Sea of Greed Page 5

  It took a few seconds for the gas to rise up the pipe, but when it reached the top, a jet of fire burst out the end.

  Kurt held it up against the launch rail, stretching dangerously over the gap to direct the fire against the actual bend in the rail where the metal was already the weakest.

  The pipe warmed in his hands, with the heat soaking through his fireproof gloves. “Come on,” he whispered.

  The jet of flame was continuous and intense. It quickly blackened the launch rail and then reddened it like the embers of a fire.

  With the rail glowing red, it softened quickly. The escape boat inched forward.

  “Just a little more . . .” Kurt grunted, his hands beginning to burn.

  All at once, gravity took over. The boat slid forward, breaking off the weakened rail and knocking the makeshift torch out of Kurt’s hand.

  Everything fell in tandem. The pipe clanging into various things and the orange pod hitting the sea like a small bomb.

  The impact forced so much water aside, it created a temporary void in the flames down below.

  “No time like the present.” With two steps, Kurt jumped over the edge. He dropped feetfirst, with both arms holding the helmet in place. He plunged twenty feet below the surface and then kicked upward with all the strength he had left.

  Kurt broke the surface and swam for the tail end of the escape boat, which was already motoring away.

  A desperate grab for a trailing rope failed and Kurt was on his own. He began swimming, following the wake made by the orange boat. It kept the fire off him, but he was rapidly being left behind. Eventually, the boat pulled far enough ahead that a wall of fire closed between them.

  Kurt stopped swimming and began treading water. He turned from side to side, looking for a gap in the wall of flames. There wasn’t one. He looked below the surface, but the fire extended downward as far as he could see. He couldn’t swim through, couldn’t swim under and couldn’t swim around.

  “Definitely need a Plan B,” he said to himself.

  Slowly, the ring of fire closed in on him, the safe space in the middle shrinking until Kurt was treading water in a circle no more than fifteen feet across. Just as he was about to pick a direction and swim for it, something hit his feet, lifted him up and left him sprawled out flat.

  Joe had surfaced the submersible directly beneath him.

  Kurt grabbed on and steadied himself.

  The hatch opened and the smiling face of Joe Zavala popped out. “The weather’s a lot nicer on the inside.”

  Kurt was already moving toward the hatch. “You don’t have to ask twice.”

  He swung his feet over, dropped down inside and sealed the hatch tight while Joe vented the tanks and took the small craft downward.

  With an oxygen alarm beeping and a coolant warning flashing, Kurt pulled off his helmet for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Took your own sweet time getting here,” he said to Joe.

  “I was giving you a chance to get out of there on your own,” Joe said. “Thought it might help build up your self-esteem.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you,” Kurt said, pretending to be appreciative, “except that I almost ended up like a baked potato.”

  “More like pasta,” Joe said. “Actually, it was hard to find you. And hard to navigate through all this fire, even in a submarine. It was only when the escape boat hit the water that I got a clear bead on where you were.”

  Looking through the forward glass, Kurt could see the columns of fire clearly now. Joe navigated around them but also had to avoid sections of the half-submerged rig, tangles of wreckage and floating debris.

  “This isn’t oil or natural gas,” he mused.

  “I don’t think so either,” Joe said. “But, then, what is it?”

  “No idea,” Kurt said. “Something tells me we’d better find out.”

  8

  NUMA VESSEL RALEIGH, ON STATION OUTSIDE THE FIRE ZONE

  KURT HAD SHED the firefighting gear, showered and thrown on some jeans and a NUMA T-shirt. Never had normal clothes felt more comfortable.

  He made his way to the sick bay, where the ship’s doctor checked his hands and found them to be burned—something Kurt could have told him without all the poking and prodding.

  “Nothing too bad,” the doctor said. “Just first-degree. Don’t high-five anyone for a few days and you’ll be fine.”

