88° North by J.F. Kirwan

Author:J.F. Kirwan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Jake slipped below the waves and began his descent down one of the platform’s three-metre-thick steel legs. Salamander had shown him a schematic. The oil platform wasn’t standing on the bottom, rather it was a floating rig, and at the end of the four legs there were two pontoons for ballast and stability, as well as propellers keeping it in position over the well. Rigs like this one could be built in a dry dock, towed into place and moved in case a heavy storm was predicted. All in all, it saved money, and everything in the oil business was about money.

The water was green fading to grey, the steel leg crawling with undulating seaweed, a few silver fish here and there, nothing exotic. Crabs managed to manoeuvre without losing their grip and tumbling to the seabed over a hundred metres below. Jake, on the other hand, freefell, like a sky diver in slow motion, squirted air into his buoyancy ‘stab’ jacket every six seconds so as not to drop too fast, and equalised the pressure in his ears every five metres. The mixing of gases was automatic, but for all he knew Salamander could override it and make the mixture toxic down at the bottom or on the way back up. By the time Jake noticed, it would be too late.

He’d never dived this deep. His deepest was seventy-six metres on air, out in Anspida, searching for hammerheads. He’d found them, four-metre-long devil fish, at six in the morning, which meant they were antsy. He and his buddy James had given each other the Up signal, only to find twenty more right above them, preventing ascent. Jake had watched the needle on his air gauge flick a fraction closer to empty with each inhalation. As soon as the school of sharks passed, he and James raced up to thirty metres, slammed on the brakes, then slowly ascended to six metres where they did a whopping thirty minutes of decompression.

That part of the dive hadn’t been fun: out in the blue, way off the island and the reef, in deep waters that held predators such as tiger sharks and even great whites. They’d hung off a line to a surface marker buoy, like bait on a hook, back to back, watching for the first sign of sharks materialising out of the blue. When the boat came to pick them up, that was the most dangerous point, because waggling fins on the surface tended to attract sharks. Jake had never boarded a boat so quickly.

No sharks here. He checked his depth. Fifty-four. It was dark, so he switched on his head torches, twin halogen beams, searchlights in the gloom. He remained close to the leg and resisted turning around. It would be easy to get lost down here. He needed to test his cognitive function, and went through his ‘two-to-the-power-of’ maths routine. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, all the way to one million and forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-six, which was two to the twentieth power.

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