Страница 59 из 124
She grabbed for the cutter, but it slid through her grip and disappeared into the blackness like some comical little sea creature, heading down to graze on shrimp corpses at the bottom of the sea.
She looked at the twelve upended drinking cups, then mustered whatever little strength she had in her shaky limbs and dove after the plunging tool.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“SIR! SIR!”
Timken turned and looked as his demolitions specialist, Rashid, burst through the door from the rig and into the dive control station.
Timken was in a foul mood. He’d been out here for thirty minutes getting rained on and blown all over the place. And every time that big clunk shuddered through the rig, he felt like he was taking one step closer to the grave. “What are you doing?” Timken said. “I told you to stay with the bomb controls.”
“That’s what I’m saying, sir. The alert circuits just went off.” Rashid was a bespectacled young man, a chemist by training.
“What do you mean?” Timken said.
“They’re cutting the wires.”
“All of them?”
“Just two. So far.”
“Will the bomb still take out the rig?”
“With ten charges? Yes, sir.”
“Get back to the drilling platform. Stay with the detonation equipment!” Timken shouted.
“Yes, sir.” Rashid ran back into the bowels of the rig.
Timken knew that Gideon had already just been pulled up to the cradle. If he was the one who had cut the two detonation circuits, then he couldn’t do any more damage. But if it was Kate who had done the damage, then he needed to pull her up now. He whipped around toward Big Al. “Haul them up!” he shouted. “Haul them up now! Both of them!”
Big Al shouted into his microphone, “They’re onto you, Kate. Do what you got to do and do it fast!”
Timken drew his Makarov to shoot the Cajun, who turned and tackled him onto the deck like a linebacker blitzing a quarterback. Big Al was no spring chicken—but he outweighed Timken by a good seventy-five pounds. All Timken could do was cover his face as the bigger man battered at him with fists the size of ca
Then Timken growled. Leaving his face momentarily unguarded, he levered his Makarov and fired. A huge fist slammed into his face. He fired again and Big Al grunted, his face a mask of /p> t‡pain.
Timken kicked the bigger man away, jumped to his feet, and hit the handle on the winch again, pulling Kate upward. A display counter on the winch showed their depth. Although Gideon Davis was being pulled toward the surface, Kate Murphy was now hovering at the exact depth where his people had placed the bomb last week.
His suspicion was confirmed—this whole dive had been a ruse. Maybe the rig was going to fall apart. But the likelihood that the rig manager would interpret some engineer’s report and predict the precise time it would fail? It had seemed plausible when he was looking at all that complicated shit and Parker had been so damn insistent. Now that he was standing here in the sobering rain, looking at the depth counter on the dive winch, he knew he’d been fooled.
“Chun, we’re aborting the mission,” he said. “Go ahead and kill the woman. I’ll take care of Davis topside.”
“Might be easier if you just cut both their umbilicals, sir,” Chun said.
“Good point,” Timken said. He pulled a knife from its mount on his tactical vest and sliced through Kate’s umbilical. Cutting the air hose was easy, but he could see he wouldn’t be able to sever the steel cable that was used to raise and lower the divers.
He looked around, saw an axe in an emergency fire box on the wall. He smashed out the glass, grabbed the axe, and with two swift blows severed Kate’s and Gideon’s umbilicals. The cables fell away, whipping lazily in the air, splashed into the water, and were gone.
Timken stared over the side for a moment, then smiled. He pressed the mic button on his waist and said, “Stand by, Chun. I’m hauling you up.”
“You’ll need to deco me so I don’t get the bends,” Chun said. “Take me up ten meters and leave me there for five.”
“Roger that,” Timken said, pulling back on the winch handle.
Gideon felt the pressure drop inside his helmet a moment before the tension went out of his line. Then he saw Kate’s severed umbilical coiling and sinking beside him, like a dying serpent. He tried to breathe, but there was no air.
Rather than surfacing, he began diving toward Kate. He saw her swimming up toward him, and when he reached her, she grabbed his helmet and yanked him toward her, pressing her helmet flush against his. Only then did he realize what she was doing. With their helmets pressed together, the sound waves could pass from one helmet to the other and they could talk.
“My bailout bottle!” she shouted. Though her voice sounded compressed and muffled, he had no problem understanding her. “I still have some air left. Grab my octo!” Gideon grabbed the fluorescent pink mouthpiece on her shoulder. The problem was that the octo was only good for a few minutes of emergency oxygen.
He realized then that they only had one chance. Where was Chun? He looked around the cradle. The water around them had gone a dull gray. It was obviously dawn above them, the sun lighting the sky enough to send a few meager rays down to where they stood.
But Chun was nowhere to be seen.
There was a tiny bit of air in the helmet, but itr. �€† was already going stale. Gideon’s lungs were begi
The air coming from the bailout bottle was feeble—the pressure in the bottle barely greater than the pressure of the water around them. But it was enough for him to suck in two quick lungfuls of air to revive his strength.
Time to move. Without a word, he handed the octo to Kate, unstrapped his weight belt and propelled himself in the direction where he’d last seen Chun. His natural buoyancy at this level was quite strong, and it only took a few kicks for him to cover ten or fifteen meters, until he saw a slash of light in the darkness ahead. Closer, and he made out a dark shape, hovering. It was Chun. Gideon could tell from the direction of Chun’s headlamp that he was facing away, and he tried approaching Chun from behind. But the water was so turbulent that Chun was spun around before Gideon reached him.
The big Korean’s eyes widened. He was quick, unsheathing his dive knife from its scabbard. Gideon grabbed Chun’s wrist with both hands. Gideon was strong—but not stronger than Chun.
The one advantage Gideon had was that he felt completely at home in the water. It was obvious to him that Chun did not.
Gideon inverted himself so that his legs were pointing skyward and wrapped them around the umbilical. By twisting one ankle over the other, he was able to put a kink in Chun’s umbilical, cutting off his air. Feeling his airflow die, Chun panicked and made a grab for the umbilical, letting go of the knife.
Within seconds the water was clouded with Chun’s blood. The big man’s body went limp.
Gideon released the knife and fumbled with the snaps on Chun’s helmet, his lungs on fire, pulled it off and settled it around his head.
Gideon blew the excess water out of the helmet and adjusted it to his head. Air! It had the acrid rubbery smell of hoses. But right now it smelled as fresh as the air on top of a mountain in the Rockies.
Seconds later he felt a pair of arms lock around him. It was Kate. Her eyes looked as big as plates as she stared at the now-dead Chun, his hair floating in a corona around his broad face. Gideon was wearing Chun’s helmet now. That was a good first step to making it safely back to the rig. But if they were going to be hoisted to the surface, he needed the hoist cable attached to the webbing of his suit. Gideon pulled the caribiner from Chun’s load-bearing harness, reattached it to his, then stabbed the bladder on Chun’s BC. As the air escaped from the BC in a rush of bubbles, the big man fell away, leaving a pink trail in the water behind him.