Firespill

by Ian Slater

  Several reporters’ hands shot up. Many of the faces looking at him wore openly suspicious expressions. The President continued in an even tone. “The same procedure, as you well know, is followed by local police all over the country in cases where media exposure may precede official notification.”

  “Are you telling us, Mr. President,” called the L.A. Times reporter, “that members of our Coast Guard or whatever are in danger of their lives?”

  “No. I never said that, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “But you said—” began Rawlins.

  “What I said,” cut in Sutherland, “was that there is a certain degree of exposure to unforeseen circumstances.”

  Sutherland was sweating. He reached for a Kleenex and motioned towards another upraised hand. This time the young reporter who had asked Clara Sutherland about the Vice-President and her husband was on his feet. Sutherland instantly realized his mistake, but he couldn’t withdraw his invitation of the question. Henricks glared icily at the young newsman as he asked, “Mr. President, you seem reluctant to talk about Vice-President Horton.”

  Sutherland was ready. “That’s because we have very little information at the moment. You will be advised as we know more.”

  The reporter smiled superciliously. “Of course.” Sutherland turned to face the other reporters. A young woman who had been waving her hand frantically for several minutes stood up. “Mr. President,” she began rather shakily, then coughed and proceeded in a steadier tone. “Would it be fair to say, Mr. President, that the reason for this closed conference is to cover up the fact that in order to save the Vice-President you are exposing the rescuers to extreme danger—far more extreme than you would otherwise consider?”

  The room fell quiet. Sutherland felt the perspiration stinging his eyes, but refrained from wiping his face. “It cert—it certainly would not be fair,” he answered, trying to control his temper. “I would have ordered—requested—the aid of the men involved for any U.S. citizen—black, white—any U.S. citizen. I—for any U.S. citizen at all.”

  The woman smiled up from her scratch pad while some case-hardened reporters looked down at their shoes. “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that a president’s, uh, special relationship with a vice-president would cause him to treat her, or him, any differently, but that in view of the worldwide outcry against the spill you might want her by your side.” She hurried on as several heads turned to stare reproachfully at her. “Bearing in mind the historically high risk of assassination which you, as Chief Executive, face.”

  Sutherland spoke very slowly. “I’m sure you’re overreacting to the world situation. I’m confident that despite these … local conditions, this administration—together with Congress—will continue to improve international relations with the United States.” And with that he left the podium.

  As the correspondents rose, the President and Henricks had already disappeared behind the red velvet drapes. “Who is that bitch?” snapped Sutherland.

  “I don’t know, sir,” replied Henricks.

  “Damn bitch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Oster followed them into Special Operations, Sutherland asked Henricks, “How do you think the conference went?”

  Henricks deliberated.

  “The first part,” Sutherland said pointedly, as if reading the other’s mind.

  “I really think it went all right, Mr. President, but I must confess I don’t think they’ll keep quiet on the rescue attempt too long. They’ll give us a few hours at the most to notify next of kin, and then if we try to pull the ‘humanitarian concern’ bit again, they’ll know we’re stalling. And if that woman—if she or anyone else stumbles onto the fact we’re using a vintage Canadian sub, they’re sure to give us hell about not having one of our own in the area, as if we were expected to know exactly when and where this was going to happen.”

  Sutherland nodded thoughtfully. “That’s all right,” he said slowly. “By that time the rescue will be over. There’ll be nothing left to speculate about.”

  “Yes,” said Henricks, smiling with a confidence he didn’t feel. As he walked away, leaving the President and the general alone, he muttered to himself that if the rescue failed, there wouldn’t be any sub.

  Encouraged by Henricks’s smile, the President for a moment felt positively optimistic. He turned to Oster. “Well, Arnold, how did the press conference go—the last part?”

  “Lousy.”

  Sutherland’s voice was surprised and indignant. “Oh, come on!”

  The general deftly plucked a piece of rank tobacco from his teeth. “That skirt had you against the ropes, Walter.”

