starved of product and out of action, but there was no fuel oil running south to feed the biggest power station in California, Lompoc, custom built to cope easily and exclusively with the power demands of the gigantic urban sprawls of both San Francisco and Los Angeles.
For once in their lives, the media had it absolutely right, putting two and two together to make a precise and pristine four, rather than five, or eighty-seven.
What they did not know was a truth more chilling than anything in the imagination of even their most erratic editors. Out there, somewhere in the eastern Pacific, was a seasoned, dazzling Special Forces battle Commander leading a group of highly trained Islamic fanatics in a brilliantly efficient nuclear submarine, which appeared capable of striking the United States at will. And may not be finished yet.
At 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, Vice Admiral Morgan read with equanimity Jimmy Ramshawe's note about the repairs on the pipeline. Every word confirmed what he already believed, knew. That there was someone out there, packing a serious wallop, with another 'X-minus' possible weapons in his magazine. And neither he, Arnold, nor any of the top military brains in the U.S. Armed Forces had the slightest idea how to proceed.
The Admiral was bewildered, along with the rest of them. He had never felt so vulnerable. In his mind, he knew that their enemy was virtually undetectable. The world was indeed the bastard's oyster; he could do anything.
All previous run-ins with terrorists paled before this. Even when the massed maniacs of Al-Qaeda had pranced about announcing they would fight to the death, they had at least presented a target somewhere in the remote hills of Afghanistan. It was difficult, but nonetheless tangible, and well within the massive capability of the U.S. military, which proceeded to pulverize their foe.
'But this,' growled the Admiral. 'This is fucking preposterous. I don't know if our enemy is Russia, China, or one of the towel-head states. But I do know this is terrorism, the most modern terrorism, and there is NO defense against it, because we don't know where it's coming from… or who is committing it.'
He had, of course, entirely ignored the point that this was also his own favorite type of warfare, to slam an opponent to the ground, kick him to death if necessary, and then act as if it was nothing whatsoever to do with America. Who me? Nah. Sorry, pal, don't know anything about it. Can't help this time. Stay in touch.
Right now he had never been in such a dilemma. Alan Dickson had the Pacific Fleet on full alert. Two submarines coming in off patrol were watching and listening for any submarine from any nation that might be on the loose. But Arnold held out little hope. If he's out there, and he's as goddamned brilliant as I think he is, the West Coast needs a hard hat and a goddamned lotta luck. I just hope to Christ he doesn't go for the Navy Base in San Diego.
He knew it would be futile to try to gain any information on the movement of any Chinese warships. The Beijing military were not hostile, but they were not friendly to the United States either. And they seemed to operate independently from their own government.
Twice in the past few years there had been a major standoff involving U.S. servicemen being held in Chinese military confinement after sorties in the South China Sea. And the recent uproar over Taiwan had done nothing for Sino-U.S. relations.
Alternately, Russia was saying nothing. And the United States was, of course, unable, as ever, to have any proper rapport with the Islamic States, the atmosphere being altogether too fraught, too untrusting.
Admiral Morgan paced his office. A new communique from the Washington State Environmental Protection Agency suggested the still-leaking pipeline had at least been shut down three miles back from the breach. But sea conditions were so bad it would be several days before they could begin their attempt to raise the fractured section and conduct the repairs.
In California, the Governor was conducting a daylong, highly classified meeting in Sacramento, the state capital, attended only by those officials who understood the razor's edge upon which their electricity supplies now rested. Jack Smith, the President's Energy Secretary, had flown in on Air Force II from Washington, D.C., and was listening intently as officials from the Lompoc power station outlined the situation at the newest, most efficient electricity plant in the United States.
Built to take the heat off the rest of California's 1,023 major power stations (one-tenth of a megawatt or larger), Lompoc operated solely on government-subsidized, inexpensive refined fuel oil coming out of Grays Harbor. Transportation to the power station was strictly railroad, straight out of Washington State, down the Union Pacific's permanent way to San Francisco, and then along the valley of the Salinas River to the scenic peninsula, where the railroad starts to hug the coast.
Lompoc lies six miles inland, right in that triangle-shaped peninsula, 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles, 240 miles south of San Francisco. Its nearest coastline forms the northern shore of the Santa Barbara Channel.
The Union Pacific Railroad runs all the way around that peninsula on its way down to Los Angeles, but there is a spur line into Lompoc, expanded in the year 2007 to run into the new power station, and form the life-giving artery to virtually all the electric power for San Francisco and Los Angeles.
According to the best calculations, the Lompoc power station was sufficiently well supplied to keep pumping out electricity for three more weeks, possibly four. The problem was, it was not on a seaward terminus where tankers could bring in emergency supplies, if necessary, from the Gulf of Mexico.
It was simply not geared for road transportation to bring in refined fuel oil. Lompoc and the railroad were bound together, and right now the last two tanker freight trains were rumbling south, one just north of Monterey, the other west of San Luis Obispo, forty miles north of the power station. Thanks to General Rashood, there would, of course, be no more deliveries in the forseeable future.
Right now it looked almost impossible to hook up the massive Lompoc outward power lines to the statewide electricity grid. At least it looked impossible to achieve in under four months.
Lompoc had been built as a separate entity, to function alone, ensuring that the state's two giant commercial centers could keep running, no matter how many blackouts and brownouts afflicted the rest of the state. Equally, Lompoc's very existence considerably reduced the pressure on all of the other California power stations, which had been devoid of shortages for several weeks.
With no refined fuel oil from Alaska, the only solution had to be road transportation. The state of California could spare hardly anything itself without putting the lights out in several cities, so oil would have to come from the Gulf, through the Panama Canal, and up the West Coast into the great artificial harbor of Los Angeles, a ponderous journey of close to 4,500 miles… assuming no delays in the canal, almost two weeks.
The Governor's emergency conference in Sacramento was racking its collective brain trying to find solutions. But there were no solutions, only ways to try and paper over the cracks, and to keep the lights on, more or less constantly, until the Alaska and Grays Harbor catastrophes were repaired. If the power station at Lompoc failed, and the great cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles went dark, it would be a national calamity of gigantic proportions.
It would certainly bring down the California Governor, and it could threaten the Republican Administration in Washington, where the GOP would be accused of pushing forward with vast moneymaking programs mostly beneficial to big oil companies, with no thought whatsoever to solutions, if the grand schemes failed.
There had been, of course, many citizens of Lompoc and its environs who had been vehemently opposed to the power station right from the start. The beautiful Lompoc Valley is known as the Valley of Flowers, thanks to its century-old flower seed industry, and the very idea of a power station in the middle of all that floral splendor had caused a political battle that raged for more than a year.
Only the intervention of the military, at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base, had finally pushed the power plant through. Vandenberg was the first missile base of the U.S. Air Force. The immediate closing of the West Shuttle Program after the Challenger crash at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had caused a major recession in Lompoc. But now, in 2008, more than twenty years later, they were preparing for the California Spaceport, and there were major advantages to having a huge power station close by, not the least of which was the sharing of a big refined fuel terminal right on the Union Pacific Railroad.
The environtmental lobby still opposed it — all of it — and continued to hurl invectives at 'money-grubbing industrialists and politicians' hell-bent on profits at all costs, never mind the destruction of the Valley of Flowers.
Their objections had a plaintive ring of truth to them, but none of them were true, or justified. The President's entire Energy Program, masterminded by Jack Smith and his staff, was in fact a work of great brilliance, dispelling at a stroke America's reliance on Arab oil.
