Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
Mac
The communication tower goes down at three forty-seven.
I know this because I know everything about this rig, every system and every status, the way the knowledge lives in me after twenty years rather than requiring checking.
The alert comes through on the main board and I note it and I radio Whelan, and Whelan confirms it and I tell him to assess and report back and I move on to the next thing because there are seventeen next things and the storm is not waiting for any of them.
Whelan will handle it. That is his job, and he is good at his job, and I have enough to manage without standing over a competent crew member while he does something he knows how to do.
I trust my crew. I have always trusted my crew.
It is one of the things I have learned in twenty years, that trust is not a weakness but a procedure, that you train people properly and then you let them do what they have been trained to do. It’s more efficient that way.
I move on.
The storm at four o’clock is something I have not experienced in twenty years on this rig.
I have said this to myself several times already, and it keeps being true in new ways.
The wind has found registers I did not know it had.
The rain is not falling, it is being deployed, horizontally and with intent, against every surface simultaneously.
The rig is holding, magnificently and with the stubborn reliability of something built to withstand exactly this, and I am grateful for every weld and every bolt and every safety check I have ever run on this platform.
But the storm is not even at full force yet. There is worse to come. Mother Nature is building to her full fury, and my competence can only be judged when this is all over.
I am coordinating the last of the external crew coming inside when I see the figure on the ladder.
My brain does the thing it sometimes does in moments of genuine shock, which is to process the information twice.
Once to receive it and once to accept it, because the first time through, it simply will not compute.
A figure on the exterior ladder of the communication tower.
In these conditions. In the gust front of the worst storm this rig has seen in twenty years.
I look again.
Rory.
The fury is immediate and total and I let it be both of those things because fury is clean and fury is useful and fury is considerably safer than the other thing that is trying to get in underneath it.
His climbing certification. Not signed off.
I know this without checking because I know the status of every certification on this rig, and Rory’s exterior ladder qualification is on the schedule for next rotation because this rotation has not required it.
Until now. Until Rory Gallacher decided it was required and nobody stopped him and I was not there to stop him, and now he is on that ladder in this storm without the training to know what he is doing.
I grab my radio.
Static. The communication tower is down, which I already knew, which means the walkies are running on the secondary system which in these conditions is giving me nothing but interference and the specific crackling sound of a system that is trying and failing.
I try Rory’s channel anyway. Nothing. I try the deck channel.
Frasier comes back broken and partial and I get enough to understand that yes, Gallacher went up, and then the static takes it.
I cannot reach him.
I look up at the tower.
I can see him clearly enough from here, the storm notwithstanding, because I have been able to locate Rory Gallacher in any space he occupies since approximately day five, and my eyes find him now with the same unhelpful accuracy.
He is most of the way up. He is moving carefully, which is something.
He is not panicking. He is doing the thing he decided to do, with the wholehearted determination that is one of his most recognizable qualities and one of the things I have always, despite everything, admired about him.
And then I see the ropes.
There are two safety ropes on the exterior harness system.
This is not an arbitrary decision but a carefully designed procedure, the result of hard lessons learned over decades of offshore work.
You unclip one rope and move it to the next attachment point.
Then you unclip the second rope and move it.
At every moment, one rope is clipped. At every moment, you are attached to something.
This is the procedure. This is what the training covers.
This is the thing that keeps you on the ladder when the wind decides to take you off it.
Rory is using one rope. The second is dangling uselessly from his harness, the clip on the end, spinning over the waves of the North Sea.
He is using one rope. Moving it, unclipping it completely, moving it to the next point, clipping it again.
Which means that at every transition, for the seconds it takes to move from one attachment point to the next, he is attached to nothing.
Nothing but his hands and his feet and his balance and the wind that is doing its considerable best to remove all three with the focused personal investment that the North Sea reserves for people who underestimate it.
Rory does not know. That is the thing I have to hold on to. He does not know because he has not been trained and he has one rope because that is what he was given or what he found and he is using it as carefully as he knows how and he does not know that carefully as he knows how is not enough.
I cannot reach him by radio.
I cannot shout, the wind would take it before it got halfway up.
I am very still for a moment.
I know the protocol. I know it the way I know every protocol on this rig, completely and precisely and without any ambiguity.
When a crew member is in a dangerous position, any dangerous position, a definition that absolutely includes being on an exterior structure in severe weather conditions, the supervising officer does not go after them. You do not risk two lives for one.
In a situation like this, you coordinate from below.
You talk them down if they can be talked down, and if they cannot be talked down, you wait.
