Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

Henna wrongly assumed Mercer’s question meant he was dropping a personal investigation. “The guy you left in your bar was named Burt Manning. Before he left the CIA in 1990, he was also known as ‘The Ghost.’ Consider yourself lucky. As far as we can determine, you’re the first man since Manning worked for the Phoenix Project who ever went up against him and walked away. The guy was the culmination of four years in Southeast Asia and twenty more as a cold warrior in the front lines against the Soviet Union. He’d run ops in Africa, South and Central America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Russia. His dossier at Langley reads like a spy thriller.

“Since retiring from the Agency, he has owned a private security consulting firm here in Washington contracting to corporations that feel their upper management is ripe for kidnapping or assassination. The other guy in your place was a former colleague of Manning’s from the CIA. We figured he was hired by Manning to back him up on the hit. We raided Manning’s office, but an alarm tripped when we broke through the door and crashed his computer system, erasing everything. A couple of our pet hackers are attempting to reconstruct the files, but they aren’t optimistic. We’ll probably never know who hired him.”

“Damn,” Mercer spat. “Knowing that would have saved you a shitload of time.”

“Be thankful we found out who he was in the first place.” Henna shot a glance at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. I need to coordinate with the Anchorage office and get them working on this new lead. You need anything?”

“I’m going home to pack and see about someone to repair my shattered skylight. Then I’m going on a vacation, maybe fishing in Belize.”

“There’s a contractor at your place right now, billed to my office. It’s the least we could do. Call before you go over just to warn the agents on guard. Have a good time. We should have this cleared up in a week or two. Don’t come home until then.”

Back in his room at the Willard, Mercer shed his jacket as soon as he passed the threshold and had his tie undone by the time he threw his key on an oak credenza. An ornate tabletop pendulum clock stood on the large desk in the corner of the elegant room. Ten-thirty A.M.

“Screw it,” Mercer said aloud and dialed room service. “I’d like two vodka gimlets and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, please, and the minibar is about to run out of ginger ale so send up a few more cans.”

He cut the connection, then dialed an outside line. A moment later, Harry White answered with a rasping hello that sounded more like a curse than a greeting.

“Have fun last night?”

“Mercer, knowing you is going to kill me quicker than the cigarettes or booze.”

“The women will do you in first, you lecher,” Mercer teased. “How’s the leg?”

“I’m going to be on the fucking peg leg for two weeks until my orthopedist can get a new prosthesis, you ungrateful bastard.”

“Ungrateful, you say? How’s this for ungrateful. I’ll let you use my new digs for a couple of days to show my appreciation.”

“Where are you?” Harry asked suspiciously.

“Willard Hotel.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“I won’t be here, but I’ll leave the key in an envelope with the concierge. The room number’s on the key. You’ll find a bottle of JD on the nightstand. Dial zero for more. There’s full cable hookup, and the FBI is paying for the whole thing. You can stay until they throw you out.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Back to Alaska.”

“You figured out who Roger is, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s trouble.”

The light drizzle had turned into a driving slushy snow in the predawn darkness. It was merciless weather that soaked everything it touched, seeping into Lyle Hauser’s pea coat as he stood on the bridge wing, a walkie-talkie clutched in his numbing fingers. In the glare of the terminal’s powerful spotlights, the sky was an angry swirling mass, churned by a shrieking twenty-knot wind. The seas of Prince William Sound mirrored the ugly mood of the sky, whitecaps slicing through the slag gray water like daggers. Visibility was so poor that Hauser couldn’t see the lights of Valdez nestled across the bay.

“Start of another miserable day,” Hauser muttered to his ship. He lifted the walkie-talkie to his lips and barked, “Status.”

“Green across the board, Captain. Engines are on line, turning at sixty-nine rpms.” Because of its massive size, the Hyundai engine could turn at such low revolutions and still produce over 36,000 shaft horsepower. Enough to move the oil tanker at a nominal cruising speed of sixteen knots. “All hydraulic pressures are up and stable.”

“Visual inspection of the steering gear?”

“Chief says it looks fine.”

While it was maritime law for the steering gear and engine to be checked by the Chief Engineer twelve hours prior to entering the harbor, Hauser wanted a second inspection to put his mind at ease about his new ship. In 1979 the 220,000-ton supertanker Amoco Cadiz lost hydraulic pressure to her massive rudder and slammed into the coast of France, spilling nearly her entire cargo into the English Channel. Since then, Hauser made sure that his gear was given a personal inspection by the Chief Engineer before he moved any of his charges from her berth. The visual inspection may or may not turn up an internal flaw in a weld or a slight tear in a rubber gasket, but it was better than nothing. Yet another of his many superstitions.

“First Officer?”

“Here, sir,” JoAnn Riggs squawked through the walkie-talkie.

Hauser peered toward the twin towers of the manifold system located amidships, nearly six hundred fifty feet away. In the artificial daylight from the dock and at this great distance, Riggs was a tiny figure, visible only because of her bright yellow rain slicker.

“Give the order to cast off bowlines, Bridge ahead slow, please.”

He watched as the massive hemp and nylon rope was slipped from the bollard and drawn into the ship by a mechanical windlass. With the last thread to land removed, the Petromax Arctica was free to begin her journey to southern California.

Belowdecks, the nine-cylinder diesel engine felt the strain of the water as the propeller shaft was engaged and began fighting against the ship’s tremendous inertia. According to Newton’s law, a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by another force. Because this particular body weighed 255,000 dead weight tons (dwt), the force needed to move it had to be equally as large. Under her flat stern, the ferro-bronze propeller, a twisted sculpture the size of a commercial aircraft’s wing, ripped at the water, torquing it so that slowly, slowly it began pulling the ship. Though located at the back of a vessel, a ship’s prop works the same as that of an airplane, creating low pressure before the blades and high pressure behind them. They do not push through the water; they pull.

The pistons, each over a yard in diameter, had the power to send a shiver through a ship even the size of the Petromax Arctica . To Hauser, the slight rattle beneath his booted feet was a comforting feeling.

Hauser changed frequencies on his walkie-talkie before speaking again. “Alyeska control, this is the Petro -” He corrected himself quickly. “This is the Southern Cross . We are underway at 2:43 A.M., en route to el Segundo.” Damn name change.

“Roger, Southern Cross . An ERV is standing by for escort duty.”

The ERVs, or Escort Response Vessels, were one of the latest safety features incorporated at the terminal, one of the many changes following the Exxon Valdez disaster. Each tanker that berthed at Alyeska was shadowed by a specialized ship until it reached the Gulf of Alaska. Designed for an immediate response to oil spills, ERVs were equipped with nearly a mile of oil-absorbent material called boom that could be laid around a slick like a floating dam. They also carried drop mats for small spills and water cannons for moving oil across the surface of the Sound. The crews of the ERVs were all highly trained specialists in the field of oil spill cleanup. The 182-foot-long ship that followed the Petromax Arctica down the length of Valdez Bay, actually a twelve-mile-long fjord, was the newest addition to Alyeska’s fleet.