9 Days Falling, Volume I

Prologue

The helo swooped low over the site, the pilot aghast at what he was seeing. It was a British Petroleum ride, out from Port Fourchon in the Mississippi Region on an emergency rig tour after Hurricane Victor cut a swath through the production zone at sea. Thus far 15 platforms had sustained damage that would be at least a week in repair, perhaps longer. This was the last planned stop for the day, to the crown jewel in the joint BP-Exxon operation in the region. They were going out to Thunder Horse, the world’s largest semi-submersible oil platform, so big you could put three football fields up on the topside area. It was fully submersible now.

“Look at that!” the pilot pointed at the badly listing platform. Thunder Horse was keeling over on her massive industrial orange flotation columns, and apparently still taking on water. It weathered, a blow from Hurricane Katrina years ago, and the last few brushes from the big storms never seemed to bother the immense platform—until now. The 650mm torpedo was a little more than the design engineers had ever planned for.

“What could have caused this?” The engineer aboard knew they had not suffered a direct hit from Victor this time. Yet the damage was plain to see. “Can you get a bit lower, I want to check the other side.”

She was obviously floundering, and in very deep water, sitting right astride block 778/822 in the Mississippi Canyon, the bottom over a mile away, some 6300 feet below. One of her massive cranes was already completely underwater.

“Damn, with Mad Dog damaged we can’t lose Thunder Horse,” said the engineer.

Mad Dog was dubbed one of the 50 projects to change the world by Goldman Sachs, sporting the world’s largest single piece truss spar, one of the biggest lifts ever set in the Gulf of Mexico. The big dog was permanently moored to the seabed, with a capacity to produce up to 100,000 barrels of oil and 60 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, much smaller than Thunder Horse, but significant. She was also damaged, but remained intact.

“Shall I spread the word?” The pilot gave the engineer a sheepish look.

“Better tell the techs on Mad Dog to get over here first,” said the engineer.

“Lord,” the engineer was scratching his head, eyes wide as he surveyed the platform below them now. “We’ve got a fire down there too! With Caesar and Cleopatra off line, and big rigs like this in the water, we’re buggered for weeks, mate. Better blow the horn. This baby needs help fast. Damn thing’s about to go down under!”

“Right-o,” said the pilot, flipping his headset on to begin transmitting. “Mad Dog, Mad Dog, this is BP Survey, Over. “

A scratch voice answered in a few seconds. “Go ahead, Survey.”

“Thunder Horse down, mates. Repeat. Thunder Horse down. Survey engineer says we’ll need all your people out this way on the double, with anything you can float, over.”

Someone swore on the other end of the transmission. Then the voice came back, “Roger that, Survey. Thunder Horse down.”

The fall of Thunder Horse was to be the final blow that would virtually end drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. It made the earlier Deepwater Horizon spill seem a minor precursor by comparison, though the Gulf had yet to recover from that event. Coastal areas of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida, and adjacent marshlands were still contaminated with oil, as much of it was simply covered up by BP crews working late night shifts with bulldozers after the disastrous spill of 2010.

The vast deepwater plumes of oil had eventually settled to the floor of the sea, or dispersed in an emulsified soup throughout the Gulf. The massive methane gas release that was at least 40% of the total toxins emitted had created broiling tides and huge dead zones devoid of oxygen where nothing could live. The humid rain would be tainted for months after the event.

The public was not told the full extent of the damage. Mainstream news outlets focused on a single leaking well close to the original site of the platform, but Thunder Horse had long tentacles servicing widely dispersed well sites over a reservoir of one and a half billion barrels of oil. Seven wells were ripped from the sea floor when the big platform fell. They were going to gush into the ocean, virtually unimpeded, for the next year and a half, after which the pressure would equalize and the flow rate subside.

The damage from the seven ruptured wells, the “seven sisters of doom,” as they came to be called, was dire enough. The question of saving the Gulf of Mexico was on everyone’s lips in the beginning, but the effects of the disaster on domestic pricing and supply for oil and gas were equally severe. The US had been trying to ‘frack’ its way to energy independence for years, effectively squeezing oil out of rock. Now that limited and very expensive production method could in no way compensate for the massive shortfall, and the President quickly announced the release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate shortages.

