Firespill

by Ian Slater

  As the Swordfish sailed out of Esquimalt Harbor and Kyle slowly began to unpack his seabag, he found Sarah’s note stuck in the socks. He drew the green curtain across his cabin door and sat down on the bunk’s edge. After all these years, he thought, and felt a deep yearning to hold her, to tell her he would be home soon, that he would never leave her again. He unfolded the note and read, “With you always, My love, Sarah.” He put the piece of paper in one of his tunic pockets. As was his custom, he would not look at the note again until they neared the end of the long patrol. In September.

  Two

  September 21

  It was an unusually mild morning as Elaine Horton, whom Kyle and Lambrecker, like so many others, had often seen but never met, walked down one of the wide streets on the outskirts of Sitka in Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. On either side of the roadway, Colonial-style bungalows, mostly white, lay nestled behind a row of golden-leafed maples, which were interspersed here and there with tall Lombardy poplars whose leaves flickered in the Indian summer breeze.

  Elaine wandered aimlessly along the road in the direction of the nearby woods. She shuffled her feet through the summer’s accumulation of leaves in an effort to block out the sound of the footsteps around her. But even when she succeeded in not hearing them, she could sense their owners’ presence. They were always with her. She had managed, miraculously enough, to escape from the scrutiny of the press these last few days, mainly due to a sudden change in flight plans from Washington. They might as well have followed her; the Secret Service agents gave her the same shut-in feeling. She conceded that they were often necessary, particularly in big crowds, but here in Sitka on her holidays? But she could never convince her aide to leave them behind. Miller was rigid in his insistence that the Secret Service contingent must be on hand at all times, no matter where they were, vacation or no vacation.

  “But Richard,” she protested, as they continued to stroll, “this is Baranof Island—off the Alaskan Panhandle. No one even recognizes me here.” He was about to answer, but was interrupted by a small group of schoolchildren who had suddenly materialized and who were gaily rushing Elaine for her autograph.

  Miller stood by smugly while the Secret Servicemen carefully watched the cluster of well-wishers. After the group had departed, Elaine turned to Miller. “And if anyone does recognize me, it’s precisely because this platoon of yours immediately draws attention to us.”

  Miller, choosing not to dispute the point with his boss, looked around him at the near-deserted street. “Ma’am, I feel safer in New York than I do here.”

  Elaine snorted. “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “Yeah. I mean it’s so—so open up here. No protection.”

  “Open, my God! That’s exactly why I came here. I can’t fish in Manhattan. I’m tired of skyscrapers and pushy crowds. I like the openness.”

  “That’s why we need all these men,” said Miller, shaking his head.

  “Well, I warn you, Richard. First gap I see, I’m off.”

  Miller smiled indulgently yet with dutiful respect. “You’re welcome to try, ma’am.”

  Despite the lighthearted exchange, Elaine really did mean to have some privacy. The pressure was getting to her. She wanted to push Washington out of her mind, to forget about the daily invasion of her desk by hundreds of reports, all crying catastrophe. Long gone were the days when the Vice-President of the United States was considered little more than a parrot of the President. There had been six assassinations of key political figures since Kennedy, so now the Veep was expected to know as much as her boss, in preparation for the chilling possibility of waking up one morning and being addressed as President.

  Elaine Horton, at thirty-seven the youngest-ever Vice-President, had once been described by an elderly Republican congressman as a “captivatingly plump” brunette. When she heard about it, Elaine had rolled her hazel eyes in pleased surprise and smiled—captivatingly. Soon the sheer force of her ebullient personality and her easy, efficient style had won over her potentially hostile male colleagues, not only in Congress but in the White House as well. And because she was attractive but not what the society journalists called one of the “beautiful people,” she was not perceived as a social threat by those women in Congress who relied upon makeup as much as brains in vying for the prestigious administrative jobs close to the President. She had been raised on the homespun and oft-caricatured virtues of self-discipline and restraint and had carried them with her through a brilliant college career and into the cynical political arena.

