Charon's Landing

Aboard the Petromax Arctica Juan de Fuca Strait, British Columbia

As the cities of Seattle and Vancouver expanded during the ’80s and ’90s, fueled by immigration from Asia and the technology companies that seemingly grew out of every garage and basement, great pains were taken to ensure that the pristine Pacific Northwest was left as virgin as possible. Unlike the megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, DC, that’s been spoiled forever by two hundred years of sprawl, the environs of Puget Sound were still beautiful rugged forests and mountains and clear cold waters that supported both commercial fishermen and the needs of the avid sportsmen. Wildlife flourished, especially in the Sound itself, where marine creatures from majestic whales to playful otters abounded. The crab beds around Seattle were legendary, teeming with the delicious crustaceans even after years of harvesting, and the national forests were perfect habitats for deer, beaver, and dozens of other woodland species. To all but the most vehement environmentalists, the area was the model of ecology and industry working together in productive harmony.

Where the sea rushes between Victoria Island and the mainland, a few miles from the city of Port Angeles, the VLCC Petromax Arctica hulked low in the water, her belly swollen by 200,000 tons of oil so her rails seemed only a few feet above the waves sliding against her. While tankers were not an uncommon sight in the Strait, one of the Arctica’s dimensions was. But more disturbing than her presence was the feathery tail of smoke leaking from her square funnel. Her engines were turning only enough for station’s keeping against the tide flowing into the Sound.

While the past quarter century is full of stories of supertanker accidents, the Exxon Valdez, the Amaco Cadiz, and the Torrey Canyon being the most famous, many of the giant vessels have been lost through storm or accident or mechanical fault. During a single month in 1969, three tankers of over two hundred thousand tons were lost or severely damaged, and few outside of the oil industry ever knew of these incidents. While the causes of disasters vary, it’s rare that a single fault can sink one of these behemoths. Many factors, from weather to a simple human mistake to a complete design flaw, are necessary to pull a supertanker under the waves. Not until the space shuttle has a single device possessed so many backup systems and fail-safes — all designed to prevent the type of disaster about to unfold in the waters leading to Puget Sound.

In Ivan Kerikov’s plan, the destruction of the tanker was to occur shortly after the cancellation of her sale to Southern Coasting and Lightering. Since the crippled ship could not make it as far south as San Francisco Bay, the plug had been pulled on the deal a few days early, a minor detail that only slightly altered the intended outcome of the operation. Captain Hauser’s valiant actions merely shifted the target city to Seattle. While not as sentimental as San Francisco, it was an equally fragile ecosystem that would suffer just as cruelly when the crude washed up on its coastlines.

JoAnn Riggs’ job now was to ensure that as much oil as possible was dumped into the sea, while making her actions appear accidental rather than intentional. With the ship’s crew shortly to be killed and the extraction boat on the way, there would be no witnesses and no physical evidence that the largest oil spill in history was an act of sabotage. The most conservative estimate predicted oil spreading from Bellingham to Everett, and the best-case scenario saw a slick covering a 174-mile stretch of coast from Vancouver to Tacoma, an area that included thousands of miles of irregular shoreline and numerous inlets, islands, and bays.

Giving the order to kill the remaining crewmen was a decision that gave JoAnn Riggs pause. It was an order that should have fallen to Captain Albrecht but now was her responsibility. While the million dollars that was to be her share for this operation would go a long way to assuaging her guilt, she was still reluctant to give Wolf the nod to do it.

Sensing her unease as they stood on the port side bridge wing, Wolf knew he would have to kill them without getting the direct order. There were so many murders in his past that a few more didn’t cause him undue concern. However, he did lose some respect for the woman who had executed the takeover of the tanker as if born to terrorism. As he turned to go, he took Riggs’ silence as a tacit approval. While Wolf would be doing the actual killing, the responsibility was still hers. Riggs gathered herself to finish what she had been paid to accomplish.

Max Johnston had made certain when the Petromax Arctica was built that she incorporated every automatic and systematic safety device to prevent her from ever spilling even a drop of her cargo. Therefore, to intentionally sink the vessel and make sure that crude poured from the hull in such volume that nothing could prevent it took the concerted effort of the entire terrorist cadre except for Wolf and one man he kept to assist him, each of them assigned a specific task and timed with military precision.

