Charon's Landing, page 52
“SEALs, we go in thirty seconds,” Krutchfield called quietly to his team. “Captain Hauser, ease us forward by about twenty feet, and when I yell out, bring us back abeam and put us right against her side.”
Hauser acknowledged the order by grabbing the throttles. Instantly, the attack boat pulled ahead of the cruiser, cutting through the wedge of water that peeled off her bow. Mercer waved again but got no response.
The timing of the SEAL commandos was uncanny. Krutchfield hadn’t even shouted when the boat’s regular helmsman bumped Hauser from the conn and burped the engines, bringing them back alongside the weathered cabin cruiser. The three men on the pleasure boat’s deck turned in unison as they started to overtake the odd-looking craft that had just passed them. But by the time they suspected anything was amiss, three of the SEALs had appeared over the gunwale and opened fire while Krutchfield and another commando leaped the narrow gap between the two speeding craft.
The H&K MP-5s the SEALs carried whined like buzz saws, pouring a hundred rounds into the cruiser in just a few seconds, blowing off pieces of fiberglass and worn woodwork, dicing the three men at the controls. There was a steady pulse of return fire from the boat’s lower cabin, the distinctive chattering crash of an AK-47. Krutchfield’s partner was caught halfway through his leap to the cruiser, the Russian-manufactured weapon stitching across his Kevlar body armor. None of the bullets pierced the vest’s ballistic material, but the hydrostatic shock tossed him into the empty space between the boats, his body vanishing in the clouds of cordite smoke that fouled the air. He hit the water with a bone-breaking splash, but his scream went unheard as the running battle continued.
Another burst from the SEALs tore a jagged hole in the hull around the porthole where the shots had originated. There was a brief scream piercing the sounds of automatic fire, and suddenly it was over. Krutchfield was at the controls of the cruiser, standing proud in an ankle-deep mire of blood and shattered bodies. He cut the engines at the same time as his helmsman slowed the assault boat, both craft hissing to a slow crawl, the echoing sounds of the battle dying away.
Mercer was the first from the SEAL boat onto the cabin cruiser, whose name he saw was Happyhour, with Hauser only a breath behind him. Krutchfield’s other two SEALs swarmed over next, like extras in a pirate movie, their eyes bright with battle lust, their gun barrels hot from the fray. The helmsman arced the assault boat away from the Happyhour, carving a tight crescent in the Strait to pick up their fallen comrade, the powerful motors bellowing like caged animals as he gave them their head. While Krutchfield heaved bodies over the side of the captured boat, his two teammates ducked down the narrow steps to the belowdeck cabin. By the time Krutchfield had finished, they were back on the bridge. One of them, a compact Hispanic with a gap where one of his teeth had been, was wiping his knife against a napkin he’d taken from the galley. Red smears bloomed from the blade’s passage.
“There were two of them, jefe,” he remarked casually, slipping the blade back into its inverted scabbard on his combat harness.
“Shit,” Krutchfield exclaimed. He turned to look over his shoulder at the distant wake of his boat.
There had been five terrorists on the boat. With one SEAL down in the water and the other out to get him, there were only three commandos on the Happyhour.
Mercer knew what the navy lieutenant was thinking and spoke before Krutchfield did something rash. “We don’t have time to wait for them,” he said. “JoAnn Riggs is expecting this boat in a couple of minutes. We don’t need to make her any more suspicious by being late. There were five men sent to pick her up. There are five of us, including Hauser and me.”
“Dr. Mercer, we’ve been trained for this type of sortie; it’s what we get paid for. I understand why you and Captain Hauser are here, but I can’t authorize you to board the Arctica until we have her secured.”
“We don’t have time to argue about this, Lieutenant. Let’s get going. We’ll discuss it on the way, but no matter what, we can’t wait here for your other men.” Mercer knew that Krutchfield would have no choice but to allow him to come along. They were going to need the extra firepower.
“Mercer, JoAnn Riggs would recognize me right away. I’d be more of a liability than an asset,” Hauser pointed out.
