“No. Is there a problem?”
“Not until you get the bill.”
Mark Jacobs slid out of his cab and entered the Sir Francis Drake precisely fifteen minutes before the luncheon was to begin. He prided himself on his punctuality.
He felt a little uncomfortable in a suit and tie. For all he knew, he was five or ten years out of style. Accustomed to Levis and nylon windbreakers, he didn’t keep up with GQ, and he had no desire to start doing so.
Jacobs captained the Arienne, a sixty eight foot Bertram cruiser whose hull sides were festooned with the swooping rainbow stripes and large green lettering of “GREENPEACE.” He was also proud of the role he was playing in the service of mankind.
A Frenchman by virtue of his mother’s heritage, Jacobs had grown up in the south of France and had obtained a degree from the Sorbonne in international law. Now in his early forties, he had never practiced law, but his knowledge of it, combined with the substantial trust fund settled on him by his American father, served him well. The income from his trust allowed him to call the Arienne his own boat.
His ancestry was apparent in his dark coloring, his very white and even teeth, and his tightly curled black hair. One unruly forelock dripped over his smooth brow. He was a careful estimator of probabilities, and when he mounted a commando style assault on environmental polluters, the odds were that he would come out of the confrontation with a successful attraction of media attention on, not only himself, but the ecological felonies being perpetrated by the industries he hated.
His media generated persona had evolved to the point where he was constantly being invited to address groups such as the one today, the Northern California Sierra Club. He never turned down such invitations if they fit into his schedule because he was ever prepared to discuss the impending environmental death of the planet and to offer his solutions toward countering the threat.
He just hated dressing up to do it.
He also found himself disenchanted with some kinds of people, the ones who were willing to talk about the problem from sunup to sundown, but unwilling to take personal, effective action. Still, those people quite often donated to the cause, sometimes substantially, and he was careful to not antagonize anyone.
Inside the front entrance of the hotel, Jacobs paused to orient himself. He was looking for an announcement board pinpointing the meeting room when a man in a three piece blue suit and paisley tie approached him.
“Mr. Jacobs, I’m Dave Argosy.”
They shook hands.
“How extemporaneous are you, Mr. Jacobs?”
Jacobs raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to change my topic?”
“If you prefer to speak on sewage dumping, that will be fine,” Argosy said. “But we just got word about an oil spill in the North Sea.”
“My favorite subject,” Jacobs told him.
Orion appeared ungainly out of her habitat. Because of her twin hulls, she was perched on a dual set of cradles at the end of the slipway. Out of the water, she seemed taller than one would expect, and Brande had the disconcerting notion that a mild wind would topple her from her roost.
Like her sister research ship, Gemini, which plied the Caribbean and Atlantic, the 240 foot Orion was the result of Brande’s design. The foredecks of the twin hulls were short, and the main deck stopped short of the end of the twin sterns, creating a space between the hulls for deploying and recovering submersibles.
The interior of each of the hulls was large enough to provide cabin accommodations for the normal crew of sixteen plus a couple extra beds when necessary. The main deck superstructure contained the large laboratory, fitted with workbenches, test equipment, and computers. It could be accessed by a large, centered door from the stern deck, by side hatches, and by a hatchway into a forward cross corridor. On the other side of the corridor, on the bow end of the superstructure, was located the combination galley/ward room/lounge.
The top deck contained the bridge, the sonar and radar spaces, the captain’s and executive officer’s accommodations, and four small guest cabins. The exposed deck behind the cabins was dominated by two Boston Whaler type boats. A mind numbing array of antennas topped the bridge, the result of Brande’s shopping sprees.
Rae Thomas called him incorrigible when it came to electronic gadgets and wizardry. The radio compartments of the Orion and the Gemini had been spacious in the design stage. Now they were cramped because the bulkheads were hung with radios spanning low to very high frequencies, satellite communications transmitters and receivers, ship to shore sets, and acoustic transceivers. There were tape recording decks and computers. The compact disk players delivered music throughout the ship. CD ROM’s (Compact Disc Read Only Memory) gave instant access to encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, and other research materials. Telex and facsimile machines required their own space. The overflow of navigation system black boxes which would take up too much room in the chart/sonar/radar compartment were also bolted to the radio shack’s bulkheads.
Thomas complained about the cost, but that didn’t stop Brande from poring through the catalogs and picking up the phone while digging for his credit card.
The cost of this overhaul was going to run to about a hundred thousand dollars, and Brande expected to hear from Thomas about that, also.
He walked slowly beneath the hulls, examining the fresh white paint and the dark red anti fouling coats that had been applied to the hulls.
Connie Alvarez Sorenson walked with him. She was first mate and executive officer of the ship, as well as the wife of the captain, Mel Sorenson. A dusky and tiny beauty, she could match sea developed vocabularies with any sailor in the Western Hemisphere. Bull Kontas had given up trying to impress her with his knowledge of curses.
“They’ve done a nice job, Dane.”
“Looks that way,” he agreed.
“Once the cycloidals are finished, probably tomorrow, we can put her back in the water to finish the topside chores.”
“You’re in a hurry, Connie?”
“She belongs in the water.”
“True.”
Brande ducked his head to peer up through one of the open panels in the hull. The flush panels could be retracted, allowing the cycloidal propellers, which appeared to be giant egg beaters, to extend downward. Modeled on the propulsion system used by the oceanographic research vessel Knorr, the four propellers fore and aft on each hull were linked to the two diesel engines and controlled by computer. The helmsman could dance the ship forward, aft, sideways, or in circles with precision. Using the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite system as the navigation aid, the computer could maintain the Orion’s almost exact position in both calm and heavy seas.
In the hull cavity above him, Brande noted the absence of the propeller.
“We didn’t lose it, I hope.”
“No way,” Alvarez Sorenson said. “They’re straightening a couple dings while it’s out for the bearing replacement.”
He backed out from under the hull and looked up again at the gleaming white paint. The superstructure still required repainting of its coat of white and its diagonal yellow stripe.
She was still a beautiful ship, despite her stubby look and her functional hatches and cranes the submersible lift was a gigantic yoke spanning the distance between the stern hulls. He was proud of his ownership, though less impressed with his $28,000 a month finance payments for both ships.
That number seemed high, but was considerably less than the $232,000 a month spent on crew salaries, maintenance, and supplies. Brande used to think it was less, but Rae Thomas, who had a way with numbers, was getting a better grasp on the allocation of costs.