Charon's Landing (10 page)

Mercer shook his head sadly. “No one appreciates the old lamp shade on the head gag anymore.”

Tiny’s was exactly what Mercer needed to forget about Aggie Johnston and her problems. He and Harry bantered with a biting sarcasm that would wither most people, but neither would have it any other way. An hour and a half went by, Mercer’s couple of nightcaps turning into an entire milliner’s shop as he and Harry as well as a few of the other regulars drank their wallets empty. Tiny closed the place at one, making sure to call cabs for those patrons too drunk to drive and assigning moderately sober drivers for the rest. Harry left with Mercer, each of them with two bottles of beer in hand for their walk home. Harry lived five blocks away in the opposite direction from Mercer. He began swaying up the street after a few parting jibes about Mercer’s tuxedo.

Mercer left his car and turned down the street, taking swallows from one bottle as he went, though each footfall made him dribble a little beer. He knew he was really drunk when his feet crossed each other and he nearly sprawled on the sidewalk. He glanced around, his blurred eyes trying to penetrate the darkness to see if anyone had noticed, but the street appeared quiet.

He continued, draining the first beer as he crossed onto the block just before his. Rather than fighting open the other, a task he knew would be impossible in his state, he simply carried it with him, each dangling by its neck in his hands. He tripped again stepping to the curb on his block and laughed at himself. He’d heard from enough people that alcohol was a depressant, but right now he had that perfect buzz that made everything funnier than hell, even the shadowy figure that stepped from behind a van parked a few paces from him.

Mercer saw the blow coming and willed his body to tense, but his alcohol-deadened nerves wouldn’t respond. He was completely limp, and that saved his life. The pistol butt laid into his face, snapping his head so hard that he corkscrewed to the sidewalk. A vicious kick to the ribs turned him over twice, and he went with it, rolling away from his assailant, giving himself enough distance to get to his feet.

He staggered up, blood slicking the right side of his face and dripping into his mouth with a metallic salty taste. The Glock came down, its nine-millimeter muzzle leveled at Mercer’s chest.

The suddenness and ferocity of the attack would have frozen a normal man, but Mercer’s reactions were quick — if dulled by the gimlets. The alcohol coursing through his body filled him with a reckless courage. He leaped forward, ignoring the Glock, his evening shoes sliding across the rain-soaked cement. The gun never went off.

Jamal Lincoln was thrown off guard by Mercer’s assault and hadn’t squeezed hard enough on the integrated trigger safety of the unfamiliar weapon. He shifted the big semiautomatic in his hand, feeling the safety disengage an instant before Mercer crashed into him. The gun was aimed at his intended victim’s chest and at this range would blow him halfway down the block.

Mercer still had the beer bottles in his hands and swung them with all of the strength he could muster, each arm whipping inward so that the two bottles smashed into Jamal’s head simultaneously. The full bottle exploded on impact, showering them both with frothing beer and shards of green glass while the empty bottle remained intact, knocking Jamal off balance. His right arm whirled across his body so when he fired, the shot ricocheted off a building across the street. Jamal almost blacked out from the blow but retained enough control to push against Mercer just as the return stroke of the bottle came at him, missing him by inches.

The unbroken bottle whizzed by Jamal’s head, the force of the swing leading Mercer into a natural follow-through, and without thinking he plunged the remains of the shattered bottle deep into his assailant’s throat. The jagged glass cut through skin and muscle and arteries with only spongy resistance. The Glock dropped as Jamal reeled away, clutching at his shredded throat. It was the last voluntary movement he would ever make.

Mercer fell to the ground at the same time as Jamal, the alcohol, shock, and fear draining his strength. Darkness crept into his mind, cutting his vision down to a haze-filled tunnel. Even the lights that had snapped on in response to the shot were just distant points, fading even as more of them lit the street. He laid his head against the cold concrete as a siren began to wail someplace in another reality.

“You’re dead, aren’t you, Howard? They got you already,” Mercer mumbled to the cement before he passed out.

