Darkness Falls, page 4
"What are they whining about?" Erin shot back. "That guy landed in the sand. I got the shit beat out of me with rifle butts."
"Come on, Jack," Beamon said before the exchange could escalate. "The Saudis wanted us out of there from day one. They were looking for an excuse."
"And you didn't miss any opportunity to give them one, did you? Were you really drinking and gambling with the guards? It's a goddamn Muslim country, Mark!"
"Screw the Saudis," Beamon said, falling into a chair uninvited.
"No, screw you, Mark. We need them, and as long as that's true, you'll treat them with respect."
Beamon's nod was noncommittal.
For a moment, Reynolds looked as if he had more to say, but then appeared to conclude that there was no point. He let out a long, frustrated breath and pointed to the empty chair next to Beamon. Erin sat carefully. He'd originally thought his head was the worst of it, but now he'd swear those assholes had managed to crack his tailbone. Completely worth it, though. There was always a nice long calm after one of those storms, and even better, it might have the unintended benefit of making him useless to the government.
"All right," Reynolds said. "Tell me what's happening over there."
"You should ask Steve Andropolous," Erin replied.
"I have. And he told me that you're the expert. I think his exact words were that you've forgotten more about these things than anyone else knows."
He'd remember to kick Stevie in the nuts for that one.
"Fine. Whatever. How much do you know about this kind of problem?"
"Why don't you assume nothing."
Erin turned to Beamon. "Mark, you're the head of Homeland Security's energy branch, right? You must have some idea of how these things work."
He shook his head. "Got this job entirely through nepotism."
"Christ. Okay. Oil is a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons are part of nature. And if something exists in nature, it's a pretty good bet that there's something out there that's evolved to use it in some way."
"Like these bacteria," Reynolds said.
"Exactly. If there's an oil spill in Mexico for example, I'd go there, find an indigenous oil-eating bacteria in the soil, and then figure out how to grow a whole lot of it. Then I'd throw it on the spill and let it do its work. That's an oversimplification, but it gets the point across."
"So you're saying these types of life forms are fairly common?"
"They're all around us. And they're in pretty wide use commercially. I mean, you can buy them by the pound to clean up the floor of your garage if you want."
"Then why haven't we run into this problem before?"
"Actually, oil companies deal with this kind of thing all the time, but in a much smaller way. Generally, these bacteria need a fair amount of oxygen to survive and replicate. That keeps them from destroying oil reservoirs --"
"But this one is different."
"Yeah, it can spread with virtually no oxygen at all, and it's really voracious. Also, the chemicals you'd normally use to kill it don't seem to faze it all that much."
"And why is that?" Reynolds asked. "It seems odd to me that these bacteria would be resistant to chemicals that don't exist in nature. Or destructive to something like drilling equipment that isn't exactly part of the ecosystem either."
"It's not as strange as it seems," Erin said. "For instance, if they evolved where a lot of metal ore was in the ground, the corrosive ones would be more successful and evolve toward being destructive to drilling gear. As far as resistance to chemicals goes, it's probably just an adaptation to an environmental challenge that was somehow similar. Did you know that a percentage of European descendants are immune to HIV? Not because they specifically evolved a resistance to the disease, but because the same mutation made their ancestors resistant to the plague."
"So you aren't surprised that these bacteria exist."
He shook his head. "Why would I be?" "Can it spread?"
"Through a reservoir? Absolutely, depending on permeability of the rock. The bad news is that it can live without oxygen in water and oil. The good news is that, based on Stevie's research, this strain doesn't do so well out in the open elements. It dies almost immediately. So it's not like you could get it on your shoes and track it to Kuwait."
"Where did it come from, Erin?"
"Not a clue. Could just be Mother Nature defending herself."
The smile that spread across Reynolds's face had more than a hint of condescension. "Ah, yes. We all have to sell our cars and take up organic farming or we're going to die, right? Isn't that what you people believe?"
