Page 61 of Dirty Rotten Love

The fury is immediate and total and I let it be both of those things because fury is clean and fury is useful and fury is considerably safer than the other thing that is trying to get in underneath it. His climbing certification. Not signed off. I know this without checking because I know the status of every certification on this rig, and Rory’s exterior ladder qualification is on the schedule for next rotation because this rotation has not required it.

Until now. Until Rory Gallacher decided it was required and nobody stopped him and I was not there to stop him, and now he is on that ladder in this storm without the training to know what he is doing.

I grab my radio.

Static. The communication tower is down, which I already knew, which means the walkies are running on the secondary system which in these conditions is giving me nothing but interference and the specific crackling sound of a system that is trying and failing. I try Rory’s channel anyway. Nothing. I try the deck channel. Frasier comes back broken and partial and I get enough to understand that yes, Gallacher went up, and then the static takes it.

I cannot reach him.

I look up at the tower.

I can see him clearly enough from here, the storm notwithstanding, because I have been able to locate Rory Gallacher in any space he occupies since approximately day five, and my eyes find him now with the same unhelpful accuracy. He is most of the way up. He is moving carefully, which is something. He is not panicking. He is doing the thing he decided to do, with the wholehearted determination that is one of his most recognizable qualities and one of the things I have always, despite everything, admired about him.

And then I see the ropes.

There are two safety ropes on the exterior harness system. This is not an arbitrary decision but a carefully designed procedure, the result of hard lessons learned over decades of offshore work. You unclip one rope and move it to the next attachment point. Then you unclip the second rope and move it. At every moment, one rope is clipped. At every moment, you are attached to something. This is the procedure. This is what the training covers. This is the thing that keeps you on the ladder when the wind decides to take you off it.

Rory is using one rope. The second is dangling uselessly from his harness, the clip on the end, spinning over the waves of the North Sea.

He is using one rope. Moving it, unclipping it completely, moving it to the next point, clipping it again. Which means that at every transition, for the seconds it takes to move from one attachment point to the next, he is attached to nothing. Nothing but his hands and his feet and his balance and the wind that is doing its considerable best to remove all three with the focused personal investment that the North Sea reserves for people who underestimate it.

Rory does not know. That is the thing I have to hold on to. He does not know because he has not been trained and he has one rope because that is what he was given or what he found and he is using it as carefully as he knows how and he does not know that carefully as he knows how is not enough.

I cannot reach him by radio.

I cannot shout, the wind would take it before it got halfway up.

I am very still for a moment.

I know the protocol. I know it the way I know every protocol on this rig, completely and precisely and without any ambiguity. When a crew member is in a dangerous position, any dangerous position, a definition that absolutely includes being on an exterior structure in severe weather conditions, the supervising officer does not go after them. You do not risk two lives for one.

In a situation like this, you coordinate from below. You talk them down if they can be talked down, and if they cannot be talked down, you wait. Losing one person is a tragedy. Losing two is a failure of command and a failure of procedure, and I have spent twenty years believing this with every part of myself because it is true.

It is true.

The protocol is clear.

I should wait.

I should stand on this deck and try to radio up to Rory and talk him down slowly and carefully and if he slips, I should not go after him because the storm is too severe and the conditions are too dangerous and the probability of me being able to hold him even if I reached him in time is not good and losing two people is worse than losing one and I know this, I have always known this, it is one of the first things you learn out here and one of the things I have never had cause to question.

I am, I realize, putting a harness on.

I am standing on the deck, in the gust front of the worst storm in twenty years and I am clipping the harness on with the focused automatic movements of a man who has done this many times, checking each connection, and I am doing this while my brain is still explaining to me, clearly and in detail, exactly why I should not be doing this.

Protocol says wait.

My heart says otherwise.

My hands are following my heart. Clipping and checking with the automatic precision of twenty years of muscle memory while my brain continues to explain to me, carefully and in detail, exactly why this is a bad idea. The probability calculation. The wind speed. The ladder conditions. The likelihood that even if I reach him in time, I will not be able to hold him if he slips. These are not small considerations. These are the considerations that the protocol exists to enforce and they are all entirely correct, but my hands are not listening to any of them.

Frasier appears.

He looks at the harness. He looks at my face. He is a man who has been on this rig for fifteen years, and he reads the situation with the efficiency of someone who has seen many things and understands most of them.

“MacLeod,” he says.

“Get everyone inside,” I say.