Hell Rig Read Free

.” Waters’ voice broke. He paused. “He was looking down at me, smiling, staring at me with those dead, empty eyes, taunting me.”
    “Who was?” Jeff asked.
    “The Digger Man.”
    Jeff shivered at the name, as if someone had stepped on his grave.
    Ed turned to Jeff and whispered an explanation. “John Diggs was a Cajun mechanic on the rig. He used to be a driller, so they called him ‘Digger Man’. Rumor is he cracked up and killed a couple of guys during the fire.”
    “The Digger Man,” Waters repeated, nodding his head as if agreeing with Ed but likely did not hear him. “He killed them all. Now he’s waiting for us.”
    “Well, kiss my ass and call me a frog,” Gleason burst out with a deep southern drawl. He wagged his thumb at Waters and chuckled. “He’s nuts!”
    “You’ll see,” Waters said. “You’ll all see.” He settled back down and withdrew into his own world again.
    The flight continued in silence. Waters had given everyone something to think about. To Jeff, even the sound of the big Huey was now somehow muted, as if the sky swallowed the sound before spitting it out again in tattered whispers. Twenty minutes later, he caught his first sight of Global rig Thirteen from the cockpit window and wished he had stayed home.
    Chapter Two
    The Huey dropped the Re-Berth crew and their equipment off on the miniscule helideck jutting out like an afterthought from the roof of the single-story main building, barely allowing them time to grab their bags before taking off again.
    “Good luck, you guys!” the middle aged pilot, an ex-Air Cavalry captain with an Operation Desert Storm pin in his battered hat yelled to them as he revved the engines for takeoff. “You’ll need it!”
    On the frightening descent, Jeff had feared the tiny landing pad with its whitewashed ‘X’ wasn’t large enough to land on. From several hundred feet up, it resembled a washcloth floating on the water. Now, standing on it, watching the Huey as it slowly grew smaller until it disappeared from sight, he felt as if he was floating on an island in the sky. Looking straight out, all he could see was blue sky and green water. He felt small and insignificant. The platform seemed different from others on which he had worked. It felt unsubstantial—dead. Maybe it was the fact that there was none of the usual hustle and bustle, no noise of drilling, or shouts or bells announcing shift changes. As much as he hated flying, he already wished he was back on the chopper headed for shore.
    They were alone, one hundred and twenty-five miles out in the Gulf in one hundred-fifteen feet of water. They had no boat, a less than reliable radio and it would take the helicopter ninety minutes to reach them once it had landed and refueled, if they somehow managed to contact it.
    “Gawd! What a piece of shit,” Gleason commented, summing up Jeff’s first impression. Gleason held one beefy hand over his eyes to shade them from the glare of the midmorning sun as he scanned their new home for the week. “Looks like the dump I grew up in.”
    Tolson chuckled. “Except it’s got toilets.”
    Jeff leaned over, suppressing a mild wave of vertigo, and scanned the platform’s main deck spread out below him. Rust and soot seemed to be the predominant colors—rust the color of congealed blood and soot so dark it blended into the shadows. The platform was an old one, built in the 1950’s and reworked as often as the fluctuating price of oil allowed. Rising on four massive, hollow round steel pylons driven deep into the mud and silt below and filled with water as ballast, it had withstood all Katrina could throw at it and came through better than some of the newer rigs had managed. Certainly, it had fared better than New Orleans. The platform had been undergoing a lengthy overhaul before Katrina with only a limited number of its wells operating. Signs of newer construction blended with old architecture spotted the deck.
    Jeff thought again about