"You people?" Erin said. "Who's 'you people'? In the past few years we've had to face SARS, AIDS, Lyme disease, and bird flu. As far as I'm concerned, the environment is doing a pretty good job defending itself on its own."
Reynolds folded his arms across his chest and stared at Erin for a full thirty seconds. "I just can't get a read on you, Erin." He pointed to Beamon. "Mark here doesn't trust you, but then he's suspicious of his own mother. So I'll ask you point-blank: Whose side are you on? Are you willing to help us with this problem?"
"Doesn't really matter anymore," Erin said, smiling painfully. "The Saudis deported me. I'm out of the game."
Reynolds ended another long silence by shaking his head in resignation. "My back is against the wall here. I've spoken with our people at the CDC, the army's bioweapons people, and just about everyone else I could think of. It's hard to believe, but the only thing everyone agrees on is that you're the expert."
"I'm sure you'll find someone," Erin said. "Now if you guys wouldn't mind, I'd like to get home. If someone could just call me a cab to the airport, I'll even buy my own ticket."
Neither Reynolds nor Beamon responded. "No problem. I'll call my own cab. May I use your phone?"
"What would you say," Reynolds started slowly, "if I told you in strictest confidence -- that two more wells are showing a similar infestation?"
Erin shrugged. "It wouldn't surprise me. Ghawar is really permeable. Or maybe it was introduced to those wells by contaminated equipment or something else they're putting in the ground."
Reynolds nodded. "Well, then, how about this: Would you be surprised if I told you that the affected wells are in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge?"
Erin had started to rise from his chair, but now stopped. "What?"
"Was I not clear?"
"You're telling me that the exact same bacteria have shown up thousands of miles from Saudi Arabia?"
"That's my understanding."
"I think your people have made a mistake."
"My thought exactly. If you were to go up there, you could probably straighten the whole thing out in a few days."
"You want me to go to Alaska? What is it you guys don't understand about me being retired? Besides, I never thought you had any business drilling in ANWR anyway. Remember a few years back when someone sprayed 'save the caribou' on your Audi?"
Reynolds' brow furrowed a bit. "It was a brand-new car."
"Well, I pitched in for the paint. So at the risk of sounding rude, I want to be completely clear that I don't really give a shit about your problems."
"You should, Dr. Neal. Because I'm making them your problems."
Chapter 6.
"There," Mark Beamon said, pointing weakly through the Cessna's windscreen. "Thank God. You can see lights."
Erin pushed the yoke forward, causing the plane's nose to dip violently. Beamon grabbed the instrument panel, but once again managed not to throw up. He was a hell of a lot tougher than he looked. The combination of the snow beating against the glass, the profound darkness extending out in every direction, and Erin's artfully simulated turbulence would have broken most people.
Erin swung the plane wide and circled, looking down at the well-lit drilling rig centered in a meticulously scraped snow-field. As they continued to lose altitude, he could make out a tangle of trailers, snow cats, and weathered machinery, but no people.
"Where is everybody?"
Beamon started to take a deep breath in preparation for answering but then seemed to conclude that it made him feel even worse. "All the normal personnel were reassigned when the bacteria was discovered. There are people who think the price of gas could go up as much as twenty percent overnight if this got out -- and that's something politicians don't like telling the people who vote for them."
That explained why Beamon had been so pleased when he'd discovered that Erin was a pilot -- one less chance of a leak. Of course, it was a decision that Erin was taking great pleasure in making him regret.
He eased back on the throttle and the plane started to dive -- too fast and angled improperly into the wind, of course. It was a shame the flight wasn't longer. Another hour or so and he was sure he could have Beamon burning through air-sickness bags like a newborn went through diapers.
On the other hand, he had to admit that he, too, was feeling a little queasy -- but not for the same reason. Just being back in Alaska was enough -- the strangely unique feel of the cold, the empty scent of the air. This was where he and Jenna had spent some of their happiest times, but now those memories mocked him with the absolute certainty that they'd never be repeated. Even worse, it looked as if he was about to replay his brief and incredibly self-destructive stint with the energy companies. Outstanding.