Losing one person is a tragedy. Losing two is a failure of command and a failure of procedure, and I have spent twenty years believing this with every part of myself because it is true.
It is true.
The protocol is clear.
I should wait.
I should stand on this deck and try to radio up to Rory and talk him down slowly and carefully and if he slips, I should not go after him because the storm is too severe and the conditions are too dangerous and the probability of me being able to hold him even if I reached him in time is not good and losing two people is worse than losing one and I know this, I have always known this, it is one of the first things you learn out here and one of the things I have never had cause to question.
I am, I realize, putting a harness on.
I am standing on the deck, in the gust front of the worst storm in twenty years and I am clipping the harness on with the focused automatic movements of a man who has done this many times, checking each connection, and I am doing this while my brain is still explaining to me, clearly and in detail, exactly why I should not be doing this.
Protocol says wait.
My heart says otherwise.
My hands are following my heart. Clipping and checking with the automatic precision of twenty years of muscle memory while my brain continues to explain to me, carefully and in detail, exactly why this is a bad idea.
The probability calculation. The wind speed.
The ladder conditions. The likelihood that even if I reach him in time, I will not be able to hold him if he slips.
These are not small considerations. These are the considerations that the protocol exists to enforce and they are all entirely correct, but my hands are not listening to any of them.
Frasier appears.
He looks at the harness. He looks at my face. He is a man who has been on this rig for fifteen years, and he reads the situation with the efficiency of someone who has seen many things and understands most of them.
“MacLeod,” he says.
“Get everyone inside,” I say.
Soon not even the deck will be safe. There is absolutely zero point in risking anyone else’s life today.
A pause. One second. The pause of a man who knows there is nothing useful to say and is choosing not to say it.
“Aye, boss,” says Frasier.
I take hold of the ladder.
The cold hits through my gloves immediately.
The wind hits from every direction at once, not randomly but with the coordinated hostility of something that knows what it wants.
The rain is in my eyes before I have climbed the first rung, but I have been on this rig for twenty years and I know how to move on it in conditions that would stop other people, I have always known how to do this.
I start to climb.
I do not look down. I look up at Rory, who is still moving, still working, still using his one rope with the careful focus of someone who believes he is doing the right thing and has no idea that he is not.
The ladder is slick and the wind is trying to peel me off it with every rung and I climb anyway, steadily and with the focused efficiency of a man who has a procedure and is following it, because even now, even here, I am following a procedure.
The procedure is, get to Rory. Every other consideration is secondary to the procedure.
I look up at Rory, who has not seen me, who has reached the top and is now working at the bracket with the intense concentration of someone who has decided to do a thing and is doing it regardless of everything the weather has to say about it.
This is so completely and entirely him that I feel something move through me that is not fury and not fear but some third thing that lives in the same neighborhood as both and is considerably more dangerous than either.
I am most of the way up when he sees me.
He looks down and our eyes meet through the roaring wind and the driving rain, and the impossible height of the ladder between us and the deck and the churning water far below, and his face does something complicated, surprise and something else, something that has no business being on the face of someone clinging to a ladder in a storm.
I keep climbing.
I need to get to him before he decides to come down, before the next moment when he unclips that rope and there is nothing between him and the North Sea.
Almost there.
Almost.
I am three rungs below him when he moves. He saw me, and must have figured out there was a problem, and decided to come down, towards me.
I watch it happen with the terrible clarity of something you see coming and cannot stop.
His hand goes to the rope. The clip releases.
His weight shifts as he reaches for the next point, just slightly, just the fraction that the wind has been waiting for, and the wind takes the opportunity it has been building towards for the last twenty minutes with the slick satisfaction of something patient.
Rory’s foot slips.
Time does something strange. It does not slow down exactly, but it becomes very specific, very detailed, every fraction of a second distinct and complete.
His hand grabbing for the ladder rail and not finding it.
His body swinging out from the ladder buffered on the wind.
The rope, the one rope, unclipped, useless, trailing.
I hear myself make a sound.
It is not a word. It is not anything I have ever made before, torn out of somewhere I did not know existed, and it contains everything, the Northern Lights and breakfast porridge and dogs wagging their tails and all the long lonely years of making things be enough and the particular unbearable truth that none of it, none of it, is sufficient now, in this moment, with Rory’s hands scrabbling for the ladder in the roaring storm.
I let go of the ladder. I let go of everything, because nothing else matters. Only Rory.
With all the strength my body possesses, I lunge.