“Let me get something out of the way from the beginning,” he said. “I know your past history, and it has no bearing on what I’m about to say.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw her stiffen. But when she spoke, her voice was calm. “I believe that at this point, a lady is supposed to say, ‘You have me at a disadvantage, sir.’ ”
“I can’t go into details at the moment. But I’m here to offer you the captaincy of an oil tanker.”
They rode for several minutes in silence.
At last she glanced over at him. “If you knew my history as well as you say, I doubt you’d be making such an offer.”
Her voice remained calm, but Glinn could read many things in her face: curiosity, pride, suspicion, perhaps hope. “You’re wrong, Captain Britton. I know the whole story. I know how you were one of the few female masters in the tanker fleet. I know how you were ostracized, how you tended to catch the least popular routes. The pressures you faced were immense.” He paused. “I know that you were found on the bridge of your last command in a state of intoxication. You were diagnosed an alcoholic and entered a rehabilitation center. As a result of rehab, you successfully retained your master’s license. But since leaving the center over a year ago, you’ve had no new offers of command. Did I miss anything?” He carefully waited for the reaction.
“No,” she replied, steadily. “That about covers it.”
“I’ll be frank, Captain. This assignment is very unusual. I have a short list of other masters I could approach, but I think they might well turn down the command.”
“While I, on the other hand, am desperate.” Britton continued staring out the windshield, speaking in a low voice.
“If you had been desperate, you would have taken that tramp Panama steamer offered you last November, or that Liberian freighter, with its armed guards and suspicious cargo.” He watched her eyes narrow slightly. “You see, Captain Britton, in my line of work, I analyze the nature of failure.”
“And just what is your line of work, Mr. Glinn?”
“Engineering. Our analysis has shown that people who failed once are ninety percent less likely to fail again.” I myself am a living example of the truth of this theory.
Glinn did not actually utter this last sentence, but he had been about to. He allowed his eyes to sweep over Captain Britton for a moment. What had prompted him to almost drop a reserve as habitual as breathing? This merited later consideration.
He returned his eyes to the road. “We have evaluated your overall record thoroughly. Once you were a superb captain with a drinking problem. Now you are merely a superb captain. One on whose discretion I know I can rely.”
Britton acknowledged this with a slight nod of her head. “Discretion,” she repeated, with a faint sardonic note.
“If you accept the assignment, I will be able to say much more. But what I can tell you now is this. The voyage will not be a long one, perhaps three months at most. It will have to be conducted under great secrecy. The destination is the far southern latitudes, an area you know well. The financial backing is more than adequate, and you may handpick your crew, as long as they pass our background checks. All officers and crew will draw triple the normal pay.”
Britton frowned. “If you know I turned down the Liberians, then you know I don’t smuggle drugs, run guns, or deal in contraband. I will not break the law, Mr. Glinn.”
“The mission is legal, but it is unique enough to require a motivated crew. And there is something else. If the mission is successful—I should say, when the mission is successful, because my job is to make sure it is—there will be publicity, largely favorable. Not for me—I avoid that sort of thing—but for you. It could be useful in a number of ways. It could get you reinstated onto the list of active masters, for example. And it would carry some weight with your child custody hearings, perhaps making these long weekend visitations unnecessary.”
This last observation had the effect Glinn hoped for. Britton looked at him quickly, then glanced over her shoulder, as if at the swiftly retreating Georgian house, now many miles behind them. Then she looked back at Glinn.
“I’ve been reading W. H. Auden,” she said. “On the train coming out this morning, I came across a poem called ‘Atlantis.’ The last stanza started out something like this:
All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.”
She smiled. And, if Glinn paid attention to such things, he would have insisted that the smile was distinctly beautiful.
Port of Elizabeth,
June 17, 10:00 A.M.
