The Swarm by Frank Schätzing Page B

too?’
    Sverdrup shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a chef.’
    â€˜He’s an amazing cook,’ said Lund.
    That’s probably not the only thing he’s good at, thought Johanson ruefully. Sometimes he found Tina Lund hard to resist, but deep down, he knew she would be too demanding. Now she was off-limits.
    â€˜How did you two meet?’ he asked, not that he cared.
    â€˜I took over the Fiskehuset last year,’ said Sverdrup. ‘Tina was here a few times, but we only ever said hello.’ He put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Until last week, that is.’
    â€˜A real coup de foudre,’ said Lund.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Johanson, looking up at the sky. The helicopter was approaching. ‘I can tell.’
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    Half an hour later they were sitting in the aircraft with a dozen oil workers. The dull grey surface of the choppy sea stretched out beneath them, littered with gas and oil tankers, freighters and ferries as far as the eye could see. Then the platforms came into view. One stormy winter’s night in 1969 an American company had found oil in the North Sea, and since then the area had taken on the appearance of an industrial landscape. Factories on stilts extended all the way from Holland to Haltenbank off the coast of Trondheim.
    Fierce gusts buffeted the helicopter, and Johanson straightened his headphones. They were all wearing ear-protectors and heavy clothing, and were packed in so tightly that their knees touched. The noise made talk impossible. Lund had closed her eyes.
    The helicopter wheeled and proceeded south-west. They were heading for Gullfaks, a group of production platforms belonging to Statoil. Gullfaks C was one of the largest structures in the northern reaches of the North Sea. With 280 workers, it was practically a community in its own right and Johanson shouldn’t have been allowed to disembark there. It was years since he’d taken the compulsory safety course for visitors to the platforms. Since then, the regulations had been tightened, but Lund’s contacts had cleared the way. In any case, they were only landing in order to board the Thorvaldson , which was anchored off Gullfaks.
    A sudden gust caused the helicopter to drop. Johanson clutched his armrests but nobody else stirred: the passengers were used to stronger gales than this. Lund opened her eyes and winked at him.
    Kare Sverdrup was a lucky man, thought Johanson, but he’d need more than luck to keep up with Tina Lund.
    After a while the helicopter dipped and started to bank. The sea tilted up towards Johanson, then a white building came into view. The pilot prepared to land. For a moment the helicopter’s side window showed the whole of Gullfaks C, a colossus supported by four steel-reinforced pillars, weighing 1.5 million tonnes altogether, and with a total height of nearly four hundred metres. Over half of the construction lay under water, its pillars extending from the seabed surrounded by a forest of storage tanks. The white tower block where the workers slept was only asmall section of the platform. Bundles of pipes, each a metre or more in diameter, connected the layers of decks, which were flanked by cranes and crowned with the derrick - the cathedral of the oil world. A flame shot over the sea from the tip of an enormous steel boom, burning natural gas that had separated from the oil.
    Touch-down was surprisingly gentle. Lund yawned and stretched as far as she could. ‘Well, that was pleasant,’ she said, and someone laughed.
    The hatch opened and they clambered out. Johanson walked to the edge of the helipad and looked down. A hundred and fifty metres below, the waves rose and fell. A biting wind cut through his overalls. ‘Is anything capable of knocking this thing over?’
    â€˜There’s nothing on earth that can’t be toppled. Get a move on, will you? We don’t have time to hang about.’ Lund grabbed him by the