Charon's landing

There had been five terrorists on the boat. With one SEAL down in the water and the other out to get him, there were only three commandos on the Happyhour.

Mercer knew what the navy lieutenant was thinking and spoke before Krutchfield did something rash. “We don’t have time to wait for them,” he said. “JoAnn Riggs is expecting this boat in a couple of minutes. We don’t need to make her any more suspicious by being late. There were five men sent to pick her up. There are five of us, including Hauser and me.”

“Dr. Mercer, we’ve been trained for this type of sortie; it’s what we get paid for. I understand why you and Captain Hauser are here, but I can’t authorize you to board the Arctica until we have her secured.”

“We don’t have time to argue about this, Lieutenant. Let’s get going. We’ll discuss it on the way, but no matter what, we can’t wait here for your other men.” Mercer knew that Krutchfield would have no choice but to allow him to come along. They were going to need the extra firepower.

“Mercer, JoAnn Riggs would recognize me right away. I’d be more of a liability than an asset,” Hauser pointed out.

“I know. I just thought about that. How about if you follow us about five minutes after we board? We should have the area around the boarding ladder secured by then. Believe me, we’re going to need you if Riggs has already started to scuttle the ship. I don’t know anything about tankers.”

“I thought you said you worked for Alyeska?”

“No, I don’t. I’m here as a favor to Andy Lindstrom, the Chief of Operations. Kind of filling in, so to speak.”

“Oh, shit, we’re in trouble,” Hauser breathed.

“Tell me about it.” Mercer was staring over the bow of the racing cabin cruiser. A half mile ahead, the VLCC Petromax Arctica appeared, her one-hundred-sixty-foot-wide beam making her head-on profile look like a solid wall of preformed steel tucked against the north bank of the ten-mile-wide Juan de Fuca Strait.

While the sight of her unimaginable size was awe inspiring, Mercer couldn’t help but think she looked like a ghost ship.

Aboard the Petromax Arctica Juan de Fuca Strait, British Columbia

As the cities of Seattle and Vancouver expanded during the ’80s and ’90s, fueled by immigration from Asia and the technology companies that seemingly grew out of every garage and basement, great pains were taken to ensure that the pristine Pacific Northwest was left as virgin as possible. Unlike the megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, DC, that’s been spoiled forever by two hundred years of sprawl, the environs of Puget Sound were still beautiful rugged forests and mountains and clear cold waters that supported both commercial fishermen and the needs of the avid sportsmen. Wildlife flourished, especially in the Sound itself, where marine creatures from majestic whales to playful otters abounded. The crab beds around Seattle were legendary, teeming with the delicious crustaceans even after years of harvesting, and the national forests were perfect habitats for deer, beaver, and dozens of other woodland species. To all but the most vehement environmentalists, the area was the model of ecology and industry working together in productive harmony.

Where the sea rushes between Victoria Island and the mainland, a few miles from the city of Port Angeles, the VLCC Petromax Arctica hulked low in the water, her belly swollen by 200,000 tons of oil so her rails seemed only a few feet above the waves sliding against her. While tankers were not an uncommon sight in the Strait, one of the Arctica’s dimensions was. But more disturbing than her presence was the feathery tail of smoke leaking from her square funnel. Her engines were turning only enough for station’s keeping against the tide flowing into the Sound.

While the past quarter century is full of stories of supertanker accidents, the Exxon Valdez, the Amaco Cadiz, and the Torrey Canyon being the most famous, many of the giant vessels have been lost through storm or accident or mechanical fault. During a single month in 1969, three tankers of over two hundred thousand tons were lost or severely damaged, and few outside of the oil industry ever knew of these incidents. While the causes of disasters vary, it’s rare that a single fault can sink one of these behemoths. Many factors, from weather to a simple human mistake to a complete design flaw, are necessary to pull a supertanker under the waves. Not until the space shuttle has a single device possessed so many backup systems and fail-safes — all designed to prevent the type of disaster about to unfold in the waters leading to Puget Sound.

In Ivan Kerikov’s plan, the destruction of the tanker was to occur shortly after the cancellation of her sale to Southern Coasting and Lightering. Since the crippled ship could not make it as far south as San Francisco Bay, the plug had been pulled on the deal a few days early, a minor detail that only slightly altered the intended outcome of the operation. Captain Hauser’s valiant actions merely shifted the target city to Seattle. While not as sentimental as San Francisco, it was an equally fragile ecosystem that would suffer just as cruelly when the crude washed up on its coastlines.

JoAnn Riggs’ job now was to ensure that as much oil as possible was dumped into the sea, while making her actions appear accidental rather than intentional. With the ship’s crew shortly to be killed and the extraction boat on the way, there would be no witnesses and no physical evidence that the largest oil spill in history was an act of sabotage. The most conservative estimate predicted oil spreading from Bellingham to Everett, and the best-case scenario saw a slick covering a 174-mile stretch of coast from Vancouver to Tacoma, an area that included thousands of miles of irregular shoreline and numerous inlets, islands, and bays.

Giving the order to kill the remaining crewmen was a decision that gave JoAnn Riggs pause. It was an order that should have fallen to Captain Albrecht but now was her responsibility. While the million dollars that was to be her share for this operation would go a long way to assuaging her guilt, she was still reluctant to give Wolf the nod to do it.

Sensing her unease as they stood on the port side bridge wing, Wolf knew he would have to kill them without getting the direct order. There were so many murders in his past that a few more didn’t cause him undue concern. However, he did lose some respect for the woman who had executed the takeover of the tanker as if born to terrorism. As he turned to go, he took Riggs’ silence as a tacit approval. While Wolf would be doing the actual killing, the responsibility was still hers. Riggs gathered herself to finish what she had been paid to accomplish.

Max Johnston had made certain when the Petromax Arctica was built that she incorporated every automatic and systematic safety device to prevent her from ever spilling even a drop of her cargo. Therefore, to intentionally sink the vessel and make sure that crude poured from the hull in such volume that nothing could prevent it took the concerted effort of the entire terrorist cadre except for Wolf and one man he kept to assist him, each of them assigned a specific task and timed with military precision.

The great hull of the Arctica was segmented into eighteen separate tanks, a system used not only to prevent the entire cargo from being lost if she were ever holed but also to make the vessel much more stable in rough water. A complex system of valves and pumps connected the tanks, used mostly to keep an even keel when part of the cargo had been pumped off the ship. The computer that monitored the level of oil in each of the cavernous tanks prevented the ship from ever becoming unbalanced in even the roughest storms, compensating automatically to the conditions of the vessel and of the sea.

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