Charon's Landing

Over the Atlantic Ocean

Like a blunt-nosed arrow, the shining Boeing 737 sped through twenty-seven thousand feet, its turbofans purring sedately under half their intended strain. The aircraft had been designed as a medium-sized commercial long-haul air carrier, built to ferry more than one hundred people. But this aircraft carried only one passenger in the kind of decadent comfort that hadn’t been seen since the time of the British Raj.

Max Johnston lay sprawled in one of the leather chairs in the cabin’s main salon. Behind him was a galley capable of five-star meals, a conference room with an African stinkwood table, and a private bedroom with an antique Shaker four-poster bolted to the cabin floor. The dresser in the bedroom was Regency in style and predated the aircraft by more than a century, and the silver backing of the mirror above it was so flecked with age that its reflection was like an old photograph. The carpeting throughout the aircraft was a rich maroon pile accenting the tasteful wallpapers and oriental throws that somewhat hid the airliner’s functional outline.

Ostensibly, the aircraft was owned by Petromax Oil and was available to every upper-level executive of the company. However, it was understood that the Boeing was Max Johnston’s private plane, and in the two years since the corporation had purchased it, only Johnston himself had ever used it.

The Scotch in his slack hand was so diluted with melted ice that it looked like urine, and when he took a quick gulping swallow, it tasted as vile. His suit coat lay balled up in the seat next to him, so wrinkled that it would probably be replaced by his valet when he returned to Washington. His shirt was soiled with spilled liquor, and his uncoordinated struggle to pull off his tie had left it knotted tightly inches below his throat. His skin was pale and waxen, dark smudges under his eyes highlighting the pouches that had developed in just the past few sleepless nights. He looked like a hanging victim after being lowered from the gallows.

Johnston heaved himself from the chair and poured his drink into the dip sink of the concealed wet bar. Ignoring the ice bucket, he recharged his glass with a twenty-four-year-old single malt and knocked it back like iced tea. It was his fourth drink in just the two hours since the plane took off from London’s Gatwick Airport. Although he was feeling drunk, his legs unsteady so that he had to brace himself against a television console, his feelings of self-loathing and disgust had not gone away. In fact, they were stronger, clutching deeper into his flesh, taking hold of his very soul.

He collapsed back into his chair, his chin sinking against his chest in a pose of utter defeat and despair. Tonight was the eve of his greatest coup. In several bold moves he was about to launch Petromax Oil into the lofty realm of a supercorporation, in league with the likes of General Motors, Exxon, or IBM, a company whose name and power would be known throughout the world. Taking risks far and above those of normal business practices, Johnston had quite literally traded his soul to scrabble those last steps to the very pinnacle of success. When he’d left London, he’d felt like one of the merchant princes of the Renaissance, making deals that not only affected his own purse strings but the fate of entire nations as well.

But now, just a few hours after sealing his pacts, he was drunk and despondent. The depression had come as soon as the aircraft labored out of England, but he knew he’d heard the voice nagging him even as a limousine was whisking him to the airport. The voice.

His father’s voice.

The ghostly hand of his father touched his shoulder, and Max Johnston jumped, spilling his drink on the Egyptian silk-on-silk rug that lay under his seat. The imagined gesture, as so often before, brought back a crush of emotions. But like all the other times he’d felt his father’s spectral presence, thoughts and feelings were quickly burned away, distilled into one crystal bitter memory. No matter what Johnston did, no matter how much he accomplished, he realized that his success would never erase what happened to him when he was sixteen years old and the scathing remarks that followed.

The teenage Johnston had helped a friend cheat on an exam by giving away his answers. Of course, they were caught, and both boys were suspended from school. That night, waiting in the study of the mansion that had become their home after Keith Johnston, a hardscrabble wildcatter, had struck it rich, young Max had been afraid. Keith Johnston had made his fortune by hard work, determination, and a large dose of luck, pulling in two fields within six months and launching Petromax Oil, a company named for his only child. Max imagined disappointment from the man he saw as a god, and the shame he felt was unbearable. His dad was an hour late coming home that night, and Max waited as if he were a soldier facing death, ready to accept whatever fate had in store.

Keith Johnston entered his study that night wearing a dusty suit, for success had not kept him out of the field. He still loved to visit the pumps, machinery, and men that made the oil flow from the south Texas plains. His wife had told him of Max’s suspension, and his mood was foul. Max, a large boy for his age, physically cowered.

“Cheating!” the elder Johnston had screamed. “There is nothing worse than someone who cheats, except someone who cheats for another’s gain, except someone so weak that he grants permission for somebody to rob him. Listen to me, boy, because this is the only time you are ever going to hear this.

