Ill Wind (5 page)

Nedermyer shook off Spencer’s hand. Squinting in the harsh sunlight, he fumbled in his pocket for a pair of sunshades to clip onto his eyeglasses. Spencer saw himself reflected in the lenses. Nedermyer said, “You just don’t get it, do you, Lockwood?”

Spencer stopped. “Get what?”

Nedermyer waved a hand at the trailer, then toward the antenna farm. “All this is just a game to you. A stunt. You might have captured the public eye this afternoon, but I have to deal with the flack back inside the Beltway. What am I going to tell Congress when they ask why DOE is spending money playing surfin’ music?”

Spencer narrowed his eyes. “Why are you doing this, Lance? You
can’t
be that dense.”

“I was just on the phone to headquarters, Dr. Lockwood.” He started to walk toward his car, but he took off his sunglasses and pointed them at Spencer. “I’ve recommended that the National Academy of Sciences review your program before we spend any more money on your operation.”

“That will take half a year! We’ve got smallsats waiting at JPL. They’re already built—”

“I’ll be back in a month with the panel to see your full-scale test results. And there’d better be some good science out of it. Play by the rules, Spencer. Everybody else does.” He jammed his sunglasses back on his face and strode to the car.

Spencer watched the cloud of dust dissipate as Nedermyer drove away. He didn’t know how long he stood there before the door to the trailer opened and Rita Fellenstein called. “Hey, Spence! The reporters want to talk to you again.”

Still in shock, Spencer kept watching the road where Nedermyer’s car vanished into an unpleasant mirage.

Someone had plugged the jukebox into the main power. The strains of “Don’t Worry Baby” drifted out the door.

Chapter 4

Alex Kramer drove toward the ocean, following memories more detailed than any map. In the morning fog, he passed down narrow roads in the Marin headlands, where craggy rocks met the sea near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. At “vista point” turnouts showing postcard views of the bridge and the San Francisco skyline, rubberneckers stretched for a glimpse of the spreading blackness below. It made him sick.

All night long, Alex had been transfixed by news of the spill, sitting with one light on in the empty ranch house and watching the same footage over and over again. It seemed like a parallel to the disaster that had smothered
his own
life.

Out on the Bay, smaller tankers pulled beside the
Zoroaster
and tried to offload oil in desperate lightering operations; boats wrestled to deploy booms around the slick as it spread. Hundreds of people scurried about with equipment, but it seemed futile. Most of Oilstar’s effort seemed to be directed at telling people the spill wasn’t as bad as it looked, that they had everything under control.

Alex passed old Fort Baker and Fort Cronkhite with their crumbling batteries and gun emplacements high on the bluffs. The landscape was a drab but striking range of deep green from the stands of flattened cypress, dry yellow-brown of gasping grass, and brilliant orange of wild California poppies.

He and his son Jay had spent some
of
their best times hiking out in the headlands. He had thought never to come here again because of the ghosts he might find along the trails; even the water reminded him of the time he and Jay had sipped from the same canteen and splashed barefoot in the rocky surf. The Coast Trail had been their last decent outing together before Jay followed his unit to Saudi Arabia.

Now Alex drove downslope to the end of the road in Rodeo Cove, an isolated section of coastline just north of the Golden Gate, with rough surf suitable only for wet-suited divers and daredevils. He parked on the cracked asphalt and got out of his pickup, unable to tear his gaze from the shore. He held the truck’s open door for support. Foul hydrocarbons permeated the air, masking the salt and iodine smell of the ocean. His eyes and nose burned.

The current of the outgoing tide had sucked the
Zoroaster
’s crude oil back out to sea, where it had spread farther. Then, with the tide’s returning flow, the waves had splattered the dark stain against the coastline in an ever-widening bruise.

Alex wanted to turn from the horror. His stomach rippled with the leaden weight of brewing nausea. But his feet moved of
their
own accord, stumbling toward the beach. Five people, dressed warmly in jeans and flannel shirts, stared and said nothing to each other.

