by Ian Slater
Both foghorns were blasting at each other now. Normal procedure had collapsed because of the Americans’ malfunctioning anticollision unit. In the radio shack, the operator shook his head in exasperation. He couldn’t understand a word of what was coming through the headset. The only message either ship would understand from the other was an SOS.
The foghorns’ slow, mournful cries sounded like a dirge to Salish. Despite countless hours of training, his anxiety was approaching panic. With the sophisticated scanner out, he knew that he was helpless to anticipate the other’s move.
Rostow arrived, sleepy-eyed, and began unscrewing the anticollision set’s side panel.
Seconds after hearing that the bow and crow’s nest watchmen could see nothing, Yashin heard the whine of the elevator bringing the captain up from the officers’ mess five stories below. With the sweat now streaming down his face and feeling ashamed that he had had to call for help, the third officer decided to regain some lost pride by taking a sudden initiative. He ordered Bykov to steer zero eight three degrees, estimating that a course change eastwards would turn the Sakhalin away at right angles from the course of the approaching blip. But as he gave the order, the American, traveling faster, had also begun what he thought was an evasive turn to the southeast, steering one two seven. Yashin looked down at the blip and went pale as he saw that it, too, was turning. He pulled the horn cord and gave five short blasts, warning of impending collision.
Out of the fog the two giant ships suddenly became visible to one another, like two great leviathans that had unintentionally stalked each other through the fogbound sea. The Russian, starboard aft on the American’s starboard quarter and heading at a sharp angle towards the Kodiak’s stem half, was the first to see the unavoidable. Frantically, both helmsmen wrenched their steering levers back as far as they could go, but even at twenty knots, the ships were too close for any turn to save them.
As Salish saw the massive, two-thousand-foot-long Russian vessel loom up out of the night, bearing down on him, his brain raced. He thought of the enormous explosion that would follow if fuel from the Russian’s forepeak tank cascaded into the engine room upon contact and met with a spark. Seeing there was no longer any hope of avoiding impact, he threw the Kodiak’s telegraph to “Stop Engines” and pushed the fire alarm button for “Abandon Ship.” Then he bit clean through the stem of his pipe.
Had the Russian ship struck the American ship anywhere from bridge to bow, most of the crew, who were quartered above the boiler room, might have survived. Although some of the longitudinal steel stiffeners which reinforced both the inside and outside plates would no doubt have been sliced through like spaghetti, like those aft, the American ship with its lighter-than-water oil cargo could actually have been cut in half and yet remained afloat, buoyed up by unpunctured center and wing tanks. Instead, with a bone-splitting crash, the Sakhalin’s bow, smashed through the Kodiak’s port-aft side, punching a hole the size of a bomb crater in the American tanker’s flank.
As the Sakhalin’s forepeak tank burst like a balloon, spraying thousands of gallons of high octane over the red-hot remnants of the Kodiak’s cavernous engine room, the sea, eager not to be left out, flooded in, cooling the engine room and reducing the possibility of a sparked explosion that could have tom the ships apart. But the implosion of thousands of gallons of seawater pushed the entire after end of the Kodiak downwards, drowning most of the American crew who had not been killed outright by the impact.
Within minutes the bow of the Kodiak angled steeply into the fog above, and the tanker began a slow backward slide into the debris-laden sea. All the while, the stricken ship’s horn, now below water, maintained the subdued moan of some great and dignified beast being slowly tortured to death.
Amid the deafening confusion of sounds caused by burst high-pressure pipes, suddenly arrested propellers, and the crashing of everything from falling pots and pans in the galley to the splitting of solid steel plating, the Russians heard the loud “whoomp,” like the crunch of a distant bomb, as a small explosion blew out the starboard side of the Kodiak’s fast-disappearing bridge. Momentarily the two huge black ships were silhouetted by the orange white flash—two dark monoliths doing battle in the shroud of fog, locked together in a grip of twisted, bending steel, the Russian lying with its bow being slowly dragged under by the after end of the Kodiak, whose own bow, acting counter to the sinking stem, was almost completely out of the water.
