On March 7, the Samira took on a million tons of crude at Maracaibo, Venezuela, and set sail for Port Elizabeth, South Africa, steaming at twelve knots.
The courses of all three ships, by no coincidence, would intersect those of the others on March 14, just to the southeast of St. Peter and St. Paul Rock in the mid-Atlantic. A plot of those intersections would form an isoceles triangle on a chart of the area, a triangle that was some eighty-five nautical miles on each side.
On March 13, the three enormous tankers–at 1,700 feet long they were so big that travel between the bridge aft and the forecastle was by motor scooter–were still more than 400 miles apart. But since they would be coming within the 100-mile cordon around the Sun King and the Alamo, the U.S. Navy dispatched boarding parties to confirm their cargoes and inspect their logs.
The old frigate U.S.S. Fanning was detailed to check the Mary am. The captain of the Fanning, Commander Dan Doon, a rangy black-mustachioed man of thirty-two with a no-nonsense air about him, climbed aboard by Jacob’s ladder, saluted the quarterdeck, and was escorted to the bridge. There he had a cup of coffee with the Maryam’s captain, inspected the log, and received a report from the chief petty officer in charge of the detail checking the cargo. Everything seemed to be in order.
By nightfall of March 13, when darkness brought an end to visual but not radar surveillance, the task force commander was able to report to the White House and Pentagon that so far all was well.
As he spoke, the three tankers had nearly reached the points which had been determined by the Planning Organization, not absolute map coordinates but rather positions at the vertices of that imaginary triangle in the center of which the Sun King and the Alamo were being borne by the South Equatorial Current, Flettner sails, and oceangoing tugs toward South America.
The sun had set at 8:01 for the westernmost tanker, and by 8:40 sea and sky had melted together in nearly total darkness.
This was the moment.
The captain of the Maryam ordered the gate valves on the eight cargo manifolds, four port and four starboard, opened full. He ordered the manifold discharge pumps run up to maximum rpm. Oil gushed through eighteen-inch rubber hoses rigged across the scuppers, arcing in a graceful curve, black against black, into the sea. At the maximum pumping rate of 165,000 tons per hour, the ship would be emptied by 2:30 A.M. By then, lightened of its load, the tanker would be moving through the sea at full speed.
Well before daylight the tanker would have passed through the cordon of U.S. Navy ships. And shortly after it did, the captain would press the red button on his remote-control radio, igniting the floating magnesium-thermite flares he had dropped overboard just before midnight.
And the scene would be repeated simultaneously aboard the Selwa and the Samira.
Each ship would be empty just as it passed the point at which another of the three had begun to discharge its cargo, enclosing the Sun King and the Alamo in a triangle of fire from which escape was impossible.
Other men would have run to give the alarm. Ripley Forte stayed where he was. He knew that any action he took now would be a waste of time. The origin of the fire was obvious enough. He himself had scanned position reports of all shipping within five hundred miles before coming up on deck with Jennifer Red Cloud the night before.
Sirens began to sound aboard the Sun King and the Alamo, and high-intensity lights flashed on from stem to stern, turning the ebbing night into day.
Forte forced himself to walk calmly across the deck to the easy chair he had occupied the night before and sit down. He took three deep, slow breaths and by an effort of will walled off the wail of the sirens from his consciousness. Then he concentrated on the problem.
The problem was, he admitted to himself at once, probably insoluble. Action would be taken by his skippers and those of the navy ships, imaginative and perhaps heroic action, but it would not be enough.
Nothing could be done to arrest the forward progress of the two behemoths. They could be slowed by reversing the Flettner sails, perhaps, and by warping the Sun King into a circular course. But the torque developed in a turning maneuver would probably put unbearable stresses on one side of the Alamo. It would break up before it could be turned in any reasonable span of time.
And turn where? He recalled that the three tankers that had been pinpointed on the chart during the evening briefing were all megatonners. If their cargo was discharged inside the hundred-mile cordon, each side of the flaming triangle would be somewhere between seventy and ninety miles long. But the carpet of fire would spread in all directions, the viscosity of the oil decreasing in direct proportion to the heat of the fire. After three or four hours, each leg of the blazing triangle would be something like eighty miles long by three miles wide. No ship afloat could possibly get through that curtain of fire, much less the Sun King and the Alamo.
Such were Ripley Forte’s somber reflections as the senior officers of the Sun King pounded up the metal ladder and out on the deck. The five men drew up short as they took in what they would always remember as one of the most incongruous sights of their lives: the horizon ringed in flames and Ripley Forte sitting in an easy chair, apparently relaxed and unruffled.
“What the hell is happening?” said the skipper.
Forte told them. “Now that you know what we’re up against,” he said, “we can spare ourselves wasting time on half measures. There’s one chance. Let’s go below and look into it.”
He led the way down to the main deck and along the green passageway to the communications room.
“I want you to get President Turnbull and Navy Chief of Staff Devin on the horn,” he told the communications watch officer. He turned to a radio officer at an adjoining console. “And while he’s doing that, get me Vice-Admiral Hodge.” Vice-Admiral Ramsey Hodge was the commander of the task force charged with guarding the Sun King and the Alamo.
A moment later Hodge’s voice, hard and brittle, came over the speaker.
“Hodge here.”
“Ramsey, this is Rip. What’s the situation?”
“Air recon indicates a triangle of fire with you very near the center. In fact, you’re only a shade over twenty miles away from the leg of the triangle toward which you are drifting. You have about eight hours before the flames will engulf the Sun King. May I make a suggestion?”
“That’s why I called you.”
“Then abandon ship. I’ve already ordered the U.S.S. Swordfish to stand by to evacuate your crews. It should be surfacing at your position in about forty minutes. It’s a 3,800-ton Trident sub. Plenty of room for everybody.”
“Good thinking, Ramsey. I’ll get them mustered and aboard as soon as possible.”
“‘Them’? I hope you’re not thinking about honoring that old tradition by going down with your ship?”
“Maybe I won’t have to. It may depend on you.”
“Shoot.”
“What have you got near the leg of the triangle of fire toward which we are drifting?”
“My flagship and the bulk of my task force–my carrier, four cruisers, and seven destroyers. Why?”
Forte explained one of the two ideas that had occurred to him.
“It could work,” Hodge said, not believing it for a moment.
“It had better. Unless you’ve got a brighter idea.”
“I wish to hell I did. I’ll deploy the ships at once and issue orders for the recall of all the ships that can get here in time, in case it works.”
“Many thanks, Admiral.”
“Keep your fingers crossed.” Hodge signed off.
Forte turned to the Sun King’s captain. “You heard it all. Make your plans accordingly.”
“On the basis that we’re going to get through?”
Forte shook his head.
“On the basis that we’re not. I want all personnel unessential to the operation of the tugs and communications gear readied for evacuation within thirty minutes. Nobody else remains except volunteers. When the Swordfish arrives, I want the other hands put aboard immediately. That way it can get back to the carrier, disembark our crews, and have time to come back for us if needed.”
The officers thought he should have said “when” needed, but didn’t think it wise to say so.
The executive officer handed a cup of black coffee to Forte as he headed out the door to muster his crew.
“Good luck, sir.”
“Don’t take a strain,” Forte said with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. “You and your men will be back aboard busting your butts scraping the soot off this old scow before we see another another sunrise.”