The plane's skis touched down and he glanced over at Beamon. His eyes were tightly closed, but he wasn't actually praying -- at least not out loud. Erin shut down the engine and Beamon immediately threw open the door and dove out.
"You made it!" Steve Andropolous shouted as Erin dropped to the snow and retrieved his duffle from the back. "I wasn't sure you'd come."
He thumbed at Beamon, who was teetering around as though he'd never felt solid ground before, but was still holding down that stubborn lunch. "Didn't have a hell of a lot of choice."
"But did they tell you? It's the same bacteria." He grabbed Erin's arm, dragging him along. "My mind's officially blown, man. I mean seriously, do you have any ideas on this? It's freakin' me out."
"Have you checked their data, Steve? This doesn't make a lot of sense to me."
"No mistakes, dude. You wouldn't believe the shit you can get done when the oil companies and the government are with you instead of against you. We've already done a full genetic profile of both the Saudi and Alaskan bacteria. They're exactly the same."
"So what's the verdict, then?" Beamon said, his breath coming out a thick fog as he caught up to them.
Andropolous shot the man a nervous glance, but didn't answer. It was a trait Erin had found infuriating when they'd worked together -- Stevie hated delivering bad news and, if given the choice, would just remain silent.
"Spit it out," Erin said.
"Uh, yeah. This well's offline basically it's a rerun of one you worked on in Ghawar."
"What about the other wells you tested?" Beamon said. "What did those samples show?"
"You're not going to believe it, man. More than seventy percent of them are showing at least trace infestation."
"Jesus Christ," Beamon said, putting a gloved hand to his face and wiping at the sweat that was already starting to freeze. "Why the hell am I just hearing this now?"
"The satellite's out! There's no way I could contact anyone. And with all this secrecy shit . . ."
Erin threw an arm around Andropolous's shoulders. "Relax, Steve. What would a bunch of politicians and FBI guys do with that information other than go out and short a bunch of oil stock in their IRAs?"
Beamon ignored the insult. "Look, you've been clear on how you feel about drilling here, and I'm sure you're enjoying the hell out of all this, but for your own good I suggest you start taking the situation a little more seriously."
"Are you threatening me, Mark? Because if so --"
"I'm not fucking threatening you. What I'm saying is that if you just forget about the hundreds of millions of dollars invested here, the incredible political costs of getting drilling in the wilderness approved in the first place, and the billions the energy companies expected to make here, it's still one of the country's biggest oil reserves. And that's a national security issue something a lot of very powerful people don't have much of a sense of humor about."
"The bacterial loads aren't high enough to bring down production in most of the other wells," Andropolous interjected hopefully, then looked at his boots. "Yet."
"Yet?" Beamon said, working to keep his voice even. "Could you define yet, please?"
Andropolous pushed through the door of a trailer and Erin followed, peeling off his jacket and feeling the warmth soak painfully into his bruised, sunburned, and now half-frozen skin.
The trailer was a typical wreck, just like he remembered from the old days: card tables covered in papers, an old sofa with the stuffing coming out of it, carpet covered with dirty footprints. Andropolous grabbed a damp notebook off the floor and tossed it to him. "This is everything we've got."
The first few pages consisted of maps of the ANWR fields with well positions superimposed and individual bacterial loads noted. Erin fell onto the couch and stared down at the diagrams, trying to make out a pattern.
"Well?" Beamon said.
He didn't answer, instead picking up a pencil and shading the different wells. The higher the bacterial load, the darker the shading. Then he connected them, gradually darkening and lightening the shading to smoothly join all the wells and give him a picture of how the bacteria might be traveling.
"Erin?" Beamon prompted again.
He ripped the page from the notebook and held it out. "Look at the different levels, Mark. This didn't start in one place and radiate out. And it wasn't already there or you'd have more random variation in the loads."
"So?"
