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  “Attention! We are now one hundred feet from history!”

  Amid the hoots and hollers around him, Paul Basmajian leaned against a deck rail to steady himself, certain somehow that they were a hundred feet from something else as well.

  CHAPTER 9

  Deepwater Venture, Gulf of Mexico

  Basmajian noticed his chief engineer, George Arnold, standing off by himself on the main deck, no bottle of champagne in hand with which to celebrate, looking detached and disinterested.

  “Do I look as bad as you?” Basmajian asked him.

  “Worse.”

  “Something feels wrong about this, Arnie.”

  “Nickel for your thoughts.”

  “What happened to a penny?”

  “Have you seen the price of oil lately, Bas?”

  Arnold was frightfully thin, his face growing more skeletal by the day when he was crewing a long rotation like this one. All in all, an odd match for the bearlike Basmajian. But that hadn’t stopped them from working together steadily for going on twenty years, watching the industry blossom from jack-up and gorilla rigs to this floating city on the sea.

  “Female crewmember fled the rig this morning,” Basmajian told George Arnold. “I’ll be damned if I can figure that one out.”

  “But that’s not what’s bothering you.”

  “No, that’s not what’s bothering me at all.”

  “I want to shut down the drill,” Arnold told him.

  “So do I, but we can’t, not mere yards from the record. Company would hang us by our asses from a drilling derrick.”

  “Let them. There’s something those fuckers aren’t telling us and you know it.”

  “Attention! We are now fifty feet from history!”

  “Let me shut down the drill, Bas,” Arnold continued, his voice starting to crack and eyes widening in what was as close to panic as Basmajian had ever seen in him. He kept tugging at his shirt, as if to peel it from the sweat gluing the fabric to his skin.

  Basmajian drummed his ring on the deck rail, Arnold left to focus on the two scratched-up letters rising from its center.

  “D-S,” he said, as much to distract himself as anything. “All these years you never told me what that means.”

  “Yes, I did, maybe a hundred times. ‘Dead Simple.’”

  “Not what they stand for, what they mean.”

  “George . . .”

  “No, I get it. It’s all about the war and you hate talking about the war. What I’m telling you now is I believe you’re gonna have something else you don’t want to talk about if you don’t give the order to shut down that drill.”

  “Twenty-five . . .”

  “Now, Bas, before it’s too late.”

  Basmajian looked into Arnold’s eyes and imagined his own being just as full of fear.

  “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  Basmajian grabbed the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “Engine room, hold the drill! Repeat, cease operations!”

  “Five, four, three,” the crew recited in cadence, bottles thrust for the sky.

  “Engine room, do you copy? Engine room, come in!”

  “Two, one!”

  “Engine room!” Basmajian blared again, as the drill continued to churn thirty-two-thousand-plus feet below the surface, breaking the Venture’s just established record with each spin as the crewmembers dotting the main deck continued to hoot, holler, and dance about the clutter with history tucked in their pockets. “Engine room, do you—”

  Basmajian stopped when the alarm bell began to sound. The celebratory crew fell silent in the next moment, Basmajian and Arnold dodging through them for the elevated bridge. The crew’s reaction might have been momentarily delayed, but they were an experienced lot to a man, each of whom knew his place in an emergency. They scattered in every direction like ants from a fallen rock.

  Basmajian and Arnold reached the bridge to find monitor readings dancing in the red and off the charts, and engineering personnel struggling to make sense of them.

  “What’s happening?” Basmajian demanded. “Talk to me!”

  “We’re losing structural integrity on the line!” George Arnold replied, his eyes sweeping over the readouts and computer monitors. “It’s breaking apart from the bottom!”

  “Trigger the blow-out preventer!”

  A technician did just that with a hardly dramatic click of the mouse. Basmajian watched him click the mouse again.

  “Nothing, sir,” he reported fearfully. “It’s, it’s . . .”

  “It’s what?”

  The technician swung his chair toward Basmajian. “Gone, sir.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  The technician could only shrug, Basmajian’s attention turning to the four closed-circuit monitors providing varying viewpoints of the seafloor and drilling apparatus from four robotic submersibles, known as ROVs, that could also perform emergency repairs.

  All four screens were dark.

  “Why are the ROVERs off-line?”

  “We lost the signals,” said a marine geologist responsible for analyzing and processing the constant stream of data transferred from the submersibles.

  “No,” said a stone-faced Arnold. “If it were a signal issue, we’d have snow. Since the screens have gone dark, something must have taken the ROVERs out altogether.”

  Basmajian felt something sink in the pit of his stomach. There was a dreamlike quality to what was transpiring, the impossible unfolding before his eyes. He actually wondered if he was about to wake up from an experience soon to be lost from memory.

  A fresh alarm began to wail.

  No such luck.

  “Something’s coming up, sir!” a new voice on the bridge blared. “Something in the line!”

  “Shut it down! You hear me? Shut the line down!”

  More clicks on a different mouse. “System’s not responding, sir! System’s not responding!”

