Three Moments of an Explosion (39 page)

On an autumn evening in the earlyish years of the twenty-first century, a fishing boat southeast of Halifax radioed an SOS, under attack—the transmission was unclear. Rescuers found two traumatized survivors in a wash of scattered debris. As they did, the cause of the catastrophe reached the coast. Authorities could not suppress civilian footage of what had come back.

It was the Rowan Gorilla I. That was the first. No Piper Alpha, no Deepwater Horizon; an undistinguished disaster. A tripod jack-up rig lost to storms and hull-fracture in 1988, on its way to the North Sea. Scattered surely by its capsizing and by thirty years below but there, back. Cramped-looking for all of its enormity, latticed legs braced halfway through its platform, jutting above it and below into the sea. In the videos the three skyward leg-halves switch and lean creaking towards each other, sway away again like cranes triple-knitting, as it walks the muck on spudcan feet. It staggered like a crippled Martian out of the water and onto Canada.

It shook the coast with its steps. It walked through buildings, swatted trucks then tanks out of its way with ripped cables and pipes that flailed in inefficient deadly motion, like ill-trained snakes, like too-heavy feeding tentacles. It reached with corroded chains, wrenched obstacles from the earth. It dripped seawater, chemicals of industrial ruin and long-hoarded oil.

Ten miles inland, a line of artillery blew the thing apart. Later they made that area a memorial park. Sections of the rig’s deck they left unsalvaged, preserved amid flower beds.

By panics and fuckups, Dughan’s unit had been trapped on the far side of the wounded platform, between the Rowan Gorilla I, they later realized, and the sea. A third of his comrades had been killed. Crushed, torn by wires, caught in its final explosion, bequeathing him years of dreams and memories of trodden men.

The world was still reeling, investigation barely begun, when the Ocean Express, capsized in 1976 with thirteen dead, which must have been quietly recomposing itself at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, stood upright in relatively shallow water and strode landward.

Fighter jets scrambled from Eglin inflicted severe damage, slowed it, and the
USS Carney
torpedoed one of its supports. The rig buckled, tilted and seemed to wait kneeling like a bettered knight. The
Carney
had shelled it apart.

Dughan saw this from the
Carney
’s deck. He and several comrades had been flown in as advisors to the U.S. Navy. He was a combatant himself again soon enough, at the return of the Key Biscayne off Australia, and the fire-mottled Sea Quest’s attempt to walk into Nigeria.

National governments subcontracted strategy to the UN Platform Event Repulsion Unit: scientists, engineers, theologians and exorcists, soldiers, veterans like Dughan of those first encounters. He learned the new motions, the vastly swaying skittishness and violence of the revenant rigs. His UNPERU colleagues strove to decode this hydrocarbon Ragnarok. Twice, Dughan boarded pitching, stinking decks to transmit to them close-up footage, from which they learned nothing. They tried to figure out what economies of sacrifice were being invoked, for what this was punishment. Ruined, lost, burnt, scuttled rigs were healing on the ocean floor and coming back. Platform, jack-up, semi-submersible: all the lost.

After the semi-sub Sea Quest retreated under heavy attack, descending back into the Gulf of Guinea, UNPERU turned its attention and resources to the Ocean Ranger, stalking the Atlantic seabed. So when, shortly after its brief first appearance, the Sea Quest reemerged, and continued its interrupted journey into the oil-fouled delta, they were not there to intercept. Word reached Dughan and his crew en route to Canada. They came back fast, turning their plane in midair.

They were escorted inland by ex-M.E.N.D. guerrillas with peerless local savvy, hastily pardoned by the Nigerian government. They followed the oil rig’s mashed-up trail, the rainbow-filmed liquid spoor, the tripod crater prints. In retrospect, certain qualities of the disturbed interior foreshadowed more dramatic instabilities that later petrospectral presences would bring.

Bursts from the derrick known to have been destroyed in the rig’s last moments, now heat-twisted but regrown, flared above the forest. The soldiers reached the edge of the clearing the Sea Quest had stamped. They held fire and watched.

Bracing on struts still thick with coralline outgrowths, the Sea Quest settled into the mud. It started its drill. Pushed it into the ground and down.

