He leaned over the rail and saw crewmen scrambling on the oil platform like ants on a floating leaf. A couple of service boats strained against the lines attached to the platform. Icy fingers grabbed at his heart as he pictured the inevitable collision.

Someone was calling Austin as if from afar. He realized that the voice was coming from the walkie-talkie earpiece dangling at his side. He stuck the plug in his ear.

“Kurt, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Austin cut into Dawe’s frantic soliloquy.

“Just dandy. What’s happening with the rig?”

“They’ve untangled the last anchor.”

The sentence was barely out of the captain’s mouth when Austin saw a burst of foam where the rig’s anchor had pulled free of the water. White water boiled around the rig’s legs. The wakes forming behind the legs indicated that the platform was on the move.

The rig’s evasive action would still fall short. The ship would strike the front right leg within seconds. Austin braced himself for the impact.

At the last instant, the ship’s bow moved slightly more to starboard. There was a tortured scraping of metal on metal as the side of the ship grazed the leg. The platform was free of its anchors, and, instead of resisting, which would have spelled its doom, the rig gave way to the force of the impact.

The oil platform rocked from the blow, then slowly stabilized and continued moving out of the danger zone.

A ship’s horn was blowing madly. The Leif Eriksson had been keeping him company.

Zavala’s voice came over his earpiece.

“That’s one way to scrape the barnacles off your hull. What do you do for an encore?”

“That’s easy,” Austin said. “I’m going to make a dinner date with a beautiful woman.”

NUMA 7 - The Navigator

Chapter 13

THE ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN IN the archives division of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia was a slightly built young woman named Angela Worth. Day after day spent hoisting cases filled with documents and files had given her strength that would have been the envy of a professional arm wrestler.

With little apparent effort Angela slid a heavy plastic container off a shelf and placed it on a cart. She wheeled the cart out of the manuscript vault into a reading room. A man in his midthirties sat at a long library table, his fingers tapping at a laptop computer. The table was piled high with files, papers, and documents.

She set the file box on the table. “Bet you didn’t know there was so much historical material about artichokes.”

“Fine with me,” said the man, a writer whose name was Norman Stocker. “My contract calls for a fifty-thousand-word manuscript.”

“I don’t know much about the publishing business, but would anyone want to read that much about artichokes?”