Charon's Landing (11 page)

The sliding glass door leading to the bridge hissed open, pulling Hauser out of his musings. First Officer Riggs approached, her angular body buried under layers of sweaters and coats. Her face was gaunt and bony, with deeply recessed eyes of an indeterminate color. They were rather hazy and small. Her mouth was tight and lipless, and her eyelids fluttered distractingly.

“Sir, a call from the Operations Control Center.” Even without the distortion of the walkie-talkie, her voice was clipped and masculine.

“Yes, what is it?”

“The tractor trailer has arrived with the new nameplates for the ship.”

Hauser blew a long breath of frustration. If his new command had not been discomforting enough, the name of the vessel was to be changed as the tanker steamed to Southern California. When Hauser was told that he was to command one of the newest VLCCs in the world, he had felt the same exhilaration as he had when he’d received his first command. Then, when he was informed that the vessel’s name was to be changed during her maiden voyage as an SC&L tanker, Hauser had felt an icy tentacle of superstitious fear wend its way around his guts.

He knew that during a tanker’s twenty-year life, it carried more names than the devil himself as it was bought and sold, sometimes faster than the new names could be placed on stern and bow. His last ship before retirement had been named and renamed seven times before her owners sent her to the Pakistani ship breakers. But he didn’t like being on a vessel, let alone in command, while her name was being changed. Every sailor knew that it was simple bad luck.

When he heard about the name change, Hauser had asked Southern Coasting to delay it until she reached Long Beach and a scheduled maintenance cycle. But his entreaties fell on deaf ears. SC&L’s Director of Marine Operations told him that Petromax had demanded the ship’s name be changed en route. Out of idle curiosity, Hauser had phoned Petromax on his way to Alaska and learned that it was SC&L that had demanded the hasty renaming. They were even paying for the workers and the plates that were to be welded on to the stern, each one-hundred-pound piece of steel cut in the shape of a letter to spell out
Southern Cross
, the
Arctica
’s newest moniker.

Hauser had almost wanted to refuse to take command. Lord knew that his wife didn’t want him traipsing around the world on a supertanker. The name change was bad enough, but what rankled him the most was being lied to. To him, it didn’t matter who’d ordered it, but to lie about it was unreasonable and childish. However, if he didn’t take the ship, there would never be another one after it. He longed, once more, to feel a great tanker under his feet and know that she was his.

“Do you want me to tell them to come aboard?”

He had been so distracted with his own thoughts that he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. “Yes. Have a couple of seamen help them with anything they need and make sure the stewards know there’ll be several supernumeraries aboard for the voyage.”

“Yes, sir.” Riggs turned and walked the long open promenade back to the bridge.

Captain Hauser stared across the thousand sprawling acres of the Alyeska Marine Terminal. On a hill overlooking the five loading berths, huge earthen containment dikes surrounded the twenty principal oil storage tanks that had a holding capacity of more than three hundred and eighty-five million gallons of crude. Below them was the East Manifold Building, which was the terminus of the eight-hundred-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Between the Manifold Building and Hauser’s ship sat the ballast water treatment facility and the fuel bunkers for the tankers that used the port. Next to them were the Operations Control Center, the Marine Operations Office, and the Emergency Response Building. This last section of the facility had been greatly improved since the
Exxon Valdez
holed herself against Bligh Reef in 1989.

As Hauser looked toward the main gate of the terminal, a flatbed tractor trailer heaved into view, diesel smoke blowing out of her twin stacks. Dark tarpaulins covered the long trailer. A white van followed the truck closely, its headlights winking against the multiple reflectors on the big rig. A crane was also crossing the yard, its long boom thrust out like a medieval battering ram preparing to assault some ancient castle.

He watched as the three vehicles converged on the
Petromax Arctica
, as he would refer to his ship until the voyage was over. Within moments, the men from the van and the crane operator had established a smooth rapport of loading the bundles of steel plate onto the tanker. Hauser noticed that eight men appeared to be outfitted to come aboard, their duffel bags and cases piled on the asphalt quay in a heap. It looked as if only the van driver and the tractor trailer would be returning to Anchorage.

