9 Days Falling, Volume I k-5

by John A. Schettler

  “Didn’t have any trouble getting here, sir.”

  “Getting here with three empty tankers is one thing, but now we’ve stuck our head in the bear’s mouth, eh? Getting those ships out again with their bellies full of crude is another matter. You have the bridge, Mister Dean.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Dean gave him a crisp salute as he was piped off the bridge. Five minutes later MacRae knocked softly on the door to Fairchild’s offices, the worry in his eyes too obvious to hide.

  Chapter 20

  “Come.”

  He let himself in, removing his hat as he entered.

  “Afternoon,” he said matter of factly, crossing the plush carpeting.

  “Yes,” said Fairchild, “but not a good one.” She had a harried expression, her face tired and drawn.

  “Complications?”

  “Princess Royal is in trouble,” she said bluntly. “The fire is burning too hot to contain with retardant. The bulkheads forward of the damaged sector may be weakening. The tugs have arrived, but she’s still in distress and moving her under these circumstances is going to be very dicey.”

  “Doesn’t sound good,” the Captain commiserated.

  “It sounds absolutely frightening.” She returned. “I’ve got calls out to anyone I can find in Al Fujairah for an at-sea offloading operation, but it’s going to be very risky. If one of the other holding tanks becomes involved in this fire we may not be able to save the ship.”

  “The aft compartments should be accessible,” MacRae suggested. “That’s three of the five—some 600,000 barrels. Vopak and Van Ommeren both have at sea loaders at Al Fujairah.”

  “Yes, they’ll be underway in an hour, or so I’m told. But that’s a lot of crude, and we’ve lost the main pumps on Princess Royal. They’ll have to bring in new equipment.” She gave him a defeated look. “And she’s listing five degrees…”

  “They’ll compensate for that. Shouldn’t be any trouble to correct that with ballast.”

  “Some of the oil in the center hold has begun leaking into the ballast zone,” she said. “Damn double hulled tankers. They’re top-heavy and unstable.”

  After the Exxon-Valdez incident all tankers calling on US ports had to be doubled hulled. The space between hulls was often used for fuel or ballast, with small areas for maintenance access. Fuel leakage into this area could be very hazardous. MacRae knew the danger that the fire would spread was now very real. Elena looked at him, clearly disturbed. “I think we may lose her, Gordon.”

  She didn’t often address him by his first name, and the sound of it was welcome. He wanted to move closer, offer something more to reassure her, but found the distance between them imposed by their roles as Captain and CEO too difficult to bridge.

  “We don’t know that yet,” he reasoned. Men always needed to fixed things, he thought. Every problem was met with a potential solution, some workable alternative in the mind of a man. Elena Fairchild, for all her discipline and the hard edge to her character honed by business dealings, was nonetheless a woman. She processed things quite differently. MacRae was sensitive enough to understand this, and took a different tack.

  “Here,” he said. “A bit of good news. It seems our local rebels didn’t want to tangle with our helos and the Argonauts. They beat a hasty retreat for the Caspian coast. We have a fast boat out now with a twelve man security team watching over that rig. The men are going to secure the airfield at Buzachi, refuel the choppers and then see about getting out to one of their pump stations so they can move what they have in the line into Baku to top off their bunker credit. Princess Angelina should be loading here in an hour or so. Princess Marie will be right behind her, and our little girl, Princess Irene will be up at Kulevi with the Iron Duke.”

  “Dangerous up there,” she said. “Too close to the Russians north of Poti like that. Mack tells me there’s a Russian military base just 10 kilometers north at Nachkadu. Too bad Supsa didn’t have enough storage for all three ships here.”

  “At least we’ll be loading two ships at one time this way,” said MacRae. “And I’ve posted a squad of Argonauts with Princess Irene.”

  Elena nodded half-heartedly, and he stepped over to the coffee bar. “You look like you could use a spot of tea,” he said, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.

  She mustered a wan smile. “I’m exhausted,” she confessed.