  Sutherland flushed. “You think she was right? That saving Elaine is screwing up my deeper responsibility?”

  At the far side of the room, Henricks’s head popped up protectively as he heard the President’s voice rise. Oster lit another cigar. “I’m saying simply that she made you lose your cool. I’m just thinking that we’re going to get more questions and that it’s disastrous to let these people—”

  “Excuse me, General,” interrupted Henricks, “I wonder if you could help us over at the map.”

  Oster recognized Henricks’s interruption for what it was—an attempt to let the President have some time to himself. For his part, Oster believed that time to himself was precisely what the President did not need, given the tug-of-war between his private and official loyalties. Nevertheless, the general followed Henricks across the room.

  Sutherland massaged his eyes slowly, sat back, and toyed with a small, gold spoon stamped with the Venetian crest. It had been given to him and Clara on their tour of Italy two years earlier. He used it to stir the oily black coffee. That goddamn woman with her questions about the rescue and her snide innuendos about Elaine. Perhaps Arnold was right; maybe he had handled the press conference badly. Perhaps unconsciously he had called it simply in the hope that his willingness to meet with the press would be interpreted as a sign that he had nothing to hide and that he had exercised no special privilege in trying to have Elaine rescued. But he had asked the Canadians to help, to risk eighty-four lives—the happiness of eighty-four families—to rescue his Vice-President, his ex-lover. His not-so-ex-lover. The change in nationalities involved was hardly a change in risk. Would he have done the same for anyone else? Would he have done it just for the fisherman? He doubted it. More and more he doubted it. And would he even have done it for Clara? He was ashamed that the question should even occur to him. Where Elaine was concerned, it had never even suggested itself. He told himself that in this matter neither his political head nor his common sense had directed him—only his love of one woman, and that, he believed, might be unforgivable to his friends and his enemies. Most of all, it would be unforgivable to himself.

  After several minutes he became aware of someone sitting next to him. It was Clara. Normally he didn’t like her interrupting him in his work, especially in the Special Operations Room, but tonight he didn’t mind. He always found her presence comforting when he was worried.

  “Won’t you come and rest?” she asked. “You’ll be up late tonight.”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t sleep—not now.”

  “But you look so worn out.”

  “I can’t sleep, Clara.”

  “All right,” she said. “You will call? If you need something?”

  “Yes,” he answered, feeling angry with himself for snapping at her. “Yes, I will.” Watching her leave, he marveled at her quiet dignity. How often it shamed his petulance! He must force himself to give his full attention to the spill, to submerge himself in the myriad details of the problem at hand, denying himself time to question his motivations, to agonize himself into a guilt-laden impotency.

  He looked up as the clocks in unison clicked off another minute. In Washington it was 9:17 P.M.

  Thirteen

  For Elaine, three thousand miles away, it was just before sunset, and the firespill around the fishing boat was receding. A squall, while doing
nothing to extinguish the main body of flames, had dispersed some of the advancing rivulets of burning oil.

  Elated by the first spray of moisture sweeping over her, Elaine turned to Harry Reindorp, whose cough had been worsening by the minute. “You must have connections.”

  The old man managed a wan smile. He said something, but it was lost in the screaming gust of wind that announced the arrival of the squall proper. Then the black arch of cloud was gone as quickly as it had come, sucked dry by the spill, with nothing more to show for its run than a few disturbed swells that momentarily chopped the surface of the sea. The fire, like some giant momentarily disturbed by a fly, renewed its inexorable advance. Elaine felt drained of energy, her sudden optimism quickly dashed as the full hopelessness of their position came home to her again.

  Feeling the depression closing in on her and shortening her already shallow breathing, Elaine tried once again to think of everything at once, to fuse her brain temporarily, to dull it against what seemed to her to be the inevitable end. But the trick did not work; instead, visions of fire filled her brain and overwhelmed any attempt at countermeasures.

