Charon's Landing

Alyeska Marine Terminal Valdez, Alaska

Under the glare of sodium arc lights, the hull of the Petromax Arctica was even darker than the water of Prince William Sound. The sun had not yet set in the northern latitudes though it was past nine at night. Despite the umber light, regulations demanded that the lamps high up in the oil gantries be on at all times. They bathed the VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier), bringing out harsh shadows on her huge deck.

The ship was more than a thousand feet long, but what truly made her seem unworldly was her width. With a hundred-and-fifty-seven-foot beam, she was nearly as wide as a city block was long. Her red-painted deck was as large and flat as a parking lot, broken only by inspection hatches and a raised catwalk that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from her superstructure to her blunted bows. The tanker’s superstructure was a slab-sided white box at the very stern, rising fifty feet over the deck. Cantilevered promenades wrapped around a few of its levels, and the wings of the flying bridges hung over empty space on each side of the ship. Her single funnel sat foursquare in the center of the superstructure. The emblem of Petromax Oil, a stylized oil derrick with the intertwined letters P and O, was lit by a floodlight just below the twenty-foot-tall standard.

Unlike any ship in history, supertankers, as VLCCs had been dubbed by the media soon after their debut, defy nearly every law of naval architecture. Because of their size, they cannot be built like a traditional vessel with a laid keel and massive steel supports rising up like ribs from the backbone. Tankers must be built in sections, each one floated independently and welded together in the water. According to the engineers, tankers are safe, yet they still tend to break up when nature or man’s own folly stresses them too much. They are a bastard creation, spawned by an oil-thirsty world with little regard for how that thirst was slaked.

The Petromax Arctica was a modern-generation supertanker, only three years old, double hulled and built with the latest inert gas scrubbers and other safety devices. But the most recent evolution of a dangerous idea was still dangerous. Therefore, Captain Lyle Hauser treated his ship as if she were a floating bomb with a lit fuse.

Hauser stood one hundred feet over the sound on the port wing of the flying bridge, feeling his ship settle as North Slope crude poured into her compartmentalized hull at a rate of twenty thousand barrels every hour. He’d been up there since the armored hoses of loading berth number three had started disgorging the oil hours earlier. Pulled from retirement for this trip, this was his first time on a tanker of this size and he wasn’t going to allow even a minor deviation from procedure. If that meant he had to stand on the flying bridge and watch the gantries automatically pump oil into his ship for the remaining hours of loading, so be it. It was a ritual he’d acquired as a lightering tanker captain. Some superstition, deep in the back of his mind, told him that if he didn’t watch the entire loading process, disaster would surely strike.

The loading system was a direct feed linked through the ship’s computer, so there was no chance for a spill or the vessel losing her center of gravity, yet Hauser could still smell the heavy stink of crude oil and feel the great behemoth below his feet shift as the internal pumps transferred crude between the compartments to keep the Arctica level.

He pulled a walkie-talkie from the deep pocket of his pea coat. “Riggs, how’re the oxygen levels in the tanks?”

“Showing five percent across the board.”

While oil is one of the most combustible substances on earth, it can only burn within a narrow ratio of gases. Too much or too little oxygen and it will not ignite. Because her main engine produced emissions in the 12 percent range, the Petromax Arctica was outfitted with a separate Sun Rod boiler system that produced exhaust well below the threshold where oil is combustible. The Sun Rod’s emissions were piped directly into the tanks to maintain an inert level.

“And what’s the cargo level in starboard tanks one through three, please?”

“Twenty-seven percent. She’s loading even, Captain,” his First Officer responded.

Hauser knew that his ship was loading evenly; he could feel it with his wide-spaced feet. His request had merely been a test to ensure that Riggs was manning his station and attentive to his job.

Her job, Hauser reminded himself. Though she had a deep, almost coarse voice that came across the walkie-talkie as mannish, his Number One, JoAnn Riggs, was a woman, a nine-year veteran out of the Merchant Marine Academy in Maine.

