Power Down by Ben Coes

ST. MARTIN’S PRESS M NEW YORK

BEN COES

POWER DOWN

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Behold, I have refi ned thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affl iction.

—ISAIAH 48:10

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CAPITANA TERRITORYPACIFIC OCEANAT 290 MILES OFF THE COAST OF COLOMBIA

A hundred miles above the equator, a day’s trip by boat from the near-est land, in a place where ocean currents collide beneath a vast horizon of black water and starry sky, a 1,500- foot double fl ame helix smoldered furiously from the cap end of an alloy gas fountain.

It was midnight. The fl ames could be seen for miles in all directions, interrupting the desolate waters in spectacular orange and black clouds. Though the billowing smoke and fi re had the appearance of chaos, they were in fact controlled blazes created by the western hemi sphere’s largest offshore oil platform, burning off the lighter layer of natural gas that fl oated like helium above the denser, more valuable petroleum that the $8 billion rig had been built to extract.

This was Capitana Territory, the largest oil strike ever outside of the Arabian Peninsula, a 68 billion barrel reservoir— a “megagiant” in oil-man’s terms— beneath a section of seabed off the western coast of South America. It was discovered less than a de cade before by a medium- sized Texas oil company called Anson Energy, now a juggernaut even among the largest energy companies in America.

A tall bearded man with the name andreas stitched to his denim

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shirt observed the fl ame stacks from the steel deck below. His brown hair was long, tousled, and hadn’t seen shampoo for days. Startling blue eyes and a sharp, tanned nose pierced out from behind a mess of mus-tache and overgrown beard. This was a handsome man who didn’t care what he looked like, or what his crew thought. He fi nished a cigarette and fl icked it down into the dark ocean below the platform.

If this had been a paper mill in the forests of Maine, Dewey Andreas would have been called plant manager. At a steel mill in Pennsylvania, he’d have been called gang boss. But this was an offshore oil rig, and the four hundred and twenty roughnecks who lived and worked here around the clock, faces and clothing layered in grease, salt, sweat, and oil, called Dewey gang chief. Or simply “Chief.”

Most of the roughnecks on Capitana didn’t like Dewey Andreas, but they all respected him. On the rig his word was law. Dewey had gotten his oil- drilling education in northern Eu rope, on the rickety, death- defying derricks off the bitter cold North Sea shelf. He ran Capitana like a U.S. Marine col o nel runs a battalion during war time, with un-compromising discipline, rapid- fi re decisiveness, and absolute auton-omy. Dewey’s eyes told his men that he wasn’t about to put up with shit from anyone. He backed up that look with a pair of massive arms, muscled from years of hard platform work, buoyed by a pair of fi sts that were ready and willing to be put to use in the constant challenge every gang chief on every offshore oil rig in the world faces: keeping the ani-mals at bay.

Dewey didn’t tolerate weakness, imperfection, laziness, or insubor-dination. If you crossed him, you could expect to pay for it with your job, or worse. Rumors circulated among the men about Dewey’s capac-ity for brutality and violence. Still, the pay was extraordinary for the uneducated collection of ruffi ans who worked Capitana Territory.

The platform Dewey stood on was the central superstructure for all of the territory. The facility itself was a massive industrial city of pipes, metal, ladders, and controlled fl ame stacks that rose on thick steel stilts out of the dark waters of the Pacifi c Ocean like a centaur.

In the distance, a series of more than thirty smaller, unmanned ten-sion leg platforms dotted the landscape. These “mini- TLPs” fed into


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the central Capitana facility and helped create a steady gusher of oil ready for transport to refi neries throughout North America. Capitana was the central juncture in a spiderlike network of pipes that lay across more than a hundred and forty square miles of seabed some six hun-dred feet below the ocean’s surface. More than two thousand insertion pipes spread out across the dark and cold seabed below. It was through these pipes that a crude, dense, and im mensely valuable mixture of natural gas and oil bubbled up and coursed into the central pumping station beneath Capitana, where it was separated, then pushed up-ward to the surface.

Capitana’s interweaving pipes, fl are booms, and steel decking looked like a monstrous erector set. The fl ames never ceased. Yet Dewey found something peaceful in the dense orange inferno. The fl ames told Dewey that his rig was performing.

He walked to the marine deck and stared at the fl ame stacks one last time before heading inside to his offi ce. He was tired but wanted to look at throughput reports before they were sent off to corporate headquar-ters in Dallas. These monthly reports tracked the volume of oil pulsing out of the Capitana reservoir.

