Firespill (18 page)

By now the smoke and fumes from the crude were starting to envelop the boat, joining the night in forming a pitch black sheet about them.

By Elaine’s reckoning the submarine had till eight-forty-five at the latest, to find them. And if the fire wind rose further, she knew it would be even less.

Fourteen

In Tokyo it was early afternoon. Through the unusually heavy smog that hung over the sprawling Asanami Shipyard, Police Chief Sunichi Yamada could see the towering, unfinished hull of a million-ton supratanker standing silently over the crowd of ten thousand demonstrators, like some great carcass besieged by swarming ants. Yamada’s hand tightened on the pistol grip of the bullhorn as the crowd, mostly students, surged further into the shipyard, through the main gate, past the high, barbed wire storm fencing.

Raising the bullhorn, Yamada ordered, “Spearhead formation!”

In one quick movement, the aluminum-shielded, blue-black-uniformed Kidōtai—the mobile squads—changed from two lines of a hundred riot-equipped men into a double spearhead. If they began to move and one man fell in the forward formation, one from the second would immediately take his place.

Here and there Yamada could see that groups of workers had joined the demonstration against the builders of the now American-owned MV
Kodiak
, but in the main the police chief could tell from the signs that this was the work of the university students. For that reason he was surprised that the protest had been so ill planned. No doubt it was due to the fact that the firespill—unlike political events—had happened without warning. Normally the radical organizers would never have allowed the crowd to gather in a road that had no side alleys and only one exit—in this case, the gate through the shipyard beyond the half-built tanker, which could take them nowhere except into the cold waters of the harbor. The only other way out was past the Kidōtai, and for an angry mob that was no way at all. Yamada took a deep breath. This demonstration would become a riot. He glanced at his watch again, for the sixth time in the last hour, and lifted the bullhorn. “You are advised that you are on private property. This constitutes a violation of Civil Ordinance Number—”

His next few words were drowned in the roar of the crowd. He waited patiently for a minute, then added, “You now have five minutes in which to vacate these premises.”

A barrage of rocks and bottles erupted from the crowd towards the Kidōtai. “Canopy!” barked Yamada, and the second row of shields clashed and rose in a single flash of sunlight, overlapping those that stood perpendicular, guarding the front line of men, forming an aluminum roof, covering the whole spearhead formation. The hail of projectiles bounced harmlessly to the already debris-strewn road.

The Kidōtai battalion stood steady, the rounded perspex helmet covers distorting their faces as they awaited the order to move. They had been through all of this a hundred times before. No one even looked round as they heard the caged buses roaring up the road and stopping behind them. They simply stood still, holding the five-foot shields in their left hands and the two-and-a-half-foot riot sticks in their right, like Roman legionaires. Immediately behind them, groups of regular police readied the tear gas guns, plopping the canisters into the stubby, black barrels. From this position the regulars could reload and advance in relative safety behind the cover of the Kidōtai.

Normally Yamada would have used the firehoses rather than tear gas, but someone had slashed most of the hose lines. At least they were that organized, he mused. He glanced at his watch for the last time. Now they had two minutes. It was hopeless. He knew they wouldn’t listen, but he had to try. He sensed from long experience that the crowd didn’t want violence, but it could not stop its own momentum. There were hundreds who were probably trying desperately to get out, but they were trapped by the crush of bodies which had taken on a collective will of its own, dictated by its sheer size and weight. But the drill was to give them a chance, until it was too dangerous to let them gather any more momentum. Some would inevitably be hurt, but better a few now than many later.

Suddenly the crowd surged towards the police. Yamada calmly lifted the bullhorn. “Fire canisters!”

There was a series of “boomps” and the silver canisters soared overhead and into the crowd. Pools of gas began to spread. As soon as he heard that the coughing was general, Yamada ordered, “Walk—advance!”

The spearhead moved in unison, the riot sticks shaking ominously up and down in expectation. A volley of rocks struck the black and silver line. One officer stumbled for a second, then a hand shot out to his side and he shuffled a little dazedly back into step.

