15000 Feet Below

Prologue

17 days 7 hours to go

‘You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you,’ she admonished the target in her huskiest voice, ‘playing around with other girls?’ And without waiting for an answer, she slid the collar of the dog leash over his head and around his neck.

But as she fixed the leash to a bedpost, she was visited by doubt. This man was a fraudster; he hadn’t killed anyone. Unlike the first two she’d done.

Stop thinking! It only brings trouble.

Dressed in a catsuit, she glided up his back. ‘And bad boys need to be punished, don’t they?’

She shoved him face down into the mattress. Then she pulled hard at the leash and pushed the collar concealing a miniature hangman’s rope against the back of his neck.

But he was quicker to react than she had anticipated, and he managed to turn, grabbing her by the throat.

Die, she demanded in silence, as the target’s surprisingly strong grip on her neck sent wisps of black across her vision. Eventually, though, he had to let go of her.

She dropped her head, giddy from a lack of oxygen, and from relief that it was over.

She felt her nose touching his chin.

Appalled by her carelessness, she pulled back up. But as she did, she felt a sharp pain in her cheek.

She saw he had opened his eyes, and that he was clawing at her face with his right hand.

‘Die,’ she repeated, this time in a whisper, as she tightened the leash another notch. And she kept it tight until absolutely certain the job was done.

She was losing her touch at the tender age of twenty-seven, no doubt about it.

‘You’ll be my last,’ she assured the corpse. As if it would somehow ease his pain at being dead that no others would follow.

Then she saw something that made her mouth go dry.

Friday June 17th BST

Chapter 1

16 days 18 hours to go

Roy felt his heart skipping a beat when he saw Melanie. She was beaming health and happiness, and despite being dressed in an orange survival suit, she was so light and jaunty of step that her feet didn’t seem to touch the ground.

She was secretary to Matt Hobson, President of Aesop, and she had come up from Head Office in London along with the mail boy. The two were part of a group of day trippers to Aesop Corporation’s oil production platform for the Cachalot Field. The rest were from the corporation’s office in Aberdeen―technical assistants, secretaries and other people who didn’t usually get a chance to go to such places. And Roy was their guide.

Melanie pulled him down a little by his shoulder. She put her lips to his ear. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you when you get back.’

‘Tell me now.’

She shook her head.

‘Please.’

She gave him the same expression of joy he had fallen so in love with the morning he met her in Matt Hobson’s office. ‘I’ll tell you, but only if you give us a good tour.’

‘Deal,’ Roy agreed, though he could hardly wait until later, let alone the three days till his two week stint as geologist on the Cachalot platform was due to end. He ached to be back with Melanie in the flat they had shared the past three years.

‘What’s that smell?’ a man from the group asked, his voice barely audible above the ubiquitous platform noise.

‘There are lots of smells out here,’ Roy told him. Then he pointed at a gleaming silvery rod a hundred and twenty feet long. It dangled at the end of a cable hung from a wheel high above, and it was being coaxed into the borehole.

Roy started his well-rehearsed spiel. ‘The worm of steel you see disappearing below deck at the end of a braided wire is a so-called wireline logging tool. It’s packed with a variety of devices measuring different properties of the rock that holds the oil in the Cachalot Field.’

‘What is that smell?’ the man bellowed in Roy’s ear, his voice now easily beating any other sound.

‘What’s what?’ Roy shouted back.

‘That smell, of rotten eggs?’

Roy picked it up now, a faint but definite whiff. Highly significant, he knew. It was a sign of a leak of the lethal hydrogen sulphide, an unfortunate by-product of the oil production from the Cachalot Field.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Roy assured the man while frantically looking for someone of rank. In vain at first, but then he seemed to have some real luck. The so-called tool pusher, the boss of the drilling crew, moved with determined strides in Roy’s direction. The man, along with the rest of the Indonesian day crew, had arrived on the Cachalot platform only yesterday.

To Roy’s surprise, the tool pusher shrugged off his query about a hydrogen sulphide leak and continued his walk.

He probably doesn’t speak much English, Roy thought. Or perhaps he doesn’t want a dark-skinned geologist from Head Office telling him what to do. Even so, he should know what that smell meant.

