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star of this adventure.
She was the heroine of this saga, she decided. And the heroine never dies.
Without a word she walked from the room.
Glancing out the port side of the wraparound canopy, Annja saw a great gray
monster of a wave crest above the level of their tiny aircraft. She understood
intellectually the need to fly so low  so that the ocean's surface effect
would hide them from the radar rig Gannet's satellite imaging had clearly
shown rotating high up in Claidheamh Mór B's superstructure.
But the sight of those menacing waves filled her with terror. The North Sea
was not known for its mercies.
It took all her will to control the fear. But she did. She held on to self. To
focus.
She formed a picture in her mind  a young, pretty face, framed by blond
pigtails. Jadzia. The innocent whose destiny she had cradled in her own two
hands. And dropped. She would not let herself fail Jadzia again. If she died
trying  well, she would die trying her very damned best.
To distract herself from the crashing menace of the storm, she let loose a
question that had been bubbling around in her subconscious for days.
"Why are you helping me, Tex?"
"Huh?" he shouted back over his shoulder. She saw his face ran with sweat,
although it was cool in the aircraft despite the efforts of its tiny heater.
His shoulders hunched and bunched with effort, he grunted with the strain of
fighting the yoke. His brow was folded with concentration, yet his eyes and
mouth smiled as if he were having the time of his life.
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"Why are you helping me?"
He actually paused. In their brief acquaintance she had seldom seen him do
that. He was thoughtful, analytical even, during the downtimes, as she had
seen again that afternoon planning their quixotic two-person aerial assault on
the oil platform. But in the crunch, when called upon he never seemed to
hesitate to speak or act as the situation demanded.
"I can't resist a pretty face?" he called back at length.
Fury surged up inside her. "Don't try to blow me off! Not now. This is
important."
At once she felt remorseful, and also stupid. He is risking terrible danger
for you and Jadzia, she thought. But Tex answered with regret audible in his
words, if scarcely above the booming of the wind and the constant cannonade of
thunder near and far.
"You're right," he said, shouting to be heard with his face turned forward
again toward their unseen goal. "You deserve a straight answer. When I was a
kid I did some things. They may or may not have been illegal. You might say I
had official status to do them, in fact. I told myself they couldn't be wrong
if duly constituted authority told me to do them. And that they were for the
greater good, you know?"
He shook his head. "Later on I found what we'd been told was mostly lies. I
watched my buddies die, for lies. And you know, my real reason for it all was
that I was a stupid, self-centered kid who thought he'd live forever no matter
what. And doing what they told me to gave a dirty, dangerous thrill like
nothing else."
"That's why you're doing this? For the thrill?" Again she regretted that the
unbearable seethe of emotion inside her, no less tempestuous than the sky and
sea outside, had propelled the first thought to pop in her mind straight out
her mouth.
"Maybe," he yelled back. "I been chasin' thrills ever since, even though
they're all pretty feeble imitations of  of what I used to do. But I feel
I've got something to make up for. And I'm grateful for a chance to do
something real  something I know is good. Shoot, Annja. It's a little girl
out there."
Her right arm shot forward past his shoulder. "Look!" she cried.
A single light glowed in the darkness like a white eye. It was just a few
points away from dead ahead.
"Now comes the fun part," Tex said, all business again. He climbed a few scant
yards to give them clearance from the thousand avid mouths of the sea, for the
plane would lose lift in a turn. He flew level a moment longer, to regain
speed. Then he banked the ultralight left.
Out into the open sea.
Jadzia stalked down a corridor with greenish enamel coming away from the metal
in flakes, leaving splotches of fungus in muted psychedelic colors on the
bulkhead. Her assurance of moments before had evaporated. Maybe it was the
creepy surroundings, and the horrible ceaseless moaning of the sea, the
creaking of the rig, the cannonading of the rising storm.
None of the noises was as terrible as the voice in her head that kept trying
to tell her, They're right. She's not coming. You're all alone.
Of course, she'd always been all alone. Alone in a world of stupid people.
Captive though she was, Jadzia was allowed total freedom to roam the platform.
It wasn't as if she could escape. There were boats, surely. But she wasn't
about to head out at random into the middle of the ocean. Even her fantasy
adventure thoughts had their limitations. Nor was she under any illusion she
could fly the sleek helicopter tied invitingly to the southwest corner of the
platform.
No, Annja was coming for her. Jadzia was sure of that. She had no other
option.
On a whim she decided to drop in on the security room. Even creepy company was
better than being alone with her fears. It was a level down from the
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commissary, down a ringing, rattling metal stair.
Inside were banks of monitors showing visual feeds from cameras positioned all
about the rig, and a pair of Albanians ostensibly watching them. A Walther
machine pistol lay ostentatiously across a table near one of them.
They looked up and emitted guarded hellos. The younger one smiled; the older
man frowned. Like all of the more than twenty personnel Jadzia had encountered
on the steel island, they spoke English as the common tongue, and their native
language when they fell in with countrymen. They took for granted they were
talking secret code that no one else could understand.
That was the reason she decided to stop there. She found Albanian fascinating,
though ugly. Though Indo-European, it had no living languages as relatives. It
therefore tied in with her love of ancient languages, as well as the weird in
general. Plus it gave her something to do. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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