Hauser hoped he’d get used to the idea of a woman under his command. Her dossier, which he’d read on his flight to Alaska, showed her to be a competent, disciplined officer. In fact, she had more time on supertankers of this size than he did. Yet there was something about her intense manner and constantly blinking eyes that he just didn’t like. After forty-five years in a career that led him to work with hundreds of people, Hauser had become an excellent judge of character. His first instincts usually served him well. He just did not like JoAnn Riggs. It had nothing to do with her gender; it was just her.

Hauser plucked a cheroot from its black and gold cardboard box, slipped the packet back into his coat, and pulled the thick wool back around himself to ward off the unseasonable cold. He automatically reached into his pants pocket for his lighter, an inscribed Zippo from his wife, but it was locked in his desk in the captain’s day room. He’d quit smoking the cigars over a year ago but kept the lighter with him. It was under lock and key, not as a safety precaution but as a deterrent from ever lighting one of the five cigars he chewed each day.

“Damn Surgeon General and his ridiculous warnings,” he muttered.

As he thought about it, Hauser realized that he didn’t care for the three other ship’s officers he’d met this morning. Because of the tremendous fortunes tied up in tankers and their cargoes, men had to accommodate the ships rather than the other way around. It was common for new crew members, including captains, to meet their new ships in out-of-the-way places like the Persian Gulf or Cape Town or Alaska. There was no time for crews to get acquainted before the ships were back at sea. Depending on the circumstances, crewmen were sometimes choppered out to the tankers while they were under way, adding to the isolation in which these leviathans existed.

It was one of the many dehumanizing effects on ocean commerce Hauser had watched develop over the decades. The industrialized world had put itself on such a rigid schedule of supply and demand that tankers and their cousins, bulk carriers and container ships, simply became another part of the assembly line. To those who owned them and to many of the new generation that worked them, the world’s merchant fleets no longer elicited the emotional responses that they’d commanded a half century before. They’d become just one more cog in the great industrialized machine.

Maybe that was why Hauser didn’t like the crew he would command until the ship docked at the El Segundo refinery north of Long Beach. They were part of the new generation. They saw what they did as jobs, not callings, as he had when he went to sea at sixteen. Hauser wondered if he was just being harsh. Maybe his wife was right, that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be coaxed out of a quiet, dull retirement for one last command. Even if he could accept a woman as a bridge officer, progress might have passed him by, leaving him longing for the old traditions that were gone for good.

“Aw, hell, give ’em time. They’ve had a rough couple a days,” Hauser said aloud. He regularly talked to himself and to his ships.

Until three days ago, the Arctica had been owned by Petromax Oil under the command of Captain Harris Albrecht. Then, through secret negotiations, Petromax sold their remaining tanker fleet, including the Arctica, to Southern Coasting and Lightering, an obscure tanker company based in Louisiana. The same day news of the sale reached the ship, Captain Albrecht, the master of the Petromax Arctica for nearly six years, had suffered a serious accident.

Hauser hadn’t yet learned the full story, but due to the severity of his injuries, Albrecht had been choppered from the ship while she was still two hundred miles from port and flown directly to Anchorage’s Providence Hospital. Riggs’ succinct report of the incident stated that Captain Albrecht had lost part of his right forearm in a machinery accident and that the severed member had not been recovered. Hauser was empathetic enough to give Riggs and the rest of the crew time to deal with the trauma before pressing for details.

Southern Coasting and Lightering had bought the crew’s contracts when they purchased the vessel. However, they did not have a captain able to fill in for the injured Albrecht, so Hauser had consented to leave his retirement and take the vessel from Valdez to California. Hauser had spent most of his career on smaller vessels called product tankers, moving fuel oil, gasoline, or other oil derivatives along the East Coast. This was the first time he’d ever worked for Southern Coasting and the first time in years that he’d commanded a tanker in these northern waters.

In addition to a more complete accident report, Hauser also wanted to get the reason why the Petromax Arctica had been eighteen hours late arriving at Valdez. He could forgive an inadequate log entry concerning the accident, given the circumstances, but he was not about to overlook Riggs bringing the tanker into port three-quarters of a day late without an explanation. That kind of laxity was unpardonable. This had not been an auspicious beginning to Lyle Hauser’s last command.

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?