Charon's landing

as he had when he went to sea at sixteen. Hauser wondered if he was just being harsh. Maybe his wife was right, that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be coaxed out of a quiet, dull retirement for one last command. Even if he could accept a woman as a bridge officer, progress might have passed him by, leaving him longing for the old traditions that were gone for good.

“Aw, hell, give ’em time. They’ve had a rough couple a days,” Hauser said aloud. He regularly talked to himself and to his ships.

Until three days ago, the Arctica had been owned by Petromax Oil under the command of Captain Harris Albrecht. Then, through secret negotiations, Petromax sold their remaining tanker fleet, including the Arctica, to Southern Coasting and Lightering, an obscure tanker company based in Louisiana. The same day news of the sale reached the ship, Captain Albrecht, the master of the Petromax Arctica for nearly six years, had suffered a serious accident.

Hauser hadn’t yet learned the full story, but due to the severity of his injuries, Albrecht had been choppered from the ship while she was still two hundred miles from port and flown directly to Anchorage’s Providence Hospital. Riggs’ succinct report of the incident stated that Captain Albrecht had lost part of his right forearm in a machinery accident and that the severed member had not been recovered. Hauser was empathetic enough to give Riggs and the rest of the crew time to deal with the trauma before pressing for details.

Southern Coasting and Lightering had bought the crew’s contracts when they purchased the vessel. However, they did not have a captain able to fill in for the injured Albrecht, so Hauser had consented to leave his retirement and take the vessel from Valdez to California. Hauser had spent most of his career on smaller vessels called product tankers, moving fuel oil, gasoline, or other oil derivatives along the East Coast. This was the first time he’d ever worked for Southern Coasting and the first time in years that he’d commanded a tanker in these northern waters.

In addition to a more complete accident report, Hauser also wanted to get the reason why the Petromax Arctica had been eighteen hours late arriving at Valdez. He could forgive an inadequate log entry concerning the accident, given the circumstances, but he was not about to overlook Riggs bringing the tanker into port three-quarters of a day late without an explanation. That kind of laxity was unpardonable. This had not been an auspicious beginning to Lyle Hauser’s last command.

The sliding glass door leading to the bridge hissed open, pulling Hauser out of his musings. First Officer Riggs approached, her angular body buried under layers of sweaters and coats. Her face was gaunt and bony, with deeply recessed eyes of an indeterminate color. They were rather hazy and small. Her mouth was tight and lipless, and her eyelids fluttered distractingly.

“Sir, a call from the Operations Control Center.” Even without the distortion of the walkie-talkie, her voice was clipped and masculine.

“Yes, what is it?”

“The tractor trailer has arrived with the new nameplates for the ship.”

Hauser blew a long breath of frustration. If his new command had not been discomforting enough, the name of the vessel was to be changed as the tanker steamed to Southern California. When Hauser was told that he was to command one of the newest VLCCs in the world, he had felt the same exhilaration as he had when he’d received his first command. Then, when he was informed that the vessel’s name was to be changed during her maiden voyage as an SC amp;L tanker, Hauser had felt an icy tentacle of superstitious fear wend its way around his guts.

He knew that during a tanker’s twenty-year life, it carried more names than the devil himself as it was bought and sold, sometimes faster than the new names could be placed on stern and bow. His last ship before retirement had been named and renamed seven times before her owners sent her to the Pakistani ship breakers. But he didn’t like being on a vessel, let alone in command, while her name was being changed. Every sailor knew that it was simple bad luck.

When he heard about the name change, Hauser had asked Southern Coasting to delay it until she reached Long Beach and a scheduled maintenance cycle. But his entreaties fell on deaf ears. SC amp;L’s Director of Marine Operations told him that Petromax had demanded the ship’s name be changed en route. Out of idle curiosity, Hauser had phoned Petromax on his way to Alaska and learned that it was SC amp;L that had demanded the hasty renaming. They were even paying for the workers and the plates that were to be welded on to the stern, each one-hundred-pound piece of steel cut in the shape of a letter to spell out Southern Cross, the Arctica’s newest moniker.

Hauser had almost wanted to refuse to take command. Lord knew that his wife didn’t want him traipsing around the world on a supertanker. The name change was bad enough, but what rankled him the most was being lied to. To him, it didn’t matter who’d ordered it, but to lie about it was unreasonable and childish. However, if he didn’t take the ship, there would never be another one after it. He longed, once more, to feel a great tanker under his feet and know that she was his.

“Do you want me to tell them to come aboard?”

He had been so distracted with his own thoughts that he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. “Yes. Have a couple of seamen help them with anything they need and make sure the stewards know there’ll be several supernumeraries aboard for the voyage.”

“Yes, sir.” Riggs turned and walked the long open promenade back to the bridge.

Captain Hauser stared across the thousand sprawling acres of the Alyeska Marine Terminal. On a hill overlooking the five loading berths, huge earthen containment dikes surrounded the twenty principal oil storage tanks that had a holding capacity of more than three hundred and eighty-five million gallons of crude. Below them was the East Manifold Building, which was the terminus of the eight-hundred-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Between the Manifold Building and Hauser’s ship sat the ballast water treatment facility and the fuel bunkers for the tankers that used the port. Next to them were the Operations Control Center, the Marine Operations Office, and the Emergency Response Building. This last section of the facility had been greatly improved since the Exxon Valdez holed herself against Bligh Reef in 1989.

As Hauser looked toward the main gate of the terminal, a flatbed tractor trailer heaved into view, diesel smoke blowing out of her twin stacks. Dark tarpaulins covered the long trailer. A white van followed the truck closely, its headlights winking against the multiple reflectors on the big rig. A crane was also crossing the yard, its long boom thrust out like a medieval battering ram preparing to assault some ancient castle.

He watched as the three vehicles converged on the Petromax Arctica, as he would refer to his ship until the voyage was over. Within moments, the men from the van and the crane operator had established a smooth rapport of loading the bundles of steel plate onto the tanker. Hauser noticed that eight men appeared to be outfitted to come aboard, their duffel bags and cases piled on the asphalt quay in a heap. It looked as if only the van driver and the tractor trailer would be returning to Anchorage.

“Why in the hell would they need eight men to change the name of the ship?” Hauser’s question was met by a quick gust of wind that pulled against his sparse gray hair. “And why in the hell do they have so much luggage? This isn’t a cruise ship, for Christ’s sake.”

The question Hauser didn’t ask himself was one he would come to regret later. Why did the eight men coming to change the name of the ship move with the precision of a highly skilled squad of soldiers?

The United Arab Emirates

The dry desert heat beat down with the intensity of a blast furnace. Great downdrafts of molten air stirred the dust of the open rocky plain into whirling spirals that grew so large they collapsed under their own weight, vanishing as quickly as they formed. The sky was a cerulean blue dome over the barren earth, hazed only to the west where the far edge of the Rub’ al Khali, the great Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, met the waters of the southern Persian Gulf. The landscape was as desolate as the surface of the moon. There was little vegetation, only a few camel thorn trees and sparse sage. Rocky outcrops were baked so fiercely by the sun that many were split apart like overripe fruit.

The land was a thousand shades of color, from the blinding white of the sand dunes that marched in waves to the distant horizon to the deepest black of the Hajar Mountains across the border in Oman, yet much of the sand