Charon's Landing - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  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 di
d 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.”