Yashin caught a glimpse of a lone man straggling in the oily sea eighty feet below. Within a second of the Soviet captain’s ordering, “Engines full astern,” in an effort to tear loose from the American’s death grip before it dragged his ship under, Yashin dispatched a life-raft canister overboard toward the American sailor.
But even as the Sakhalin’s diesels screamed in a wild fury, her three screws churning the sea about them into a spinning vortex of foam a hundred yards wide, the Russian captain knew he could not break free. After forty-five seconds, the Sakhalin’s forward deep tanks one and two, half-full of Avgas and situated immediately behind the forepeak tank, ruptured, and highly combustible aviation fuel gushed into the sea.
Meanwhile the strain on the bulkheads was beginning to tell, and leaks shot open in seven of the sixteen wing tanks along the port side. Yashin reported that the indicators showed that fuel was also being lost through foot-long fissures in the inch-and-a-half steel walls of numbers one and two center tanks. Even so, the Soviet captain decided to keep the engines straining full astern for another two minutes. It was only when the control panel showed obvious buckling of the plates in six, seven, and eight center tanks that he stopped engines. He was losing oil fast. The next moment he was flung to the deck as another explosion in the Kodiak’s engine room rocked the Sakhalin, blowing forward with such force that it burst four of the Kodiak’s after tanks, namely sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen. Fortunately all the tanks were full. Had any of them been only partially so, allowing a buildup of gas inside them, the engine room explosions would almost certainly have ripped the Kodiak apart and turned her into an inferno. As it was, thousands of tons of crude were pouring into the sea.
When the lone American was brought aboard the Russian ship, he was vomiting violently, throwing up oil and saltwater. Cleaning him off and giving him coffee, Yashin tried to comfort him in halting English. The American had difficulty understanding how the two ships were stuck together. In the fogbound sea he had had no idea what had happened, only that one moment he had been reading in his bunk and the next he had heard the alarm; then he was suffocating in a sea of oil.
But the sailor had no difficulty understanding Yashin’s concern when he asked the Russian officer for a cigarette. Yashin shook his head vigorously. “Sparking,” he said, “sparking!” and then made a wide upwards gesture with his hands which very obviously described the arcs of an enormous explosion. At first the American was not as concerned as Yashin, because the Kodiak was carrying crude, and though it would bum, it was almost impossible to ignite by itself. But when he smelled the air, he finally understood the other’s fear. The Russian, he guessed, was carrying a combination bunker oil and high-octane cargo bound for Cuba. The heavy vapor from the highly refined fuel was already spreading like a poisonous cloud through the fog about the ships and low over the sea’s surface.
It was a cloud which would spread with extraordinary rapidity over wide areas of the ocean about them, a cloud which, despite the red identification dye of its liquid form, was all but invisible to the naked eye when spread so widely in the fog bank. Therein lay its danger. The American sailor, staring blankly at the mountainous hulk that was now a coffin for so many of his friends, began to shake uncontrollably from delayed shock. He tried to get up from the bunk, but fell back and vomited again. The smell of the gas was making him feel increasingly ill. As he gasped for air, all he could think of was the conservation movies he had seen during the gasoline rationing of a few years back. One of them had shown the ignition of a four-
gallon can of gas. It had gone off like a bomb. And four gallons, he knew, was literally a drop in comparison with what the cavernous tankers were spilling. He didn’t believe in God, but he began to pray anyway.
While the deadly vapor continued to spread silently over the sea, transported more rapidly now by rising winds, row upon row of tiny red, green, and white lights continued to play a silent and fantastic dance on the indicator boards of the Kodiak’s sinking bridge. Urgent messengers of doom, they continued to flicker their warning of impending disaster even as the ship’s bow continued to rise and the saltwater sizzled briefly around the main computer’s core, signaling the Kodiak’s end. Then, their frantic brain finally recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, all the lights died simultaneously, leaving the bridge in total darkness as Salish’s crumpled body, supported by a life jacket, drifted aimlessly about, softly bumping into protruding islands of equipment.