  He poured her a cup from the ivory pot she kept at the ready. Two lumps, with a twist of lemon, just as she liked it. “She’s tough old gal,” he said, coming round to Princess Royal again, his voice softening. “She’ll hold up long enough to get a good bit off into Volker’s tankers. They’ll manage.”

  “There’s more…” She took the cup, here dark eyes finding his, appreciating his closeness at the moment, the masculine presence, the quiet competence of the man.

  “What more?”

  “Cable on my desk,” she said, too beset at the moment to explain.

  He stepped away and saw the telex, reading it quietly, his brow raising a bit as he did so.

  “I see,” he said. “Marines on Abu Musa. Leave it to the Americans to jump right in like that.”

  “What are they up to? The Iranian’s will be up in arms and a big chunk of my company is right in the thick of it over there!”

  “Intel thinks this was a missile,” said MacRae. “Maybe the Americans know something more.”

  “Oh, they’ve been angling for a reason to go after Iran since they knocked off Saddam,” she said, exasperated.

  “Yes, well I can’t imagine they’re still spoiling for a fight right now with what’s been going on in the Pacific. Bloody hell out there on Taiwan, from the latest news. Mack has the full report if you want it.”

  “I’ve’ enough bad news for the moment,” she said. “Fact is, Marines are on Iranian soil.”

  “That island is disputed territory,” he said quickly.

  “Yes, but the Iranians have an airfield there, and they won’t take this lying down.”

  She shrugged with disgust. “Perhaps someone should gently suggest to the Iranians that taking pot shots at oil tankers in the Gulf is hardly conducive to the promotion of peaceful commerce. Insurance rates are going to skyrocket again, not to mention oil prices, which the only thing that might save us in this situation,” Fairchild conceded a crack of hope in the otherwise bleak news. “Oil’s moving. It’s gained $16. on the exchange in the last hour, and futures are already at $175.”

  “It’ll go higher,” said MacRae. “Traders are fleeing to commodities again to escape the mess in the US financial system. With Thunder Horse down in the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Hormuz closed—pipeline into Ceyhan blown too, well, it’ll go higher, you can count on that.”

  “So we’ve got to salvage that oil on Princess Royal. If we can at least get those three compartments ashore it might just be enough. Then we take everything we can get here and get the hell out of this place as quick as we can.”

  MacRae pursed his lips, his jaw set with the realization that she was probably right. Things were wound up tight enough in the Gulf, he thought, and someone has lit the match. Now it was more than the oil in Princess Royal at stake. The whole region could erupt at any moment, and the price of oil would erupt with it. It was certain to do so. It was just a matter of time, and very little of that remained.

  Even as he was contemplating this, the telex began chattering yet again, as if reading his very thoughts and telling him the worst had already happened. Elena Fairchild turned, half afraid to look. She leaned to read the text, her head shaking with an air of disillusionment as she did so.

  “It gets worse every minute,” she said quietly, pinching the bridge of her nose between her eyes where the headache had been bothering her the last hour.

  “More trouble?” MacRae stated the obvious.

  “It appears so,” she said. “The Israelis are at Iran’s throat again and the Mullahs started firing ballistic missiles! The hit install
ations all along the Gulf coast—my god, look at this list! They hit Ras Tunura, Al Jubayl, Al Fujairah. This is insane!”

  She rushed to the telescreen and had up a news feed. Initial reports looked very bad. The life blood of Western civilization was burning in the Persian Gulf.

  In these same crucial minutes, the fires aboard the beleaguered Princess Royal had spread to yet another compartment, and now threatened the massive central reservoir on the ship. There had been another explosion aboard the tanker, and she was listing. Even as word came of the Israeli strike on Iran, secure phone lines sent emergency signals to the Argos Fire notifying the Fairchild CEO that her flagship tanker was now doomed to near total loss. The chaos at the port would prohibit any further rescue operation.