U
nder the glare of sodium arc lights, the hull of the
Petromax Arctica
was even darker than the water of Prince William Sound. The sun had not yet set in the northern latitudes though it was past nine at night. Despite the umber light, regulations demanded that the lamps high up in the oil gantries be on at all times. They bathed the VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier), bringing out harsh shadows on her huge deck.

The ship was more than a thousand feet long, but what truly made her seem unworldly was her width. With a hundred-and-fifty-seven-foot beam, she was nearly as wide as a city block was long. Her red-painted deck was as large and flat as a parking lot, broken only by inspection hatches and a raised catwalk that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from her superstructure to her blunted bows. The tanker’s superstructure was a slab-sided white box at the very stern, rising fifty feet over the deck. Cantilevered promenades wrapped around a few of its levels, and the wings of the flying bridges hung over empty space on each side of the ship. Her single funnel sat foursquare in the center of the superstructure. The emblem of Petromax Oil, a stylized oil derrick with the intertwined letters
P
and
O,
was lit by a floodlight just below the twenty-foot-tall standard.

Unlike any ship in history, supertankers, as VLCCs had been dubbed by the media soon after their debut, defy nearly every law of naval architecture. Because of their size, they cannot be built like a traditional vessel with a laid keel and massive steel supports rising up like ribs from the backbone. Tankers must be built in sections, each one floated independently and welded together in the water. According to the engineers, tankers are safe, yet they still tend to break up when nature or man’s own folly stresses them too much. They are a bastard creation, spawned by an oil-thirsty world with little regard for how that thirst was slaked.

The
Petromax Arctica
was a modern-generation supertanker, only three years old, double hulled and built with the latest inert gas scrubbers and other safety devices. But the most recent evolution of a dangerous idea was still dangerous. Therefore, Captain Lyle Hauser treated his ship as if she were a floating bomb with a lit fuse.

Hauser stood one hundred feet over the sound on the port wing of the flying bridge, feeling his ship settle as North Slope crude poured into her compartmentalized hull at a rate of twenty thousand barrels every hour. He’d been up there since the armored hoses of loading berth number three had started disgorging the oil hours earlier. Pulled from retirement for this trip, this was his first time on a tanker of this size and he wasn’t going to allow even a minor deviation from procedure. If that meant he had to stand on the flying bridge and watch the gantries automatically pump oil into his ship for the remaining hours of loading, so be it. It was a ritual he’d acquired as a lightering tanker captain. Some superstition, deep in the back of his mind, told him that if he didn’t watch the entire loading process, disaster would surely strike.

The loading system was a direct feed linked through the ship’s computer, so there was no chance for a spill or the vessel losing her center of gravity, yet Hauser could still smell the heavy stink of crude oil and feel the great behemoth below his feet shift as the internal pumps transferred crude between the compartments to keep the
Arctica
level.

He pulled a walkie-talkie from the deep pocket of his pea coat. “Riggs, how’re the oxygen levels in the tanks?”

“Showing five percent across the board.”

While oil is one of the most combustible substances on earth, it can only burn within a narrow ratio of gases. Too much or too little oxygen and it will not ignite. Because her main engine produced emissions in the 12 percent range, the
Petromax Arctica
was outfitted with a separate Sun Rod boiler system that produced exhaust well below the threshold where oil is combustible. The Sun Rod’s emissions were piped directly into the tanks to maintain an inert level.

“And what’s the cargo level in starboard tanks one through three, please?”

“Twenty-seven percent. She’s loading even, Captain,” his First Officer responded.

Hauser knew that his ship was loading evenly; he could feel it with his wide-spaced feet. His request had merely been a test to ensure that Riggs was manning his station and attentive to his job.

Her job, Hauser reminded himself. Though she had a deep, almost coarse voice that came across the walkie-talkie as mannish, his Number One, JoAnn Riggs, was a woman, a nine-year veteran out of the Merchant Marine Academy in Maine.

