Sea of Greed

Kurt looked toward Cox. “Maybe you should tell them.”

Cox stood and cleared his throat. “There isn’t any oil coming to the surface.”

Alcott looked shocked. Even Rudi tilted his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

“No oil?”

“Just flammable gas,” Cox said.

“They can still snap onto the outlying wellheads and draw some of that gas up, even if they simply flare it off.”

“It’s not natural gas,” Kurt said. “Nor is it methane or any other type of hydrocarbon that I’ve ever seen. It’s reacting with the water. Burning on its way up. Dousing it spreads and thins it but does nothing to extinguish it.”

Alcott sat back, looking flummoxed. “That makes no sense. I’ve never heard of a gas that burns while submerged in water.”

“Neither have we,” Kurt replied. “So, I spoke with Paul Trout, our chief geologist. He suggested two possibilities. Either the ruptures are venting oxygen vapor along with the hydrocarbons or we’re dealing with a previously undiscovered compound. All we can be sure of is that the gas is hydrophoric, meaning the fumes ignite spontaneously when they make contact with the water.”

“Makes it even harder to imagine towing the rigs to safety,” Rudi said.

Kurt nodded. “We’ll work on it and let you know.”

Rudi and Alcott signed off and Kurt glanced at Brooks. “Let’s see what we’re up against.”

He walked over to the fish tank and turned it on. The lights in the room dimmed as the hologram came to life. The seabed appeared first — depicted in olive green — then orange lines crisscrossing revealed the locations of the submerged pipelines. Finally, vertical red lines appeared, representing thousand-foot lengths of pipe string, which led up from the seafloor toward icons representing the oil platforms at the surface.

“Let me add the fires,” Kurt said.

He tapped a few more keys and soon columns of purple and white could been seen traveling vertically from breaks in the orange pipes. They spread out as they rose upward and bloomed on the surface like giant, deadly flowers.

“Each fire is coming from a different pipeline,” he said, looking at Cox. “The main fire is here, venting upward through the wellhead you and your crew drilled. It’s hitting the surface directly under what’s left of the Alpha Star.”

The three-dimensional image showed the Alpha Star engulfed in purple.

Kurt turned the image slightly and it was easy to see that the other platforms were ringed with fire and getting toasted from the outside but not sitting directly over the flames.

Cox moved closer and squinted into the projection chamber. His bloodshot eyes were wide. “We use a lot of high-tech junk when we’re looking for oil, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

He scratched his head and studied what he was looking at. No one knew what lay below the rigs better than him. “Those other fires are coming from the field collection lines,” he said, pointing to small sections of the orange pipe. “There’s no way to shut them off, they lead directly to the main well.”

Joe leaned closer. He was an engineer. He’d built submersibles and subsurface aquatic habitats and had even worked on an oil rig in his youth. He pointed to an area where the orange pipes merged. “If we closed the transfer valves here, that would block the flow of gas to the fires near the other rigs.”

“In theory,” Cox said. “But the controls to operate those valves were on the Alpha Star.”

“Can we do it in person?” Joe asked.

Cox shook his head and all four men went back to studying the fish tank. Finally, Kurt had an idea. “We can’t put the fires out and we can’t move the rigs, but what if we move the fires?”

Cox looked Kurt’s way. “How, exactly, does one move a fire?”

Kurt pointed out the largest pipe that was still intact. It led back to a spot directly beneath the burning wreckage of the Alpha Star. “If we cut the pipe here, the gas that’s venting near the other rigs will escape here instead of at the other ruptures. What’s left of the Alpha Star will take the full brunt of the fire, but the rest of the inferno should die on the vine. With the other two platforms free of the flames, you can tow them out and they should end up no worse than blackened Cajun chicken.”

Cox leaned closer, studying the arrangement, and then walked around to the far side so he could see it from the reverse angle. There, he dropped down and gazed into the fish tank like he was staring at lost treasure.

“Sacrifice the ruined platform to save the others?” he said. “I could sign off on that. But if this gas does what you say it does — if it detonates the instant it contacts the water — then you’re going to get an enormous blast when you cut into that pipe. Knowing what it did to our rig, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that line when it goes.”

Kurt nodded. “Then we’ll use explosives and blow it remotely.”

9

NUMA VESSEL RALEIGH