Charon's Landing

120 Miles West of British Columbia

The waves started far out in the ocean, churned up by currents and tides into great sloping mounds of water that rushed across the Pacific at nearly thirty miles per hour, building momentum and force with each passing moment. They were not the surface swells whipped up by stormy winds that were the delight of surfers along America’s Pacific coast. These were pulsating mountains that shifted millions of tons of water as if driven by the very engine of the earth. The Petromax Arctica, now called Southern Cross, took these massive rollers along her beam, her quarter million tons lifting easily, her deadly cargo shifting so the steel baffles within her tanks groaned. When she took an errant wave head-on, an explosion of white foam and dark green sea would blow over her bow. In the pale afternoon, the collisions looked like torpedo strikes, great plumes of water lashing the deck, each hit sending a shudder through the tanker.

She’d been built for these seas, and despite the seeming violence of the confrontation between ship and sea, she rode them well. Only the larger commercial fishing boats and tankers braved these waters. The endless procession of ferries and cruise ships that sailed to Alaska never strayed from the protection of the Inside Passage, a marine route protected from the ravages of the open ocean by a string of islands that stretched from Vancouver to the Gulf of Alaska.

The tension on the bridge, which was an almost tangible presence, had nothing to do with the deteriorating weather. Since the takeover, every member of the crew regarded the situation with equal doses of fear and expectation, fear for their lives and hope that there would be an opportunity to retake the tanker. When not on duty, the crew was kept in the main mess hall under the watchful eye of at least two guards. Conversations at the long tables were kept to ship’s business and nothing more.

Despite their incredible size, VLCCs are operated with only a tiny crew, twenty ratings and ten officers. And since there were only three key areas that needed monitoring — the engine room, the tank control station, and the bridge — the eight terrorists under JoAnn Riggs’ command could maintain control for as long as necessary.

Riggs sat in the port side Master’s chair, one of the two comfortable seats located on each side of the spacious bridge. Since the takeover, she had sat there braying orders, watching the bridge crew with predatory eyes, and smoking cigarette after cigarette in an unending chain. To her right, a helmsman kept a firm grip on the two levers that acted as the ship’s wheel. When his eyes were not scanning the open horizon, he either studied the digital engine displays or glanced at his new captain. Behind the helmsman, Wolf, the terrorists’ leader, stood against the aft bulkhead, a machine pistol dangling below his crossed arms. Despite his presence, Riggs felt exposed and vulnerable. To hide it, she lashed out at the crew, screaming orders that would normally be spoken in a whisper, forcing them to work extended shifts to repair the damage from the terrorists’ attempt to subdue Lyle Hauser.

JoAnn Riggs was not supposed to be in charge of the supertanker or the terrorists, but due to the misfortune of the ship’s original captain, Harris Albrecht, she found herself in this position. Albrecht should have commanded the ship back to Long Beach and led the terrorist takeover, with JoAnn acting as First Officer. But then he lost a good share of his lower arm and had to be evacuated, forcing Southern Coasting and Lightering to ask Petromax for a replacement because Riggs didn’t have experience in these waters. Riggs had to rework her plan and had intended to use Hauser until the ship was safely away from Alaska, then lock him with the rest of the crew. She would then captain the vessel to their final destination. With Albrecht gone, Riggs’ payment for her involvement had doubled, but she was left as the only officer working with Wolf and his men. The responsibilities were daunting, especially with a crew who were virtual prisoners and many critical systems either off-line or destroyed.

Another wave crashed into the bow a quarter mile away, thick spume rising up nearly to the height of the bridge before slamming back to the deck and racing to the scuppers like a river at full flood. Just as the deck cleared of water, a series of yellow and red warning lights went off all along the control console. An alarm sounded.

Riggs reacted instantly, coming off the chair like a panther. She was at the helmsman’s shoulder before the crewman realized she’d moved.

“What happened?” she snapped, fearing that the wave had stoved in the bow.

“Automatic engine override. The computer shut the main down.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet. The diagnostic is still cycling,” the helmsman answered.

Riggs picked up the hand mike for the intercom and dialed the mess hall. “This is Riggs. I want the Chief Engineer and three of his men in the engine room immediately.” She snapped off the button but held the mike in case she needed to issue more orders. “Do we have a fire?”

“Negative. Engine room heat is nominal, and the suppression system hasn’t tripped.”