Hauser hoped he’d get used to the idea of a woman under his command. Her dossier, which he’d read on his flight to Alaska, showed her to be a competent, disciplined officer. In fact, she had more time on supertankers of this size than he did. Yet there was something about her intense manner and constantly blinking eyes that he just didn’t like. After forty-five years in a career that led him to work with hundreds of people, Hauser had become an excellent judge of character. His first instincts usually served him well. He just did not like JoAnn Riggs. It had nothing to do with her gender; it was just her.

Hauser plucked a cheroot from its black and gold cardboard box, slipped the packet back into his coat, and pulled the thick wool back around himself to ward off the unseasonable cold. He automatically reached into his pants pocket for his lighter, an inscribed Zippo from his wife, but it was locked in his desk in the captain’s day room. He’d quit smoking the cigars over a year ago but kept the lighter with him. It was under lock and key, not as a safety precaution but as a deterrent from ever lighting one of the five cigars he chewed each day.

“Damn Surgeon General and his ridiculous warnings,” he muttered.

As he thought about it, Hauser realized that he didn’t care for the three other ship’s officers he’d met this morning. Because of the tremendous fortunes tied up in tankers and their cargoes, men had to accommodate the ships rather than the other way around. It was common for new crew members, including captains, to meet their new ships in out-of-the-way places like the Persian Gulf or Cape Town or Alaska. There was no time for crews to get acquainted before the ships were back at sea. Depending on the circumstances, crewmen were sometimes choppered out to the tankers while they were under way, adding to the isolation in which these leviathans existed.

It was one of the many dehumanizing effects on ocean commerce Hauser had watched develop over the decades. The industrialized world had put itself on such a rigid schedule of supply and demand that tankers and their cousins, bulk carriers and container ships, simply became another part of the assembly line. To those who owned them and to many of the new generation that worked them, the world’s merchant fleets no longer elicited the emotional responses that they’d commanded a half century before. They’d become just one more cog in the great industrialized machine.

Maybe that was why Hauser didn’t like the crew he would command until the ship docked at the El Segundo refinery north of Long Beach. They were part of the new generation. They saw what they did as jobs, not callings, as he had when he went to sea at sixteen. Hauser wondered if he was just being harsh. Maybe his wife was right, that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be coaxed out of a quiet, dull retirement for one last command. Even if he could accept a woman as a bridge officer, progress might have passed him by, leaving him longing for the old traditions that were gone for good.

“Aw, hell, give ’em time. They’ve had a rough couple a days,” Hauser said aloud. He regularly talked to himself and to his ships.

Until three days ago, the
Arctica
had been owned by Petromax Oil under the command of Captain Harris Albrecht. Then, through secret negotiations, Petromax sold their remaining tanker fleet, including the
Arctica
, to Southern Coasting and Lightering, an obscure tanker company based in Louisiana. The same day news of the sale reached the ship, Captain Albrecht, the master of the
Petromax Arctica
for nearly six years, had suffered a serious accident.

Hauser hadn’t yet learned the full story, but due to the severity of his injuries, Albrecht had been choppered from the ship while she was still two hundred miles from port and flown directly to Anchorage’s Providence Hospital. Riggs’ succinct report of the incident stated that Captain Albrecht had lost part of his right forearm in a machinery accident and that the severed member had not been recovered. Hauser was empathetic enough to give Riggs and the rest of the crew time to deal with the trauma before pressing for details.

Southern Coasting and Lightering had bought the crew’s contracts when they purchased the vessel. However, they did not have a captain able to fill in for the injured Albrecht, so Hauser had consented to leave his retirement and take the vessel from Valdez to California. Hauser had spent most of his career on smaller vessels called product tankers, moving fuel oil, gasoline, or other oil derivatives along the East Coast. This was the first time he’d ever worked for Southern Coasting and the first time in years that he’d commanded a tanker in these northern waters.

In addition to a more complete accident report, Hauser also wanted to get the reason why the
Petromax Arctica
had been eighteen hours late arriving at Valdez. He could forgive an inadequate log entry concerning the accident, given the circumstances, but he was not about to overlook Riggs bringing the tanker into port three-quarters of a day late without an explanation. That kind of laxity was unpardonable. This had not been an auspicious beginning to Lyle Hauser’s last command.