  MacRae took the decrypt, reading it with sad, dark eyes, his lips pursed, jaw set, brows heavy. “I’m not one to cry wolf, Madame,” he began, “but I don’t know whether our big lady will make it out of there now. You may have to be prepared to lose her.”

  “Along with half a billion dollars in oil.”

  The oil recovery operations had to be terminated due to the raging fires, and the ship continued to list while frantic tugs attempted to push her out of the main sea lanes and rig heavy towing lines to move the stricken vessel to shallower waters near the coast. But Princess Royal would not reach the safety of the jetties and docking quays of the port at Al Fujairah, and her captain would not rest easy that evening at the International Marine Club there. Al Fujairah was also on fire.

  “Then this is it, Gordon,” she said quietly. “This is all we’ve got now—those three tankers out there waiting for oil from Baku. When news of this hits home they’ll start to renege on every contract pending. Oil is going to be worth $200 a barrel in a few hours, if not sooner. Three days from now it will be up another hundred. We’ve bloody well got to get these tankers loaded, and that fast. How many men did we sent out to Kashagan?”

  “The Argonauts? Nine man squad per helo, with two non-comms. Twenty man team in all.” MacRae was surprised she could so easily shrug off this news on Princess Royal. She was already moving on to the situation here, and he soon found out why.

  “Then we still have some muscle here?”

  “Three squads, m’lady. Thirty-three men, though I have one squad with Princess Irene up north.”

  “Get the rest ashore. Secure the loading facilities. Get engineers with them as well. Nobody is going to back out on my contract. Not while I’ve got this ship and a couple squads of very dangerous men to set this right.”

  “You mean to simply take the oil?”

  “Take it? It’s mine already! I’ve a letter of credit on file at the exchange for everything Chevron has bunkered at Baku. Made the trade this morning before Princess Royal was hit. Yes, we’ll lose the ship, but her oil belongs to Chevron now.”

  “But Chevron hasn’t even taken possession of that oil yet.”

  “A minor detail.”

  “They’ll say the contract was contingent upon safe delivery and claim non-performance.”

  “They can argue with me in court over it six months from now,” She smiled, a fiery light in her eyes. “In the meantime, I’m damn well going to take possession of this oil here—every drop I can get my hands on. And if anyone thinks they can back out of the deal now they’ll have to get past my Argonauts first. Understand?”

  MacRae took a long breath. “I do indeed,” he said.

  She sat at her desk, eyes staring blankly at the screen, a simmering anger inside her that was slowly giving way to a feeling of thrumming anxiety. She could still lose it all, she thought, not just Princess Royal but all her remaining tankers as well. She could lose the whole damn company in the next forty-eight hours, but what did that matter in the grand scheme of things? She knew, deep down, that it was something more than the fear of imminent ruin and bankruptcy that was plaguing her. It was that damn phone call—the red phone—the signal she had received in those three agonizing words: Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo….

  It was back, she mused darkly. Kirov was back in the here and now, and God only knows what had happened to the world while it was gone—happened so subtly that few, if any, could perceive it. The words of Shakespeare whispered again in her inner ear: “Hell is empty, and all devils are here.”

  What were those devils up to, she wondered? What did they do to change the course of events in that distant era, the time of her grandfather’s day, when the world was locked in a titanic struggle from one end of the globe to another? The same unanswered question that had plagued the Watch for the last 80 years returned to haunt her. What did the Russians know? They had tried to penetrate that iron curtain for decades, but it was late in the game before the Watch had been able to establish a foothold deep inside the Russian intelligence community itself. They finally had a man inside, and all reports seemed to indicate that the Russians were still fumbling in the dark about Kirov’s sojourn to the 1940s. So it was not an official act of the Russian government to send the ship there. That was the great revelation that had finally been confirmed. It had been an accident—a strange and inexplicable accident—or was it? Other information indicated the Russians had been doing some very odd things in and around their nuclear testing sites. The Americans too.

