Only Once (A Sadie Price FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 4)

CHAPTER ONE The wind sounded like a mad thing, the howling seeming to fill every inch of spare space on the rig, creeping round corners and then hurtling down the stairs into the bunks. Accompanied by the crashing of the waves on the Beaufort Sea coastline in the dark north of Alaska, the sound was almost demonic. It was enough to give the derrick hands nightmares, at least while they were still new, before they got used to it and it became nothing more than background noise. Paul Montford was used to it. He had been here a long time. He lay awake, staring at the top of his bunk, listening to Russ on the bed above him, snoring loudly. Now that was a sound that could regularly keep him awake. The siren sounded, waking them up for morning rousting. Time to get up. Russ’s snoring stopped abruptly. His legs and torso appeared in Paul’s eyeline as he jumped down from the upper bunk. “You awake, man?” “I’ve been listening to you snore for about an hour. You sound like a goddamn bear,” Paul complained as he sat up. Russ just chuckled. They dressed hurriedly in the half-light, packing on twenty pounds of gear to insulate against the freezing conditions outside. Worse than freezing; it could go as low as minus twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit on some days. Inside the berth, the lights were dim, perhaps intentionally so that the perpetual darkness outside was not so much of a shock. Even in the summer months, light was precious. Right now, it was perpetual gloom, but after ten years working the rig, Paul was used to it. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else. His fellow derrick hands were like his family. Not that everyone could cope with it. Suicides happened. The occasional polar bear attack on the ice floats. Rumors of men going mad in the dark and the cold. Paul just got on with it. Life was a predictable round of drilling, eating, and sleeping. There wasn’t much time for anything else. That predictability, the routine and the sense of being buffered from the outside world, made him feel as though he was safe here. A lot of derrick hands were running from something. There was a joke that if Alaska was a place that people fled to, then the rigs were the place to flee from Alaska. There was nowhere to go from here; they were literally at the ends of the earth. Paul followed Russ up the steps toward the higher decks to reach the small dining hall. His stomach growled loudly. “Now who sounds like a bear,” Russ joked. “Shut up,” Paul rejoined, good-naturedly. Even with the twenty-pound gear, the early morning cold hit him as soon as he stepped onto the higher decks. All around, the gray waves roiled and crashed against the backdrop of an inky sky. Paul thought it looked beautiful, in an eerie, wild kind of way. Others, he knew, would think that this was hell on earth. He had to brace himself against the wind, which could sustain speeds of thirty miles per hour. It whipped against him, and he took a deep breath and squinted against the gloom. Then something caught his eye. Hanging above him, being whipped around in a frenzy by the driving wind, it took Paul a few moments to realize what he was looking at. It was only when he felt Russ tense up next to him and heard the low groan that came from his colleague’s mouth that he processed the sight of the body hanging from the flare boom crane, sixty feet above him. His first thought was that someone had had enough. One of the newbies, driven to despair by the harsh conditions and the past two months of perpetual darkness. But then someone shone a flashlight on the swinging body and caught the man’s face full on before the wind whipped it out of sight again. It was just a few seconds, but it was long enough for Paul to see the man’s expression, and he knew that face was going to haunt his dreams. It was frozen in an expression of sheer terror, and Paul suddenly felt very, very certain this was no suicide. It was murder.