Roy was at pains to show an unconcerned face to the group as he gently ushered them back towards the assembly point. But of course, he couldn’t hide anything from Melanie.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, concern spreading across her face.

‘Just tell us what the smell is,’ the man from the group demanded. And soon, all eight members of the party knew that not everything was as it should be.

But it was only when someone spotted two of the crew by one of the lifeboats that true panic began to set in.

‘No need to worry, it’s probably just a drill,’ Roy said in an attempt to allay their fears. It hadn’t been scheduled, though, at least to his knowledge. And no alarm had been raised despite the fact that the smell of hydrogen sulphide was becoming ever more pungent. ‘Stay here, I’ll be back in a minute.’

Roy moved as fast as he could across pipes and other obstacles on the deck. He leapt down one flight of metal stairs and up another, until he reached the door to the OIM’s quarter.

The OIM, or Offshore Installation Manager, was the boss of the entire platform. Roy opened the door and stepped inside.

He saw to his horror that the OIM was lying on the floor with a cracked skull. There was a massive bloodied pipe wrench by his side.

‘Fuck!’ Roy yelled to the dead air ahead. But there was no time to soak up the shock or the significance of what he had just seen. He had to get back to his party and off the platform as quickly as possible.

He was halfway down the staircase leading up to the OIM’s quarters when an explosion sent him over the railing.

He tried to rise, but a pain in his right hip brought him back to the deck. He made a second attempt and managed to get to his knees, then to his feet.

Regaining his bearings, he saw that a flame was separating him from the party in his charge. Or so he assumed. He couldn’t actually see anyone from his group.

He shouted Melanie’s name.

A small figure emerged from the flames―on fire, screaming, running one way, then the other.

He was about to run towards her when he saw it was a man. The man fell and rolled a little. Then he lay still.

Roy shouted her name again.

There was no response.

He started hobbling towards the rapidly expanding wall of fire. But the heat soon became unbearable, and he was forced to retreat.

In an attempt to get around the flames, he headed for the edge of the platform. And at last the alarm sounded, cutting through the roar of the fire.

A man from the wireline logging crew―another of yesterday’s new arrivals―crossed his path.

Roy put an arm out to stop him. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted into the noise of a fire growing at frightening speed in all three dimensions.

The man swerved to evade his outstretched arm.

Roy grabbed him by the shoulder, but the man wrestled free of his grip. With his injured hip, Roy was unable to follow.

He continued his painful progress across the uneven deck, along the flames, searching for a way around them. But the heat was now so intense that he had to take one step aside, away from the blaze, for every two steps ahead.

An explosion battered his eardrums.

He turned to find that the OIM’s quarters had disappeared, along with the platform’s control room. Looking up, he saw that the remains of the two cabins were hurtling down towards him.

He was looking for something to dive underneath when he saw Melanie running towards him.

‘Take cover!’ he screamed into the roar, just as the undercarriage of an office chair crashed into the steel deck beside her. But Melanie kept running.

By the time she reached him, unhurt, only smaller pieces of debris were still falling.

‘I should have listened to Matt,’ she wept.

‘Matt?’

‘Hobson. He told me not to go. He doesn’t even know I’m here.’

‘He did what?’ But as in the OIM’s office, there was no time for Roy to speculate, or to wait for an answer. ‘Where are the others? We have to get them off the platform.’

Melanie pointed into the ravenous fire. ‘There, trapped behind.’

Through a parting of the whipping, licking flames, Roy spied the man who had asked about the rotten eggs. He was jumping over the edge―into the sea, it seemed.

‘We’ve got to get the rest of them out,’ he told Melanie. But as he made a move, she grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back.

She was stronger than her slight frame suggested, though not strong enough to hold Roy back against his will. But he saw sense. Melanie was his priority above everyone else.

Together they broke for the lifeboats at the platform’s edge. They weaved through bodies, some with horrific injuries, others apparently unharmed. Roy did his best to keep up with Melanie, but he couldn’t with his injured hip. She had to stop every twenty paces or so, waiting for him to catch up.

The flames got closer, heat searing his face. Melanie started slowing down. She became unsteady on her feet.

