Firespill

by Ian Slater

  “No—can hardly breathe.”

  Harry, convulsed by his coughing, lost his grip on the hose. It slithered along the deck like a tired snake, finally gushing up against the pump and flooding it. When his cough temporarily abated, Harry turned his attention to fixing the pump. “All we can do is to keep us hosed down. I’ve thrown everything overboard we don’t need in case we have to make a dash.” His eyes searched carefully about the boat for anything else that was expendable. Then, although the effort nearly made him black out, he managed to restart the pump. He slapped it affectionately, as one would a faithful pet. “She’s a heavy old sod—weighs us down I know, but if that sub makes it I’ll chuck her over all right. An extra burst of speed will come in mighty handy.”

  The Vice-President wasn’t listening. All she could hear was a bellowing roar, and all she could see was the canyon-deep wall of fire which completely surrounded them. “Do you think we’ve got a fighting chance?”

  Slumped against the life preserver, Harry was coughing uncontrollably. Finally he took a swig of fresh water, hot from the fire, cleared his throat, and spat blood over the side. After a while he answered slowly. “No, Lainey, I don’t. A fighting chance is a fair chance.”

  More fumes swept over and around the boat.

  “One in ten, maybe?”

  “More like one in fifty.”

  They did not speak again for several minutes. Elaine didn’t want to think of anything, least of all her slim chances of survival, but she knew that she must steady her mind against the panic she felt welling up again inside her. But the only thing her consciousness would allow was the thought of how much trouble she was causing. She heard the old man wheezing heavily. She looked at him sorrowfully. “I’m very…” she began weakly, coughing again. “I … shouldn’t have gotten you into this … should’ve let those agents come with me … used a bigger boat.”

  The wind had changed direction again, and they immediately felt better as the suffocating fumes momentarily fell back. “Bigger boat wouldn’t have helped, Lainey. Neither would a hundred agents. We’d still be stuck out here, and them with us. Besides, it’s the motor’s fault.”

  Before ceasing transmission to save their battery’s power, they had radioed Admiral Klein that if there were any risk at all to others, no one should try to rescue them. Klein, taking care not to tell them about the precarious position of the Swordfish, the dispersal rate of the oil, the deteriorating weather, or anything else which would make the rescue hazardous, had thanked them and then had told them that regardless of their desire, the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada had decided that an attempt should be made. All Harry had said was “Damn fine of them Canadians.” Elaine had readily agreed, buoyed up by even the faint prospect of rescue.

  But afterwards she realized that there had been a certain inner calm in the acceptance of finality. Now that there was hope, however little, there was anxiety.

  For her the most terrifying aspect of the fire was that there was no reference point, no steady marker against which to calculate the rate of its advance. It was even possible, she thought, that it might be slowly withdrawing, as it had earlier, in the squall. She tried to gauge the wind, but because much of it was being generated by the fire itself, it seemed to be coming from all different directions at once. Harry passed over some fresh water. Elaine felt that it was all she could do to reach out for the flask, and when she drank, it tasted of gasoline. She wiped her lips with a rag to rid them of their crust of smoke deposits. The next sip tasted worse. She capped the flask and handed it back. “How wide do you think this—this pond of ours is?”

  “It was about five miles.”

  “Was?”

  “The fire’s coming in. Wind’s rising.”

  A surge of panic passed over the Vice-President. “But—I mean—how can you tell? The wind’s been eddying all around us.”

  Harry motioned towards the control console. “Drift indicator.”

  She looked at her watch. “How fast do you think it’s advancing?”

  “ ’Round half a mile an hour. It’s about four miles across now, I reckon. Time we moved into the center again—need as much moat as we can get.”

  As Harry struggled to his feet to make his way towards the console, Elaine, her face contorted against the heat, asked, “You said four miles wide?”

  Harry nodded and pressed the starter button.

  “Then we’ve got four hours … before it reaches us?”

