Gideon's War / Hard Target

Kate raised an eyebrow, then followed Big Al’s nod toward the idling Sikorsky. A small man with a face that reminded her of a bloodhound was now emerging from the chopper, followed by a Secret Service agent. Behind him was the U.S. ambassador, Randy Stearns, a large, red-faced man wearing a bespoke suit. Stearns was nearly as big as Big Al. He’d played pro football for the Vikings, Kate knew, because on all three occasions that she’d met him, he had made a point of telling her. He was talking to a slim woman with hair that was dyed one shade too blond, whom Kate recognized as his press attaché. Her name was Tina. Or Tara. She couldn’t remember which.

Two more bodyguards followed, and as soon as they cleared the rotors, the chopper rose into the air again, as though the pilot had had enough of sitting on a tiny platform a hundred feet above the sea.

Kate extended her hand to the man with the bloodhound face. “Mr. Parker, I’m Kate Murphy, the rig manager.”

“Call me Earl.” If not for the bodyguard who sh33; D‡adowed him, you’d never have known he was a man of any importance.

Ambassador Stearns leaned in to kiss her cheek without her offering it. “How you doing, hon?” he said. “Good to see you again. You remember Tina.”

Kate gave the ambassador a noncommital nod, then turned back to Parker. “Sir, the president wants you to call him right away. If you need privacy, you can use the observation room.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “Soon as I’m done, I hope you can show us around.”

“Of course,” Kate said, before leading Parker to the glass-walled observation room. She remained outside with Parker’s security man, watching through the window as Parker raised his satellite phone to his ear. But the disapproving glare of the Secret Service agent prompted her to turn away. Before she did, though, she could see Earl Parker’s expression darken and his ramrod-straight posture give way to what she could only imagine was some kind of bad news.

Following the reception at the UN, President Diggs had spent the night at the Park Avenue apartment of Cameron Stack, an investment banker who’d been one of the leading fund-raisers during his campaign. Stack had declined a cabinet position, preferring to remain an unofficial economic advisor. They had talked well into the night, discussing the sobering economic challenges facing the nation, from rising unemployment to price competition from China, all of which caused the president to sleep fitfully. He’d returned early the next morning to Washington, when he learned what had happened to Gideon’s convoy. It took another hour before he was finally able to reach Earl Parker, who’d just landed on the Obelisk. The president’s chief of staff, Elliot Hammershaw, held out the encrypted satellite phone.

“I have him, sir.”

Diggs pressed the phone to his ear and proceeded to tell Parker that General Prang and his men had all been killed during an ambush, but that Gideon’s body hadn’t been found yet.

“Then he may still be alive,” Parker said.

“The Sultan’s troops are sweeping the area, but they’re not optimistic. I’m sorry, Earl, I know how much Gideon means to you. And you know how much he means to me.”

Parker leaned heavily against the communications console. “Mr. President,” he said, hesitating before finishing his thought. “Tillman may have been behind this.”

“Based on what?”

“Tillman and General Prang were the only people who knew Gideon’s itinerary.”

“I realize Tillman’s capable of betraying his country . . . but do you really think he’d try to kill his own brother?”

“Who else could it have been?”

Kate stole another furtive glance into the observation room. Parker was pinching his forehead as he talked to the president. When Parker finally ended the call, he lowered the phone into his lap and remained as still as a statue. Then, suddenly, he turned toward Kate, who averted her gaze, hoping he hadn’t caught her watching him. A few seconds later, he emerged from the room, clearly shaken by whatever news hebroÑ€’d just gotten from the president.

“Is there anything I can do, sir?” Kate asked.

Parker hesitated before he spoke. “You said you’d give us a tour of the rig before the camera crews come.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lead on.”

Kate was keenly aware of Parker’s lingering distraction as he waved for the ambassador and the rest of his entourage to join them. She led the group to a place at the edge of the chopper deck that gave them the best view of the rig. “As you can see, the Obelisk is composed of two structures linked by a small bridge.”

They stood nearly a hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. Only the steel skeletons of the drilling derricks and cranes were higher. Even after all these years working on rigs, being on the deck was still thrilling to her.

“The unit we’re standing on is the Wellhead Service Platform. It includes not only the drilling apparatus, but also the mess, bunk quarters, rec room, laundry, and control room.”

“Why is the rig split into two parts?” Stearns asked.

“There are some structural considerations—but primarily safety. As soon as the oil comes out, we pipe it over to the Bridge Linked Platform. Over there we have the power-generation equipment, storage, and preprocessing. Normally an FPSO—that’s a factory processing and storage ship—is moored a few hundred yards away. It stores and processes the oil and gas prior to transshipment to our onshore facility. Because it’s so far out at sea, the Obelisk was designed to warehouse larger quantities of oil so production can continue if the factory ship needs to return to port in the event of a storm or some other emergency. That allows us to continue pumping while the ship isn’t here. At full production, our operating budget is around a hundred thousand dollars a day. Needless to say, we make every effort to keep production going at all times.”

Except when Washington bigwigs show up to stage some pointless exercise in political theater, she thought.

“Of course, the downside to storing that much oil and gas is the potential for fire. If that happens, we can delink the pipes until the fire is controlled. The idea here is to make even a catastrophic event survivable by the crew.”

She led Parker’s entourage down the stairwell and through a door.

“One of the most interesting things about this rig is that it’s a semi-compliant tower, which means that it sways with the movement of the ocean. Most of the time it’s pretty imperceptible. But in the kind of heavy seas we have today, you can actually feel it. We have systems in place that can both actively and passively dampen those potentially destructive forces.”

Kate pointed to a pair of large pumps in the middle of the room. “These pumps can move water at a rate of over eight thousand cfm— sorry, for you nonengineers, that’s cubic feet of water per minute. Several large nozzles beneath the rig are constantly steadying the structure by automatically countering currents and compensating for other forces, like wind or tectonic movement.”

“What about the passive soseÑ€ystem?” Parker said. “How does that work?”

Kate was surprised that Parker had been paying attention, considering his earlier distraction. “Good question. There’s a four-hundred-ton weight situated about seventy feet below the surface of the ocean. It’s mounted on a sort of gimbal that allows the weight to shift with respect to the rig. Skyscrapers along the Pacific rim are being built with similar systems to counterbalance the forces of an earthquake.” She didn’t see the need to tell the visitors that the passive system was in serious danger of failing, and she quickly led the group out the door and up the next flight of stairs.

“This is the heart of the rig,” she said. “The drill deck.” In the center of the slippery steel floor was a hole, through which the now-idle drill pipe ran down into the sea.