Hastily erected “Danger No Swimming” and “Contaminated Water” signs dotted the beach. Normally rich brown, pebbled with black and tan rocks, the sand was slathered with an opaque slime of crude. Viscous waves licked the shore.

Seagulls, smeared with oil, chased the waves, looking for something to eat; they circled in confusion at the strange new consistency of the ocean. Farther out to sea, buoys clanged. Normally, fishing boats would have bobbed with the swells—but not today, and not for a long time. At the tide line, algae clustered against the rocks among other shellfish, already dying.

A few years before, Alex and Jay had started a long backpacking trip here. The Coast Trail wound along the headlands for miles, and the two of them walked in the cool air all day, looking down at the crashing surf from the crumbling edges of horrendous cliffs.

 
Jay had labored for a year at the University of California, San Francisco, though he had little interest in school. During their three-day hike, Jay finally broke the news to Alex of his decision to join the Army. Jay had rubbed his short red hair, looked at Alex, then away, then back at him again. His pale skin had flushed a deeper red as if embarrassed to be changing his mind about what he wanted to do with his life.

“I know it’s not what you wanted me to do,” Jay had said. He took a nervous sip from the open canteen, offering it to Alex, who shook his head. Jay looked away again as he screwed the metal cap back on. “But college just isn’t what I want to do, at least not right now. I want to challenge myself in a different way, and I think the Army can do that for me.”

Alex had been surprised, but not unduly upset. He and Marcia tried to keep a light hand on the children. Both Erin and Jay were intelligent and sensible; they made their own decisions. “If that’s what you think will work best for you, Jay. It’s better to change your mind than to keep going along with what you know is a bad decision.”

Jay, who had not hugged his father since eighth grade, clapped an arm around Alex’s shoulder, gave a brief squeeze, then struck off down the trail at a greater speed,
embarrassed.
. . .

Alex still remembered the visit from the two Army officers, informing him that Jay had been killed in a nighttime skirmish on the Saudi border in one of their oil wars.

Now, the roar of the surf sounded like distant, booming gunfire in his ears.

Alex stood unmoving at the tide line. Dark blobs clumped on the beach. The waves had churned the crude and water into a frothy, gummy substance, “mousse,” that stuck to everything.

A seagull flew overhead with mouth wide open. The waves crashed in, bringing the oil closer, and Alex skittishly stepped back.

Cold wind blew in his eyes. The same oil slick would paint the Bay, wrap around Alcatraz Island, Angel Island, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero. San Francisco had been called the most beautiful city in the world—and it had just been brutally raped by the
Zoroaster
. Seeing the effects up close, Alex felt the walls surrounding his anger and despair rattling, crumbling.

Right now, Oilstar officials were desperate for any public relations coup. They would leap at any hook Alex Kramer could offer, though the barbs were plainly visible. Panic removed all common sense.

Alex breathed deeply, trying to ignore the pain in his side. Mitch Stone was probably correct in thinking the Prometheus microbe could help clean up this spill. This was a scar that could not be ignored.

Trembling, Alex squatted and dipped his fingers in the blackish-brown ooze on the shoreline. His fingers came away soiled and greasy, covered with a stain that looked like blood.

Blood and oil.
In his life, the two had so much in common.

Chapter 5

The wreck of the
Oilstar Zoroaster
lay like a corpse on the Golden Gate Bridge’s south tower, canting downward at a drunken angle. On the span above, cars crawled by as people craned their necks to gawk.

Coast Guard boats, Oilstar barges, and private fishing boats descended like vultures to begin massive lightering operations. Riding choppy waves beside the
Zoroaster
, a smaller tanker—the
Tiberius
—lashed up to the hulk. Straining pumps attempted to pull crude from
Zoroaster
faster than it could leak into the Bay.

As its cargo holds emptied, the wrecked supertanker rode higher in the water. Pumps replaced ballast with Bay water to keep the
Zoroaster
from floating up from its precarious balance.

