Firespill (6 page)

“Yes, sir. I think he’s on our starboard side.”

“No, no—he’s to port,” answered Salish unconvincingly. “You’re hearing the echo.”

“Don’t think so, sir. He sounds—”

Salish turned on the helmsman sharply. “Shut up and listen…”

Two minutes later the Russian horn sounded again. Salish’s mouth went suddenly dry. This time he could feel the deep, booming vibration in his stomach. Both men strained their ears. Salish rang the watchman who had been stationed at the bow since the fog had started rolling in. “Bow, you see anything?”

“Only fog, sir.”

Salish replaced the phone with a crash, ran over to the port side, and drew open the sliding door. The anxious watchman whom he could not see had anticipated his question. “Nothing this side, sir—least I can’t see anything.”

“Damn!” Ramming the door closed, he crossed back to the starboard side, flung open the door, and yelled into the wind, “Anything, Wray?”

“Nothing, sir—just fog. I think he’s dead ahead.

“First light you see, holler.”

“Roger.”

Salish closed the door and looked at the scanner. It was still out. He turned to the relative position radar. He could see the series of black dots that had marked the other ship’s previous positions—sometimes close, sometimes several kilometers from the
Kodiak
. But without the anticollision radar the relative radar was all but useless, given the time he needed to turn. It was pure guesswork now. Should he stay on this heading, hoping that the other ship would move, or should he change course again? Maybe her radar was out too. As he pressed the horn button for another blast, his stomach knotted and bile rose in his throat. Angrily he grabbed the phone and rang again for Rostow.

Both foghorns were blasting at each other now. Normal procedure had collapsed because of the Americans’ malfunctioning anticollision unit. In the radio shack, the operator shook his head in exasperation. He couldn’t understand a word of what was coming through the headset. The only message either ship would understand from the other was an SOS.

The foghorns’ slow, mournful cries sounded like a dirge to Salish. Despite countless hours of training, his anxiety was approaching panic. With the sophisticated scanner out, he knew that he was helpless to anticipate the other’s move.

Rostow arrived, sleepy-eyed, and began unscrewing the anticollision set’s side panel.

Seconds after hearing that the bow and crow’s nest watchmen could see nothing, Yashin heard the whine of the elevator bringing the captain up from the officers’ mess five stories below. With the sweat now streaming down his face and feeling ashamed that he had had to call for help, the third officer decided to regain some lost pride by taking a sudden initiative. He ordered Bykov to steer zero eight three degrees, estimating that a course change eastwards would turn the
Sakhalin
away at right angles from the course of the approaching blip. But as he gave the order, the American, traveling faster, had also begun what he thought was an evasive turn to the southeast, steering one two seven. Yashin looked down at the blip and went pale as he saw that it, too, was turning. He pulled the horn cord and gave five short blasts, warning of impending collision.

Out of the fog the two giant ships suddenly became visible to one another, like two great leviathans that had unintentionally stalked each other through the fogbound sea. The Russian, starboard aft on the American’s starboard quarter and heading at a sharp angle towards the
Kodiak
’s stem half, was the first to see the unavoidable. Frantically, both helmsmen wrenched their steering levers back as far as they could go, but even at twenty knots, the ships were too close for any turn to save them.

As Salish saw the massive, two-thousand-foot-long Russian vessel loom up out of the night, bearing down on him, his brain raced. He thought of the enormous explosion that would follow if fuel from the Russian’s forepeak tank cascaded into the engine room upon contact and met with a spark. Seeing there was no longer any hope of avoiding impact, he threw the
Kodiak
’s telegraph to “Stop Engines” and pushed the fire alarm button for “Abandon Ship.” Then he bit clean through the stem of his pipe.

Had the Russian ship struck the American ship anywhere from bridge to bow, most of the crew, who were quartered above the boiler room, might have survived. Although some of the longitudinal steel stiffeners which reinforced both the inside and outside plates would no doubt have been sliced through like spaghetti, like those aft, the American ship with its lighter-than-water oil cargo could actually have been cut in half and yet remained afloat, buoyed up by unpunctured center and wing tanks. Instead, with a bone-splitting crash, the
Sakhalin
’s bow, smashed through the
Kodiak’s
port-aft side, punching a hole the size of a bomb crater in the American tanker’s flank.

