Darkness Falls, page 3
"That's an oil field, right?"
"It's not a field, it's the field. Most people think the world's oil supply comes more or less evenly out of thousands of individual fields, but it's not true. A few giants produce most of it, and of those Ghawar is by far the largest. It's responsible for ninety percent of Saudi Arabia's oil and almost seven percent of the world's."
When the skids touched down, Erin unfastened his harness and, before jumping out, waited for the tornado of sand the blades had kicked up to subside. They'd landed about two hundred meters from a small, lonely derrick that would have seemed almost laughably unimportant if it weren't for the gleaming trailers surrounding it and the soldiers moving toward them.
Although they were all running and had guns in their hands, Beamon strode forward confidently, holding his ID above his head. Erin hung back.
The royal family was in complete control the last time he'd visited Saudi Arabia, and he had been a highly valued employee of Saudi Aramco. It had been all smiles and bags of cash back then. Now, though, the atmosphere had changed.
"Hello! I'm Mark Beamon from U. S. Homeland Security. I think we're expected.
One of the ten or so approaching guards aimed his rifle in their direction, prompting his companions to do the same. Someone started shouting in Arabic -- too fast and complicated for Erin to follow, though the tone and the wall of gun barrels they were facing made things pretty clear.
To his credit, Beamon didn't seem bothered by the deteriorating situation, and he continued to make himself the center of attention; meanwhile, Erin slowly backed toward the helicopter. The whine of the motor gained pitch and he turned to run toward it, but he saw that the skids were already off the ground. He turned back to find that Beamon was now facedown on the ground, a rifle barrel pressed to the back of his head.
There were too many soldiers to search one person, though, and the ones who felt left out inevitably turned their attention Erin's way. A moment later, he was lying next to Beamon and being groped by men who smelled as though they hadn't showered in a month.
"Look, we're here to --" Erin started through the sand in his mouth, but then fell silent when he felt the jab of a gun barrel against his spine.
By the time they were through with him, Beamon had been rolled onto his back and was lying there squinting into the empty sky, his sunglasses already pocketed by one of the men patting him down.
"We had to twist a few arms to convince the Saudis to let us come here -- they're kind of a secretive bunch and with all their political problems, I guess they're a little edgy."
"A little edgy?" Erin said as the guards retreated a few feet, guns still poised. He pushed himself to his feet and dusted off the sand as Beamon did the same. "As far as the royals are concerned, the U. S. isn't doing shit to help them keep their grip on the country, and letting a couple of Americans get killed would probably be a good illustration of their irritation."
"I've never been here," Beamon said, ignoring him. "Kind of stark, isn't it?" He actually used a finger to push aside one of the rifle barrels aimed at him and then strode off toward a white trailer, obviously attracted by the air conditioner humming on top of it. Erin slipped in behind him, careful not to make eye contact with the guards as he squeezed past.
The door to the trailer opened and a man waving energetically in their direction jogged down the steps. He wore thick glasses that glinted in the sun and a long black ponytail carefully concocted from what was left of the hair on his sunburned scalp.
"Dude!" he shouted, bounding toward them through the sand, only to stop short when Erin's angry expression became evident. He threw his hands out in a gesture of submission. "Not my doing, man. You've got Rick Castelli to thank for being here."
Erin's nod prompted the man to close the rest of the distance between them. He threw a bear hug around Erin that almost lifted him from the ground.
"How the hell are you, man? It's been way, way too long."
When Erin finally managed to pull away, he motioned to his right. "This is Mark Beamon. Mark, meet Steve Andropolous. He used to work for me."
"Yeah, we've talked on the phone," Andropolous said, thrusting out a hand. "How you doing, Mark?"
"I'm hot."
He laughed and turned back to Erin. "More important, how are you? That shit with Jenna? So fucked up."
