Chapter 14

"Dang," Tex said. He didn't say it loud. Annja was surprised she could hear it over the reverberations of that last thunder crack. Her ears literally rang.

"What? What 'dang'? 'Dang' does not sound good."

"Depends on your definition of 'not good.'"

"Try me."

"Just lost GPS."

"The lightning bolt did that? I didn't know lightning could knock it out."

He shrugged despite the sheer physical effort of keeping the little airplane under control in the brutal winds. Annja suddenly realized just how difficult that must have been with no power assist on a plane that size. "Might just be the storm blocks the signal. One way or another we're flying by dead reckoning now."

"It never occurred to me until now," Annja said, "just how ominous that phrase is. Can you really find the platform without it?"

The rig, which had seemed so huge and intimidating when she and Tex had worked out their tactics for infiltrating it, shrank in her mind to the dimensions of a Matchbox model in this vast and hateful sea.

"Well," Tex said, drawing it way out, "I can give it the old college try."

"What if we miss it in the storm? This rain is like lead curtains at times."

"Lemme put it this way – got a hankerin' to see the Arctic up close and personal?"

"We can make it all the way to the ice pack?"

"Oh, shoot, no. I'm just funnin' you, ma'am. We'll run out of fuel and ditch in the sea long before that. The good news is, it's a short-enough hop from Papa Westray to the platform. We don't see it in the next five minutes, we've got plenty of leeway to double back and try a quartering search."

"What if we still can't find it?"

"Then we'll be well and truly lost. As opposed to just lost."

"I love a man who knows how to show a girl a good time."

"We aim to please, ma'am."

****

The big man sat in a chair, oblivious to the spray the wind lashed against the window of the commissary. A generator-run space heater blasted away, turning a far corner of the room into a localized furnace. He was out of its baleful radiance, but cushioned by layers of clothing, fat and a genuine indifference to his own comfort, he ignored the chill that inevitably seeped in from the storm outside.

Sulin stood by the window, as far as possible from his coleader, with his hands clasped behind the back of his high-collared jacket, gazing out into the storm.

For some reason, both turned and looked at Jadzia. The girl sat eating a bar of jerky, tearing at the tough strip with sharp white teeth. She had been semicovertly admiring Sulin. She almost regretted that Annja Creed would inevitably kill him.

Something in her manner seemed to irk Marshall. "Time is running out for you, girl," he rumbled.

Sulin stiffened slightly. "It's true that the ultimatum has expired," he said. "But we are to wait for further orders from above before we take any action, my friend."

"I'm not your friend, pretty boy," Marshall said without looking at him. His small gray eyes gazed intently at Jadzia, who ostentatiously crossed her long bare legs.

"Your little gal pal must not really care about you," he told her. "She's gone to ground to protect her own precious hide. But we'll find her and dig her out. And we'll get the scrolls."

"Don't hector her," Sulin said. "It's doubtful she knows anything of real use, to us or our superiors."

"What about what they've read from the scrolls so far?"

"Presumably all the truly sensational revelations they have come across are contained in what they posted on the Net," Sulin said. "If they found more, it died with the rest of the dig team."

He glanced over his shoulder at Marshall. A flash of lightning lit his beautifully sculpted face in harsh purple-white radiance. "Beware of asking questions that might have dangerous answers," he said with contempt ringing through his voice. "If she did happen to know something more, something...controversial – would it be healthy for you or for me to hear it? This whole operation is about keeping these things secret."

"You threatening me?" Marshall laughed.

Sulin's violet eyes narrowed. "Do not delude yourself," he said in a voice of oiled silk. "We are tools, purchased by our employers. Will they think twice about discarding us if they deem our usefulness has come to an end?"

Marshall stretched and sighed. "Shit, Lucy," he said. "You figure anybody leaves this world alive?"

"Louis," Sulin hissed.

Jadzia rose. Her mood had shifted. She didn't take Marshall's menace particularly seriously. He was a sadistic thing, certainly. But Jadzia was the star of this adventure.

She was the heroine of this saga, she decided. And the heroine never dies.

Without a word she walked from the room.

****

Glancing out the port side of the wraparound canopy, Annja saw a great gray monster of a wave crest above the level of their tiny aircraft. She understood intellectually the need to fly so low – so that the ocean's surface effect would hide them from the radar rig Gannet's satellite imaging had clearly shown rotating high up in Claidheamh Mór B's superstructure.

But the sight of those menacing waves filled her with terror. The North Sea was not known for its mercies.

It took all her will to control the fear. But she did. She held on to self. To focus.

She formed a picture in her mind – a young, pretty face, framed by blond pigtails. Jadzia. The innocent whose destiny she had cradled in her own two hands. And dropped. She would not let herself fail Jadzia again. If she died trying – well, she would die trying her very damned best.

To distract herself from the crashing menace of the storm, she let loose a question that had been bubbling around in her subconscious for days.

