The Rig 3: Eye of the Hurricane by Steve Rollins

nose.
    Garcia coughed discreetly. It was a discreet but potent noise.  Smith looked up and saw the angry look on his colleague's face. He stopped short of snorting up the powder and looked up at him quizzically. “What?”
    “You absolute fuckwit,” Garcia said calmly.
    As so often, the calmness in his voice was a surer measure of anger than a voicing of passion. He was the opposite of Smith in many ways, but in that, the difference between them was more than obvious.
    Smith wanted to give an angry retort, but he saw Garcia's hand twitch towards a harpoon gun next to him on the crate. He saw the look in Garcia's eyes and knew then Garcia would not hesitate to use it on him. “Calm down...” Smith said eventually. “What's gotten into you?”
    “You know perfectly well what's gotten into me,” Garcia said in the same chillingly calm voice.
    “No, I don't!” Smith protested.
    “The drugs, the women and the attitude is one thing.” Garcia's eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth twitched. He still sounded eerily calm, but his face was a rictus of anger. “You jeopardizing not only our mission, but the agency and above all, our lives, is not something I can live with any longer.”
    Smith said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He knew he should say he would change things and would stop the liberal use of hookers and blow, but he knew Garcia would not believe him now and would quicker lodge that harpoon in his body than let him make the promise.
    “I'm going back to the security rooms to try and find them on the monitors,” Garcia said after several moments of deadly silence. He picked up the harpoon gun and watched Smith recoil. “Pull yourself together,” Garcia snarled at him. He stood and walked up the stairs, making his way back to the screens he had left earlier.
    Smith was fuming. He did not like Garcia's judging ways. He knew Garcia was right as well, but he did not need the bastard to tell him that. He had lucked out on a drug test earlier and he carried the scoop for his blow for a reason. He could not carry razor blades or let a finger nail grow as a scoop lest the FBI find out. He was already under scrutiny for the routine visits of call girls, so the last thing he needed was them finding out about his drug habit.
    Now he would have to make sure Garcia did not talk to their superiors. Not that he thought Garcia would. Given his monumental fuck up, he reckoned Garcia might actually get rid of him here and now instead. The rig was destined for the scrap yard anyway, most likely it would tilt and sink, and nobody would be able to find him if Garcia did use the harpoon gun on him.
     
    ***
     
    Garcia opened every drawer in the camera room. The last drawer finally yielded what he was looking for. There was a locked box, but with the picklock he carried in his pocket, it only took a minute to open the box. Inside were two Walther PPK's and ample ammunition. He took both the guns out and put them in the holsters he carried. The holsters were not made for those guns, but they fit well enough.
    He buttoned his jacket and brushed over it. He made sure the gun did not show under it. He did the same with the gun he hid in the ankle holster. He kept the harpoon gun with him. It would be useful if Smith, or indeed the prey they were hunting, did not know he was carrying a gun again.
    He sat down again, the harpoon gun in his lap. He reached for the keyboard, using the keys to flip through all the cameras he could see. He smiled. He liked this work for some reason. The bone dry work of going through data and camera feeds, trying to establish a lead in a case, or like now, in surveillance.
     
     
    Chapter Thirteen
     
    The meteorologist at San Clemente was surprised to see Commander Lovell enter his office. It was unusual to see the commanders from the base at all. Commander Lovell was a man who trusted his intuition when it came to storms and his intuition had proven right more often than the models of