N. Dark Order: A Ryan Weller Thriller Book 13 Paperback

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CHAPTER 1
Ryan
Present Day
Bay of Campeche, Mexico

It was an all-hands-on-deck effort for Dark Water Research.
Every available diver had been shipped into Progreso, loaded onto crew barges, and sent to the Zama oilfield to work the joint effort between Pemex, the Mexican state-run petroleum corporation, and Talos, the private oil exploration and development company that had discovered the deposit and had estimated it to contain between 1.4 and two billion barrels of oil.
After Pemex forcibly took over the project in 2017, Talos had fought to regain control. In the end, the Mexican government simply didn’t have the capital to drill wells and implement the infrastructure needed to make the field produce. When Pemex had finally turned the field back over to Talos, the Texas-based company had been ready with capital and labor. One phone call to Dark Water Research, and the crews had quickly deployed. With energy production in the U.S. at record lows due to the current presidential administration’s policies, there were plenty of men ready to spring into action to work the Zama field.
Ryan Weller stood on the seabed some two hundred feet below the dark surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Above him, DWR’s pipe-laying barge, Midkiff, named for a dried-up oil town in Texas, was ablaze with lights that shone down through the water. The illumination backlit Ryan’s work, but for the close-up view of the nuts and bolts he was tightening to assemble the flange of the subsea manifold, the diving contractor relied on the twin lights mounted on his yellow Kirby Morgan dive helmet. A hiss of gas accompanied each inhalation, and exhaust bubbles vented from the side of his rig. Sweat ran down from his brown hair and blurred the vision of his green eyes. Unable to wipe it clear, Ryan blinked away the water and twisted the knob on his demand regulator a little farther open to help cool his face.
An umbilical, consisting of a breathing hose, a pneumofathometer hose—used to measure depth—and a fiber-optic communications cable wrapped around a nylon line, was clipped to the rear of Ryan’s dive harness, bringing breathing gas from the compressor laboring on the surface. High above him, the crewmen in the Midkiff’s viewing room could watch the real-time feed from the camera mounted on his helmet and his tender could communicate either through the comms gear or via a series of prearranged tugs on the umbilical.
Ryan reached into the pouch on his side and extracted a one-inch diameter bolt. He pushed the bolt through the hole on the pipe flange connected to the U-Haul truck-sized manifold. Submerged pipelines from multiple wells ran to the manifold, bringing oil from the rigs that would then travel through the line Ryan and the DWR team were currently constructing to an onshore collection point some thirty miles away, at the Puerto Dos Bocas refinery.
Next, Ryan withdrew a nut and spun it onto the bolt he’d just inserted. He continued to work his way around the flange, connecting the first section of the pipeline to the manifold. After spinning on each nut finger tight, Ryan reached for the pneumatic driver and fitted its large socket to the first nut. The bolt head on the rear of the flange seated into a hexagon cup to prevent it from spinning, which meant Ryan didn’t need to hold both a wrench and the impact gun.
Triggering the gun, Ryan watched in disbelief as the nut spun backward off the bolt and shot out the end of the socket, disappearing into the sediment-laced water below.
“Way to go, butterfingers,” Stacey Wisnewski commented from her perch in topside control. “We’re all standing around waiting for you, and you can’t even get the direction of the gun right.”
Fortunately, Ryan carried extra nuts and bolts. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such a rookie mistake. He’d lost more than his fair share of nuts and bolts in the mud over his years beneath the waves. But in truth, this whole trip, he’d felt like a newbie. Since he didn’t work full time as a commercial diver, Travis, Stacey’s husband and the diving supervisor aboard the Midkiff, had treated him like a pariah.
Ryan fished out another nut and threaded it on, then ensured the impact wrench was toggled to rotate forward and pressed the trigger to tighten the nuts. He worked his way around the flange in a star pattern, tightening all sides evenly so the flange didn’t warp under pressure. If there was even the slightest deviation, the flange might leak and cost Talos more money and time to send divers in to repair Ryan’s screwup.
“All right, I’m done,” he reported to Stacey.
“Good. Move to the far end of the pipe.”
Ryan hooked the pneumatic driver to his harness with a carabiner, then trudged through the mud along the pipe. Each step stirred up plumes of sediment that hung in the water column before slowly settling back to the seafloor, a blank slate of gray muck running uphill toward shore.
As he trudged through the water, Ryan decided that the next time Greg Olsen, the owner of Dark Water Research and one of his best friends, called him to work a diving job, he’d flat out refuse. While Ryan was an accomplished commercial diver, he had left that life behind and was applying his skillset to other endeavors. Lately, those had been lying on his boat and drinking margaritas. Since Ryan had come aboard the Midkiff, he’d had to brush the rust off his diving skills and that hadn’t been easy.
Twenty feet later, Ryan halted at the end of the pipe which was also fitted with a flange so the next piece of pipe could be attached to it.
The barge Ryan worked from was equipped with a welding shop, while a second barge was alongside to feed pipe into the welding shop. The pipe ends would be welded by a computer-controlled rig, then ultrasonically inspected for defects. With the weld complete, a conveyor would feed the pipe through the stinger, a special boom hanging off the end of the barge, laying a continuous pipeline from the manifolds controlling the wellheads to the refinery on land.
“I’m here, Stace,” Ryan said, reporting his arrival at the next flange.
“Cool,” she said. “Travis is on his way down to help you align the pipes.”
