Trident Force by Michael Howe Page A

the time he’d felt great sadness and great fear. His father, the central authority of his young life, had been destroyed by an even greater authority. Only later had he come to understand strength and weakness and power. Only later had he understood that the officer’s expression was not one of simple pleasure, but the near-divine pleasure of forcing one’s will on others. Of exercising power.
    After his father’s death there was little to keep Marcello in the hot, fever-infested, frequently muddy village of his birth. At the age of eight he wandered off in the general direction of the ocean, a course that was not difficult to determine since he was on an island.

4
    Houston
    â€œWhat do you think of this bottle, Mamoud?” asked Bob Gilchrest, chairman of Oceanic Petrotransporters, LLC, as he partially filled Mamoud al Hussein’s glass with red wine. The two men were sitting, with half a dozen others, in one of the private dining rooms in one of Houston’s more exclusive clubs. The room was done in a heavy, traditional Spanish style. Dark wood paneling, heavy oak furniture. It was a style that still reflected, especially in some of its details, the tastes of the Arabs who had dominated Spain for so many centuries.
    Mamoud tasted it. “Very fine, Bob. Much better than that product you served me earlier . . . Did you say that was from West Texas?”
    â€œAnd I admit they’re better at making oil there than wine,” continued the ship owner in a deep, slow drawl.
    â€œStill, I salute their effort.”
    â€œAnd I salute your efforts the past six years. You’ve turned Tecmar into one of the world’s cutting-edge yards.”
    â€œMost of the credit goes to Lorenzo and his Brazilians.” As he spoke, Mamoud nodded toward Lorenzo Almeida, the president of Tecmar. “They’re the ones who put together the proposal you accepted a few hours ago to overhaul six liquid natural gas carriers and they’re the ones who will execute it. All I did was a little cheerleading.”
    â€œYou sound as if you’re about to retire.”
    â€œNo, but I understand His Highness has another project for me.”
    â€œReally! Can you talk about it?”
    â€œI don’t see why not. We’ve been planning to build a new solar panel factory. It’s a business His Highness wants to be in, and I have been asked to build it and get it started.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œNorth Africa. But please don’t worry, Lorenzo and his team are totally capable of handling this project and any others you may ask him to undertake.”
    â€œI know that, Mamoud. We’d have never given you this contract if we weren’t confident that Lorenzo could handle it himself, just in case something happened to you.”
    Mamoud smiled and looked around the table. He hadn’t allowed himself the liberty of relaxing much recently, but tonight a sense of comfortable satisfaction was almost forcing itself on him. He and Lorenzo had landed a huge contract and Lorenzo had proven to be a very apt pupil. The men at the dinner table with him were all skilled engineers or other technicians, and he always enjoyed the company of such men. But then, as the topic of conversation changed to topics more mundane and, to him, childish, his perpetual unease returned. Their utter conviction that their successes were totally the result of their own personal perfection, their total inability to think of science as merely one portion of something far greater, grated on his nerves and soul. To them, engineering was a means to enhancing one’s paycheck rather than a means of approaching and glorifying God. Some of these men, he reflected, might even believe that they were men of faith but he suspected they were just deceiving themselves.
    It was through logic of just this sort that Mamoud al Hussein had managed to alienate himself from a major portion of the human race.
    â€œBob,”