Firespill (10 page)

There was a silence as the White House staff shared their chief’s bewilderment at the firespill’s magnitude. Finally it was Jean Roche who again proffered an explanation. “We’ve had the warning signals for years, Mr. President. And the ULCC—I mean the supratanker—breakup, for example, has been very heavy lately—five tankers a month, let alone offshore blowouts and submarine pipeline leaks.”

The President gestured towards the map. “If part of the Pacific Ocean can catch fire, what about our smaller seas?”

Jean was unhesitating in her assessment. “They’re sludge pools, Mr. President—ready for ignition.”

“Goddamn it, we’ve got rules against that possibility, no? The Great Lakes legislation, the Water Quality Improvement Act. Aren’t they operable? What’s the EPA been doing—sleeping?”

The other aides retreated to files and memos. Henricks was talking to the admiral again as Jean continued to bear the brunt of the President’s frustration. “Yes, sir, they’re operable but barely. Trouble is, we started too late, with Nixon impounding the nine billion allocated for water improvement, then Congress haggling over which agency got what. The Great Lakes are the highest risk. We thought something would happen there first. We’ve already had a big spill on Lake Superior, but fortunately no fire.”

“Then we’d better send out a top priority immediately. I want those rules enforced.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Jean. She lifted the phone and began dialing the head of the Environmental Protection Enforcement Agency to get special emergency action on all antipollution laws. “Should I release it for international coverage, Mr. President?”

“Hell, yes. And make sure you let the Russians know. This is one thing we can agree on … maybe.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll also—”

Henricks, looking grave, cut in. “Mr. President, I’ve got some bad news from the shipping report.”

Sutherland waved his hand towards the Communications Annex. “Throw it on the pile.”

“The Vice-President is trapped by the fire.”

Everyone in the room was stunned. For a moment no one spoke, and the only noise was the steady hammering of the Teletype machines. The President’s face was white. He stared at Henricks. “I thought Elaine—I thought she was on a fishing trip…?”

“That’s just where she’s been fishing, sir—deep sea off the Alexander Archipelago.” He glanced down at his notepad. “Out of Sitka.”

Two other aides entered the room with charts and files. Sutherland felt a dull, heavy ache begin above his left eye. Jean Roche moved towards him, convinced he was going to collapse. Just as she reached him, he sat down at the table. “Trapped.” His voice was barely audible.

Henricks glanced apprehensively at Jean Roche. “Yes, sir. Admiral Klein just told me. You could probably see from the satellite photos that the blaze isn’t a blanket fire. That is, there are pockets as yet not ignited due to differing wind and sea currents. The boat is caught in one of those areas.” Henricks paused and then went on in a quieter tone. “Apparently its motor cut out. Repairs took most of the day. By the time it was fixed—well, they were encircled by the firespill.”

The President coughed and reached into his pocket. “What’s the size of the boat?”

“It’s a thirty-footer, sir.”

For the third time that day the President was utterly incredulous. It was as if the impossible were becoming the norm. “Good Christ!” he exploded. “What’s she doing fishing in a tub that size?” No one answered. “Can it outrun the fire?”

The answer came from one of the new arrivals, Norman Blane, an EPA man attached to the White House staff. He was pinning up a satellite weather map which showed that beneath the cloud and smoke layer there were small pockets of clear sea standing out like blue islands amid the blackness. Despite his airy manner, Blane, who, like most of those present, did not know the extent of Elaine Horton’s relationship with the President, only added to the growing mood of helplessness. “No, sir, not a chance. It’s been caught in a pincer movement—completely surrounded by a large fire zone which could come in fast.”

On the map Blane’s finger moved westward from Sitka out to sea. “This is where the Vice-President is—about fourteen or fifteen miles from the collision site. You can see the spill was already in front of her, to the east, between her and Baranof Island, before it caught fire. Pretty soon after, two arms of it circled back around her, then joined up again and spread back of her, making a kind of bone-shaped spill. The clear area, with the boat in it, is in the center of the eastern part of the bone, as it were. Now, as I say, how fast the fire comes in towards the boat is—well, anybody’s guess. It all depends on the hydrostatic head at what was the Russian tanker site.”