She looked out the bridge window and was relieved to see that the horizon was clear. Even if they couldn’t get the engine restarted right away, there was little cause for concern. There wasn’t any other shipping in the area, and they had plenty of sea room before the tanker drifted close to shore. Because of the inertia built up by the two hundred thousand tons of oil in her tanks, it would take seventeen miles and about six hours before they came to a stop. After that, they would be at the mercy of the North Pacific.

“Bridge, this is the engine room.” George Patroni, the ship’s engineer, sounded tinny through the onboard intercom. “There’s no emergency. I can have us under way in about an hour, but we’ve got another problem.”

“What is it?” Riggs said, then quickly countered herself. “Belay that. I’m coming down.”

The engine room of the Southern Cross was a towering cavern of steel, aluminum, and copper. The ceiling lofted four stories over the bottom decking and was obscured by the tangled junctures of the countless miles of piping conduits, ductwork, and electric cables that meandered throughout the ship. Though spotlessly clean, the room was permeated with the heavy stench of marine-grade diesel fuel and machine oil. The smell coated everything and clung to the clothing and skin of anyone who entered.

The engine itself was the size of two overland buses laid end to end with two others stacked on top of them. The huge diesel wasn’t running, but there was a palpable feeling of power emanating from it. In a vessel that taxed superlatives to their very limits, the engine suited the ship perfectly. When it was operational, no one could tolerate the deafening roar of the nine-cylinder power plant, but even now, the noise produced by the auxiliary generators and steering gear pumps was just below the pain threshold.

When she stepped off the tranquil elevator at the main engineering level three floors above the bottom deck, JoAnn Riggs was pushed back by the noise as if physically struck. Patroni stood on a catwalk suspended over the molded block head of the engine in a huddled meeting with his assistants. He was built like a fireplug. Wolf had somehow beat Riggs here and watched the engineers from a few paces away, one of his men at his side. Because of the noise, no one was aware of her presence until she tapped Patroni on his hard sloping shoulder.

“Well?” She had to scream into his ear to be heard over the machinery.

Patroni held up a scarred finger, then bade Riggs to follow him.

The walk to the engineering control room was hot and uncomfortable; the smell made her nauseous. Patroni slid open the glass door to the control room and waited until they had all entered before sealing the room again. Through the thick glass enclosure, they had a commanding view of the engine room, but the noise was reduced to a dull rumble by the sound insulation, and the air was fresh thanks to air conditioning.

“Well?” repeated Riggs.

Patroni ignored her for a moment as he studied the countless banks of control consoles that hugged three walls of the room. With each display he checked, he grunted a bit louder and the scowl on his pug face deepened.

“I told you we needed to keep engineering manned at all times. This accident is your fault entirely,” he accused, ignoring the two machine pistols trained on him.

“Just tell me what happened,” Riggs ordered angrily.

“According to the computer logs, there was a buildup of scale on the fuel filter for number-five cylinder. Had someone been in here, it would have been easy to switch over to the backup injector, clean the filter, and reactivate the primary, but me and my staff weren’t here. The filter failed, and the fuel pumped into number five was contaminated. It started running lean. The computer picked it up, but again” — he glared at Riggs — “no one was here. Had the seas been calm we would have felt the engine vibrating as cylinder five started to pre-detonate. As near as I can tell, she was running so lean, she blew the head right off the piston. The computers sensed the presence of that much metal grinding through the machinery and initiated an emergency shutdown.”

“You said you could get her running again.”

“Sure. I just release the compression on number five and let her cycle without power, but we’ve got a couple hundred pounds of scrap metal in the crankcase right now and it’s going to tear the rest of the engine apart when we restart.”

“Drain the oil and refill it with lubricant from ship’s stores,” Riggs replied.

“That’ll get out most of it, but not all,” Patroni pointed out. “She’ll foul up again. At reduced power we just might make Seattle before the whole engine seizes solid.”

“I don’t care what you do, Chief, but this ship will make it to San Francisco or, so help me God, you’ll watch as every member of the crew is castrated before I kill you myself. Am I clear?” Riggs turned to Wolf, whose eyes showed respect at Riggs’ handling of the situation. “Any chance this could be caused by sabotage?”

“No one has been down here since we took the vessel except for the inspection, which my men watch. This is a natural accident.”

“Accidents are never natural,” Riggs snapped before leaving the control room, heading back to her sanctuary on the bridge.

