Big Miracle (17 page)

“Hello, Cindy?” he said. “Commerce Secretary William Verity suggested I call you to offer our help in your efforts to save those three whales.”

Who said the nature gods didn't offer miracles? This was
the
critical call of the entire event. Without that call, no rescue would have proceeded. Kent Burton got involved at the request of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Even then, Stevens was one of the longest-serving members of the United States Senate. Anonymity was the tool Stevens used for twenty years to build his unique position of quiet power. It was the tool he would use for twenty more years until he was narrowly defeated in his bid for a seventh term just eight days after being found guilty in a high-profile federal corruption trial. He was convicted of accepting unreported contracting services from none other than Bill Allen's VECO. A few months later, Stevens's convictions were all dismissed on grounds of “gross prosecutorial misconduct.” Stevens was killed in an August 2010 plane crash deep in the Alaskan bush.

It was Stevens more than anyone else who leveraged enough power to save the three whales. Stevens answered almost every reporter the same way. In his native Hoosier twang, Stevens repeated his maxim. “If you're gonna get things done next time, you better keep your mouth shut this time.”

The Commerce Department was the critical arm of government responsible for dealing with endangered species and animal protection. Unlike Outsiders, nearly every Alaskan has experience with wild animals. Even in the heart of Anchorage, moose graze in public parks and bears pick through curbed garbage. Just outside town, grizzly bears stand comfortably in any of the hundreds of salmon-rich streams.

Senator Stevens wasn't the only one to lobby the Commerce Department that day. Earlier, Campbell Plowden had done the same. He told Burton that Cindy was trying to get an icebreaker to cut a path for the whales to swim through. It worked. Commerce was interested in helping Cindy Lowry with the whales. Who needed the governor? Now, she had big oil and Ronald Reagan on her side. With allies like that, how could she lose?

7

Billy Bob's Last Frontier

Alaskans call their state the Last Frontier. Kind of an “America's America,” it is a place where a dark past, or even no past at all, do not prevent a better future. The Alaskan ethic venerates those who overcome adversity. There weren't many who embodied that ethic better than William “Billy Bob” Allen. Few Alaskans would impose their own tales of hardship on Bill Allen. When he disembarked at the Port of Anchorage in 1968, there was not much to distinguish him from other Lower 48 migrants flocking north in search of a better life. A difficult past and a burning desire to stake his own claim were his only possessions. Alaska was the last place big enough to accommodate ambitions the size of Bill Allen's. Alaska was his last, best hope.

The poverty of hard-scrabble New Mexico helped fuel Allen's hopes. The day Allen's father walked out on the fourteen-year-old Bill and his family was Allen's last day of school and his first day of work. The hungry youngster found work helping a local welder lay oil and gas pipelines. After fifteen years of toiling under a hot desert sun, Bill Allen examined his life and determined it would lead him nowhere unless and until he changed. His dreams sprang back to life with stories of an Alaskan oil boom. It was 1968.

Alaska was about to take off and Bill Allen wanted to get in on the ride. He and a partner founded a small oil-supply business called VE Construction. His partner had the money; Allen had the brains. Before long the thirty-one-year-old leather-necked New Mexican landed his first contract building a small offshore oil platform in waters near Anchorage. He was so good that, in less than a decade, Bill Allen had built Alaska's largest oil construction company.

No one could tell by looking at Allen, but in 1988 he was one of the richest men in Alaska. Only after he achieved great success in Alaska could Allen find much time to spend at his ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado.

On Saturday morning, October 15, 1988, two days after the whales first appeared on NBC News, Allen and a number of his ranch hands were checking and fixing the shoes of some of his fifty thoroughbreds. Through the back legs of one of his horses, Allen could see his ranch manager's pickup approach the paddock. He brushed off his Wrangler Jeans and pulled out a faded red bandana to wipe the sweat from his dusty face.

“Mornin' boss,” the ranch manager said. “Pete Leathard's on the phone from Anchorage. He said it's important.”

