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anybody had told me I’d end up here when I was taking meteorology at the University of Florida, I’d have switched to animal husbandry.’
    ‘You can’t make two hundred bucks a day getting cows to fuck, Sparks.’
    ‘No, but it’s a helluva lot more fun.’
    The Chief laughed. ‘Well, if you get nervous, gimme a call. I’ll come hold your hand.’
    The lights on the computer readout began to flash.
    ‘Here comes the report in from Barrow now,’ Sparks said. He punched out the word ‘TYPE’ on his keyboard and the report immediately flashed on one of the monitor screens.
    ‘Jesus, Chief, they’re reading winds up to a hundred and eighty knots. And waves! They’re running twenty to thirty feet along the coast. Temperature’—he whistled through his teeth—’forty-one below. Freezing rain. No shit, freezing rain. What do they expect, a fucking spring drizzle? This goddamn rig is gonna look like Niagara Falls by morning.’
    ‘Your language is getting terrible, Sparks,’ Lansdale said. ‘I may have to write your mother.’
    ‘You do and I’ll tell her who taught me.’
    Lansdale laughed. ‘Lemme know if anything serious pops up,’ he said and left the weather room. Walking down the tunnel toward the bar, he could hear the heavy seas thundering at the steel legs below him and the wind shrieking in the rigging. He liked the sound and feel of the storm. The Thoreau was as sturdy as a pack mule and as indomitable as Annapurna.
    He took the elevator to the second floor and went to the bar. Willie Nelson was lamenting on the jukebox, and there was a poker game in one corner under the head of a giant caribou one of the riggers had bagged on a weekend hunting trip to the Yukon. Lansdale loved it. It was the Old West, the last frontier, it was John Wayne and Randy Scott and Henry Fonda and the OK Corral all rolled up into one. He looked down the bar and saw Marge Cochran, one of the four women on the rig, a red-haired lady in her early forties who was a hardhat carpenter, Hard work had taken its toll on her, as it had on the Chief, but there was still the echo of a young beauty in her angular face and turquoise eyes. The work had kept her body lean and young. But despite the seams of her tanned face, she was a handsome woman, earthy and boldly honest.
    The Chief kept watching her for a long time but she paid him no mind. Finally, as he bore in with his stare from the end of the bar, she turned briefly and a wicked little smile flew briefly across her lips.
    Tough lady, he thought. Yeah, tough. Like a steel-covered marshmallow.
    He ordered a Carta Blanca beer and gulped it down as a handful of technicians strolled in from the evening shift.
    ‘How about a game, Chief?’ one of them asked.
    ‘Rain check,’ Lansdale said. ‘1 need some shut-eye.’ And he left and went to his apartment on the third floor.
    II
    One hundred and fifty feet below Lansdale’s feet, the four men continued their perilous task. As the driver kept the scooter aimed up-tide, one of the scuba divers snapped the cable of the box to a clasp on his belt and shortened the line to twelve inches or so. He was obviously the most powerful swimmer, his biceps straining the thermal Suit as he moved down behind the leader.
    The swell was sudden and monstrous, striking without warning out of the murky and violent sea, the tail of a twelve-foot wave on the surface ninety feet above them. It seized the scooter, flipping it up s that, for an instant, it seemed to stand on end, pointing toward the surface, before the driver got it under control. The line slackened for one deadly moment and then snapped tight again. As it did, it jerked out of the hands of the man with the box. The angry sea snatched him away from the line, sweeping him, end over end, and tossing him, like a piece of seaweed, toward the column. He thrashed his powerful arms against the treacherous, silent tide, but he was like a child caught in a deadly undertow, and the giant column