“All right, boys.” Patroni turned to his three assistants. “Ken, Paul, I want you to go to the stores and grab three barrels of oil. Pete, start pulling the drains on all the cylinders. I want you to set some filters under the drains so I have an idea how much shit is in the crankcase. I want to flush the whole system once, turn her over a couple of times with the primary starter, and wash her out again. Then we’ll fill her up. Oh, and check the fuel preheater, will ya? Make sure it’s ready. The fuel’s going to be cold again by the time we’re ready for a restart. I need to go put on my working rig.” Patroni’s men were already wearing their heavy overalls, but he was still in his uniform and had to change before tackling the messy job of changing eighty gallons of engine oil. He glanced at Wolf and asked ironically, “Is that all right with you?”

Wolf waved him away with a flick of his wrist. He was more concerned about Patroni’s men somehow sabotaging the engine repairs. He felt certain that the Chief Engineer knew what was at risk and would soon return to the engine room.

George Patroni angrily stabbed at the elevator call button and quietly cursed everyone involved with fouling his beloved engine. First, of course, was the bitch Riggs, followed closely by Wolf and the rest of his band of cutthroats; then came the idiots who had installed the faulty fuel injector and the morons who’d built it in the first place. He was still adding people to his list when the elevator arrived and he stepped into the empty car.

He wasn’t even aware that the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator was open until a voice called down to him, “Did I stop the ship?”

Patroni nearly jumped out of his skin, slamming himself against the back of the car and staring up at the dark opening over his head. He watched, slack-jawed, as Captain Lyle Hauser peered through the hatchway.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Patroni muttered.

Hauser snapped him out of his near panic. “Disengage the alarm and stop the car.”

Patroni peeled himself off the wall and opened the small panel cover beneath the elevator’s controls. It took him a second to cross-wire the elevator alarm so when he hit the stop button, the bell remained silent. Hauser almost fell from his perch at the sudden deceleration.

“I thought you were dead,” Patroni said after finally finding his voice.

Hauser eased through the hatch and dropped to the floor next to Patroni, the car shuddering with the impact. “So did I.”

Hauser’s life had been spared by a fraction of an inch. When he leaped from the bridge wing the night before, he had lost his footing at the critical instant and had slammed into the stout railing that surrounded the lower promenade. Through the agony of the crushing blow, he had enough presence of mind to clutch at the railing before falling another forty feet to the main deck. He clung precariously for many long moments as his breath returned in aching gasps.

He knew that Riggs would send someone to make certain he was dead. He had to find refuge. Cold, numb, and racked with pain, Hauser had broken into one of the ship’s three enclosed lifeboats, the one that hung directly at her stern. The other two boats, both port and starboard, were visible from the bridge and therefore not options. Hauser had thought about launching the craft and escaping, but he was the captain of the Petromax Arctica and there was no way he would abandon his ship and crew.

Despite his fear, Hauser had managed to eat a little of the emergency stores cached in the craft. He had donned one of the yellow survival suits to retain his body heat and had even managed to sleep for a few hours. By the time dawn finally arrived, he was rested enough to implement the plan that had come to him during the night.

Hauser had spent only a few hours aboard the Petromax Arctica before she was seized, but he’d been around ships, especially tankers, his entire life. It was easy to work his way into the multiple layers of crawl spaces and access tunnels that were sandwiched between the decks. This gave him full run of the supertanker while avoiding any chance of detection. He’d been able to watch guards and crewmen alike as he lay in the cramped confines of the heating ducts.

When he reached the engine room this morning, he’d found Patroni and an assistant oiler doing a scheduled inspection under the malevolent glare of one of the terrorists. His hopes of sabotaging the tanker were dashed. There was nothing he could do as long as the engine room was occupied. But even as he prepared to make his way back to the sanctuary of the lifeboat, the guard herded Patroni and his aide back to the elevator.

Because of the complexity of the forest of pipes running to and from the power plant, inspection hatches were placed in readily accessible areas. One of them gave him access to the primary fuel bunker for the odd-numbered cylinders. The metal shavings he found on the floor of the machine shop adjacent to the engine room were perfect for what he had in mind. He simply dumped a few handfuls into the viscous diesel fuel and waited for them to grind the engine to a halt. The tanker wouldn’t be delayed long — he hadn’t done enough damage — and he hadn’t wanted to disable the ship permanently, fearing the dangers of her drifting out of control. Still, he’d hoped that he could grab a few minutes alone with a member of the crew during the confusion. Finding the Chief Engineer in the elevator was a godsend.

“We don’t have much time,” Hauser said to the still-startled Patroni. “They’ll wonder about your delay, so give me a quick rundown of the situation.”

“Well, terrorists have seized the ship and Riggs is working with them.”

