Firespill

by Ian Slater

  Eight

  Heading southeast at latitude 57°20′ north and longitude 137°29′ west, seventy-five miles west of the northern tip of Baranof Island and eighty-seven miles northwest of Sitka, H.M.C.S. Swordfish was homeward bound, gliding silently ninety feet beneath the spill at a steady eighteen knots.

  Apart from some modifications to the casing which covered the two-hundred-foot-long, cigar-shaped cylinder, and the blackening of its formerly red forward and after messenger buoys, the sub looked like any of the conventional Ranger-class trainers built in the early seventies.

  Ten weeks before, when they had put to sea from Esquimalt, Captain Kyle had been a reasonably contented man, and he had not allowed the incident with Lambrecker to darken his hope of an enjoyable patrol. Now he was worried, unhappy, and eager to be home. Alone in his cabin, he tried by way of distraction to understand one of the latest electronic equipment manuals, but he found it hard to concentrate. He was thinking that perhaps he’d made a mistake, and a bad one, in accepting this assignment.

  Except for the old submariners aboard, few of whom had seen a shot fired in anger, most of the crew of eighty-four were newcomers. It wasn’t their greenness that Kyle minded; he’d been steadily knocking that out of them during the last ten weeks, making himself unpopular by constantly drilling them until they were sick and tired of it. It was their attitude that disturbed him. No, it might still be a good navy, but it was different—so different that he had seriously begun to doubt his ability to command.

  It had been as he’d suspected. There were those who wanted an explanation for every order—and worse, they could quote all the new regulations which required you to give them one. These were the men Kyle didn’t need aboard the Swordfish. They merely increased the everyday tensions on a boat where in a sleeping compartment that measured six by ten by twenty feet, thirteen men were required to bunk for three months. It was this small core of troublemakers that had made this patrol one of the most exhausting of his career. Their questions were nothing more than a camouflaged hostility, a bitterness towards any authority. And it was their hesitation to carry out orders during an emergency that had continued to burden Kyle’s command with unnecessary anxiety. Such hesitation, he knew, might cost not only their own lives but everybody else’s on board.

  He kept trying to teach the crew the lessons he had learned—to follow the same checklists day in and day out so that in times of stress the boat’s safety would rest secure in habit and not hinge on memory alone or on individual variation. He’d told them how it had been in the Atlantic: you did what you were told when you were told, otherwise you might find yourself cut in half by a German destroyer. To his surprise, most of them had listened and learned Well; but there were still a few who refused to conform.

  A few times in the last few days Kyle had felt himself coming close to losing his temper with one or two of them who, though doing nothing overt in their refusal to execute orders promptly, had added to the host of petty insubordinations that constantly tried his patience.

  He sighed heavily, knowing that he understood neither the “new breed” nor the latest electronic wizardry sketched out before him in the manual. He really did belong to another age. Even a few of the younger officers felt uneasy with a man of his years in charge. “To hell with them,” he grunted, getting up from his bunk and shaking two aspirins from the bottle. His head ached. The air was getting foul.

  He was a little concerned about the firespill, which was keeping them submerged much longer than he would have liked. Fifty-four hours, in fact. But it didn’t worry him too much, for he’d instructed his first officer to plot the shortest course out from under the spill, and now they were on that heading. An hour or so to the south and they should be clear. Then they could surface, blow out the carbon dioxide, replenish their air, and run on the surface, using their diesel engines while recharging the batteries that powered them while they were submerged. He was comforted by the fact that they hadn’t been caught submerged further inside the firespill. He would pity any poor devil in a situation like that. He decided that to allay any fears for Swordfish’s safety at home, he should report their position as soon as they reached periscope depth, where they could raise the transmitting antennae. Until then they could only receive from the trailing floating wire, and with the worsening weather they were having difficulty doing that. Wind and sea were whipping the aerial around, and long waves of static made reception very bad.

  Soon he felt less fidgety as the aspirins started to work on his headache. Feeling drowsy, he let the manual slide easily from his hands. He looked forward to securing the sub in Esquimau, already seeing in his mind the pleasant green hillsides which concealed the ammunition dumps of Pacific Command.

  In the radio shack, the operator cursed. For the third time in the past hour, a roar of atmospherics had caused him to miss Pacific Command’s bulletin on the extent of the spill.

  Nine

  In the short time it took Jean Roche to get through to Ottawa, Sutherland glanced through the file on the Canadian Prime Minister. The photograph made him look like a mild-mannered banker with balding head and a weak mouth. But in a few seconds Sutherland had found out that the picture belied Prime Minister Henri Gerrard’s reputation as a strong, if quiet-spoken, leader of a large majority government. For the purposes of the request he was about to make, this was all Sutherland needed to know.

  As he took the receiver, Jean thought it prudent to tell him that the call had taken the Prime Minister away from a cabinet meeting—presumably being held in response to the Canadian outcry over the spill. Sutherland nodded his thanks and indicated he would take the call alone. By the time she had closed the lounge door, he was already speaking to the Canadian leader.

  “Mr. Prime Minister.”

  “Mr. President.”

  “I’m told I interrupted a cabinet meeting. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. I needed the break.”