  She wanted desperately not to cry, not to blubber like a lost child. “You remember the time—” she began, but she didn’t finish the sentence. A burning, sulphurous smell swept her breath away. “You remember,” she continued gamely after the fumes had passed, “when we went fishing?”

  Harry saw that she was on the verge of tears. “Yes,” he said gently. “The last time in Prince William Sound?”

  “Yes … yes. Father caught the big salmon.”

  Reindorp nodded. “I remember it. He never shut up about it for days.”

  The smoke, pushed aside by the squall, was now returning. There was a long silence as Elaine watched the fire creeping forward. She swung her head around to face her companion. “You used to fish in New Zealand, Harry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it as good as our trips?”

  “Company wasn’t as good, but it was as beautiful,” he said, trying not to cough. “Never saw more beautiful sunsets. You could smell the land, too. A sweet smell it was.”

  Elaine was staring at the fire. There was another long silence before she spoke. “They have thermal areas, don’t they?” Before he could answer, she went on. “You ever seen anything like this over there? Not the fire,” she added quickly, “I mean the smoke.”

  Reindorp’s eyes were running constantly, and he could barely see through the stinging film of tears.

  “Saw something like it in Rotorua,” he said, “and White Island.”

  “Which was more interesting?”

  Elaine’s face was beet red. Harry reckoned that the temperature must be near a hundred and five Fahrenheit. “White Island was the most interesting,” he answered dully.

  “Why?” She swung back from the fire as she spoke and fixed her eyes on the growing darkness of the small fo’c’sle so that she could not see the whole circle of fire. Surprised that she had even heard him, Harry tried to remember why the place had stuck in his memory. “Well, it was an old volcanic island. It was kind of mysterious.”

  Elaine now sat facing him. Though she seemed to have recovered some of her composure, there was a forced air, an intensity, about her quite unlike her usual unruffled poise. Reindorp wondered what he should do, and decided that under the circumstances the best contribution he could make was simply to keep talking. “The island was only five acres in all—the middle blown clean out of it. Nothing left but a few of those gas holes—fumaroles the geologists call ’em. All they did was hiss an’ spit most of the time; blowing up sulphur fumes. Sometimes they’d just gurgle a bit and throw up a few puffs of smoke, but then before you could say howdy-do, they’d erupt with steam. Full of sulphur, that steam. Whenever you took a breath, it was like having a poker in your throat.”

  “What happened to the men?” asked Elaine, her vision drawn back to the crimson wall only half a mile away. Suddenly, Reindorp realized that Elaine must already know the story, and that she had deliberately steered him into relating it. What puzzled him was that he was almost sure he hadn’t told it to her, though he couldn’t swear to it.

  “The men?” he continued. “Well, in 1916 there were about fourteen of them on the island, and the supply ship would drop off fresh food and whatnot every three weeks or so.”

  Elaine lay back on the gunwale, wiping the sweat from her face. She lifted her sweater a little and fanned her neck. “They were mining sulphur, weren’t they?”

  “What?”

  “Sulphur, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. For munitions. Well they—I mean the ship—they called around two weeks later and all the men had vanished.”

  “Without trace.”

  Harry nodded tiredly. He didn’t want to go on with the story. It was the worst possible story in a situation like this, akin to talking of starvation amongst starving men. But Elaine looked over at him. “It was the fumes, wasn’t it?” she asked, “a sudden buildup from the—what do you call them?”

  “The fumaroles.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind you,” said Harry, trying his best to convey doubt, “it could have been anything.”

  Elaine’s eyes closed. She shook her head, and when she spoke it was in a very matter-of-fact voice. “But there was no sign of anything. No volcanic debris, no bodies.”

  “They must have panicked,” said Harry, pointedly. “Once you panic you’re gone. They must have just run and pushed off in the few boats they had.”

  “But fourteen men? You’d think that there would have been some wreckage washed up on the island.”

  “There were no beaches,” said Harry, feeling nauseated. Something seemed to be muddling his brain, making him think that it was of the utmost importance that Elaine and everyone else in the world should know that there were no sandy beaches on White Island, five thousand miles away in the Southwest Pacific.

