Godzilla 2000 by Marc Cerasini

Author:Marc Cerasini [Cerasini, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

DEATH FROM

THE SKY

Sunday, June 13, 1999, 2:23 A.M.

The Gulf of Mexico

355 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas

The Texas Star was riding high in the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The massive supertanker, a "ULCC" - ultra-large crude carrier, in oil industry lingo - was empty. The two million barrels of crude oil it had carried from South America had been pumped into a tank farm on the Texas coast. Now the ship was returning to Venezuela for another load of South American crude.

The Texas Star had been busy lately. The short-lived embargo of Middle Eastern oil increased United States dependency on South American product, and the Star; along with her sister ships the Texas Queen and the Texas Belle, had been making continuous runs from North to South America, and back again, for the past six weeks.

The crew was overworked, but Captain Charles Dingle ran a tight ship, and things were still going smoothly.

At 0200, Captain Dingle had turned over his vessel to the night watch. First Mate Scott Howard, a ten-year veteran of the South American run, had taken the bridge.

Night on the Gulf was calm and peaceful, unlike life on shore lately. What with monsters appearing out of every corner of the globe and rocks from space threatening to destroy the earth, life on dry land was getting nuttier all the time, First Mate Howard thought as he gazed into the darkness.

The bridge of the Star was antiseptic white, and all the surfaces gleamed. Over twelve hundred feet from stem to stern, and fifty feet across, the ULCC was one of the largest ships in the world. But despite her size, the crew and officer compartments were cramped, jammed inside the raised superstructure on the extreme end of the ship's stern. The other nine-tenths of the vessel was taken up by the ship's huge oil containers.

The flat deck of the supertanker was covered with cargo pipelines for pumping the oil ashore. At the very center of the deck was a heliport. Right now, a chopper from the corporate fleet was secured to the deck.

The supertanker traveled at a leisurely eight knots an hour. Because of her tremendous size, the Texas Star needed at least a mile to come to a complete stop, and the ship's turning radius was equally absurd. The supertanker needed computers to navigate and radar to avoid collision.

First Mate Howard came up behind the wheelman and glanced at the compass and the navigational computer's readouts. The ship, he duly noted in the log, was on schedule and on course, so he went to his command station on the bridge. He listened to the radio chatter from Coast Guard and civilian shipping, then switched over to AM radio.

Mariachi music blared out of the radio. Howard quickly twisted the dial. He settled on a country music station out of Galveston; he leaned back in his chair, and listened to Garth Brooks sing about standing outside the fire.

Suddenly, the peaceful night turned to chaos.

There was a tremendous crash that rocked the massive ship.

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