Chapter 8 - Fatigue Fracture
The *Pelican State* was an eighty-foot harbor tug built in 1964, its hull made of three-quarter-inch Low-alloy steel designed to shoulder ocean-going tankers away from the mud banks of the Southwest Pass. It had two diesel engines that could pull an apartment block off its foundations and an engine room that smelled of thirty years of burnt lube oil and black coffee.
Rain had begun to fall at ten o'clock—a heavy, tropical deluge that flattened the river into a gray, boiling plain.
Wren stood in the wheelhouse beside Cormac, her hands braced against the brass railing. The vibration of the twin Caterpillars hummed through the soles of her boots, sending small, dull twinges through her healing thigh, but she ignored them. Around her neck hung the digital velocity meter, sealed in a waterproof Pelican case.
Teague stood at the radar console, the green sweep illuminating his scarred cheek with every rotation.
“Two patrol boats from the Delacroix security detail are tied to the downstream dolphin,” Teague reported. “They have spotters on the gantry crane with thermal scopes.”
“They’re looking for cars coming down the service road,” Cormac said. He had both hands on the heavy wooden spokes of the wheel. He wore a heavy rubber sea coat, the hood thrown back, rain running freely down the dark planes of his face. “They don’t look at the river. People who spend their lives on concrete forget that the water is the only thing that actually moves.”
“Cormac,” Wren said, pointing through the salt-crusted glass.
Through the rain, the skeletal silhouette of Pier Seven loomed out of the dark like a prehistoric rib cage. Four massive yellow floodlights on telescoping booms lit the working deck in a sickly, jaundiced glare. Two white concrete mixer trucks were already backed up to the delivery manifold, their drums churning with a wet, gravelly roar that carried over the wind.
On the central platform stood Julian Delacroix, wrapped in a high-visibility slicker, a hard hat clamped over his silver hair, screaming orders at a crew of six laborers in rubber boots.
“The main conduit is at the base of the third piling,” Wren shouted over the roar of the diesels. “Between the high-water line and the inspection catwalk. It’s a four-inch PVC sleeve. If I can reach it before they pump the slab, I can drop the probe twenty feet into the heart of the footing.”
“You won't reach it from the catwalk,” Cormac said, throttling back the port engine. The tug swung broadside to the current with a heavy, groaning lurch. “Julian has two men on the ladder.”
“Then how do I get to it?”
Cormac looked down at her. His eyes were completely steady, his pulse as slow as the idling diesels. “We don't use the ladder, Wren. We use the bow.”
Before she could speak, Cormac slammed both throttles forward to the stops.
The *Pelican State* surged. Six thousand horsepower bit into the Mississippi current. A wall of white water erupted from the bow, crashing over the forward deck as the heavy steel prow pointed directly at the temporary timber fendering of Pier Seven.
“Brace!” Teague shouted.
Wren grabbed the brass helm rail with both hands.
The impact was not a crash; it was a hydraulic sledgehammer. The tug’s heavy rubber fendering struck the timber pilings with a sound like three dozen oaks snapping in a tornado. The entire pier shuddered. On the working deck thirty feet above, a mixer truck slipped sideways on its outriggers, its front tires lifting two feet off the wet deck with a scream of torsion iron.
Men shouted. Searchlights whipped across the boiling water, catching the wheelhouse of the *Pelican State* in blinding, white circles of light.
“Teague,” Cormac said without letting go of the wheel.
Teague kicked open the starboard door of the wheelhouse, leveled the twelve-gauge shotgun, and fired two heavy copper-slug rounds into the generator housing on the nearest light boom. The light exploded in a shower of blue sparks, plunging the eastern half of the pier into pouring, rainy darkness.
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“Go,” Cormac told Wren. “Three minutes.”
***