  The boat started to move, slowly. “Less than that, Lainey. Four hours and it’ll be right on top of us. Doubt if we can last less than a quarter of a mile from the flames. All the oxygen’d be gone. I’d say about two hours—maybe less.”

  Despite his fatherly tone of voice, his matter-of-fact delivery was alarming. Elaine suspected that the old man no longer believed that their chances were even one in fifty; he didn’t believe they had any chance at all.

  When they reached the center of the clear area and Harry turned off the motor, they could see rivulets of oil from the main slick curling about the bow in rainbows of colors, riding the wake and probing here and there in long tentacles. In the distance there was a loud crump as a new pool of high octane exploded, shooting a long, bluish yellow flash through the dull orange of the burning crude. Soon new columns of smoke could be seen arching towards them, riding on the advancing balls of flame which tumbled madly over and into each other, growing larger and spreading by the second as they cannibalized the primary fire in their path. As each wave reached the perimeter of the clear area, it collapsed, spreading out and hissing into the newly won space.

  Soon the explosions of the high octane sounded like a creeping artillery barrage, raising the temperature of the whole spill, bringing more and more of the vast blanket of crude to its flash point. Unlike the variegated and dancing patterns of the high-octane fire, there was nothing especially dramatic about the ignition of the gel-like crude—only a slow roll of tangerine flame. But once it was alight, the thicker oil would bum on and on, outlasting the high octane by days, even weeks.

  Harry guessed what the explosions meant, but when Elaine asked him what was happening, he said he didn’t know. More fire meant less oxygen and less time for the submarine to reach them. Suddenly a fierce gust of hot, skin-itching wind howled into the Happy Girl, sending Elaine’s hair streaming behind her and flattening her against the gunwale. The fire was creating its own wind system, and this was its first assault. Harry knew that this too would get worse, for even though the high waves that would result from the winds at the fire’s center might douse part of it, churning and breaking up some of the oil, he was sure that the winds had already pushed part of the fire onto the North American coast, and would push more. But he said nothing about this to Elaine. It would only make her feel worse about having asked him to bring her out here.

  “What time do you have?” she asked.

  He turned towards her and smiled kindly, answering her question as if it really mattered, as if they really did stand a chance. “Nearly six-forty-five.”

  By now the smoke and fumes from the crude were starting to envelop the boat, joining the night in forming a pitch black sheet about them.

  By Elaine’s reckoning the submarine had till eight-forty-five at the latest, to find them. And if the fire wind rose further, she knew it would be even less.

  Fourteen

  In Tokyo it was early afternoon. Through the unusually heavy smog that hung over the sprawling Asanami Shipyard, Police Chief Sunichi Yamada could see the towering, unfinished hull of a million-ton supratanker standing silently over the crowd of ten thousand demonstrators, like some great carcass besieged by swarming ants. Yamada’s hand tightened on the pistol grip of the bullhorn as the crowd, mostly students, surged further into the shipyard, through the main gate, past the high, barbed wire storm fencing.

  Raising the bullhorn, Yamada ordered, “Spearhead formation!”

  In one quick movement, the aluminum-
shielded, blue-black-uniformed Kidōtai—the mobile squads—changed from two lines of a hundred riot-equipped men into a double spearhead. If they began to move and one man fell in the forward formation, one from the second would immediately take his place.

  Here and there Yamada could see that groups of workers had joined the demonstration against the builders of the now American-owned MV Kodiak, but in the main the police chief could tell from the signs that this was the work of the university students. For that reason he was surprised that the protest had been so ill planned. No doubt it was due to the fact that the firespill—unlike political events—had happened without warning. Normally the radical organizers would never have allowed the crowd to gather in a road that had no side alleys and only one exit—in this case, the gate through the shipyard beyond the half-built tanker, which could take them nowhere except into the cold waters of the harbor. The only other way out was past the Kidōtai, and for an angry mob that was no way at all. Yamada took a deep breath. This demonstration would become a riot. He glanced at his watch again, for the sixth time in the last hour, and lifted the bullhorn. “You are advised that you are on private property. This constitutes a violation of Civil Ordinance Number—”

  His next few words were drowned in the roar of the crowd. He waited patiently for a minute, then added, “You now have five minutes in which to vacate these premises.”

