Firespill (11 page)

As the night darkened even further, she turned on the lamp in the mahogany stand near the balcony overlooking the still, light-bathed lawn. She opened a book, but try as she might she could not concentrate. Perhaps, she thought, he would ring later; perhaps they might have supper together. She pressed the remote TV control, changing channels only to see the same pictures of the fire reappear.

Back in the Operations Room the President, somewhat shamed that his attention had been almost entirely centered on Elaine’s welfare, asked, “How about our agents down on the boat? How many are there besides the Vice-President?”

Jean Roche had been fearing this question, for although she was as upset as anyone else about the situation, she thoroughly disapproved of the Vice-President’s behavior as reported by a distraught Miller from Sitka. She was afraid her disapproval might show. “None, Mr. President—only the captain, I believe. The Vice-President refused to have agents along on this trip.”

The President made no comment though he instinctively felt angry that someone he loved had unnecessarily exposed herself to danger. And yet he realized, in her defense, that he, too, periodically tried to lose agents, as every president before him had done. “We’ll have to ask the Canadians, then, even if it does mean risking a point of no return. We haven’t time to wait for any other help.”

Henricks was skeptical. He thought of the men aboard the sub. “It’ll be touch and go, Mr. President.”

Sutherland felt the stabbing pain above his eye. He instinctively raised his hand to protect it. “Well, Bob,” he grimaced, “we haven’t got anything else to go with.”

“No, sir.”

“Jean, get the Canadian Prime Minister. If he’s out of the country, get him wherever he is. I want to speak to him personally. I’ll take it in the Operations Lounge.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Jean.”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“Get me the file on him before I talk to him.” As Jean Roche pushed the buttons that would connect her to the records computer, Sutherland, looking up at the small red circle that marked the fire on the map, allowed himself an uncharacteristic moment of self-reproach. It was his fault that Elaine and that fisherman were trapped. If he had not met her, she would most likely never have gone to Alaska, would never have gone fishing. But then the ifs started to pile up. If the tankers hadn’t collided. If it hadn’t been so foggy. If only none of us had been born. He smiled, without humor. Regrets and recriminations were useless. Steeling himself, he settled in his chair and reached for the file Jean placed in front of him.

Eight

Heading southeast at latitude 57°20′ north and longitude 137°29′ west, seventy-five miles west of the northern tip of Baranof Island and eighty-seven miles northwest of Sitka, H.M.C.S.
Swordfish
was homeward bound, gliding silently ninety feet beneath the spill at a steady eighteen knots.

Apart from some modifications to the casing which covered the two-hundred-foot-long, cigar-shaped cylinder, and the blackening of its formerly red forward and after messenger buoys, the sub looked like any of the conventional Ranger-class trainers built in the early seventies.

Ten weeks before, when they had put to sea from Esquimalt, Captain Kyle had been a reasonably contented man, and he had not allowed the incident with Lambrecker to darken his hope of an enjoyable patrol. Now he was worried, unhappy, and eager to be home. Alone in his cabin, he tried by way of distraction to understand one of the latest electronic equipment manuals, but he found it hard to concentrate. He was thinking that perhaps he’d made a mistake, and a bad one, in accepting this assignment.

Except for the old submariners aboard, few of whom had seen a shot fired in anger, most of the crew of eighty-four were newcomers. It wasn’t their greenness that Kyle minded; he’d been steadily knocking that out of them during the last ten weeks, making himself unpopular by constantly drilling them until they were sick and tired of it. It was their attitude that disturbed him. No, it might still be a good navy, but it was different—so different that he had seriously begun to doubt his ability to command.

It had been as he’d suspected. There were those who wanted an explanation for every order—and worse, they could quote all the new regulations which required you to give them one. These were the men Kyle didn’t need aboard the
Swordfish
. They merely increased the everyday tensions on a boat where in a sleeping compartment that measured six by ten by twenty feet, thirteen men were required to bunk for three months. It was this small core of troublemakers that had made this patrol one of the most exhausting of his career. Their questions were nothing more than a camouflaged hostility, a bitterness towards any authority. And it was their hesitation to carry out orders during an emergency that had continued to burden Kyle’s command with unnecessary anxiety. Such hesitation, he knew, might cost not only their own lives but everybody else’s on board.