Erin was surprised when he found himself fighting the smile threatening to cross his face -- not his usual reaction to the sound of Jenna's name. For as long as he'd known Andropolous, the man's speech patterns had tracked the current high school fashion. Whatever the delivery, though, his words were heartfelt, and Andropolous was one of the few people who had always supported him. For a moment, Erin remembered what it was like to have friends.
"So what have you figured out?" Beamon said, looking back at the guards who seemed to have lost interest and were shouldering their rifles in search of shade.
"Weird shit," Andropolous answered. "You're gonna have to come and see for yourself to believe it."
The rig was only about a hundred feet high, and it seemed to be attached to the back of a truck. Erin circled, looking at something that resembled dried vomit splattered all over the rig's tower and the back of the truck used to transport it.
"What do you think?" Andropolous asked. "Look familiar?"
Erin tried to keep his interest from showing as he scraped some dried beige gunk from a pipe and rubbed it through his fingers. "Well, you've got a bacteria problem. But you didn't need me to tell you that."
"No, but you've dealt with this kind of thing before and I haven't."
Erin nodded. "Not far from here in the Hawtaw Trend. But it wasn't like this. It wasn't all over the place. Did you try to punch through it?"
"Yeah, we went down another four hundred feet, but it just got worse."
"Four hundred feet? No shit?"
"And it's not easy drilling. Everything's gummed up, and it's corroding the crap out of the equipment. That's when the U. S. government started calling." He turned toward Beamon. "Guess you've got spies out here, huh? Or maybe those cool drone planes. Can you get me one of those things? How sweet would --"
Beamon interrupted. "Can it be fixed?"
They both looked at Erin, who was slowly shaking his head, seemingly lost in thought. "I don't really know."
"But you've fixed this kind of problem before, right? How did you do it?"
"Nothing all that creative. It was pretty easy to drill past, and then we pumped some toxic chemicals down the hole to see if we could kill it."
"That doesn't sound very environmental," Beamon commented.
Erin scratched the side of his face, making a show of extending his middle finger.
"Did it work?" Andropolous asked.
"I don't really know. We managed to get a casing through it and that was the end of the problem. I wanted to go back and look to see what happened to the bacteria pocket, but the Saudis weren't interested. Their well was producing again and that's what they hired me for."
"It's not going to be so easy this time," Andropolous said, pulling a wad of damp papers from the pocket of his cargo shorts and holding them out. "You're gonna freak when you see this, bro. I looked over your data on the Hawtaw Trend bug and this stuff is so much more radical. Ridiculously corrosive, reproduces like nothing you've seen with basically zero oxygen, and, oh man, does it like to eat oil."
Erin took the sheets and slowly flipped through them. As he read Andropolous's initial analysis of the infestation, he shook his head. Finally, he handed the report back. "You've been smoking too much dope, Steve. There's no way those numbers can be right."
Chapter 4.
"All right, let's do it!" Erin shouted. He grabbed one side of a giant clamp suspended by chains while the other was handled by a man whose thick forearms were nearly black from years under the desert sun. They disconnected the drill pipe and were immediately covered in bacterial ooze as the back pressure blew it out with so much force that Erin was almost knocked off his feet. With a gloved hand, he scraped at the goo spattered on his goggles so that he could see well enough to connect another section of pipe. When it began spinning again, he walked over to a trough of water and splashed his face before the stuff dried and stuck to him.
He was drying off with a greasy rag when a familiar grinding sound drowned out everything else and the drill pipe came to a sudden halt. He didn't even bother to look up when a man leaning over the railing above shouted to him in Arabic. Another drill bit had twisted off.
He grabbed a piece of broken pipe and angrily threw it across the rig. It landed with an unsatisfying thud in the sand below just as the man he'd been working with started shouting and jabbing a finger in his direction.
Erin's Arabic was generally limited to a drilling vocabulary, so he had no idea what the guy was going on about, although he was pretty sure he heard Allah in there a few times. But then, he always thought he heard Allah when Arabs yelled at him.
