It is the largest oil spill in history: a supertanker crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay. Desperate to avert environmental damage (as well as the PR disaster), the multinational oil company releases an untested designer oil-eating microbe to break up the spill.

What the company didn’t realize is that their microbe propagates through the air . . . and it mutates to consume anything made of petrocarbons: oil, gasoline, synthetic fabrics, plastics of all kinds. And when every piece of plastic begins to dissolve, it’s too late. . . .

ILL WIND

by

Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

© 1996 by WordFire, Inc. and Doug Beason

Originally published by Tor Books

Published at Smashwords by WordFire, Inc.

Chapter 1

Crashing through 20-foot waves, the supertanker Zoroaster drove through the Pacific night like a great steel behemoth.

Longer than three football fields and 170 feet wide, the Oilstar supertanker was one of the largest objects ever constructed. Weather and salt water had left a patina of blisters and rust on a deck that had once been painted silver. Behind the ship, the wake looked like a bubbling cauldron of green foam, lit by a wash of moonlight.

Four days earlier, the supertanker had left the Alaskan port of Valdez after filling its twelve massive tanks with crude oil piped from Prudhoe Bay. Fully loaded, the Zoroaster had churned out of the Gulf of Alaska, bound for the Oilstar refineries in the San Francisco Bay.

Oilstar representatives claimed the massive ship could function with a minimal crew of 28 because of highly efficient computer warning and navigation systems. Internal corporate memos included terms like “increased profit margin” and “downsizing.” Only the long, exhausting shifts broke the tedium for the crew.

No one wanted to think about what could go wrong with so large a ship . . . and so few people to respond to it.

#

The lower corridor of the Zoroaster’s deckhouse was empty. Good. The only sounds were the continuous groans of the tanker, the whisper of the Pacific, and the distant throb of the engines. Everyone asleep. Along the corridor, the gunmetal-gray cabin doors had been sealed against the deep night. This ship always stank of fumes.

Connor Brooks did not hesitate. Sweating with excitement, he yanked down the fire alarm. It would create one hell of a diversion, and he would be glad to destroy the papers and get his sorry ass out of sight. Let the Oilstar pricks do all the explaining.

Electronic whoops clamored through the intercom, making the whole ship echo. Christ, it was loud enough! Connor grabbed his metal food tray and raced up the narrow corrugated stairs to the bridge. Keep everything moving. His entire plan depended on timing. Come on, come on!

Connor’s heart hammered as he bounded up the stairs. His shaggy blond hair flew backward; his scalp prickled with sweat. That butthead, Captain Miles Uma, would take a few seconds to respond to the emergency, and Connor would get his chance. About time, too.

He had to get everyone off the bridge so he could break into his personnel file, trash the evidence that was going to get him in trouble with the authorities. As the Zoroaster approached the end of her four-day journey to San Francisco, Connor’s time was running out. The supertanker would pass through the Golden Gate in less than an hour.

He wanted to kick someone in the kneecaps with his heavy workboot. So he had been caught with a few credit cards he had lifted from the wallets of other crew members—big fucking deal! Nobody was liable for more than fifty bucks or so from purchases made on a stolen card anyway. Besides, Connor had never imagined anybody would notice until long after he jumped ship in San Francisco. What would someone use a credit card for on an oil tanker, for crying out loud?

Connor deserved a decent break in his life. Just one. He had run to Alaska in the first place to hide from a lot of things he did not want to remember, things that other people refused to forget. The port of Valdez in Prince William Sound was full of dirty jobs, working the slime line in fisheries or scrubbing out tankers before they refilled from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. He had hired onto the Zoroaster as a bottom-rank seaman, which meant serving meals and cleaning toilets. Connor hadn’t counted on the captain being such a stuffed-shirt butthead! Why was the world so full of pricks?

Uma wasn’t going to give him a break, so Connor had to take matters in his own hands.

Still running from the deafening fire alarms below, Connor reached the top deck with the tray of food. He wore a stained cook’s apron over his muscular frame.

He paused a second to catch his breath before stepping onto the bridge. He was tempted to whistle a bit, just to show how casual he felt, but that would be too obvious. Old Butthead had the night watch—didn’t the man ever leave his station? Damned Eskimo/Negro mixup. Short and bearlike, Butthead’s swarthy skin, frizzy black hair, huge beard, and heavy eyebrows, made him look like a gorilla trying to pass himself off as human. He kept his Oilstar uniform neat, and he didn’t drink booze. At all.

Butthead Uma whirled upon hearing Connor. “Brooks! What the hell are you doing here?”

Amid the confusion of panicked sounds, Connor put on a big ‘Yes sir!’ smile. “Brought your late-night snack, Captain.”

Butthead ignored him and turned instead to the second mate. “Where is that damned alarm coming from, Dailey?”

The second mate looked up from a display panel, shoving his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. “Two decks down, sir!”

“Right here in the deckhouse?” Butthead said. “At least it’s not out by the cargo holds.”

Connor spoke up. “Yeah, I just came from down there. It looked pretty bad, and the others were calling for you. The intercom is busted or something.” He shrugged. The alarm kept yammering.

“Fire control activated, Captain,” said the second mate.

Uma seemed suspicious. “Dailey, take the conn. Brooks, put that food down and come with me. Why didn’t you let me know?”

Connor cursed under his breath. Now he had to go with Butthead! How the hell was he going to get at the records?

The second mate looked out the wide, salt-spattered windows of the bridge, squinting through thick glasses toward the glimmering lights that stood out on the coast. “Captain, we’re approaching the Point Bonitas lighthouse. Only two miles out of the Golden Gate. The Bay pilot is on his way to come aboard and take us through.”

“I can’t sit around if there’s a fire on my ship.” Uma dashed to the bridge doorway. “Brooks, get a move on!”

Connor refrained from “assisting” Butthead down the stairwell with a hard kick in the ass. He had to delay, get the second mate out of the picture. The captain’s heavy boots clomped down the corrugated stairs like bricks falling on a brass gong.

Connor set the food down on the chart table, keeping the heavy metal tray. The moment the captain disappeared from view, Connor whirled, smashing the metal tray against the second mate’s head. The second mate held up an arm to fend off Connor, then fell to one knee; his glasses broke as they clattered to the floor. Two more blows to the head knocked the man unconscious.

“Sorry, shipmate,” Connor said as he ground the broken eyeglasses under the heel of his stained boot. “You should have gone with Butthead.”

He tossed the tray to the side, and the clatter vanished in the throbbing noise of the alarm. He rushed over to the personnel records bureau next to the captain’s station. Secure locks had never been a high priority, considering the supertanker’s limited crew and long voyages. Connor diddled with the lock, using the screwdriver in his pocket. He slapped his palm against the handle of the screwdriver, and the drawer popped open.

Connor dug through the manila folders, finding his own file: Connor’s hiring record, Uma’s incident report, and an arrest order. His face darkened. He had to be long gone before everybody stopped running around in circles.

Connor yanked out more of the files, shuffling them, anything to gain a little more time when they started hunting him down. Maybe he could slip off the ship without anyone seeing. Glancing out the bridge window, he saw the fog-dimmed lights of the approaching city. It seemed very far away. He had to hurry.

Connor turned to get out of there. The captain would know by now that the fire alarm was a hoax, and he would have no doubt who had done it. Dailey remained stone cold on the floor next to his broken glasses.

Time to haul ass.

He pulled the metal fire door shut behind him as he left the bridge and twisted tight the wheel-lock. During the entire four-day trip down the west coast, Connor had never seen the bridge door closed. Bracing himself against the wall, he kicked viciously at the wheel-lock with his heavy work boot. The wheel bent, jammed.

The grin returned. “Try explaining that one, Captain Butthead!” They would need a blowtorch to get the door open again. Connor sprinted to the long cargo deck. This just might work out after all.

#

Fire alarms screeched. Cabin doors slammed open as groggy, offduty crewmembers scrambled into the corridors. Seamen shouted to each other, wanting to know what was going on. Instinctively three crewmen stumbled into the brisk night to man the water cannons, but they saw none of the crude-oil cargo burning.

On deck two, Captain Miles Uma found no sign of fire. Cramming his cap down on his frizzy hair, he stood by the alarm on the wall, saw that it had been pulled intentionally. Realization fell into place as a wave of cold anger coursed through him. His skin prickled. “I’m going to kill Brooks!”

Uma’s stomach soured with dread as he suddenly realized his mistake. Brooks had not followed him down the stairs. The slimeball must still be up on the bridge with Dailey. Even with such a small crew, Uma knew he should have locked the bastard up.

They were close to the narrow and treacherous Golden Gate. Too close. And Brooks was pulling some stupid stunt. Uma bounded back up to the bridge deck.

The door to his own bridge stood shut against him, the wheel-lock bent. Uma strained against the wheel, but it remained jammed. He hammered with a fist. “Open this door right now!”

He received no answer. Listening, he could hear the automatic collision-avoidance radar beeping a warning. His mind whirled, and his stomach tangled in impossible knots. Of their four-day, 2000 mile journey, this was the most crucial point, “threading the needle” through the deep channel under the Golden Gate Bridge to Oilstar’s North Bay refineries. Dead Man’s Curve.

Uma was appalled at his own stupidity, his overconfidence. Captain Joseph Hazelwood had done the same thing on the Exxon Valdez—left the command post at a critical moment. Uma angrily slapped the bulkhead; his hand stung. Stupid!

Uma stepped back and kicked as hard as he could. The thick metal door did not give.

A crewman panted up the stairs, followed by two others. Uma briefly wished they had given him a few more moments to get through the door; now everyone could see his helplessness.

“What is it, Captain?” asked the crewman. Uma did not turn to look at him.

“The door’s jammed.” He kicked again, hard enough to send a sharp pain through his shin. Uma threw his shoulder against it. His voice suddenly turned hoarse. “Help me get in there now!” He shoved the crewman forward. Another man joined him, but the three of them slammed against the door in vain.

Uma turned and pointed at the crewmen on the stairwell. “Get me a battering ram—anything. Move it!”

Muffled through the door, the collision-avoidance alarms kept beeping.

#

Out on the vast, cluttered deck, alarms bleated into the night. Connor wondered if Captain Butthead had made it back to the bridge yet. He wished he could be there to watch Uma’s expression as he tried to cope with the jammed door.

Connor hurried out to the storage shacks, pump control banks, and water-cannon valves. Everything was wet with spray, slimy with oil residue. He crumpled the incriminating papers as he faced the stiff ocean breeze and tossed the wad overboard. The white ball glimmered in the moonlight, then vanished forever. If he could just hide until the ship docked at the terminal, then slip off . . . .

He looked across the ship, the twelve tank hatches, the catwalk down the center of the deck, the pressure and vacuum relief valves. The Zoroaster was so long the crew had to take bicycles from one end to the other. He would have little trouble finding a place to lie low for a few hours.

He couldn’t jump and swim to shore; years ago, maybe with a wetsuit and surfboard, he would have tried. The cold, fast-moving waters of the Bay were notorious—and even fully loaded, the tanker rode six stories above the water. He should have thought of that part before setting all this in motion, but Connor hated to waste time over-planning. He did what he needed to do, then tried to be flexible if the details didn’t work out right.