  After applying some Silvadene cream, the doc released him and Kurt met up with Joe, Captain Brooks and Rick Cox at the command and control center for the Raleigh’s dive teams—a compartment the crew referred to as OSLO.

  The acronym stood for off ship and land operations. The crew pronounced it like the name of the Norwegian capital and referred to it that way, too. Meet you in OSLO for the briefing. Where have you been all day, stuck in OSLO?

  From here, a project leader could monitor the status of crew members and submersibles conducting dives or landside operations. Screens around the room could display images beamed in from helmet-mounted cameras, ROVs and anything else NUMA used.

  Sonar images, including those relayed from other ships, buoys and sleds, could be combined into one coherent picture and presented on the centerpiece of the room, a 3-D virtual display that its designers called a holographic presentation chamber.

  The crew of the Raleigh called it the fish tank because it was the size of a billiard table and, when turned off, appeared to be nothing more than a huge block of frosted glass.

  Once turned on and supplied with sonar data, it created a miniature, three-dimensional view of whatever area was under observation, including accurate positions and scales of any divers, submersibles, reefs, wrecks, obstructions and surface ships in the sonar area. All in incredible detail.

  Looking into the tank from above provided a top-down view. Moving around to any of the sides gave the observer a side-on view and allowed the project manager to gain a big-picture understanding of any operation that was being conducted.

  He walked in to find Joe, Brooks and Cox studying several wall-mounted screens at the far end of the compartment. The first screen was displaying the ongoing fire as viewed from the masthead cameras. Another showed them a satellite view of the Gulf, with the pall of smoke that was drifting eastward.

  A third screen displayed a map of the Gulf, showing the positions of every active drilling rig, capped wellhead and pipeline in the area. The arrangement looked like a mess of tangled string.

  A fourth screen showed the grim faces of two men in Washington. Rudi Gunn, who was NUMA’s Assistant Director and second-in-command, and Lance Alcott, the head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

  Alcott was talking as Kurt walked in. “. . . and the Coast Guard is sending five ships to help fight the blaze, but until they arrive, the President has put NUMA in charge. A decision that makes no sense to me, but there you have it.”

  Alcott shot Rudi a sour look. Rudi ignored him completely and took over the conversation. “First order of business is to assess the damage.”

  Captain Brooks had already done that. “We’ve circled the fire zone, studying the surviving rigs and scanning the waters below with sonar. We have a full picture of the destruction. The pipeline network is damaged and venting gas. The Alpha Star is a total loss—she won’t be on the surface much longer. The other two rigs are in better shape, the crews are safe, but the platforms are in danger. They remain surrounded by fire, though not directly ablaze at the moment.”

  Rudi looked toward Cox. “Your company was hoping we could save the other platforms.”

  “They cost almost a billion dollars each,” Cox replied.

  Rudi nodded. “So I’ve heard. We’re sending a pair of oceangoing tugs to drag them out of danger. But looking at the video, I don’t see any hope of getting a line on either one unless the fires dampen down.”

  “That
’s unlikely,” Cox said.

  Alcott had a suggestion. “We’re sending tankers to latch onto the outer wellheads. They’ll draw some oil and gas off to decrease what’s venting. That might reduce the flames.”

  “Might as well turn the tankers around,” Kurt said. “They’ll only get in the way.”

  The head of FEMA bristled at that suggestion. “We found them useful in the Deepwater Horizon incident. Kept two million barrels of oil from hitting the Gulf waters.”

  Kurt looked toward Cox. “Maybe you should tell them.”

  Cox stood and cleared his throat. “There isn’t any oil coming to the surface.”

  Alcott looked shocked. Even Rudi tilted his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

  “No oil?”

  “Just flammable gas,” Cox said.

  “They can still snap onto the outlying wellheads and draw some of that gas up, even if they simply flare it off.”