For a long time it was still but for an occasional swaying tremble of some stuff low-hanging from it. Should we attack? officers kept asking. Dughan shook his head. He checked Unit Beta’s images, the Ocean Ranger off the Labrador coast, the tip of its tower a dorsal fin. The stomach-dropping video was proof for which no one had known they were waiting: that below the waves the rigs also walked.

High overhead the Sea Quest’s flame was all but out: a dirty smoke plume took its place as cockscomb. “It’s drinking,” one of the soldiers had said to the shake of its pumps. After four hours Dughan sent out a team, joined them when the rig did not respond. Another four and they went closer still. Eleven hours after the drilling had started, the tower breathed fire again and shook and abruptly pulled its drill from the mud.

The birds that had settled to peck at its deepwater carrion were gone in one cloud. The soldiers made it back to the treeline. The Sea Quest rose on shaft-legs like some impossible dreaming pachyderm. It retraced its stamping passage, trees in its shadow.

The UNPERU team followed. They tried to keep locals away. They were the oil rig’s escorts, back to the sea. The platform walked slowly into the water, paused a while in the chop, descended.

A clutch of dead trees jutted from the scrub like bleached markers of where Covehithe ended. A ribbon of crabgrass separated the sea and shore from Benacre Broad. A cold marsh, a roosting place for birds. The Petrobras approached.

Dughan hesitated and his daughter saw him do so. He wanted to go closer, but there was not enough cover.

The rig. It closed on her and she stopped breathing. It came near enough that she felt the envelope of cold air it brought, smelled abyssal rot and chemical cracking. Spray hit her. The weary factory’s spray. It giant-walked by her hiding place sending all those Suffolk birds away, hauled into the fens to squat like a monument that had always been there.

It braced. A percussion of chains, the crack of old shells, and its drill descended.

The first platforms had returned close to where they went down. But then Interocean II had emerged not in the North Sea but in the harbor of a hastily evacuated Oporto, stepped daintily over the seawall like someone crossing a stile. Sedco 135F rose in the Galapagos, far from the Bay of Campeche. The many-legged barge Ocean Prince came up not in Dogger Bank but Sardinia. Revisitors might come, drill, go back to the water, even come up again, anywhere.

Dughan’s daughter had got away from him, got closer to the visitor. Had he not noticed her go? Before he knew it, he might have said, she was gone. It might be true. She was pressed against one of the dead trees. Beyond her was Petrobras, like a failed city block. Dughan whispered her name. She watched the dead and come-back rig boring.

He went to her, of course. Exhilarating to exit the cover. He was quickly there, looking with her through barkless branches.

The platform was calm, its fire low. It shivered, only, tinily, all its thousands of tons. Ripples passed over the wetland, not outward but in, circles decreasing, shrinking to that point where the shaft entered the ground.

They watched. After many seconds, Dughan felt something pressed to his back. He had long enough before anyone spoke to be surprised that whoever this was had got so close without him hearing. He blamed the reek and weird industry he was watching.

A voice said: “You move and I’ll fucking kill you.”

When the lost rigs of the world came back, old hands claimed they had seen in the motion of the drills something reversed. Dughan doubted it: shuddering was shuddering. But most of the places where the rigs went there were no oil fields. It might have been that they were sniffing other things than oil to sustain them, but that was not so.

“Turn around,” the voice said. The uniformed man who faced them was young and afraid. With a weapon pointed at him, old techniques, muscle memory came back and twitched Dughan’s fingers, but he stayed still.

The man scanned them. No RPGs, no mortars, not even smaller arms. They were not oleophobe fanatics here to attack the Petrobras, nor Oil Firsters, here to kill him, his colleagues and all those who came to investigate or exploit, in their parlance, the visitations.

“Who the fuck are you?” The guard glanced over their heads at the shuffling rig. He was whispering, though Dughan knew it would make little difference now.

“We’re just here to watch,” the girl said gently. She was taking care of him. “My dad brought me here to watch is all. Just to see it.”

The guard searched them, cack-handedly. Dughan silently counted the times he could have disarmed him. The man found only binoculars, torch, and cameras. He frowned at their pictures of Suffolk, of Punch-and-Judy shows, of roadside oddities. No contraband sights. “Jesus!” he said. “Move, then.”