  The Vice-President became aware of someone coughing nearby. It was Miller’s usual way of drawing her attention. She had been so preoccupied that she had not realized she had reached a cul-de-sac and had been standing still for several minutes. The Secret Service was trying to look inconspicuous, peering apprehensively through the trees that stretched far beyond the street. The Secret Service did not like trees. Too much cover. The chief agent had been frowning at Miller to do something, to keep the Vice-President moving. Already the long limousines had slid up behind her, engines purring faintly, sending out long breaths of grey-blue exhaust into the still, clear air. “Perhaps you’d like to ride for a bit,” Miller suggested diplomatically.

  She glanced at the vice-presidential limousine, heavy and somber with its armor plate and black paint. My God, she thought, it looks like a hearse. It reminded her of the almost successful attempt on the President’s life last month in New Orleans. That had shaken her badly at the time. Even now the thought of it sent a slight shiver through her. For the country, it would have been the loss of a leader; but to her it would have meant much more. Their affair which had begun some years before when they were both just members of Congress was over—at least they had both done their best to convince themselves that it was. Theirs was now a strictly professional relationship. She shivered again. Was it?

  Miller coughed again, a little louder this time, and Elaine shot him an angry glance. Miller, the agents, everything reminded her of her job. Most of all they reminded her of the President, and it was the President she was trying to forget. Suddenly she felt almost claustrophobic. She would have to break free of the official world—of the constant surveillance—if only for twelve hours or so. She needed somewhere quiet to rest and to think. It would be tough on Miller, but there was no other way. She would put everything right when she returned.

  The agents were still looking anxiously about. One of the women spun sharply on her heel when a colleague crunched gravel at her back. Elaine looked around at her protectors, at Miller, and at the chauffeur dressed in black, all patiently waiting. Two of the women agents even accompanied her when she went to the ladies’ room. “What’s the weather forecast for tomorrow?” she asked, her irritation showing in her voice.

  Miller, hardly ever surprised in his job, was momentarily stymied. “I don’t know,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Then find out, please,” she snapped, getting into the car, her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket.

  As the long black limousine pulled away from the wooded area, Miller lifted the phone and within a minute had the weather report. “They say it will be fine tomorrow—high of sixty-seven. Indian summer,” he added, trying to cheer her out of the sudden depression. She managed a smile. “I’m sorry for barking at you, Richard. I’m tired.”

  “That’s what I’m paid for.”

  “No, you’re not,” she replied quietly. “I’m just being bitchy, that’s all.” She drew a piece of paper from her purse. “Here’s Harry Reindorp’s address. He’s the fishing captain I told you about—the old friend of my father’s. I’d like to have him around this evening. Would you invite him to join me for dinner? We’ll go back to the hotel now.”

  That evening was the most enjoyable Harry Reindorp had had—since the week before. A tall man of sixty-seven with fearless pale blue eyes, he was still in remarkably good condition after a long, hard life as a deep-sea fisherman off Alaska. After a few drinks,
his usually taut, wind-polished cheeks rumpled with delight when he saw the silver-laden food tray being wheeled quietly over the soft, deep red carpet in the vice-presidential suite.

  “Ah, now, Lainey, would that be the hot dogs?” he exclaimed happily. He would not normally have addressed her so informally, for although he’d known Elaine most of his life through her father’s fishing trips and had called her Lainey as a youngster, he had never quite recovered from her becoming Vice-President. But tonight the relaxed atmosphere was reminiscent of their fishing trips years ago. Elaine smiled. Usually she couldn’t get him to call her anything but ma’am, which she disliked, not so much because it was formal as because it made her feel old.

  When the waiter bent to offer her a sip of wine, she waved him gently aside. “Oh,” she said, “let Mr. Reindorp try it.”