The alarms suddenly ceased, plunging the ship into an echoing silence. Off in the distance, he heard the asynchronous hoots and chimes of foghorns around the Golden Gate. Through sparse fog, the coastal cities lit up the shoreline like Christmas lights. Connor was glad to be approaching civilization again.

The twinkling outline of the Golden Gate Bridge seemed very, very close.

#

Using a pipe as a battering ram, the crew finally broke through the bridge door, letting it hang on one twisted hinge. Uma kicked the door aside, allowing access. He spotted second mate Dailey on his knees, groaning and trying to pull himself up.

The Golden Gate Bridge was much too close.

Uma ran three steps toward the controls, then stopped to stare across the Zoroaster’s sprawling deck at what lay ahead. The Golden Gate loomed, a narrow opening into the calm waters of the Bay. The Bridge cut across their path with a flickering necklace of automobile headlights. Rocky headlands crouched in the surf, where lighthouses sent their beacons out to sea.

Uma knew the north tower of the Bridge stood on rocks extending from the Marin shore; but the south tower rose straight out of the sea on the San Francisco side, built on a shelf of rock fifty feet deep and a quarter mile from land.

For a fraction of a second, Uma froze. His career was over. He could never save the ship in time. His mind numbed, unable to grasp the disaster about to happen in front of his eyes, all because of his stupidity.

The supertanker took about a mile to turn, and she’d had four days to build up speed. But he couldn’t just stand there.

He slapped at the intercom. “Full reverse!”

The grinding hum from the engine room sounded strained and uncooperative. The Zoroaster shuddered with the sudden change as the engine responded.

Collision-avoidance radar bleeped, a sound that frightened him much more than the fire alarms. He scanned the screens at the navigator’s station. Red danger circles overlapped the tanker’s silhouette and the south pier of the Bridge. Over the radio, the voice of a Coast Guard operator kept calling for a response.

At the radio station, he switched channels to the Coast Guard frequency. “Mayday, mayday! This is Oilstar Zoroaster. We are headed for the Golden Gate. Declaring an emergency and prepared to abandon ship!”

Uma squinted at the radar, watching the tanker’s projected path. The ship headed straight for one of the two great towers that supported the Golden Gate Bridge. He grunted, moving the rudder as far to port as the electronic control would allow.

He might be able to make the great ship swing just enough. Just by a fraction. Uma sounded the whooping general quarters alarm. He wondered how many of the Zoroaster’s crew would assume it to be another false emergency and go back to their bunks.

He held the rudder hard to port. His body felt drained, exhausted. Behind him, one of the seamen muttered, “Come on, we’ll make it . . . we’ll make it.”

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.

He rode in silence, but then he switched on the radio to see if he could find out what Mitch had been talking about. Zoroaster. Thumbing the dial, he found only stations that had music or advertisements, but National Public Radio had a long discussion about the aftereffects of the Exxon Valdez spill, the Torreycanyon, the Shetland Islands spill, and other tanker accidents. Alex wondered why that had become so topical after all this time. Must be an anniversary of one of the disasters or something. He moved along at exactly the speed limit, other cars passing him regularly.

Alex was primarily an idea man at the bioremediation lab, leaving Mitch and the others to take care of bothersome details with management and record-keeping. Mitch panicked about deadlines at least once a month.

Half an hour after leaving home, Alex exited the freeway and turned toward the sprawling Oilstar refinery. As he approached the chain-link fence, he saw a crowd of protesters in front of the guard gate. TV camera crews stood on the sidelines. The demonstration seemed orderly; Oilstar had brought in extra rent-a-cops, along with a handful of California Highway Patrol officers.

Alex raised his eyebrows. One group or another found reason to rail at Oilstar several times a year, but whenever somebody planned a protest, they usually informed Oilstar in advance, along with the local media. He was so tired of all this, angry at the demonstrators for tossing more unpleasantness in his lap. He just wanted to sit at home and rest.

As his pickup crawled past the protesters, he saw the usual signs depicting oil-covered sea birds and otters, the skull-and-crossbones; the word Zoroaster was repeated over and over. Well, he thought, maybe it was something important after all. Maybe there had been another spill somewhere. He had worked for Oilstar long enough to know there would always be oil spills. . .and the oil companies would always swear that it would never happen again.

At another time, his daughter Erin might have been among the protesters. Erin had become outspoken whenever she found a cause, “Save the Whales” or “Don’t Use Colored Toilet Paper.” Though he had not always understood Erin’s drive, he had never been scornful or disdainful. She was a smart girl and full of questions, many of which Alex had not been able to answer. He was just glad she felt such a passion for things.

But Erin would never grow up to join these demonstrators at the Oilstar gate, and he felt unexplainably annoyed at the protesters for that.

He drove past the crowd without incident, then worked his way across the refinery grounds, driving past a wasteland of pipes and tanks, fractionating towers and steam, with huge oil-storage tanks riding the surrounding hills. The place looked like an Escher industrial nightmare, amplified by hissing noises and foul smells.

Eventually, he found himself by his office on the second floor of Oilstar’s research annex. Fumbling with his keys, he opened the door and went inside, ignoring the yellow telephone messages taped to his door. His office looked too clean, too neat. He had never taken the time to be tidy when he was swallowed up in work; now he did little else but rearrange his papers into neat piles.

A picture of Alex’s family sat on the desk, all four of them smiling, a frozen moment from the past. His own image faced him, wire-rimmed glasses and graying hair above a neat peppery beard; beside him sat Marcia, strong and slender. Jay, 21 years old, reddish hair cropped short since entering the Army, his sparse mustache all but invisible against his skin; petite Erin with strawberry-blond hair, striking dark eyebrows and flawless skin, a beauty that was lost on the high-school boys. Erin would have shattered hearts had she lived to enter college.

“About time, Alex!” Mitch Stone leaned on the door frame. “I’ve already set up a meeting for us tomorrow morning with Emma Branson and the other mucky mucks. We’ve got to move on this right away.”

At 28 and rising fast, Mitch concerned himself with dressing impeccably. He got his hair razor cut every other week, wore stylish clothes, even sported a tie in the lab. In public, Mitch toed the Oilstar party line and talked fast. He didn’t try to annoy Alex, but his skewed priorities, office bullpen politics, and his constant “emergencies” had drained away all of Alex’s respect for him. Alex remembered when he had been filled with so much ambition.

Mitch ticked off points on his fingers. “The engineering folks are getting lightering operations underway to pump the rest of the oil out of the cargo holds. The tides are playing hell with the wreck. Boat teams are rigging booms around the spill, but there are pleasure boats and protesters up the wazoo, maritime rubber-neckers in everyone’s way. Best estimates are that a quarter of a million barrels have already dumped into the Bay and it’s still gushing out. Zoroaster—”

Alex held up a hand to stop the other man. He noticed his fingers trembling. “Mitch, I don’t know what on Earth you’re talking about. Tell me what a Zoroaster is before you go on.”

Mitch goggled at him. “You mean you don’t know? Oh, come on!” Tugging on Alex’s sleeve, Mitch marched him down the carpeted halls into the lunchroom.

A sour, burnt smell drifted up from a puddle of coffee in the bottom of the pot. Washed coffee cups—no two alike—sat upended in wet spots on brown paper towels between the sink and microwave oven. The television was turned on and loud. Four people straddled uncomfortable plastic chairs at the wood-grain tables, watching CNN. Alex had not seen such rapt expressions on viewers’ faces since the coverage of the first Gulf War.

“Could be the biggest spill ever,” Mitch said. “Far bigger than the Exxon Valdez. Only this time it’s not up in Alaska, it’s right here in San Francisco Bay!”

From a helicopter, the TV camera looked down at the wreck of the Oilstar Zoroaster, its side ripped open by the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. A montage of shots, beginning with pictures at dawn, traced the growth of the spill during the day. Boats hovered on the edges of the slick.

Alex’s knees went weak, appalled at himself for belittling Mitch’s reaction, the protesters’ outrage. The sharp thorns of pain in his bones felt suddenly overwhelming.

The broadcast showed seagulls blanketed with tarry residue, floating corpses of sea otters. Crowds stood anxiously on Fisherman’s Wharf, staring out at the approaching oil. Alex’s breath quickened; his head ached, starting with a pressure in his temples that wouldn’t go away. The program played a long sequence of archival footage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

Mitch clapped a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “The bozos over at Admin Gardens are in a state of panic. They’re willing to try anything for some positive publicity. We can cash in on it if we get approval to release Prometheus to help the cleanup efforts!”

Mitch didn’t seem affected by the images on the television. He lowered his voice. “We’ll be heroes even if it doesn’t work!”

Alex shook off Mitch’s hand and stared at the oil spilling across the water, the thick liquid lapping against the shore. He remembered the times he and his son Jay had spent days hiking on the rocky headlands. Especially the time when Jay had told him he wanted to drop out of college and join the army. . . .

“What’s the matter, Alex?” Mitch frowned. “Don’t you see what an opportunity this is?” He pressed closer.

“An opportunity?” Alex said in a voice that came out as a low growl. Time and again, since the death of his family, he had shielded his emotions behind a wall of weariness and apathy; at rare times, though, the wall cracked to expose a furnace blazing inside. He had never been a violent man, but he had been walking on the thin ice of intensely charged emotions for months.

Alex flexed his right hand; the pain inside made his breath like ice knives, and Mitch stood just too damned close. Suddenly lashing out, he shoved Mitch backwards—not hard, but enough to knock the other man over a chair, sprawling to the floor.

“You’re right, Mitch,” Alex said, “but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it.”

Chapter 3

Spencer Lockwood shielded his eyes from the glaring sun. The wasteland around White Sands, New Mexico, looked more like the surface of the Moon than a restricted national preserve. Bleak gypsum sand stretched to the horizon, broken only by scrub brush, yucca plants, and lava rock. The rugged peaks of the Organ Mountains shimmered like a mirage. The heat made the dusty air smell like gunpowder.

Numerous rocket and guided-missile systems had been tested at the White Sands missile range in its half century of existence. Mountains in the east stood over Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated in 1945. To the north, the five-mile-long ramp of a prototype railgun launcher ran up Oscura Peak, where a month earlier it had accelerated its first test satellite to low Earth orbit. History, plenty of history.

Spencer was determined to add not just a footnote to the story of White Sands; he was after an entire chapter.

For now he devoted his attention to the small metal antennas that dotted the compound. Thousands of whiplike microwave receivers blanketed a circular patch of desert two kilometers in diameter, making it look like a huge pincushion. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the “antenna farm.”

Spencer knelt by one of the frail-looking antennas and fingered the flexible wire. Work for me today, baby! He had cobbled the whole project together on a shoestring budget, and he dreaded that his experiment might fail because of a stupid glitch. A preventable glitch. Then the bureaucrats would shut down the whole circus.

“Hey, Spence!”