"Fuck off," he said, even though the man was at least twice his size. He took off his dripping cowboy hat and held it out to shade his eyes. Five days in the Saudi desert and it just kept getting hotter -- already 110 and it wasn't yet noon.
Of course, Mark Beamon wouldn't know anything about that. He spent his time in the air-conditioned trailer watching satellite TV until sunset; then he came out to drink the bourbon he'd had flown in and play backgammon with the guards, who, for some reason, thought the sun shined out of his ass.
Erin rubbed a raw, swollen hand over his dry lips and watched flakes of skin drift through the metal mesh that made up the floor of the rig. Everyone was just standing around waiting for him to decide what to do, but for the first time in his career, he wasn't sure.
It turned out that Steve's insane numbers were exactly right. Erin was now managing six rigs, trying everything he could think of to beat a bacterial infestation that seemed almost supernatural in its destructiveness. Going deeper was proving pointless, and might even be making things worse. He'd experimented with poisons to try to kill the stuff, but had met with surprisingly limited success. So now he was drilling at intervals around the infected wells to try to figure out the scope of the infestation and get some idea of the spread rate. So far, though, he couldn't find the edges of it.
And so what if he did? He was fresh out of ideas on how to contain it, which brought up the question of just what he was doing here. It was fucking indentured servitude. The government had kidnapped him, dropped him in the middle of the Saudi desert without so much as a dime for expenses, and said "Fix it!" Who the hell did they think they were?
Suddenly, a powerful hand clamped onto his shoulder and he was violently spun around to face the man he'd told to fuck off a few moments before. Apparently, the Arab didn't fully grasp the meaning of the phrase.
The man started shouting again, spit flying from his mouth and the wrench he was brandishing flashing in the sun. This time, there didn't seem to be any Allahs, but America was butchered in there a few times. Erin leaned to the side, glancing around the man's enormous torso, and saw that the rest of the workmen had paused to watch with glassy-eyed enthusiasm.
So there it was. Guys he'd treated with nothing but respect since he'd arrived were going to stand there and watch him get beaten to within an inch of his life because of where he was born. Or at least that's what they thought they were going to see.
"Look . . . Abbud, isn't it? You're about to do something you'll regret," Erin said, trying to hold back the blind rage that he'd been fighting all his life. He'd quit drinking for it, tried meditation -- even sat through counseling. All to push it just barely below the surface.
The man shoved him, pointing with the wrench and starting another unintelligible diatribe.
"Blah, blah, blah," Erin said, talking over him. "You guys have it all figured out, don't you? You got a bunch of thieving princes doping you with religion so they can lounge around in palaces while you live in fucking huts in the desert. And now you finally figure that out and who do you get behind? A bunch of terrorists who won't be satisfied until they start an endless civil war that sets you back five thousand years."
The anger on the man's face faded into confusion at Erin's reaction. Guys his size were all the same. They expected everyone to shake in their boots and had no idea what to do when someone stood up to them.
"You think I want to be frying in this shit hole you call a country?" Erin continued, slamming his palms into the man's chest and knocking him back a few feet. "I couldn't give a rat's ass if your entire oil industry crashes and burns tomorrow. So let me give you the best piece of advice you've ever had: Step off and stop waving that wrench in my face before I shove it up your ass."
Of course, it wasn't likely that he was going to do as Erin suggested -- or that he even understood. Erin was a little disappointed that his reputation in the oil fields had faded so quickly. No respect. No respect at all.
To his credit, the Arab was faster than he looked, but Erin was still easily able to duck under the wrench aimed at his head and then drive a fist into the man's midsection hard enough to lift him off the ground.
He could feel the cuts on his hand spread open and the blood begin to flow, but the pain only heightened the familiar sense of release that he'd always hated himself for feeling. The ability to lose oneself in a violent frenzy, although occasionally useful for an environmentalist who worked with roughnecks, was, to quote Jenna, kind of a serious character flaw.