Hung up on the Bridge’s south pier, the
Zoroaster
had been ripped by the same submerged ledge the steamer
Rio de Janeiro
had struck a century earlier; the
Rio
had dragged over half of its passengers and crew to the bottom, and now the
Zoroaster
rested against the same ledge, groaning against the six-knot ebb tide.

Standing on the deck of the
Zoroaster
, Todd Severyn jammed a broad, aching shoulder under one of the massive transfer hoses cast across from the smaller
Tiberius
. Other men from his lightering crew fought with the hoses, hoisting them over the deck rails and swinging the hose derrick to align them with cargo hatches. Todd tried to bellow orders, do at least as much work as his best man, and keep from puking all at the same time.

Todd planted his big feet on the slick deck, keeping a delicate balance with his heavy workboots. The stinging hydrocarbon fumes burned his eyes, his nose, as volatile petrochemicals roiled into the air. But the slant and rocking motion of the wreck in the choppy sea nauseated a Wyoming man like Todd more than the smell of crude.

He had worked oil for most of his life, getting his start in the oil-shale processing plants near Rock Springs, before Oilstar had sent him to Kuwait, Burma, Alaska,
the
North Sea. They had assigned him to an offshore rig off New Orleans for his first big job—but he had never before been in charge of a hellish job like offloading the
Zoroaster
.

“Come on, kids!” he shouted into the noise of the pumps, the wind, the gurgling oil far below. His throat was raw from yelling, and his crew staggered about in exhaustion mixed with panic. Overhead, helicopters bearing TV station logos circled to get dramatic footage. Spectators looked through the criss-crossed superstructure of the Golden Gate Bridge. It felt like a three-ring circus; Todd wished he
was
back in Wyoming. The last time he had taken off by himself with nothing more than a horse, mess kit, and bedroll on the plains seemed like a million years ago. Well, a few months at least. But it sure beat this crappy work.

Out on the water, absorbent booms along the greatest concentration of floating oil filled up and clogged. Skimmers tried to draw in the oil but lost ground quickly in the face of the gushing flow. Cleanup tugs struggled to deploy nylon containment booms, long draperies that hung under the water, lassoing the oil for pickup by recovery boats. A barge anchored near Alcatraz Island received the recovered oil from containment vessels. Privately owned fishing boats and small pleasure craft made an effort, scooping five-gallon buckets of foul-smelling crude directly from the surface.

At the stern of the
Zoroaster,
the wall of the four-story deckhouse admonished in large, mocking letters: NO SMOKING, PREVENT ACCIDENTS, and SAFETY FIRST.

Todd worked with three men to clamp the transfer hose into the hatch of cargo hold 7. He moved in a barely controlled frenzy, like the rest of his team, and they ended up getting in each other’s way. The clamorous racket, the foul fumes, and the treacherous deck made conditions worse.

Todd pulled a wrench from a deep pocket on his greasy slicker and tightened the seal. “Start the pumps!” he yelled, raising a gloved hand.

Farther up the deck, the Oilstar helicopter pilot waved an acknowledgement, then spoke into the chopper’s radio. A few moments later, the hose shuddered as
Tiberius
started another pump. More crude began to flow out of the
Zoroaster
’s hold.

Todd stumbled to the deck rail. The weather slicker hid much of his big-boned frame, but he had managed to smear oil over his craggy face and brown hair. He coughed and spat over the rail.

Below, brownish-black oil continued to bubble out of the torn hull like a vile potion in a cauldron. The oil lay two feet thick on top of the water. If it
was
up to him, he’d just as soon toss the tanker captain overboard into the mess; the idiot should have at least gone down with his ship, like a real captain, after causing a disaster like this.

With the outgoing tide and turbulent weather, there was a very good chance the
Zoroaster
would slip off and plunge into the deep channel. If that happened, the tanker would drag with it the 900,000 barrels of oil still on board. Its cargo holds would leak into the Bay for years.