  It all has something to do with that damn ship, she thought. The answer has to be there. Yet her latest intelligence on that indicated Kirov had put to sea two days ago, leading out the Russian Red Banner Pacific Fleet. What will the Americans make of that, she wondered? Then word came in on the secure line late last night. Admiral Yates, the current director of the ultra secret organization, had come to a decision on the question that had been debated by all the Twelve Apostles for some time. Now that Kirov had been seen to vanish and reappear, and the time of the ship’s intervention to the past had been finally discovered, should the ship be destroyed?

  They went round and round on that issue, with some members feeling that it would be better to use espionage to try and ascertain just how the ship was able to move in time. Others refuted that with the assertion that the “incident,” as it came to be called, was an accident, mere happenstance, and that the ship had no voluntary control over its movement into the past. They cited that a nuclear detonation seemed to be involved in at least two observed shifts, the first witnessed by the Royal Navy in 1941 when Task Force 16 was destroyed, and the second witnessed by the Submarine Ambush this very year. This explained the strange activities involving above ground nuclear tests, and it was also a far less nefarious explanation of the event, yet one that left several members unsatisfied, Elena Fairchild among them. Kirov had also appeared in the Med and in the Pacific, and no evidence of any nuclear detonations were involved in those incidents.

  In the end the Council of Twelve, as it was called when the Watch convened a major meeting, was split six to six on the issue, and the deciding vote went to Admiral Yates. The order was given to seek the immediate destruction of the battlecruiser Kirov and therefore close the possibility, once and for all, that the ship would ever again return to plague the Royal Navy of the past. High ranking officials in the US government were always seated as members of the Twelve, and when Kirov was seen to sortie again in the Pacific they saw to it that orders were quickly relayed to find and sink the ship at any cost.

  She sighed inwardly, realizing that if the time breach was something peculiar to the ship itself, its cause would now never be discovered. Perhaps that is for the better, she thought. The power to change the course of events in the here and now was a heady enough drink for any man to stomach, or any woman. The power to change the course of history by altering past events was too great to even fathom. Yet she wondered, even now, what the men aboard that ship ever truly learned about what had happened to them.

  Then the intelligence line rang again and her reverie broke. She came back to the moment, seeing Captain MacRae still standing there, hat in hand, looking at her strangely as though he could discern the inner turmoil of her thou
ghts. She smiled wanly, attempting to give him a thin reassurance that she was still in the fight, then reached for the line.

  “Fairchild….Yes…. I see. Very well. Yes, I think we’d better have a look, but be discrete. Report as soon as you know more.”

  “More bad news?” asked MacRae.

  She cocked her head to one side, considering. “Well here’s a strange bird,” she said. “That was Mack Morgan. I guess I ruffled his feathers over that lapse with Salase, and now he’s ferreting out anything he can find. Well, it may be nothing, but he seems to have gotten wind of an operation underway in the Caspian—a Russian operation. It appears that some unusual assets are deploying to the Makhachkala area, and it involves a ship called the Anatoly Alexandrov.”

  She was typing something at her computer terminal. “That’s odd. I just looked it up on the register and it’s a floating nuclear reactor; not a warship—presently anchored ten kilometers off the Caspian coast and listed as inactive. It seems Intel picked up a lot of activity at the Russian naval base at Kaspiysk, and that ship seems to be the focal point. We have helos out there. Think we might be able to sneak a peek with some long range cameras?”

  “That would be risky,” said MacRae. “Let’s not forget about those long range Russian missiles. But we could see about getting a UAV up for a look. I’ll bet our friends in NATO might help, if it’s deemed critical.”

  “I can make it critical,” said Elena, and MacRae knew she would do exactly that.

  Chapter 21

  Evening came, one more in its endless round. Light, pale and diffused, washed over the gray bank of low clouds that slouched heavy and tiresome in the still air and obscured the winding interface of land and sea with its listless presence. And the sea itself moved with a languorous swell; the land lay hushed and subdued. The helmsman aboard Argos Fire gazed out on the indolent waters of the bay, leaden-eyed and waiting for relief.