He jerked his head up. Surrounded by the small wire constructions, he seemed to be standing in the center of a field of metallic cornstalks. Shading his eyes, he saw a gangly woman wearing an Australian hat walk toward him. Rita Fellenstein was a technical whiz herself, but she had taken it upon herself to be a combination den mother and butt-kicker for the solar satellite group—including Spencer himself.

“It’s gonna work,” Rita said. “Stop hovering over it.”

“Just checking the connections one last time.” Spencer wiped his hands against his pants.

Rita stepped around the wires. “Well, don’t get all anal retentive about it. You’re starting to act like Nedermyer.”

“He could get you fired for a remark like that,” Spencer said.

“Fire a national lab employee? Get real. Come on, let’s get back to the command trailers. The reporters want to talk to you.”

Spencer felt a tug at his gut. “Uh, I’ve got to check this stuff.” It seemed that every time they got the array hooked up they lost contact with one of the antennas, usually due to a kangaroo rat gnawing through the cables.

“No you don’t need to check it. You’ve already done it. I’ve already done it. And the technicians have already done it. Now go talk to the newsies before first light comes down.”

“I just hate it when they ask stupid questions.” He realized he was not much sounding like a history-making visionary.

Rita put her hands on her narrow hips. “Well, Nedermyer doesn’t mind talking to the press. He’ll come across as an important Department of Energy watchdog over us brash young scientists. And if you don’t get back there, they’ll be quoting him instead of you. Do you want them to get a Washington beancounter’s view of the project?”

Spencer detected a smile beneath the shadow of her hat. “Okay, okay. I give up. He always tries to rain on my parade.”

Of all the bureaucrats who had visited the solar antenna farm, Lance Nedermyer was the most difficult for Spencer to understand. Nedermyer had built a fast-burning reputation during his younger days, with a promising future ahead of him in research. But a White House Fellowship lured him to the Washington political scene, and the spark of his scientific curiosity had fizzled. “Potomac fever” they called it. Nedermyer had thrown away his chance at doing real research in favor of gaining political influence.

Spencer started toward the battered U.S. Government truck at the periphery of the antenna farm. He stepped over the spaghetti web of wires on the ground, connecting hundreds of whiplike antennas. The setup didn’t have to look pretty to work—nor did it have to cost an arm and a leg. That was the beauty of it.

Spencer had to trot to keep up with Rita’s long-legged pace. “I lost track of time,” he said. “When’s the next flyover?”

Rita answered without checking her watch, still striding along. “Alpha One is due in forty minutes. It’s got a dwell time of five minutes, with Alpha Two and the rest of them right on its heels. It’ll be another twenty-four hours before the Seven Dwarfs are in place again.”

The “Seven Dwarfs,” a cluster of small solar-collection satellites, circled Earth more than 300 miles up, equally spaced over a segment of orbit like cars on a freight train. Spencer marveled at the simple concept. He couldn’t claim total credit for coming up with the idea, but he had been instrumental in getting the project off the ground.

The satellites converted raw solar energy into microwaves. Once the first satellite popped over the horizon, it would beam focused energy down onto the field of antennas, not unlike the millions of telephone conversations comsats already beamed to Earth. The key was to use a lot of little, low-orbiting satellites instead of a single big one.

Spencer had spent years fighting for his project, trying to convince uninterested politicians or military types the best way to tap the power of the sun. Low-efficiency passive solar arrays on Earth could generate only minimal power, enough to run a few local farms. Only by deploying enormous solar panels in space, then beaming the power through the atmosphere, would solar energy pay off in a way big enough to make a difference.

But other technical experts hawked their own ideas to the same committees; since the decision makers knew little or nothing about the subject, they were swayed by razzle-dazzle presentations and good public speakers rather than solid technical content.

Spencer’s test had finally come down to the wire, and today was the day he would blow the other guys out of the water. He hoped his smallsat program would be as simple in practice as he made it sound in his sales pitches.

Rita slammed the door of the old gray pickup, then roared across the rutted temporary roads. The infrequent New Mexican rain fell two inches at a time, then dried the ground hard as cement. Spencer tried to keep his head from hitting the roof of the truck as they bounced toward the cluster of buildings. He tried to talk, but his teeth clicked together as the truck jounced. He kept quiet until they reached the command center.

He brushed aside his usual revulsion at the substandard quarters the government had allotted his project. Maybe the TV reporters wouldn’t shoot too much footage of the facility itself. The “blockhouse” was a bank of three revamped 1960s-vintage trailers that had been used for various experiments at White Sands. A mesh of chickenwire completely surrounded the trailers, making the blockhouse into a giant Faraday cage, safe from stray microwave beams if the satellites missed their mark.

The rattling hum of portable air conditioners buzzed outside the white aluminum-siding walls. A fist of twisted fiber-optic wires ran from the distant microwave farm to a switchboard inside.

“Get your badge on, Spence,” Rita said. “Look nice for the newsies.”

He pulled his laminated badge out of his pocket and clipped it to his collar. Awful I.D. photograph, on par with his driver’s license. Brown hair that wouldn’t stay combed, blue eyes open a little too wide, prominent sunburn, and a thin face wearing an expression like he had just swallowed a grape whole. Spencer wondered if it was a requirement that photo identification had to be embarrassing.

The cool, musty-smelling blockhouse felt good after baking out on the desert. The only light inside the trailer seeped through closed miniblinds or shone from computer screens. The overhead flourescents had been switched off. A jukebox purchased from an old cafe in nearby Alamogordo sat dormant in the corner.

The news crew from Albuquerque had their equipment set up in a small alcove walled off by portable room dividers. Spencer had hoped for a bit more media, but the big San Francisco oil spill monopolized most of the prime-time broadcasts.

Spencer’s people chattered in a staccato but precise drone, verifying readings from the antenna farm, calibrating the solar smallsat. “DOE’s on the line, Spence. They told us to call them when you got here.”

Spencer dismissed it with a wave. He had more important things to do than to chat with Department of Energy paper-pushers. “Tell them I’m tied up. What’s our time?”

Rita Fellenstein glanced up from a computer monitor. Colors from the CRT display reflected off the sheen on her thin face. “Twenty-three minutes until Alpha One comes into range. Go ahead and kiss up to DOE—they have a psychological need to give you a pep talk. That way they can take credit for our success.”

Spencer ignored the suggestion. “Any air traffic?”

“Sky’s clear, verified by El Paso control.”

“Data link?”

“Echo checks are error free.”

A decade ago the operation would have taken ten times the people and a thousand times the budget. Spencer looked around in quiet satisfaction, content that his project had succeeded against “conventional” DOE wisdom. The bureaucracy of Big Science added thousands of unnecessary corners that could be cut if you weren’t brainwashed into believing they were necessary.

He raised his voice over the murmur in the blockhouse. “Okay, you guys, all green on the diagnostics. Everyone knows the drill—any reason to call for a hold takes precedence. Problems?”

The trailer remained silent except for the background hum of equipment and air conditioners. The reporters stood around, shuffling their feet, adjusting their pin-mikes, not understanding the details but sensing something important about to happen.

“All right, signal DOE we’re going hot,” Spencer said.

Activity filled the dim trailer. Excitement raced through Spencer’s veins, anticipation to see his project come on-line at last. A voice interrupted him, sounding as if it had taken years to perfect its nasal resonance. Spencer’s stomach dropped.

“I don’t like your ‘negative response only’ policy, Dr. Lockwood. Statistics prove that a checklist methodology eliciting positive acknowledgments has an appreciably higher percentage of success. DOE would feel more comfortable if you adopted this procedure, as the rest of the civilized world does.”

Lance Nedermyer’s fleshy torso filled most of the walking space in the crowded trailer. Though the blockhouse was cool, beads of perspiration dotted Nedermyer’s flushed forehead. At the moment, he was probably the only man on the entire White Sands installation wearing a suit and a tie. Spencer wanted to say: My people know their jobs, Lance! Teamwork sometimes proves more effective than checklists. But, much as he wanted to, Spencer could not afford to embarrass or ignore the man. “Thanks for your input, Lance. I’ll be sure to include your suggestion in our post-test assessment comments.”

“I’d be more pleased if you’d make them part of your operating procedures, post-haste.”

“Thanks, Lance.” But Spencer had already hunched down in front of a communications workstation operated by Juan Romero. Romero, with his long black hair and drooping mustache, looked like a bandit from a cheap Western—and Romero intentionally played the part to the hilt.

Romero expanded a portion of his screen to show a televised view of the antenna farm, taken from the top of a hundred-foot tower outside the blockhouse. The image of the metallic receivers wavered in the heat, making them look like thousands of fingers reaching up to grasp the invisible radiation.

“Sixty seconds,” said Rita Fellenstein.

Spencer wet his lips; the desert dryness seemed particularly piercing now. “Jukebox plugged in?” he whispered.

“That was the first thing on the checklist,” Romero raised his voice loud enough for Nedermyer to hear, then he grinned broadly out of sight.

Spencer felt Nedermyer’s eyes on him. The news crew hushed. TV cameras pointed at the techs constantly updating the system status.

“Folks,” Spencer said, raising his voice, “we’re about to catch the first solar energy ever beamed directly from space. Keep your fingers crossed.”

At the top left corner of the workstation in front of him, numerals flashed the countdown. Spencer wondered if he should voice the numbers out loud for the benefit of the DOE bureaucrats in D.C. He joined the faint whispering as everyone counted down to first light. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . bingo!”

The televised view from the desert didn’t change. Romero and Spencer stared at the screen. They saw no indication that millions of joules of energy rained down from space into the waiting arms of a thousand microwave antennas.

The news crews probably wanted to see a dazzling green death beam streak down from orbit. The trailer fell silent as everyone held their breath. Nothing.

Click!

Bright light filled the trailer, then a whirring hum. The sound of the Beach Boys singing in harmony swept through the air. Spencer smiled as the strains of “The Warmth of the Sun” drifted from the jukebox. Everyone laughed and started clapping. Spencer broke into a wider grin; Romero slapped him on the back.

Nedermyer scowled at the jukebox. The music grew louder until it blared out of the speakers.

Spencer reached left and right to shake hands. His crew congratulated him, pounding him on the back. “Hey, somebody notify DOE!”

Rita waved an arm and held up a portable telephone. “Spence, the Assistant Secretary wants to talk with you.”

“Tell her I’m monitoring the test.” A champagne cork popped, and Spencer was doused. Breaking free of the revelry, he made his way toward the reporters. Now he didn’t mind talking to them. Over the din, he could hear voices shouting performance figures.

“We’re showing a thirty-five percent conversion efficiency! With this baseline, we’ve already exceeded the design specs!”

Nedermyer stood with his arms crossed, lips drawn into a tight line. Nedermyer’s foot tapped, but it didn’t seem to be moving to the beat of the song. The ruddy color that crept into the bureaucrat’s cheeks was far darker than a sunburn.

Spencer motioned with his head to the jukebox. “Well? Are you satisfied, Lance?”

“At what? This . . . stunt?”

“We could have used anything for a load. We thought this would be a bit more . . . memorable than an oscilloscope.”

“There’s a purpose for all the diagnostics equipment your group has purchased, Dr. Lockwood. They convey much more information for competent analysis than this boombox of yours.”