  Harry held up his hand. “Not me,” he said, “I’m a beer man. I wouldn’t know if that stuff was swamp water. Just pour it, son. If it’s no good, I’ll use it to preserve my starfish.”

  During the meal Elaine pushed Miller, the agents, and the cares of office to the back of her mind as the old fisherman explained the new additions to his boat, Happy Girl. Any other time she would have been bored by the conversation, for she had been on the boat often in the past, but now she listened intently. An idea had started to take shape. But it wasn’t until he told her of his special pride in the new lanyard quick-release mooring lines that she became really excited. During the dessert—baked Alaska, much to Harry’s delight—the Vice-President explained to Harry what she wanted him to do. Listening to the details, Harry—helped along by his fourth glass of wine—began to chuckle. He was looking forward to doing Miller and those miserable agents one in the eye.

  Elaine was up before her seven o’clock wake-up call. As she stood under the shower she felt almost ashamed of her excitement about the adventure which lay ahead. The plan was so simple that she was now convinced it would work. It had to work. Three more days and they would be returning to Washington. She lifted the bathroom window slightly and marveled at the weather. Though the sun was not yet up, there wasn’t a cloud in sight. She watched a gull dip effortlessly and heard it screech against the clear sky. She took it as a good omen.

  As she lathered her body she thought of Walter Sutherland and what he would be doing back in Washington. By now it would be mid-morning in the capital. In the same instant she thought of his wife. She turned off the shower and walked naked through the hall to the sitting room, luxuriating in the sun’s rays. Miller had tried to persuade her to keep a female aide with her, but she was adamant. No one would share her living quarters. Ironically, her decision was not so much a bid for privacy as a precaution against talking in her sleep. She would never have been aware of the danger if her mother had not asked at the breakfast table during a weekend visit, “Who’s Walt, dear?”

  “Walt?”

  “Yes. You were talking about a Walt in your sleep.”

  “Oh? What did I say?”

  Her mother had poured the coffee unconcernedly. “Oh, nothing I could make out.” There was a slight pause before she went on, a little too casually. “It wouldn’t be the President, would it?” Elaine had felt the heat of a blush. She gave a weak laugh. “Good heavens no. Me call the President Walt? Really, Mother.”

  Since then Elaine had refused to be accompanied by stay-in female aides. Donning a long, soft robe from the closet, she sat down and began to dry and style her hair with a hand blower, not bothering to call in her hairdresser.

  She had breakfast and got dressed slowly, putting on a clinging red turtleneck sweater, black pants, and a heavy brown suede jacket. It was one of the President’s favorite combinations. To disarm the agents she stuffed her light blue Windbreaker into her large handbag and, walking out of the hotel, kept up a stream of questions about cables, news, and the like, trying to appear as official as she would have been on a quiet day in Washington.

  Three

  September 22

  As Elaine climbed into the limousine, First Officer Peter Salish, fifty miles to the north off Chichagof Island, was in the last hour of his 4:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. watch on the bridge of the U.S. merchantman MV Kodiak.

  Heading south, thirty miles off the northernmost part of the Alexander Archipelago, the ship was en route from Valdez to Cherry Point in Washington State. Unable to sleep, the junior officer who would relieve Salish at 8:00 A.M. wandered onto the bridge, coffee mug in hand.

  Salish made a caustic remark in the log about the unreliability of the recently installed anticollision radar, pulled out his pipe tobacco, and walked past the helmsman to the starboard side of the bridge to check the Fathometer. The giant tanker stretched before him, its bow no more than a distant blur in the gray morning light. From his position on the bridge, the outline of the seemingly endless, three-hundred-foot-wide deck looked like an airstrip relentlessly pushing its way through the subdued sea. Kodiak was not like most other ships. She was bigger. Enormously bigger. Five times the size of the Queen Elizabeth; length 450 feet more than the height of the Empire State Building; as wide as two football fields; depth 150 feet; deadweight tonnage 1, 000, 000 tons—equal to the capacity of a 200-mile-long train of 20, 000 tank cars, each car holding 30, 000 gallons—enough to supply a nation Canada’s size with its entire oil needs for three days. And her generators could produce enough electricity to light up a city.