Hauser cut him off. “I know all that. What’s the status of the ship and crew?”

“Whatever you put into the fuel system only affected cylinder five before the computer shut the engine down. We’ll have her running in an hour or two. But we’ll only be able to goose fifty percent power without destroying the rest of the engine. Riggs told me that the ship has to make it to San Francisco.”

“Frisco? Why Frisco?”

“She didn’t say, but she made it damn clear that that’s where we’re headed.”

“How’s the crew?”

“We’re doing okay. They keep us in the main mess hall when not on duty. We’re fed only once a day and have to sleep on the floor or in chairs, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. They’ve made a few threats, and so far two are dead. One of them was Larry Walker, the helmsman who took the bullets meant for you.”

“What about the rest of the ship? I know the bridge was shot up pretty badly.”

“Yeah, it was. The radar system is a complete write-off; I’ll never be able to fix it. And the tank pressure sensors were taken out too. She wants those sensors back on-line ASAP. In fact, she’s got the ship’s electrician scavenging parts from other systems to get them running again. The helm controls still work fine, but changing engine speeds must be done manually in the engine room.”

“They don’t have throttle control, yet they leave the engine room on UMS status?” Hauser was shocked by the negligence. UMS, or Unmanned Ship, is the automatic system that controls the power plant during the engineering staff’s off-duty time. In normal conditions, a tanker is run under UMS only at night and in calm seas.

“I’m not issuing the orders. I’m just following them.”

“I wonder why tank control is so important to them. It shouldn’t be prioritized above regaining remote throttle control.” Hauser spoke almost rhetorically. Neither he nor Patroni could second-guess the motivations of the force that had taken their ship. “Do you know anything about the terrorists?”

“Only that the leader is named Wolf, and even he takes orders from JoAnn Riggs.”

“What’s your take on all of this? You’ve sailed with Riggs.”

“I don’t know, Captain. I’ve sailed with her, yes, but only twice before. I’m almost as new to this tub as you are. All I know is that she was pretty chummy with the former captain, Harris Albrecht.”

“Do you think Albrecht was involved with this?” Hauser asked, putting two and two together but still coming up with three.

“I’m sure of it.”

“Do you know what happened to him and why the ship was late getting into Valdez?”

“Albrecht confined most of the crew to their quarters while we wallowed in the Gulf of Alaska. Nobody was allowed topside except him and Riggs. And it wasn’t the first time we stopped out there, but it was the longest. I don’t know what happened to Albrecht’s arm. But I do know that they never recovered the limb, if you know what I mean.”

“What are you saying?”

Patroni looked at Hauser for a second as if he couldn’t believe that the captain didn’t catch his meaning. “Hey, this ship is big and dangerous too, but if you lost an arm, you would damn well find it real fast and hopefully have a doctor sew it back on. Captain Albrecht never got his arm back, and the medevac helicopter was here only twenty minutes after the accident. What happened to the severed limb?”

“Overboard?”

“What was he doing at the rail that could take his hand off?”

Hauser had no reply.

“I’ve been talking to the guys who’d been sailing with Riggs and Albrecht for a while. They’ve been doing this for a few months, stopping in the middle of nowhere and confining the crew belowdecks. They were paid a small bonus for the inconvenience, so no one complained.”

“Petromax never said anything about these delays?”

Patroni shook his head. “Not as far as I know.”

Hauser looked at his watch. “You’d better get going before they wonder where you are. I’m holed up in the aft life raft. I need you to pass me any information you can get.”

“Yes, sir. I want these bastards off my boat as bad as you do.”

“Listen…” Hauser hadn’t been in command long enough to know the names of his officers.

“George,” Patroni offered.

“Listen, George, it may be necessary for me to leave the ship. The emergency radio in the life raft doesn’t have much range and we have to tell the outside world what’s happened. I want you to think of a way of launching the life raft without arousing suspicion. I don’t want my escape causing problems for the crew.”

“I understand,” Patroni replied. “I can arrange a short on the master control panel that will kill the indicator lights when the raft goes up on her davits. Don’t forget, the aft boat can be self-launched, but the timing has to be perfect.”

“It won’t happen for a while,” Hauser said as he prepared to heave himself back onto the roof of the elevator. “But be prepared. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

Once on the top of the elevator, he turned and looked back through the open hatch. “George, take care of the crew. No matter what happens, they come first.”

“I will, sir. You can count on it.” A moment later the elevator lurched upward as Patroni disengaged the manual arrest button.