The great hull of the Arctica was segmented into eighteen separate tanks, a system used not only to prevent the entire cargo from being lost if she were ever holed but also to make the vessel much more stable in rough water. A complex system of valves and pumps connected the tanks, used mostly to keep an even keel when part of the cargo had been pumped off the ship. The computer that monitored the level of oil in each of the cavernous tanks prevented the ship from ever becoming unbalanced in even the roughest storms, compensating automatically to the conditions of the vessel and of the sea.

Riggs and her team had to take the computer off-line and manually operate the pumps, valves, and float cocks that controlled oil movement. The computer could not produce the conditions necessary for dumping her cargo — there were mechanical checks as well as those programmed into the system. Human hands, driven by greed or madness, would have to run many of the controls, opening them wide even as the computer was demanding they close. The machine’s binary morality put that of humans to shame.

The first part of their plan to dump the Arctica’s cargo was the sea suction inlet located at the stern of the vessel. This thirty-inch-diameter pipe, in conjunction with the Arctica’s three cargo pumps, was used to draw seawater into the tanks during cleaning and ballasting operations. To allow the cargo to drain from the hull out through the inlet, eight different valves of the double-segregated system had to be opened. Then, gravity would force the two hundred thousand tons of crude into the open sea. Perversely, the ship would rise in the water as its cargo discharged, increasing the pressure through the outlet and spraying oil in a two-hundred-foot jet when it cleared the waterline. Unless a salvage diver explored the tank control room after the ship had been scuttled and checked each of the valves, there would be no evidence of sabotage.

The second part of the plan involved temporarily removing the deck covers over several tanks and using the manifold system to flood the deck with oil. Once Riggs was ready to open the sea suction inlet, the covers would be replaced, again — to remove evidence of tampering. The crude would then be ignited as the remainder drained away. Spill response teams would waste precious time battling the flames, never realizing that much more significant damage had already been done in the pump room. Third, shaped explosive charges were to be detonated in the crawl spaces between the vessel’s double hulls, timed so that much of her oil would already be oozing toward shore when her bottom was blown out. If things went according to design, the reasons behind the sinking of the Petromax Arctica would remain a mystery.

Riggs waited in the pump control room while some members of her team were in the labyrinthine tangle of the inner hull spaces planting explosives and others removed the covers to six of the tanks. So far, the computer monitors showed that the system was nominal. The tanks were in perfect trim, the ratio of gases in the inert mixture that prevented the oil from ever catching fire was within the proper range.

Riggs had wanted to coordinate efforts with handheld walkie-talkies, but they appeared to all have failed at the same time. She couldn’t get even a faint whisper from any of the units. Thinking it was a bad batch of batteries, JoAnn never suspected that the signals were being jammed. Relying on a quickly drawn up schedule, she waited for the appointed time to deactivate the computer and spool up the huge pumps that controlled the oil flow within the ship.

As soon as a hatch cover was removed from one of the brimming tanks, an alarm sounded in the control room that indicated the gas ratio had changed and was becoming dangerously explosive. At each alarm, Riggs flipped several switches, and the valves controlling oil flow forced crude into the open-hatched tank. It came bubbling through the openings in thick clots like some primordial tar pit, spreading in ever widening pools. At fifteen thousand tons an hour, it took only a few seconds for the pumps to coat the main deck in an inches-deep slick, heavy ropes of oil draining through the scuppers to pour into the Strait. The alarm for the Saab ullage radar, which measured the height between the top of the cargo and the tops of the tanks, wailed an even more strident note than the other sensors. Riggs ignored it, making certain that the entire four-and-a-quarter acres of the deck were awash with North Slope crude. The mixture of oil vapor and air became a destructive cloud over the hull. Satisfied, she shut down the pump and waited for the crews to wrestle the hatches back into place through the stinking black slime.

She had emptied oil from only six of the eighteen tanks in a zigzag pattern that caused the hull to creak mournfully from the added strain of her now uneven load. Once the explosives in the ship’s belly detonated, this additional stress against her keel would speed up her destruction. A shining pool that scintillated like a rainbow had already formed around the Arctica’s dark hull, and a few inches of her oxide red Plimsoll line showed above the waves.