Spencer lowered his voice. “What is your problem, Lance? Can’t you see it worked? Give us a little credit.”

Nedermyer’s whisper had the edge of a bayonet. “I spend all year long trying to crowbar money out of the trenches for your pet projects, and you screwballs turn it into a comedy routine! We had to can a dozen other equally worthy proposals to get your funding, Dr. Lockwood, and look what kind of impression you’ve just made. Imagine the headlines: Government Wastes Millions of Dollars to Turn on Jukebox from Space! Are you too young to remember how the public howled when the Apollo astronauts were having too much fun on the Moon? You’re supposed to act respectable in situations like this. Can’t you grow up for a few minutes, golden boy?”

The jukebox song changed to “I Get Around.” Chuckles rippled through the trailer. Rita’s voice boomed over the background noise. “Quiet! Switchover in one minute. Alpha Two coming up.”

Spencer turned to Nedermyer, trying to back to neutral ground. “Ready for the next satellite. Care for a closer look?”

Nedermyer kept his arms folded. “I can see—and hear—from where I’m standing.”

Spencer kept a straight face as he went over to Rita’s area. Three telephones and two laptop computers lay jumbled next to her workstation. Even sitting, the gangly scientist was nearly as tall as the reporter hovering over her shoulder. Rita pointed to a graphic on the screen for the reporter’s benefit. “Alpha One is about to go over the horizon. We’ll lose contact soon.”

The reporter pulled his microphone back and spoke into it. “I thought these satellites stayed overhead the whole time.”

“To do that, we’d have to put the satellites up so high that their beam would spread out too much by the time it got down to Earth. Our beam from low-orbiting satellites stays tight enough for us to milk it. But the downside is that each satellite is overhead for only five minutes.”

“Does that mean your antenna farm will only generate electricity for a few minutes a day?”

Spencer rolled his eyes and wondered if the reporter hadn’t done his homework, or if he was just playing dumb to clarify things for his viewers.

“No, we’ve got seven satellites in four different planar orbits for broader coverage,” said Rita.

“The Seven Dwarfs,” the reporter said, grinning.

“Right. We were fairly certain we could lock the microwave beam from the first satellite. The real trick is to see if we can turn on the next satellite when it comes into view without interrupting the power. If there’s enough overlap between the beams, the electrical network won’t even notice the difference.”

A shout erupted from the front. “Two, one . . . transition! Alpha Two is locked on!”

Spencer noticed no dimming of the lights, no jitter in the jukebox. The party started all over again.

Rita kept talking, giving the canned speech every member of the project knew by heart. “At least one of the Seven Dwarfs is within view of White Sands 46 percent of the time. But they may be at too low an angle to do any good. Eventually we hope to get a continuous ring of satellites over the Earth so we never lose touch—at least in daylight. We also need to build more antenna farms along the path so that as soon as a satellite loses sight of one farm it can switch to another.”

The reporter recorded all the information, but Rita didn’t slow down. “Once we get them up there, all that energy is free. Since the cost of sending up smallsats is decreasing, it’ll become economical and a lot less polluting than any form of Earth-based power system. Twenty more satellites are sitting in sealed storage at the Jet Propulsion Lab right now. We’ll eventually need about 70 for a complete system, but the strategy is to first show they work. Solar satellites don’t wear out, you know, they just keep going and going and going—like that pink bunny.”

Another cheer went through the trailer a few moments later. “Alpha Three overlap and switch-on is successful. Three down and four to go.” The celebration was more subdued this time. After the first milestone, every other event seemed less significant.

“What about the Zoroaster spill?” the reporter asked.

Spencer interrupted the interview; he had hoped for a question like that. Rita looked relieved. Spencer stepped too close to the microphone, then awkwardly backed away as he talked. “The pictures speak for themselves. Until we develop alternative energy sources like this one, we’re going to keep having accidents like that one.” He felt warm inside as he said it. The words came out like a perfect sound bite, and he had no doubt the broadcast would use it.

Before long, the seventh satellite passed over the horizon. The lights dimmed and the jukebox stopped. Spencer was suddenly exhausted.

Like an addict craving another hit, he looked around to keep the thrill going just a little longer. He spotted Lance Nedermyer standing in the corner, alone, talking into a telephone. Nedermyer loosened his tie, then turned his back on the party.

Spencer set his mouth as he realized he had to do some damage control; he reached Nedermyer as the bureaucrat hung up the phone. “Looks like a total success, Lance,” he said. “We’re having a quick-look briefing in ten minutes to go over preliminary data.”

Nedermyer smiled tightly. “I’ve seen all I need to for now.”

“Too bad the Secretary couldn’t make it out.”

“No need to, that’s why I’m here.” He turned for the exit. “If your test is over, I’ll be heading back to Albuquerque. It’s a three-hour drive.”

Spencer followed the man out the door, growing angry as Nedermyer brushed off his accomplishment. Outside, the sunlight seemed to explode with brightness. With an effort, Spencer kept his voice friendly. “Albuquerque, already?”

Nedermyer pulled off his tie and strode toward his rental car. The ground crunched beneath his feet. “That’s what I said.”

“Well, is there anything else I can show you?”

“I said I’ve seen all I need to see—”

Spencer’s patience snapped and he reached out to grab Nedermyer by the elbow. The man’s arm felt as fleshy as it looked. “Lance, you can’t deny that what happened here today marks a new era. When all the satellites are up—”

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.

But Todd had a job to do, and he would bust his back cheeks to accomplish it. He couldn’t turn back the clock and prevent the wreck from happening. He had to turn off his disgust at seeing the massive damage grow worse every second. The whole dang world was watching, but he had to focus on the job at hand. Keep cool. There would be time to get pissed later—get good and drunk, maybe even look up that captain and kick some butt. While other people spent all their time yakking and complaining, Todd Severyn waded in and started doing something about it.

He yanked off his thick gloves, stuffed them in his pocket, and reached inside his slicker. Hauling out his walkie talkie, he clicked the channel to his counterpart over on the Tiberius. “Glenn! Give me an update. How much have we offloaded so far?”

The radio crackled after only a moment’s pause. “Close to fifty thousand barrels. Pretty good for a day’s work—”

Todd scowled. “Darn it, that’s only a few percent of what’s still inside.”

He heard shouting in the background of the Tiberius. Glenn snapped back, “Then shut up and keep pumping! We’re doing everything we can.”

The transfer hoses had been pumping for less than fifteen minutes, throbbing as they sucked barrel after barrel out of the Zoroaster’s holds—when the wind picked up. Todd froze, wondering what else could go wrong. Lightering operations were tough under good conditions, but now the sea grew rougher. The fog had cleared, but the sky turned gray like a smoke pudding.

The deck began to creak, and the ship suddenly lurched to the side, increasing the slant.

Todd scrambled to grab the rail as panic welled up in him. He heard the other six men on the tanker shouting. He hated to leave a job unfinished, hated to run away when conditions got worse—but he wasn’t stupid. He knew when to make the call. He pressed the TALK button on his walkie talkie. “Getting unstable, Glenn. Start thinking about closing up shop.” He looked at his watch. It was getting close to high tide, the greatest danger, when the supertanker rode highest on its unsteady balance against the bridge pier.

The Tiberius responded. “They’re going to crucify us if we abandon this puppy, Severyn. She’s still gushing thousands of gallons a minute.”

Todd wanted to smash the walkie-talkie on the deck. “If the Zoroaster goes down, none of my people are gonna be on it. I’m ordering the chopper to start shuttling people back over to you.”

“We’d better check with Oilstar—”

“It’s my call, and I’m making it.” If Emma Branson didn’t like it, she could come out of her high-and-mighty Oilstar office and do the work herself.

He switched off the walkie talkie and raised a hand to get the attention of his crew. He pointed toward the helicopter, then held up four fingers. Seeing this, the first team of four broke away from their work and struggled up the sloping deck, slick toward the helicopter, which seemed about half a mile away. The pilot started the engine while waiting for them; two minutes later the blades began to rotate.

The walkie-talkie crackled . “Oilstar okays it, Severyn. But the minute the weather turns better, we come right back.”

Todd’s stomach twisted with the thought of how much oil still remained in the unbreached cargo holds. He shouted as the wind picked up again, “After the chopper takes the first load of my people over, we’ll unlash the two ships. Stop pumping from cargo hold 3. We’ll disconnect right now. Three of us will stay here to get the transfer hose ready when it’s time.”

He turned to see the four men clamber aboard the helicopter. The blades became a blur, and the craft lurched from the deck, heading toward the adjacent Tiberius.

As Todd watched the copter land on the other tanker, the Zoroaster groaned under his feet, listing and settling deeper. He fell back against a metal supply shack mounted to the deck. Keep cool, he reminded himself, but the thought of the tanker sliding off the submerged ledge and plunging to the bottom filled him with terror, which he attempted to smother in front of his men.

Jimmy Mack, a wide-eyed kid just days with the company, started yelling about stupid risks. Todd staggered over to help him disconnect the transfer hose from cargo hold 3. “I keep my word—no one’s going down with this ship!” He bent over and used his wrench on the transfer hose connection.

Two men detached the hose from the hold and hauled it toward the deck rail. Black oil gushed from the end, splattering the deck. Todd radioed for the Tiberius to shut off the pumps to cargo holds 7 and 8. “Start unlashing the ships,” he said. The words sounded like failure to him, and it made him angry. “Get ready to disengage these other hoses.”

On the deck of the smaller tanker, the helicopter lifted off and began its journey back. Working two men at a time, Todd and his companions threw off the heavy hooks securing the Zoroaster to the Tiberius. The thumping vibrations of the helicopter grew louder as it approached the supertanker’s landing pad.

“Disconnect those hoses,” Todd shouted. “Move it!”

With a large swell, the Zoroaster lurched, tumbling them backward into the water cannons. Todd smashed his elbow against a large red pipe, but managed to grab the rail of a foam-monitor station. Everything was going wrong. Todd felt as if he were standing in the path of an avalanche. One of the men smacked his helmet on a release valve, and water began to spray from a nozzle.

No longer lashed together, the two tankers drifted apart by a few more feet.

The transfer hose at cargo hold 7 sheared away, spraying oil in all directions. With a loud pop, the hose connected to cargo hold 8 tore off. The Zoroaster began to tilt sideways, away from Tiberius.

“She’s going down!” Todd shouted. For just a moment he wanted to run in blind panic to the empty chopper pad, but he had to get his crew off. He shoved Jimmy Mack toward the landing platform. “Go! Now!”

“Yes, sir!”

All three men began a scramble for the helicopter pad near the stern deck. They were covered with petroleum slime, the rough metal deck plates slick with crude. Jimmy Mack tumbled to his knees, disoriented with panic. Todd reached out a big hand and helped him up. “I told you I keep my word!”

The helicopter came in and tried to land, but the Zoroaster tilted fast. Todd grabbed a rail to keep his balance. Just as the second team of three made it to the landing circle, the copter rose up and circled back around, leaving Todd and the two others to scream for it to come back. The tanker lurched again.