“Why in the hell would they need eight men to change the name of the ship?” Hauser’s question was met by a quick gust of wind that pulled against his sparse gray hair. “And why in the hell do they have so much luggage? This isn’t a cruise ship, for Christ’s sake.”

The question Hauser didn’t ask himself was one he would come to regret later. Why did the eight men coming to change the name of the ship move with the precision of a highly skilled squad of soldiers?

T
he dry desert heat beat down with the intensity of a blast furnace. Great downdrafts of molten air stirred the dust of the open rocky plain into whirling spirals that grew so large they collapsed under their own weight, vanishing as quickly as they formed. The sky was a cerulean blue dome over the barren earth, hazed only to the west where the far edge of the
Rub’ al Khali
, the great Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, met the waters of the southern Persian Gulf. The landscape was as desolate as the surface of the moon. There was little vegetation, only a few camel thorn trees and sparse sage. Rocky outcrops were baked so fiercely by the sun that many were split apart like overripe fruit.

The land was a thousand shades of color, from the blinding white of the sand dunes that marched in waves to the distant horizon to the deepest black of the Hajar Mountains across the border in Oman, yet much of the sand was stained pink by iron oxide. It was as if the desert were rusting. The late afternoon temperature hovered above one hundred and ten, and even with the coming evening, it wouldn’t dip more than a few degrees.

The
khamsin
, the scorching summer wind that tore across the land, was still strong this late in the year. It raked the surface of the earth, gouging it, shaping it as it had for a hundred million years. It forged an uncompromising environment that supported only the most hearty species.

Prince Khalid Al-Khuddari stood proudly in the open desert, the brutal heat raising only a thin layer of sweat under the thin cotton of his bush shirt. He was a creature of the desert, as hard and uncompromising and starkly handsome as the land around him. He was naturally light-skinned, but the time he spent in the desert had darkened him, turning his face and arms a dark mahogany. His high cheekbones and strong, hooked nose made him look like an American Plains Indian, his thick black hair and dark eyes only adding to the allusion.

He was tall, just over six feet, and he held his body erect and alert. In the open V of his shirt, his chest was smooth and hairless, almost like that of a boy, but the muscles stood out sharply. His belly was greyhound thin yet rippled like a streambed. He held his left hand at chest height, his elbow crooked so he could regard the creature perched on his gauntleted wrist. If any animal captured the essence of Khalid Al-Khuddari, it was the saker falcon gripping him so strongly with its talons that he could feel their needle tips piercing the leather of the falconer’s glove.

The saker, the second largest of the species
falconidae
, stood just over nineteen inches, with a reddish brown body and a neat pale head. Its beak, so sharply curved that it almost touched its breast, was as deadly as a scimitar, while its eyes were arguably the keenest in nature. The bird was known as one of the finest hunters in the world, with a determination and courage that were the basis of legend.

Used for falconry since generations before the horse was domesticated, the saker had the longest history of coexistence with man of any animal except the dog. Considered a sport of the noble elite of Europe since they learned of it during the Crusades, falconry is as much a part of the Arab culture as the five Pillars of Islam. In decline in the West because of an emotional animal rights movement, falconry thrived in the Gulf States. It was a pastime of both the wealthy and the poor. In fact, Khalid had learned it from a desert Bedouin, an elder of one of the tribes that had wandered the Arabian Peninsula since before the Prophet heard the word of God.

This falcon, a female named Sahara, was quiescent, calmly listening to the soothing words of her master, her head covered by an ornate leather hood so that she would not take flight until Khalid was ready to hunt her. Leather jesses tied around her tarsus, the naked part of her legs above her claws, leashed her to Khalid’s glove. He stroked her wings and the bird responded with a quiet
kweet kweet
, a sure sign of her contentment, much like the purr of a tabby cat.

“Are you ready, my darling?” Khalid asked the raptor, his face so close to the bird that his breath made her shift her weight. The tiny bells around her ankles chimed softly.