He kept trying to teach the crew the lessons he had learned—to follow the same checklists day in and day out so that in times of stress the boat’s safety would rest secure in habit and not hinge on memory alone or on individual variation. He’d told them how it had been in the Atlantic: you did what you were told when you were told, otherwise you might find yourself cut in half by a German destroyer. To his surprise, most of them had listened and learned Well; but there were still a few who refused to conform.

A few times in the last few days Kyle had felt himself coming close to losing his temper with one or two of them who, though doing nothing overt in their refusal to execute orders promptly, had added to the host of petty insubordinations that constantly tried his patience.

He sighed heavily, knowing that he understood neither the “new breed” nor the latest electronic wizardry sketched out before him in the manual. He really did belong to another age. Even a few of the younger officers felt uneasy with a man of his years in charge. “To hell with them,” he grunted, getting up from his bunk and shaking two aspirins from the bottle. His head ached. The air was getting foul.

He was a little concerned about the firespill, which was keeping them submerged much longer than he would have liked. Fifty-four hours, in fact. But it didn’t worry him too much, for he’d instructed his first officer to plot the shortest course out from under the spill, and now they were on that heading. An hour or so to the south and they should be clear. Then they could surface, blow out the carbon dioxide, replenish their air, and run on the surface, using their diesel engines while recharging the batteries that powered them while they were submerged. He was comforted by the fact that they hadn’t been caught submerged further inside the firespill. He would pity any poor devil in a situation like that. He decided that to allay any fears for
Swordfish
’s safety at home, he should report their position as soon as they reached periscope depth, where they could raise the transmitting antennae. Until then they could only receive from the trailing floating wire, and with the worsening weather they were having difficulty doing that. Wind and sea were whipping the aerial around, and long waves of static made reception very bad.

Soon he felt less fidgety as the aspirins started to work on his headache. Feeling drowsy, he let the manual slide easily from his hands. He looked forward to securing the sub in Esquimau, already seeing in his mind the pleasant green hillsides which concealed the ammunition dumps of Pacific Command.

In the radio shack, the operator cursed. For the third time in the past hour, a roar of atmospherics had caused him to miss Pacific Command’s bulletin on the extent of the spill.

Nine

In the short time it took Jean Roche to get through to Ottawa, Sutherland glanced through the file on the Canadian Prime Minister. The photograph made him look like a mild-mannered banker with balding head and a weak mouth. But in a few seconds Sutherland had found out that the picture belied Prime Minister Henri Gerrard’s reputation as a strong, if quiet-spoken, leader of a large majority government. For the purposes of the request he was about to make, this was all Sutherland needed to know.

As he took the receiver, Jean thought it prudent to tell him that the call had taken the Prime Minister away from a cabinet meeting—presumably being held in response to the Canadian outcry over the spill. Sutherland nodded his thanks and indicated he would take the call alone. By the time she had closed the lounge door, he was already speaking to the Canadian leader.

“Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Mr. President.”

“I’m told I interrupted a cabinet meeting. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. I needed the break.”

Sutherland leaned back in his chair, relieved at the other’s friendly tone. “That’s very kind of you in view of what’s happened. I’m very sorry about the spill, damned sorry.”

There was a slight, awkward pause before Gerrard spoke. “Of course. I understand. I gather that’s what you’ve called about.”

“Yes. We have a difficult situation down here,” and he added hurriedly, “as I’m sure you do. I realize the Canadian coast is in imminent danger as well as Alaska. I’d like to talk to you about that in a minute, if I might. But first I would like to ask a very great favor of you.”

“Yes?”

“Well, as fate would have it, Mr. Prime Minister, our Vice-President has been trapped by the fire.”

Again there was a brief silence.

“My God.”