The November throughput report for Capitana Territory showed why the fi eld was so critical. In the thirty- day November cycle, Capitana had produced 54.6 million barrels of oil. This meant annual throughput of approximately 650 million barrels. The average per barrel extraction- to- market expense was $19 for other oil companies. Dewey’s men could do it for $11— an $8- per- barrel cost savings. That $8 along with oil prices averaging $55 per barrel meant net profi ts of more than $7 billion from Capitana Territory this year. That $8 bought Dewey a lot of leeway in the way he was allowed to run his rig.

It was past midnight. Dewey watched as the confi rmation ticker from the fax came through, indicating that his reports had made it to Anson headquarters in Dallas, landing on the desk of a man he’d never met named McCormick.

He reached behind him and took a book off the shelf, a thick, hard-cover edition of Moby- Dick that he kept with him. He’d never actually read it, but he kept it with him because behind it he could hide a bottle


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of Jack Daniel’s. He unscrewed the cap and took a large gulp. In a

minute or two, he thought, he would head to his adjoining cabin for the

night.

On the shelf below, a small wooden frame held a grainy black- and- white photograph. He hadn’t looked at the photo in a long time. He glanced at it, looked away, then took another large swig from the bottle. Slowly and against his better judgment, he picked up the photograph and put the whiskey down.

Holding the frame in his left hand, he wiped the dust away from the glass with his right elbow. The photo showed a much younger Dewey with a pretty blond- haired woman and a young boy. Behind them, a large, ornate sign read disneyland. A statue of Mickey Mouse stood to the side. The boy sat on Dewey’s lap, a big smile on his freckled face. The edges of his mouth were decorated with the remnants of a choco-late ice- cream cone.

Dewey had a military uniform on, his Ranger tab visible on his shoul-der, white thread around its edges, before he’d been asked to try out for Delta. His hair was cut short, his large arm wrapped around his young wife. She looked tiny against him; protected, beautiful, and happy.

Dewey didn’t like to think about his past. Most of the time he didn’t have to. He went about his work and when thoughts of his old life crept in he simply worked himself and his men harder. More than a de cade had passed since it all ended, and he’d spent those years working as hard as he could physically to escape what haunted him mentally. The sight of his old uniform always jolted him, a combination of intense pride and deep hatred, hatred for what they’d done to him, the crimes he’d been falsely accused of, and for the small- minded people who’d driven him from Delta, from the armed forces, from the country he loved. He’d learned to blot it out, to erase the memories, the history, everything, from his mind.

Oil had been his savior; oil and the anonymous, brutal Darwinism that was the life of a platform man.

He took his big, callused right index fi nger and rubbed it across the small black- and- white face of the boy in the photograph. He held the frame close to his face, a couple of inches from his nose. Robbie was


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so young then. He was so perfect. He loved Robbie like he’d never loved anything in his life. He thought of how he used to hold his young son, with the boy’s head on his arm and his legs in his hands. Dewey closed his eyes. He could almost feel Robbie there with him.

With his other hand, he picked up the bottle and took another swig, then put it down. He walked to the other side of the small offi ce. He placed the bottle on the desk and sat down in the metal chair. In front of him, he held the photo, staring. A gentle smile, the fi rst in a long time, creased the edges of his mouth as he looked at the grainy photo of what was once his family. He closed his eyes one more time and tried to remember. It had been so long; the memories were harder and harder to fi nd.

A sudden noise came from the deck. Shouting. He stood up, walked down the corridor to the deck, and opened the large steel door that led to the outdoors.

On the deck, men were gathering quickly. In the middle of the crowd, two roughnecks were squared off against each other. The fi ght had already begun. The crowd around the edge of the fi ght numbered more than twenty and was growing, the yelling getting louder as the roughnecks egged the fi ghters on. One of the men in the fi ght was Jim Mackie, a drill team manager who’d worked Capitana for years. Dewey had hired Mackie after working alongside him on a British Petroleum platform in the North Sea. The other man was a young tanker guide from Egypt named Serine.

Mackie and Serine were squared off, Serine’s nose and chin fl owing blood. Serine was shirtless. His muscles, like most of the workers aboard Capitana, were ripped. A silver knife appeared in Serine’s hand and fl icked forward, leaving a large gash in Mackie’s thigh. Blood coursed down Mackie’s leg to the crimson- splattered deck. Around the two combat-ants, the crowd continued to grow quickly. By the time Dewey reached the outer edge of the scrum, at least fi fty men had gathered.