  A barrage of rocks and bottles erupted from the crowd towards the Kidōtai. “Canopy!” barked Yamada, and the second row of shields clashed and rose in a single flash of sunlight, overlapping those that stood perpendicular, guarding the front line of men, forming an aluminum roof, covering the whole spearhead formation. The hail of projectiles bounced harmlessly to the already debris-strewn road.

  The Kidōtai battalion stood steady, the rounded perspex helmet covers distorting their faces as they awaited the order to move. They had been through all of this a hundred times before. No one even looked round as they heard the caged buses roaring up the road and stopping behind them. They simply stood still, holding the five-foot shields in their left hands and the two-and-a-half-foot riot sticks in their right, like Roman legionaires. Immediately behind them, groups of regular police readied the tear gas guns, plopping the canisters into the stubby, black barrels. From this position the regulars could reload and advance in relative safety behind the cover of the Kidōtai.

  Normally Yamada would have used the firehoses rather than tear gas, but someone had slashed most of the hose lines. At least they were that organized, he mused. He glanced at his watch for the last time. Now they had two minutes. It was hopeless. He knew they wouldn’t listen, but he had to try. He sensed from long experience that the crowd didn’t want violence, but it could not stop its own momentum. There were hundreds who were probably trying desperately to get out, but they were trapped by the crush of bodies which had taken on a collective will of its own, dictated by its sheer size and weight. But the drill was to give them a chance, until it was too dangerous to let them gather any more momentum. Some would inevitably be hurt, but better a few now than many later.

  Suddenly the crowd surged towards the police. Yamada calmly lifted the bullhorn. “Fire canisters!”

  There was a series of “boomps” and the silver canisters soared overhead and into the crowd. Pools of gas began to spread. As soon as he heard that the coughing was general, Yamada ordered, “Walk—advance!”

  The spearhead moved in unison, the riot sticks shaking ominously up and down in expectation. A volley of rocks struck the black and silver line. One officer stumbled for a second, then a hand shot out to his side and he shuffled a little dazedly back into step.

  Another volley of rocks struck the line, and two men fell. As two replacements came from behind, the long lines of clubs went up as one. “Charge!” yelled Yamada.

  As the Kidōtai hit the first wave of demonstrators, scores of people went down amid a screaming panic. The crowd shrank to almost half its size, like a frightened slug. Now the regular police were mopping up, dragging and pushing the arrested over the littered road, back into the waiting buses. One student, a boy of about eighteen, dashed to the side of the street and frantically began to scale a shop awning. A regular policeman dropped his baton and grabbed an ankle. The boy kicked back, opening his captor’s cheek. Feeling no pain in his fury, the policeman caught the boy’s leg again, dragged him down, threw him against the brick wall, and kicked him in the groin. As the boy slumped, the policeman continued to kick at his face, squashing the nose so that soon the boy’s arms, hopelessly trying to cover his head, were covered in blood. By now two other policemen had arrived and were pulling their colleague off, one of them yelling, “That’s enough. We’ll take him. That’s enough!”

  As the boy was hauled away, his head fell limp over his chest like a squashed fruit. One of the policemen supporting the boy was nearly out of breath. Gasping for air, he murmured, “All this—because—because of some oil. Is it worth it, fella? Hey—hey—is it worth it? You bastard!”

  Thirty-two miles east of the firespill, on the southwest coast of Kruzof Island, which lay like a protective arm guarding Sitka from the sea, the Tlingit village was deserted.

