'You've seen the Coast Guard surveillance reports?'
'Only the prelim. There's no record of any ship movement anywhere in Prince William Sound any time after 2300 the previous night… And that takes care of a lot of ocean… The bloody place is one hundred miles long, out to the one hundred-meter line.'
'Air traffic?'
'Not even a private aircraft after 2100.'
'Nonetheless, the oil guys must be thinking someone blew the holding tanks up?'
'They're not saying that, sir. At least not yet. But they must be thinking it. Let's face it, crude oil doesn't suddenly go off bang by itself, does it? And that bloody fuel farm has nothing anywhere near that would cause even a spark, never mind a twenty-acre inferno.'
'Hmmmm,' said the Admiral. 'No ships, no aircraft, no suspects, no apparent motive, no clues. Not much of a start to an investigation, eh, Jimmy?'
'No, sir. Not much at all.'
'Who was it said, When you have eliminated the impossible, only the truth remains?'
'Sherlock Holmes, sir. Front and center.'
Admiral Morgan laughed. 'What do you have to do around here to get a cup of coffee?'
'Oh, Christ. Sorry, sir. I'll fix it. The usual… black with buckshot?'
No one ever forgot Arnold Morgan's coffee requirements, honed during his years in nuclear submarines. No cream, just two or three little white sweetener pills. Buckshot, he called them.
'Right. Better get some coffee for the boss too. He'll be back in a moment. But before that I want to talk to you, so hurry up.'
Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe picked up the phone and ordered coffee for three, with hot English muffins, since it was now after eight in the morning and the two Admirals had been up half the night.
He replaced the receiver, then turned back to the President's National Security Adviser. 'Lay it on me, sir. What do you need?'
'Jimmy, in the absence of any further evidence to the contrary, we'd better face up to the fact that some bastard just blew up the biggest oil terminus in the United States.'
'Yes, sir.'
'The total impossibility of an attack by sea or air means that whoever did it must have escaped by land. That means the range of mountains right behind Valdez, correct?'
'Yes, sir. The Coast Guard will be combing the area with three helicopters by first light in about one hour. I've already spoken to them.'
'Do you think it likely that a bunch of crazed terrorists crept through the snow and ice, down Mount Hogan, and put a few bombs in the oil storage area?'
'No, sir. And even if they did, they'd get caught pretty sharpish this morning. The place is gonna be alive with helicopters, and anyone making a getaway will be leaving footprints in the snow all over the bloody wilderness, right, sir?'
'Precisely. The chances are nothing will be found. So what does that leave?'
'Sabotage,' said Jimmy. 'By a local person, or persons. Or an enemy attack with at least two missiles, which no one saw.'
'Fired from where, Jimmy?'
'Well, not from the land. Not from the air. And not from a surface ship.'
'Why not from the land?'
'Have you seen the size of those storage tanks, sir? And the area that's burning? You couldn't cause that much catastrophe with a handheld missile like a Stinger. If the fires were caused by a missile strike, it was a big, highly explosive, unbelievably accurate guided weapon. Sophisticated military. Nothing less. You don't keep that kind of stuff in a bloody cave.'
'And you can't fire that kind of stuff from a bloody cave,' said the Vice Admiral. 'There is only one place from which you can fire that kind of stuff. It's known as a warship.'
'And there wasn't one of them within hundreds of miles, sir.
'Not one that we could see, James. Not one we could see.'
Ramshawe smiled his lopsided Aussie grin. 'I was just thinking you might get around to that, sir,' he said.
'Likewise,' replied Arnold Morgan. 'And this is my real question… When I arrived in this office you were too preoccupied to care whether it was me, the President of the United States, or Jesus Christ. Whatever you were working on was extremely important to you. What was it?'
'Sir, I don't want to be accused of irrelevance. Not on a day like this.'
'Jimmy,' said Admiral Morgan, walking across to the window and staring out over the gigantic parking lot, 'what was it?'
'Well, sir. I arrived at the conclusion that if the culprit was a salvo of big guided missiles, they must have been unleashed from a warship, one that we somehow couldn't see.
'I've actually been here all night, sir, because I've been working on a minor problem since yesterday evening… It keeps running through my mind. I've pulled a file up in hard copy, and I've been reading it carefully. When the fires broke out, and the guys on the radio kept saying it could not have happened, I found myself putting two and two together and making about three hundred ninety-five.'
'I know the feeling,' said Arnold. 'Tell me the minor problem.'
'OK… lemme get these papers in order… Right… On February twenty-first, our Naval attache in the Tokyo Embassy receives an inquiry from the Japanese Government about U.S. submarine patrols off the Kamchatka Peninsula.
In particular, about patrols off the Bay of Avacinskiy, you know, sir, that godforsaken place in front of Petropavlovsk?'
'Got it. Go on.'
'Well, our man in Tokyo makes a few inquiries and discovers no American submarine has been on patrol in the Western Pacific for at least three months. Nothing nearer than the southern waters of the Aleutians. But being a careful and cunning diplomat, he doesn't tell this to the old Japanese. He decides to withhold all information until he finds out why the hell they want to know.'
'Good man,' said Arnold. 'Rear Admiral Whitehouse, I believe?'
'That's him, sir,' said Jimmy, long accustomed to Arnold Morgan's encyclopedic memory. 'He tells the Japanese Government they can count on full U.S. cooperation, but first they have to explain why they want classified Naval information. We don't just bandy this stuff around, right?
'Anyway, he gets what he asks for. The Japanese Ministry tells him they have received a very large claim for compensation from the master of a one thousand five hundred-ton trawler out of Ishinomaki, that's Honshu. The Japs not only tell him, they enclose full, signed affidavits from Captain Kousei Kuno and his senior crew members, who all claim they were damned nearly dragged to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by a submarine that charged straight into their trawl net.'
'What made them think we were the prime suspects?'
'That's the thing, sir. They didn't. They went straight to the Russians, and got a surprisingly fast and comprehensive reply. The Pacific Fleet Commander immediately cited a Sierra Class Barracuda nuclear boat that they said left Petropavlovsk early that very morning, 9 February, bound for the South China Sea.
'Their memorandum said the ship had turned south, immediately beyond their restricted area, outside the bay, and could not possibly have collided with any fishing boat some fifteen or twenty miles north of the Petropavlovsk area. And it just so happens I've been watching that particular ship for several months — followed it on the satellite all the way from Murmansk — and right here, sir, I have a dated photograph.'
He handed the Admiral a black-and-white ten-by-eight-inch print. 'See that, sir — it did leave Petropavlovsk on that day, very early because we take satellite photographs at around 0730. And it did turn south — there it is, right there, sir. Check the GPS. It really was exactly where and when they said it was.'
'Then what did the Japanese do?'
'They checked with the Chinese, who told them they have not had a submarine in that area for more than six months. Nothing beyond the Yellow Sea.'