Another volley of rocks struck the line, and two men fell. As two replacements came from behind, the long lines of clubs went up as one. “Charge!” yelled Yamada.

As the Kidōtai hit the first wave of demonstrators, scores of people went down amid a screaming panic. The crowd shrank to almost half its size, like a frightened slug. Now the regular police were mopping up, dragging and pushing the arrested over the littered road, back into the waiting buses. One student, a boy of about eighteen, dashed to the side of the street and frantically began to scale a shop awning. A regular policeman dropped his baton and grabbed an ankle. The boy kicked back, opening his captor’s cheek. Feeling no pain in his fury, the policeman caught the boy’s leg again, dragged him down, threw him against the brick wall, and kicked him in the groin. As the boy slumped, the policeman continued to kick at his face, squashing the nose so that soon the boy’s arms, hopelessly trying to cover his head, were covered in blood. By now two other policemen had arrived and were pulling their colleague off, one of them yelling, “That’s enough. We’ll take him. That’s enough!”

As the boy was hauled away, his head fell limp over his chest like a squashed fruit. One of the policemen supporting the boy was nearly out of breath. Gasping for air, he murmured, “All this—because—because of some oil. Is it worth it, fella? Hey—hey—is it worth it? You bastard!”

Thirty-two miles east of the firespill, on the southwest coast of Kruzof Island, which lay like a protective arm guarding Sitka from the sea, the Tlingit village was deserted.

Backed by an apron of spruce and fir forest that stretched towards the three-thousand-foot Mount Edgecumbe, the small Indian settlement that just hours before had been inhabited by eighty men, women, and children could well have been mistaken for a ghost town. But quite apart from the fact that it was known to be a relatively new settlement, made up of families descended from the Angoon clans on Admiralty Island, the signs of recent habitation were everywhere. Inside the short-peaked plank houses, plates of food and unmade beds stood as evidence of the Indians’ hasty retreat. Outside, washing fluttered on lines like the shredded flags of defeat, while racks of drying seaweed lay unattended and the tall, silent totem poles of Thunderbird, Beaver, and angry Bear glared across the village ground as if determined to do battle with the oncoming sea.

The Tlingit took their living largely from the ocean, but they feared it too. Some, though nominally Christians, still believed that if a man drowned and his body was not recovered, he would surely not be taken into the soft embrace of the afterlife. The men of the clan were modern fishermen, but this day the fear of the sea had swept ashore with the crashing of the waves and had moved them to abandon the motor-powered fishing boats that now lay rocking mutely like obedient animals awaiting an inescapable end.

Beyond the riot of devil club, cranberry bushes, and yellow pond lilies that grew at the edge of the thick woods, the village smokehouse, with its trapdoorlike chimney, kept streaming smoke as if it expected to go on forever. The smell of the cooking salmon wafted deep into the moss-laden spruce forest nearby and rose slowly through a clearing that had once been the site of an ancient gravehouse.

An old chief had been the first to see dark smoke scratched across the salmon pink horizon. He had hauled in his lines and buoys and headed in to alert the village. No one had taken any notice, saying that it was not possible that the sea was on fire. Not even the white men with all their madness could make such a thing.

In earlier times the old chief would not have informed them that it was wise to move lest the wind quicken and bring in the fire; he would have ordered them to move, and they would have obeyed. But now chiefs were elected, and the new leader, a younger man, had agreed with most of the other fishermen that the smoke was probably from a large ship on fire, nothing more.

By the time they heard the news of the spill, the wind had blown the northernmost part of the fire into the shape of a scythe whose tip, aided by the strong currents in the area, had reached the headland at Point Mary, several miles north of the village. Dry as tinder from a long, hot summer, the forested coast hills had caught fire within minutes of the first burning and oil-soaked log’s striking the heavily wooded inlet. Soon thousands of cypress began to explode, splitting apart in grotesque shapes as the wind-driven flames raced across the treetops faster than the fires on the forest floor.