Sutherland didn’t allow the other’s shock to slow him down. The only thing that would help Elaine and the boat’s captain was action. “It’s particularly tricky, because while she’s in a nonfire pocket at the moment, the firespill could close in very quickly. Well, the long and short of it, Mr. Prime Minister, is that we have no ships close enough to effect a rescue. We do, of course, have subs on western patrol, but fast as they are, it would take them too long to reach the boat.”

Gerrard’s response was instantaneous. “I’ll give you all the help I can, Mr. President.” Sutherland was deeply moved. He had met Gerrard only once, but suddenly he felt he was talking to an old friend.

“Thank you very much. Mr. Prime Minister, my … sources inform me that there is a Canadian submarine under the spill area. Of course, to have her go in would be—well, frankly, it would be very dangerous…”

“What precisely are the dangers?”

The President explained the risk of the sub’s reaching a possible point of no return, given the depletion of her oxygen and battery power. “Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame you for rejecting the request out of—”

“Nonsense,” interjected Gerrard. “These things happen. Naturally I will have to confer with my cabinet colleagues—for media consumption, if you get my meaning?”

“Of course. I understand.”

Despite his headache, which now felt as if it would cleave his skull, Sutherland found himself smiling at the Canadian’s innuendo. The President liked his style. The Prime Minister might wear banker’s clothes, but underneath the blue suit he had a politician’s eye for expediency as well as a human disposition for generosity.

The Prime Minister added, “Perhaps you could have your people send the Vice-President’s position direct to Maritime Command Esquimalt.”

“We’ll send the coordinates immediately.”

“Good. Can I ring you back, Mr. President?”

“Certainly—and thank you again. Ah—Mr. Prime Minister?”

“Yes?”

“I believe the name of the submarine is
Swordfish.”

The Canadian leader laughed. “Yes, I know. We only have two of them.”

Sutherland was hardly listening. Obviously, the Prime Minister was joking.

As Gerrard made his way back to the cabinet room from his third-floor office in Parliament’s center block, he talked to his secretary in an unusually subdued voice. Despite the confident tone of his conversation with Sutherland, he was not at all sure that he could get cabinet approval to risk the Canadian sub. His biggest worry in the cabinet was Farley, the minister for health.

A one-time provincial socialist M.P., Farley had crossed party lines and joined the federal Liberals ten years ago, disgusted with the stagnation of his own party. Capable and cantankerous, he nurtured and championed the conviction common among many western M.P.’s that the United States, even more than the easterners, was determined at every opportunity to cheat western Canada out of its natural resources, from oil in Alberta to minerals in British Columbia. Gerrard had brought Farley into his cabinet not only because of his expertise as an administrator but also as a sop to a particularly vociferous group of backbenchers, most of them from the West.

The Prime Minister had at times regretted the appointment; not that Farley didn’t do a good job with the health portfolio, but in cabinet he remained as divisive an element on Canadian-American affairs as he had been on the back bench. The little red-haired ex-Scot had a way of polarizing normally middle-of-the-road Liberals, and while he often guided his fellow M.P.’s to the best goals, he almost invariably brought out the worst manners.

Gerrard could only hope that Farley would not start asking awkward and irrelevant questions as to why U.S. nuclear subs were not available. He decided that he would just have to pass on what President Sutherland had told him. It should be acceptable, even to Farley, that the Americans would have looked after their own had they had a sub close at hand. Nevertheless, the P.M. knew that he would have to handle the affair cautiously; one never knew what tack Farley would take if given the slightest opportunity to steer the issue towards Canadian nationalism.

Sure enough, after Gerrard had explained the Americans’ request as succinctly as possible, the air in the cabinet room was thick with tension.

The minister for external affairs, Eric Bern, was plainly all for sending the sub in immediately, but he had clashed with Farley even before the P.M. had finished his situation report. Now Bern was standing at a window with his hands in his pockets, looking out glumly at the mottled maples to the east of the parliamentary quadrangle. He rounded angrily on his colleague. “I might remind you, Farley, that that woman and that man out in that boat are first of all people, and then Americans—if that makes any difference to the members from British Columbia.”