Dewey pushed his way through to the center of the human ring. As he came to the front, he encountered re sis tance as men fought to hold their prime place at the edge of the fi ght.

The crowd was excited and tense, hyped by the fi ght’s rising stakes.


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As Dewey pushed through, a big man on his left turned quickly in an-ger. Seeing that it was Dewey, he recoiled and moved aside. The man next to him, an even stockier roughneck, didn’t bother to look; he felt Dewey nudge his arm and swung on him. Dewey caught the dirty fi st with his right hand. With his left he hammered a fast, crushing blow into the man’s rib cage. The man doubled over in pain, but managed to return a blow to Dewey’s stomach. Dewey did not even fl inch. He delivered another shot with his left as he held the roughneck’s fi st in his right. This swing landed dead- center on the man’s nose, collapsing it and sending him down for good.

The cheering grew louder. Serine had drawn blood again, laying Mackie’s cheek open with his blade.

Serine had been hurt as well. His nose looked badly damaged and his left arm was clearly broken, hanging awkwardly at his side. Blood trickled from his left ear, an injury to the head that made him stumble dizzily as he moved.

Dewey had learned long ago to let fi ghts go. It was better to let ten-sions on the rig settle once and for all than to let them fester, only to explode later on. It was the promise of physical harm, after all, that kept an oil platform stable, not meddling from a supervisor. But this fi ght would end soon. Mackie was covered in his own blood, the wound on his cheek gaping and wide. Dewey could see the edge of his cheekbone. Serine looked desperate, circling like a maimed animal bent on sur-vival. Dewey stepped forward, toward the two fi ghters, to break it up. But as he did, Serine’s arm fl ew up wildly at Mackie. Before Mackie could dodge, the knife entered his throat at the larynx. The bigger man stum-bled back and away, his chest already soaked in scarlet gushing from the opening in the throat. Mackie attempted in vain to stop the fl ow and fell to the deck.

As Dewey reached him, Mackie’s legs kicked the ground in violent spasms and he began to lose consciousness. Dewey quickly applied pres-sure to the neck wound, but it was futile, blood gurgled from Mackie’s mouth as he struggled to speak.

“A rag, Chief,” said one of the men from behind Dewey, handing him a dirty blue cloth.


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Dewey stuffed it into the wound and maintained the pressure, but it was no use.

“It’s okay,” Dewey lied to Mackie. “You’re gonna be okay.”Mackie’s eyes fl uttered and found him. He tried to say something.

Dewey leaned closer, his ear inches from the dying man’s lips.“Sally.” Mackie coughed. “I love her.”“I know.” Dewey’s mind fl ashed on Mackie’s wife, back in Cork. “I’ll

tell her.”Mackie shut his eyes for a moment. He was fading quickly. Then his

eyes opened and he moved his lips again.“Serine,” he gurgled. “I found something.”Dewey cradled Mackie’s head and stared into the fading gray pools

of his eyes. “It’s all right, Jim.”Mackie jerked his head back and forth, using the last of his energy.

“I found . . .”“What?” Dewey asked.“It’s them. On the rig . . . they’re here.” Mackie’s voice trailed off

and his eyes shut for the last time.


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SAVAGE ISLAND PROJECTLOWER NUNAVUT, CANADAON THE COAST OF THE LABRADOR SEA

Two continents away, more than four thousand miles to the north, in a remote part of Canadian frontier, the roar of turbines in North Ameri-ca’s largest hydroelectric facility joined gale force winds in an over-whelming wall of sound.

A lone man atop the great dam clenched a cigarette and struggled to get his lighter to work. A yellow patch with the word white written on it was sewn into the right chest of a heavy- duty, bright orange Patago-nia winter parka. On the left chest of the coat, the letters kkb spread austerely in black thread.

It was past midnight. Jake White stood at the precipice of the three-thousand-foot wall of granite and steel and looked out at the black wa-ters of the Labrador. He took a drag on his cigarette. He smoked too much, he knew, but he’d already lived enough for two men, having survived for so long in this monster of his own creation. Savage Island Project, White’s audacious vision, had beaten and bloodied him, not into submission, but into an altogether different state of mind. He’d beaten himself into a place even more desperate and lonely, a place you go not


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when defeated but after you’ve accomplished all you’ve set out to do and there’s nothing left.

