“Can you remember what you might have ingested?” Berkley asked him. “They drugged my rum one night.”
“I don’t really drink alcohol,” Lionel stated.
“Any idea otherwise how you might have ended up drugged?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve racked my brain about it, but I don’t know.”
“Your brother is still here,” Berkley said. “You know that, right?”
“I really wanted to tell him,” he said. “I’ve been worried about explaining this to him, but then I didn’t have the guts to.”
“I get it,” Troy said. They stared out over the oceans as the sun rose. It was still stormy and ugly outside, but a little bit more daylight was breaking through.
“Can we get off the rig today?” she asked.
“I hope so,” Troy said. “I presume you’re done with wanting to stay.”
“I’m very done,” she said, in a quiet voice. “I won’t be coming back here again.”
“No, this culture is not good for anybody,” he said.
“I know,” she whispered. “But we still haven’t found who’s behind all this.”
Just then Mason and Nelson walked in.
“So, what the hell’s going on?” she asked Mason, hopping to her feet.
He studied her face for a long moment. “Well, we appear to have brought something to light,” he said, “but you won’t want to hear it.”
“If you’re telling us about Lionel here,” she said, stepping back so they could see Lionel, “and that I was on the calendar as being the next victim for their nasty pay-to-play events, I already know.”
He nodded. “Glad I didn’t have to tell you that,” he said in a clipped voice. “Chucky and Winslow are up, and they’ll join us here,” he said. “I stopped in to talk to Denny, and he’s on his way back here too.”
“What about the others?” Troy said.
“Well, Bruce, as we know, is dead, so we need Jonesy and Idiot to join everybody too,” Axel said.
“Right,” she said. “Well, Jonesy is a little worse for wear, after Troy beat the crap out of him. What’s up with the pilot?”
“He’s fine. He’s staying with our men.”
“And Daniel, the foreman?” she asked.
“Right, that’s who I was looking for. Where is his room?” Mason asked.
Lionel gave it to him. Then added, “But he’s in my room.”
“We’ll go wake him up,” Mason said.
“What about the company man, Gregor?” Troy asked.
“Yeah, we knocked on his door earlier,” he said. “If he’s not up, we’ll rap on it again, after we wake up Daniel.” Mason and Nelson both left.
“I’ll put on more coffee,” Berkley said.
Troy got up to walk over and check on her. “Are you okay?”
She looked at him and gave him a dark look. “Just rattled. It’s a little hard to realize that you’ve been targeted, and they had you on a calendar, scheduled for that kind of abuse,” she said. “It’s pretty upsetting.”
“It is,” he said, as he helped her put on another pot. “It could get really ugly coming up. You know that, right?”
“Uglier?” she asked, skeptical. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Yes,” he said, “it actually could.”
She shrugged. “If you say so.”
Just then several more blasts came, and the four of them stared at each other in shock. Troy and Axel were at the door instantly. Berkley went back to Lionel and waved at them. “Go, go, go.”
Troy hesitated, then shook his head. “We stay together. Both of you come on.”
Lionel looked at him. “Leave me here,” he said, his voice broken. “Maybe they’ll blast me into the ocean too.”
Troy wasn’t having anything to do with that, and he grabbed one of Berkley’s hands and one of Lionel’s arms and hauled them down and outside.
They could hear creaking steel and metal as the rig suffered.
“I don’t think any of us are intended to get off this rig alive,” she cried out.
“It’ll be fine,” Troy said. “We have a navy ship close at hand,” he said, “so we’ve got a way off. But I want to make sure that whoever is here has another way to get themselves off too. We can take everybody, but we need to all be in one place.”
As he spoke, another huge crash came, and one part of the rig started to collapse. She screamed as Troy pulled the three of them underneath the shelter, as the steel railing from above came down.
“We didn’t get up to check the top of the rig, did we?” Berkley asked.
“No,” he said. “It probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, because whoever did this has been working all night to get around us.”
“One guy can get around pretty hidden from sight in this rig,” Lionel said, but his voice was faint, and he looked terrified.
“What about the helicopter?” she asked.
Troy nodded. “We’ll take you both up there right now.”
They headed toward the chopper. As they got up there, Chucky and Winslow were already there, waiting. They looked relieved when they saw them.
“Please tell me that you’ve got a pilot for this bird.”
“Not at the moment, but we will have,” Troy said. “We’re getting everybody up here. I’m not sure what’s going on, but everybody needs to be evacuated.”
Just then another blast rumbled throughout the rig, and the part they stood on listed and dropped about six inches.
Chapter 15
Berkley screamed and hung on to the railing.
Troy looked at Winslow and Chucky. “You two keep these two here and stay together. I have to go help the others.”
The two men nodded, grim but determined, as they reached out and grabbed hold of Lionel.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Lionel asked.
“We suspected something,” he said, “but, no, we didn’t know. We would have stopped it if we’d known for sure, and we just found out a couple days ago.”
“Just before the first blast?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, somebody was posting pictures, and we accidentally saw them.”
“Jesus,” she swore, feeling sick.
Chucky looked at Lionel. “We’re so sorry.”
“Yeah, I am too,” Lionel said. “This isn’t exactly something that you walk away from.”
“No, it isn’t.”
The wind picked up just then, carrying everybody’s words away. They clung to each other beside the helicopter, which was still strapped down, as more blasts continued to erupt around them.
“This whole place will go down,” she screamed.
Chucky nodded. “It will.” He looked over at Winslow. “How is your helicopter flying?”
“Hell no,” he said, “I can’t stand to fly anyway. I do it under duress only.”
The two men looked at Lionel and Berkley. “Either of you know how to fly?”