It was the hydrogen sulphide. It had to be. Roy felt increasingly groggy himself.

Grimacing from the pain in his hip, he dragged Melanie to the edge of the platform by the outer wall of the accommodation module―the launch site for the lifeboats.

Others were there already, about twenty, in a huddle by a lifeboat thirty feet away. Most of them were only partly dressed. Roy recognised them as members of the British night crew. One of them was about to climb into the fully enclosed lifeboat when it shot like a bullet from the platform’s edge. The five other lifeboats did the same. Then all six exploded, mid-air, like synchronised fireworks.

Roy froze with shock. It seemed surreal. It couldn’t be happening.

He saw a giant fireball rolling in his direction, as if spun off from the sun. He would be consumed alive by the flames if he remained where he was for more than a few seconds. His eyes were burning. He caught a smell of singed hair.

Melanie’s consciousness was hanging by a thread. He saw it in her eyes.

There was only one option left: to jump into the sea.

Melanie was both fitter and lighter than him, a good swimmer and an excellent diver from the high board. The cold water, he hoped, would bring her back to life―if she, if any of them, survived the hundred and forty foot drop.

Roy took her by the hand. He hesitated.

‘Jump!’ she cried, and together they jumped.

He hit what felt like a concrete pavement. It turned black before his eyes.

A flicker of brightness became a ray. The ray became a beam. The beam became several.

Dizzy and disorientated, he found himself surrounded by froth and bubbles. He was dragged, kicking and flailing, ever deeper into the sea, as if by some unseen liquid hand.

His ears ached and his chest was tightening. But the cold water dulled the pain in his hip.

He needed air desperately, and he was about to give in to his lungs’ demand for a feed―of air, water, anything―when he started to rise.

Hang in there, you’re only twenty-nine. It’s too early to go.

He pushed his body upward with his arms and legs. His lungs were about to explode. Then at last, heaving for breath, he broke through the surface.

He scanned the sea around him. He couldn’t see Melanie anywhere in the waves.

He called out her name, but his voice didn’t carry far through the roar of the blaze above.

Then he caught sight of her some distance away, alive and moving in the direction of an approaching supply boat.

He began to swim in the same direction. In a few minutes they would both be safe on the boat. It was a miracle.

While in this state of elation, Roy heard a peculiar sound―like an almighty belch. It appeared to emanate from the thick pipe that connected the platform to the oil in the Cachalot Field twelve thousand feet below the seabed.

The pipe was torn in two, or so Roy guessed, above the base of the platform where he couldn’t see. What he did see was a gigantic fountain of oil. And soon, black rain came crashing down, lathering the water’s surface in thick black oil.

The slick reached Melanie and several of the other survivors, who were making their way towards the supply boat. But, to Roy’s relief, she kept moving, if more slowly, through the sticky liquid.

Then he saw something that made him wish he had filled his lungs with water.

A flame dipped below the platform along the broken pipe. Almost instantly, it became a fully-fledged fire cascading down the smooth surface of the fuse of steel and out into an ocean carpeted with oil.

‘No!’ he screamed as an avalanche of fire rolled across the sea. Away from him but towards Melanie.

He swam faster, screaming for her to get out of the way.

As if in response to his pleas, she turned to face the fire.

She threw back her head, away from the approaching sheet of yellow. She opened her mouth.

Roy let out a wail of pain. He wanted to be there. He wanted to die with Melanie. He moved towards her, faster and faster. But like in a dream, he didn’t seem to get anywhere.

The tip of that tongue from hell reached her, lighting her hair like a wick.

He saw her head silhouetted against the flames. Black against yellow, frozen in a scream. Then her head crumpled, like a scrap of burning paper.

Wednesday June 29th BST

Chapter 2

4 days 21 hours to go

Roy stepped into his office on the fifth floor of Aesop House just before eight o’clock in the morning. He turned his computer on. Seconds later, the words, Asian European and South American Oil Production (AESOP) Ltd., were splashed across the screen in crimson letters. As they had been most weekday mornings during the seven years he had worked for the company.

Twelve days had passed since he was pulled from the sea off the Cachalot platform, and he had only returned home from hospital yesterday evening. But his flat had seemed a dark, desolate place without Melanie, and when he occasionally escaped into a shallow sleep, he had relived in his dreams those dreadful moments in the water.

