Firespill (7 page)

“Couple of miles sou’ southwest.”

The captain grunted. He took a cup of coffee from an orderly and instructed a junior officer, “Sound ‘Approaching PD Zone’ warning. We’ll likely encounter the slick within the quarter hour.”

In fact the
Tyler Maine
was already deep within the fuel oil slick, though no one aboard could have known, for the ship had entered a long, tonguelike extension of the high-octane vapor that had been blown into a clear area beyond the fogged-in Mayday position and the bulk of the spill. Having vaporized, the octane now lay in a highly volatile, invisible layer over the surface of the sea. The captain, confident that they were merely smelling advance fumes from the main spill, believed that he was giving ample warning to his crew. He added crisply, “I want a double check that there’s no smoking and that the engine room and galley are in the sealed-off condition and operating on filtered air only. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Leading Seaman Jones, a newcomer to the
Tyler Maine
, wasn’t what you’d call a big drinker, but standing alone outside on the bridge’s starboard side lookout position, unable as usual to make out anything that came out of a PA system whether in an airport, train station, or aboard a destroyer, all he was thinking about was ending his watch and having a shot of the Jack Daniel’s he’d smuggled aboard. It was a birthday gift from his wife. Every year she gave him the same thing, and every year he said it was just what he wanted. He lifted the binoculars and scanned the horizon, but all he could see was the ashy gray mist of the scattered fog banks. Letting the binoculars hang about his neck for a moment, he pulled out his tobacco pouch. At forty-two he figured that if lung cancer was going to get him, it was going to get him—same as old age. He’d tried to cut down his habit, and on shore he could do it, but here at sea, he asked himself, what the hell else could you do but eat and sleep and maybe drool a bit over
Playboy
? Besides, how could you cut it out when you’d already been at one and a half packs a day at sixteen? Using the bridge’s flanged wing as a wind barrier, he held the cigarette paper low and deftly rolled the tobacco into it.

Inside the bridge, confident that the ship was completely electrically grounded in the event of lightning or electronic malfunction, the captain was receiving “sealed off” confirmation from various sections of the ship. Halfway through listening to the engine room report, he motioned to the executive officer.

“Yes, sir?”

“Better remind the new man on the starboard watch about PD drill. He might not hear it on the PA system in this wind.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” The executive officer pulled up his parka hood and made his way out to the starboard wing. As he opened and closed the bridge door, the wind howled past, causing his eyes to smart. Bending his head low, he held onto a rail with one hand and fumbled for a handkerchief with the other. The officer knew that two tankers the size of the
Sakhalin
and the
Kodiak
had never before collided. Compared to this, the old
Torrey Canyon
back in the sixties had been strictly minor league.

One figure kept coming back to him—the data from a spill on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the late sixties. In just one day a spill of ten thousand gallons—only a fraction of the
Torrey Canyon
’s cargo—had covered an area a hundred miles in diameter. And the whole cargo of the
Torrey Canyon
had been only a sixteenth of the spill they were heading into.

For a moment he could see nothing in the hurtling mist, but then he caught a glimpse of the vague outline of the watchman drawing on a cigarette. The officer roared against the noise of wind and sea, “What the hell are you doing, sailor?”

Leading Seaman Jones, startled, quickly took the cigarette out of his mouth, and before the other man could stop him, flicked it overboard. “Sorry, sir.”

For a fleeting moment the executive officer watched with horrified fascination as the ship’s slipstream plucked the lighted cigarette, carried it aft, and then whipped it down towards the sea. There was an enormous orange flash followed by a deafening CRUMP, then another and another, until soon the horizon itself seemed to be exploding in a distant, silent flashing of massed artillery.

The Russians and the lone American, like their would-be rescuers now a short distance away to the northeast, could do nothing; but their end was more agonizing, for they had time to see what would soon kill them. Standing and sitting, they were silhouetted like toy soldiers, clinging to their dying ship, staring in horror as they watched the long, orange roll of flame building up on itself, advancing towards them through the illuminated shroud of fog, like breakers from a closing and fiery surf. As succeeding pockets of gas exploded, each flash closer than the last, Yashin looked in numb despair at the radar screen. The pulsating dot that seconds before had been the advancing American destroyer was now scattered in a thousand tiny points of lights which quickly faded, like so many meteorites suddenly extinguished by an inhospitable planet.