Riggs looked at her watch. It was ten minutes past two. The boat sent to fetch her and the others would be here in minutes. As if echoing her thoughts, Wolf appeared at her shoulder and said, “The boat is approaching. It is time to go.” His accent masked any emotion he might have had, though Riggs doubted he was capable of feelings.

“Is it done?” Riggs asked, referring to the murder of the crew.

“Yes, they’re dead.”

As a precaution if any bodies were recovered or washed ashore, Wolf and one of his men had forcibly drowned each member of the Arctica’s crew in the saltwater swimming pool on the funnel deck. Each man had to be led up to the pool individually, rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, and held under water until his struggles had ended. It had taken them much longer than anticipated to kill all twenty-four.

Riggs and Wolf waited in silence for a few minutes, giving the deck crews enough time to resecure the hatches. Once Riggs’ watch swept past 2:20 P.M., she manually opened the eight screw valves that led from the sea suction inlet to the main lines feeding from the ship’s cargo tanks. As the final valves opened, the pressure of oil venting through the ten-inch pipes could be felt as a palpable presence in the room. The flow sounded like a locomotive hissing through a long tunnel. Where the three lines combined into the main thirty-inch artery, the torrent made a noise like a continuous explosion. Crude began pouring from the vessel, life blood from a mortal wound.

Riggs smiled. “Let’s get off this coffin ship. I just need to stop and use the radio to complete our cover as hapless victims about to die, and then we’re gone.”

Any conversation Mercer and Krutchfield planned to have about the two civilians helping to retake the Petromax Arctica became moot when they saw the cauldron of oil blooming around the supertanker’s fantail. Even from a distance of half a mile, the sharp smell carried to them on the salty breeze.

“Madre de Dios,” the Hispanic SEAL mumbled. He crossed himself quickly.

“They didn’t wait for the rescue boat.” Krutchfield stated the obvious. “We’re too late.”

“Maybe not,” Mercer said tightly. He looked at Hauser, who regarded the crippled ship with horror. “Captain?”

“I don’t know,” Hauser finally said. “I can’t tell how bad it is until I’m aboard. It looks as if they reversed the sea suction and used it as a discharge outlet. Or they may have holed her. I can’t be sure.”

The Arctica’s stern pointed toward the open ocean and her bow speared eastward inside Puget Sound. The cabin cruiser raced along the entire quarter mile of her length to where a rope ladder dangled from her aft port rail. Like an iceberg that hides four-fifths of its bulk underwater, the true dimensions of the supertanker could not be fully comprehended even as they passed down her hull. The ship’s side, as black as sin and as smooth as glass, scrolled by endlessly as Krutchfield guided the Happyhour to the boarding ladder. It defied belief that something so vast could have been wrought by human hands, yet Mercer and the rest could see only part of the ship. Below them, the hull sank into the depths for sixty feet, the equivalent of a six-story building.

At the stern, Mercer looked behind them to see the full scope of the tanker and was reminded of the photographs he’d seen of China’s Great Wall, a continuous slab stretching to infinity. It was a chilling sight.

The entire hull was surrounded by a thick poisonous moat of oil.

“Hold fast,” a voice called from high above, a tiny blob that was a face peering over the rail of the Arctica. “We are coming down.”

Krutchfield and his two remaining SEALs had put on yellow rain jackets to camouflage their black uniforms, and so far it seemed to have fooled the man on the tanker. The next few minutes would be telling as the SEALs started up the ladder, their weapons hidden under the rubberized slickers.

“No, go back down. We’re finished,” the terrorist aboard the tanker shouted, his words torn away by the breeze tunneling down the Juan de Fuca Strait.

Krutchfield ignored the order as he scrambled up the swaying rope ladder, his feet kicking effortlessly on the rungs, his remaining team members following closely. They looked like a single organism as they climbed, undulating upward in a fluid motion. Mercer waited for half a beat before he committed himself to the task, knowing that Hauser would follow. The Captain no longer cared if he was recognized by Riggs or one of the terrorists. The Petromax Arctica was his ship, nominally under his command, and he would do whatever was necessary to prevent her destruction.