In the end, the absence of Melanie had become unbearable, and he had decided to go to the office. Still, he was here mainly to have a word with Spike Leary, his office neighbour, about something that had struck him in the early hours.

Waiting for his PC to boot up, he dropped his newspaper in the waste paper basket. But even in the bin he wasn’t rid of it. The faces of twenty-four dead Indonesians stared up at him from the front page, just as they had during his Tube journey to work. He moved his gaze down the page, only to be met by Melanie’s smiling face.

Former Arsenal Ladies striker Melanie Taylor, 26, Confirmed dead in blaze, the caption read. He closed his eyes.

But her face was still there when he reopened his eyes, as it had seemed to be every time he turned on the TV or picked up a newspaper in the hospital.

He had known for certain that Melanie was dead less than a day after regaining consciousness in the helicopter back to the shore. But in his mind, she was still laughing at his impersonations of the Aesop brass, just as he was still dreaming of the children they now would never have. Because of those bastards, those sick Indonesian bastards.

He picked the newspaper from the bin and tore each face to confetti, one by one, until only Melanie’s was left. Then he dabbed her tear-soaked picture and kissed it, again and again, until it fell apart in his hands.

But he didn’t want to lose her like he had lost her that day on Cachalot. So he pulled his wallet from his pocket and opened it.

Once more her smile and warm, green eyes greeted him. But the pain of looking at Melanie’s image soon became too intense.

He flung away his wallet and sank into his chair. He let his head fall on his arms on his desk.

He imagined opening the door to the flat they shared, filled with joy over his and Melanie’s imminent reunion. As he had on so many occasions while working on the Cachalot platform. Now, as then, he could hear the knock in his head; he could see the door open; he could feel Melanie’s breath on his face, her body tight to his. It was only when he heard the sound of knocking for a second time that he realised it was actually happening.

He looked up to find Spike Leary by the open glass door to his office. The tips of his colleague’s handlebar moustache pointed upward a little more than usual, as they tended to do when something surprised him.

Spike rolled up to Roy in his wheelchair. ‘What are you doing here? You should be at home.’

‘I can’t be at home. Everything there reminds me of Melanie.’

Spike put his arm around him. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

Roy knew that Spike did. Five years ago his wife had died of cancer. A year later he had moved from Houston to London in the hope that a new start would ease his loss. But Spike’s understanding didn’t make Roy’s pain any easier to endure.

Spike tightened his grip on Roy a little, as much, Roy sensed, to cope with his own grief as to comfort his office neighbour. ‘I didn’t leave the house for a month after my wife’s funeral. I was sure my life had come to an end. All I could do was to feel sorry for myself and wait to die.’ He let go of Roy. ‘You better put that in your pocket.’

Roy saw that his wallet was lying on the floor. He rose from his chair and picked it up, dropping it on his desk. And again Melanie looked up at him.

‘Is that you?’ Spike asked, just as Roy was about to close his wallet. He was pointing at a scanned image encased in heat-sealed plastic next to the photo of Melanie.

Roy nodded. The picture was from an almost thirty year old newspaper. It showed a chestnut-skinned infant boy that a childless vicar’s wife had found on the steps of her husband’s church and named after Roy of the Rovers. But only five days after finding him, the vicar’s wife had died from a heart attack, and that had been the starting gun for Roy’s miserable journey through childhood.

Spike appeared to read the caption. ‘You never told me you’re a foundling.’

Roy averted his eyes from the image. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of.’

‘You shouldn’t be ashamed of it either.’

‘I thought about my mother every hour of every day. I kept speculating about her, who she was, why she threw me away.’ Roy bit his lower lip. ‘Until three years ago.’

‘When you met Melanie?’

Roy let out a sigh. ‘She helped me come to terms with my strange beginnings.’

Spike fell into thought before speaking again. ‘I shouldn’t really poke any more in your life, but do you know what that is?’ He pointed at the little thing that held together the sky blue shawl wrapped around baby Roy.

Before Melanie came into his life, Roy could spend entire days wondering about exactly that. ‘I don’t know. I’ve only seen it in that photo.’