Blane’s cool professionalism irritated the President. “Come on, Norman, put that in English I can understand.”

The aide’s arms moved flamboyantly as he explained. “Hydrostatic head? Oh, well, it’s the pileup of oil as it leaks up from the sunken tanks, sir. Like pouring whipped cream on coffee, only from underneath the surface.” Blane smiled, congratulating himself on the analogy. “Its dispersal rate depends on wind and currents. And temperature. Oil will normally move at around four percent of wind velocity, but with strong currents and winds it can do a lot better than that. Those gases can race across the sea like a regular prairie fire.”

Sutherland grunted. “Has anybody found out yet if any of our ships are in the area?”

Henricks quickly read the shipping report. “No, sir, no U.S. surface craft now that the
Tyler Maine
has gone. There is a Canadian sub. That’s all.”

The President thought for a moment, then asked, “What about our subs?”

Henricks checked the report again but shook his head. “No, sir. We have four nuclear subs on northwestern patrol—two in the Bering Strait, two in the Beaufort Sea—and one conventional a hundred miles south of the Aleutian chain. They’re all too far away to get there in time, even at maximum speed.”

Sutherland barely heard Henricks’s last remark. For a moment his mind had fled from the present crisis to the memory of a much happier time—to Elaine’s face, flushed with excitement, the first time he had shown her how to snorkel on Kauai, the northernmost island of the Hawaiian chain. He could still hear her voice, her words almost tripping over one another, eager to tell of the wonders she had seen for the first time: the kaleidoscope of colors; the polished black, yellow, and blue of the Moorish Idol gently nibbling the seaweed just a few feet below her; and the long white eels with their eyes like marbles, immobile and piercing, as they hung suspended like stiff pieces of kelp below the surface of the gently rolling surf. Her mood had been so infectious that the thrill of his own youthful discoveries had come flooding back to him.

It was the sheer vigor of her childlike curiosity which had first drawn him to her, had revived in him emotions far removed from the daily machinations of power, and had filled him with a desire to shrug off the inhibitions imposed by the often secret nature of his work as a congressman in the Armed Services Appropriations Committee. The long hours, the constant pressure from generals and admirals to increase the size of defense contracts, and the almost flagrantly ill disguised bribes offered by hopeful contractors had made him suspicious of nearly everyone in Washington.

But with Elaine, he found, he could relax. She possessed a candor so well balanced by a sense of humor that no one could take offense. He had once seen her fix a large and importunate electronics tycoon with a winning smile and announce, “I hope you’re not trying to bribe me into voting yes on that new import quota bill, Jack, because if you are, I’ll vote the other way, just to prove how crazy women are.”

That had ended that episode, and it had been done with such disarming geniality that the tycoon had no alternative but to buy another round and leave, putting as good a face as he could manage on it. It was this mixture of childlike honesty and worldly sophistication that had constantly surprised and delighted Sutherland.

Henricks coughed politely, waiting for the President’s orders, but Sutherland was back on Kauai, on the day he and Elaine had walked hand in hand along the deserted, straw-colored beach and swum in the cool green sea just as the red disk of the sun disappeared behind the macadamia trees. That day their lovemaking had been the best. Afterwards they had strolled along the more inhabited beach at Poipu, in the soft twilight, watching the torches of the hotels flicker and wave in the gentle trade wind, listening to the surf pounding over the reef and surging onto the curving, palm-backed beaches, awash with moonlight.

And now she might die.

Henricks coughed again, louder.

Sutherland tried to marshal his thoughts, to put the memories out of his mind, but the more he tried, the more they rushed back at him. “Are there any other surface craft out there?” he asked curtly. “Any nationality at all?”

“A Japanese LNG off Chichagof Island out of Juneau. She’s under contract to El Paso Company—heading towards Point Conception just north of L.A. But she’s too far off at the moment, too.”

The President slapped the table angrily. The telexes kept chattering like recalcitrant children as everyone fell silent. “Would you all stop trying to impress me with your technical expertise and talk to me in plain, simple English.” There was a long silence. The President reached into his pocket and threw several small balls of Kleenex into the wastebasket. After a few seconds he asked quietly, “Now, Bob, what in Christ is an LNG? Just so a simple old Harvard boy like me can understand.”