Mercer was three quarters of the way up the ladder when Krutchfield heaved himself over the railing and onto the deck. He thought about the ladders he used to climb as a boy in the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont, where he was raised. He used to be able to scamper up them like a monkey, unburdened by the fear that now clamped onto his stomach and knotted every aching muscle in his body. Above him, the last of the SEALs reached the top and disappeared from view. Without knowing what waited, he followed.

Suddenly the rope ladder jerked, bucking so hard that Mercer paused to see if Hauser was in trouble below him. Looking down, he saw the older man shaking the ladder to catch his attention. Reflexively, Mercer glanced upward in time to see one of the SEALs pitch over the side of the ship. A heartbeat later, the sound of gunfire reached him.

The lifeless corpse of the Hispanic commando flew by, pinwheeling through space until he landed flat on the water, white spume like a policeman’s chalk outline erupting around his body. Mercer jerked the pistol from his belt as he listened to the gunfire over his head. He couldn’t stay where he was, exposed and vulnerable, and rather than backing down, he surged upward, bobbing his head quickly over the railing to assess the situation.

The deck was empty except for a handful of shining brass shell casings that rolled on the white steel deck. Wisps of acrid smoke still filtered from the necks of the spent shells, singeing his nose even sharper than the leaking crude. There were thick strings of blood splashed across the deck leading toward a closed hatchway.

A mechanical-sounding voice almost made Mercer lose his precarious perch. “Devil Fish calling Mud Skipper. Standing by.”

He’d forgotten that he had Krutchfield’s comm link to the Tallahassee. Tucking his pistol under his arm to free his hand, Mercer reached for the radio. “This is Mud Skipper. The condition is… Oh, shit, I don’t know. Just wait. I’ll be back in touch.”

He jammed the radio back in his coat pocket and rolled onto the deck, finding cover under the port side lifeboat davit, the empty mechanism offering protection from every side.

The pain he had endured before, the agony of being beaten and shot and crashed and drowned and nearly incinerated, meant nothing at this instant. Adrenaline, the natural drug he had become addicted to so long ago, coursed through his body, giving clarity to everything he saw or felt or sensed. Mercer was on automatic and nothing else mattered.

“Hauser, move it. We don’t have time,” he called, rushing past the rope ladder.

Mercer slammed his shoulder against the superstructure door as Hauser came onto the deck. The heavy steel crashed back against a bulkhead, and beyond lay a dim carpeted hallway. Eight feet down the corridor, a dark lump on the deck revealed itself to be the body of one of the terrorists, his chest ripped open by a SEAL’s machine pistol. As Mercer stooped to pick up the pistol left lying near the corpse, Hauser came up behind him. The smell of oil lay heavy in the air, coating their throats like a thick mucus and burning their eyes so that they were red and raw.

“We have to get to the pump room.” Fear and tension made Hauser speak unnaturally loudly, his voice booming in the corridor.

Gunfire rippled in the distance. A fierce battle raged a deck below them.

“We’re not going to make it this way,” Mercer said, guessing they were cut off from the pump room.

“We can get there from the other side of the ship, but we need to go back outside and cross the hull on the funnel deck. I’ll lead you.”

“No, stay behind me. I can’t risk you if we get ambushed. Just call out directions.” Mercer was already running the way they’d come, the two automatic pistols held in his fists like a western gunslinger.

Hauser guided Mercer up several flights of stairs, their feet slipping on the steel treads. On the lower bridge deck, the area that housed the crew’s mess, theater, library, and dispensary, Hauser paused to look into the mess. Seeing that it was empty, a dark look crossed his face. He feared the worst for his boys. They crossed the width of the ship on the funnel deck at the very top of the superstructure. From this vantage, nearly eighty feet above the water, Mercer could see the widening stain of oil like a cancer around the supertanker. He had no way of judging the amount of crude already lost, but even a single drop was too much. A high wave passing down Juan de Fuca Strait met the resistance of the slick and was crushed under the oil’s weight into a ripple that could barely undulate the sea’s glossy surface. The two men dashed across the funnel deck, the Arctica’s captain on Mercer’s heels as he dodged between vent stacks, mechanical housings, and the elevator’s machinery shack. Hauser almost ran into the mining engineer when Mercer stopped just short of the swimming pool. The limp bodies of Hauser’s crew floated on the surface of the water like so many neglected toys. The gruesome tableau held both men immobile for long seconds as they stared mutely at the horror before them.

