The drive from her house on the north side of Port Bayard to the Gulfline Terminal was eleven miles, most of it on the highway that ran along the top of the hurricane levee, with the town spread out below on one side and the ship channel on the other. The channel was four hundred feet wide and forty feet deep, a long, dredged, man-made river that ran twenty-two miles from the Gulf of Mexico up to the refineries and terminals and grain elevators of Port Bayard, and every ship that came up it or went down it with more than a certain draft had to carry a licensed state pilot, by law, because the channel was narrow and the bottom was soft and moved, and the currents did strange things at the bends, and the only people who truly knew all of it were the people who drove it every day and night for years.
There were thirty-one Bayard Pilots. Rania was one of them. She was the second woman in the history of the association, and the first who wore a hijab, and she had held her full, unrestricted license for two years and four months, after six years of apprenticeship and deputy licensing, and before that eleven years at sea.
She drove with the radio off and the windows cracked so she could smell the weather. On the far side of the channel, the refinery stacks were burning their flares, steady orange tongues against the darkening sky, and the wind, when it moved at all, came in small, warm, uncertain puffs that smelled like salt and asphalt and, faintly, the sulfur of the refineries. The squall line was a long, low wall of cloud stretching from horizon to horizon in the southwest, with a flat, dark bottom and a churning, cauliflowered top lit pink by the sunset behind it. She could see lightning inside it, not bolts but sheets, cloud lighting cloud from the inside like lamps behind a curtain.
She checked the radar on her phone at a red light. The leading edge of the line was a band of red and yellow pixels, solid and bowed outward in the middle like a drawn bow. It was twenty-six miles out. The bulge in the middle was pointed almost exactly at the Gulfline Terminal. At the speed the Weather Service was giving, that put it at the docks around five minutes to seven, maybe five minutes after.
She did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way she had done it since she was a cadet. Arrive at the gate at six-forty. Two minutes through the gate. Three minutes to drive to Berth Four. Up the gangway, two minutes. Bridge, master-pilot exchange, five minutes, maybe less with a master she knew. The tugs would already be made fast. Single up the lines, let go aft, let go forward, tugs pull her off, bow thruster, engine, swing her out into the channel and head her into the wind, then down to the turning basin where there was room to hold her while the squall blew through. If everything went right, the Corvina Star would be off the berth by six-fifty-five with her bow pointed at the weather and her engine turning. If everything went right, there would be about three minutes to spare.
She thought, as she always did on the levee road, about her father.
Ibrahim Mansour had been a ship's engineer, born in Alexandria, trained at the Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport, who had sailed on Egyptian and Greek and Liberian-flagged ships for fifteen years before he came ashore in Houston and took a job maintaining diesel engines for a tugboat company on the Houston Ship Channel. When Rania was small, on Saturdays, he used to drive her down to the Lynchburg Ferry, the free little car ferry that crossed the channel near the San Jacinto battleground, and they would ride it back and forth, back and forth, six or seven times, standing at the rail, while he pointed at the big ships passing and told her what they were. That's a bulker, he'd say. Grain, probably, going to Egypt maybe. That one's a product tanker. See how she sits low? She's full. That's a car carrier, see, she looks like a building that fell over. And that, he would say, pointing at a small, fast boat that came alongside the big ship and matched its speed, and at a tiny figure in a life jacket who stepped from the small boat onto a rope ladder hanging down the ship's steep black side and climbed, and climbed, and disappeared over the rail at the top, that is the pilot. That is the most important man on the ship for the next five hours.
"More important than the captain?" she had asked once. She was seven.
"The captain is the captain," her father said. "The captain is always responsible. But the pilot knows the river. The captain knows his ship and the pilot knows the river, and together they don't hit anything. The pilot is the one who knows."
"Can a girl be a pilot?"