Charon's Landing

VLCC Southern Cross

The seas had calmed. The huge ship no longer rolled or yawed but ran as smoothly as a skiff on a mountain lake. Her main engine, though damaged, still moved her tremendous deadweight through the water at a healthy ten knots. Fat wedges of deep green water peeled back from her bows and raked along her sides in an unending rhythm. The wind was backing the tanker at the same ten knots of her speed so the massive decks felt becalmed.

Below decks, the mess hall smelled of unwashed bodies cramped too long in one space, stale cigarettes, and the heady stench from the overflowing bins of garbage next to the scullery. Because the doors leading to the nearby head were left open and nervous men had poor aim, the stink of the lavatory reached deep within the large mess. All together, it was nauseating.

The crew, who’d been prisoners for four days now, were quiet, subdued by both a pervasive sense of torpor and the omnipresent machine pistols of the terrorist watchers. Faces were ashen under grizzled beards, eyes dull and lifeless. As they mechanically slurped from coffee cups that they continuously recharged, their gestures were slow and deliberate. Such was their depth of despondency that the crewmen rarely made eye contact with their shipmates.

When the ordeal had begun, there had been fervent glances and subtle gestures of reassurance, keeping alive some hope of escape or rescue. But as time dragged, one day leading to the next and the vigilance of the terrorists waxing rather than waning, hope quickly dimmed. Now they sat docilely, heads hanging, cigarettes dangling from slack lips even among those who’d never smoked before. Rather than experience the much-hyped Stockholm Syndrome, where captives commiserate with their keepers, the officers and crew of the supertanker had fallen into a stupor.

All except Chief Engineer George Patroni and his three assistants.

Patroni had managed to inform his two men about Hauser soon after he’d been confronted by the Captain in the elevator. He’d told them just as the engine went back on line, its deafening roar ensuring that their conversation wasn’t overheard by their two guards. They were professional enough not to let the news distract them or make them act any differently from the rest of the listless crew. Apart from their regular inspections and heavy workload, they sat in the mess hall with the others, sleeping on the floor when they could, or slurping coffee with slow regularity, not once betraying their special knowledge.

Short and stocky but incredibly strong, Patroni was the son of a New York longshoreman and had grown up knowing that he would spend his life at sea. While his father had wanted him to finish high school and then follow in his footsteps, unloading the giant vessels that kept New York City filled with goods from around the globe, the older Patroni understood when seventeen-year-old George had signed on with a container ship as an oiler.

When he’d gotten his first look at the massive power plant that moved the cargo vessel, George Patroni knew that someday he would master one of these huge machines. It took twenty years before he would make chief engineer and another five before he could tame the tremendous engines of supertankers, but he never once regretted his youthful decision. Today, his wife and three teenage kids were secure in a modest slice of Jersey City. They packed more family bonding and love into his infrequent leaves than most people who worked the nine-to-five treadmill.

Patroni had been in a few scary situations in his life. For much of his tanker career, he’d worked the Persian Gulf-to-Europe run, rounding the Cape of Good Hope during its infamous winter storms and braving the Straits of Hormuz when Iranian and Iraqi gunboats were launching missiles at anything that moved. Patroni had watched the Seawise Giant, the largest tanker in the world, take a missile no more than a mile from his own ship.

Yet nothing had prepared him for this — the palpable fear of his mates, the angry expressions of their captors, and the ugly presence of their weapons.

Patroni sat at his own table in the mess, his arms making stout pillars on the Formica table to support his bowed head. An empty coffee cup sat in a dried ring of spilled liquid only inches away. A press-formed tin ashtray lay before him, the half dozen crushed butts looking like fallen stumps in the ash. His eyes were downcast, his mind a near blank, when suddenly a tiny folded scrap of paper appeared as if it had risen from the table itself.

Patroni made no move for it but lifted his eyes and peered around the room. No one was paying him any attention, and there wasn’t anyone close enough who could have thrown it to him. He leaned back in his chair, yawning widely so that his spine arched against the molded plastic chair and his face pointed toward the ceiling. Above him was a ventilator grid, mounted flush with the ceiling tiles. As he watched, the grid moved slightly as it was set back in its proper location.

He swept up bits of ash and tobacco from the tabletop and with the same gesture pressed the tiny piece of paper to his palm. When he smeared the debris against his coveralls, the scrap vanished into a pocket. His gesture was so smooth that no one even glanced in his direction.

In keeping with the terrorists’ instructions, Patroni raised his hand until the guards estimated that it was worth their time to escort a batch of their prisoners to the bathroom.

Shepherding them with machine guns, two terrorists maneuvered the six other crewmen who’d raised their hands from the room, their hard eyes anticipating any threat. While the door to the head was always kept open to make communication easier for the terrorists, the crew were allowed the privacy of the toilet stalls. Patroni patiently waited his turn, his hands held casually at his side. Only a slight tic in his right cheek revealed any sign of his agitation. Finally he gained access to a stall. He unzipped his coveralls, dropping them to his ankles, and sat on the still-warm seat. Killing two birds with one stone, he voided noisily and retrieved the note from his pocket, smoothing it out with his thick fingers so that he could read the neat script.

