The Hook by Barry B. Longyear

Author:Barry B. Longyear [Longyear, Barry B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Enchanteds Publishing
Published: 2020-01-10T21:00:00+00:00

The God Huracán

Juan-Diego looked again at the ships making for the gulf, most of them very high in the water. Why were so many empty tankers and unloaded freighters leaving port at the same time? Refinería Madero was where tankers came to get filled. He could make out the names and numbers of a few ships. The company names, however, were unmistakable. The ships all belonged to privately owned concerns.

When he had been just a lad, the tankers had fled from port due to a storm warning in advance of Hurricane Julian, a category two event that eventually made landfall on the Veracruz coast thirty kilometers south of Tampico-Madero. The flight had included PEMEX tankers, as well as private ships.

There had been some flooding close to the coastline that time, and there had been a great deal of temporary work helping to clean streets, fix windows, and roofs. But that had been a category two event, the eye thirty kilometers to the south.

Juan-Diego said to me, “As I watched all those ships leaving port, I knew that was standard practice in the event of a high-probability hurricane warning. But the only mention of a hurricane that came to my notice were those boys in Fabiana Garza’s geology lecture who were talking about something in the Bahamas that was supposed to turn north into the Atlantic.”

“Did you check it out?” I asked.

“I called the government maritime service, and their recorded forecast predicted Hurricane Rafael had almost no chance of even entering the gulf, much less reaching Mexico’s northeast coast.” He smiled. “Then I did my first smart thing of the day. I asked the information robot at the maritime service if all the tankers and other ships using the Rio Panuco port used the free Mexican government weather forecast.”

“The government ships did,” I guessed, “but the insurance carriers for those non-government ships wanted something more reliable.”

He nodded.

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