“I know. I just thought about that. How about if you follow us about five minutes after we board? We should have the area around the boarding ladder secured by then. Believe me, we’re going to need you if Riggs has already started to scuttle the ship. I don’t know anything about tankers.”
“I thought you said you worked for Alyeska?”
“No, I don’t. I’m here as a favor to Andy Lindstrom, the Chief of Operations. Kind of filling in, so to speak.”
“Oh, shit, we’re in trouble,” Hauser breathed.
“Tell me about it.” Mercer was staring over the bow of the racing cabin cruiser. A half mile ahead, the VLCC Petromax Arctica appeared, her one-hundred-sixty-foot-wide beam making her head-on profile look like a solid wall of preformed steel tucked against the north bank of the ten-mile-wide Juan de Fuca Strait.
While the sight of her unimaginable size was awe inspiring, Mercer couldn’t help but think she looked like a ghost ship.
Aboard the Petromax Arctica Juan de Fuca Strait, British Columbia
As the cities of Seattle and Vancouver expanded during the ’80s and ’90s, fueled by immigration from Asia and the technology companies that seemingly grew out of every garage and basement, great pains were taken to ensure that the pristine Pacific Northwest was left as virgin as possible. Unlike the megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, DC, that’s been spoiled forever by two hundred years of sprawl, the environs of Puget Sound were still beautiful rugged forests and mountains and clear cold waters that supported both commercial fishermen and the needs of the avid sportsmen. Wildlife flourished, especially in the Sound itself, where marine creatures from majestic whales to playful otters abounded. The crab beds around Seattle were legendary, teeming with the delicious crustaceans even after years of harvesting, and the national forests were perfect habitats for deer, beaver, and dozens of other woodland species. To all but the most vehement environmentalists, the area was the model of ecology and industry working together in productive harmony.
Where the sea rushes between Victoria Island and the mainland, a few miles from the city of Port Angeles, the VLCC Petromax Arctica hulked low in the water, her belly swollen by 200,000 tons of oil so her rails seemed only a few feet above the waves sliding against her. While tankers were not an uncommon sight in the Strait, one of the Arctica’s dimensions was. But more disturbing than her presence was the feathery tail of smoke leaking from her square funnel. Her engines were turning only enough for station’s keeping against the tide flowing into the Sound.
While the past quarter century is full of stories of supertanker accidents, the Exxon Valdez, the Amaco Cadiz, and the Torrey Canyon being the most famous, many of the giant vessels have been lost through storm or accident or mechanical fault. During a single month in 1969, three tankers of over two hundred thousand tons were lost or severely damaged, and few outside of the oil industry ever knew of these incidents. While the causes of disasters vary, it’s rare that a single fault can sink one of these behemoths. Many factors, from weather to a simple human mistake to a complete design flaw, are necessary to pull a supertanker under the waves. Not until the space shuttle has a single device possessed so many backup systems and fail-safes — all designed to prevent the type of disaster about to unfold in the waters leading to Puget Sound.
In Ivan Kerikov’s plan, the destruction of the tanker was to occur shortly after the cancellation of her sale to Southern Coasting and Lightering. Since the crippled ship could not make it as far south as San Francisco Bay, the plug had been pulled on the deal a few days early, a minor detail that only slightly altered the intended outcome of the operation. Captain Hauser’s valiant actions merely shifted the target city to Seattle. While not as sentimental as San Francisco, it was an equally fragile ecosystem that would suffer just as cruelly when the crude washed up on its coastlines.
JoAnn Riggs’ job now was to ensure that as much oil as possible was dumped into the sea, while making her actions appear accidental rather than intentional. With the ship’s crew shortly to be killed and the extraction boat on the way, there would be no witnesses and no physical evidence that the largest oil spill in history was an act of sabotage. The most conservative estimate predicted oil spreading from Bellingham to Everett, and the best-case scenario saw a slick covering a 174-mile stretch of coast from Vancouver to Tacoma, an area that included thousands of miles of irregular shoreline and numerous inlets, islands, and bays.
