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 was stained pink by iron oxide. It was as if the desert were rusting. The late afternoon temperature hovered above one hundred and ten, and even with the coming evening, it wouldn’t dip more than a few degrees.
The khamsin, the scorching summer wind that tore across the land, was still strong this late in the year. It raked the surface of the earth, gouging it, shaping it as it had for a hundred million years. It forged an uncompromising environment that supported only the most hearty species.
Prince Khalid Al-Khuddari stood proudly in the open desert, the brutal heat raising only a thin layer of sweat under the thin cotton of his bush shirt. He was a creature of the desert, as hard and uncompromising and starkly handsome as the land around him. He was naturally light-skinned, but the time he spent in the desert had darkened him, turning his face and arms a dark mahogany. His high cheekbones and strong, hooked nose made him look like an American Plains Indian, his thick black hair and dark eyes only adding to the allusion.
He was tall, just over six feet, and he held his body erect and alert. In the open V of his shirt, his chest was smooth and hairless, almost like that of a boy, but the muscles stood out sharply. His belly was greyhound thin yet rippled like a streambed. He held his left hand at chest height, his elbow crooked so he could regard the creature perched on his gauntleted wrist. If any animal captured the essence of Khalid Al-Khuddari, it was the saker falcon gripping him so strongly with its talons that he could feel their needle tips piercing the leather of the falconer’s glove.
The saker, the second largest of the species falconidae, stood just over nineteen inches, with a reddish brown body and a neat pale head. Its beak, so sharply curved that it almost touched its breast, was as deadly as a scimitar, while its eyes were arguably the keenest in nature. The bird was known as one of the finest hunters in the world, with a determination and courage that were the basis of legend.