Page 60 of Dirty Rotten Love

Whelan looks at me. Frasier looks at me. Tam, standing a little apart, looks at me with an expression that is several things at once.

“It’s not your job,” says Frasier.

“I’m a fast climber,” I say, which is true, I have always been fast at anything physical. It is one of the things my body does reliably regardless of what my brain is doing. “And Whelan knows the system. He can talk me through what needs doing from down here.”

Whelan opens his mouth. Closes it. He nods once, the nod of a man who is relieved and ashamed of being relieved in equal measure.

I look at Dazza. Dazza is already looking at me. The guilt on his face is enormous and quiet and has been there since Wednesday.

“The harness,” says Dazza. His voice is not quite steady. “Let me help you with the harness.”

Procedure. Like everything on this rig. Important things need to be checked twice. By two different people.

“Aye,” I say. “Obviously.”

It is not obvious. I am aware, in the part of my brain that is still functioning correctly, that I said obviously in a tone that suggested the harness was a formality rather than the thing standing between me and a very long fall into very cold water, and that this is not the correct attitude to bring to climbing an exterior ladder in a storm. I am aware of this and I cannot seem to make it matter the way it should.

Dazza fits the harness with hands that are not quite steady. He checks every clip and every connection with the thoroughness of a man who is doing this because he needs it to be right, who needs very much for this to be right, and I stand still and let him do it and watch his face while he works.

“Rory,” he says, very quietly, not looking up from the clip he is checking for the third time.

“It’s fine, Dazza,” I say. “It was always going to be fine.”

I don’t entirely mean the harness.

He looks up. His eyes are doing something that I am not going to look at directly because I do not have the reserves for it right now, and he nods, once, and claps me twice on the shoulder in the way that means something he cannot say out loud.

I turn to the ladder.

The wind hits me immediately, properly and personally, the way the North Sea always makes things personal, and the rain is in my eyes and my collar and everywhere else and the ladder stretches up above me into the gray churning nothing and far below the water is doing things I choose not to look at.

I put my hands on the first rung.

How hard can this be?

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.