“It’s a liquefied natural gas carrier, Mr. President,” Henricks explained. “It’s like a regular tanker, only it has three—maybe five—cylindrical tanks sunk into the deck.”

Sutherland nodded his thanks. “Then it won’t be any use at all. Matter of fact, it’d be downright dangerous having it anywhere near the fire. Right? Wouldn’t the gas expand in those tanks?”

It seemed no one in the room had thought of this possibility. “Well, wouldn’t it?” asked the President. “As I remember it, natural gas has to be refrigerated for transporting; otherwise it becomes extremely unstable.”

Henricks answered, “Yes, sir, it probably would. Be dangerous, I mean.”

The President wasn’t listening. He pushed his chair back and jumped to his feet, slamming his fist on the table. “The Canadian sub! It can go under and get them out!”

It was a rough day for Henricks. Again duty obligated him to be the harbinger of bad news. “Sorry, sir, it’s trapped like the boat—only beneath the fire. Admiral Klein has been in contact with Canadian Maritime Command at Esquimalt in British Columbia. They say it’s a nonnuclear, conventional trainer type—post-World War Two, but not much. It’s modernized, but apparently it will have to surface soon to recharge its batteries and replenish its air supply. Klein says it could perhaps make it under the fire to the boat, but in order to return it would have to recharge and reoxygenate.” Henricks hesitated. “That is, of course, if the Canadians agreed to try it.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” enquired the President.

Jean Roche answered quickly. “Along with Washington and Oregon, they fought hard against supratanker routes down their coast, Mr. President. They’ve always been afraid of spills. They feel very strongly about it, I’m afraid.”

“Of course,” grumbled Sutherland, obviously piqued. “They don’t have to import as much.” He turned back to Henricks. “You said its batteries ‘apparently’ need recharging. Does that mean they’ll need it or not?”

“Yes, sir, they will.”

The President waved impatiently at the weather map. “Couldn’t they do that in the clear area where the fishing boat is holding out?”

Henricks admired the President’s inventiveness, but he shook his head. “It would take time, sir. Besides, the fire could have eaten up most of the area by then. As Norman said, we don’t know how fast it’s closing in on the Vice-President or any of the other patches which haven’t caught fire yet. All we do know is that it’s closing. Where it is now, the sub’s only safely got enough power and air to retreat away from under the fire. If it goes further in, it could reach a point of no return.”

Seeing how risky such an operation would be, Sutherland studied the weather map for some hidden answer. “Is there any possibility that the fire can be doused? By the weather, I mean?”

Blane’s arms were windmilling. He looked like an enthusiastic professor unexpectedly given an opportunity to get in on the decision making. “There is an Arctic front coming down, but it’s a close bet. It might not rain. Actually, that would be worse; you’d have winds pushing the firespill further in, right down the coast.”

“Well, we can’t depend on acts of God,” said the President, turning to Jean for a glimmer of hope. “Jean, call General Oster. Ask him if there’s any chance of a helicopter or parachute drop. And ask him to come over.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

The general’s voice on the phone was clipped and tense. “No way. Even if we could get them there in time, planes or helicopters couldn’t work effectively in that smoke cover. They really couldn’t work at all. Too dangerous lifting someone out of a fire you can’t see properly. And they’d be burned themselves, as well as the Vice-President. I’ve checked with the Coast Guard; they’ve ruled out hydrofoils. They’d be useless in slick even if they could get near the fire, which they couldn’t.”

As Jean relayed the information, the President sat down. For an instant, he looked very anxious.

Clara Sutherland sat quietly in her White House study overlooking the tall, white, floodlit Washington Monument, waiting patiently for the phone to ring. He had not even told her about Elaine Horton’s being trapped. Had it not been for an aide, she still wouldn’t have known. She knew better than to call down to the Operations Room at a time like this, yet she had hoped that somehow he would need her. But the phone in her study remained silent. It did not occur to her to feel self-pity, but she did feel lonely. She gained no comfort from the warm feeling she usually experienced in the study which she had decorated in soft, autumnal shades of red and russet brown.