Yashin kept staring at the blank radar screen, momentarily hypnotized by the sweeping arm. He had seen a fire on a tanker once. It had happened in the Black Sea. Now he could see it in the screen. As the fire wave had struck, everyone at the deck level had died instantly, their bodies lit up like pieces of burning paper, first white, then saffron darkening to black as they curled up, shriveling in the flames. Any screams bad been lost in the noise of the exploding tanks. A steel whale in a final agonizing attempt at escape, the tanker had first leapt hopelessly into the air, her back broken as she was thrown up by a series of explosions. No sooner had she collapsed back into the water than her bow disintegrated in a shower of shrapnel, a half-empty forward tank blowing out sideways, spewing tons of coal black bunker oil through the orange flame like volcanic bile.

Illuminated by the fire, the sea around the crippled tanker had taken on the semblance of a moving abstract painting as the translucent greens, mauves, and reds of the various dyed octanes curved and slid about each other in liquid rainbows, their ever-changing patterns invaded here and there by the dark brown molasses of crude that continued to ooze from the stricken ship. What amazed Yashin was that despite the force of the initial explosion, many of the house-sized wing tanks, though hurled hundreds of yards at a time and badly ruptured, were still afloat. What had once been the second-largest tanker in the Soviet Eastern Fleet was soon no more than two dozen hulks, each bleeding its cargo into the sea.

The explosions were very loud now. Sweat dripped onto the screen from his nose. His heart punching his chest, frantic to escape, he tried not to think what would happen when the fire wave hit the
Sakhalin
. He heard the captain yell his name, and as he turned away from the radar, he saw through the bridge windows that the fire, now blood red, was less than 400 yards away, rolling inexorably towards him.

Admiral Klein, commanding officer of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, refused to believe the first reports. He said flatly that it couldn’t happen. But the satellite pictures showed that it had.

Six

No one had ever seen so many gulls. By noon, fourteen miles over the horizon and beyond the fog bank, they came in tens of thousands. Some headed north and others south, over the wide mouth of Dixon Entrance and the green-dotted blue of British Columbia’s island-strewn coast towards the snow-dusted peaks of the Coast Mountains which formed the common backbone of the American and Canadian lands. Old-time fishermen were puzzled, for there was no storm in sight.

Forty-three miles northwest of Sitka,
Happy Girl
lolled lazily on the long, glossy swells. Even had the Vice-President seen storm clouds following the distant claps of thunder she thought she had heard earlier that morning, she would not have cared. This was the first real break since her hectic election two years before, and her only concern this day lay with the big rockfish that inhabit the nutrient-rich upwelling of water about the summits of the undersea mountains that rise almost sheer from the ocean floor to within a few hundred feet of the surface. She cast her line again and smiled mischievously. This was the first time in her term of office that she had managed to elude her watchdogs.

There was no sign of land, only the hazy, pale blue-washed horizon of the endless Pacific giving her the illusion of a limitless world. She let the quietude seep into her as a lizard would the sun. She felt a tug on the line, reeled in the five-pound red snapper, took the hook out, threw the fish back, and wiped her hands on a clean rag. Harry looked over and made a wry face, friendly but slightly deferential. “Time used to be when you could eat ’em, ma’am.”

“Time’ll come again, I hope, Harry.”

“Not in my life. Only fish I’ll ever eat will have all the flavor steamed out. It’s all that sterilizing stuff. The fish are all like that now. Like a goddamned sewer here.”

The Vice-President said nothing. The last thing she wanted to talk about today was pollution. She looked eastwards, watching a long line of dots trailing the thin sliver of the horizon. “Harry?”

“Ma’am?”

“Have you ever seen so many birds?”

Harry’s old eyes squinted at the clouding sky. “Nope, can’t say I have. Must be a storm building out yonder. Don’t look bad here, though.”