Though he felt alone with his falcon in the great desert, Khalid was not. Behind him, under a dazzlingly white bell tent, forty guests watched him from the tables laid specifically for the hunt. He and his guests had just finished a late lunch of lamb grilled over open fires and strong cheeses and dates, washed down with French champagne. Many of the assembled felt that they were emulating their early tribal history. Used to the air-conditioned comfort of Abu Dhabi City, they thought that the afternoon in the open country was a great adventure. That the tent had been set up for them and that a small army of servants ensured that their wineglasses never emptied was lost on them. Their roots had been yanked up by the Western influences that had poured into the country since oil was discovered in 1958.

Khalid looked behind him. Beyond the tent, the road was hidden by a small dune, but he could see the top of the two Daihatsu trucks that had brought the men and equipment for the outing. He knew that there was a fleet of Mercedes limousines near the trucks, their drivers waiting patiently while their pampered charges enjoyed themselves. He did not blame his guests for their wealth and privilege, for he was one of them, but he felt a twinge of disappointment that none of them shared his love of the land that had given them the lifestyle to which they had grown overly accustomed.

The land. Khalid turned back, ignoring the waves of greeting from a few of the women. The land. It gave no indication of the wealth it stored.

The United Arab Emirates had known three great periods of prosperity, once as one of the great pearl-producing areas of the world, once as an active piracy coast, and now as the home of one of the largest oil reserves on the planet. The fact that there were thirty-two billion barrels of oil trapped beneath the coastal plain and shallow offshore shelf of the UAE was not lost to Khalid Al-Khuddari. He knew that the open market price of Brent light sweet crude closed up a dollar and a half the day before, which translated into $750 billion buried in the desert. That wealth was spread among the Emirates’ two hundred thousand citizens, giving them the second highest per capita income in the world.

Khalid tracked these numbers and knew what they meant because he was Abu Dhabi’s Petroleum Minister, the UAE’s official representative to OPEC. Even though all seven of the autonomous Sheikdoms that made up the United Arab Emirates now had Petroleum Ministers, only Abu Dhabi, with the lion’s share of the oil, had the clout to join OPEC. After Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the UAE possessed more oil than any other nation within the cartel and thus wielded a great deal of power determining oil policy and prices. This power and responsibility were newly laid upon Khalid’s shoulders following the untimely death from lung cancer of Abu Dhabi’s previous Oil Minister.

His elevation to such a position of authority was highly unusual, not only because of his youth — Khalid would turn forty in two years — but also because he was not a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. He wasn’t even part of the same tribe as the Crown Prince Shaik. Khalid’s people were the wanderers of the open desert, the Bedouin who knew no border but the ones their herds of goats and camels established. They owed no loyalty or allegiance to any but their own and the
Sharia
, the law of Islam.

Khalid’s father may not have owed allegiance to any man, but the ruler of Abu Dhabi owed the Al-Khuddari family a great debt because of the support they had given during the early years of the UAE’s independence from Britain. Because of this, Khalid was given a European education, Eton, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, and when he returned to his homeland, his sharp mind and keen negotiation skills launched him on the fast track within the Emirates’ Oil Ministry.

The death of the previous Minister, following so closely after the American President’s announcement to suspend oil imports, had thrown the Ministry into chaos. Old guard clashed with the new generations of technocrats who had grown up with the affluence oil had brought, never knowing the poverty that had gripped the region prior to World War II. In the end, it was decided to turn the job over to someone outside of the ruling family and thus disassociated from the familial infighting.

Khalid realized that the debt to his father had been paid and that he himself was now beholden to the royal family of Abu Dhabi, a responsibility he took seriously, not only as the Oil Minister but also as an ad hoc family member. It was in this last capacity that he’d called this hunt, not to allow him an afternoon pursuing one of his great passions, but as a demonstration.

“Gentlemen,” he called over one broad shoulder while stroking the breast of the hooded falcon. “Why don’t you join me for a much better view.”