“I want them, Mercer. I want them all to pay for this.…” Words failed Hauser as he looked at what had become of his crew. Tears of rage and frustration pricked his eyes as he struggled to keep his emotions in check.

“We both do,” Mercer said quietly. No matter how many times he’d seen death in its thousand guises, he could not, would not, harden himself to it. He was as shaken as Captain Hauser.

A door opened beside them. Mercer instantly noticed the man’s clothes as he peered onto the deck. It wasn’t one of the SEALs, and Mercer’s two guns spit in rapid succession, eight rounds fired as fast as he could pull the triggers. Six of the shots caught the terrorist, stitching him from thigh to throat. He was dead before he hit the deck.

Deep below the waterline, at the very keel of the Petromax Arctica, microscopic welding flaws in the hull plating began to expand into long jagged rents as the strain of the uneven cargo load grew. Like a tree caught in a high wind, the ship moaned, metal rending against metal in a deep resonance that echoed across the Strait. The Arctica was beginning to break up.

“Let’s go. We’ve got to stop this ship from splitting apart.”

Hauser led Mercer to the forward edge of the superstructure just above the bridge. Both men were struck dumb. Expecting to see the red-painted main deck stretching the length of three football fields, they were greeted by a wide expanse of crude oil. Only the elevated catwalk that ran the length of the ship and the twin towers of the manifold located amidships were visible above the stinking black morass.

“What does it mean?” Mercer found his voice.

“They probably plan to ignite the ship too. It’s not enough just to pour her cargo from her — they want to set her ablaze as well.”

Far beyond the bow of the tanker, miles away it seemed, Mercer could just make out the white knife-edge prow of an approaching Coast Guard cutter, but it was already too late for the cavalry’s arrival. Poison was dumping from the tanker so fast that by the time the authorities arrived, tens of thousands of tons would be polluting the virgin waters of Puget Sound.

“We’ve got to close the sea suction inlet,” Hauser shouted.

“Lead on,” Mercer cried and followed Hauser at a fast run toward the interior of the VLCC.

They ran through the crew’s portion of the superstructure, both men ignoring the possibility of an ambush. If they did come across one of Riggs’ terrorists, it would be a chance to vent some of their hatred and anger. At a T-junction at the end of a long hall, Hauser directed Mercer left, then down two more flights of stairs. So far the coast was clear. The ship had begun to list, and it felt more noticeable as they entered her bowels, forcing both men to run with one shoulder braced against the wall. The chemical stench was getting stronger with each passing breath.

“How much farther?” Mercer’s lungs burned from the combination of exertion and the petrochemical mist he inhaled with every step.

“One more deck down,” Hauser panted. “We’re almost there.”

Mercer set off again, his jaw locked in determination. Twelve hours ago he had been struggling to escape a doomed oil rig and now he was racing into the heart of a doomed oil tanker. The irony was not lost on him, and he chuckled grimly.

All at once, he heard voices at the foot of a staircase and flattened himself against a wall to listen. Over the shriek of several alarms, he couldn’t distinguish the words. The voices, one male, the other female, seemed to be retreating down the hallway he and Hauser had almost entered.

Taking a chance, he ducked around the stair landing and saw two figures walking away, neither of them apparently concerned with the vessel’s predicament or the alarms crying around them. Hauser looked too and almost started after JoAnn Riggs and the terrorist named Wolf, but Mercer restrained him, forcing the captain against a bulkhead so that he could look the older man in the eye.

“They’re not important. I know how you feel, but we’ve got to save the ship first. You’ve got to stop the oil.”

Reluctantly, Hauser nodded, and the two men dashed down the dim corridor and into the pump room. The captain immediately set about righting his ship, spooling up the three pumps in an effort to suck the oil-contaminated seawater back into the vessel. It was a desperate act that did not succeed. The weight of crude remaining in the tanks exerted too much pressure for the pumps to overcome. Oil continued to belch from her. Hauser was forced to close the double valves on the thirty-inch main and each of the three smaller pipes, managing to stem the leach of petroleum. While Hauser was doing this, Mercer worked on deactivating the alarms. The sound was rising and falling so shrilly that his teeth felt on edge.