  “It’s not natural gas,” Kurt said. “Nor is it methane or any other type of hydrocarbon that I’ve ever seen. It’s reacting with the water. Burning on its way up. Dousing it spreads and thins it but does nothing to extinguish it.”

  Alcott sat back, looking flummoxed. “That makes no sense. I’ve never heard of a gas that burns while submerged in water.”

  “Neither have we,” Kurt replied. “So, I spoke with Paul Trout, our chief geologist. He suggested two possibilities. Either the ruptures are venting oxygen vapor along with the hydrocarbons or we’re dealing with a previously undiscovered compound. All we can be sure of is that the gas is hydrophoric, meaning the fumes ignite spontaneously when they make contact with the water.”

  “Makes it even harder to imagine towing the rigs to safety,” Rudi said.

  Kurt nodded. “We’ll work on it and let you know.”

  Rudi and Alcott signed off and Kurt glanced at Brooks. “Let’s see what we’re up against.”

  He walked over to the fish tank and turned it on. The lights in the room dimmed as the hologram came to life. The seabed appeared first—depicted in olive green—then orange lines crisscrossing revealed the locations of the submerged pipelines. Finally, vertical red lines appeared, representing thousand-foot lengths of pipe string, which led up from the seafloor toward icons representing the oil platforms at the surface.

  “Let me add the fires,” Kurt said.

  He tapped a few more keys and soon columns of purple and white could been seen traveling vertically from breaks in the orange pipes. They spread out as they rose upward and bloomed on the surface like giant, deadly flowers.

  “Each fire is coming from a different pipeline,” he said, looking at Cox. “The main fire is here, venting upward through the wellhead you and your crew drilled. It’s hitting the surface directly under what’s left of the Alpha Star.”

  The three-dimensional image showed the Alpha Star engulfed in purple.

  Kurt turned the image slightly and it was easy to see that the other platforms were ringed with fire and getting toasted from the outside but not sitting directly over the flames.

  Cox moved closer and squinted into the projection chamber. His bloodshot eyes were wide. “We use a lot of high-tech junk when we’re looking for oil, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  He scratched his head and studied what he was looking at. No one knew what lay below the rigs better than him. “Those other fires are coming from the field collection lines,” he said, pointing to small sections of the orange pipe. “There’s no way to shut them off, they lead directly to the main well.”

  Joe leaned closer. He was an engineer. He’d built submersibles and subsurface aquatic habitats and had even worked on an oil rig in his youth. He pointed to an area where the orange pipes merged. “If we closed the transfer valves here, that would block the flow of gas to the fires near the other rigs.”

  “In theory,” Cox said. “But the controls to operate those valves were on the Alpha Star.”

  “Can we do it in person?” Joe asked.

  Cox shook his head and all four men went back to studying the fish tank. Finally, Kurt had an idea. “We can’t put the fires out and we can’t move the rigs, but what if we move the fires?”

  Cox looked Kurt’s way. “How, exactly, does one move a fire?”

  Kurt pointed out the largest pipe that was still intact. It led back to a spot directly beneath the burning wreckage of the Alpha Star. “If we cut the pipe here, the gas that’s venting near the other rigs will escape here instead of at the other ruptures. What’s left of the Alpha Star will take the full brunt of the fire, but the rest of the inferno should die on the vine. With the other two platforms free of the flames, you can tow them out and they should end up no worse than blackened Cajun chicken.”

  Cox leaned closer, studying the arrangement, and then walked around to the far side so he could see it from the reverse angle. There, he dropped down and gazed into the fish tank like he was staring at lost treasure.

  “Sacrifice the ruined platform to save the others?” he said. “I could sign off on that. But if this gas does what you say it does—if it detonates the instant it contacts the water—then you’re going to get an enormous blast when you cut into that pipe. Knowing what it did to our rig, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that line when it goes.”

  Kurt nodded. “Then we’ll use explosives and blow it remotely.”