For two long de cades, Savage Island Project had been his singular obsession, the pursuit of which had destroyed his marriage, his rela-tionship with his two sons, and any ties he’d had with life back in Ohio. But here he remained, surrounded by the noise. It penetrated the air with a steady pulse of metallic friction, penetrated it, then surrounded it and pulsated down, then back up; it was everywhere. This was the din that results when you build a wall of cement, granite, and steel more than half a mile high, in a place it’s not supposed to be, an awe- inspiring spectacle designed to hold back endless waters meant to fl ow free. This was the deafening, inhuman sound of man triumphing over nature; of turbines and technology; of all that you must create when you decide to build a wall whose sole purpose is the taking of God’s waters for soci-ety’s use, for a company’s profi ts, for power.

This was the roar of Savage Island Project, the largest hydroelectric facility in North America, a $12.5 billion monolith constructed over a punishing de cade in the far northeastern reaches of Canada, in the Nunavut, 575 miles from the last outpost of modern civilization.

Savage Island Project was everything and more than White had dreamed it could be, a massive power house of perpetually renewable elec-tricity. It generated enough energy to power a large section of the eastern United States. Enough energy to make its builder, KKB of New York City, the second- largest energy company in America.

Savage Island had been White’s idea, and no one had agreed with him. Not his brother. Not his wife. None of the corporate jackasses at com-pany headquarters. Nobody except for Teddy Marks, at the time a young KKB executive. He had believed. He’d convinced his bosses. Now the dam was complete. Marks was CEO. And the jackasses were gone.

And the noise was everywhere.As he stood atop the dam, upon an iron stanchion that served as the

observation deck, White glanced for a moment behind him, at the out-fl ow area where the water poured in a controlled river after passing


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through one of the two hundred jet engine–sized turbines of the dam. It was an amazing sight, a full half mile above the man- made dark harbor below. Its edges were lined by a spectrum of small white houses built for the six hundred permanent Savage Island workers and their families.

White turned from the calm waters below back to the unruly sea. It was an astonishing contrast, the ordered valley spread out behind the dam, and the angry Labrador Sea whose whitecap crests pounded at the granite of the dam not more than fi fty feet below where he stood. It was this contrast, between man and nature, between unbridled chaos and controlled order, that had come to him some twenty years ago in a waking dream.

He was a manager at KKB’s Perry Nuclear Power Plant outside of Cleveland. He’d written his idea down one month after returning from a fi shing trip to the Nunavut, near Frobisher Bay, a brutal stretch of rocky coastline at the edge of the Labrador Sea that suddenly notched southward in a unique rivulet more than a mile wide near a stretch of rocks known as the Lower Savage Islands. White had written it down on a napkin as he sat eating lunch in the cafeteria one bland, forgettable day at work.

Now it was real.White shook his head, took a last drag on the cigarette, and fl icked

the stub of it into the wind. He walked to the end of the granite walkway that crossed the apex of the dam to the entry door that would take him to the operations center. It was nearly 1:00 a.m. He’d take a last look at turbine per for mance data before he took the elevator down and then walked to his house in the village below.

As he reached for the door, a solitary fi gure stepped from the shad-ows. White looked up, momentarily startled as the dark fi gure moved swiftly to his left. A hand thrust out, too quickly for him to react or to even begin to understand that he was being attacked.

The assailant grabbed him by his left hand. Twisting with trained, precise force, the killer pulled his arm behind his back and snapped it. The sound of White’s scream was loud enough to rise momentarily above the noise of the dam. But it was soon muffl ed by the killer’s gloved hand covering his mouth. Pushing him to the edge of the deck, the killer


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dropped White’s broken left arm and moved his gloved hand to his leg. White tried to fi ght but it was useless. The man lifted him up. With a grunt, he hoisted him to the railing. His right arm slipped off of White’s mouth.

“No!” White screamed. He twisted his head around and tried to get a glimpse of the man. He clawed with his one good arm but only scratched air. His struggles were in vain. In the dull light, he saw a face. Oh, my

God, he thought. Recognition came in the same instant he understood he was about to die.

With a last grunt, the killer brought White to the edge of the deck and forced him over the brink. The ocean pounded violently against the dam, close enough to soak both men with spray. The killer let White fall. Screaming helplessly, the architect of Savage Island dropped into the watery oblivion.


Power Down by Ben Coes

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