The Double Man (Jack Widow Book 15) Read online

  Peter said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not going to kill him.”

  “I hear the doubt in your voice. You already suspect it, don’t you? Liddy’s long since outlived his use for Voight. Now he’s caused all this ruckus. Easier just to kill him. I mean, why keep him alive? So he can run the Liddy’s Lodge business in Alaska? From what I understand, Voight doesn’t need the money from that. The oil thing is where all his fortune comes from. How much do you think Voight is worth anyway? Gotta be a lot of money selling oil to dictators all around the world, right?”

  Peter said, “I wouldn’t know about any of that.”

  Widow said, “What do you think he’ll use you for next? After he kills Liddy.”

  Peter said, “Enough talk.”

  Widow turned his head and stared out the window.

  Thirty-seven minutes later, they landed in Bell Harbor, back through the hard rain. Widow saw lightning strikes in the distance in the direction of the river where he first met Liddy. He thought about it for a second, and he wished he had let the bear just eat him.

  Peter landed the plane on the bay, and they rode it back in to Liddy’s wharf, and different dock workers from the ones he saw previously were there to help them park the plane at the dock.

  Widow got out first and was helped onto the pier, and Peter followed. He got in front of Widow and said, “This way.”

  Liddy’s Lodge looked different at night. It was slower than the night he was there. There were far less people around. Widow glanced up to one end of a flight of stairs, and he saw the same girl that was in his room three nights back. She was still pale, still covered in tattoos, and still rail thin. She stared at him. He recalled her name. It was Miley. He lifted a hand and waved at her. She grimaced in his direction and turned and vanished between two buildings.

  Peter led Widow back up the stairs and behind the lodge to the four-wheelers. The rain pounded on them both. He stopped in front of them and took out a set of keys. He sat on one and started it. He revved up the motor and got off the saddle.

  Peter said, “Take this back down that path. Keep heading straight until you get to the trees and can’t go any further. Park it, leave the keys on the seat. Walk back to the river where you met Liddy. They’ll pick you up there.”

  Widow shivered in the rain. He asked, “Who will?”

  Peter stared at him. He paused a beat, and then he took off his rain poncho and handed it to Widow.

  He said, “Take this. I’ve got more.”

  Widow took it and slipped it on, put the hood up. He didn’t thank Peter. And it made only the smallest difference because he was already soaked.

  Peter turned and walked away. He stopped halfway and turned back to Widow.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  Widow stayed quiet. He sat on the four-wheeler and looked forward and took off down the path into the darkness.

  Widow drove on for what seemed like forever. The four-wheeler had a set of headlamps on the front, and they were on, but it might as well have just been off because of the rain and the darkness. Everything was still hard to see.

  Widow followed the winding path and drove as fast as he could while trying to stay upright. One wrong move, or if he hit the wrong bump, and he could flip the four-wheeler and crash. Potentially, he could break a leg or something, and then what would he do?

  Finally, he came to the end of the path. He parked the four-wheeler and killed the engine and left the keys on the seat. He looked around, and nothing looked familiar. He tried to remember the direction of the river, and he headed that way. He walked on until he felt mud under his shoes.

  He stopped and listened. It was hard to hear with the rain pounding on his poncho. But he could hear the river running wild. He walked toward the sound and found it. It was the same bank that Liddy had fished on.

  Peter had told him to wait where he and Liddy had met, but there was no way for him to find that exact spot. Not in the dark. So he waited there even though he had no idea what he was waiting for.

  Widow didn’t have to wait too long. About ten minutes after he stopped at the river’s bank, he heard it. It was distant but audible. It was the mechanical sound of a vehicle. He looked around and saw nothing. He knew that the path he came on was the only road for miles. He knew that because he spent a lot of time traversing this area before he met Liddy and that bear.

  He watched the path, thinking it was a truck or something, but there was nothing there.