Allen told his men they could go to lunch as soon as they finished shoeing the horses. He walked across the meadow toward the heavy black rotary phone that was probably older than the stable it was in. Allen knew Pete Leathard would not have bothered him unless it was necessary. In the “all bidness” (oil business), unexpected news is almost always bad news. Allen's mind raced to concoct the worst possible scenario. Perhaps there was a blowout at one of the offshore rigs built by VECO. He wondered how many men had died. Therefore, Allen thought he was hearing things when Pete asked him for permission to authorize the National Guard to tow the hoverbarge to Barrow on a whale rescue mission.

“You wanna do what?” Allen asked incredulously.

Not only had Bill Allen not heard about the whales, even if he had, he wouldn't have given a Texas damn. He loved horses, not whales. Those damned environmentalists always hid behind whales whenever they tried to stop any of his new projects—projects that employed thousands, and funded the very Alaskan government Lowry and others used against him.

Allen listened while Leathard tried to convince him that VECO might get some benefit from helping free the whales.

“Bill,” Pete said. Allen had only recently begun to insist on a single, more dignified first name. “That barge can do the job. It can free those whales and win us some points with the public. I hate to do this to you, Bill, but we need you back here to take charge. The media's all over this one.”

Allen didn't need to be reminded that the hoverbarge was a VECO disaster. It was his $4 million that paid for it. No one liked losing money more than Bill Allen. Better to use the barge rather than let it sink further into the tundra. Pete Leathard was right. The moment Allen signed on, the rescue was on.

Allen canceled the rest of his stay at the ranch and booked a flight back to Anchorage. He stored his cream-colored ten-gallon Stetson in the overhead compartment and stretched his long legs in his specially requested bulkhead seat of the 757 widebody jet. During the six-hour flight from Denver to Anchorage, he started having second thoughts. What in the “hail” was he thinking, he asked himself. An oil construction company doing environmentalists bidding to save three whales? Whenever someone from the Outside asked him how folks in his business got along with the state's environmentalists, Bill Allen used an industry metaphor. “Since ‘all' don't mix with water,” he would say, “we don't mix.”

Just about the time Pete Leathard called Billy Bob Allen in Colorado, Kent Burton from the Department of Commerce got in touch with Cindy Lowry in Anchorage. Burton was waiting for instructions on how to help save the whales. Cindy told him she still had not heard that VECO had officially donated the barge. The phone rang again. It was Pete Leathard from VECO. He told her that Bill Allen not only authorized use of the barge and himself was on his way back to Anchorage.

Cindy Lowry's acceptance of VECO's offer created one of the oddest coalitions in the history of modern environmentalism: VECO with its barge and Greenpeace's Cindy Lowry with her contacts to save three California gray whales. Cindy called Kent Burton at the Commerce Department in Washington to tell him the good news. She asked him what she could do to get the helicopter that the governor turned down. Burton informed her that this could only be obtained with the request of an authorized elected official. Once that was done, Burton could take the next step.

Why bother with senators? Cindy asked herself. She expected even less help from them than from Governor Cowper. When was the last time, Cindy wondered, when either of Alaska's senators, or its lone congressman—all of whom were Republicans, who everyone knows hate nature and all that's in it—ever supported anything she worked for? Surely, if any of Alaska's four statewide office holders would help, it would be Governor Cowper. He was the only Democrat.

Still, Cindy took Kent Burton's advice and called Senator Ted Stevens's office. She realized she might have misjudged the demonized Stevens when the senator's assistant, Earl Comstock, told Cindy they were anxious to do whatever they could to help. Stevens had been following the story of the trapped whales on television like everybody else. Republicans could love whales, too!

On Saturday, Comstock called the senator at home to ask if he would be interested in relaying Cindy's request for National Guard helicopters to tow the frozen barge. The senator was more than interested. To his wife's chagrin, he canceled plans to spend a quiet Saturday with his family and rushed to his office on Capitol Hill.

Cindy wanted to find out for herself who had the helicopters and how long it would take to make them operational once they were put on active duty. She called National Guard headquarters in Anchorage, expecting to get another answering machine. Instead, she reached General John Schaeffer.

