"James Morrow - Towing Jehovah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

burned, his sinuses grew raw and bloody.
From out of the darkness, a sailor shouted, "Holy shit!"
Descending the amidships stairway, Anthony dashed across the weather
deck and leaned over the starboard rail. A searchlight swept the scene, the
whole stinking hell of itтАФthe black water, the ruptured hull, the thick,
viscous oil gushing from the breach. Eventually Anthony would learn how
close they'd come to foundering that night; he would learn how Bolivar
Reef had lacerated the Val like a can opener cutting the lid off a cocker
spaniel's dinner. But just then he knew only the fumesтАФand the
stenchтАФand the peculiar lucidity that attends a man's awareness that he
is experiencing the worst moment of his life.
To Caribbean Petroleum, it hardly mattered whether the Val was lost or
saved that night. An eighty-million-dollar supertanker was chopped liver
compared with the four and a half billion Carpco was ultimately obliged to
pay out in damage awards, lawyers' fees, lobbyists' salaries, bribes to
Texas shrimpers, cleanup efforts that did more harm than good, and a
vigorous campaign to restore the corporation's image. The brilliant series
of televised messages that Carpco commissioned from Hollywood's
rock-video mills, each new spot trivializing the death of Matagorda Bay
more shamelessly than its predecessor, went ridiculously over budget, so
eager was the company to get them on the air. "Unless you look long and
hard, you probably won't notice her beauty mark is missing," the narrator
of spot number twelve intoned over a retouched photograph of Marilyn
Monroe. "Similarly, if you study a map of the Texas coast . . ."
Anthony Van Horne gripped the rail, stared at the pooling oil, and wept.
Had he known what was coming, he might simply have stayed there,
transfixed by the future: the five hundred miles of blackened beaches; the
sixteen hundred acres of despoiled shrimp beds; the permanent blinding
of three hundred and twenty-five manatees; the oily suffocation of over
four thousand sea turtles and pilot whales; the lethal marination of sixty
thousand blue herons, roseate spoonbills, glossy ibises, and snowy egrets.
Instead he went up to the wheelhouse, where the first words out of Buzzy
Longchamp's mouth were, "Sir, I think we're in a peck of trouble."
Ten months later, a grand jury exonerated Anthony of all the charges
the state of Texas had leveled against him: negligence, incompetence,
abandoning the bridge. An unfortunate verdict. For if the captain wasn't
guilty, then somebody else had to be, somebody named Caribbean
PetroleumтАФCarpco, with its understaffed ships, overworked crews,
steadfast refusal to build double-hulled tankers, and gimcrack oil-spill
contingency plan (a scheme Judge Lucius Percy quickly dubbed "the
greatest work of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick. Even as the legal
system was vindicating Anthony, his bosses were arranging their revenge.
They told him he would never command a supertanker again, a prophecy
they proceeded to fulfill by persuading the Coast Guard to rescind his
license. Within one year Anthony went from the six-figure salary of a
ship's master to the paltry income of those human marginalia who haunt
the New York docks taking whatever work they can get. He unloaded
cargo until his hands became mottled with calluses. He tied up bulk
carriers and Ro-Ros. He repaired rigging, spliced mooring lines, painted
bollards, and cleaned out ballast tanks.