"Why are you helping me, Tex?"

"Huh?" he shouted back over his shoulder. She saw his face ran with sweat, although it was cool in the aircraft despite the efforts of its tiny heater. His shoulders hunched and bunched with effort, he grunted with the strain of fighting the yoke. His brow was folded with concentration, yet his eyes and mouth smiled as if he were having the time of his life.

"Why are you helping me?"

He actually paused. In their brief acquaintance she had seldom seen him do that. He was thoughtful, analytical even, during the downtimes, as she had seen again that afternoon planning their quixotic two-person aerial assault on the oil platform. But in the crunch, when called upon he never seemed to hesitate to speak or act as the situation demanded.

"I can't resist a pretty face?" he called back at length.

Fury surged up inside her. "Don't try to blow me off! Not now. This is important."

At once she felt remorseful, and also stupid. He is risking terrible danger for you and Jadzia, she thought. But Tex answered with regret audible in his words, if scarcely above the booming of the wind and the constant cannonade of thunder near and far.

"You're right," he said, shouting to be heard with his face turned forward again toward their unseen goal. "You deserve a straight answer. When I was a kid I did some things. They may or may not have been illegal. You might say I had official status to do them, in fact. I told myself they couldn't be wrong if duly constituted authority told me to do them. And that they were for the greater good, you know?"

He shook his head. "Later on I found what we'd been told was mostly lies. I watched my buddies die, for lies. And you know, my real reason for it all was that I was a stupid, self-centered kid who thought he'd live forever no matter what. And doing what they told me to gave a dirty, dangerous thrill like nothing else."

"That's why you're doing this? For the thrill?" Again she regretted that the unbearable seethe of emotion inside her, no less tempestuous than the sky and sea outside, had propelled the first thought to pop in her mind straight out her mouth.

"Maybe," he yelled back. "I been chasin' thrills ever since, even though they're all pretty feeble imitations of – of what I used to do. But I feel I've got something to make up for. And I'm grateful for a chance to do something real – something I know is good. Shoot, Annja. It's a little girl out there."

Her right arm shot forward past his shoulder. "Look!" she cried.

A single light glowed in the darkness like a white eye. It was just a few points away from dead ahead.

"Now comes the fun part," Tex said, all business again. He climbed a few scant yards to give them clearance from the thousand avid mouths of the sea, for the plane would lose lift in a turn. He flew level a moment longer, to regain speed. Then he banked the ultralight left.

Out into the open sea.

****

Jadzia stalked down a corridor with greenish enamel coming away from the metal in flakes, leaving splotches of fungus in muted psychedelic colors on the bulkhead. Her assurance of moments before had evaporated. Maybe it was the creepy surroundings, and the horrible ceaseless moaning of the sea, the creaking of the rig, the cannonading of the rising storm.

None of the noises was as terrible as the voice in her head that kept trying to tell her, They're right. She's not coming. You're all alone.

Of course, she'd always been all alone. Alone in a world of stupid people.

Captive though she was, Jadzia was allowed total freedom to roam the platform. It wasn't as if she could escape. There were boats, surely. But she wasn't about to head out at random into the middle of the ocean. Even her fantasy adventure thoughts had their limitations. Nor was she under any illusion she could fly the sleek helicopter tied invitingly to the southwest corner of the platform.

No, Annja was coming for her. Jadzia was sure of that. She had no other option.

On a whim she decided to drop in on the security room. Even creepy company was better than being alone with her fears. It was a level down from the commissary, down a ringing, rattling metal stair.

Inside were banks of monitors showing visual feeds from cameras positioned all about the rig, and a pair of Albanians ostensibly watching them. A Walther machine pistol lay ostentatiously across a table near one of them.

They looked up and emitted guarded hellos. The younger one smiled; the older man frowned. Like all of the more than twenty personnel Jadzia had encountered on the steel island, they spoke English as the common tongue, and their native language when they fell in with countrymen. They took for granted they were talking secret code that no one else could understand.

That was the reason she decided to stop there. She found Albanian fascinating, though ugly. Though Indo-European, it had no living languages as relatives. It therefore tied in with her love of ancient languages, as well as the weird in general. Plus it gave her something to do.

Apparently the men felt flattered by her presence.

"She fancies me," the younger man said.

"Imbecile," the older man replied. He spoke without heat. He had an air of having been there and having done that. Jadzia's grasp of the niceties wasn't up to telling her whether it was a pose or not.

"Why does she keep sniffing around us, then?"

"Who knows? Perhaps she is a demon, sniffing for your soul."

"Hah," the young man said. But he looked at Jadzia warily.

"What bothers me most," the older man said, "is that while she's here we cannot drink." The monitors were flashing images from around the rig, but the man paid no attention. Clearly, there was nothing interesting to see out on the raging sea.

Jadzia propped her rump against the edge of a table and let her eyes drift lazily over the other monitors.

Then they backtracked quickly. And went wide.