Page 58 of Dirty Rotten Love

He looks young.

I know he is young. Twenty-two years old and his first rotation and his whole life still in front of him, I have said this to myself many times, and it has always been true and it is still true and it does not help at all. He looks young, and he looks wrecked, and he looks cold in a way that has nothing to do with the wind that is building around us.

I look away and keep walking and do not look back. I do not look back.

This is his first proper storm.

The thought arrives before I can stop it, the way thoughts about Rory always arrive, without permission and without any apparent awareness of the fact that they are not welcome. His first rotation and therefore his first North Sea storm, and the one that is coming is not the kind you want as an introduction. I have worked through dozens of storms on this rig and there is a specific quality of fear that even experienced crew carry into the bad ones, a healthy respect for what the North Sea can do when it decides to do it properly, and Rory has never experienced it.

He might be frightened.

I am angry at myself before the thought has finished forming. I am angry in a sharp focused way that I recognize as useful, the kind of anger that cuts through other things and gives you something clean to hold onto. I do not get to worry about whether Rory Gallacher is frightened. I do not have that right and I do not have that information, and I will not be standing anywhere near him when the storm hits. So the question is entirely academic, and I am going to stop thinking about it immediately.

I think about it for the next forty minutes while I complete the mid deck checks.

He will be fine. He is capable and he has been trained and he has Tam and Whelan and the rest of Green Crew who have been through this before, and he will be fine, and my worrying about it is not only pointless but actively counterproductive and I am stopping now.

I stop.

I start again approximately three minutes later.

This is the specific cruelty of caring about someone you have decided to stop caring about. The decision is very clear and very logical, and the caring simply does not respond to it at all. It continues on regardless, entirely indifferent to what you have decided, showing up at inconvenient moments with inconvenient questions like whether a twenty-two-year-old on his first rotation is going to be frightened by his first serious storm.

I am furious about it.

The fury is useful. I take it with me through the afternoon checks and the roster adjustments and the briefing I run at four o’clock where I go through the storm protocols with Green Crew and every other crew on rotation with the focused precision of a man who has done this many times and knows exactly what needs to be communicated and how. I look at the assembled faces. I do not look at one specific face for longer than any other.

I am very good at this.

By evening the wind has picked up significantly and the rig is moving with it in the way that rigs move, not dramatically, not dangerously. Just the constant, low awareness of being a structure in the middle of something much larger than itself. I have done my final checks. The crew are briefed. Everything that can be secured is secured and everything that cannot be secured is documented and everything that needs monitoring is being monitored.

I step outside to do one final visual sweep before going in to review the latest data, and I stop.

Something has changed.

Not in the instruments. Not in anything I can point to immediately or explain in the language of readings and measurements and forecast models. Something older than that, something that lives in the body rather than the mind. Grown from twenty years of standing on this deck in every mood the North Sea has. The smell of the air has shifted, carrying something metallic and cold and enormous underneath the salt and the crude oil. The color of the water is wrong in a way that has no precise name, darker somehow, denser, as if the sea is drawing itself together for something. The wind has a different note in it, lower and more purposeful, and the pressure against my face is not the pressure of a significant storm.

It is the pressure of something else entirely.

I have never felt this before. In twenty years I have never stood on this deck and felt the North Sea preparing itself the way it is preparing itself right now, with the focused, total intention of something that has decided to be completely and fully what it is. And every instinct I have developed over two decades of living on this water is telling me the same thing.

This is going to be very bad.

I go straight to the weather station.

The data confirms what my body already knew. The pressure differential is larger than anything in the forecast models. Significantly larger. The storm that was coming, the significant one I have been preparing for with the gratitude of a man who needed something to do, has become something else in the last hour, something the models did not fully predict, and the something else is considerably more serious than anything I have handled in twenty years on this rig.

I am still looking at the numbers when the alert comes in.

The radio crackles and the automated weather service delivers its update in the flat precise tones of something that does not understand what it is saying, and what it is saying is that the system currently approaching our position has intensified dramatically and is now classified at the highest severity level and all offshore installations in the designated area should implement full emergency storm protocols immediately.

I stand very still for a moment.

Twenty years. I have been on this rig for twenty years, in every season and every weather, and I have never received an alert at the highest severity level. I have been close. I have had bad ones, serious ones, ones that tested the rig and the crew in ways that mattered. But not this.

Not this.

I pick up the radio and begin making calls, my voice exactly as it always is, calm and precise and giving nothing away, because this is what I do and this is who I am and the rig needs MacLeod right now more than it has ever needed him and MacLeod is what I will be.