Free Reckoning by Ian Barclay

with the levers to raise the container quickly, the ship pitched on the
     crest of a wave. Its stern section rose sharply and the sloping deck hit one end of the container suspended above it. The
     force of this blow knocked the container out of Dockrell’s control and it slammed into another container in front of it.
    Dockrell caught a glimpse of the deckhand desperately trying to get out of the way. He knew the man wouldn’t make it.
    “I can’t live my life like this!” Nicholas Avedesian was shouting at Richard Dartley above the roar of chopper engines on
     the helideck. “Fuck it! I might as well be dead already, having to live out here all the time, being shadowed by someone like
     you. You hear me? I said I might as well be dead!”
    “You may not have long to wait,” Dartley told him coldly.
    “I’m out here with my friends!”
    “You’re out here with men you don’t know from Adam. They leave and arrive by the hour from all over the world. You’re about
     as safe as a herring in a fishnet. I’m not even sure I can save you. Out here, I don’t think anybody can. I want you back on the beach.”
    “No!”
    Dartley knew he had already lost the argument but went on shouting anyway. Some yelling and cussing at each other would let
     some steam off for both of them, and no one could possibly hear them with the racket on the helideck. Avedesian felt emotionally
     secure and physically isolated on this oilfield, and he was hiding here like a hermit crab in an old whelk shell. No doubt
     he could see the logic of Dartley’s objections, but when a hunted man feels safe someplace, for whatever irrational cause,
     he is slow to leave. Dartley let him rant on above the sounds of the engines and waves. It was good for him.
    As Dartley listened, he watched a container rise on a crane cable, swinging wildly and missing the edge of the flotel platform
     by mere inches. Dartley was used to the stylish performance of the crane operators, who often liked to show their skill by
     putting a huge steel container through its paces. But this looked like it was out of control, spinning and swaying.
    Something caught Dartley’s eye. A man was clinging to one end of the container moving through the air. As it spun about, Dartley
     glimpsed him splayed out like the letter X, his hands holding on above his head, his feet spread apart. The container swung
     over the helideck, not many feet above the whirling rotors of one chopper. The crane operator had to be out of his mind. As
     it passed overhead, Dartley saw that the man was notholding onto one end of the container, but had been squashed flat against it.
    Dartley’s right fist caught Avedesian under the left jawbone and he went out like a light. Before he collapsed, Dartley slung
     him over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift and ran from the container as it dropped from the crane, crashing into the
     deck. He didn’t make it by much, maybe fifteen feet, and wouldn’t have made it at all if he had waited to explain things to
     Avedesian.
    The container hit the helideck hard enough to shake the entire flotel and deform some of the steel deck structure. Dartley
     kept running until he reached a gangway. He dumped the now half-conscious Avedesian on the floor of the first cabin he came
     to and headed back to the flat top. It took him a little time to get from the helideck to the base of the crane.
    He climbed the rungs fast to the crane’s control cabin. He slid open the sliding steel door and looked inside. A man he had
     seen before was lying on the floor, a bullet hole above his left eyebrow, a trickle of drying blood down his cheek. In his
     right hand, he loosely held a plastic pistol.

CHAPTER

6
    “You really believe that crane operator was the assassin and that he committed suicide when he failed to kill you with the
     container?” Richard Dartley asked Nicholas Avedesian incredulously.
    “Those Scotland Yard men ruled his death a suicide and said he