"So in my opinion, you had a number of wells contaminated all around the same time, and now it's spreading from those individual wells."
"What are you saying?"
"If I had to guess -- and it's only a guess
I'd say that some of the drilling chemicals were contaminated, and when they got pumped down the holes, the bacteria took hold and started to spread. I'd look at suppliers the Alaska drilling companies have in common with the Saudis."
"Okay, let's say you're right. What can you do about it?"
Erin thought about it for a moment. "Nothing."
"That's not going to go over real big, Erin. You're going to have to do better."
"What the fuck do you want me to use on this stuff, Mark? Harsh language? I just spent an entire week in Saudi Arabia and got exactly nowhere."
Beamon's face, which had lost the green pallor it had taken on in the plane, now looked pale. "So you're saying more wells are going to go down?"
"Yeah."
"How many?"
"Eventually, all of them, I guess."
"All of them. That's just great. How long?"
Erin shrugged and looked over to Andropolous, who was trying to disappear into a corner. "Did you look at the spread rate?"
"We don't have any history, Erin. And we don't really know much about this reservoir. So, it's impos "
"For God's sake, Steve!" Beamon said. "I'm not here to shoot messengers. Just give me your best guess! A year? Two?"
Andropolous chewed his lip for a moment. "Oh, no, definitely not years. At this point, we're talking about months."
The two other men were sound asleep Beamon on the couch and Andropolous sitting in a chair with his chin tucked into his chest. Erin was on the floor, squinting blankly at the loose papers surrounding him. Another one of his many failings was his uncanny ability to obsess. Any problem that he couldn't solve, no matter how complicated, or even how trivial, could consume him. He'd once lost three days of sleep over why the door on his truck wouldn't close properly.
But this wasn't a truck door. How had the bacteria traveled between Saudi Arabia and Alaska? His initial idea that it had been carried by drilling chemicals didn't bear hard scrutiny. But every other idea he had was even worse. At this point, he was down to imaginary host animals that liked to swim across oceans specifically to crawl down drill holes.
Jet lag was catching up with him and it was obvious that he wasn't going to figure it out tonight, but he also knew that his mind wasn't going to let go easily. He needed something to shut his brain off, something mind-numbingly dull. He glanced around him, and finally settled on Andropolous's genetic profile of the bacteria.
In the dim light from a distant desk lamp, he leafed disinterestedly through the initial pages, but then stopped and flipped back to the beginning of the report. Even to his sleep-deprived brain, something here was familiar. The DNA structure of the bacteria had similarities to concepts he'd played around with years ago -- before Jenna had finally convinced him to abandon his genetic engineering ambitions because the world wasn't ready for a Frankenstein bioremediation bacteria. Now it looked as if nature had beat him to it.
He flipped forward and again stopped short, blinking hard as he tried to focus on a description of a specific and unusual adaptation displayed by the bacteria. This one wasn't just recognizable, it was an exact duplicate of an alteration he'd hypothesized could be achieved by inserting genetic material from a bacteria common in the Amazon Basin into a hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria he'd found in Nigeria.
Erin dropped the report and looked up to see if the sound had woken the other two. Beamon rolled onto his back and began snoring. Andropolous just looked dead.
He rose silently, finding it hard to balance himself as his tired mind grasped for an explanation of the contents of that report. He went out into the cold night, gently pushing the door closed behind him, and began walking across the brightly lit carpet of snow beneath the rig.
He continued past the equipment and through a break in the snow bank that surrounded the area, finally finding himself back out in the silent tundra. There had to be an explanation. If he'd found that adaptation potentially useful, maybe nature had too? Yeah, right. Nature had adapted an African bacteria to survive in Alaska and then combined it with one that wasn't found anywhere near either place.
He was staring at his feet as he moved forward, the cold penetrating his sweater. When he finally stopped and looked up, the plane was only about twenty yards away. He headed toward it and climbed in, taking one last look at the rig before starting the engine and opening the throttle.