  Sutherland leaned back in his chair, relieved at the other’s friendly tone. “That’s very kind of you in view of what’s happened. I’m very sorry about the spill, damned sorry.”

  There was a slight, awkward pause before Gerrard spoke. “Of course. I understand. I gather that’s what you’ve called about.”

  “Yes. We have a difficult situation down here,” and he added hurriedly, “as I’m sure you do. I realize the Canadian coast is in imminent danger as well as Alaska. I’d like to talk to you about that in a minute, if I might. But first I would like to ask a very great favor of you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, as fate would have it, Mr. Prime Minister, our Vice-President has been trapped by the fire.”

  Again there was a brief silence.

  “My God.”

  Sutherland didn’t allow the other’s shock to slow him down. The only thing that would help Elaine and the boat’s captain was action. “It’s particularly tricky, because while she’s in a nonfire pocket at the moment, the firespill could close in very quickly. Well, the long and short of it, Mr. Prime Minister, is that we have no ships close enough to effect a rescue. We do, of course, have subs on western patrol, but fast as they are, it would take them too long to reach the boat.”

  Gerrard’s response was instantaneous. “I’ll give you all the help I can, Mr. President.” Sutherland was deeply moved. He had met Gerrard only once, but suddenly he felt he was talking to an old friend.

  “Thank you very much. Mr. Prime Minister, my … sources inform me that there is a Canadian submarine under the spill area. Of course, to have her go in would be—well, frankly, it would be very dangerous…”

  “What precisely are the dangers?”

  The President explained the risk of the sub’s reaching a possible point of no return, given the depletion of her oxygen and battery power. “Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame you for rejecting the request out of—”

  “Nonsense,” interjected Gerrard. “These things happen. Naturally I will have to confer wi
th my cabinet colleagues—for media consumption, if you get my meaning?”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  Despite his headache, which now felt as if it would cleave his skull, Sutherland found himself smiling at the Canadian’s innuendo. The President liked his style. The Prime Minister might wear banker’s clothes, but underneath the blue suit he had a politician’s eye for expediency as well as a human disposition for generosity.

  The Prime Minister added, “Perhaps you could have your people send the Vice-President’s position direct to Maritime Command Esquimalt.”

  “We’ll send the coordinates immediately.”

  “Good. Can I ring you back, Mr. President?”

  “Certainly—and thank you again. Ah—Mr. Prime Minister?”

  “Yes?”

  “I believe the name of the submarine is Swordfish.”

  The Canadian leader laughed. “Yes, I know. We only have two of them.”

  Sutherland was hardly listening. Obviously, the Prime Minister was joking.

  As Gerrard made his way back to the cabinet room from his third-floor office in Parliament’s center block, he talked to his secretary in an unusually subdued voice. Despite the confident tone of his conversation with Sutherland, he was not at all sure that he could get cabinet approval to risk the Canadian sub. His biggest worry in the cabinet was Farley, the minister for health.

  A one-time provincial socialist M.P., Farley had crossed party lines and joined the federal Liberals ten years ago, disgusted with the stagnation of his own party. Capable and cantankerous, he nurtured and championed the conviction common among many western M.P.’s that the United States, even more than the easterners, was determined at every opportunity to cheat western Canada out of its natural resources, from oil in Alberta to minerals in British Columbia. Gerrard had brought Farley into his cabinet not only because of his expertise as an administrator but also as a sop to a particularly vociferous group of backbenchers, most of them from the West.

  The Prime Minister had at times regretted the appointment; not that Farley didn’t do a good job with the health portfolio, but in cabinet he remained as divisive an element on Canadian-American affairs as he had been on the back bench. The little red-haired ex-Scot had a way of polarizing normally middle-of-the-road Liberals, and while he often guided his fellow M.P.’s to the best goals, he almost invariably brought out the worst manners.

  Gerrard could only hope that Farley would not start asking awkward and irrelevant questions as to why U.S. nuclear subs were not available. He decided that he would just have to pass on what President Sutherland had told him. It should be acceptable, even to Farley, that the Americans would have looked after their own had they had a sub close at hand. Nevertheless, the P.M. knew that he would have to handle the affair cautiously; one never knew what tack Farley would take if given the slightest opportunity to steer the issue towards Canadian nationalism.

  Sure enough, after Gerrard had explained the Americans’ request as succinctly as possible, the air in the cabinet room was thick with tension.

  The minister for external affairs, Eric Bern, was plainly all for sending the sub in immediately, but he had clashed with Farley even before the P.M. had finished his situation report. Now Bern was standing at a window with his hands in his pockets, looking out glumly at the mottled maples to the east of the parliamentary quadrangle. He rounded angrily on his colleague. “I might remind you, Farley, that that woman and that man out in that boat are first of all people, and then Americans—if that makes any difference to the members from British Columbia.”

