AFTER THE CRASH: HOW TO ESCAPE FROM A SUBMERGED HELICOPTER (Part 1)
In Murder at Cape Three Points, a canoe drifts into the restricted space around a deep sea oil rig carrying unusual cargo: two dead bodies. Charles Smith-Aidoo and his wife Fiona have been horrifically murdered with a signature bearing the hallmarks of a ritual killing. An oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean is not your run-of-the-mill crime scene, but it is still a crime scene and Inspector Darko Dawson, as thorough as he is, feels he must see it.
Just one problem: the oil rig is some 37 miles off Ghana’s coast at Cape Three Points and one can only get there by chopper. One further detail: the oil company requires rig visitors to go through a 3-day BOSIET, Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Emergency Training. That includes HUET, Helicopter Underwater Egress (or Escape) Training, in which one is lowered into a pool in a mock helicopter cabin and turned upside down. Passengers then have to escape.
This might have been manageable if Darko could swim and wasn’t terrified of deep water. The thought of being dunked into a pool strikes fear in him like a stone cold statue in his chest, and if he gets through that, he then must face the real thing: crossing the vast Gulf of Guinea in a craft flying by dint of mysterious physics.
This author likes to experience exactly what his characters do–well, except the murders; not that part–so this MLK weekend, I’ll be attending that same training course that Darko did in Ghana, only I will be in Houston, TX (the course is standardized across the globe.) And this February when I go to Ghana, like Darko, I will cross that same magnificent Gulf of Guinea in a chopper that will touch down on the helipad of a deep sea oil rig–and not, I trust in the water.
