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 Hint, 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 Hint, '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?'
'Not a chance,' replied Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe.
10
Admiral George Morris left the White House right after lunch, without his personal assistant. Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe was required by the National Security Adviser for a brainstorming session, to think and, essentially, to play war games.
On a large computer screen on the left-hand side of the office was a close-up chart of the entire area of southern Alaska, the coastline west to east, from the Aleutians all the way around to the Queen Charlotte Islands, passing the Cooke Inlet, Prince William Sound, and Yakutat Bay. The route of the Alaska Bi-Coastal Energy Transfer pipeline was marked in thick black against the light blue tone of the inshore ocean.
Vice Admiral Morgan, however, was not quite ready to delve into the main thrust of his investigation. Right now he was grilling Jimmy Ramshawe for every last contact he may have had with any foreign submarine in the past two years.
Jimmy was telling him about Old Razormouth, and how he took that to be a code name for a Russian Barracuda. He told Arnold about that message, OLD RAZORMOUTH 60 °CONFIRMED. And he told him how the U.S. SOSUS men in South Wales had briefly picked up the transient engine lines of a similar Sierra I in the Atlantic, off the west coast of Ireland, on February 7.
And he mentioned how Rear Admiral Morris had asked Moscow for an explanation. And how they had both judged the reply to be polite and helpful, but evasive.
'Rankov?' growled the Admiral.
'Yes, sir.'
'Lying Russian bastard,' added Arnold.
'Anyway, sir, I did check on the Barracuda program and we have no record of a second hull ever being operational. Hull K-239, the Tula, was always with the Northern Fleet, and we then tracked it, last summer, along the north coast of Siberia — an obvious transfer to the Pacific Fleet. Admiral Rankov confirmed that himself. Then we saw it leave Petropavlovsk and turn south.'
'Do we know they completed the second hull?'
'No, sir. Not really. There is a slightly shaky report that it was launched. But we have no record of it ever going to sea. It was reported laid-up, in a covered dry dock, out of commission, in the Northern Fleet at Araguba back in the early 1990s. That's the last we heard.'
'Guess they couldn't afford to run 'em. They were expensive ships.'
'There was never much doubt about that, sir. The Russians canceled the class, and laid one hull up. They never made a secret about that. It was obvious.'
'But we still don't know what submarine the guys heard off the coast of Ireland?'
'No, sir. We never got a handle on that.'
'And neither do we know what submarine hit the trawl nets on the goddamned sushi ship off Petropavlovsk?'
'Must have been the Barracuda. But no, sir. Nothing confirmed.'
'Well, well,' said Vice Admiral Morgan. 'Who plays games with us, Jimmy? Very big, very destructive games, eh?'
'I'm not sure, sir. But I got a creepy feeling Old Razormouth is somehow right in the bloody thick of it.'
'I would not disagree with that, Jimmy. Not at all.' And with that, the Admiral stood up and walked over to the chart, and with the touch of a couple of keys, he described a big seaward arc one thousand miles out from the port of Valdez. It was a long arc, extending southwest to southeast, starting way down, off the Alaskan Peninsula, and slicing across the Gulf to the southern half of Graham Island.
'If he exists, Jimmy, he's somewhere in there,' said Arnold. 'At least he was in the very early hours of yesterday morning. Christ knows where he is now.'
'Why yesterday, sir? The pipeline ruptured early today.'
'Jimmy, if you and I were going to blow a big hole in an oil pipeline, or a ship, or any underwater target, and we were using modern high explosives, we certainly would not wish to be anywhere near when the charge