Giving the order to kill the remaining crewmen was a decision that gave JoAnn Riggs pause. It was an order that should have fallen to Captain Albrecht but now was her responsibility. While the million dollars that was to be her share for this operation would go a long way to assuaging her guilt, she was still reluctant to give Wolf the nod to do it.
Sensing her unease as they stood on the port side bridge wing, Wolf knew he would have to kill them without getting the direct order. There were so many murders in his past that a few more didn’t cause him undue concern. However, he did lose some respect for the woman who had executed the takeover of the tanker as if born to terrorism. As he turned to go, he took Riggs’ silence as a tacit approval. While Wolf would be doing the actual killing, the responsibility was still hers. Riggs gathered herself to finish what she had been paid to accomplish.
Max Johnston had made certain when the Petromax Arctica was built that she incorporated every automatic and systematic safety device to prevent her from ever spilling even a drop of her cargo. Therefore, to intentionally sink the vessel and make sure that crude poured from the hull in such volume that nothing could prevent it took the concerted effort of the entire terrorist cadre except for Wolf and one man he kept to assist him, each of them assigned a specific task and timed with military precision.
The great hull of the Arctica was segmented into eighteen separate tanks, a system used not only to prevent the entire cargo from being lost if she were ever holed but also to make the vessel much more stable in rough water. A complex system of valves and pumps connected the tanks, used mostly to keep an even keel when part of the cargo had been pumped off the ship. The computer that monitored the level of oil in each of the cavernous tanks prevented the ship from ever becoming unbalanced in even the roughest storms, compensating automatically to the conditions of the vessel and of the sea.
Riggs and her team had to take the computer off-line and manually operate the pumps, valves, and float cocks that controlled oil movement. The computer could not produce the conditions necessary for dumping her cargo — there were mechanical checks as well as those programmed into the system. Human hands, driven by greed or madness, would have to run many of the controls, opening them wide even as the computer was demanding they close. The machine’s binary morality put that of humans to shame.
The first part of their plan to dump the Arctica’s cargo was the sea suction inlet located at the stern of the vessel. This thirty-inch-diameter pipe, in conjunction with the Arctica’s three cargo pumps, was used to draw seawater into the tanks during cleaning and ballasting operations. To allow the cargo to drain from the hull out through the inlet, eight different valves of the double-segregated system had to be opened. Then, gravity would force the two hundred thousand tons of crude into the open sea. Perversely, the ship would rise in the water as its cargo discharged, increasing the pressure through the outlet and spraying oil in a two-hundred-foot jet when it cleared the waterline. Unless a salvage diver explored the tank control room after the ship had been scuttled and checked each of the valves, there would be no evidence of sabotage.
The second part of the plan involved temporarily removing the deck covers over several tanks and using the manifold system to flood the deck with oil. Once Riggs was ready to open the sea suction inlet, the covers would be replaced, again — to remove evidence of tampering. The crude would then be ignited as the remainder drained away. Spill response teams would waste precious time battling the flames, never realizing that much more significant damage had already been done in the pump room. Third, shaped explosive charges were to be detonated in the crawl spaces between the vessel’s double hulls, timed so that much of her oil would already be oozing toward shore when her bottom was blown out. If things went according to design, the reasons behind the sinking of the Petromax Arctica would remain a mystery.
Riggs waited in the pump control room while some members of her team were in the labyrinthine tangle of the inner hull spaces planting explosives and others removed the covers to six of the tanks. So far, the computer monitors showed that the system was nominal. The tanks were in perfect trim, the ratio of gases in the inert mixture that prevented the oil from ever catching fire was within the proper range.
Riggs had wanted to coordinate efforts with handheld walkie-talkies, but they appeared to all have failed at the same time. She couldn’t get even a faint whisper from any of the units. Thinking it was a bad batch of batteries, JoAnn never suspected that the signals were being jammed. Relying on a quickly drawn up schedule, she waited for the appointed time to deactivate the computer and spool up the huge pumps that controlled the oil flow within the ship.