  “No sand,” he mumbled. Each time he breathed, fumes seared his throat.

  “But it was so rocky. You would think some—oh my God,” she said, sitting up, eyes wide, staring unseeing into a cloud of smoke that reeked of kerosene.

  Harry, snapped into full consciousness by her alarm, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her protectively towards him. “What’s the matter?” he asked urgently. “What’s wrong, Lainey?”

  “It was the sharks,” she said. “Now I remember. It was the sharks. They killed the men. That’s why they were never found.”

  “Who told you that damned story?” he asked angrily. “Was it me?”

  Elaine patted his hand softly.

  “I should never have told you,” he said, his voice full of self-reproach.

  “You didn’t, Harry. It was Father—you told him.”

  “Then I was a damned fool.”

  “No. It was my fault. I’ve been trying to remember him. All I could think of was that story. I can see him telling it now. Both of you—you were great story-tellers.”

  Harry looked down at her. “Were? Hey, girl, don’t count me out yet. I’ve still got a few thousand miles left.”

  She forced a smile. There was a splash near the boat. They didn’t bother to look for the dead bird as it popped to the surface; they’d already seen dozens fall, dead from the utter exhaustion of trying to outfly the fire.

  “You remember your tenth birthday, Lainey?”

  “The go-cart,” she said.

  “The red go-cart.”

  Elaine’s eyes were closed again as she spoke, in an effort to lock out the smoke. “All the boys in the neighborhood said that girls didn’t ride go-carts—couldn’t ride go-carts.”

  Harry nodded. “I said girls didn’t ride go-carts. That’s what made your pa build it. It wasn’t the boys that set his mind to it; it was old blabbermouth Reindorp.”

  “That was my dad,” she said, “and then I had to go and gash my shin on the edge of the seat. I still have the scar.”

  “I don
’t remember that,” cut in Harry. He was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that it was the Vice-President sitting across from him and not Lainey, a small country girl, speechless at her first glimpse of the sky blue Pacific.

  “Oh, yes,” she continued, “the boys laughed at that—little monsters—but Daddy just got a thick piece of rubber hosing, slit it almost right through from end to end, and glued it onto the edge of the seat.” She paused. “I thought he was the smartest man in the world. I mean, he was always there to help, especially after Mother died. ’Course he had his faults, like anyone, but…” Elaine’s lip began to tremble.

  Harry leaned over, straining his back. “I know, Lainey,” he said, patting her gently on the arm. “I know.”

  Elaine was winding and unwinding a grimy rope end around her finger. “I miss him,” she said, but her words were lost in the explosion of a pool of high octane floating in amongst the heavier oil. More crude was burning, its water vapor driven off by the heat of the lighter fuel.

  As the smoke all but blotted out the fast-fading daylight, they forced themselves to breathe as slowly as they could, to move as little as possible, in order to conserve what strength remained. The boat now lay near the middle of the lake-sized area not yet covered by the firespill. Afraid as they were, watching and hearing the roar of the fire wall encircling them in the near distance, they could not help but be struck by its awesome beauty.

  The singed yellow flames of high octane did not leap up now, but rather churned towards the indigo sky in crimson fireballs belched up by the boiling sea. Now and then, surprised by the bellows of the rising wind, the flames would suddenly flare out, and the tar black fume clouds would roll further in towards the boat. Each time this happened, it seemed that the becalmed area was being reduced to nothing. For Elaine it was like watching a great black spider taunting its trapped prey. For minutes at a time they were blinded by the acrid vapor; then without warning the wind would fall, causing the smoke to retreat just far enough to reveal that the flames had not yet reached them. Harry, exhausted from coughing, was leaning on the gunwale, limply holding a hose, trying to cool the wooden boat. Beside him a pump chattered away, lifting and pushing the dirty seawater up onto the deck. He coughed again, his throat sore and burning. “You all right, Lainey?” he gasped as a new wave of smoke enveloped them.