“How’s it going?” Mercer shouted over the klaxons. Hauser was working frantically, moving from one workstation to another, flipping switches and checking dials before returning to the Damatic computer system, running through menus and sliding the mouse around like a child with a toy race car.

“I think we’re going to make it. I’m trying to redistribute oil within the holds. I need to rebalance the ship.” Hauser looked up at Mercer seriously. “If we were a minute later, there wouldn’t have been anything I could do. The ship would have broken up.”

Without warning, the air in the pump room came alive as if an electric charge had arced through the space. A wild burst of nine-millimeter ammunition smashed into the steel walls and ceiling, fragmented into hundreds of supersonic pieces, filling the air like a maddened swarm. Over the shriek created by the fusillade came two concussive booms of a larger-caliber gun. Mercer was spared from the assault by a metal cabinet used to store crude samples taken from the tanks during loading. Hauser was not.

The captain caught a brutal spread across his broad back, red blooms erupting on his coat where the hot metal punctured cloth and skin. He pitched forward, screaming. He hit a desk, balanced for a second, and then fell to the floor, writhing as though caught in a seizure.

Mercer ducked around the cabinet in time to see a dark figure lurch from the doorway, getting off a snap shot he knew had been too slow. He edged to the door to take a quick look down the hall and almost had his throat slit for his effort. Lieutenant Krutchfield was leaning there, his face blackened and bloody. There were three bleeding holes in his uniform, and his Kevlar body armor looked as though it had been stampeded by a herd of buffalo. The knife he held at Mercer’s throat had drawn a thin line of blood before the SEAL realized he was about to kill one of the good guys and checked the motion.

“I almost had the son of a bitch, but I’m out of ammo.”

Krutchfield’s pistol was locked back empty and still smoked in his other hand. “I thought you were his backup.”

“Christ, he just opened fire in this room.” Fear stripped Mercer of his usual calm. “Do you think he would have done that to his own man?”

“Sorry.” Krutchfield was fading fast. “I’m a little messed up right now. I can’t seem to think too well.”

“No shit. You’ve lost a lot of blood.” Mercer guided the commando into the pump room and laid him on the floor next to Hauser. The captain had quieted to an occasional whimper. Mercer couldn’t tell if he had gone into shock. “Krutchfield? Is your other man still around?”

“I don’t think so. We got jumped pretty hard coming up. There were at least six terrs waiting for us. After securing the top of the ladder, we separated and went into pursuit. That wasn’t one of my best ideas,” the SEAL admitted.

“Just make sure you live to regret it.” Mercer checked the clips on his two pistols, combining the half-empty magazines into one fully charged weapon. “Stay with Hauser. Do whatever you can for him. I saw a Coast Guard ship headed our way, probably called in by Devil Fish. Help will be here in just a few minutes.”

Mercer was almost out of the room when Krutchfield called to him. “Be careful of this guy. I had him in my sights when I pulled the trigger, but he’d moved by the time the bullets arrived. He’s the quickest bastard I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks.” It was news Mercer didn’t need.

In the hallway, Mercer took a second to examine the trail of blood splattered on the decking. Maybe the fleeing terrorist wouldn’t be so fast anymore. With the pistol held before him, he followed the blood, keeping himself covered as best he could. As the trail led him out of the superstructure, he increased his pace, feeling that the terrorist was more interested in escaping than finishing what he’d started in the pump room.

Finally coming out into a naturally lighted corridor, the pale sun entering through long rectangular windows, Mercer realized that the terrorist wasn’t headed toward the rope ladder. They had come out on the main deck on the opposite side of the tanker and well forward of where it had been left dangling. This close to the main deck, Mercer could feel the radiant heat of the crude oil that covered it. It had been about one hundred twenty degrees when it was pumped from the ground at Prudhoe Bay and had lost little of its warmth since. It actually felt good compared to the sharp October air, but the smell was tremendous, so strong he could see the fumes rising off the slick.

Staring down the expanse of the main deck it was easy to see the footprints left by JoAnn Riggs’ last terrorist, their shape distorted as the oil slowly oozed back to cover them but distinguishable nevertheless. In the very far distance, past the manifold towers, a figure ran, favoring one leg as he moved but maintaining a good pace on the slick surface.

