Firespill (8 page)

It was the networks’ mention of the story only a week before which Oster had in mind as he entered the locker room with the President. After making sure that the Secret Service agents and the aide were outside in the corridor, Oster asked bluntly, “Walt, how’s things with Clara?”

The President peeled off the sweat-soaked T-shirt and dropped it wearily to the floor. “She’s very understanding.”

The general nodded and began adjusting the shower tap. As the water began drumming loudly, he raised his voice. “Hell, I know that. She’s a champion. But how are
things
?”

Walter Sutherland looked up at his friend. No one else would have dared press the question. He sighed heavily. “Things are—well, not so good. Truth is, Arnold, Clara’s hurt, but she’s so goddamn understanding I feel like a child-beater. That’s how things are. It was that goddamn press conference that did it. In a way I was almost pleased that little bastard brought it up. At least, I thought, now we could talk about it. But Clara won’t even do that. She never said a word. Any other woman and I’d think she was trying to get her revenge, but not Clara. She’s forcing herself to keep cheerful about everything. Makes me feel even worse.”

Oster soaped up and didn’t say anything until he had sluiced the suds from his face. “Hell, Walt, she’s not saying anything because she’s too damn sensible. Knows it’s all water under the bridge.” The general paused. “Isn’t it?”

Sutherland felt like a shower, but he was exhausted. He had made the decision to sit and talk, to unload his private burden, or as much of it as he could, on his friend. But now the bluntness of Oster’s question inhibited him. He found himself answering vaguely, “Well it’s finished as far as I’m concerned, but you know … I mean it’s difficult when the two of us have to see so much of each other.”

Oster as usual was quick to cut through the President’s hesitancy. “You been fooling around with her again?”

“Goddamn it, you bastard, I should have you court-martialed.”

“You don’t want to talk about it, you mean?”

“No—yes. It’s just that you’re less subtle than a B-52.”

Oster grinned. “The best airplane,” he said proudly. “Straightforward.”

The President managed a laugh. “No, I haven’t been fooling around. But—” He found it hard to say her name. “Elaine, you see, she’s still—well, she’s…”

“Hot?” offered Oster.

“Yes. Never says so, but I know. Sounds conceited, I suppose.”

“Horse balls,” said Oster, toweling himself vigorously. “Elaine’s a great woman—knows a great man when she sees one. I introduced you. Don’t ever forget it.”

“I remember.”

“I only introduce damn fine women, Walt. Still, what’s your problem? She wants to; you don’t. You can keep your distance.”

There was a long silence. Oster knew he had hit a nerve, but for once he didn’t press. Sutherland got up and began to shower. He finished quickly. Eyes still closed, he reached for a towel. There were none on the rack, and Oster handed him one. The President wiped his eyes slowly, as if playing for time. “I don’t know, Arnold. I don’t know if I can keep my distance.”

Oster’s voice was lower now. “You still love her?”

“Yes. But I have to stop … that.”

“Why?”

“Guilt. My job. My wife.” He smiled, his eyes empty. “The President of the United States can’t fuck around.”

“Horse balls. If Roosevelt could run the country for all that time and enjoy himself on the side, why can’t you? Just keep it quiet.” The general hesitated, but only for a moment. “It can be arranged. I’d help—you know that.”

“And what about Clara, Arnold?”

“She’s a grown woman. She could do the same. She’s got a mind of her own.”

The President tightened his tie absently. “No. She wouldn’t want to do the same.”

“All right, she wouldn’t want to. But she could, and that’s the point.”

“It’s not right, Arnold. It’s as simple as that. I know it reeks of God, Mother, and Boy Scouts but I was raised on all three and I can’t shake them. What’s worse, I’m not sure I want to.”

Oster lit up a cigar, a practice which Sutherland abhorred but tolerated out of friendship. “Look, man, I’m your friend, not your pastor, and I tell you, a happy President is a good President—or a lot fucking better than a lonely President. Right?”

Thinking hard, Sutherland took his navy blue suit off its hanger. He was about to answer when an aide entered the locker room. “Mr. President, you’re wanted at the White House.”

“What’s up?” the President asked calmly.