General Schaeffer was more than the highest-ranking military officer in the state; he was an Alaska legend. The full-blooded Inupiat Eskimo from the small subsistence village of Kotzebue on Alaska's northwest coast was the unrivaled hero of his people. The fifty-one-year-old general was the highest-ranking Inupiat in Alaska state history. His achievements were taught in all of Alaska's schools. As an investment manager turned a half-million-dollar grant to his local Native corporation by the 1971 Alaska Land Claims Settlement act into more than $50 million. Schaeffer managed it all in less than a decade, and he did it by employing seven hundred people in a village that had never before used money.

His military career was just as impressive.

Two years before statehood, a twenty-eight-year-old Schaeffer enlisted in the famous Eskimo Scouts, officially known as the Alaska Army National Guard's First Battalion. By 1988, General John W. Schaeffer was adjutant general for the Alaska National Guard and commissioner of the State of Alaska Department of Military and Veteran Affairs. Many Alaskans felt Schaeffer's next stop would be a term in Juneau as Alaska's first native governor. Opinion polls showed Schaeffer winning almost any political office he sought.

Cindy was startled to hear his unmistakable voice answering the phone that Saturday morning. Before she could respond, the general had to repeat his greeting a second time. Cindy didn't know at the time that General Schaeffer had gone to his office because of the whales. Ted Stevens had beat her to it, and had already asked the general to coordinate the logistics needed to support a rescue operation.

“We're here trying to save those whales,” the Inuit general told Cindy. She was impressed. She didn't know how or why, but all of a sudden, the “bad guys” were marching to her tune—or perhaps she was marching to theirs?

In less than twenty-four hours, Cindy Lowry had enlisted the support of a giant oil construction company, a U.S. Senator, the U.S. Commerce Department, and Alaska's highest-ranking military officer, all to help save three stranded whales at the top of the world. But this was no time to celebrate. The rescue hadn't even begun. The constantly ringing phone never let Cindy's exhaustion catch up with her. If it wasn't the National Guard, it was Senator Stevens. Her boyfriend's bedroom had become the makeshift headquarters for most massive animal rescue in history.

She couldn't grab a much-needed cup of coffee before the phone rang again. This time it was Ben Odom, Bill Allen's biggest client. Odom was a senior vice president for the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company (ARCO), one of the largest, oldest, and richest oil companies on Earth. Established in 1866, ARCO was a driving force behind John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, which developed the modern petroleum industry and, in many ways, the very world we inhabit today. In the intervening century and a quarter, ARCO had grown to become the largest gasoline retailer in the United States with huge oil operations all over the world, including Alaska.

It was Ben Odom's ARCO, together with partner Exxon, that discovered North America's largest oil field on March 12, 1968, at Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska's North Slope. Odom was responsible for all of ARCO's in-state operations, which made him one of the most powerful men in Alaska. (ARCO merged with BP in 2000.)

Although Ben Odom and Bill Allen had become close friends, the two men were cut from very distinct cloths. Both were born into the oil business, but at opposite ends of it. Whereas Allen had a tough childhood, Odom was born into the elite world of the great Oklahoma oil boom of the 1930s. Refined and educated in the ways of the industry, Odom was groomed to rise to the top. After thirty-five years at ARCO, his style and charm were frequently compared to his lifelong friend James A. Baker III, who in just a few weeks would be nominated to be U.S. secretary of state by yet another old Texas oilman friend, President-elect George H. W. Bush.

Early Saturday morning, the casually dressed Odom had arrived in the elegantly appointed executive suite atop the twenty-three-story ARCO Alaska Tower in downtown Anchorage. The night before, Pete Leathard had asked permission to use some ARCO equipment to remove the hoverbarge, which sat at ARCO's East Dock in Prudhoe Bay. Odom was intrigued as much by the technical challenges of a rescue as he was by the whales. The Arctic was the world's most difficult work environment. Any chance to try something new could only help. He built his career by accomplishing things people said couldn't be done in such harsh conditions. Odom also knew it wouldn't hurt ARCO's image to look like the good guy. (As though providing cheap, reliable, abundant, and safe energy wasn't enough to be called a good guy.) Trying to save whales could only win points in a much larger industry battle.