As the
Sakhalin
’s forepeak tank burst like a balloon, spraying thousands of gallons of high octane over the red-hot remnants of the
Kodiak
’s cavernous engine room, the sea, eager not to be left out, flooded in, cooling the engine room and reducing the possibility of a sparked explosion that could have tom the ships apart. But the implosion of thousands of gallons of seawater pushed the entire after end of the
Kodiak
downwards, drowning most of the American crew who had not been killed outright by the impact.

Within minutes the bow of the
Kodiak
angled steeply into the fog above, and the tanker began a slow backward slide into the debris-laden sea. All the while, the stricken ship’s horn, now below water, maintained the subdued moan of some great and dignified beast being slowly tortured to death.

Amid the deafening confusion of sounds caused by burst high-pressure pipes, suddenly arrested propellers, and the crashing of everything from falling pots and pans in the galley to the splitting of solid steel plating, the Russians heard the loud “whoomp,” like the crunch of a distant bomb, as a small explosion blew out the starboard side of the
Kodiak
’s fast-disappearing bridge. Momentarily the two huge black ships were silhouetted by the orange white flash—two dark monoliths doing battle in the shroud of fog, locked together in a grip of twisted, bending steel, the Russian lying with its bow being slowly dragged under by the after end of the
Kodiak
, whose own bow, acting counter to the sinking stem, was almost completely out of the water.

Yashin caught a glimpse of a lone man straggling in the oily sea eighty feet below. Within a second of the Soviet captain’s ordering, “Engines full astern,” in an effort to tear loose from the American’s death grip before it dragged his ship under, Yashin dispatched a life-raft canister overboard toward the American sailor.

But even as the
Sakhalin
’s diesels screamed in a wild fury, her three screws churning the sea about them into a spinning vortex of foam a hundred yards wide, the Russian captain knew he could not break free. After forty-five seconds, the
Sakhalin
’s forward deep tanks one and two, half-full of Avgas and situated immediately behind the forepeak tank, ruptured, and highly combustible aviation fuel gushed into the sea.

Meanwhile the strain on the bulkheads was beginning to tell, and leaks shot open in seven of the sixteen wing tanks along the port side. Yashin reported that the indicators showed that fuel was also being lost through foot-long fissures in the inch-and-a-half steel walls of numbers one and two center tanks. Even so, the Soviet captain decided to keep the engines straining full astern for another two minutes. It was only when the control panel showed obvious buckling of the plates in six, seven, and eight center tanks that he stopped engines. He was losing oil fast. The next moment he was flung to the deck as another explosion in the
Kodiak
’s engine room rocked the
Sakhalin
, blowing forward with such force that it burst four of the
Kodiak’s
after tanks, namely sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen. Fortunately all the tanks were full. Had any of them been only partially so, allowing a buildup of gas inside them, the engine room explosions would almost certainly have ripped the
Kodiak
apart and turned her into an inferno. As it was, thousands of tons of crude were pouring into the sea.

When the lone American was brought aboard the Russian ship, he was vomiting violently, throwing up oil and saltwater. Cleaning him off and giving him coffee, Yashin tried to comfort him in halting English. The American had difficulty understanding how the two ships were stuck together. In the fogbound sea he had had no idea what had happened, only that one moment he had been reading in his bunk and the next he had heard the alarm; then he was suffocating in a sea of oil.

But the sailor had no difficulty understanding Yashin’s concern when he asked the Russian officer for a cigarette. Yashin shook his head vigorously. “Sparking,” he said, “sparking!” and then made a wide upwards gesture with his hands which very obviously described the arcs of an enormous explosion. At first the American was not as concerned as Yashin, because the
Kodiak
was carrying crude, and though it would bum, it was almost impossible to ignite by itself. But when he smelled the air, he finally understood the other’s fear. The Russian, he guessed, was carrying a combination bunker oil and high-octane cargo bound for Cuba. The heavy vapor from the highly refined fuel was already spreading like a poisonous cloud through the fog about the ships and low over the sea’s surface.