  As the mechanical sound got closer, he heard whop, whop. And he knew what it was. He ran over to a hill next to a clearing and stood there. He looked up to the sky toward the southwest, and he saw the navigational lights of a helicopter. It came closer and closer. He started waving his arms in the air, hoping it would see him. He wished he had road flares, but he had nothing. He thought about running back to the four-wheeler and switching on the head lamps, but he didn’t have to.

  The helicopter pilot must’ve seen him because the lights pointed in his direction, and the helicopter lowered. The blades rotated above. As it drew near, he recognized the helicopter. It was a Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk rescue chopper. It had twin engines. It looked like the ones he saw on the Coast Guard base parked on the runway, only this one was different. The paint on it was different. There were words on the side.

  As it lowered, Widow read the inscription on the helicopter. It read, "Ruffalo Oil and Gas."

  The helicopter lowered and landed in the clearing. The cabin door swung open, and two large men got out. They both wore rain ponchos. They both switched on flashlights. One of them drew a gun. He pointed it at Widow. Both flashlight beams shone on his face. He saw nothing beyond the lights and the muzzle of the gun.

  A voice shouted, “Put your hands in the air!”

  Widow put his hands up. The guy without a drawn firearm lowered the flashlight and approached him. He said, “I’m going to search you. Do you have any weapons?”

  “No,” Widow said.

  The guy searched him and found no weapons. He nodded at his partner, and the two of them stepped back. The one who searched him took a set of handcuffs out of his pocket. He tossed them to Widow, who didn’t catch them. They fell at his feet into the mud.

  The guy said, “Put those on.”

  Widow knelt slow and scooped them up out of the mud. He stood back up, slow. The rain washed away most of the mud from the cuffs, and the steel glimmered from the flashlight beams.

  Widow clicked one around his wrist, and then he put the other on the other wrist. He kept them in front of him because they didn’t order him otherwise.

  The one who searched him said, “Tighten them. All the way.”

  Widow tightened them. The second guy lowered his gun and holstered it on his belt on his hip under the rain poncho. The two of them approached Widow, turned around, and put hands under his biceps, which reminded him of the cops from Kodiak Police Station.

  They escorted Widow to the Jayhawk, loaded him onboard, and slammed the door shut. Before they slammed the door, Widow noticed a winch on the side of the Jayhawk. He saw the cable, the hook, but there was no rescue litter. It was gone. He knew instantly that this was the helicopter that Kloss was thrown from.

  The Jayhawk took off from the clearing. It yawed and banked and came back around until the nose faced southwest. The rain pounded on the steel skeleton, and the Jayhawk took Widow over the island and out to sea.

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  The Jayhawk rotors whopped above Widow. He heard them even over the rain and thunder. The flight crew numbered two in the cockpit and two in the cabin with Widow—if you counted the two big pit-bull guys that Widow was sandwiched between on a bench as flight crew.

  The two pit bulls wore rain ponchos, which made them even more menacing in a certain kind of way to a certain kind of person. But Widow wasn’t a certain kind of person. He continued looking straight ahead, unphased, watching the skies through the windshield. The rain hammered on the glass, but the pilots se
em to not care. Normal helicopters wouldn’t traverse this kind of weather on purpose, but the Jayhawk was designed for harsh elements, making it the preferred rescue helicopter for the Coast Guard.

  They flew over Kodiak Island, past it, and out to sea. They flew fast. The Jayhawk could clock in at speeds of two hundred and seven miles per hour, but in this weather, pilots normally didn’t go that fast. It was dangerous. But the two pilots sitting in the cockpit didn’t seem to mind the risk. They didn’t seem to mind so much that Widow was convinced they even had a death wish. The thought made him crack a smile because if they were a part of Voight’s operation and helped him kill Kloss, then Widow would oblige their death wish—no problem. They made their beds.

  Widow kept on staring out the windshield. He tried to remember landmarks in case he had to somehow fly back. That only lasted fifteen minutes, while they were still over Kodiak Island. When they flew over the Gulf of Alaska, he stopped worrying about landmarks. He tried to keep up with the distance in his head. After about thirty minutes over the ocean, Widow figured they were about fifty miles out to sea. That’s when he saw their destination through the clouds and rain and darkness.