  “Go to Failsafe!” Basmajian ordered without hesitation.

  The eyes of the half-dozen men in the control room swung toward him, aware that triggering that system would destroy everything they’d laid below the surface, turning $10,000,000 worth of equipment into undersea garbage. Only George Arnold responded by slicing his way to the manual Failsafe trigger switch, yanking open the glass seal and pulling down on a handle.

  In that moment, the control room crew thought the subsurface rumble was the result of the Failsafe explosives triggering. In that moment, they felt the drill and all beneath it had been killed, that whatever had penetrated the line on a rapid rise to the surface was gone.

  But in the next moment the drill housing exploded in a curtain of white flame, more of a flash that crumpled the nearest derrick and tipped it over toward the main deck. Screams penetrated the bridge with a fury that stole Paul Basmajian’s breath.

  Literally.

  Basmajian’s last conscious thought was that he couldn’t breathe, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air—no, it was the air itself. The air was . . . gone.

  And then the rest of the world around the Deepwater Venture followed it into oblivion.

  When the Venture failed to respond to radio calls in response to its MAYDAY signal, a pair of F-16s were scrambled out of Barksdale Air Force Base for a flyover. Both pilots had been trained in all areas of emergency response, and their jets were outfitted with the latest generation of rotating cameras to capture both motion and still shots and then transmit them in real time to the Pentagon, NORAD, and Washington headquarters of Homeland Security. The pilots could see exactly what they were transmitting on a console-mounted screen in order to provide a verbal report as well.

  The F-16s had been ordered to do a series of crisscrossing flyovers, maintaining a safe distance from each other to assure that both of them could not be knocked out from below by a single attack.

  “Base, this is Alpha One,” the pilot of the lead jet reported after only a single pass.

  “Go ahead, Alpha One.”

>   “Base, we have confirmation of a Level Six event. Repeat, a Level Six event.”

  A pause followed.

  “Alpha One, did you say Level Six?”

  “That’s an affirmative,” the pilot replied, keenly aware that the phrase had never before been uttered in anything but drills.

  “Alpha One, stand by for further orders and routing instructions and continue transmission.”

  “Roger that, Base. Standing by and continuing transmission.”

  “Go with God, Alpha One.”

  “Looks like He’s sitting this one out, Base.”

  CHAPTER 10

  New Orleans

  “Something wrong, my friend?”

  Roused from his daze, McCracken gazed up at the stout man standing behind the shop’s counter. “Just the usual,” he lied.

  “Because today is your birthday, reason for celebration, not melancholy in spite of the milestone.”

  “I guess the alternative is worse,” McCracken said, trying to smile.

  A week had passed since Arturo Morales had been handed over to American authorities and three college students returned to their parents, while a fourth had been lain to rest two days ago.

  “Feast your eyes,” the man behind the counter was saying. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?”

  The truth was that McCracken hadn’t, glad for the distraction no matter how fleeting. The samurai sword had been polished to such a shine that he could actually see a blur of his distorted reflection. The sword was a true beauty, expertly restored to its original condition from feudal Japan and presented in shirasaya without any ornamental trappings. Just a blade that had almost certainly taken its share of lives at the hands of its original owner.

  “It dates back to the time of the great Masamune,” shop proprietor Levander Levy continued, “and it’s signed by a sword maker my historical records indicate was one of the master’s actual disciples.”

  McCracken held the sword by its plain wooden handle that someday would be replaced by one fashioned of ivory and shark skin perfectly sized and fitted to its new owner’s hands. Twenty-eight deadly inches and yet it felt feather light in his grasp. Its balance was exquisite, indicative of a truly master sword maker indeed.

  “What do you think it’s worth?” McCracken asked.

  At just over six feet tall, he towered over the diminutive Levy who bore a passing and unfortunate resemblance to the classic actor Peter Lorre. The shop, more of a museum-quality resale store, was located in the Garden District of New Orleans just off the main drag on a side street that sloped slightly upward. McCracken had known “Sir” Levander for any number of years and had serious doubts that he was a “sir” at all, or even a Brit for that matter. That, though, hardly detracted from the quality of the merchandise he’d obtained over the years to add to McCracken’s impressive collection of weapons always restored to full working order.

  “Worth?” the portly, flabby-cheeked Levy asked, smoothing some stray hair that looked painted onto his scalp back into place. “Impossible to say. I can’t even estimate it.”

  “If you’re trying to drive the price up, Lee, you’ve done it.”

  Levy looked honestly hurt. “This is my gift to you, my friend, on the occasion of such a momentous birthday.”

  McCracken wished he could feel happier about that, but even holding such a wondrous gift did little to brighten his mood. The shelves around him were lined with all sorts of historical artifacts, each and every one genuine. Levy seemed to specialize in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his tastes as well as his inventory ran the gamut from women’s jewelry to first-edition novels by the likes of Thackeray and Eliot, to collectible pieces produced by the finest craftsmen of their time. It left McCracken wondering how Levy’s small shop managed to thrive among tourists and revelers who came to New Orleans for different reasons entirely. But he guessed it was supported almost exclusively by private collectors like himself who dabbled in antiquities and maintained an appreciation for historical beauty.