  Backed by an apron of spruce and fir forest that stretched towards the three-thousand-foot Mount Edgecumbe, the small Indian settlement that just hours before had been inhabited by eighty men, women, and children could well have been mistaken for a ghost town. But quite apart from the fact that it was known to be a relatively new settlement, made up of families descended from the Angoon clans on Admiralty Island, the signs of recent habitation were everywhere. Inside the short-peaked plank houses, plates of food and unmade beds stood as evidence of the Indians’ hasty retreat. Outside, washing fluttered on lines like the shredded flags of defeat, while racks of drying seaweed lay unattended and the tall, silent totem poles of Thunderbird, Beaver, and angry Bear glared across the village ground as if determined to do battle with the oncoming sea.

  The Tlingit took their living largely from the ocean, but they feared it too. Some, though nominally Christians, still believed that if a man drowned and his body was not recovered, he would surely not be taken into the soft embrace of the afterlife. The men of the clan were modern fishermen, but this day the fear of the sea had swept ashore with the crashing of the waves and had moved them to abandon the motor-powered fishing boats that now lay rocking mutely like obedient animals awaiting an inescapable end.

  Beyond the riot of devil club, cranberry bushes, and yellow pond lilies that grew at the edge of the thick woods, the village smokehouse, with its trapdoorlike chimney, kept streaming smoke as if it expected to go on forever. The smell of the cooking salmon wafted deep into the moss-laden spruce forest nearby and rose slowly through a clearing that had once been the site of an ancient gravehouse.

  An old chief had been the first to see dark smoke scratched across the salmon pink horizon. He had hauled in his lines and buoys and headed in to alert the village. No one had taken any notice, saying that it was not possible that the sea was on fire. Not even the white men with all their madness could make such a thing.

  In earlier times the old chief would not have informed them that it was wise to move lest the wind quicken and bring in the fire; he would have ordered them to move, and they would have obeyed. But now chiefs were elected, and the new leader, a younger man, had agreed with most of the other fishermen that the smoke was probably from a large ship on fire, nothing more.

  By the time they heard the news of the spill, the wind had blown the northernmost part of the fire into the shape of a scythe whose tip, aided by the strong currents in the area, had reached the headland at Point Mary, several miles north of the village. Dry as tinder from a long, hot summer, the forested coast hills had caught fire within minutes of the first burning and oil-soaked log’s striking the heavily wooded inlet. Soon thousands of cypress began to explode, splitting apart in grotesque shapes as the wind-driven flames raced across the treetops faster than the fire
s on the forest floor.

  Unable to head out to sea through the horseshoe of blazing oil, the Indians had quickly packed what belongings they had and started north in a race with the fire to Shelikof Bay, their only hope being to cross the island on the five-mile logging road to Mud Bay and there to find a boat to take at least some of them down through Hayward Strait and across the sound to Sitka. As they began their forced march towards the road, the chief couldn’t help but remember that his Tlingit ancestors had once burned Sitka to the ground, and now he and the clan were seeking its refuge.

  The President was feeling shaky from drinking too much coffee, but he wanted to be alert for reports both of the rescue attempt and of the much larger danger facing millions of people should the firespill reach the coast. Perhaps the wind from the forecast Arctic front wouldn’t rise and spread the fire after all; or if it did increase, perhaps it would reach gale force as the meteorologists had predicted and counteract the coast-bound movement of the spill, breaking it up into thousands of smaller, more manageable patches. But even then much of the shape and direction of the spill would still depend on the speed of the currents.

  Sutherland began to pace before the map wall, glancing now and then at the bank of digital clocks which, in the neutrality of their constant clicking, took on the appearance of a row of automated referees disinterestedly counting off the seconds against him. He felt irrationally hostile towards them, so ordered and efficient in the face of human disarray. Here he was, president of a powerful nation, perhaps the most technologically advanced in the world, and yet he was helpless to stop the firespill’s advance. All he could do, it seemed, was to react defensively, to continue to press plans for the mass evacuation of the entire civilian population of the Pacific Northwest.