Over the side of the ship, the black petroleum looked like a vile quagmire, bubbling like lava. Fumes burned Todd’s face and eyes like acid. He couldn’t imagine a death worse than drowning in several feet of crude oil.

The helicopter wheeled overhead and landed with a skid, bouncing across the deck. Without waiting for the rotors to slow, Todd and the others ducked their heads and scrambled to the open door. They tumbled into the back in an oil-stained pile of bodies. The last one on, Todd still hung halfway out of the hatch as the copter took off. “Yeeee-hah!”

The pilot flew without speaking, his jaw clenched, as they lifted up and away from the Zoroaster’s tilting superstructure. Todd struggled to a better position to watch through the scratched plexiglass cockpit window.

Below, the Tiberius pulled away from the sinking Zoroaster. Sliding down, rolling sideways as it lost its slippery grip on the Fort Point ledge, the Zoroaster toppled in a slow-motion avalanche. Todd’s stomach sank with it. Water and oil foamed gray in the churning violence of the plunge. The supertanker’s hull yawned open wider, geysering black crude into the waters.

Before his eyes, the disaster became a thousand times worse.

Despite the desperate lightering operations, nearly 50 million gallons of crude oil remained in the breached cargo holds. Cold, dark water swallowed the doomed supertanker in less than fifteen minutes.

Todd watched, sick with disgust. From inside the Zoroaster, oil would continue to gush upward for years . . . and now there was no way to stop it.

Chapter 6

The Zoroaster spill was a shit-storm in a small room, but Speaker of the House Jeffrey Mayeaux had to cover a smile as he faced the audience for the news conference. He took grim pleasure in knowing he had arrived on the scene a full three hours before the Vice President was due. The rooster-faced V.P. didn’t even know he had been upstaged yet.

A techie wearing jeans and a faded yellow T-shirt scurried stooped over like a hunchback, checking leads to the microphones on the podium. Mayeaux walked in, flanked by his Chief of Staff Franklin Weathersee and a Secret Service mastodon. He fixed his eyes on the reporters; they looked like crawfish in a bowl, and he was about to have them for dinner. He wore his gravest “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you” expression.

The Honorable Jeffrey Mayeaux would do his best to witness the concerns first-hand and say the necessary words to foster hope. He was good at that. Yes, the government would do everything possible to help the San Francisco area cope with this crisis. You betcha.

The Executive Branch would be pissing Tabasco sauce by this evening.

Mayeaux had skipped out on his Acapulco “conference” early for the sole purpose of stealing the V.P.’s thunder. Unannounced, Mayeaux was the first high-level government official to respond to this serious disaster—and the bozos at 1600 Pennsylvania would not get the credit this time. Mayeaux would shake the hands and kiss the babies; Vice President Wolani—Miss Congeniality—would get the tough questions a few hours from now. The whole escapade should add at least another ten grand onto Mayeaux’s lobbyist salary after he retired from Congress in a year.

A half dozen video cameras jockeyed for position as he turned to expose his best side. He eyed a cute brunette gripping a microphone bearing the letters KSFO. Watching the way she wrapped her fingers around the shaft of the microphone, holding its head close to her red lips, Mayeaux thought how deliciously erotic it looked. Admiring the swell of her bodacious breasts against her silk blouse, Mayeaux made a mental note to have Weathersee offer her an off-the-record interview, “inside sources,” before he had to jet back to the east coast. Often enough, promotion-hungry lady reporters were willing to go to extremes for a scoop. And you didn’t know unless you asked.

Like a few other Louisiana politicians, Mayeaux didn’t give a coonass’s damn about scandal. His constituents watched it with the fascination of spectators at a car accident—but as long as they knew some of Mayeaux’s obvious weaknesses, they didn’t dig too deep for hidden flaws. The old saying went that every person owned the same total allotment of vices . . . so the folks who looked squeaky clean usually had some very twisted skeletons in their closets. According to that theory, a holy roller like V.P. Wolani probably got off by pulling legs off live frogs.

Mayeaux straightened, pulling himself to his full height of five and a half feet. For his opening statement, he spoke slowly, careful to smother his leftover Cajun accent, as he always did in public speeches.

“Incredibly devastating,” he said. “This could set back the advances we’ve made in environmental management by decades. I have personally contacted the Federal Emergency Management Agency to encourage their best efforts here. I also advocate calling out the National Guard, but of course that’s up to the administration, whenever they get here. I understand the Vice President is on his way, so you can ask him yourselves. He’ll be along any time now.”

“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker!”

He scanned the crowd until he caught the brunette’s eye. He raised his eyebrow a fraction before nodding to her. He didn’t give a rat’s ass for her question, but he kept his public face on autopilot. He wondered how much of a challenge she would be. “Go ahead.”

“How will this affect the proposed new gasoline tax? Will the administration back the House’s legislation calling for a majority of the tax to be used for cleaning up the environment?”

He pegged her: tough reporter type, arrogant and driven, looking for the big story. Willing to do just about anything for it—and he bet his Louisiana homegrown hot link would satisfy her. “I don’t see how the President could refuse to sign the bill, especially now, with this mess right in America’s lap.”

“But do you anticipate a fight? Could this be a big test of your abilities as Speaker?”

Mayeaux put on his “grave and understanding” expression to mask his utter scorn for testing his abilities. He was in this for the ride and the perks, and by next year he could say goodbye to all the bullshit.

“We all try to work within the system, Ma’am. I’ve been in close contact with Vice President Wolani, who is making time in his busy schedule to personally view this disaster.” Mayeaux squelched a smile before it could form on his face. “I’m sure when he returns to Washington, he’ll convince the President of the necessity for this legislation. If not, then I’ll have to twist a few more arms.” He flashed the brunette a warm smile and turned to answer other questions.

Before long, he glanced at the clock at the back of the press room. He had been talking for ten minutes. Good enough. Short and sweet. The reporters would remember the “zingers” more than the message; he’d have to personally thank that cute new speech writer who’d come up with the lines on the jet up from Acapulco.

Excusing himself, Mayeaux smiled one last time at the brunette, then answered a final question over his shoulder as he was led into the anteroom. Weathersee, a stable but joy-killing anchor through Mayeaux’s entire career, bent closer and spoke quietly. “Emma Branson is waiting upstairs in a private suite.”

“You make a good den mother, Franklin,” he said.

The Chief of Staff ignored the comment. “She needs to speak with you.”

Mayeaux glanced around and saw no one dangerous in view; the media was gone and with no one listening, let his annoyance show. “That old bitch? I can’t afford to be seen with her, especially now. Oilstar connections are going to be extremely bad for my reputation right now.”

“I thought you were planning to work for her,” Weathersee said calmly.

“That’s after I retire, and you know it, Franklin!”

“She came in through the back entrance. No one saw her. She says it’s urgent,” Weathersee said. “She’s in a hurry and is calling in a few favors.”

Mayeaux allowed himself to be guided toward the elevators. “Yeah, yeah.” He knew who had spearheaded the donations that bankrolled his campaign. Even though other big oil companies had stayed away from direct contributions, Emma Branson and Oilstar had played too important a role to ignore.

They emerged from the elevator. Weathersee waited outside the penthouse door as Mayeaux entered, somehow managing to stand without fidgeting for impossibly long periods.

Mayeaux smiled broadly at Branson as he padded across the beige-carpeted floor to kiss the lizard-faced woman on both cheeks. He thought he might get frostbite on his lips—God, he knew she had once been married, but Mayeaux couldn’t imagine anyone willingly fucking the old hag.

He flashed her his warmest grin. “This is like old home week, cher, defending the environment, running into old friends.” He stroked his hand up and down her arm. She looked so much like a mummy. “How’ve you been? Damn tragic about that tanker!”

Emma Branson smiled, but her eyes looked as hard as a diamond-tipped oildrill. She wore a necklace of small pearls over a throat that was wattled like an iguana’s. A television set in the back of the suite recapped Mayeaux’s live interview; she did not seem pleased about it. Branson picked up a decanter of scotch and poured two fingers’ worth into a pair of glasses; she thrust one at him.

“This is no time for bullshit—my corporate board is waiting for me. This spill will hurt the economy a great deal more than it will hurt the environment, Jeffrey. We’ll get this mess cleaned up well enough in a few months, but the oil business will be paying forever. We’re going to be in court over this one for the next half century.”

Branson placed her glass on the counter without sipping from it. Mayeaux didn’t say a word; whatever the old iron maiden wanted from him, it wouldn’t involve small talk. Branson came straight to the point. “I’d hoped to speak with you before the press conference. You sounded rather enthusiastic about this new tax of yours—how hard are you going to push it?”

Mayeaux took a measured sip of scotch. It had a smokey, peat-like flavor, and very pure. It had to be a single malt—everything about Emma Branson was first class. He paused long enough to make her think his answer wasn’t spring-loaded.

“It’s scary, Emma. This spill provides the catalyst for the new tax, and there’s nothing I, or the back-room boys, can do to prevent it. There’s too much momentum behind the bill. Every TV in the country is flooded with Zoroaster images, and people are demanding a scapegoat—they want to string somebody up by the balls, and they don’t care who. The tax will be a way to ensure ‘it doesn’t happen again.’ You know, like ‘the war to end all wars.’ Propaganda bullshit, but there you have it.”

“Do you really think you could use that money to buy more efficient equipment or make better tankers? Do you think even triple hulls would be safer? Smaller tankers means more tankers, more traffic means more accidents. Simple statistics. You don’t gain anything.” Branson shook her head.

Mayeaux swirled his drink and took a final sip. He might as well have been wrestling with an alligator. Emma Branson was personally responsible for bringing in over five million in contributions, and even at that, he had been lucky to get re-elected this time. If every other state besides Louisiana hadn’t had term limitations, Mayeaux would never have gained enough seniority to be elected Speaker this year. Pure unadulterated serendipity, a fait accompli before the new selection rules could grind their way through the system. With his track record he would never rise higher—but with Branson’s backing, he’d make a fine lobbyist for the oil industry. Damn fine, with his connections.

He sighed and placed his drink on the counter next to Branson’s still-untouched glass. A shame to waste good scotch. He looked her in the eye.

“Emma, as always you have a point. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in politicking that I forget my roots, not to mention my friends. Tell you what—when I get back to Washington, I’ll bury this legislation in subcommittee. I’ll throw my staff into patching together a compromise solution.” He reached out and squeezed her hands.

Branson pulled her hands away, but she did not argue with him. As he reached the door, Branson’s raspy voice said, “I’ll be paying close attention to the Congressional Record, Jeffrey. Just remember those future plans of yours. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” She paused, then smiled. “Or I’ll be the one to string you up by the balls.”

Mayeaux forced a chuckle, keeping a grin plastered to his face. “I’m heading back to D.C. right now to work on it.”

Outside the door, Weathersee steered him to the elevator. “The V.P.’s plane is due in another hour. Did you want to join the welcoming party?”

Mayeaux’s grin melted as soon as he was away from the penthouse door. “Hell, no! I’ve already upstaged the bastard. I don’t want to be seen fawning over him. It’s bad enough I promised Emma Branson I’d look for an alternative to the energy tax bill.” He raced through the options—there had to be a way to not piss off the oil industry.

