Read Online Reckoning by Ian Barclay - Free Book Online

helicopters picked up and delivered freight
     and passengers. While the big Chinooks flew the long distance from Aberdeen to Brent, and medium-sized Sikorksys flew from
     the nearer Shetlands, small Bell 212s were used for rig hopping.
    The flotel had four stories—three of them used for accommodating in excess of five hundred men in two-and four-berth cabins.
     There was a mess hall, a coffee shop, two TV rooms, a cinema, a gym, offices, engineer workshops, a radio room and a captain’s
     bridge. Yet the flotel was dwarfed by Brent Delta, which was designed to withstand one-hundred-foot waves and winds of 160
     miles per hour.
    The tallest of the installations rose a thousand feet from the seabed to the gas flare at the top of the derrick, which made
     them about the same height as the Eiffel Tower. The water at Brent was about 450 feet deep, and the derricks rose about 300
     feet above the water surface, giving them a total height of 750 feet.
    Even after days out here, Richard Dartley was still impressed by the monumental scale of everything. Even so, he could see
     that it was not all that different from a farmer sinking a well shaft for water back of his farmhouse. A lot of backbreaking
     labor went into the manhandling of pipes, fittings, drill bits and so forth. Steel parts rusted and seized, shafts broke,
     men made mistakes. There was nothing “high tech” about this side of the work.
    While Dartley waited for Avedesian to finish some work before they took a chopper to Brent Alpha—they were traveling in the
     same craft—he watched one of the flotel cranes unload a supply vessel. The sea was not very rough, but obviously the ship’s
     helmsman was having a problem keeping the vessel close enough to the installation to allow containers to be lifted off without
     hitting the hull against it. The crane operator was having a difficult problem. One moment the deck was rising fast on a surge,
     the next moment it was dropping twenty or thirty feet, leaving the crane hook dangling far above it. The ship’s crewmen ran
     about like crazy to attach the crane hook to a container during the few seconds while this was possible, then got the hell
     fast out of the way before the heavy container became airborne.
    When Avedesian appeared, both men climbed the metal stairs to one of the helidecks. The wind was lifting white froth from
     the tops of the waves, and a few scattered clouds moved quickly across the blue sky. Thesun wasn’t hot enough to warm them, but at least it was there.
    “Weather don’t get much better than this,” a helideck crewman told them. “If you ever saw a whole week like this, you’d say
     you had a nice summer.”
    They could see for miles in all directions. The tall spindly shapes of installations poked high out of the sea all around
     them. Some, with the flat tops, looked like distant aircraft carriers.
    The crewman named some of them. “That’s Shell-Esso’s Cormorant North, with Dunlin behind it. There’s Conoco’s Murchison and
     Britoil’s Thistle. Those two belong to the Norwegians, and these three over here are on Chevron’s Ninian field.” He adjusted
     his hard hat and fixed his headphones over his ears as a Bell 212 approached for a landing.
    Dartley, Avedesian and two other men watched the helideck crewmen unload the passengers and freight after the chopper landed.
     Then they were beckoned to, pushed inside and the doors were secured. They felt a heave in their stomachs as they lifted fast
     and saw the flotel shrink beneath them.
    Dockrell watched Avedesian and three men board the chopper and leave the flotel. Avedesian was on one of his short hops to
     other installations. One of the three men with him was American also, an efficiency expert named Hank Washington. Dockrell
     didn’t like the look of him and had taken care to keep his distance from him, as he had from Avedesian. Washington seemed
     tohave the same kind of clearance to go anywhere that Avedesian had.