  Just ahead in the ocean, Widow saw lights, lots of them. Including a light that blinked at the top of something that couldn’t have been the crow’s nest of a ship. It was too high off the surface of the water. As they drew closer, he knew what he was staring at.

  In the middle of the ocean far from shore, there was an enormous offshore oil platform. It looked practically out of use, or maybe it was out of use because there were large sections of the hull that were completely gone. They looked ripped off by something even bigger than the platform, like an alien creature from the deep or maybe that prehistoric shark had taken giant bites out of it.

  Even with all the damage to the hull, the rig still had power. That was for damn sure, because every light in the thing was on. However, most of them didn’t work. Widow saw bulbs flashing and sparking all over the place. Then there were large patches of complete darkness. That’s where he suspected there were more giant shark bites out of the wall.

  The layers underneath the platform, beneath the hull, looked like large construction beams. They crisscrossed all over the place. Some of them were damaged and even missing and broken. The legs for the platform were enormous. They stretched down into the sea. Elevating racks doubled as a set of legs. At the bottom, over the ocean surface, were giant spud tanks.

  There were tanks and gear units and gear boxes and seawater pumps all neatly placed along the platform. There was an old building to the north. It must’ve been living quarters for the workers. Only, there were no workers—Widow figured because there was too much damage to the external parts of the entire rig.

  Widow saw scrawled across the top of the platform, written for passing aircrafts, was the name of the oil company: "Ruffalo Oil and Gas."

  An enormous crane jutted out from one side, but it wasn’t as large as the derrick, which shot straight up into the air. It had the flashing light on top. The crane’s neck hung out over the water. The body was a thick, double-layered structure, and the derrick was enormous, bigger than the crane. The derrick’s neck stretched up so high that Widow could imagine, without the blinking light on top, it would look like the derrick vanished into the clouds.

  Widow imagined enormous drills that went down from the center of the legs, below the spud tanks. He pictured the drills at the leg centers going all the way below the ocean surface and down to the floor. He imagined several, if not dozens, of oil wells below. He had no idea how deep the water was right there, but the oil rig looked to be four hundred feet from the top of the derrick to the ocean surface. It was far.

  Lightning struck the ocean off in the distance. It was directly behind the oil platform but miles away. The light illuminated the rig. Widow saw a helipad on the platform deck. That’s what the pilots aimed for. The helicopter yawed and shook as the pilots turned it and hovered for a moment and then began lowering the Jayhawk, aiming at the helipad.

  Widow saw waves crashing below the rig. The landing was rough. They came in low; the wind swayed the helicopter a bit, but the pilots were pretty good. They maneuvered and managed to keep the Jayhawk on target, like they had done it a thousand times before. The landing wheels touched down on the helipad, safe and sound.

  A moment later, Widow was on deck with the pit bulls and the pilots. They were greeted by a third pit bull in a rain poncho. The three of them could’ve been classified as henchmen because they appeared so interchangeable. They took Widow down a flight of stairs into the hull. The two pilots came along behind the rest of them. Widow counted five guys so far.

  They passed a large torn-out section of the hull and then back to covered walls.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Widow passed into the belly of the beast, and it showed. He heard the waves crashing far below. They took him into a lit hallway and passed a couple of closed doors until they came to a bridge of sorts. It was a control room with computer terminals all over the place. Some of the terminals blipped and whirred. Some of them were completely off, but not switched off. They either had no power or had been destroyed long ago. There was water damage on the tiled floors and on the ceilings.

  The inside of the hull looked more like the inside of an office building than it did an offshore oil rig in the middle of the ocean. That was except for all the large swaths of missing walls. The giant holes and missing walls made it feel chilly in the hull. Widow felt the heating system was on full blast to accommodate. His body temperature switched between cold and hot almost every step he took.

