Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“You said you could get her running again.”

“Sure. I just release the compression on number five and let her cycle without power, but we’ve got a couple hundred pounds of scrap metal in the crankcase right now and it’s going to tear the rest of the engine apart when we restart.”

“Drain the oil and refill it with lubricant from ship’s stores,” Riggs replied.

“That’ll get out most of it, but not all,” Patroni pointed out. “She’ll foul up again. At reduced power we just might make Seattle before the whole engine seizes solid.”

“I don’t care what you do, Chief, but this ship will make it to San Francisco or, so help me God, you’ll watch as every member of the crew is castrated before I kill you myself. Am I clear?” Riggs turned to Wolf, whose eyes showed respect at Riggs’ handling of the situation. “Any chance this could be caused by sabotage?”

“No one has been down here since we took the vessel except for the inspection, which my men watch. This is a natural accident.”

“Accidents are never natural,” Riggs snapped before leaving the control room, heading back to her sanctuary on the bridge.

“All right, boys.” Patroni turned to his three assistants. “Ken, Paul, I want you to go to the stores and grab three barrels of oil. Pete, start pulling the drains on all the cylinders. I want you to set some filters under the drains so I have an idea how much shit is in the crankcase. I want to flush the whole system once, turn her over a couple of times with the primary starter, and wash her out again. Then we’ll fill her up. Oh, and check the fuel preheater, will ya? Make sure it’s ready. The fuel’s going to be cold again by the time we’re ready for a restart. I need to go put on my working rig.” Patroni’s men were already wearing their heavy overalls, but he was still in his uniform and had to change before tackling the messy job of changing eighty gallons of engine oil. He glanced at Wolf and asked ironically, “Is that all right with you?”

Wolf waved him away with a flick of his wrist. He was more concerned about Patroni’s men somehow sabotaging the engine repairs. He felt certain that the Chief Engineer knew what was at risk and would soon return to the engine room.

George Patroni angrily stabbed at the elevator call button and quietly cursed everyone involved with fouling his beloved engine. First, of course, was the bitch Riggs, followed closely by Wolf and the rest of his band of cutthroats; then came the idiots who had installed the faulty fuel injector and the morons who’d built it in the first place. He was still adding people to his list when the elevator arrived and he stepped into the empty car.

He wasn’t even aware that the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator was open until a voice called down to him, “Did I stop the ship?”

Patroni nearly jumped out of his skin, slamming himself against the back of the car and staring up at the dark opening over his head. He watched, slack-jawed, as Captain Lyle Hauser peered through the hatchway.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Patroni muttered.

Hauser snapped him out of his near panic. “Disengage the alarm and stop the car.”

Patroni peeled himself off the wall and opened the small panel cover beneath the elevator’s controls. It took him a second to cross-wire the elevator alarm so when he hit the stop button, the bell remained silent. Hauser almost fell from his perch at the sudden deceleration.

“I thought you were dead,” Patroni said after finally finding his voice.

Hauser eased through the hatch and dropped to the floor next to Patroni, the car shuddering with the impact. “So did I.”

Hauser’s life had been spared by a fraction of an inch. When he leaped from the bridge wing the night before, he had lost his footing at the critical instant and had slammed into the stout railing that surrounded the lower promenade. Through the agony of the crushing blow, he had enough presence of mind to clutch at the railing before falling another forty feet to the main deck. He clung precariously for many long moments as his breath returned in aching gasps.

He knew that Riggs would send someone to make certain he was dead. He had to find refuge. Cold, numb, and racked with pain, Hauser had broken into one of the ship’s three enclosed lifeboats, the one that hung directly at her stern. The other two boats, both port and starboard, were visible from the bridge and therefore not options. Hauser had thought about launching the craft and escaping, but he was the captain of the Petromax Arctica and there was no way he would abandon his ship and crew.

Despite his fear, Hauser had managed to eat a little of the emergency stores cached in the craft. He had donned one of the yellow survival suits to retain his body heat and had even managed to sleep for a few hours. By the time dawn finally arrived, he was rested enough to implement the plan that had come to him during the night.

Hauser had spent only a few hours aboard the Petromax Arctica before she was seized, but he’d been around ships, especially tankers, his entire life. It was easy to work his way into the multiple layers of crawl spaces and access tunnels that were sandwiched between the decks. This gave him full run of the supertanker while avoiding any chance of detection. He’d been able to watch guards and crewmen alike as he lay in the cramped confines of the heating ducts.

When he reached the engine room this morning, he’d found Patroni and an assistant oiler doing a scheduled inspection under the malevolent glare of one of the terrorists. His hopes of sabotaging the tanker were dashed. There was nothing he could do as long as the engine room was occupied. But even as he prepared to make his way back to the sanctuary of the lifeboat, the guard herded Patroni and his aide back to the elevator.

Because of the complexity of the forest of pipes running to and from the power plant, inspection hatches were placed in readily accessible areas. One of them gave him access to the primary fuel bunker for the odd-numbered cylinders. The metal shavings he found on the floor of the machine shop adjacent to the engine room were perfect for what he had in mind. He simply dumped a few handfuls into the viscous diesel fuel and waited for them to grind the engine to a halt. The tanker wouldn’t be delayed long — he hadn’t done enough damage — and he hadn’t wanted to disable the ship permanently, fearing the dangers of her drifting out of control. Still, he’d hoped that he could grab a few minutes alone with a member of the crew during the confusion. Finding the Chief Engineer in the elevator was a godsend.

“We don’t have much time,” Hauser said to the still-startled Patroni. “They’ll wonder about your delay, so give me a quick rundown of the situation.”

“Well, terrorists have seized the ship and Riggs is working with them.”

Hauser cut him off. “I know all that. What’s the status of the ship and crew?”

“Whatever you put into the fuel system only affected cylinder five before the computer shut the engine down. We’ll have her running in an hour or two. But we’ll only be able to goose fifty percent power without destroying the rest of the engine. Riggs told me that the ship has to make it to San Francisco.”

“Frisco? Why Frisco?”

“She didn’t say, but she made it damn clear that that’s where we’re headed.”

“How’s the crew?”

“We’re doing okay. They keep us in the main mess hall when not on duty. We’re fed only once a day and have to sleep on the floor or in chairs, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. They’ve made a few threats, and so far two are dead. One of them was Larry Walker, the helmsman who took the bullets meant for you.”