  Farley’s small, red face glowered up from the green baize-topped table that seemed to Gerrard like a moat between the warring east-west factions of his cabinet. The British Columbian’s rasping voice spat out the words at his fellow M.P. “And what’s that supposed to mean, eh? That I don’t care? Let me remind—”

  Bern, his face now as livid as Farley’s, cut in. “I am merely making the observation that the Honorable Member for Vancouver East and some of his colleagues have repeatedly voiced what I consider, and I daresay what many others consider, an almost obsessive anti-Americanism and that this is neither the time nor the place to—”

  Farley could hardly speak. “Good God! You’ve got gall calling me obsessive after your bloody performance in Washington! All that ass licking on import quotas. Why didn’t you just sell them Alberta and be done with it?”

  Prime Minister Gerrard was disgusted by the vehemence of the two members, especially Farley’s willful vulgarity, but although he could have stopped it with a word or two, he sat quietly and let them air their mutual dislike. He had learned that in his cabinet compromise was invariably easier to achieve once these two had vented their spleen and were feeling a little ashamed of their loss of control.

  While the other members sat quietly, waiting for the ritual name calling to pass, Gerrard’s private secretary entered the room. Studiously ignoring the acrimonious exchange, he bent down and whispered to the Prime Minister, who simply nodded, then leaned forward again to watch the Honorable Members. He had the air of a man at a cockfight of which he totally disapproved but with which he still felt it prudent not to interfere. Several junior cabinet members glanced at each other; the minister for health looked pointedly at his watch. It was the external affairs minister’s turn. “The trouble with you, Farley, is that with typical socialist fervor you love humanity but can’t stand people—particularly those to the south of us.”

  Farley pushed his blotter to the middle of the table as if he were throwing down a gauntlet. He turned to Gerrard, dismissing Bern’s remark as beneath contempt. His voice had lost its grating aggressiveness. He spoke slowly, without profanity, but with such pained restraint that the older cabinet members knew that if Gerrard did not step in he would soon burst into an uncontrollable rage. “Prime Minister, perhaps you can enlighten our dull-witted colleague and explain to him that the only point I wish to make is that whether we are talking about Americans or Chinese, there is a simple arithmetical equation involved.”

  He glared at Bern, who was staring out at the quadrangle again. “It is this. There are two people trapped by this inferno—which, I might add, would never have happened had we been more insistent upon policing tanker traffic on the west coast. As the chances of rescue hardly seem promising, the idea of risking the lives of eighty-four seamen—eighty-four people if the minister for external affairs would prefer—should be examined closely. In short, I’m saying that the minister and those colleagues who agree with him seem to be more impressed by the status of the unfortunate victims than by the number of rescuers who could well be lost. That is my point, and I fail to see how it can possibly be misconstrued as a petty display of nationalism.”

  Bern turned back from the window. “I’m fully aware of the … statistics Mr. Farley so assiduously quotes. The point I am trying to make, however, is that in such matters we do not, nor should we, make our decisions on the basis of slide rule projections. If we did, every missing child would be left to perish on the basis that we risk a hundred men in the search.” The minister leaned forward, his weight supported by widely spread fingers drained white from the strain. “Clearly, clearly this is morally unacceptable—quite apart from being thickheaded.”

  Farley pushed the blotter further out and jumped up angrily, but Gerrard held up his hand. Enough steam had been let off for both sides’ egos to have been satisfied. “All right, gentlemen, you’ve both had your say. All I can add is to say thank God cabinet meetings are not televised. This has not been a particularly edifying spectacle.” There was an awkward silence as both Farley and Bern sat looking into the distance. “Be that as it may,” continued the P.M., “I concede that both points of view have merit. I’m sure we all concur with Eric’s argument, namely, that we cannot vote on matters of this nature simply on the basis of numbers. But,” he added quickly, “John is likewise correct in pointing out that this is an enterprise involving an extremely high level of risk to
over eighty sailors, and we owe them equal consideration. Humanitarian concern notwithstanding, we are, after all, representatives of the Canadian people, and their interests must come first.”

  Farley was beaming. “For my part,” the Prime Minister went on, “while I am in favor of the rescue attempt, I could not possibly insist that the submarine go to the rescue at any cost. Therefore, I propose the following: that Swordfish be instructed to enter the area, but that her captain, in the face of all the unknowns—disrupted communications, for example—be free to decide to abort the mission should he consider the prospect of rescue hopeless. This seems to me at once the fairest and most humane solution, bearing in mind the two points of view we’ve just heard.”

  The cabinet room began buzzing with group conversations, and with each rise in the noise level the tension slackened. Even so, Farley, unlike anyone else except the P.M., immediately saw that to abort the rescue attempt on the grounds of its impossibility was not the same as to abort on the basis of unwarranted risk to a ship’s crew. “Prime Minister,” he began.

  “Not again,” murmured one of the junior ministers.”

  Prime Minister, naturally I’m willing—in fact all of us who had some reservations about rushing into this are now, I think, willing—to go along with your proposal. When someone’s in danger you have to—well, you have to help, that’s all there is to it. But it seems to me very likely that in such unstable conditions, once the initial decision to go in has been made, the captain may not be able to abort. No matter how much he wants to.”

  Gerrard frowned impatiently. “Yes, yes. But what’s your point?”

  “About the rescue? Simply that we should realize we’re putting an awesome responsibility on the shoulders of that captain, whoever he is.”