Barracuda 945 (40 page)

“Meanwhile, we better keep a tight lid on this. We can’t tell the populace someone is trying to wipe us out. Make certain no one releases anything, and I’ll have the President make a short national broadcast later tonight…just expressing his regrets at the terrible accident in Alaska. That way we’ll take the sting out of it. The Press won’t catch on till someone tells ’em. And no one better do that. Yet.

“George, be at my office tomorrow morning 0600. Bring Ramshawe. Does he know about the missile sightings?”

“Sure does. He told me.”

“Fluky little bastard. Tell him not to be late.”

Morgan carefully drafted the text of the President’s broadcast, then called the White House to tell the Press Officer how to handle it and what to tell the man in the Oval Office.

Submitted by anyone else, this would have taken several drafts and a committee of God knows how many people to write and rewrite, suggest and resuggest, criticize and recriticize. The fact that not one of these literary minnows could come within a
bull’s roar of writing anything one-tenth as good as the original was not considered relevant.

Even the great Ronald Reagan had a White House plagued by these fourth-raters, trying to look thoughtful, and mostly failing. The wondrous political writer Peggy Noonan, a talent of genuine stature, revealed in her book,
When Character Was King,
they were known as the Three Blind Mice. She once observed, in hysterical detail, precisely how they would have rewritten Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

It was as well they were not in residence during the reign of Admiral Arnold Morgan, who had all of the flinty, idealistic, conservative character of President Reagan, the same selfless regard for what was right for the country, and much more capacity to be flagrantly rude to people whenever he felt so inclined.

The Three Blind Mice would have lasted about ten minutes with Admiral Morgan on the prowl. On one occasion when the duty Press Officer did venture to tamper with a draft speech the Admiral had penned for the President, Arnold sent for him, tossed the offending sheets of paper into the bin, and growled:

“When I write something, with all the implications of National Security involved, don’t ever again dare to change one word of it. What I write, is what I mean. You don’t like it, get another job. Join a fucking poetry society. Just remember, there’s a thousand goddamned writers around, but not one of them—NOT ONE, hear me?—NOT ONE understands what to do, like I understand what to do. That’s all.”

That particular Press Officer, not the head of the department, was in shock when he left. And his mauling in the lair of the National Security Adviser became legend among the writers. No one had ever wanted to tangle with Admiral Morgan again.

On this Sunday evening, when he told the Press Officer his requirements, the only words he heard were, “Yes, sir. White House Press Room, 2100. No questions afterward.”

“Correct,” said Admiral Morgan, banging down the phone, without saying good-bye.

Thereafter, his mood mellowed somewhat, despite the circumstances. He and Kathy always had dinner together at home on
Sunday night. They started with a couple of glasses of champagne. Then, with their main course, drank the best bottle of wine Admiral Morgan could lay hands on.

Tonight Kathy had prepared roast beef, and Arnold had opened, warming by the fire, a bottle of superb Burgundy, 1997 Corton Rouge, a Grand Cru from one of France’s historic Domaines, the Bonneau du Martray. Eleven years old, from a great vintage, the wine was another recommended by Harcourt Travis, the Secretary of State, connoisseur of the French grape, wine adviser to the National Security Adviser.

The Admiral poured two glasses and tasted his before he carved the beef. Then he handed one to Kathy and kissed her, asking her, as he did every Sunday evening, if they were to be married this week.

Her reply varied no more than the question. “Only,” said Kathy, “if you resign from the White House and allow us to spend carefree years together without you trying to run the world.”

“Guess we’ll have to hold off for another week, then,” he said. “Otherwise, there’s not going to be a light left on in the country, no oil whatsoever coming out of Alaska, and the goddamned Chinese running off with all the crude in the Middle East.”

For a moment, Kathy O’Brien looked pensive. “Do you really think,” she said, “that someone actually hit that oil terminus in Valdez?”

“Honey, I know full well someone hit it,” he replied. “Hit it good and hard, blew up and incinerated Christ knows how many acres of stored fuel, in two places, with guided missiles, which two witnesses saw going in. They were fired from a submarine that somehow crossed one of the narrowest parts of the Pacific Ocean, into either the Gulf of Alaska or the Bering Sea.”

“How come you don’t even know which ocean the missiles were fired from?”

“Because that’s the nature of SLCMs,” he said unhelpfully.

“What’s an SLCM?” she asked.

“Submerged launch cruise missile. Flies itself. Steers itself. Finds its own target. All preprogrammed. It’s just about the trickiest
weapon in the world because it launches suddenly, from out of an ocean. From a launch pad which seemingly does not exist.”

“Well, if it’s caught on radar, you’d surely know where it’s come from, roughly?” said Kathy.

“And therein lies the problem,” said Vice Admiral Morgan, archly. “Among the many secrets our last Democratic Government somehow allowed the Chinese to get their hands on, was a brilliant preprogrammed flight direction system that allows these missiles to make whatever course you want ’em to make.

“Let’s say you gotta target a thousand miles away to the northeast. You can make one of these missiles go right round it, swinging north a hundred miles early, then heading east, then homing in on its quarry, flying due south, right out of the north. At that point, no one knows where the hell it’s come from.

“The final flight path is irrelevant. It just came from nowhere. So in this case, you can only stick the point of your compasses into Valdez and describe a circle to about 1,200 miles and anywhere there’s ocean more than 300 feet deep, inside your circle, is a place a submarine could have launched from. Right here, on this enchanted Sunday evening, we’re looking at around a zillion square miles.”

Arnold sipped his Burgundy.

“Well, my darling,” said Kathy, “you don’t seem overanxious to send out a posse to find him.”

“No point. You can’t search that big an area. All you can do is get your defenses and surveillance systems on high alert, and wait for the son of a bitch to make a mistake. As he will.”

