Charon's Landing

Charon's Landing by Jack du Brul Page A

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Authors: Jack du Brul
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the gantries automatically pump oil into his ship for the remaining hours of loading, so be it. It was a ritual he’d acquired as a lightering tanker captain. Some superstition, deep in the back of his mind, told him that if he didn’t watch the entire loading process, disaster would surely strike.
    The loading system was a direct feed linked through the ship’s computer, so there was no chance for a spill or the vessel losing her center of gravity, yet Hauser could still smell the heavy stink of crude oil and feel the great behemoth below his feet shift as the internal pumps transferred crude between the compartments to keep the
Arctica
level.
    He pulled a walkie-talkie from the deep pocket of his pea coat. “Riggs, how’re the oxygen levels in the tanks?”
    “Showing five percent across the board.”
    While oil is one of the most combustible substances on earth, it can only burn within a narrow ratio of gases. Too much or too little oxygen and it will not ignite. Because her main engine produced emissions in the 12 percent range, the
Petromax Arctica
was outfitted with a separate Sun Rod boiler system that produced exhaust well below the threshold where oil is combustible. The Sun Rod’s emissions were piped directly into the tanks to maintain an inert level.
    “And what’s the cargo level in starboard tanks one through three, please?”
    “Twenty-seven percent. She’s loading even, Captain,” his First Officer responded.
    Hauser knew that his ship was loading evenly; he could feel it with his wide-spaced feet. His request had merely been a test to ensure that Riggs was manning his station and attentive to his job.
    Her job, Hauser reminded himself. Though she had a deep, almost coarse voice that came across the walkie-talkie as mannish, his Number One, JoAnn Riggs, was a woman, a nine-year veteran out of the Merchant Marine Academy in Maine.
    Hauser hoped he’d get used to the idea of a woman under his command. Her dossier, which he’d read on his flight to Alaska, showed her to be a competent, disciplined officer. In fact, she had more time on supertankers of this size than he did. Yet there was something about her intense manner and constantly blinking eyes that he just didn’t like. After forty-five years in a career that led him to work with hundreds of people, Hauser had become an excellent judge of character. His first instincts usually served him well. He just did not like JoAnn Riggs. It had nothing to do with her gender; it was just her.
    Hauser plucked a cheroot from its black and gold cardboard box, slipped the packet back into his coat, and pulled the thick wool back around himself to ward off the unseasonable cold. He automatically reached into his pants pocket for his lighter, an inscribed Zippo from his wife, but it was locked in his desk in the captain’s day room. He’d quit smoking the cigars over a year ago but kept the lighter with him. It was under lock and key, not as a safety precaution but as a deterrent from ever lighting one of the five cigars he chewed each day.
    “Damn Surgeon General and his ridiculous warnings,” he muttered.
    As he thought about it, Hauser realized that he didn’t care for the three other ship’s officers he’d met this morning. Because of the tremendous fortunes tied up in tankers and their cargoes, men had to accommodate the ships rather than the other way around. It was common for new crew members, including captains, to meet their new ships in out-of-the-way places like the Persian Gulf or Cape Town or Alaska. There was no time for crews to get acquainted before the ships were back at sea. Depending on the circumstances, crewmen were sometimes choppered out to the tankers while they were under way, adding to the isolation in which these leviathans existed.
    It was one of the many dehumanizing effects on ocean commerce Hauser had watched develop over the decades. The industrialized world had put itself on such a rigid schedule of supply and demand

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