  But despite the ship’s impressive capabilities, Salish, in the long hours of the dogwatch, was apt to reflect that it wasn’t true that the bigger the vessel the safer you felt. Not in his book, anyway. These man-built behemoths, beside which the great blue whales looked no larger than porpoises, simply took too long to turn. For all their sophisticated electronic gear, they reminded him of huge, lumbering, prehistoric animals grown too big too fast, bullying the sea with their power rather than using its natural forces. On a “crash astern” testing run at her usual seventeen knots, the Kodiak, even after deploying her stem parachutes, side fins, and bow rocket thrusters, had still gone on for four and a half miles before she had braked sufficiently to actually begin to go astern. And at the same speed without using her auxiliary braking systems, it took her twelve miles to come to a complete stop from the moment her engines were shut off.

  Nevertheless, Salish had stayed with the Kodiak for the reasons most people stay with most jobs: they know little else and the money is good. After a dozen trips from Valdez to the Washington or Californian coasts, he would be able to afford a down payment on some land and move his family out of their chicken coop of a city apartment. Maybe he would build a house on one of the secluded Gulf Islands off the coast of British Columbia.

  As the junior officer, for want of anything better to do, moved across the bridge and scanned the log, Salish stopped thinking about his wife and two young boys and where they might live, and stabbed his pipe in the direction of the anticollision radar computer. “That bag of bolts is acting up again.”

  The junior officer looked down at the rows of tiny flashing lights and the small recorder, which earlier had been disgorging its paper strip at an alarming rate. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Damned if I know, but if it blows we’re blind.”

  The younger man thought of his coming watch. He cleared his throat. It felt tight and dry. “How about the relative radar? We can steer by that,” he suggested hopefully.

  Salish was tired. It had been a particularly dark night watch, and like every sailor, no matter how much electronic gear was stowed on board, he liked to see where he was going as well as read it on a printout. “All right then, we’re half-blind. The point is, we’re in a major sea lane, and if the terrific Marconi Mark II anticollision computerized radar screws up because of a speck of dust in its guts, someone up here will have to do some pretty quick thinking to plot a new course with only the relative radar as a backup. And with this tub nearly two thousand feet long, we need a turning circle of at least a mile to get out of the way of anything. Right?�
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  The junior simply nodded; he didn’t like Salish’s instructor’s tone.

  “Now what happens if some other bucket is turning too? It’s no good if only one of us is on anticollision radar, ’cause then we’re back in the old ball park—he turns, you turn, he turns. The board of inquiry calls it ‘human error’—official language for ‘screwup.’ ”

  The junior officer nodded again, looking worriedly at the gray crackle-finish computer housing. “Is it working now?”

  “Oh, it’s all right now, but it was off for a while. Maybe it was just the paper roll. If you have any trouble, call Rostow. Let him earn his bread.”

  “Will do. But the weather’s holding. In this light we can steer visually anyway.”

  Salish handed the junior officer the weather report: a slightly rising sea over the next twelve hours, then patches of fog off the west coasts of Chichagof and Baranof islands, reducing visibility to zero. The junior officer looked at his watch. It was 7:08 A.M. According to the forecast the Kodiak would encounter fog in the next half hour. At least Salish would have the first of it.

  At 7:30 A.M., when the vice-presidential party arrived at the harbor, everyone except the Vice-President was annoyed to find that Harry Reindorp’s thirty-footer, Happy Girl, was the only boat tied up at Wharf 17. The agents looked uncomfortable. The mooring was exposed to an impossibly wide field of fire. Noticing that Happy Girl’s motor was running, and at a loss for any other way to express his disapproval, the chief agent looked at Harry Reindorp sourly. “Going anywhere?”