Behind them the rig shifted and he cringed at the great squelch. “What are you even doing?” he said when they had retreated to the living trees. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?”

“I’m sorry, it was me,” she said. “I just really wanted to see it up close and I begged him. I’m really sorry.”

The man wiped his forehead. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Last time there was one of them here, down by Camber Sands?” The Adriatic IV. Dughan didn’t say it. “There was a couple of young lads got in. Got past us. I shouldn’t tell you. They were larking about. Taking pictures and that. Anyway, you know what happened? They had a dog with them and it got too close, and it spooked the rig and it moved. Midway through.” He waved through the copse. “It trod on the dog.”

Dughan looked back up at the Petrobras’s subdued high burning.

“Now come on.” The guard beckoned. “Let’s get back.”

When their feet hit the beach sand, the girl said to him, “How long’ll it be?” Just close enough to the inlet and troughs gouged by the rig’s passing to afford a sightline into the broads, headlights flashed. The jeeps were visible a moment, and people.

“It’ll be there half a day at least,” the man said. “And it’s a few months later it’ll all kick off.” He even smiled.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t know, you might probably be a bit old for it but there’s like a kid’s club they have here. They have activities and that.”

“You saw some once, didn’t you, Dad?” Dughan was not angry when she said that. He marveled, really, at her.

All its research notwithstanding, UNPERU expressed as much shock as the rest of the world when, over a year after the Ocean Ranger’s visit, up from the still-recovering Newfoundland ground into which it had pushed its drill, the first clutch of newly-hatched oil rigs had unburied themselves.

They had emerged into the night, shaking off earth. Stood quivering on stiffening metal or cement legs. Tilted tiny helipads. Tottered finally for the sea.

“How big are they, Dad?” she said.

“You’ve seen films,” he said. “As big as me.”

Dughan had gone back to Nigeria. He had waited for months, on the vagaries of gestation. At last the monitors in the delta picked up evidence of subterranean shifts. Over many hours, long before dawn, he had watched unsteady six-foot riglets burrow up out of the forest dirt. Seven of them, of all different designs: buildings, supports, struts, derricks. They waited, swaying like new calves, still wet from their tarry sacs, swinging umbrella-sized cranes.

He helped to capture two, and to usher the rest safely to the water, where the baby rigs had been tagged and released to scuttle below the waves, escorted by divers as far down as the divers could go. The two captives were taken to hangars where great tanks of brine waited. But they sickened within days and died, and fell apart into scrap and rubble.

The Oporto authorities pumped poisons into the university grounds where the Interocean II had drilled and left the earth slick and soupy. Whether that was what kept its brood from being born was never clear: those eggs were not recovered. In other coastal cities, neonate oil platforms did emerge, to gallop hectic and nervy through the streets, spreading panic.

Only the most violent post-return decommissioning could stop all this, only second deaths, from which the rigs did not come back again, kept them from where they wished to go, to drill. Once chosen, a place might be visited by any one of the wild rigs that walked out of the abyss. As if such locations had been decided collectively. UNPERU observed the nesting sites, more all the time, and kept track of the rigs themselves as best they could, of their behemoth grazing or wandering at the bottom of the world.

“What activities do they do in this club?” the girl said.

“Oh.” The guard shrugged. “Stuff like, you can see the eggs on a live feed. They’ll be digging down to them and they’ll put cameras and thermometers and whatever. Sometimes you can even see movement through the shells. And there’s coloring books and games and that.” He smiled again. “Like I say, it’s too young for you.”

They laid eggs, so, many people said, they must have sex. There was no logic there. They were oil rigs. Dughan thought the belief exoneration of the strange prurience that endlessly turned on monoliths rutting miles down. An inhuman pornography of great slams and grinding, horrified whales veering from where one rig mounted another, warmed by hydrothermal vents.

“And no one knows what happens to the young, do they, Dad?”

Other guards came to meet them. Half-welcoming, half-peremptory. Dughan recognized none. Behind the security were the few tourists lucky to have been nearby, at accredited hotels, when Petrobras’s heavy steps had registered on the scanners.

“No one knows yet,” Dughan said to his daughter. “They’re still very young. They’re little and the sea’s very big. They’ve got a lot of growing to do.”