As soon as a hatch cover was removed from one of the brimming tanks, an alarm sounded in the control room that indicated the gas ratio had changed and was becoming dangerously explosive. At each alarm, Riggs flipped several switches, and the valves controlling oil flow forced crude into the open-hatched tank. It came bubbling through the openings in thick clots like some primordial tar pit, spreading in ever widening pools. At fifteen thousand tons an hour, it took only a few seconds for the pumps to coat the main deck in an inches-deep slick, heavy ropes of oil draining through the scuppers to pour into the Strait. The alarm for the Saab ullage radar, which measured the height between the top of the cargo and the tops of the tanks, wailed an even more strident note than the other sensors. Riggs ignored it, making certain that the entire four-and-a-quarter acres of the deck were awash with North Slope crude. The mixture of oil vapor and air became a destructive cloud over the hull. Satisfied, she shut down the pump and waited for the crews to wrestle the hatches back into place through the stinking black slime.
She had emptied oil from only six of the eighteen tanks in a zigzag pattern that caused the hull to creak mournfully from the added strain of her now uneven load. Once the explosives in the ship’s belly detonated, this additional stress against her keel would speed up her destruction. A shining pool that scintillated like a rainbow had already formed around the Arctica’s dark hull, and a few inches of her oxide red Plimsoll line showed above the waves.
Riggs looked at her watch. It was ten minutes past two. The boat sent to fetch her and the others would be here in minutes. As if echoing her thoughts, Wolf appeared at her shoulder and said, “The boat is approaching. It is time to go.” His accent masked any emotion he might have had, though Riggs doubted he was capable of feelings.
“Is it done?” Riggs asked, referring to the murder of the crew.
“Yes, they’re dead.”
As a precaution if any bodies were recovered or washed ashore, Wolf and one of his men had forcibly drowned each member of the Arctica’s crew in the saltwater swimming pool on the funnel deck. Each man had to be led up to the pool individually, rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, and held under water until his struggles had ended. It had taken them much longer than anticipated to kill all twenty-four.
Riggs and Wolf waited in silence for a few minutes, giving the deck crews enough time to resecure the hatches. Once Riggs’ watch swept past 2:20 P.M., she manually opened the eight screw valves that led from the sea suction inlet to the main lines feeding from the ship’s cargo tanks. As the final valves opened, the pressure of oil venting through the ten-inch pipes could be felt as a palpable presence in the room. The flow sounded like a locomotive hissing through a long tunnel. Where the three lines combined into the main thirty-inch artery, the torrent made a noise like a continuous explosion. Crude began pouring from the vessel, life blood from a mortal wound.
Riggs smiled. “Let’s get off this coffin ship. I just need to stop and use the radio to complete our cover as hapless victims about to die, and then we’re gone.”
ANY conversation Mercer and Krutchfield planned to have about the two civilians helping to retake the Petromax Arctica became moot when they saw the cauldron of oil blooming around the supertanker’s fantail. Even from a distance of half a mile, the sharp smell carried to them on the salty breeze.
“Madre de Dios,” the Hispanic SEAL mumbled. He crossed himself quickly.
“They didn’t wait for the rescue boat.” Krutchfield stated the obvious. “We’re too late.”
“Maybe not,” Mercer said tightly. He looked at Hauser, who regarded the crippled ship with horror. “Captain?”
“I don’t know,” Hauser finally said. “I can’t tell how bad it is until I’m aboard. It looks as if they reversed the sea suction and used it as a discharge outlet. Or they may have holed her. I can’t be sure.”
The Arctica’s stern pointed toward the open ocean and her bow speared eastward inside Puget Sound. The cabin cruiser raced along the entire quarter mile of her length to where a rope ladder dangled from her aft port rail. Like an iceberg that hides four-fifths of its bulk underwater, the true dimensions of the supertanker could not be fully comprehended even as they passed down her hull. The ship’s side, as black as sin and as smooth as glass, scrolled by endlessly as Krutchfield guided the Happyhour to the boarding ladder. It defied belief that something so vast could have been wrought by human hands, yet Mercer and the rest could see only part of the ship. Below them, the hull sank into the depths for sixty feet, the equivalent of a six-story building.