PALMER LLOYD paused before the windowless door, a grimy rectangle in the vast expanse of metal building that reared up before him. From behind, where his driver leaned against a limousine reading a tabloid, he could hear the roar of the New Jersey Turnpike echoing across the dead swamplands and old warehouses. Ahead, beyond the Marsh Street dry docks, the Port of Elizabeth glittered in the summer heat. Nearby, a crane nodded maternally above a container ship. Beyond the port, a brace of tugboats was pushing a barge burdened with cubed cars. And even farther beyond, poking above the blackened backside of Bayonne, the Manhattan skyline beckoned, gleaming in the sun like a row of jewels.
Lloyd was momentarily swept by a feeling of nostalgia. It had been years since he was last here. He remembered growing up in ironbound Rahway, near the port. In his poverty-stricken boyhood, Lloyd had spent many days prowling the docks, yards, and factories.
He inhaled the industrial air, the familiar acrid odor of artificial roses mingling with the smell of the salt marshes, tar, and sulfur. He still loved the feel of the place, the stacks trailing steam and smoke, the gleaming refineries, the thickets of power lines. The naked industrial muscle had a Sheeler-like beauty to it. It was places like Elizabeth, he mused, with their synergy of commerce and industry, that gave the residents of the suburbs and the phony boutique artiste towns the very wherewithal that allowed them to sneer at its ugliness from their own perches of comfort. Strange how much he missed those lost boyhood days, even though all his dreams had come true.
And even stranger that his greatest achievement should be launched from here, where his own roots lay. Even as a boy he had loved collecting. Having no money, he had to build up his natural history collection by finding his own specimens. He picked up arrowheads out of eroded embankments, shells from the grimy shoreline, rocks and minerals from abandoned mines; he dug fossils from the Jurassic deposits of nearby Hackensack and caught butterflies by the dozen from these very marshes. He collected frogs, lizards, snakes, and all manner of animal life, preserving them in gin swiped from his father. He had amassed a fine collection—until his house burned down on his fifteenth birthday, taking all his treasures with it. It was the most painful loss of his life. After that, he never collected another specimen. He’d gone to college, then into business, piling success upon success. And then one day, it dawned on him that he could now afford to buy the very best the world could offer. He could, in an odd way, erase that early loss. What started as a hobby became a passion—and his vision for the Lloyd Museum was born. And now here he was, back at the Jersey docks, about to set off to claim the greatest treasure of all.
He took a deep breath and gripped the handle of the door, a tingle of anticipation coursing through him. Glinn’s thin folder had been a masterpiece—well worth the million he had paid for it. The plan it outlined was brilliant. Every contingency had been accounted for, every difficulty anticipated. Before he’d finished reading, his shock and anger at the price tag had been replaced by eagerness. And now, after ten days of impatient waiting, he would see the first stage of the plan nearing completion. The heaviest object ever moved by mankind. He turned the handle and stepped inside.
The building’s facade, large as it was, only hinted at the vastness of its interior. Seeing such a large space without internal floors or walls, completely open to its high ceiling, temporarily defeated the eye’s
ability to judge distances, but it seemed at least a quarter mile in length. A network of catwalks stretched through the dusty air like metal spiderwebbing. A cacophony of noise rolled through the cavernous space toward him: the chatter of riveting, the clang of steel, the crackle of welding.
And there, at the center of furious activity, it lay: a stupendous vessel, propped up in dry dock by great steel buttresses, its bulbous bow towering above him. As oil tankers go, it was not the biggest, but out of the water it was just about the most gigantic thing Lloyd had ever seen. The name Rolvaag was stenciled in white paint along the port side. Men and machines were crawling around it like a colony of ants. A smile broke out on Lloyd’s face as he inhaled the heady aroma of burnt metal, solvents, and diesel fumes. A part of him enjoyed watching the flagrant expenditure of money—even his own.
Glinn appeared, rolled-up blueprints in one hand, an EES hard hat on his head. Lloyd looked at him, still smiling, and shook his head wordlessly in admiration.
Glinn handed him a spare hard hat. “The view from the catwalks is even better,” he said. “We’ll meet Captain Britton up there.”