“What about refueling? Won’t someone have to come and deliver him some gas?”

“That, Ms. O’Brien, is what really worries me. He may not have to.”

“Oh, does the submarine run on fresh air?”

“No. Water.”

At which time Arnold spent ten minutes explaining to his fiancée the principles of a nuclear submarine, how its reactor just goes on working, how it can stay underwater for years, if necessary.
How it’s the goddamned sneakiest little son of a bitch ever invented, and every time we run into a major problem, I look for an enemy submarine.

“Wow,” said Kathy. “You mean it’s possible there actually could be an enemy submarine, lurking off our coast?”

“I’m afraid it is. But the little bastard might already be chugging its way back over the Pacific Ocean,” he replied.

“To which country, though?” she persisted.

“If I knew that, life would be a great deal easier,” rasped the Admiral.

In fact, it did not get any easier at all. Arnold and Kathy retired to bed at around ten o’clock, since he had to be up and on his way by half past five. And while they slept, an appalling catastrophe happened on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Alaska.

At precisely 11:35
P
.
M
. (2:35
A
.
M
. Eastern time), two simultaneous, muffled underwater explosions breached the biggest oil pipeline in the United States. Right inside the entrance to the Hecate Strait. In the pitch dark, crude oil began to pump out into the ocean, millions of gallons, and no one could see it. And it pumped for seven hours, until someone did see it, a Canadian fishing boat at first light.

A breach in any oil pipeline is bad. Back in 2001, a disen-chanted and very drunk Alaskan fired a .338 caliber hunting rifle into the overland pipeline at point-blank range, punctured it with one bullet, and caused a spillage of 300,000 gallons of crude over a two-acre area.

Several fathoms below the surface of the ocean, out near the Overfall Shoal, the situation was one hundred times worse. The fires in Valdez had caused thousands of barrels to be diverted down the new pipeline, causing a marked increase in the pressure.

All through the night the massive pumping station in Yakutat Bay was driving tons and tons of oil into the pipe and it was all thundering out into the ocean, over 500 miles away, causing an ecological disaster of satanic proportions. It was also the beginning of a stark and terrifying shortage at the new refinery in Grays Harbor.

By dawn, the Coast Guard had alerted everyone, and the slick was ten miles long, already washing on the rocky shores of Graham Island. The Canadian Government, always skeptical and knee-jerk jumpy toward any environmental problem, was beside itself with indignation.

CNN was on the air in Washington by 10
A
.
M
., but the radio news bulletins were earlier. Meantime, there were tugs, frogmen, oil pipeline emergency crews, support vessels, cranes, and divers hurtling toward the shallows north of the Overfall Shoal from where the pumping oil seemed to emanate.

From the Gulf coast of Texas, crews of disaster specialists were preparing to fly north. Many of them were veterans from the 1991 Gulf War, men who had worked on the massive grid of oil fires in the Kuwaiti desert, ignited by Saddam Hussein once he realized all was lost. These repair crews would bring with them the cutting edge of modern disaster technology. Anything to stop the flow.

Obviously, valves would be turned off, but in an undersea pipeline, these are far apart, and several miles of oil could just go right on leaking into the ocean.

By the time Admirals Morgan and Morris and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe were briefed on the scale of the disaster, the media already had experts on the airwaves explaining what had happened.

It was Professor Jethro Flint, a mining and energy expert from the University of Colorado, who was the most lucid. Answering questions from a CNN news reporter he stated:

“The fires in the Valdez terminus have plainly shut down the entire Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Nothing is currently flowing south through the line from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. But, back in the north, the oil is still flowing into the pumping station from the deep wells, which are active in a very wide area up there.”

The professor paused. “What to do with the extra capacity?” he said. “Since the crude can’t go where it always goes, down the TAPS route, and it’s gotta go somewhere.”

Where, sir? Where will it go?

“That oil,” replied Professor Flint, “will be diverted down the
new south-running oil freeway, the Alaska Bi-Coastal Energy Transfer, direct to Yakutat. And there they will increase the traffic flow, pumping much more crude into the underwater system.”

Will that matter, sir?

“It will matter to the extent they will never have tested that pipeline with those kind of real-life pressures. And when you subject something to stresses it’s never undergone before, it can rupture. And in my view, that’s what this has done. They’ve overloaded the pipeline, somewhat thoughtlessly, and it’s come unraveled.”

That was sufficient to send afternoon newspaper editors and media newsmen into a collective dance of death, preparing headlines such as
OIL EXECS BLAMED FOR ALASKA PIPELINE DISASTER
…
ALASKA PIPELINE—ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN
…
PIPELINE TESTING SNAFU—ACCIDENT PREDICTABLE
…
PIPELINE ACCIDENT CAUSED BY OVERLOAD.

Admirals Morgan and Morris watched the drama unfold with Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe. The three of them had lunch together in the White House, poring over the charts, studying the distances, trying to work out from where a rogue submarine might have unleashed a salvo of missiles at Valdez, and then blown up the pipeline.

“I’ll say one thing,” said Vice Admiral Morgan. “The media, for once in their miserable fucking lives, are being helpful. They keep saying ‘accident’ and that’s what we want. Not just to calm the populace, but so no word gets out we’re suspicious.

“Once someone realizes we’re on the case, our chances of finding out what the hell’s going on get diminished by fifty percent.”

“You’re not yet ready to start ordering a search?” asked George Morris.

“No. Not without some evidence there is a definite submarine out there. Right now we’re chasing our tails, but I hope not for long.”

“Do you think there’s any possibility, this is all just a huge accident?” said George.

“Not a chance,” snapped Arnie. “How about you, Jimmy?”