Mercer dashed up to the raised metal catwalk that ran down the center of the deck in hopes the dry surface would be quicker going than chasing directly after the terrorist. He was surprised, but thankful, to find an old bicycle propped up against a support stanchion, the tired-looking two-wheeler left there as a convenience to crews who needed to get to the distant bow during routine ship’s operations. Every supertanker usually carried them.

In seconds, he was gaining rapidly.

Wolf had been certain he’d heard voices as he and JoAnn Riggs were leaving the pump room. As they’d walked away, he could almost feel eyes on the back of his head, but he hadn’t turned to look. It was only after he and Riggs had gotten to the main deck, and he saw the human carnage that had once been his team, that he decided to go back into the ship and dispose of whoever was opposing them. Riggs continued to the boarding ladder and the cabin cruiser. Wolf knew that the pump room would be the logical target for a counterstrike. It was the only place on the ship to prevent her imminent destruction.

As he fled along the deck, running as best he could with the stinging wound to his thigh where Krutchfield had shot him, he realized that going back had been a critical, maybe fatal, mistake. He had abandoned his training by giving in to emotions. Even if the destruction of the Petromax Arctica was averted, he had done his job. Yet he’d returned to the pump room and gotten seriously wounded for his efforts.

Now he raced for the bow, hoping the SEAL who’d shot him would follow. If he was to die on this cursed ship, he wanted the opportunity to take out just one of the Americans.

Wolf looked behind him, hoping to see the SEAL giving chase, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a madman on a bicycle racing toward him on the elevated walkway over his head. He tossed his empty weapon onto the deck, and from the deep pocket of his cargo pants withdrew a wax-coated flare he’d carried with him since the beginning of the scuttling operation. It had been his assignment to ignite the oil lying on the deck just before he and Riggs and the rest of the team fled the vessel.

Mercer heaved the bicycle into a tight skid on the catwalk when he saw the figure below turn and toss away a machine pistol. He let the bike clatter to the deck as he stood to take careful aim with his pistol. Just before he got into a proper stance, the terrorist jerked his right hand, and a red sun burst from his fist, an acrid trail of smoke billowing from the flare he’d been carrying.

“Drop your weapon or this whole ship goes up in flames,” Wolf shouted at what he thought was a SEAL on the spidery walkway.

“You don’t need to do this. Throw the flare over the side of the ship,” Mercer countered. Wolf stood in a pool of oil about two inches deep but covering nearly four acres. Just behind him, the deck bubbled as more crude leached out of an improperly secured hatch cover.

Two hundred thousand tons of highly explosive crude oil. Two hundred kilotons. Facing his own death, Mercer absently wondered if a ton of TNT had more or less explosive force than a ton of oil. He recalled that Hiroshima had been leveled with the equivalent of twenty kilotons. Even if the ratio between TNT and oil wasn’t close, he was still standing on a bomb many times more powerful than Little Boy.

He tried to remember what Hauser had said about the gases in the storage tanks. Why did the air in the tanks have to be inert? It was a sign of Mercer’s exhaustion that he couldn’t remember what it was about oil that made the air in the tanks so important.

“Yes, I do need to do this,” Wolf shouted back, the flare waving in his hands like a Fourth of July sparkler, as mesmerizing as a cobra’s dance. “If for no other reason than to know you will die with me.”

Mercer tightened his grip on the gun, keeping the sights centered on Wolf’s chest. Then he remembered. Oil is combustible only in a narrow range of gas ratios; to burn it had to be mixed with precisely 11 percent oxygen. Too much or too little and the mixture was noncombustive unless the oil was preheated first. Hoping that the mix was in his favor and without thinking further, Mercer adjusted his aim and fired off three rapid rounds. The 9mm bullets shredded Wolf’s shoulder so that his arm swung uselessly at his side, attached to his trunk by a few scraps of flesh. The flare, its tip burning at several hundred degrees, fell from his deadened fingers, landing with a sluggish splash onto the deck.

Wolf screamed in pain and fell to his knees. He then saw the crimson flare lying beside him, the bright flame shooting from its tip like a tiny rocket motor. He tried to stand, but the wound in his leg and the damage done to his shoulder made his movements so uncoordinated that he pitched forward into the slick. In seconds, he was drowning, unable to turn his face out of the ooze.