Abbud doubled over and Erin connected a knee with his face, sending him stumbling backwards, blood splattered across his thick beard. He was saved from falling by the railing that circled the rig, and Erin walked calmly toward him, grabbed his throat, and shoved him back so that his spine arched over the rail. The Arab didn't have enough strength to resist other than to raise his arms in a pathetic effort to ward off the blow that was about to slam into his mouth.
Erin hesitated for a moment and then lowered his fist. He crouched and grabbed Abbud's feet, lifting him up and sending him over the rail to the sand fifteen feet below. He landed hard, tried briefly to rise to his feet, and then just collapsed.
Erin was surprised that he felt no need at all to jump down on top of the guy. Maybe he was mellowing with age? Looming maturity? That couldn't be a bad thing.
The metallic ring of footsteps on the stairs behind him wasn't unexpected, and he turned to watch the soldiers flowing onto the platform.
The first one, running at him with the butt of his rifle raised, underestimated his own momentum and Erin sidestepped, clothes-lining him hard enough that his feet flew up over his head. The glancing blow from the rifle butt of the next soldier was hard enough to send Erin to his knees, but not so hard that it kept him from kicking the man's feet out from under him and then slamming the back of his skull into the metal platform.
And then they were on him. Five, maybe six, he couldn't be certain. He rolled into a ball and tried to protect his head with his arms as they hit him with rifles, fists, boots. He managed to topple one of them, but in the process opened up long enough to take a hard shot to the forehead. The relentless blue sky above him started to look more like the ocean, flowing gently before turning dark.
At first Erin thought the thudding sound was just the throbbing in his skull, but after a few seconds he realized that it was faster and heavier than anything biology could dream up. He opened his eyes slowly, the light stabbing into them.
"What happened?" he croaked when he finally managed to focus on Mark Beamon strapped into a seat above him.
"You're one lucky son of a bitch," he shouted over the helicopter blades. "If I hadn't happened to walk out of that trailer to take a leak at the exact moment I did, you'd probably be dead or in a wheelchair right now."
Erin tried to push himself up off the floor, but then thought better of it. "What do you want me to say? Thank you? If it weren't for you, I'd be sitting on my sofa right now."
"Doing what?" Beamon said. "Staring at a picture of a woman who's been dead for two years?"
Erin lunged forward, but he was still weak enough that Beamon was able to stop him by sticking a foot against his chest.
"Son, have you ever considered seeking therapy for that temper of yours?"
Chapter 5.
"Don't see why I need to be here," Erin whispered loudly as he and Beamon were led down one of the many corridors at the Department of Energy. "Stevie's the guy on the ground doing the work."
Mark Beamon reached out to give him a reassuring pat on the back, but then realized that there probably wasn't a hand-sized spot anywhere on Erin's body that wasn't bruised or cut. "Look, I've been unfortunate enough to work for the government most of my life, and the trick is to just recognize when things are out of your control and go with it "
.
"But I don't work for the government." "Uh huh."
The woman escorting them took a hard left, and they followed silently.
"So that's what you do?" Erin said finally. "You just go along?"
Beamon let out a snort that seemed to have real humor in it. "Do as I say. Not as I do."
Their guide veered left again, and Erin started to follow, but Beamon pulled him through a set of open double doors. He nodded absently at the woman sitting behind an elaborate workstation, but didn't stop. "Hey, Ruth. Is he here?"
"Go on in, Mark."
Erin entered the next room hesitantly, immediately recognizing the man standing in the middle of it as Jack Reynolds, the energy secretary. A few years back, Erin had blown up a photo of him to use as a dartboard.
"Jack, this is the guy I've been telling you ab--"
"What the hell is going on?" Reynolds said. He stared directly at Erin, but seemed not to notice his swollen face. "I just got a call from the Saudis saying that you assaulted an oil worker -- who is now in the hospital with a separated shoulder -- and that you were both deported."