What he didn’t announce, however, was the inevitable fact that this problem was going to be far more serious than anyone first believed, and the shortages far more pronounced. Nor did he mention the fact that the 700 million barrels of oil in the reserve would only last 35 days if it had to sustain the average US daily usage of 20 million barrels. If doled out at a more conservative rate of 5 million barrels per day it could ease the shortfall, but producers were immediately looking for any offshore oil they could get to move into the system. Oil on the sea, or ready at coastal terminals was premium now, and any carrier positioned to deliver these commodities to US terminals.

But the US, and the world, did not have 35 days to worry about the problem as the oil dwindled away. They had nine days. Events would soon push even this disaster off the headlines as political posturing and squabbling quickly became all out military confrontation. It would start slowly, building like a bad storm, and Nature would groan in protest, shaking the world with her wrath and displeasure. Nine days…Unless a new version of the events now unfolding could be forged in the past.

On Tuesday, September 21, 2021, Anton Fedorov and two Marines stood in the reactor monitoring room of the Primorskiy Engineering center near Vladivostok. They were the first to go, boldly returning to the last great war in the hopes of preventing the final great war. They soon vanished into the ether to take up the thread of that hunt in a distant past. That same night the Red Banner Pacific Fleet sailed from the Golden Horn Bay under the steady watch of Captain Vladimir Karpov while Admiral Volsky gathered a handful of Marines in his office at Naval Headquarters Fokino. Miles away, a large Antonov-124 cargo plane was finishing up loading operations and preparing for takeoff: eighteen Marines boarded with a team of six nuclear power plant engineers and specialists led by Chief Dobrynin, and one radiation safe container with a very special cargo.

The news crawl on Thunder Horse would dominate the headlines on Wednesday, but come Thursday the worsening situation in the Pacific began to grab news cycles at the top of the hour.

On that morning Karpov was bandying words with his counterpart on an American carrier battlegroup off the coast of Japan, thinking to reach a mutual understanding that would prevent or limit hostilities. The breaking headlines in the news crawl now warned of the imminent potential outbreak of war over Taiwan, and the darkening threats from North Korea. Marshal Kim Jong Un, the so called “Brilliant Commander of Mt. Paektu” declared in a solemn statement to the United Nations: “This sacred war of justice will be a nation-wide, all-people resistance in which the traitors to the nation including heinous confrontation maniacs, warmongers and human scum will be mercilessly swept away.” As it had in the early decades of the previous century, the world was about to lose its grip on sanity in short order.

Dobrynin’s AN-124 Condor circled to land north of Makhachkala on the eastern Caspian coast, and he gazed out the pilot’s window to see the vast expanse of the sea dotted with tiny islands of framed metal on their stubby legs painted international orange—the oil platforms of superfield Kashagan. It was there that a host of producers greedily sunk their umbilicals into the silted bed of the sea to drink from the deep, rich deposits of light sweet crude. On one such platform, appropriately named “Medusa” a man named Ben Flak was having fits with the bad news coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. It was going to be a very busy day for Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum. They were all searching to find carriers for any oil they had bunkered in terminals that could be quickly moved to ports in Europe and the US before the situation got any worse.

One such carrier was a small British company, Fairchild Inc., running a fleet of seven tankers and cargo ships with a total lift capacity of 5.5 million barrels, and half of that available for a lucrative haul. The problem the company would face was the cold logic of geopolitics: where oil was found, the fires of war would soon follow.

Miles to the south, in the quiet port of Larnaca, Cyprus, the pipelines of the Caspian Sea were about to become entangled with the lives of a very special person, and a very tough sea captain on a very dangerous ship. It was a circumstance that would bring the Fairchild company into the midst of the gathering storm of war, and link its fate to that of many others who were now hot in the chase to find one man—Gennadi Orlov. But the swirling vortex opening like a black hole in history would expand, pulling people and things into the distant past and a rendezvous with fate itself on the shores of the Caspian Sea.