As soon as he’d fired and saw that Wolf had dropped the flare, Mercer vaulted over the railing of the catwalk. While the flare had not yet ignited the crude, he didn’t want to push his luck. He landed hard, his legs kicking out on the slippery surface so that he fell on his backside, the impact jarring his buttocks and lower back. Agony crashed against the top of his skull. Sliding more than crawling, he reached for the incendiary, scooping it up and holding it high over his head just as the globules of oil that dripped from it burst into yellow flames that landed on his body. He used his free hand to beat out the tiny fires and carefully got to his feet, shuffling to the Arctica’s railing. He heaved the flare far out into the Strait, well beyond where the oil had leaked from her holds.

“Mud Skipper, this is Devil Fish. Come in, please.”

Mercer stood by the rail watching the flare sputter in the water and didn’t want to respond to the submarine lurking below the ship, but slowly he began to hear an alarming noise. He fished the small radio from his pocket. “This is Mud Skipper. Go ahead.”

“Sonar is picking up a prop signature, twin screws accelerating away. The signal matches that of the cabin cruiser. Can you confirm you are aboard it?”

He looked down the length of the ship, past where the bridge wing jutted out over the side of the huge vessel. Beyond the stern, he could see the Happyhour running from the tanker toward the open Pacific. With Krutchfield and Hauser in the pump room and the rest of the SEALs dead — as well as the Arctica’s crew, only terrorists or JoAnn Riggs could be on the fleeing cabin cruiser.

“Negative, Devil Fish. The boat is carrying terrorists. Can you take them out?”

“Affirmative.”

The swift passage of the USS Tallahassee only thirty or so feet below the surface actually created a disturbance in the water like the movement of some great fish. Mercer couldn’t believe the speed of the attack submarine or its incredible agility as it went off in pursuit of the Happyhour. Watching intently, he waited for the explosion of a torpedo strike against the vessel’s transom, but it never came. The Happyhour was just a small speck near the horizon when suddenly a shining black leviathan rose up from the sea directly behind her.

Like a playful dolphin, the nose of the USS Tallahassee exploded into the wake of the Happyhour, the huge hull coming forty feet out of the water before her incredible weight overcame the inertia of her atomic engines and she smashed back into the Strait, walls of white water blowing out from the impact. Almost as quickly as she appeared, the Tallahassee vanished once again. The submarine crash dove as soon as she broached the surface, and as the Tallahassee sank under the waves she created a huge vortex behind the cruiser as it tried to escape. Four thousand tons of water rushed back into the void the sub’s hull had produced with her brief appearance.

JoAnn Riggs and the pleasure boat Happyhour were sucked into the maelstrom, vanishing as if they had never existed. The cruiser was swamped so quickly by the maneuver that a seagull racing above the white-hulled boat was also drawn under and drowned. A few seconds passed and the broiling water calmed. There was no debris to mark where Riggs had died.

Had Mercer not been watching, he wouldn’t have believed it. One minute he could clearly see the Happyhour racing for the open ocean, and the next it looked as though it had been swallowed by some nightmarish creature, like Jonah being consumed by the whale. Gone. Forever.

“Devil Fish to Mud Skipper, Devil Fish to Mud Skipper. Mission accomplished. Coast Guard reports they will be alongside in two minutes. There are lightering tankers en route to pump off your cargo, and Seattle authorities have been alerted to an oil spill. Response teams are on their way. We are continuing on to our regularly scheduled mission already in progress.”

Mercer smiled at the jubilant voice over the radio, not knowing it was the submarine’s captain but not surprised later when he found out it was. “Roger, Devil Fish. This is Mud Skipper. Over and out and thank you very much.” He began trudging back to the superstructure where a Coast Guard cutter was getting into position to tie up.

With only eight minutes left before detonation, Coast Guard personnel discovered and disarmed the charges placed between the Arctica’s double hull. The tide that Riggs and Kerikov had counted on to dump oil all along the shores of Puget Sound was not nearly as high as predicted that day, and the twelve million gallons of crude spilled, though more than the Exxon Valdez, did not cause nearly the environmental catastrophe as intended.

A chopper flew Captain Hauser and Lieutenant Krutchfield to a hospital, and both survived. Knowing there was only one more detail to take care of, Mercer was beginning to feel he could finally put an end to the entire affair.