He dropped the note into the bowl, finished what his body demanded, and left the stall. As he washed his hands, one of the guards watched him from under heavy brows, a German-made H&K MP-5 cradled nonchalantly in his arms. Patroni could feel the terrorist’s eyes burning the back of his neck. Yet he showed nothing of the thoughts swimming in his head.

They were required to wait in the restroom until the last man had finished, and only then were they led back to the mess hall. The terrorist who’d been watching Patroni gave him a sharp jab to the kidneys that propelled the engineer across the hallway and into the mess. He just managed to remain on his feet by clutching a seat back.

Patroni whirled around, his fists coming up as he settled into a defensive crouch. Then a hand reached out and pressed against his hip. It was the ship’s electrician, whose chair he’d stumbled into. “It’s what he wants,” the electrician whispered so softly that his lips didn’t move.

Patroni relaxed, straightening his body and lowering his beefy fists. He ambled back to his customary seat, a secret smile on his face. Somehow he would find a way to help Hauser.

Hauser was too old for this and knew it. His heart pounded against his ribs like some wild animal trying to escape its cage, and sweat poured into his eyes, reducing them to painful slits. The air in the crawl space above the mess hall was so fouled with cigarette smoke that it felt as if he was drawing battery acid into his lungs. To think he used to smoke voluntarily. He clung to a thick steel conduit line running through the crawl space, his legs slung over the piping, his hands gripping so tightly his fingers ached. His shoulders were afire with the strain of holding himself in position. If he lost his grip, he’d fall through the acoustical tile ceiling below him. His labored movements kicked up dust that threatened to bring about a sneezing fit at any moment.

Captain Hauser began to haul himself back out of the space, inching along like a caterpillar. The air whooshing through a twelve-inch ventilator trunk line nearby was loud enough to cover the sounds of his ragged breathing. Once he was above the kitchen, he lowered himself to a more comfortable position — the ceiling was hardened to make it flame-proof and could support his weight. His chest pumped like a bellows, and long minutes passed before his hands stopped quivering.

“Too damned old by half,” he muttered quietly.

It took another hour of crawling, worming, and squeezing through the tanker’s numerous mechanicals spaces for him to reach a ventilator shaft and outside hatch. The cool sea breeze drawn in by the air conditioners blew across his face. It was a welcome relief to the smoke, dust, and heat he’d just endured, but the trip had been well worth it. He knew that Patroni would find a way to disable the bridge indicators when he launched the raft and make sure that no one was blamed. That was the key. Make sure the terrorists didn’t suspect that anyone had escaped.

Although his contribution to the Vietnam War had been running oil and cargo to Southeast Asia, Hauser had met enough soldiers to know that anyone with a gun in his hand suspected everything and everyone. Anything out of the ordinary meant trouble, and the only logical reaction was to open up with automatic fire. If the terrorists became suspicious, Hauser knew that some of his crew were going to die.

Easing the ventilator grid from its clamps, Hauser slid from the shaft and dropped lightly to the deck. He was near the tanker’s fantail, no more than fifteen feet from the life raft on its launching rail. As he’d hoped, he was alone. There were too few terrorists and too much ship for them to patrol effectively.

He allowed himself the luxury of watching the sea hiss past the vessel for a moment before undogging the waterproof hatch of the fiberglass lifeboat and jumping inside the claustrophobic craft. While the tanker carried a crew of thirty, as a safety precaution, each of her three life rafts could hold twenty men. Each boat carried emergency locator beacons and a two-way marine transceiver. A stay in one was never meant to last more than a day or two, especially in the busy shipping lanes that tankers ply, but they carried enough food and water to last a week.

Sitting on one of the plastic bench seats, Hauser checked that the few Plexiglas portholes were covered with blankets taken from the boat’s stores before allowing himself to relax. In a few hours, Patroni would cover for him while he launched the boat. He would motor away until some other vessel or shore-based radio picked up his broadcast. Until then, he had to wait, painfully watching the hours tick away. He turned to the question that had plagued him since he’d overheard two terrorists talking while he hung in a crawl space above a cabin.

Seattle. What was Riggs planning to do in Seattle?

Thoughts and ideas rumbled through his head, but nothing solidified enough to give him an answer. Even as he drew together every scrap of information he’d learned about the ship and the terrorists, nothing made Washington State’s port city seem important. He tried to remember which system Patroni had said was so crucial to Riggs. Tank control, that was it. She wanted to be able to shift the tanker’s cargo from hold to hold. The system was normally used to keep the vessel trimmed in rough seas or if she unloaded part of her cargo and then moved to another port to discharge the remainder. Maintaining equilibrium was significant for normal ship’s operation, but it should not be such a high priority.

It didn’t make any sense.

The continental United States’ northernmost port and the ability to shift oil within the monstrous hull… what was the connection? Suddenly Hauser knew. And fear and horror almost made him gag.

“Oh, dear God, they wouldn’t do it. No one would.”