“I built this company for you. I lied and cheated and stole to create all of this for you, so you could go on in my footsteps. And now I find my sole reason for working is nothing but a weak, impotent lackey, who gives away what he’s earned. Had you been cheating so you could get a better grade, I would have understood, but you knew the material for the test and gave it away so someone else could get as good a grade as you. You are a disgrace, a ready victim for anyone who comes along. I can’t believe that you are my son.

“We came from nothing, and you goddamned better not drag us back down to nothing or so help me Christ, I’ll kill you myself.” The hatred in the old man’s voice was the worst thing Max had ever heard in his entire life. “You disgust me.”

That was the last day they spoke to each other. Keith Johnston did not attend his son’s graduation from high school or from Texas A&M, where Max gave the valedictorian speech. He didn’t go to Max’s wedding, nor after his retirement did he offer congratulations when Max became CEO of the company named for him. The old man was still alive when, under Max’s guidance, Petromax topped one billion dollars in assets; however, he never said a word. The last lines of Keith Johnston’s will, read by an embarrassed family lawyer, cut Max so deeply that he actually fired the man who had been a friend for years.

“Just because I’m gone doesn’t mean I can ever forgive you or forget what you really are. No accomplishment will ever erase the fact that you are weak. Someday it will destroy you and the company you never deserved.”

The bitterness still burned the back of Max Johnston’s throat. He tried to wash it away with Scotch, but the respite was only temporary, for even as the liquor exploded in his belly, his jaw tensed and acrid saliva flooded his mouth.

“You’ll respect me,” Johnston said softly, a defiant plea for the acceptance of a man who could never give it.

Academics hadn’t impressed his father, himself a high school dropout who’d worked since he was twelve. Being at the top of his class in high school and college had not gained Max the praise he so desperately wanted; he should have known that such honors would mean nothing to his father. Max realized his father had been driven by the desire for wealth, not knowledge.

Certainly turning Petromax into a global holding company with far-flung interests and billions of dollars would get to the old man, reclaim the love he needed. Surely a balance sheet of half a billion dollars would get his father’s attention. When the respect did not come, Max turned the company into a one-billion-dollar behemoth. Then two.

When that failed, Max thought about what all that money represented. What was wealth’s purpose? It took him years to finally see what his old man had seen, to understand that the accumulation of wealth was nothing. It was the power that went along with it that was the reason for money’s existence. That was what the old man coveted, that was what the old man respected.

Keith Johnston was a drooling invalid who couldn’t use a bathroom by himself when Max gained his first White House invitation, and the old man had been dead for six years when Max financed his first successful campaign, buying himself a junior congressman for a mere eight million dollars. Even with his father dead, Max single-mindedly pursued those things that he hoped would impress the elder Johnston, gain the credibility and character that his father believed he did not possess. Now the President of the United States regularly consulted with Max about the Middle East and on energy matters, yet still he knew the old man was not impressed.

Power. The ability to control the lives of others with impunity.

Max Johnston was about to gain more power than any human being had possessed since the days of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. It wasn’t the scholastic honors gained through late-night studies. It wasn’t the mountains of money made through shrewd financial dealings. Nor was it being courted by politicians more concerned with reelection than actually accepting the responsibility given to them. This is what Keith Johnston had always wanted, the accumulation of so much power that the entire world would take notice. Now is when Max would finally regain the old man’s respect. Everything in his life had been a prelude to this moment. All the learning and all the money boiled down to this ultimate prize, the one thing that would make his father love him again.

It didn’t matter what was left in the wake of what he was about to do. The deaths were meaningless, no matter how many or who. Wars were about to start because of him, nations destroyed, possibly even his own, but when that moment came, when his father finally respected him and the voice late in the night finally fell silent, it would all be worth it.

Johnston hated what he’d become, hated everything about himself, from the urbane sophisticate he presented to the world to the shame-faced sixteen-year-old boy who still lived within him. He’d become the same cold, hate-filled, intractable man who’d dominated his entire life. He’d broken ethical codes, skirted moral ideals, and ignored international laws on this quest, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do now. No boundary was too far for him to cross. Nothing else mattered.

Somehow the glass he’d been gulping from had emptied and he got up to pour himself another, shying away from his mirrored reflection behind the minibar. When he finally did look at himself, staring deeply into his frantic eyes, he saw only shadowless clarity and single-minded purpose.

Max Johnston’s chance to finally lay to rest his personal demons was about to change the face of the earth, lay waste to thousands of square miles of land, and cause the deaths of countless thousands of people. Staring at his reflection, he knew that the price was cheap. He would do anything, achieve any goal or destroy any obstacle, to finally gain the love of a long-dead monster.

Knowing that his daughter was in Alaska, unintentionally in the middle of his personal crusade, Johnston knew even her death would be meaningless if his father finally left him alone.