Spike scrutinised the image for a few moments. ‘If someone asked me, I’d say it’s a small silver brooch with a ruby at the centre, or a large earring.’

‘Is that the insurance man speaking?’

Spike shook his head. ‘I’ve never worked with small stuff like that. But whatever it is, it hasn’t come cheap.’

Roy closed and pocketed his wallet. He had come to a similar conclusion some time ago. But what did it matter now? Melanie was dead and the Cachalot platform a pile of scrap metal at the bottom of the North Sea. And what was the point of the evenings and weekends he had worked for Aesop Corporation, carrying out analyses with impossibly tight deadlines?

‘No fucking point!’ he shouted as he hammered his fist into his desk so hard that his cracked Aesop mug fell on the floor and broke in two on the blood-red carpet. He kicked the largest piece into the wall, where it shattered.

He moved his foot to the smaller piece, which instantly became a fusion of Aesop, Indonesian terrorists and Anton Craig, his last foster father.

Through the top of his vision, he saw that Spike was closing the door to his office.

Shocked over the ferocity of his own outburst, Roy shoved the remains of his cup aside with his foot.

Spike rolled up to Roy, patting him in the same fatherly way Roy imagined he would his two grown-up daughters when he paid them an occasional visit.

He moved away from Spike’s touch. ‘I don’t need any sympathy. What I need is to know why Melanie died.’

‘That’s how I felt after my wife passed away.’

‘Why it had to be her and not someone else?’

Spike nodded.

‘It’s different for me. Melanie was murdered and I have to find her killers. Anyone in my position would feel the same.’

‘Perhaps. But few would act, no matter the strength of their feelings.’

‘What are you basing that on?’

‘I’m sure you remember the big meeting a few years ago, back in the days when it was still possible to halt the development of the Cachalot Field.’

Roy most definitely did. And yet, it was all a bit of a blur. ‘I don’t remember much of what actually happened.’

‘You were the main presenter.’

‘I know it sounds strange, but all I remember clearly is the shape of Matt Hobson’s mouth when he cut me down.’

Spike’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘I can’t say I blame you. The reality of corporate politics must have come as a bit of a shock to a keen young geologist like you. Do you want to know to know what happened?’

Roy didn’t. ‘If you insist.’

‘You told the President to his face what kind of field you believed Cachalot really was, and it didn’t take your fellow geologists long to see what you were seeing, too. But no sooner had Hobson cleared his throat in disapproval before they all disappeared into the walls like roaches.’

That was something else Roy did remember―how he had been abandoned by his spineless peers.

His recollection of that incident prompted him to open his most recent management presentation of the Cachalot Field on his computer screen. Or more precisely, the version of the presentation that included the slide he had been under strict instruction by the President of Aesop not to show to anyone outside the company. Not even the other stakeholders in the Cachalot Field.

The controversial slide was a sort of map of the field. It looked as if someone had dropped a box of grey shoelaces in muddy water, where the ‘laces’ were sand-filled river channels from the distant past. Over time, these river channels had become buried deep underground, the sand had become sandstone and the sandstone had become filled with oil. But the dominant part of the map―the areas between the laces―was thick, impermeable clay without a drop of oil.

Management, though, had stubbornly stuck to the initial euphoric perception of Cachalot from five years ago when the field was discovered: that the majority of the rock in the field was oil-filled sandstone.

Roy pointed at the confusion of ‘shoelaces’ on the screen. ‘Just look at that. If those terrorists attacked Cachalot to hurt the Western economy, they picked the wrong bloody field. You’ll have to admit that.’

The scenario implicit in Roy’s own words had only entered his head in the early hours of the morning, but what surprised him most was that he didn’t find it all that hard to believe. He looked Spike in the eye. ‘If the Aesop brass had to blow up the platform to get their hands on the insurance money, couldn’t they at least have waited until Melanie got off?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Spike whispered.

That moment, Roy couldn’t care less who heard him; the more the better, in fact. He needed an outlet for his grief, for his anger. ‘The brass’ll be pleased as punch to get rid of that heap of shite and cash in the insurance policy. Even if the attack on Cachalot was carried out by Muslim fanatics, as everybody seems to believe, it was frightfully convenient for Aesop, don’t you think?’

