providing storage for nearly thirty million barrels of petroleum products, was mired in a waist-deep sea of black ooze from dozens of cracked and fractured tanks. Farther into the desert, countless oil supply pipelines were broken in two like twigs, soaking the surrounding sands black with thick pools of crude oil.
Overnight, nearly a third of Saudi Arabia's oil exporting capability was destroyed. Yet a raft of terrorist suicide bombers was not to blame. Around the world, seismologists had already fingered the cause of the destruction. A massive earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, had rattled the east coast of Saudi Arabia. Analysts and pundits alike would lament the happenstance of Mother Nature when the quake's epicenter was computed to be just two miles from Ras Tanura. The shock waves caused by striking at such a critical locale would ultimately ripple far beyond the Persian Gulf, shaking the globe for many months to come.
-11-
Hang Zhou drew a last puff from his cheap unfiltered cigarette, then flicked the butt over the rail. He watched in lazy curiosity as the glowing ember flittered to the dirty water below, half expecting the murky surface to ignite in a wall of flames. Heaven knows, there's enough spilled petroleum in the black water to power a small city, he thought as the cigarette fizzled to a harmless demise alongside a belly-up mackerel.
As the dead fish could attest, the dank waters around the Chinese port of Ningbo were anything but hospitable. A flurry of construction activity along the commercial waterfront had helped stir up the polluted waters, already contaminated by the steady stream of leaky containerships, tankers, and tramp freighters that frequented the port. Located in the Yangtze River Delta, not far from Shanghai, Ningbo was rapidly growing into one of China's largest seaports, in part due to its deepwater channel that allowed dockage for giant three-hundred-thousand-ton supertankers.
'Zhou!' barked a Doberman-like voice, whose owner more resembled an overweight bulldog. Zhou turned to see his supervisor, the operations director for Ningbo Container Terminal No. 3, high-stepping down the dock toward him. An unlikable tyrant by the name of Qinglin, he wore a permanent scowl painted on his pudgy face.
'Zhou,' he repeated, approaching the longshoreman. 'We've had a change in schedule. The
'I'll pass the word,' Zhou said and nodded.
The containership terminal where they worked operated around the clock. In the nearby waters of the East China Sea, a steady stream of transport ships milled about, waiting their turn at the docks. China's abundant labor pool ground out an endless supply of cheap electronics, children's toys, and clothing that were immediately gobbled up by the consumer markets of the industrialized nations. But it was the lumbering containership, the unsung workhorse of commercial trade, which empowered global commerce and allowed the Chinese economy to skyrocket.
'See to it. And keep after the loading crew. I'm getting complaints again about slow turnarounds,'
Qinglin grumbled. He lowered his clipboard and slid a yellow pencil over his right ear, then turned and walked away. But he stopped after two steps and slowly wheeled back around, his eyes widening as he stared at Zhou. Or at least Zhou thought he was staring at him.
'She's on fire,' Qinglin muttered.
Zhou realized his supervisor was looking past him and turned to see what he meant.
In the harbor surrounding the terminal, a dozen ships milled about the area, an assorted mix of huge containerships and jumbo supertankers overshadowing a handful of small cargo ships. It was one of the cargo ships that distinguished itself, trailing a heavy plume of black smoke.
Through Zhou's eyes, the ship looked to be a derelict, well overdue for an appointment with the scrapyard. She was at least forty years old, he guessed, with a tired blue hull that in most places had turned scaly brown from the onslaught of rust. Black smoke, growing thicker by the second, billowed from the forward hold like an inverse waterfall, obscuring most of the ship's superstructure. Yellow flames danced out of the hold in random leaps, occasionally bursting twenty feet into the air. Zhou turned his gaze toward the ship's prow, which cut a frothy white wake through the water.
'She's running fast ... and heading toward the commercial terminals,' he gasped.
'The fools!' Qinglin cursed. 'There's no place to run ashore in this direction.' Dropping his clipboard, he took off sprinting down the terminal toward the dock office in hopes of radioing the impaired ship.
Other ships and shore facilities had already witnessed the fire and were filling the airwaves with offers of assistance. But all of the radio calls to the smoking vessel went unanswered.
Zhou stayed perched at the end of the container dock, watching as the burning ship steamed closer to shore. The derelict narrowly skirted between a moored barge and a loaded containership in a deft move that Zhou considered miraculous, given the blanket of smoke engulfing the ship's bridge. For a moment the ship appeared headed for the container terminal adjacent to Zhou's, but then the ship made a sweeping turn to port. As the vessel's path seemed to straighten out, Zhou could see that the ship was now headed toward Ningbo's main crude oil loading facility on Cezi Island.
Oddly, he noted that there were no men on deck fighting the flames. Zhou scanned the length of the ship and even got a glimpse of the bridge through the smoke as the ship turned away from him, but he couldn't catch sight of any crew members aboard. A shiver went down his spine as he silently wondered if it was an unmanned ghost ship.
A pair of deepwater tankers straddled Ningbo's main crude offloading terminal, which had recently been expanded to accommodate four supertankers. The burning derelict took a bead on the leeward tanker, a black- and-white behemoth owned by the Saudi Arabian government. Alerted by the frantic radio traffic, the tanker's executive officer let loose a blast from the ship's deafening air horn. But the burning freighter held steady. The disbelieving exec stood peering at the flaming vessel from his outside bridge wing, powerless to do anything more.
Alerted by the warning blast, the tanker's crewmen scrambled like ants to flee the floating incendiary tank, converging onto the lone gangplank. The exec stood and watched unblinking, now joined by the harried captain, who stared waiting for the rusty ship to slice into them.
But the impact never came. At the last second, the flaming ship wheeled again, its bow swinging sharply to port and just missing the flanks of the supertanker by a few feet. The freighter seemed to straighten, running parallel with the tanker and taking a bead on the adjacent docking terminal. A semifloating ramp built on sectional pylons that ran six hundred feet into the harbor, the terminal carried the pipelines and pumps used to offload the tanker's supply of crude oil.
The rusty derelict now ran as straight as an arrow, the flames from its hold engulfing the entire forward deck. No attempt had been made to slow the vessel, and she, in fact, appeared to have actually gained speed. Striking the end of the terminal, the rusty ship's bow tore through the wooden platform like it was a box of matches, sending splintered pieces of the dock flying in all directions. Pylon after pylon disintegrated under the onslaught, barely slowing the vessel as it plowed forward. A hundred yards ahead, several crewmen who had been fleeing the big tanker froze on the gangplank, unsure of which direction to find safety. The answer was presented a few seconds later when the ship drove through the base of the plank. Hidden by smoke and flames, a jumble of steel, wood, and humanity that was the gangplank surged underwater and was quickly lost beneath the churning propellers of the ship.
The ship continued to drive forward, but, at last, began to stagger as a tangled mass of debris piled up before the bow. Yet the old ship had legs and plowed ahead in the last gasp of its life, fighting to reach shore. Mashing through the final pylon, the spent ship made a final surge onto the shorefront offloading and storage facility. A thunderous crash, accompanied by waves of black smoke, echoed across the island as the mystery ship finally ground to a halt. Those who witnessed the carnage let out a sigh of relief that the worst was apparently over. But then a muffled blast erupted deep in the bowels of the ship, which blew the bow off in a wall of orange fire. In seconds, flames were everywhere, devouring the spilled crude oil that flooded around the ship. The fire raced across the layer of floating oil that reached into the harbor and climbed up to engulf the moored tanker. The