  “It’s too much,” he said, returning the blade to its rectangular wooden saya fitted to its precise specification and handed it back across the counter. “I can’t accept it.”

  Levy took the sword reluctantly, looking even more hurt. “After all you’ve done for me . . .”

  “That was a long time ago, Lee.”

  “You saved my life. A man tends not to forget such things. You want to speak of gifts? Put a price tag on that one.”

  “It’s what I do, Lee. I never expected anything in return.”

  “Nor did you ask for it. Yet I have waited all these years for just a occasion like this to repay at least a measure of my debt to you.” With that he extended the sword back across the counter. “Please, my friend, I beg you.”

  “Well, since you put it that way.”

  Ever since McCracken had saved Levy from modern-day Turkish pirates who promised to kill him if he did not begin moving merchandise on their behalf, the trusty Brit had served as a wonderful source for all things pertaining to weaponry. And not just from a historical perspective either; Levander Levy was also a creative and masterful craftsman in his own right, capable of devising virtually anything McCracken requested made to his precise specifications. That relationship had led Levy to seek McCracken’s help after the Turks threatened Levy’s family as well, promising to kill his relatives in chronological order starting with the youngest. In response, McCracken and Johnny Wareagle had blown up four of the pirates’ boats and left a note on the fifth that blood would follow the flames if Levander Levy wasn’t left alone. The pirates never bothered him again.

  The little man was smiling behind the counter. “So glad you’ve come to your senses, my friend.”

  “I’m gaining a new appreciation for relics,” McCracken told him. “You know, things that are better fit for the past.”

  Levy glanced at the samurai sword in McCracken’s grasp. “My good friend, just because something’s old doesn’t mean it can’t still be functional, especially when meticulously restored to its original condition.”

  McCracken held his stare on his old friend. “On the surface, you mean.”

  “On the contrary, this sword is as sharp and sure as the first time it was wielded.”

  “If only the same could be said for flesh and blood, Lee.”

  CHAPTER 11

  New Orleans

  Katie DeMarco had clung to cover provided by the cargo pods, ships, and storage hangars at the Port of New Orleans until there was no sign of the men who’d been waiting when the supply ship returned from the Deepwater Venture that morning. She evaded them initially by exiting the ship behind a rolling pallet packed with shipping crates. She took solace only in the fact that at such an early hour it was doubtful her absence from the rig had been noted yet, meaning these were strictly precautionary steps. Men lying in wait for her expected flight, now that the ruse was up. A two-mile-long quay squeezed between Henry Clay Avenue and the Milan Street terminals offered plenty of concealment from the building heat as well, but fleeing the area before her absence from the Venture was noted remained her primary goal. Her jeans felt damp and sticky, and perspiration born of the unusual spring humidity glued her T-shirt to her back, while droplets soaked through the front in now widening splotches.

  Katie had been aboard the rig for three weeks in the carefully scripted guise of administrative assistant to the operations manager. Yesterday, she’d intercepted a confidential e-mail to his second in command, the rawboned Paul Basmajian, with instructions to detain her; further information to be forthcoming.

  Further information . . .

  Such information, no doubt, would include a security team dispatched by Ocean Bore to take her into custody. She didn’t expect the company to involve the traditional authorities, at least not until ascertaining exactly what she knew about the Venture’s strange, if not inexplicable, mission in the Gulf.

  Katie had seen the correspondenc
e from Basmajian to Operations requesting clarification about the results of a series of geophysical surveys. If Basmajian’s e-mails were to be believed, there was little or no chance of striking oil where the Venture had been ordered to drill. Which made no sense and left her wondering if she’d stumbled upon something entirely different from what she’d been expecting upon infiltrating the rig.

  Katie was part of the environmental activist group WorldSafe, the group’s specialty being to plant environmentalists like her in settings where they could get a firsthand look at how business was conducted in ways that continued to ravage the environment. Her assignment on board the Deepwater Venture had started out as routine, but that had changed the moment she’d read Basmajian’s series of e-mails demanding an explanation from Ocean Bore headquarters that never came. Cell phones had been strictly prohibited on board the Venture, leaving her with no way right now to contact WorldSafe’s leader, Todd Lipton, at the group’s remote location in Greenland.

  Katie DeMarco wasn’t her real name, of course, and she couldn’t remember now exactly why she’d chosen it. She’d thought about Katie “Black,” because of the color of the hair that tumbled past her shoulders. Or Katie “Gray,” because of the unusual shade of her eyes. “DeMarco,” though, had seemed both generic and somehow romantic at the same time, so she’d gone with that.

  Among other attributes, the Port of New Orleans was the nation’s premier coffee-handling port with fourteen warehouses and more than five and a half million square feet of storage space. Katie was making her way to that area when she noticed additional teams of uniformed harbor police scouring the docks and pier. Reinforcements, apparently, that could waylay her plans for flight for good.