'Harry!' he said. 'Did you see that? A fucking UFO just flew straight over mah pecker.'
'What are you talking about?' replied Harry, swaying but still aiming steadily into the wilderness.
'I just saw a UFO. Straight up there. Flew over us. I saw it, heard it. Honest. Like something from that movie — what was it? — Close Encounters of the Most Fucking Awful Kind.'
'Never heard of that movie,' said Harry, distractedly.
'Harry. I'm telling you. I just saw a fucking spaceship fly straight over us.'
'You're hal-lu-ci-na-tat-ing.'
'I'M NOT! Hey, look, Christ! There's another one. Look over there. To the right,' he added, pointing left.
Harry stared up the wrong way. But Cal was still yelling, 'LOOK! LOOK! LOOK! UP THERE… THAT LIGHT IN THE SKY… SHIT! IS THAT BABY MOVING…!'
Harry turned and looked left. And he saw it too. 'Christ! What is it?'
'It's a UFO, whaddya think it is?'
'What's a UFO?' said Harry, slurring his words.
'Unidentifiable fucking object in the sky, asshole,' said Cal.
'You can't spell,' grunted Harry. 'It was just a regular plane, maybe a little late for something.'
'You ever see a regular plane go that fast, that low? Jesus Christ, I could hear it swishing through the air. Ain't never heard nothin' like that before. Nossir.'
The oil terminus of Valdez lies at the end of a twenty-four-mile-long deepwater fiord in the northeastern corner of Prince William Sound. It is beautifully sheltered, standing in the seaward foothills of the 5,000-foot-high Mount Hogan, located northwest of the giant clusters of storage tanks.
These great steel structures, thirty of them, glinting in the starlight of this bitterly cold February night, stood in groups of four and six, all over the terminus, each one thirty feet high and sixty feet across. They are essentially connected at one end to the inflowing crude pipeline from the Prudhoe Bay, and at the other to a further galaxy of pipelines stretching only a few hundred feet, but leading out to the shipping berths where the world's largest tankers wait in line, to fill up and then head south. Valdez is the most northerly ice-free port in the Western Hemisphere.
The Valdez terminal never sleeps, and neither do the waters of Prince William Sound freeze. The crude keeps right on flowing, summer and winter, seven days a week, night and day. The natural protective geography of the place is the result of modern thinking, because the entire city of Valdez was constructed after 1964, when the Good Friday Earthquake practically wiped the place out, including many citizens.
The oil terminus itself was completed in 1977 at a cost of $9 billion, and the project made Valdez a rich city, its economy glittering behind the huge taxes paid out by the oil companies. Half the town worked in the local oil industry, and everyone knew the value of the Valdez goose, which laid eggs of the purest black gold.
Within hours of the September 11 catastrophe, in faraway New York, the Valdez city fathers were calling for additional radar, and indeed sonar, for their priceless port. They got them too, double-quick, all aimed, across, above and through the water. But all aimed, essentially south, to the area of potential danger. Nothing was aimed at the desolate, freezing, snowbound mountain range to the north, where human life is just about impossible during the winter months.
But it was from out of the north that Ravi and Shakira's missiles were coming, ripping through the night, frightening the life out of one extremely drunk Alaskan, who nonetheless made a mental note that some kind of a spaceship had just flown directly over his pecker.
The first missile came flashing over Mount Hogan's western heights at around 1:30 in the morning. It leveled off over the descending ground, and came scything through the icy air, pointing downward at an angle of almost forty-five degrees.
It hit Tank 18 head-on, with a colossal explosion, which detonated the adjacent Tank 17, which in turn blew Tanks 15 and 16 to smithereens. Almost a million gallons of crude oil were blasted by the incinerating heat, hit flashpoint in under two seconds, and a scarlet-black mushroom of fire rumbled into the air 200 feet high.
Just then, the second missile came in, slamming home, slightly to the right of the blaze, and blew to high heaven the small gas-refining plant and the entire control section of the terminus.