It was a cloud which would spread with extraordinary rapidity over wide areas of the ocean about them, a cloud which, despite the red identification dye of its liquid form, was all but invisible to the naked eye when spread so widely in the fog bank. Therein lay its danger. The American sailor, staring blankly at the mountainous hulk that was now a coffin for so many of his friends, began to shake uncontrollably from delayed shock. He tried to get up from the bunk, but fell back and vomited again. The smell of the gas was making him feel increasingly ill. As he gasped for air, all he could think of was the conservation movies he had seen during the gasoline rationing of a few years back. One of them had shown the ignition of a four-gallon can of gas. It had gone off like a bomb. And four gallons, he knew, was literally a drop in comparison with what the cavernous tankers were spilling. He didn’t believe in God, but he began to pray anyway.

While the deadly vapor continued to spread silently over the sea, transported more rapidly now by rising winds, row upon row of tiny red, green, and white lights continued to play a silent and fantastic dance on the indicator boards of the
Kodiak
’s sinking bridge. Urgent messengers of doom, they continued to flicker their warning of impending disaster even as the ship’s bow continued to rise and the saltwater sizzled briefly around the main computer’s core, signaling the
Kodiak’s
end. Then, their frantic brain finally recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, all the lights died simultaneously, leaving the bridge in total darkness as Salish’s crumpled body, supported by a life jacket, drifted aimlessly about, softly bumping into protruding islands of equipment.

The Russian captain had all his crew ready to fight any outbreak of fire, though they all knew that if fire did start in this ocean of oil, no number of extinguishers could stop it; it would simply ride on the sea’s skin, glued like napalm on a helpless body. The boats and inflatable raft containers were readied too, though again, fire would render them useless. The captain had decided not to abandon his ship until she actually began to sink. Putting out life rafts in this fog, with the wind rising, would be a sure way to lose his crew. Yashin saw that all they could do was wait and hope that help arrived before any explosions reached the high octane or before the
Kodiak
dragged them further under. He noted the time in the
Sakhalin
’s log. It was 0802 hours.

Five

At 8:30 A.M., the knife-edged bow of the nuclear-armed destroyer U.S.S.
Tyler Maine
, speeding south from the direction of Cross Sound at a point twenty-five miles off the southern end of Chichagof Island, cut ghostlike through the fog that now and then mysteriously gave way to clear patches of sea.

Being the only ship anywhere near the collision site, the destroyer had been asked by the U.S. Coast Guard to answer the Russian Mayday. The sinking
Kodiak
had not even had time to send a distress signal, her radio room having been demolished upon impact with the Soviet supratanker. The destroyer’s captain rang the engine room. “Chief, you got us on maximum revs?”

“That’s what the dials say, Captain, but I could maybe squeeze another knot or two out of her. It’d be pushing her mighty hard.”

“Well, push her. I want to get those poor bastards out before anything else happens. I don’t want to be a hundred yards from ’em and have to give ’em up.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

In the destroyer’s chart room, the executive officer worked fast with dividers and parallel rule. The line he drew between the destroyer’s position and that of the stricken tankers—estimated to be forty-odd miles west of Sitka—ran northeast to southwest. In the zero visibility, they would not be able to see the Russian ship until they were practically upon it. Till then it was up to them to reckon how close they were to the escaping oil. After a few more minutes, the navigator poked his head out of the chart room and called urgently to the captain, “I think we’re approaching the pollution danger zone now, sir. At least we must be getting close, according to their position and the increase in wind velocity.”

The captain received the information without surprise. “Shit. Don’t need your charts to figure that out, Ex. My nose is the best goddamn indicator on this ship. You can smell it—stinks to high heaven.” The first officer agreed. The captain coughed and spat into his handkerchief. “And I can taste it,” he added irritably. “How far from the Russian?”