Lloyd fitted the hard hat to his head and followed Glinn onto a small lift. They ascended about a hundred feet, then stepped out onto a catwalk that ran around all four walls of the dry dock. As he moved, Lloyd found himself unable to take his gaze off the immense ship that stretched away below him. It was incredible. And it was his.
“It was built in Stavanger, Norway, six months ago.” Glinn’s dry voice was almost lost in the din of construction that rose up to meet them. “Given everything we’re doing to it, we couldn’t opt for a spot charter. So we had to buy it outright.”
“Double overage,” Lloyd murmured.
“We’ll be able to sell it later and recoup almost all the expense, of course. And I think you’ll find the Rolvaag worth it. It’s state of the art, double-hulled and deep drafted for rough seas. It displaces a hundred and fifty thousand tons—smallish when you consider that VLCCs displace up to half a million.”
“It’s remarkable. If there was only some way of running my affairs remotely, I’d give anything to be able to go along.”
“We’ll document everything, of course. There will be daily conferences via satellite uplink. I think you’ll share everything but the seasickness.”
As they continued along the catwalk, the entire port side of the vessel became visible. Lloyd stopped.
“What is it?” Glinn asked.
“I … ” Lloyd paused, temporarily at a loss for words. “I just never thought it would look so credible.”
Amusement gleamed briefly in Glinn’s eyes. “Industrial Light and Magic is doing a fine job, don’t you think?”
“The Hollywood firm?”
Glinn nodded. “Why reinvent the wheel? They’ve got the best visual effects designers in the world. And they’re discreet.”
Lloyd did not reply. He simply stood at the railing, gazing down. Before his very eyes, the sleek, state-of-the-art oil tanker was being transformed into a shabby ore carrier bound for its graveyard voyage. The forward half of the great ship presented beautiful, clean expanses of painted metal, welds and plates in crisp geometrical perfection: all the sparkling newness of a six-month-old vessel. From amidships to the stern, however, the contrast could not have been more outrageous. The rear section of the ship looked like a wreck. The aft superstructure seemed to have been coated in twenty layers of paint, each flaking off at a different rate. One of the bridge wings, a queer-looking structure to begin with, had been apparently crushed, then welded back together. Great rivers of rust cascaded down the dented hull. The railings were warped, and missing sections had been crudely patched with welded pipe, rebar, and angle iron.
“It’s a perfect disguise,” said Lloyd. “Just like the mining operation.”
“I’m especially pleased with the radar mast,” said Glinn, pointing aft.
Even from this distance, Lloyd could see the paint was largely stripped off, and bits of metal dangled from old wires. A few antennae had been broken, crudely spliced, then broken again. Everything was streaked with stack soot.
“Inside that wreck of a mast,” Glinn went on, “you’ll find the very latest equipment: P-Code and differential GPS, Spizz-64, FLIR, LN-66, Slick 32, passive ESM, and other specialized radar equipment, Tigershark Loran C, INMARSAT, and Sperry GMDSS communications stations. If we run into any, ah, special situations, there are some mast electronics that can be raised at the push of a button.”
As Lloyd watched, a crane holding a huge wrecking ball swiveled toward the hull; with exquisite care the ball was brought in contact with the port side of the ship once, twice, then three times, adding fresh indignities. Painters with thick hoses swarmed over the ship’s midsection, turning the spotless deck into a storm of simulated tar, oil, and grit.
“The real job will be cleaning all this up,” Glinn said. “Once we unload the meteorite and are ready to resell the ship.”
Lloyd tore his gaze away. Once we unload the meteorite … In less than two weeks, the ship would be heading to sea. And when it returned—when, at last, his prize could be unveiled—the whole world would be talking about what had been accomplished.
“Of course, we’re not doing much to the interior,” Glinn said as they started along the catwalk again. “The quarters are quite luxurious—large staterooms, wood paneling, computer-controlled lighting, lounges, exercise rooms, and so forth.”