  9

  NUMA VESSEL RALEIGH

  THE SUN was dropping toward the horizon by the time Kurt and Joe climbed back onto the Raleigh’s main submersible. To the east, the sea continued burning, a nautical vision of Hades, obscured by smoke and blurred by waves of heat.

  With Joe already at the controls, Kurt climbed in and sealed the hatch.

  Kurt took the briefest glimpse of the inferno and then gave a thumbs-up to the crane operator. The submersible was lifted off the deck, swung out over the side and lowered into the water.

  “Once more unto the breach,” he said, settling in beside Joe.

  “We’re going to cause our own breach,” Joe said. “So technically . . .”

  “Right,” Kurt said. “Let’s go.”

  Joe opened the valves and the sound of air rushing out of the tanks roared in their ears until it was replaced by a soothing quiet as the submersible dived beneath the waves. A mile from the nearest fire, the sea appeared serene—at least until a flickering glow became obvious in the distance.

  “Coming up on the outer fires,” Joe said.

  Their progress was being monitored by Brooks, Cox and others back in OSLO. Brooks replied to Joe’s comment over the radio. “Outer fires confirmed. Steer five degrees to port and you should have smooth sailing through to the next danger zone.”

  “Strange that they have a better view of things up there than we do down here,” Joe said. “I imagine the tiny icon of our sub looking like the miniature sub in Fantastic Voyage.”

  Kurt laughed. “And yet I’m stuck in here with you instead of Jessica Chastain.”

  As Joe made the course correction, Kurt slid a control panel with a lighted keyboard in front of him. From it, he could control the submersible’s robotic arms.

  “Leveling off,” Joe said. “Continuing east.”

  “We see you,” Brooks replied. “In a quarter mile, you’ll be closing in on what’s left of the vertical shaft that blew out under the Alpha Star. All you’ll see is a column of fire, but sonar confirms there is still metal debris in there, so watch yourselves.”

  Kurt could sense a backseat driver situation forming, one drawback to having the OSLO system in full swing.

  “Campfire dead ahead,” Joe said. “Hope you brought the marshmallows.”

  “Fresh out,” Kurt said. “How about fifty pounds of C-4?”

  “That ought to liven things up.”

  The radio came to life again. This time, it was Cox. �
�You boys are approaching the main transfer line now.”

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Joe replied.

  “The line is buried, but you’ll see a distinctive bulge running perpendicular to your position. Follow that and it’ll lead you back beneath the Alpha Star.”

  Kurt spotted the bulge in the sediment and pointed.

  “I see it,” Joe said. “Commencing turn.”

  They followed the raised line of sediment toward their destination, passing between two fiery eruptions along the way. Kurt noticed the columns of flame beginning life in narrow, concentrated jets and then widening as they went upward.

  “Whatever this hydrophoric gas is, it’s blasting out of the pipes at high pressure.”

  As they neared the fires, a rumbling sound reverberated through the steel hull of the sub.

  “Sounds like a freight train,” Joe said.

  Kurt would have agreed but the racket became so intense that it blocked out all conversation. Up close, the fountain of flame became too bright to look at and Kurt averted his eyes, looking beneath the point of ignition. He saw a crater in the seafloor and a broken pipe, bent and splayed outward.

  With the fire behind them, the sound levels returned to normal and the seafloor ahead was lit up like a sandy beach on a sunny day.

  “Next thing you should see is a group of exposed pipes. A three-into-one connector and then the valve assembly sticking out of the silt like a tree trunk. Fifty feet beyond that is the best spot to place the explosives.”

  Joe brought them over the valve assembly and down onto the raised section of sediment. “This looks like the spot.”

  “Hold her steady,” Kurt said.

  Using the keyboard, he activated one of the submersible’s robotic arms, powering up a water jet contained in the arm and blasting away the sediment. A swirling cloud engulfed, drifting away only after Kurt shut off the water jet and focused on the newly exposed pipe, which was as thick as a telephone pole.