The Russian captain had all his crew ready to fight any outbreak of fire, though they all knew that if fire did start in this ocean of oil, no number of extinguishers could stop it; it would simply ride on the sea’s skin, glued like napalm on a helpless body. The boats and inflatable raft containers were readied too, though again, fire would render them useless. The captain had decided not to abandon his ship until she actually began to sink. Putting out life rafts in this fog, with the wind rising, would be a sure way to lose his crew. Yashin saw that all they could do was wait and hope that help arrived before any explosions reached the high octane or before the Kodiak dragged them further under. He noted the time in the Sakhalin’s log. It was 0802 hours.
Five
At 8:30 A.M., the knife-edged bow of the nuclear-armed destroyer U.S.S. Tyler Maine, speeding south from the direction of Cross Sound at a point twenty-five miles off the southern end of Chichagof Island, cut ghostlike through the fog that now and then mysteriously gave way to clear patches of sea.
Being the only ship anywhere near the collision site, the destroyer had been asked by the U.S. Coast Guard to answer the Russian Mayday. The sinking Kodiak had not even had time to send a distress signal, her radio room having been demolished upon impact with the Soviet supratanker. The destroyer’s captain rang the engine room. “Chief, you got us on maximum revs?”
“That’s what the dials say, Captain, but I could maybe squeeze another knot or two out of her. It’d be pushing her mighty hard.”
“Well, push her. I want to get those poor bastards out before anything else happens. I don’t want to be a hundred yards from ’em and have to give ’em up.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
In the destroyer’s chart room, the executive officer worked fast with dividers and parallel rule. The line he drew between the destroyer’s position and that of the stricken tankers—estimated to be forty-odd miles west of Sitka—ran northeast to southwest. In the zero visibility, they would not be able to see the Russian ship until they were practically upon it. Till then it was up to them to reckon how close they were to the escaping oil. After a few more minutes, the navigator poked his head out of the chart room and called urgently to the captain, “I think we’re approaching the pollution danger zone now, sir. At least we must be getting close, according to their position and the increase in wind velocity.”
The captain received the information without surprise. “Shit. Don’t need your charts to figure that out, Ex. My nose is the best goddamn indicator on this ship. You can smell it—stinks to high heaven.” The first officer agreed. The captain coughed and spat into his handkerchief. “And I can taste it,” he added irritably. “How far from the Russian?”
“Couple of miles sou’ southwest.”
The captain grunted. He took a cup of coffee from an orderly and instructed a junior officer, “Sound ‘Approaching PD Zone’ warning. We’ll likely encounter the slick within the quarter hour.”
In fact the Tyler Maine was already deep within the fuel oil slick, though no one aboard could have known, for the ship had entered a long, tonguelike extension of the high-octane vapor that had been blown into a clear area beyond the fogged-in Mayday position and the bulk of the spill. Having vaporized, the octane now lay in a highly volatile, invisible layer over the surface of the sea. The captain, confident that they were merely smelling advance fumes from the main spill, believed that he was giving ample warning to his crew. He added crisply, “I want a double check that there’s no smoking and that the engine room and galley are in the sealed-off condition and operating on filtered air only. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Leading Seaman Jones, a newcomer to the Tyler Maine, wasn’t what you’d call a big drinker, but standing alone outside on the bridge’s starboard side lookout position, unable as usual to make out anything that came out of a PA system whether in an airport, train station, or aboard a destroyer, all he was thinking about was ending his watch and having a shot of the Jack Daniel’s he’d smuggled aboard. It was a birthday gift from his wife. Every year she gave him the same thing, and every year he said it was just what he wanted. He lifted the binoculars and scanned the horizon, but all he could see was the ashy gray mist of the scattered fog banks. Letting the binoculars hang about his neck for a moment, he pulled out his tobacco pouch. At forty-two he figured that if lung cancer was going to get him, it was going to get him—same as old age. He’d tried to cut down his habit, and on shore he could do it, but here at sea, he asked himself, what the hell else could you do but eat and sleep and maybe drool a bit over Playboy? Besides, how could you cut it out when you’d already been at one and a half packs a day at sixteen? Using the bridge’s flanged wing as a wind barrier, he held the cigarette paper low and deftly rolled the tobacco into it.