Harry’s mention of a storm made Elaine feel uneasy. Then, quite suddenly, she was assailed by an overwhelming sense of guilt. Despite her need for privacy, and no matter that other vice-presidents had made a habit of deliberately breaking out of their protective cocoon, she rebuked herself. No American vice-president had any business being miles out at sea, virtually alone, radio or not. She should know better. Any senator, any aide knew better. She began reeling in.

“Harry, I think we’d better head back.”

Harry nodded and moved towards the cabin to start the engine. Still reeling in, Elaine saw a dark lump bobbing up and down by the boat. She pointed it out to Harry, who shook his head in disgust and fished it out of the water. It was a dead gull. Feeling its sticky body, he threw it back into the sea and showed Elaine his hands, which were now covered with oil. “Pollution,” he grunted, and went into the cabin.

To starboard a tremor passed through the water as a phantom breeze broke the silken surface of the sea. The Vice-President looked up again at the multitudes of gulls passing over the horizon. “I wonder why they’re all coming from the same direction.”

Harry pushed the starter button. The motor did not respond. “Don’t know,” he answered. He pushed the starter button a second time. Again it did not respond.

Seven

At 5:35 P.M. eastern daylight time a military aide sat in the gallery of the North Virginia Country Club carrying the nuclear code box that always accompanied the President. Below the President and his close friend, Air Force General Arnold B. Oster, moved into match point in the sixth game.

An athletic six-footer who always looked as if he had just stepped off a reviewing stand, Oster served the ball into the President’s corner. It dropped slowly. The President, his red face in marked contrast to the hospital whiteness of the squash court, moved quickly but not hurriedly behind the ball and drove it into the front right corner. Oster, anticipating him, had already moved across the court. He intercepted the ball on the rebound, flicked it across to the President’s backhand, and stood in center court, waiting for the inevitable hard backhand drive, but it didn’t come. Instead he could hear the plop of a dead ball dribbling forward from the back wall. Oster turned around. “You don’t usually miss those, Walt.”

The President, who at fifty was three years younger than the general, wiped the sweat from his eyes with his armband. “No,” he answered quietly, almost dispiritedly, “no, I don’t.” His voice was almost apologetic. “You mind if we break off now?”

Oster picked up the ball with a deft flick of his racket. “Not at all. Walt?”

“Yes.”

“You okay?”

The President smiled without conviction. “Yes. Hard day.”

Oster glanced up at the aide sitting alone in the gallery. He decided to wait until they were in the privacy of the locker room before asking more questions. The President was his closest friend. They had been in school together long before the future President had gone to Harvard, and he knew that when Walter Sutherland couldn’t kill an easy backhand, it meant he was either out of shape or he was worried. And the President was in shape. They had been playing an hour’s squash three times a week for the past ten years. Sutherland had then been an up-and-coming congressman serving on the powerful Armed Services Appropriations Committee to which Oster had been an advisor.

Oster knew he had made himself unpopular in some circles for his frankness, but his blunt honesty had made him the President’s closest confidant and friend. Walter Sutherland could tell him anything with the assurance that his thoughts would go no further. The President had to have at least one such friend in the White House, an ever-ready sounding board for some of the tougher decisions.

Clara Sutherland, the President’s wife, was another thing. Though she had always been willing to support her husband during the tougher moments of his office, she was essentially nonpolitical. She was a deeply religious woman, whose beliefs did not dispose her to insert herself into the world of power and manipulation. When she first heard gossip about her husband and Elaine Horton, for example, she had discounted it, convinced that it was just crude gossip.

Until recently, staff, friends, and even the press corps had refrained from confronting her with her husband’s infidelity, but a month ago a loud-mouthed young reporter, violating the self-imposed restrictions of the press corps, had blurted out, “Mrs. Sutherland, could you tell us whether you and the President have come to terms with your husband’s liaison in Congress?”

There had been a hush in the pressroom before Clara Sutherland, with a smile on her face, had replied, “My husband’s relations with Congress have always been extremely close. I believe that it’s most proper for a President to maintain ties with Congress, don’t you?” The First Lady got a solid round of applause for that one, but the story broke in some of the tabloids, and try as they might, the local networks couldn’t avoid mentioning it. Finally, CBS and NBC had made passing, cautious references to it.