  Widow saw a working CB radio station on one of the terminals. He knew it worked because he could hear radio chatter. Plus, it was lit up like someone had been listening to it or using it.

  They passed through the control room and stepped into an office suite that looked like it belonged to a fancy executive. No wall missing from in there. It was toasty inside too. The two pit bulls holding his biceps pushed him through the doorway, and the third shut the door behind them. Inside the office, there was an old executive desk and cushioned armchairs sprawled in front of it. There was a high-backed chair behind the desk with a leather jacket draped over it.

  Widow saw a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling.

  There was a room to the right with a door open and a light on.

  The two pit bulls shoved Widow down in one of the armchairs. He sat there for a long minute in silence. He felt the rig rattle and grind under his feet. He imagined the giant metal beams below him were strained from both the hard wind outside and the rig’s enormous weight. Then he heard water running from a sink in the open doorway. He looked up and saw that it was a private bathroom. Probably from years ago when the rig boss worked from this office.

  Just then, a man of average height and well built in his fifties stepped out of the bathroom. He wore a crinkled dress shirt and a lose tie and black chinos. Widow had never seen him before, but he felt he had because the guy looked a lot like James Ruffalo, only it wasn’t. He was younger, and he didn’t have the white scar on his face, but he had those goggle eye sockets. His eyes were a different color though. They were blue and his hair was neater. It was white but combed and slicked back. He was clean-shaven, whereas the Ruffalo he knew probably hardly ever shaved. This guy was in much better shape physically than Ruffalo.

  The guy came out and glanced at Widow and smiled a big smile. He walked out into the room and around the desk. He stopped right in front of Widow and reached a hand out for Widow to shake.

  He said, “Mr. Jack Widow. Or is it Commander Jack Widow? How do you prefer to be addressed?”

  Widow stayed quiet and stayed still. He didn’t take the guy’s hand.

  The guy looked up at one of the pit bulls and nodded. The pit bull drew a gun and shoved it into Widow temple. He pressed it hard. Widow stayed quiet.

  The pit bull said, “Shake his hand!”

  Widow reached a hand up and took th
e Ruffalo clone’s hand and shook it, then released. The pit bull lowered the gun and holstered it somewhere behind his rain poncho.

  Ruffalo’s clone walked back behind the desk and over to a table. The table had rocks glasses and a bottle of expensive whiskey. The guy poured himself a drink—neat—and stepped to the desk. He didn’t take a seat behind it, like Widow expected. Instead, he ambled around to the front and sat on the edge. He put the glass to his lips and took a swig.

  He stared at Widow. There was something in his eyes, something Widow had seen before and something Widow recognized. It was malevolence—evil, pure and simple.

  Widow didn’t flinch away. He stared back.

  Ruffalo’s clone said, “I’ll just call you Widow. I got ahold of some information about you. I gotta say, I’m impressed. An undercover agent pretending to be a Navy SEAL, all while you're really investigated them. Was that how it went?”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Ruffalo’s clone said, “My name is Efrem Voight, in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Voight said, “You don’t have to talk with me. Soon, we won’t be able to shut you up. Trust me. I’ve seen it a million times. I wanted to have a drink with you and talk. It’s not every day I meet someone who’s lived a life like I have.”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Voight said, “See, Widow, like you, I also lived a double life. I was a spy for the CIA for two decades. I worked all over the world, but it was when I was in Africa that I discovered the oil business. The CIA sent me to meet with a warlord in the mountains. They sent me on a peace mission. They sent me to deliver a briefcase as a gift, a sign of good faith. You know what was in the case?”

  Widow knew but didn’t answer.

  Voight said, “Money. It was a million dollars in unmarked bills—currency, Widow. Have you ever seen a million dollars in cash?”

  Widow said nothing.

  Voight said, “Well, that changed the course of my life. I’m sure that’s a simple explanation for the complicated life I have lived. You might wonder, 'Why Ruffalo? And why don’t I just kill him? Why keep him alive all these years?' I often asked myself that.”