“Roger that,” Ryan replied, feeling the fatigue of the long hours underwater. He glanced at his dive computer. He’d spent fifteen minutes getting the first flange bolted into place, so he now had twenty minutes of total bottom time on this dive.
Travis landed on the seafloor beside Ryan. The two men worked together to wrap a sling around the free end of the barge-fed pipe so they could hook the barge’s crane onto it and use the barge to pull the pipe into place before bolting the two pipes together.
Ryan’s breathing had quickened with the pace of the work, air now hissing through the regulator. A low, continuous ring of tinnitus played in Ryan’s ears. He had grown to ignore it for the most part, but sometimes it was just annoying. Too many unmuffled gunshots, explosions, and working around heavy machinery and power tools had all taken their toll.
“We got it in the sling,” Travis reported into his comms gear. “Slack up two feet.”
Flexing his hands, Ryan tried to work the stiffness from his fingers caused by holding the sling in place.
The slack went out of the crane cable and increased tension on the pipe. This was the most dangerous aspect of the job. They had to properly align the two sections of pipe without getting their hands caught between them. Losing a digit or a hand was something neither man could afford.
The flange on the pipe Ryan had secured to the manifold had small alignment pins built into it. They just needed to align the holes on the pipeline side and insert the gasket, then bolt everything together. Seemed simple enough.
“Move the pipe forward a foot,” Travis instructed.
The crane operator nudged his boom a fraction of an inch through its arc, and the two pipes nearly collided.
Ryan installed the gasket on the alignment pins and withdrew his hand so Travis could make the next move. While he waited, he saw the holes and the pins were off by a quarter of an inch and pointed to the problematic alignment just as Travis called for the next movement of the crane. Ryan snapped his hand out of the way just before the pipes kissed together.
“Hold, Johnny,” Travis said to the crane operator.
“We need the chain bar,” Ryan observed.
Travis agreed, calling for Anthony, the standby diver, to enter the water and bring down the tool they needed. A couple of minutes later, the St. Croix native was standing on the seabed beside the other two divers. They wrapped the chain around the pipe and cinched it tight, careful not to crush the outer ring of the dual layer pipe. The outer hull delivered hot water to the manifold to keep the oil warm and flowing while the oil moved in the opposite direction.
As Ryan and Anthony manned the eight-foot-long chain bar, Travis stood by to push home the first bolt.
“Heave, Ant,” Ryan directed.
The two men applied their body weight to the bar, forcing the pipe to twist.
“A hair more,” Travis said.
Grunting with the effort, Ryan and Anthony applied more force until Ryan began to feel his hand moving on the bar. “It’s slipping!” he warned.
Travis tried to hammer the bolt home but lacked the fraction of an inch needed to slide the bolt smoothly through the two holes.
“Come on,” Travis begged.
“I can’t hold it,” Ryan shouted.
“One more heave,” Travis yelled back.
The bar slipped from Ryan’s hand, smacking him in the side of the helmet and cracking the heavy-duty fiberglass. Water began to rush in as Ryan tried to shake off the effects of the blow.
“Get Ryan up now!” Travis shouted into the comms unit. “His helmet’s flooding.”
The tenders instantly responded, heaving on the umbilical to race Ryan to the surface. Water continued to gush through the widening crack, covering Ryan’s mouth. He twisted the knob on the regulator all the way open to increase the amount of air coming through the line and blast out the rising water.
But even with the regulator operating at maximum capacity, it couldn’t ventilate the helmet as fast as the water was coming in. The comms unit shorted out with a screeching buzz.
With the water surging around his head, Ryan tilted it back to fight for one last breath. As the tenders dragged him to the surface, Ryan exhaled a stream of bubbles to prevent his lungs from swelling like balloons and bursting inside his ribcage.
Two minutes later, Ryan was on the deck of the Midkiff, being stripped of his gear. Once he was down to his underwear, the tenders moved him quickly into the recompression chamber and pressurized him down to working depth.
Stacey peered through the chamber’s portal at Ryan. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just got my bell rung. Other than that, I’m all right. Are Travis and Ant okay?” Ryan asked, looking up at Stacey’s head of purple hair. She’d dyed it like that for longer than Ryan had known her.
“They’re fine. What happened?” Stacey replied.
Ryan rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “The bar slipped out of my hand.”
Stacey patted the tank. “Rest up. We’ll get you checked out when you get out of the chamber. In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye on you.”
Ryan flashed her the “Okay” sign by circling his index finger to his thumb and holding up the other three fingers. He lay down on the thin pad that covered the bench and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. While he hated being in the “Iron Cadillac,” the chamber was a necessary evil of commercial diving. Divers worked long hours underwater and couldn’t afford the time it took to decompress in the water, especially when the weather turned nasty and the waves built, meaning they would be bounced around like a yo-yo on a string and not capable of holding a steady depth.
Closing his eyes, Ryan allowed his mind to drift. His wife Emily was in Hollywood, Florida, staying with her mother and brother while Ryan worked offshore. He didn’t have to be there. He didn’t need the money. He didn’t need to take the risks associated with one of the most dangerous professions in the world—but there he was, feeling like a “muppet.” In diver parlance, he was someone who just couldn’t get anything right. It seemed every time he went into the water on this job, something went wrong.
On account of the escalating number of accidents, Ryan was beginning to dread going back under. This time, his helmet had been the only thing to break.
The next time, he feared it would be a lot worse.