Lloyd stopped once again as he noticed activity around a hole cut into the forward hull. A line of bulldozers, D-cats, front-end loaders, skidders with house-size tires, and other heavy mining equipment snaked away from the hole, a heavyweight traffic jam, waiting to be loaded onto the ship. There was a roar of diesel engines and the grinding of gears as, one by one, the equipment drove in and disappeared from view.
“An industrial-age Noah’s ark,” said Lloyd.
“It was cheaper and faster to make our own door than to position all the heavy equipment with a crane,” Glinn said. “The Rolvaag is designed like a typical tanker. The cargo-oil spaces occupy three quarters of the hull. The rest is taken up with general holds, compartments, machinery spaces, and the like. We’ve built special bays to hold the equipment and raw material we’ll need for the job. We’ve already loaded a thousand tons of the best Mannsheim high-tensile steel, a quarter million board feet of laminated timbers, and everything from aircraft tires to generators.”
Lloyd pointed. “And those boxcars on the deck?”
“They’re designed to look like the Rolvaag is making some extra bucks on the side piggybacking containers. Inside are some very sophisticated labs.”
“Tell me about them.”
“The gray one closest to the bow is a hydro lab. Next to it is a clean room. And then we have a high-speed CAD workstation, a darkroom, tech stores, a scientific freezer, electron microscope and X-ray crystallography labs, a diver’s locker, and an isotope and radiation chamber. Belowdecks are medical and surgical spaces, a biohazard lab, and two machine shops. No windows for any of them, I’m afraid; that would give the game away.”
Lloyd shook his head. “I’m beginning to see where all my money is going. Don’t forget, Eli, what I’m buying is basically a recovery operation. The science can wait.”
“I haven’t forgotten. But given the high degree of unknowns, and the fact that we’ll only get one chance at this recovery, we must be prepared for anything.”
“Of course. That’s why I’m sending Sam McFarlane. But as long as things go according to plan, his expertise is for use with the engineering problem. I don’t want a lot of time-wasting scientific tests. Just get the thing the hell out of Chile. We’ll have all the time in the world to fuss with it later.”
“Sam McFarlane,” Glinn repeated. “An interesting choice. Curious fellow.”
Lloyd looked at him. “Now don’t you start telling me I made a mistake.”
“I didn’t say that. I merely express surprise at your
choice of planetary geologists.”
“He’s the best guy for the job. I don’t want a crowd of wimpy scientists down there. Sam’s worked both the lab and the field. He can do it all. He’s tough. He knows Chile. The guy who found the thing was his ex-partner, for chrissakes, and his analysis of the data was brilliant.” He leaned confidentially toward Glinn. “So he made an error of judgment a couple of years back. And, yes, it wasn’t a small one. Does that mean nobody should trust him for the rest of his life? Besides”—and here he placed a hand on Glinn’s shoulder—“you’ll be there to keep an eye on him. Just in case temptation comes his way.” He released his hold and turned back to the ship. “And speaking of temptation, where exactly will the meteorite go?”
“Follow me,” Glinn said. “I’ll show you.”
They climbed another set of stairs and continued along a high catwalk that bridged the ship’s beam. Here, a lone figure stood at the rail: silent, erect, dressed in a captain’s outfit, looking every inch the ship’s officer. As they approached, the figure detached itself from the railing and waited.
“Captain Britton,” said Glinn, “Mr. Lloyd.”
Lloyd extended his hand, then froze. “A woman?” he blurted involuntarily.
Without a pause, she grasped his hand. “Very observant, Mr. Lloyd.” She gave his hand a firm, short shake. “Sally Britton.”
“Of course,” said Lloyd. “I just didn’t expect—” Why hadn’t Glinn warned him? His eyes lingered on the trim form, the wisp of blond hair escaping from beneath her cap.
“Glad you could meet us,” said Glinn. “I wanted you to see the ship before it was completely disguised.”
“Thank you, Mr. Glinn,” she said, the faint smile holding. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so repulsive in my life.”
The Ice Limit Page 7
