Uma stared out the windows. The Bridge came at them like a giant pillar. Momentum would carry the Zoroaster through, and all he could do was sit and watch.
The Zoroaster almost missed her doom.
But with a 200,000 ton ship as big as the Empire State Building, “almost” is not good enough. The tanker struck the concrete fender surrounding the south tower and crushed it.
Slowed, but not stopped by the impact, the Zoroaster scraped her starboard side against the jagged concrete and steel. The double hulls offered protection against minor grounding and maritime accidents, but not a monstrous impact such as this. The inertia ripped open both hulls like so much paper. The Zoroaster hung up on the wreckage of the concrete fender, settling downward to the deep shelf of rock.
Five of the supertanker’s twelve holds immediately split; within minutes, metal fatigue breached three additional holds.
The Zoroaster held more than a million barrels of oil—42 million gallons. Most of which began to pour into the San Francisco Bay.
Crude oil gushed like black blood.
Chapter 2
The phone rang again.
Alone in his stables, Alex Kramer tended the two horses. He insisted on ignoring the ache, no matter how much the leukemia tortured him. He had plenty of experience with pain.
The telephone extension he had wired out to the barn sounded tinny, invasive. He hated it.
Alex looked up, but didn’t move. The ringing phone seemed to cut through him. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. In happier days, Jay or Erin would have rushed to grab the call—Jay expecting his college buddies, Erin a high-school boyfriend. If his wife Maureen didn’t get the phone first. Alex never had to worry about answering it before.
But in one disastrous year, he had lost his entire family—Maureen and Erin killed when a gasoline truck slammed into them on a winding road, Jay a casualty of the latest Middle East conflict. Cocking his head to look behind him at the large, empty ranch house, Alex wondered why he bothered to stay behind in such a hollow place.
Because I don’t ever want to leave those ghosts behind.
The phone kept ringing. Let the answering machine in the house get it.
Finally, after four rings, the phone fell silent. The only noises were the restless stirring of the horses, the morning breeze rustling through the live oaks and pines, and the birds in the wooded hills of Marin County, California. Alex turned back to the horses, feeling numb relief. Dealing with people, even trivial matters, was too much effort. Too much effort.
He gathered the tack for his ritual ride. Moving cautiously from the pain in his body, and reverently with his memories, he saddled his daughter’s mare, Stimpy, a chocolate quarter-horse with a blond mane. Tomorrow he would take Ren, his own horse, for a ride. The two horses loved their exercise, and Alex needed the excuse to get out.
Holding the bridle, Alex hooked an arm between the horse’s ears, then slid the bit into Stimpy’s mouth. After settling the headstall, he buckled it. Lifting the bulky western saddle required most of his remaining strength, but the horse waited graciously. Alex rested a moment, holding himself up by the saddle horn; it even hurt to breathe. He reached under Stimpy’s belly to tighten the cinch strap. Finally, brushing himself off, he levered himself up into the saddle.
Without prodding, Stimpy walked out of the stables into the sunshine. In the fresh air, Alex’s lethargy cleared. For longer than he could remember, he had used the unpaved fire roads in the wooded hills north of San Francisco for morning rides; he and Erin had explored them years before, racing, picnicking, eating the sloppy “secret recipe” peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches she always made before a ride.
Under the stands of oaks, surrounded by an ocean of rustling grass, Alex found it quiet, peaceful… a far cry from the nightmarish hell of the Oilstar refinery where he worked. He drove to his office three days a week—management’s concession “until you recover from your grief,” as if that were possible.
Oilstar had forced him to go for five sessions with their “psychological fitness and health” counselor, a flinty-eyed young woman with short blonde hair that seemed a mass of cowlicks. She had tapped a red-enameled fingernail as she explained the stages of severe grief to him: shock, then disbelief, anger, and finally resignation. Alex had listened to her politely, contributing as little as possible. Each time he left a session, he felt no different, understood no more about why his family had been taken from him, and felt no more fit for work. At least it proved that Oilstar considered his bioremediation research valuable.
As Alex rode out, the morning was so bright and fresh, it mocked him.
At noon, Alex returned to his echoing house, drawing the curtains to shield him from the cheery sunlight. He noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine, but decided he didn’t want to deal with it at the moment. He went past the living room and wet bar, down the hall where the kids’ rooms stood empty and silent, to the master bedroom. He showered, turning the water hot enough to scald away his body aches for a while, then dressed slowly as if his clothes were made out of glass. He thought about eating lunch, but his stomach wasn’t ready for it. He finally played the telephone message.
Resting one elbow on the tile countertop, he listened to the voice of Mitchell Stone, his deputy project manager in the microbiology lab. “Alex, where are you? Don’t you watch the news, for God’s sake! With the Zoroaster thing, the execs are scrambling for any way to save their butts. Maybe we can pull Prometheus out of the closet. Give me a call and get in here as soon as you can, okay?”
As the message ended, Alex frowned at the machine, upset at the intrusion. No, he did not watch the news, and it surprised him that Mitch assumed he did. He hadn’t even turned on the TV in a month. Prometheus? That work was over a year old, merely a precursor to the bacterial strains they were developing now.
Oilstar had funded Alex’s work as a showpiece, their nod to the popular “green” movements. Bioremediation was the catchword, cultivating natural microbes that had an appetite for the swill man wanted to destroy. Already, many companies were developing microbes that would digest toxic wastes, PCBs and PCPs, even break down garbage.
When his daughter Erin turned seventeen and suddenly awakened to political causes, she had first railed at Alex about working for a big oil company, spouting phrases she had memorized from leaflets; but then Erin had beamed with pride and relief when she learned he was attempting to get rid of the tons of styrofoam and non-biodegradable plastics clogging the nation’s landfills.
“Prometheus” had been just a step along the way, a strain that could metabolize certain components of crude oil, primarily octane and a few aromatic ring molecules. Not terribly useful, according to Oilstar.
What could Mitch have in mind now? And what on Earth was a Zoroaster? He clicked on the dusty television, but saw without surprise that his cable service had been cut off. The only stations he could get through the surrounding hills showed a soap opera and a grainy image of talking heads.
Resigned, Alex tried calling in, but the lines were busy. He listened to the buzzing signal, then returned the phone to its cradle. He felt like telling Mitch to solve his own damned problems and then hang up on him. By the time he finished the long drive to the refinery, maybe his thoughts would have cleared.
He slowly tugged on an old jacket against the spring chill and started for his four-wheel drive Ford pickup. Out in the corral, the horses nickered at him, and several crows rattled at him from up in the pine trees. He paused for a second, just breathing the air and thinking nothing, before getting into his truck. He drove along the winding road toward the freeway and the Richmond bridge.