The Oil Slickers - Preview

Chapter One

Black clouds were gathering around the tower of the Texacontinental Petroleum Corporation in midtown Manhattan. In his office on the seventy-second floor, Oliver Myers felt himself alone with the forces of nature. He looked out on the city below him, remote. Up here he was in the center of the gathering storm.

He turned from the window to the photo on his desk, of a young smiling woman. She lived down there somewhere -- his wife. He thought how fresh she looked in jeans, her hair blown back from her face by the wind.

Christ I've got to get home to her, he thought, pulled by an urgency he didn't understand. He stood and paced the length of his office, stopping at the far end before a black and white blow-up of the Texacon Manhattan, the newest 1,040 foot supertanker, known to the trade as a ULCC -- ultra large crude carrier.

In a gesture of desperation he grabbed his hair in his hands and stared hard at the largest ship that man had designed -- and the most deadly. With all the monitoring systems and electronic equipment, these ocean mammoths have a potential for disaster which exceeds any in the history of shipping, and never before has shipwreck involved such a far reaching chain of death.

They are built to save costs, not the environment but, no one knew better than Oliver, the world wants oil and oil it will get as long as there are big profits.

He gazed at an aerial shot; looking down a deck like a manicured park three football fields in length. Cargo pipelines divided it like hedges; loading valves stood naked like branchless trees; the jogging track was a half-mile of steel plated deck; instead of a rose bed there was a circular helicopter pad and the stern of the superstructure rose like the north side of a solar house.

A floating island of technology, Oliver thought, standing legs braced before the way of ULCC, like an old time captain before his maps.

He would never forget the tour Texacon had provided for some of its executives, ferrying them out thirty miles into the Gulf to the new SPM facility (single point mooring) designed to allow the huge vessels, which demand a 100 foot draft, a port to unload their cargo through submerged pipelines. The captain had stunned them all with an explanation of the electronic panels, screens to flash computerized images of the hull, safety controls and automatic pilot. He had come away with a new respect for the captains who were responsible for the safe delivery of a cargo worth one hundred million dollars. They were worth every cent of their $100,000 per year and up salaries. Continue