Weathersee raised an eyebrow, then looked at his watch as they waited for the elevator. “I didn’t think you’d want to stay. I’ve booked you back on a direct flight that leaves in less than an hour—” He fell silent as the elevator door opened, glancing around; when no one came out, they stepped in. “Unless you have other plans? I did keep your suite at the hotel.”

Mayeaux sighed and smiled. “Offer that brunette KSFO reporter an exclusive deep-background interview with me tonight. Order room service. Champagne. I’ll leave tomorrow morning. And call my wife—tell her I’ve been held over.”

“Should I start the staff researching gas tax alternatives?”

Mayeaux shook his head, waving dismissively. “And have Huey Long roll over in his grave? There’s no way to stop it, no matter what I promised Branson. I’ll throw it back into negotiations and let it build up its own momentum—as long as I don’t go on record for it, that should keep Branson happy. I’ll call for a voice vote so she can’t pin me on anything.”

The elevator bumped to a stop. When the door opened, a crowd surged toward him. Speaker of the House Jeffrey Mayeaux put on his smile and started shaking hands, offering reassurance. He spotted two sweet young things straining to get a glimpse of him.

He hated the work itself, but God, he loved being a congressman.

Chapter 7

“But are we following our contingency plan?” Emma Branson said, glaring at her deputies in what had to be the most claustrophobic meeting room on the entire Oilstar site. “Can we at least say that much? We have to find some kind of positive spin for Oilstar.”

“Uh, we rescued the crew of the tanker—how about that?”

“What kind of positive spin is that?” Branson snorted. “We rescue a captain who blames the whole mess on some mysterious crewman who’s disappeared? The public wants to see every member of the Zoroaster crew shot.”

Charlene Epstein, a deputy with severe gray-blond hair, slapped a stack of thick books that no one had ever bothered to read before. “We think we adhered to all the legal requirements, but the plan is eight volumes long. Six thousand pages of convoluted sentences and flow charts that nobody ever thought about needing to follow!”

Branson shook her head, disgusted instead of surprised. The arguments had continued all morning. Arriving from her brief meeting with Mayeaux after his grandstanding news conference, now she was ready for some shouting. She counted off names on her fingers. “The Petroleum Industry Response Organization signed off on it, the Departments of Transportation, Interior, Energy, the EPA, the Coast Guard Pacific Area Strike Team, the American Petroleum Institute. Didn’t anybody read the damned plan?”

“Everybody’s passing the buck, Ms. Branson,” Henry Cochran said. “No one ever really believed a million-barrel spill would happen.”

“Lucky us, to witness it in our lifetimes!” Charlene snapped. All of Branson’s deputies began arguing at once.

She tolerated only a moment of the chaotic shouting, enough to let them blow off some steam, then she slammed her hand down like a schoolteacher. The deputies shut up.

“So,” Branson said, her voice rattling, “we wrote all this documentation to cover ourselves, but nobody even knows what we agreed to. We’ve got an army of demonstrators outside the gate. People are making death threats on me, and not one of you has a clue about what Oilstar is supposed to be doing.”

“It’s not that simple —” Cochran interrupted. Sweat covered his bald head and florid face, making his fashion-frame glasses slide down his nose.

“Cut the bullshit, please,” Branson said quietly. “What about the lightering operations? How much did we pull off before Zoroaster went under?”

Walter Pelcik squinted at his figures, running pudgy fingers through his beard. “75,000 barrels. That’s a damned good amount, I might add.” He grabbed another piece of paper. “The skimmers are recovering some of what’s floating on the surface, but for all intents and purposes we’ve got an inexhaustible supply down there inside the hulk, and it’s going to keep leaking for years.”

Charlene Epstein shuddered. “We already have a spill that’s four to five times greater than the maximum estimates of the Valdez—and it’s not way up in Nowheresville, Alaska. It’s in downtown San Francisco.”

Cochran shook his head, then yanked off his glasses. “They are going to string us up. We might as well all change our names and move to Argentina.”

“Enough of that, Mr. Cochran,” Branson said. “Oilstar will accept responsibility for this spill, and we will make our absolute best effort to clean it up. Is that clear? Have we requested all available skimmers worldwide? Do we need more booms? What else can we do to mitigate this disaster?”

Walter Pelcik folded his hands over his paunch. “We’ve ordered everything. The other oil companies are pitching in, mostly for the PR value.”

Charlene slid one of the heavy books off a stack. “What other options do we have? They won’t let us do controlled burning. The Bay Area Air Quality Management people would rather smell stinking petroleum fumes for a decade than have a few days of black smoke.”

Branson tried to recall everything she knew about their own preparations. “How about dispersants? We’ve got a whole stockpile—why don’t we use them?”

“No chance!” said Pelcik. “The environmentalists are singing the same song on that one, and you know how powerful those groups are when they actually agree on something!”

Cochran leaned over the conference table. “Dispersants break the oil up and suspend it in the water. Right now the crude is floating on top. Dispersants would mix it with the water, make it look great from above—but the suspended oil would still be killing fish and damaging the food chain.”

Branson sighed in exasperation. For the first time in her life, she felt like giving up. “You mean we’ve got nothing else? What do you suggest we do, roll over and die? I won’t believe there are no alternatives.”

“Well there is Argentina,” Cochran said, smiling weakly.

At the doorway, a tall young man cleared his throat. “Excuse me?” He wore a tie and expensive clothes. Beside him stood an older man in jeans and a flannel shirt. “I’m Mitchell Stone and this is Dr. Kramer. We have a meeting with Ms. Branson?” He looked at his watch and smiled before any of the startled deputies could answer. “Looks like our timing is pretty good, because we’re going to offer you something that might solve this crisis.”

For a strange instant, Branson recalled the story of Faust; she wondered if Stone would offer her a magical solution to the Zoroaster spill . . . for the mere price of her soul.

Cochran glanced at both of their badges, then turned to flip through an appointment book. “Oh. Bioremediation people.”

Branson heaved a weary sigh. Dr. Kramer hung behind Stone, who seemed too full of himself. She decided which one to trust on the basis of her first impression. Kramer looked tired and listless, with a simmering fire behind his eyes. She recalled a memo that had mentioned Kramer’s name, something about losing his family in an accident, an Oilstar fund to send flowers. She had even signed the form letter herself.

“What can we do for you, gentlemen? We’re in the middle of an important meeting.”

Stone flinched a smile. As he stepped into the room, the strong smell of his sweet cologne mingled with the haze of cigarette smoke thickening the air. “We need you to listen to us for a moment. What you decide after that is up to you.”

The deputies frowned at the interruption. “We’ll be brief,” Dr. Kramer interjected, looking very uncomfortable.

Mitch strode toward an overhead projector in the corner of the room. He pulled a set of viewgraphs from under his arm and slapped one on the projector, punching the button that turned on the lamp. The title stood out against the blue-and-gold Oilstar logo: THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT.

Branson sighed. “Is a canned presentation really necessary? I get enough plastic flipped at me that I don’t believe my people can think for themselves anymore. Just talk to me and get it over with.”

Stone faltered, then flicked off the projector. “Of course.” He drew a breath. “In the Bioremediation section, we’ve been searching for a way to use natural microbes to break down substances in the environment, toxic wastes and so forth. Dr. Alex Kramer, here, and myself head up a team studying ways to break down long-chain polymers in landfills. You know, plastic garbage bags, beverage containers, styrofoam cups, and packaging. Waste products of such polymers deteriorate very slowly. We’re trying to find ways to get rid of it.”

“Excuse me!” Walter Pelcik said, raising his voice. His bushy brown beard stuck out in all directions. “We’ve got an oil spill to deal with here.”

Stone raised his voice a notch higher and continued without acknowledging the interruption, speaking directly to Branson, as if she was the only one who counted. Smart guy. But he had better get to the point in the next few seconds.

“As the first step, we developed an organism we called Prometheus. This little microbe has an appetite for octane—the eight-carbon molecule in gasoline . . . and crude oil.

“At the time, we didn’t see any use for it, but we applied for an FDA license just in case. Why would anyone want to decompose crude oil? Well, now it seems you might have a use for our little miracle.” Stone looked at the others. Dr. Kramer hovered beside him, fidgeting but not interrupting Stone. The conference room became quiet as the information sank in.

“Let me get this straight,” said Branson. An unexpected sensation twisted inside of her. Hope. “You’ve come up with some kind of germ that eats crude oil?”

“Not all of it,” Dr. Kramer answered, stepping forward, moving in front of Stone, “only the octane component and some of the ring hydrocarbons.”

Branson got right to the point. “So what does it leave behind? What kind of toxic mess are we going to have to deal with? Will we be in worse trouble than we are now, like with dispersants?”

“No.” Dr. Kramer shook his head vigorously. “Octane is just carbon atoms and hydrogen. When the Prometheus organism metabolizes the octane, it leaves behind CO2 and H2O, carbon dioxide and water, with maybe a little hydrogen sulfide—like rotten eggs—from sulfur contaminants in the mix. Nothing toxic whatsoever. It’ll work.”

Stone picked up the thread. “From our studies, we know that 25 percent of the Zoroaster crude is lightweight hydrocarbons that will evaporate off in a few days all by themselves. The rest of it, though, will be broken down slowly by photo-oxidation and natural microorganisms in the water. That part will take years.”

His eyes gleamed. “What we’re offering is a way to get rid of all the octane in the spill. That, plus the evaporation effects, will decrease the amount of visible oil on the Bay by something like 65 percent in a few days—and it will leave no pollution behind.”

Dr. Kramer cleared his throat. “We need to make clear, though, that Prometheus does not attack longer-chain hydrocarbons. That’s been our problem in fighting styrofoam and plastic waste. You’ll still be left with the tarry residue they keep showing on the news.”

Branson’s heart pounded, and a flush rose in her face. “But from the public’s point of view, over half the spill will disappear? That’s a dramatic and obvious effect.”

“You said you applied for an FDA license—why don’t you have it? And what if this microbe spreads?” Cochran said. “How are we going to get rid of it when we’re done?”

Dr. Kramer shook his head. He spoke confidently, as if daring them to disbelieve him. “That’s not unusual. It takes years for the FDA to process those things. Anyway, we should be able to get a waiver in an emergency. The other problem will take care of itself. These microorganisms are not indigenous to the area. We got them out of the ocean, near volcanic vents deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico. We crossbred them with some of the other oil-eating strains from samples along the beaches in Prince William Sound in Alaska. They’ll flourish for a while, feasting on the spilled crude oil, but they’ll die out quickly. They can’t handle this climate, and their food source will disappear as soon as the spill goes away. They can never become airborne.”

“We’ve demonstrated that several times in laboratory tests,” Stone added. “We can show you the reports. Dr. Kramer has all his lab books.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Branson said, tapping her nails on the table. She looked around the smoky room. “And this could look very, very good for Oilstar.”

“It’s not a cure-all,” Dr. Kramer said.