“Don’t know, sir. Just told me it was top priority.”

As the aide began to explain, Sutherland finished dressing, nodding from time to time. On his way out, he called back to the general. “Arnold, stay in Washington, will you? I need you nearby.”

“Yes. Mr. President. I’ll be here.”

Walter Sutherland left his friend wondering how it was that a man who daily dealt with the enormous pressures of public affairs had such difficulty making up his mind about a woman. Oster didn’t know whether Walter Sutherland would take his advice, but he hoped like hell that the problem would be solved before the strain on the Chief Executive started to affect the way he handled his other responsibilities.

At 6:00 P.M. eastern daylight time, a grim-faced President walked briskly along a brightly lit corridor beneath the White House. At the end of the long, polished floor, two immaculately dressed marines stood guard outside a door marked Authorized Personnel—A-1 Clearance Only.

Since special aide Bob Henricks, a discreet distance behind, had joined him a few minutes earlier, the President had said nothing—had not even acknowledged his presence, and all Henricks could hear was the loud, hollow echo of their footsteps in unison.

The President felt irritably in his pockets. He had forgotten his handkerchief, and in a crisis his hands sweated profusely. He could live without crises. Some men, like Kissinger, he remembered, had soaked them up, used them as fuel for their careers. Solving big problems kept them happy. Crisis cranks. They loved it. He didn’t. After months of preparatory work, just when he finally felt confident enough to launch a massive legislative assault on a whole range of domestic and foreign policy problems—and incidentally secure his place in history—this catastrophe had to come.

The high shine of the guards’ helmets pleased him. Although they looked impassive, the marines had already checked to see whether each of the approaching men wore the required striped I.D. card on his lapel. For the President, the guards were daily reminders of his personal control. He would need a firm hand on the reins this evening. His first question to Henricks was more of a snap than an inquiry. “How big’s the area?”

“At the moment, two thousand square miles, Mr. President.”

The President allowed himself the luxury of incredulity. “Two
thousand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sweet Jesus! Why wasn’t I told immediately—this morning?”

Henricks, for all his calculated casualness, replied somewhat sheepishly, “Ah, the cable was put into the ‘Urgent’ slot by mistake, sir—instead of ‘A-l Priority.’ ”

The President’s head turned sharply. “By mistake? We’ve got a million-dollar computer in our basement and you’re telling me the cable was put in the wrong box?”

Henricks had a way of accepting responsibility while seeming to sidestep the major portion of blame. “I’m afraid so, Mr. President,” he replied.

But this evening the President was unrelenting. “Not good enough. You should have been on top of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long’s it been burning?”

“All day. At first the experts said there was a good chance that it wouldn’t spread. That’s before we knew about the tanks breaking up.”

Reaching the end of the corridor, the two men stepped onto a small platform under the eye of a camera-computer which verified their I.D. through an instantaneous check of their photographs and thumbprints. The guards snapped to attention as the oak doors slid open. Inside the windowless Special Operations Room, busy aides barely glanced at the President as he entered and sat down at the long, oval mahogany table which ran almost the entire length of the cedarpaneled room. On the east wall, a huge relief map of the world slowly descended from the ceiling as the equally large movie screen retracted. Superimposed over each of the capital cities was an illuminated digital clock face—orange for those ahead of Washington time and blue for those behind. As the lights began to dim, most of the aides left the main room to work in the Communications Annex nearby, which was filled with chattering telex machines monitoring the news services and receiving official cable traffic.

President Sutherland shifted his chair for a better view of the huge map, whose oceans passed from ultramarine to navy blue as the lights behind the screen dimmed, casting lighter-shaded ocean currents and green mountain ranges into greater contrast. The President turned to look for his top aide from the Environmental Protection Agency. “Where’s Jean?”

Henricks glanced up from his attaché case. “She’s taping a newscast of it now, Mr. President. The networks are covering it as a special report.”

The President’s fingers began drumming on the table. “That figures. The United States government has to wait for Walter Cronkite. What in hell is our Intelligence Service for?”