Missile Three shrieked through the smoke and devastation and knocked Tank 14 flat, setting fire to Tanks 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. For whatever reason, the fire was less volatile, but was somehow even hotter, and it blew the big main pipeline out to Berth 4, where the Exxon Prince was taking on thousands of gallons of crude being pumped right now into its two for'ard holding tanks.
The incinerating flame ripped across the jetties like a massive length of detcord, slower but bigger. And before the astonished eyes of the ship's master, a thunderous explosion, caused by the vast amount of inflammable gas in the tanks, blew the entire bow of the 400,000-ton tanker clean off the front of his ship.
Nineteen seconds later, Missile Four came spearing through the smoke and devastation of the terminus and crashed into the middle of Tanks 1 to 6, four of which were only half full of crude, but were loaded with volatile gasses, and went up like an atomic bomb. The searing explosion was visible in the night sky for fifteen miles to the south. And the fire lit up the sleeping city of Valdez.
By some miracle, no one on the burning tanker was injured, mainly because of its size. Every one of the crew was in quarters way back in the stern of the ship, close to the bridge, the oil control room, and the engine room. The explosion up for'ard had taken place almost 400 yards from anyone. The crew would have to abandon ship, fast, but even when the tanker finally settled on the bottom, there would still be the equivalent of a six-story building jutting out of the water.
Meanwhile, General Rashood's second salvo of four RADUGAs was well on its way, fanned out two miles apart, whipping through the night skies over central Alaska, again traveling the precise same final track, north to south. Eight minutes after the Exxon Prince had blown up, the final four Russian cruises slammed into the gigantic fuel farm above the city — lines of vast storage tanks which, when full, hold up to nine million barrels of crude oil piped from the North Slope.
Right now, they were full, and the tanks split assunder, unleashing a burning river of oil onto the hillside. Crude needs ferocious heat to ignite, and those four missiles provided that heat in spades. People in the town, awakened by the gigantic explosions at the main terminus, would later describe a succession of 'kinda soft' explosions up the hill. Not the KERBAM! of a bomb. More a series of WHOOOOSH! sounds, like that from a petrol- sprinkled bonfire when the first light is thrown in.
The fuel farm fire above the city was terrifying, because people thought it would rage downhill and set fire to the entire town. But the crude was burning at such a rate, and at such heat, it scarcely moved, settling quickly into a contained twenty-acre inferno, roaring and crackling, destroying every last gallon of Alaskan crude on the shores of Prince William Sound.
No one had even the first idea what had happened. Nor how it happened. Certainly not why it happened. The 4,000 citizens of Valdez knew only that the great terminus, and all the oil in it, owned and operated by Amoco, BP, and Phillips Petroleum, was gone. The entire place was on fire, and there had been, plainly, a disaster on a monumental scale.
There had been just a skeleton night staff of three in the oil control area — two of whom were luckily having coffee in a mess room 300 yards away — and all communications from the Terminus were down. But the scale of this blaze was so great you didn't need a telephone. A passing huskie could have told you the oil port was on fire.
Dick Saunders, the local stringer for the Anchorage Daily News, was the first reporter on the case, fifteen minutes after the last missile plowed into the fuel farm. He had missed the last edition of the newspaper by a long way, but he nevertheless called the night desk in Anchorage and told a tired, bored-sounding editor that the entire port of Valdez was on fire and right now they were facing the total destruction of the Alaskan economy.
This definitely stopped the night editor from being bored, and he in turn hit the wire to his brother, who worked the-night shift at KBBI, the public radio station over in the little port of Homer on the Cook Inlet. Eight minutes later the story was out, and every late-night radio station in Alaska was on the phone to Valdez, verifying the scale of the disaster. The broadcasters were in full cry by 2:30 a.m. and CNN was out nationally with the drama onscreen by 3 a.m. (Pacific time).
By 4 a.m. (7 a.m. on the East Coast), the National Security Agency was calling key operatives into the Fort Meade Headquarters, the FBI was dispatching West Coast staff in a private military jet from San Diego to Anchorage, the White House was informed, the President was headed for the Oval Office, and Vice Admiral Arnold