“We’re only interested in a short-term solution for now,” she retorted. “I need something spectacular to confirm that Oilstar is doing all it can. Once the press is satisfied, they’ll turn to some other problem.” She tapped a pencil on the table. “How soon can you have it? When can we try it?”

Stone flipped through viewgraphs to double-check information he should have known perfectly well—unless he was just putting on an act to appear overly conscientious. “Prometheus has been successfully tested. We got piles of reports out of it. We’ve already started making a supply, and the strain reproduces quickly. That’s one of its advantages. Once we get the waiver from the FDA, we can start spraying the spill in a day or so.”

“I’m not sure about this microbe stuff,” Cochran said. “I can just imagine people complaining even louder about genetically engineered organisms than they are about the spill itself.”

“Excuse me,” Dr. Kramer said, as if he had anticipated the question. “Don’t let anyone raise those objections. These microorganisms are crossbred strains of naturally occurring microbes. No genetic engineering.”

Branson waved aside the words. That part didn’t matter, and she had heard what she needed to know. “If the people stonewall our every effort to clean up the spill, we can take the moral high ground because we offered a solution and they didn’t want it.”

She beamed at Stone and Dr. Kramer. “We’ll call a press conference for tomorrow morning, a regular town meeting. We can let the public decide—and Oilstar wins either way.”

Chapter 8

“Emergency override! Eagle One, this is Albuquerque tower. I say again, emergency override!” The squawk of the walkie-talkie jerked Brigadier General Ed Bayclock out of a tedious Friday interview in his base office. Time to leap into action.

David Reinski, the young-and-trim mayor of Albuquerque, somehow didn’t notice the emergency call and kept chatting. “General, this White Sands agreement could benefit Albuquerque as well as Kirtland. Could you point that out in your dinner speech?” Reinski to Bayclock as if they were equals.

“Quiet, please!” Bayclock said, holding up a hand as he strained to hear the radio voice.

“Guzzle 37 on approach,” the walkie-talkie said. The voice sounded tight and high-strung. “Five souls on board with an ETA of five minutes. An emergency has been declared.”

In an instant, Bayclock became a different person, shoving trivial business matters to the back of his mind: the agreement he had just signed with the White Sands Missile Range and the upcoming awards dinner, at which Mayor Reinski would introduce him. No time for that baloney right now. God had given different people different skills, and not everyone was as good at coping with emergencies as he was.

He lurched forward in his overstuffed chair. The warm leather creaked as he snatched the clunky old radio from its recharging stand. “Tower, this is Eagle One. Give me details.” From his window, Bayclock looked out over Albuquerque International’s 13,000-foot runway out in the desert, but saw no sign of the approaching aircraft.

“KC 10A unable to retract their boom, sir,” the tower voice answered. “Their controls were inadvertently scrambled by a high-power microwave test at Phillips Lab. Main pump has failed, and they are unable to dump fuel. They’re coming in from the east and are cleared to the desert where the crew will eject—”

“Belay that!” Bayclock said. The KC 10 was a wide-body jet outfitted as a flying fuel tank, and it would explode like a bomb if it crashed. “Foam up the runway and have them do a slow pass.”

Dammit, he’d hang those Phillips Lab scientists later.

“A flyby?” The tower voice sounded incredulous. “General, we are following the emergency checklist!”

“You heard me,” he said. He didn’t have time to explain to some snot-nosed airman. “Bring them low enough so I can spot the damage. I’ll watch them at the break-to-final point, three miles from the runway. Then you let me decide what to do. That’s what I’m paid for, son.”

Waiting for a response, Bayclock glanced at his office walls, at the framed photos of fighter aircraft, at the memos and reports stacked on his desk. He longed for the days when he had been in the cockpit himself, ‘kicking the tires, lighting the fires,’ and blasting off into the stratosphere. Not chained to a desk.

Desk job. The words soured his mouth. It was the one thing he had disdained throughout his 30-year Air Force career. Real men don’t fly a desk. Yet Bayclock had been offered a star, the chance to serve as a general officer with command over a large number of people, more responsibility. He was not power hungry, but he firmly believed a man should serve to the best of his ability. And few people had the ability to do the job Bayclock did every day. He could not shirk the tough assignment just because he would miss flying.

“What’s taking so long, dammit!” he said to the silent radio. He could feel the cold, exhilarating sweat prickle beneath his clean uniform.

“Uh, we’re getting flack from the crew, Eagle One. We told them your plan, and they insist—”

Bayclock strangled the transmit button. “Tell them to do the flyby, or they’re going to wish they crashed with their plane! They’re not qualified to make this kind of decision.” He took a deep cold breath. He didn’t question orders from above, and he didn’t like it when enlisted men did it to him.

“Rog,” came the stiff reply from the tower.

Keeping the old-model walkie talkie in one hand, Bayclock reached for his dark blue flightcap. He snapped at Reinski as he started for the door. “If you want to come along, Mr. Mayor, you’ll have to move it.”

Reinski jerked to his feet, but Bayclock left without waiting for an answer. The general clicked past officers and enlisted people who moved out of his way. He paid them no attention—he had his body set on autopilot, intent on getting to the staff car.

He burst out of the air-conditioned headquarters building, feeling the sudden dry heat slam him like a baseball bat. He trotted to his staff car parked in the reserved space, then turned to see Reinski tripping down the steps after him. “You coming?”

“Yeah.” Reinski wheezed, out of breath.

The general’s driver was nowhere to be seen, but Bayclock could damn well drive himself. “Hurry up, Reinski, but don’t get in my way.”

“Shut up and drive, General. There’s an emergency here,” Reinski said as he scrambled into the car. Then, with an uncertain grin, he added, “Sir.”

Bayclock snorted at the young mayor, then let out a guffaw. Flicking on his lights as he screeched from the parking lot, he barely missed an oncoming car. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Reinski frantically trying to fasten his seat belt.

Bayclock fumbled at the dashboard and brought up a microphone. “Tower, Eagle One. I’m heading to the break-for-final. What’s the status of Guzzle 37?”

The radio crackled. “We’re foaming the runway now.”

“Is that plane going to crash?” asked Reinski. His voice seemed to carry a mixture of dread and anticipation.

“Maybe.” Bayclock shot a glance at the scrawny mayor fidgeting in the front seat. “But not if I can help it.”

When they reached the runway, Bayclock jumped out of the car, leaving the door rocking on its hinges. He held a hand up to his eyes, searching for the incoming plane in the bright desert sky. The smell of hot asphalt rose up from the tarmac. The overtaxed staff car made ticking noises as it sat under the sun.

When Reinski joined him, Bayclock spoke without turning. “There’s a flying fuel tank up there with a gas hose they can’t pull in. The problem is the hose isn’t made out of rubber—it’s a twenty-foot-long hollow steel pole that juts down. The crew thinks it’ll be like lighting a fuse if it scrapes on the runway. They can’t dump their fuel, so they want to eject.”

“And you’re not allowing them?”

“Hell no!” said Bayclock. “Not without seeing for myself. People in situations like this tend to panic and overreact. It’s my call, and I’ll make it. What is this, twenty questions?”

Reinski’s eyes were wide as he stared into the sky. He was looking in the wrong place. “But if those men die because of—”

Bayclock glared. “I’m not going to let them do anything stupid, Mr. Mayor. Once they fly over our position, I’ll tell them what to do.” He didn’t want to be distracted right now. He had to concentrate, ready to change his mind in a flash. “My people trust me.”

Reinski kept scanning for the crippled tanker aircraft in the sky. Bayclock could hear stuttered transmissions over the radio as the tower communicated with the tanker. Three miles behind them, trucks crisscrossed the runway, spraying fire-retardant foam. Ambulances, emergency trucks, fire engines, and Kirtland AFB police vehicles waited at the edge of the runway.

Bayclock patted his pockets, looking for a cigarette, a pack of gum, anything to keep him busy. He picked up the microphone. “Tower, Eagle One. Give me an update.”

“No change, Eagle One.”

“Patch me directly into the cockpit.”

Tower sounded reluctant. “Ah . . . Rog.”

Bayclock fingered the microphone. “Guzzle 37, you there?”

The reply came back in irritation. “Rog, rog, Eagle One. You sure you know what the hell you’re doing, sir?”

“Affirmative,” said Bayclock. “Listen, I’m three miles east of the runway—you bring her down to 500 feet and I’ll give you a reading. That’s plenty of time to either land or keep going to the desert if I wave you off. You copy?”

The voice over the radio sounded clipped and tired. “That’s a rog, Eagle One.”

Bayclock spotted the plane coming low over the Manzano mountains east of Albuquerque. He felt a sudden rush as he focused his attention even more on the problem. He knew he could do this. Bayclock had never been wrong in an emergency before. Never. “Got you, Guzzle—looking good.” The enormous KC 10 moved so slowly it seemed like a zeppelin in the air.

The giant wide-body roared past, low to the ground. Bayclock would have to make a decision fast. His heart pounded. He knew the crew of the tanker would be white-knuckled up there, praying, counting on him. The import of the situation buoyed Bayclock. Beside the staff car, Reinski was saying something, but Bayclock shut the distraction out of his universe.

He squinted, taking a split second to spot the refueling boom. He glanced quickly away, then back again to confirm what he had really seen. He spoke rapidly into the microphone. “Guzzle 37, your boom is rigid and extended so low it will snap on landing. Bring her in—I say again, bring her on in.”

The shrill reply came immediately from the lumbering tanker, now less than two miles from runway. “If the boom doesn’t snap, it’ll skid and light us up!”

Good thing I’m making the decisions, Bayclock thought. “Bring her down!” he commanded.

The pilot gave no confirmation other than two rapid clicks over the radio. Bayclock watched as the tanker descended through the remaining 500 feet. The last few seconds seemed to take forever. “Come on, come on!”

The jet flared with its nose up in the air, wheels reaching out to grab the runway like a bird of prey. The long boom struck the foam-covered tarmac. A brief flash of light gave Bayclock the sudden sick feeling that he had made the wrong decision, and the fuel tank would go up in a Nagasaki-class fireball.

But the boom broke off and tumbled into the barren scrub. The aircraft wobbled from side to side, then finally touched down. It skidded, then the tires kicked up foam that enveloped the plane. All Bayclock could see was a huge ball of dust, foam, dirt and debris as ambulances and emergency vehicles raced down the runway.

Bayclock slammed his hand on the staff car, leaving a small dent. “Shit hot!” Jumping inside, he took off for the runway, barely giving Mayor Reinski time to climb in. He didn’t care if the mayor had to walk.

As they pulled up to the KC 10 hissing and cooling on the tarmac, Bayclock saw long streaks of water and dirt along its fuselage. The crew staggered out of the plane down a long aluminum ladder, and an ambulance whisked them away. He felt vindicated as emergency personnel stepped up to the tanker and sprayed fire retardant over the fuselage.

General Bayclock’s perfect track record had yet to be broken.

Chapter 9

In the middle of San Francisco Bay, the volunteers gathered on forested Angel Island to meet the oncoming black tide. Standing on the rocky shore, they looked like desperate defenders pitted against an overwhelming force.

