy was Fred and I was, well, Snot Face.
“How was the wedding?” I ask, purely for Teddy’s sake. He was excited to be a best man on Saturday, and while I don’t approve of his choice of groom, I do care about Teddy.