Henricks was drawing a red circle off a group of islands that lay adjacent to the Alaskan Panhandle. The circle represented an area of about two thousand square miles on the world map’s transparent overlay. He turned about carefully on the small stepladder. “Intelligence is covering it too, sir.”

The President smiled derisively, wiping his hands with a trail of Kleenex he’d pulled hurriedly from his jacket. “That’s nice.”

Henricks was relieved to see Jean Roche walk in carrying two video tapes. The President waved the Kleenex impatiently towards the bank of TV sets and video recorders. “All right, Jean, let’s hear it.”

Henricks watched her bend over to insert the cassettes into a Zenith recorder and mentally undressed her. She was petite, quite ordinary-looking, even plain, but with a striking figure for a woman of thirty with three children. It always surprised him how at times like this he invariably thought of sex. He wondered whether the President had the same habit—whether he thought of Elaine Horton.

The overhead lights were dimmed further as the video tape began to show up on one of the forty-eight-inch screens. After a few flickers, Cronkite appeared, shuffled some papers, glanced down to his right, showing thinning white hair, coughed politely, and looked up. “Good evening. A news flash has reached CBS reporting an international disaster of unprecedented proportions. An ocean area of almost two thousand square miles caught fire early this morning and is now burning fiercely off the North American continent. What is already being described as the largest fire in history was primarily caused by the vast and ever-growing buildup of escaping oil.”

Superimposed on the lower right of the screen, old film clips of massive worldwide and local pollution formed the background for Cronkite’s description.

“Environmentalists have long warned that continuing undersea oil seepage, oil from the hundreds of tanker sinkings, and the dumping of waste oil by ships in transit might one day combine to form a huge and potentially inflammable blanket of oil in the North Pacific. Only last week CBS reported the blowout of two Alaskan north slope offshore wells, each spilling more than ten million gallons of crude oil into the sea…”

As Cronkite continued, the background changed; two model tankers, both broken in half, were shown. “…Now CBS has learned that shortly after dawn this morning, two million-ton supratankers traveling south from oil storage depots in Valdez, Alaska, collided in heavy fog approximately thirty miles off southern Alaska’s Chichagof Island, one of the northernmost islands of the Alexander Archipelago. Both ships were fully loaded, the American, the
Kodiak
, with crude, the Russian, the
Sakhalin
, with a cargo of high octane and bunker fuel. It appears that at least one of the ships either was not equipped with the recently developed Marconi anticollision radar or did not have it in operation at the time, although this has not been confirmed. Agents for the ships report that both supratankers, measuring more than nineteen hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide, were carrying a near-capacity cargo of a million tons. This means that a total of more than
six hundred million
gallons of oil is spilling into the ocean. UPI reports that there is little possibility of survivors. More details on that spill in a moment.”

The President turned away from the set as a soap commercial came on. He had placed a hand over his eyes as if shading them from an invisible glare. “My God,” he said slowly. “How many gallons did he say?”

It was Jean Roche who answered. “Six hundred million, Mr. President.” She added hesitantly, “Actually it’s higher than that.”

“Six hundred mill—! I can’t even imagine that much.”

There was a long pause. When the President spoke again, he was more composed. “Jean?”

“Mr. President?”

“Why are we watching that damned commercial?”

His aide flushed. “Ah—there was no time to edit it, sir.” And she added quickly, “We didn’t want to lose any footage.”

The President groaned.

When Cronkite reappeared, he mentioned something about a report from Juneau, and now a field reporter was taking up the story. “Years ago experts predicted such a freak combination of circumstances somewhere in the world. They warned that should a large amount of gasoline or high octane be present, there would be an imminent danger of fire. Well, the experts have been proven right. Ironically, the fire, which is now igniting the thousands of smaller natural and man-made oil slicks in the area, is suspected to have been started accidentally by a U.S. destroyer. The destroyer was answering the Russian tanker’s distress calls. It has not been heard from since it itself issued an SOS, saying only that it was afire. Experts here believe that the destroyer, the
Tyler Maine
, entered an area of high gasoline vapor density while en route to the collision site, and that a single spark from an electrical malfunction aboard the destroyer may have set advance sections of the slick ablaze. The Coast Guard has said it will release more details as they become available.”