On the pier in Ayala Cove, Jackson Harris fought to keep despair from crushing him. Three days, and the job still seemed immense, impossible—but if he let himself start believing it to be a hopeless task, he wouldn’t be able to go on. His stomach felt watery and knotted from his anger.

While corporate cleanup crews concentrated on the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, and other high-visibility areas, Harris was outraged to learn that they had written off one of his favorite spots in the Bay Area. He and his wife Daphne had worked the phones nonstop to bring a team together on the secluded island state park in the middle of the Bay. Together, they had plugged into their own activist network and mustered volunteers to protect Angel Island. The group received equipment from a handful of Oakland industries, which had donated dozens of dumpsters and tons of plastic garbage bags to hold the oil-stained rags and other debris from cleaning the shoreline.

Acrid chemical fumes mixed with the stench of decaying bodies of birds and fish. Staring across the foul water, Harris spoke into his radio to the boats out on the slick. “Keep to your search pattern. Pick up all the birds and sea otters you can get.” They would try to save the live ones, but even carcasses were important for the lawsuits to be filed against Oilstar.

Harris lifted his thumb from the TALK button. He scratched his scraggly beard, still frowning. He hadn’t showered in days, not that primitive and isolated Angel Island had such facilities; he hadn’t slept much in the past three days either.

Off Point Stuart, the edge of the island closest to the spill, Harris’s group had sunk 55-gallon drums filled with cement to anchor a long string of buoys in an inverted “V”. Between the buoys, they strung heavy plastic fabric as a diversion boom to split the flow of thick crude and deflect it around the island. Yesterday when the spill struck, the “V” bifurcated the oil . . . but not enough. Now the black flow curled around to slop against the shore.

Harris left the pier and crunched down the crumbling, poorly maintained road. At the charcoal picnic grills, groups of volunteer kids cooked an endless supply of hot dogs and hamburgers for the famished workers. Harris stretched his aching arms, but decided he could stand some more heavy work. No time for rest. Never any time for rest. The spill would keep moving, keep destroying, and only he and his volunteers stood in its path.

At the water’s edge, people in rubber wader boots stood in the oozing crude. They dunked five-gallon buckets to scoop thick oil from the surface, passing each bucket to the next person in line. Once again dredging deep inside himself for just a little more energy, Harris slipped into the brigade line, relieving one of the brothers who looked ready to drop. The man nodded his thanks, then staggered to the grassy picnic area and collapsed onto a weathered picnic table.

A loud radio boomed music from a San Francisco Top 40 station, but few of the volunteers seemed to hear the tunes. Harris loved music, but in the last few days it seemed like his capacity to love anything at all had been smothered by the spreading blanket of crude.

The fire-brigade line skimmed oil, one bucket at a time. It would take his people ten million buckets to remove all the oil spilled by Zoroaster. Harris refused to admit it was a hopeless task, because that would pop the fragile soap bubble of stamina that kept him going.

After dragging another heavy bucket partway up the beach, Harris handed it to the next person in line, who lugged it to the reservoir tanks. Harris looked down at his thigh-length rubber boots, yellow rain slicker, and canvas gloves, all smeared with sticky brown oil darker than his skin.

The walkie talkie at his side crackled again. “Jackson, this is Linda. We have to come back in. Boat’s overloaded.”

He handed off another bucket and stepped out of the brigade line, pulling off his gloves and grabbing the walkie talkie. “All right, man. We’ll get another crew to take over.”

A few minutes later, a fishing boat puttered toward the dock. Harris yelled for another group to help off-load the cargo of carcasses and surviving animals the rescue crew had scooped up. Among the other volunteers, his wife Daphne ran up to help.

Trim and wiry, with very dark skin, she looked beautiful even with oil smeared on her face and frayed overalls and sweat trickling down her neck. When Daphne had studied law at Berkeley under a scholarship, she probably never imagined herself in a place like this. But Daphne wanted to help needy people, help the environment, taking a job in a small firm in Oakland so she could work in the volunteer legal-aid clinics.

She gave Harris a weary smile, bent toward him for a kiss, then laughed, smudging him with oil. On his lips, the oil tasted like vile medicine. The humor lasted only a moment before they both helped to off-load the stricken animals onto the pier.

They carried the live ones first—sea otters, terns, and gulls soaked in oil. Three people stood together, straining to haul the first sea lion from the boat. It panted, squirming in a slow-motion effort to fight. Its wide brown eyes were encircled by the red of internal hemorrhaging.

Harris knew what the oil was doing to the internal organs of this struggling creature. Its kidneys would fail, unable to filter such massive amounts of waste products from the bloodstream; its intestines would be immobilized, preventing the absorption of nutrients. He felt bile rise in his throat. He remembered hundreds of sea lions sprawled on Fisherman’s Wharf, sunning themselves and bellowing.

Most animals, even the ones “rescued,” would probably die from the spill anyway. Oil-soaked pinfeathers or fur no longer insulated the animals from the cold waters of the Bay. Many could not float, and would drown in the sludge-covered water.

Daphne and the others took the animals to hand-pumped shower stations, where they squirted soapy water and used brushes to scrub off the oil. Daphne worked quickly, weaving her hands out of the way of an exhausted seagull, alarmed by the movement but too exhausted to struggle, as the panicked but stunned bird tried to peck any object that came near it.

The team worked in silence, unable to manage the usual banter of volunteers engaged in a large job. Even if the animals survived to be released again, they would simply return to the Bay, where they would get contaminated again. Seeing the animals’ plight tore at Jackson’s heart; he could not just leave the creatures to die a variety of slow, cruel deaths. The odds were against them, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying.

The boom-box radio announced a spill update, and gave a short human-interest story on the heroic volunteer efforts under way on Angel Island, which drew a scattered but lukewarm cheer. Then the reporter said, “Oilstar Public Relations Officer Henry Cochran claims their efforts to clean up the spill are being hindered by environmental restrictions that prevent them from mounting an all-out response.”

A man’s voice continued, speaking for the oil company in a slow, reedy voice that sounded like a prepared statement. “We have well-researched and innovative solutions for coping with this problem, but the government says we need weeks of study before taking this action. That’s ridiculous! Look out in the Bay—how can we just sit around, knowing we’ve got a possible cure? Tomorrow, Oilstar will hold a ‘town meeting’ to discuss a crucial plan to decrease the spill by 40 percent within a four-to-five day period, leaving no toxic residue. But we’ll probably be restrained—again—by bureaucracy and finger-pointing. We have a solution. If the State and Federal governments won’t let us use it, don’t blame Oilstar.”

Jackson Harris stared across the water to the northern part of the Bay. He could see where the Richmond-San Rafael bridge terminated near the Oilstar refinery. How could they make such preposterous claims? Forty percent of the spill gone in a few days? No toxic residue? Did they have some sort of magic wand?

He did not trust the big oil company, but they wouldn’t make such wild claims unless they had something. And after seeing the relatively minor success of his volunteers’ efforts, he was just about willing to give Oilstar a chance.

Chapter 10

Heather Dixon fixed her eyes on the set of plane tickets in her new boss’s hands, trying to control her frustration. Albert “You can call me Al” Sysco tapped the tickets against his palm as he sat on the corner of her desk in an attempt to make himself look taller.

“Sorry, Heather,” he said. “Boston changed their mind and wanted me to go at the last minute. They think people will be more receptive dealing with managers instead of the worker bees.”

Bullshit, she thought. Surety Insurance knew he’d take this trip as soon as he got the promotion instead of me.

Sysco tucked the tickets in the breast pocket of his polyester suit. Heather knew the itinerary: a small plane to Phoenix from the Surety Insurance western headquarters in Flagstaff, Arizona, then a jet into San Francisco International. Sysco would be traveling with four other Surety middle managers, all male, none more qualified than herself.

Ambulance-chasing lawyers were descending on the Zoroaster spill like locusts, sniffing for lawsuits. The insurance industry was orchestrating a defense, gearing up to fight the claims. The main Surety headquarters in Boston had already announced plans to argue that damage caused by the oil spill should be classed as the result of an Act of God or a terrorist action, neither of which would be covered by most policies. Sysco would fly to San Francisco and stay in fine hotels, leaving the “worker bees” back home in Flagstaff.

“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?” Heather asked, knowing damned well what he was going to say.

“Take over my desk.”

For months Sysco had dropped unpleasant innuendoes about Heather Dixon’s incompetence, about her lack of dedication to Surety and her ability to be a team player. If it hadn’t been for Sysco’s self-serving maneuvers, she would have gotten the job of auto claims section manager herself.

Heather decided not just to hope, but to actually pray that his plane crashed en route. Not a big fiery crash—just one so that Sysco would never be found, where he could survive for awhile in the Arizona desert and spend a long, slow time dying of thirst. Maybe the other middle managers would have to eat him for sustenance . . . but then they’d probably die of food poisoning.

“Gee, I’ll do my best, Mr. Sysco.” She batted her eyes like the brain-dead bimbo he seemed to think she was.

She had never learned how to wear a dress with feline grace; she was tall and well-built, yet not graceful enough to be a model. Her mother called her “clunky.” Her reddish-brown hair hung perfectly straight. In her thirty years, Heather had tried dozens of different styles, long and short, even once with a punkish scarlet streak. No one seemed to notice.

Albert Sysco didn’t catch the sarcasm in her answer. “I’ll be back in three days. Try not to screw up too much.” He turned, a medium-sized man on the outside, remarkably small on the inside.

Heather gave him the finger under her desk. She heard a quiet snicker and whirled to see Stacie, the other claims-resolution assistant, watching from her desk. As Sysco slipped into his cubicle, Stacie flipped him off too.

Heather smiled. She had worked at Surety for seven years, but she couldn’t say she enjoyed it.

The phone rang, but Stacie ignored it. “At least he’ll be out of our face for a few days,” she said.

Heather nodded. “I guess that’s a better vacation than going with him.”

Chapter 11

Everybody screwed up. Everybody insisted it would never happen again. No one learned the lesson.

Alex Kramer felt numb, standing in the eye of a storm of shouting and accusations at Oilstar’s “town meeting.” He wanted to shout back, to wring a few necks at the insanity of the entire situation: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. More than anything, he wanted to be at home, alone, searching for peace.

He had known Oilstar’s public meeting would be a circus, but he hadn’t thought he himself would be thrust at the center of it. The bedlam in the room drowned his words. Standing at the podium, he closed his eyes and took a breath, trying to ignore the pain from the cancer chewing at his body.

Mitch Stone, at first disappointed at not being Branson’s chosen spokesman, now sat in the front row—in a new suit and tie, of course—grinning support for Alex.

The audience murmured like a torch-bearing mob ready to storm the scientist’s castle. Alex gripped the sturdy podium with stiff hands, using it as an anchor. Just get it over with, he thought.

Out in the room, the spectators fidgeted on folding metal chairs that creaked as people sat down. Tripods with cameras stood in the corners. In the back of the room a silver coffee urn crouched above flickering blue sterno flames, flanked by stacks of styrofoam cups. Alex could smell the fear, feel palpable anger rising in waves from the audience. It strengthened his resolve.

It’ll never happen again. I promise.