Inside the bridge, confident that the ship was completely electrically grounded in the event of lightning or electronic malfunction, the captain was receiving “sealed off” confirmation from various sections of the ship. Halfway through listening to the engine room report, he motioned to the executive officer.
“Yes, sir?”
“Better remind the new man on the starboard watch about PD drill. He might not hear it on the PA system in this wind.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The executive officer pulled up his parka hood and made his way out to the starboard wing. As he opened and closed the bridge door, the wind howled past, causing his eyes to smart. Bending his head low, he held onto a rail with one hand and fumbled for a handkerchief with the other. The officer knew that two tankers the size of the Sakhalin and the Kodiak had never before collided. Compared to this, the old Torrey Canyon back in the sixties had been strictly minor league.
One figure kept coming back to him—the data from a spill on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the late sixties. In just one day a spill of ten thousand gallons—only a fraction of the Torrey Canyon’s cargo—had covered an area a hundred miles in diameter. And the whole cargo of the Torrey Canyon had been only a sixteenth of the spill they were heading into.
For a moment he could see nothing in the hurtling mist, but then he caught a glimpse of the vague outline of the watchman drawing on a cigarette. The officer roared against the noise of wind and sea, “What the hell are you doing, sailor?”
Leading Seaman Jones, startled, quickly took the cigarette out of his mouth, and before the other man could stop him, flicked it overboard. “Sorry, sir.”
For a fleeting moment the executive officer watched with horrified fascination as the ship’s slipstream plucked the lighted cigarette, carried it aft, and then whipped it down towards the sea. There was an enormous orange flash followed by a deafening CRUMP, then another and another, until soon the horizon itself seemed to be exploding in a distant, silent flashing of massed artillery.
The Russians and the lone American, like their would-be rescuers now a short distance away to the northeast, could do nothing; but their end was more agonizing, for they had time to see what would soon kill them. Standing and sitting, they were silhouetted like toy soldiers, clinging to their dying ship, staring in h
orror as they watched the long, orange roll of flame building up on itself, advancing towards them through the illuminated shroud of fog, like breakers from a closing and fiery surf. As succeeding pockets of gas exploded, each flash closer than the last, Yashin looked in numb despair at the radar screen. The pulsating dot that seconds before had been the advancing American destroyer was now scattered in a thousand tiny points of lights which quickly faded, like so many meteorites suddenly extinguished by an inhospitable planet.
Yashin kept staring at the blank radar screen, momentarily hypnotized by the sweeping arm. He had seen a fire on a tanker once. It had happened in the Black Sea. Now he could see it in the screen. As the fire wave had struck, everyone at the deck level had died instantly, their bodies lit up like pieces of burning paper, first white, then saffron darkening to black as they curled up, shriveling in the flames. Any screams bad been lost in the noise of the exploding tanks. A steel whale in a final agonizing attempt at escape, the tanker had first leapt hopelessly into the air, her back broken as she was thrown up by a series of explosions. No sooner had she collapsed back into the water than her bow disintegrated in a shower of shrapnel, a half-empty forward tank blowing out sideways, spewing tons of coal black bunker oil through the orange flame like volcanic bile.
Illuminated by the fire, the sea around the crippled tanker had taken on the semblance of a moving abstract painting as the translucent greens, mauves, and reds of the various dyed octanes curved and slid about each other in liquid rainbows, their ever-changing patterns invaded here and there by the dark brown molasses of crude that continued to ooze from the stricken ship. What amazed Yashin was that despite the force of the initial explosion, many of the house-sized wing tanks, though hurled hundreds of yards at a time and badly ruptured, were still afloat. What had once been the second-largest tanker in the Soviet Eastern Fleet was soon no more than two dozen hulks, each bleeding its cargo into the sea.