Stephen Coonts - Combat

I strolled back, paying casual attention to the Ras Ormara, listening to the sounds of engine-driven pressure washers and recording the logos on two trucks with hoses that snaked up and back to big tanks mounted behind the truck cabs. I could see men operating the chassis-mounted truck consoles, wearing headsets. Somehow I’d expected more noise and melodrama in cleaning the ship’s big cargo tanks.

Words like “big” and “little” are inadequate where a cargo vessel, even one considered small, is concerned. I guess that’s what numbers are for. The Ras Ormara was almost three hundred feet stem to stern, the length of a football field, and where bare metal showed it appeared to be stainless steel. All that cleaning was concentrated ahead of the ship’s glassed bridge, where a half dozen metal domes, each five yards across, stood in ranks well above the deck level. Two rows of three each; and the truck hoses entered the domes through open access ports big enough to drop a truck tire through. Or a man. Welded ladders implied that men might do just that.

I suppose I could have climbed one of the gangways up to the ship’s deck. It was tempting, but Quent had told me — couched as a suggestion — not to. It is simply amazing how obedient I can be to a boss who is not overbearing. I moseyed along, hoping I stayed mostly out of sight behind those servicing trucks without seeming to try. From an open window behind the Ras Ormara’s bridge came faint strains of someone’s music, probably from a CD. It sounded like hootchie-kootchie scored for three tambourines and a parrot, and I thought it might be Egyptian or some such.

Meanwhile, a bulky yellow extraterrestrial climbed from one of those domes trailing smaller hoses, and made his way carefully down the service ladder. When he levered back his helmet and left it with its hoses on deck, I could see it was just a guy with hair sweat-plastered to his forehead, wearing a protective suit you couldn’t miss on a moonless midnight. My luck was holding; he continued down the gangway to the nearest truck. Meanwhile I ambled back in his direction, stowing away my StudyGirl.

The space-suited guy, his suit smeared with fluid, was talking with the truck’s console operator, both standing next to the chassis as they shared a cigarette. Even then smoking was illegal in public, but give a guy a break ….

They broke off their conversation as I drew near, and the console man nodded. “Help you?”

I shrugged pleasantly and remembered to talk high in my throat because guys my size are evidently less threatening as tenors. “Just sightseeing. Never see anything like this in Omaha.” I grinned.

“Don’t see much of this anywhere, thank God,” said the sweaty one, and they laughed together. “Thirsty work. Not for the claustrophobe, either.”

“Is this how you fill ’er up?” I hoped this was naive enough without being idiotic. I think I flunked because they laughed again. The sweaty one said, “Would I be smoking?” When I looked abashed, he relented. “We’re scouring those stainless tanks. Got to be pharmaceutically free of a vegetable slurry before they pump in the next cargo.”

“Those domes sitting on deck,” I guessed.

“Hell, that’s just the hemispherical closures,” said the console man.

“The tanks go clear down into the hold,” said his sweaty friend.

I blinked. “Twenty feet down?”

“More like forty,” he said.

The console man glanced at his wristwatch, gave a meaningful look to his friend; took the cigarette back. “And we got a special eco-directive on flushing these after this phase. We have to double soak and agitate with filterable solvent, right to the brim, fifty-two thousand gallons apiece. Pain in the ass.”

“Must take a lot of time,” I said, thinking about Dana Martin’s ability to make people jump through additional hoops on short notice, without showing her hand.

“Twice what we’d figured,” said Consoleman. “I thought the charter-service rep would scream bloody murder, but he didn’t even haggle. Offered a bonus for early completion, in fact. Speaking of which,” he said, and fixed Sweatman with a wry smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” said his colleague, and turned toward the Ras Ormara. “For us, time really is money. But that ten-minute break is in the standard contract. Anyhow, without my support hoses it’s getting hot as hell in this outfit.”

“Hold still, it’s gonna dribble,” I said. I found an old Kleenex in my pocket, and used it to wipe around the chin plate of Sweatman’s suit, then put it back in my pocket.

“Guess I’m lucky to be in the wrought-iron biz,” I said. With a smithy for a hobby, I could fake my way through that if necessary.

“My regards to Omaha,” said Consoleman. “And by the way, you really shouldn’t be here without authorization. Those guys are an antsy lot,” he said, jerking his head toward the bridge. It was as nice a “buzz off, pal” request as I’d ever had.

I didn’t look up. I’d seen faces staring down in our direction, some with their heads swathed in white. “Okay, thanks. Just seeing this has been an education,” I said.

“If the skipper unlimbers his tongue on you, I hope your education isn’t in languages,” Consoleman joked.

I laughed, waved, and took my time walking back to the gate, stopping on the way to gaze at the much larger container ship as if my attention span played no favorites.

When I got back to my Toyota I rummaged in the glove box and found my stash of quart-sized evidence baggies. Then I carefully sealed that soggy old Kleenex inside one and scribbled the date and the specimen’s provenance. I’d seen Sweatman climb out of a cargo tank of the Ras Ormara and that fluid had come out with him. Quent might not do handsprings, but the Feebs got off on stuff like that.

I took a brief cell call from Quent shortly before noon, while I was stoking up at one of the better restaurants off Jack London Square. The maitre d’ had sighed when he saw my tourist getup. Quent sighed, too, when I told him where I was. “Look, the Feds are paying, and I keep receipts,” I reminded him.

He said he was striking out in Chinatown, just as he had in hospitals and clinics, but the Oakland side had its own ethnic neighborhoods. “I thought you might want to ride with me this afternoon,” he said.

“Where do we meet? I have something off the ship you might want Dana to have analyzed,” I said.

“You went aboard? Harve, — oh well. Just eat slowly. It’s not that far across the Bay Bridge,” he replied.

“Gotcha. And I didn’t go aboard, bossman, but I think I have a sample of what was actually in the Ras Ormara ’s tanks, whatever the records might say. You’ll be proud of your humble apprentice, but right now my rack of lamb calls. Don’t hurry,” I said, and put away my phone.

Quent arrived in time for my coffee and ordered tea. I let him play back my StudyGirl video recording as far as it went, and took the evidence baggie from my shirt pocket as I reported the rest. “We have the name of the pressure-washing firm. No doubt they can tell some curious Fed what cleaning chemicals they use. What’s left should be traces of what those tanks really carried,” I said.

Quent said Dana’s people had already analyzed samples of the stuff provided by Customs. “But they’ll be glad to have it confirmed this way. Nice going.” He pocketed the baggie and pretended not to notice that I made a proper notation on my lunch receipt. We walked out into what was rapidly becoming a furry overcast, and I took the passenger’s seat in his Volvo.

Quent said we’d try an Oakland rooming house run by a Korean family. From the list we had, he knew a pair of the Ras Ormara ’s crew were staying there. “You, uh, might want to draft your report while I go in,” he said as he turned off the Embarcadero. “Shouldn’t be long.”