Charlie Thorne and the Lost City by Stuart Gibbs

Author:Stuart Gibbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Chempro Refinery

The Napo River

25 miles south of Coca

Tell me what happened here today,” Oz told his foreman.

“I already have,” Jose replied. “Twice.”

“Then tell me again,” Oz said. “I need to understand.”

Oswald Crutcher ran the oil refinery where Dante and Milana had deposited the Castello family that day, although he hadn’t been on duty when that had happened—or when the company’s tanker trucks had been blown to bits, for that matter. He had been upriver at the time, in Coca, getting a much-needed break from work. At the refinery, he worked five days straight, on call twenty-four hours a day, and then got two days off, which he tried to make the most of. There wasn’t much to do in Coca, but Oz always enjoyed his time there, because any time away from the refinery was a joy. Life at the refinery was awful. It was dull and exhausting and the refinery was brutally hot and always stank of petroleum fumes. But the job paid well, so Oz stuck with it.

Oz had come to the Amazon from about as far away as you could get. He had grown up in Point Barrow, Alaska, where his parents had both worked at refineries. The oil business was all Oz knew, so there had never been any doubt that he’d go into that line of work. But he had never liked the cold, so when the chance came to shift to the Amazon, he had jumped at it.

Oz was a big, strapping man, and well muscled from a lifetime of physical labor, although now that he was a manager, he didn’t work quite as hard and thus he’d developed a sizable beer belly. He was only in his thirties; he had originally thought he’d been given the job running the Napo refinery because he knew the business well, but in truth, no one else wanted to work at that plant. In fact, Oz wasn’t that smart, but he knew how a refinery worked and he was good at keeping the workers in line. Plus, he spoke Spanish, as many of the refinery workers in Point Barrow had been migrants. Oz simply ended up migrating in the opposite direction.

It was certainly warmer than Alaska down here. The coldest it ever got in the Amazon was a good twenty degrees warmer than it ever got in Point Barrow. And the surroundings were staggeringly different. Point Barrow was up above the arctic circle, farther north than most plants could grow. Trees had been rare up there; now Oz was surrounded by billions of them. But the jobs themselves had an eerie similarity. Refinery work was the same pretty much wherever you were.

Oz had been here fifteen months, and not much had happened, save for the grind of working day in and day out. As the only American, and the boss, he wasn’t accepted into the social circle of his workers—and the refinery was too far from the closest town to visit except on his days off—so he spent most of his downtime alone, gaming on his computer.

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