Deep Cut by Nick Sullivan

Author:Nick Sullivan [Sullivan, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wild Yonder Press
Published: 2019-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

“There she is, The Golden Rock,” Captain Every said as the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard cutter Puma sliced through the indigo waters between Saba and Statia. They were standing on the upper deck alongside the pilot house, enjoying the morning sun.

Ahead, the island of Sint Eustatius came into sharper focus. It was shaped like a teardrop, the smaller, northern end consisting of rocky hills and scrub, uninhabited except for a surprisingly large expanse of white oil tanks. Beyond lay a relatively flat saddle of land where most of the population lived. Far to the south, the massive stratovolcano named The Quill rose above all, its flanks an emerald green. Unlike Mount Scenery on Saba, which had a mountainy look, The Quill was clearly a volcano, its squat, cone-shaped mass topped by a clearly-defined crater.

“Golden Rock? Um… okay.” They were coming at it from the northwest, so the northern tip was most prominent. The predominant color Boone saw there was brown.

“It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when Sint Eustatius was one of the biggest trading hubs in the Caribbean.”

“Really?” Boone had landed at the little airport there on his way to Saba and the island had seemed far less developed than Bonaire or Curaçao.

“I know, it doesn’t look like much, but it had a good harbor and, more importantly, no customs duties. Most of the British, French, and Spanish ports had monopolistic trade with substantial tariffs in place. Here, traders bringing in goods could make a tidy profit. Some days, there were over 200 ships in the harbor.”

“You moonlight as a history professor when you’re not policing?”

Captain Every smiled under his mustache. “Bit of a hobby.”

As the cutter neared Statia, they encountered a dense yellow slick of sargassum, but the bow of the Puma parted the floating seaweed with ease. Closer to the island, the scale of the oil tanks in the hills came into sharper focus, dominating the northern part of Sint Eustatius. An extremely long jetty extended from shore into deep water. Boone estimated its length at over half a mile. A large oil tanker was alongside the jetty and nearby, two other tankers waited at anchor.

“When I was a boy, there was nothing over here. Now, after a major oil shipment company moved in, it’s one of the largest oil transshipment storage facilities in the Western Hemisphere.”

“On that tiny island?”

“Believe me, not everyone is happy about it. My Statian friends say it’s definitely brought jobs to the island, but it’s also brought massive amounts of tanker traffic. And that means damage to the reefs from anchors, pollution… oil spills. Normally, there would be a lot more tankers here, but with the storm coming, this is probably the last of them for a while.”

South of the oil terminal, the inhabited part of the island came into view. Three smaller boats were anchored in the shallows and Boone could make out several small docks in the vicinity of the few buildings that stood along the shore. To the south was a larger pier inside a breakwater and an area for offloading cargo.

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