Unable to head out to sea through the horseshoe of blazing oil, the Indians had quickly packed what belongings they had and started north in a race with the fire to Shelikof Bay, their only hope being to cross the island on the five-mile logging road to Mud Bay and there to find a boat to take at least some of them down through Hayward Strait and across the sound to Sitka. As they began their forced march towards the road, the chief couldn’t help but remember that his Tlingit ancestors had once burned Sitka to the ground, and now he and the clan were seeking its refuge.

The President was feeling shaky from drinking too much coffee, but he wanted to be alert for reports both of the rescue attempt and of the much larger danger facing millions of people should the firespill reach the coast. Perhaps the wind from the forecast Arctic front wouldn’t rise and spread the fire after all; or if it did increase, perhaps it would reach gale force as the meteorologists had predicted and counteract the coast-bound movement of the spill, breaking it up into thousands of smaller, more manageable patches. But even then much of the shape and direction of the spill would still depend on the speed of the currents.

Sutherland began to pace before the map wall, glancing now and then at the bank of digital clocks which, in the neutrality of their constant clicking, took on the appearance of a row of automated referees disinterestedly counting off the seconds against him. He felt irrationally hostile towards them, so ordered and efficient in the face of human disarray. Here he was, president of a powerful nation, perhaps the most technologically advanced in the world, and yet he was helpless to stop the firespill’s advance. All he could do, it seemed, was to react defensively, to continue to press plans for the mass evacuation of the entire civilian population of the Pacific Northwest.

The Canadian and American police in northwest British Columbia, the Alaskan Panhandle, the Queen Charlotte Islands, and the Alexander Archipelago were working as fast as they could to initiate what the authorities had hoped would be an orderly evacuation but what in fact was beginning to resemble a rout from a war zone.

East of Ketchikan at the Hyder-Stewart border crossing between Canada and Alaska, long lines of evacuees, panic-stricken by the news reports of the approaching fire, jammed the highway, their overloaded cars and trucks stretching back for miles. Children cried, grandparents tried to soothe, and impatient parents attempted, with varying success, to remain patient, their growing anxiety all the time threatening to push them into blind rage. The customs officials, who had as yet received no explicit instructions from above, continued to ask each immigrant, “Good evening. Where do you live? Where do you come from?” and “Are you importing anything into the country?” Finally the hereditary chief of a local Haida band had to be physically restrained from punching a police officer who, with clipboard dutifully by his side, had thrust his overworked face into the Indian’s crowded car and asked quite ingenuously, “Are you landed immigrants?”

By now the President’s staff had had time to assemble oil experts both at the White House and by phone linkups across the country, and observers had been sent to the coastal areas.

But as the minutes flew by, the President felt more and more like the coach of a losing team committed to a blocking action, and a futile blocking at that, as an apparently invincible opposition ate further and further into home territory. One of the telexes stuttered to life in the annex, and Henricks tore off the latest message. Sutherland turned anxiously away from the clocks. “Is it spreading?”

“Afraid so, Mr. President. Satellite pictures show that we’ve reached flash point. There’s an immense pileup of smoke. They say that means a lot more of the crude is burning.”

Sutherland thought of Elaine and at once regretted it. “Is it the wind?” he asked, as much to divert his thoughts away from her as to know the answer.

Henricks called over one of the oilmen. It was the expert’s first time in the White House. He was a small, flabby man who walked comically but did everything else with the utmost seriousness as if to compensate. His voice began at a nervous pitch. “Ah—partly, Mr. President.” He cleared his throat. “Partly—I mean, part of the wind is made up of—well, the front coming down from the Arctic, and part is caused by the fire generating a wind system of its own. It’s, ah, fanning itself, you see.”

“Hmm,” Sutherland murmured as he turned back to Henricks, leaving the oilman to back away. “The sub. How’s it doing?”

“It’s on maximum speed—eighteen knots submerged—but it’s still about two hours from the Vice-President.” Henricks grimaced and went on. “That is, providing the fishing boat’s still afloat. The sub won’t have it on its sonar for a while yet.”

“If they are holding out in that calm area, can the boat wait that long for the sub with this increase in wind?”

Henricks exhaled wearily while he studied his note pad. “It’s got about two hours—maybe—”