‘For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down,’ Spike insisted, making a downward movement with his hands.

Roy realised that his own hands were shaking, and he could feel his heart pummelling his ribcage. He knew he was digging a hole for himself by blurting out such accusations. But he had lost the only one he ever loved—the woman who had freed him from the shackles of his past, who had given him a reason to live and made him look ahead, not hark back to a dark empty void. And he was supposed to show restraint, to take it like a ‘man’, with a stiff upper lip. It was just plain impossible.

‘Who do you think blew up Cachalot?’ he asked Spike, a man who knew a thing or two about the murky world of corporate insurance.

To Roy’s surprise Spike didn’t answer straight away, and when his reply came it wasn’t exactly emphatic. ‘You’ve read the papers, haven’t you?’

‘I mean, who do you think did it?’

Spike kneaded the right side of his handlebar moustache and pulled out the tip as far as he could. ‘I’ve heard a few people ask why we don’t just hire a bunch of terrorists to blow the damned thing up. But that was done entirely in jest. It’s something altogether different to...’

‘Answer my question.’

Spike inhaled deeply. ‘Why would anyone in Aesop’s management risk a long jail sentence for something like that?’

‘If it could save the company’s shareholders more than a billion dollars, perhaps someone would. In particular, if that someone has a shed-load of shares and share options, and if that someone has a huge mortgage and extortionate school fees to pay.’

‘I’ll buy that, just. What I’m not buying is that any terrorist should be willing to sacrifice himself for a big Western oil company’s insurance fraud scheme.’

‘What if he was duped into believing that he was killing himself for a noble cause?’

Spike looked out of the window ‘Think about it,’ he said in that now slightly annoying paternal manner, his hands on those legs rendered useless by a stray bullet to his spine during a hunting trip in his native Pennsylvania. Spike had been in his late twenties then, and after the accident he had started observing the wildlife instead of killing it. He even kept a pair of binoculars in a drawer for the unlikely event that a rare bird should land on The Thames below his office.

‘You think about it,’ Roy demanded, ‘you’re the bloody expert.’

Spike turned to face Roy. ‘You’re as much an expert as I am.’

‘Because I’ve been to prison?’

Spike opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he stiffened up.

Roy heard a double knock, and he turned to find a woman standing the other side of the closed glass door to his office. She was quite tall, five foot ten or so. He didn’t believe he had seen her before.

Roy guessed that she had joined Aesop while he had been away. Perhaps she was sitting in one of the cubicles outside his office, his old one even, and was coming to say hello. He waved her in.

The woman strode into his office, straight-backed and with a rather unnerving assurance. Her black hair was tied up and her skin was dark, if not as dark as Roy’s, more Latin or Middle Eastern in hue. She wore a loose navy trouser suit that didn’t manage to conceal a nice figure.

She offered Roy her hand.

Stepping forward to accept it, he looked into a pair of steely umber eyes that didn’t quite catch his. Yet it felt as if they penetrated deep into his being.

He drew breath involuntarily, as his gaze drifted from her eyes to a subtle kink halfway up the ridge of her classic nose. It was a sure sign that her nose, like his, had once been broken. Only the faint lines on her face and a trace of crow’s feet betrayed an age over thirty-five.

She pushed her rimless glasses to the kink in her nose and looked at Roy over them, though still not quite in his eye.

‘Roy Vicars, I presume,’ she said in a rasping voice.

He noticed that the heaving of her chest became more pronounced after she had spoken. He found this curiously at odds with her calm appearance and controlled manner. But when he caught the scent of her breath, a strange intangible memory of her came to him. From long ago, it seemed, but from where and when, he had no idea.

He steadied himself. ‘Just call me Roy.’

‘Come to my office at nine.’ The words slipped through the woman’s barely moving lips, and Roy picked up a hint of flatness in her vowels that jarred a little with her BBC-style diction.

He wanted to ask who she was and what part of the country she came from. But she turned on her heels and strode off, her back straight as a guardsman’s.

‘That’s just about the stiffest upper lip I’ve ever come across,’ Roy said once the woman was out of earshot. ‘She didn’t even have the courtesy to introduce