“It’s the President, sir,” broke in the radioman, swiveling in his chair.
“Mr. President,” Forte began, depressing the button on his handset, “sorry to–”
“No apologies, Rip,” the President said briskly. “You have troubles.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What can I do?”
“Is Admiral Devin on?”
“Yes,” said Devin, speaking for himself.
“Good. I–”
The Sun King started to shake like an aircraft caught in sudden turbulence, and two seconds later the deepthroated rumble of a cascade of bursting high explosives reverberated from the iron hull.
“Is that gunfire I hear?” demanded the President.
“It’s everything Admiral Hodge can throw at it, sir. I’ve requested a two-minute bombardment with shells, missiles, and bombs dropped from his carrier-based planes. The idea is to blast a path through the flaming oil so we can pass through.”
“I see.”
“I don’t,” put in Chief of Staff Devin. “How will you be able to keep the flaming oil from flowing right back across the break?”
“Well, sir, while the firing is underway, Admiral Hodge is going to maneuver his carrier, four cruisers, and five destroyers into two lines, in right and left echelon. If a pathway is cleared, he’s going to ram his ships through the break. The wake of the first ship in line will push back the oil a hundred yards or so, the second another hundred yards, and so on, clearing a path for the Sun King and the Alamo to pass through when it reaches that point in the line of fire in about eight hours.”
“And once the ships are through the first run, they’ll turn 180 degrees, increase the separation between the echelons, and go back, widening the breach?”
“That’s it.”
“But what if it doesn’t work?” said President Turnbull.
“We’ll know in a minute. I’ll have Admiral Hodge patched into this circuit while I go topside to see what’s going on.”
He nodded to the radio operator, who had been listening in. The operator flipped switches, and a moment later Vice-Admiral Hodge’s voice acknowledged the call.
“The President and Admiral Devin are on the line, Ramsey. Any luck?”
“Can’t tell yet, Rip. The shelling is still in progress, but the visibility is degrading as the fire builds, and I can’t be sure of a break until I actually see it. One of my destroyers is standing by to make the first run.”
“Ramsey,” he said into the handset, “have you sent in the tin can yet?”
“Just gave the order to execute,” Admiral Hodge said.
“What does aerial reconnaissance estimate the width of the oil track now?”
“The smoke is too dense to take a visual reading, Rip, but infrared detectors aboard the AWACS say it’s 1,050 meters.”
“How long will it take that destroyer to penetrate and report?”
“It should take forty-five seconds at flank speed to come out on your side. Any second now.”
They waited, keeping the voice channel clear for the destroyer commander’s report.
Suddenly a new, raspy voice came through the speaker.
“Captain U.S.S. Pratt speaking, sir. We’re through.”
“Great!” said Admiral Hodge.
“No, sir, not so great.”
“What the hell–” Hodges began angrily and then, as if suddenly realizing that someone may have been hurt during the dash through the fire, went on solicitously, “No casualties, I hope, Captain?”
“Couple of guys are groggy from smoke inhalation, sir.”
“Then what–”
“The flames are pretty hot, Admiral, and the hull paint ignited. We’re aflame from stem to stern.”
32. EXPERTS
14 MARCH 2008
IT WAS A BUSY TWENTY MINUTES FOR FORTE AND THE
three radio officers who had volunteered to stay behind.
At 0337 Forte rousted Al Seifert out of an all-night poker game in San Antonio.
At 0343 he located Benjamin J. Rockwell, who was superintending operations at the scene of a forest fire in northeastern California.
At 0344 he caught up with Lieutenant General Fritz Habner, deputy commander of the military air transport service, on an inspection tour at an Air Force base near Topeka, Kansas.
After a brief discussion with Seifert and Rockwell to learn who was the top fire theoretician, Forte ran Professor Jerry K. Smith to earth at a singles bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The four men were instructed to stay on the open line by presidential order, which Forte had taken upon himself to issue in Turnbull’s name.
Meanwhile, at 3:44, the captain of the U.S.S. Pratt reported that the fire, which he had anticipated and prepared for by mustering all hands at fire quarters before committing his ship to the flames, had been extinguished.
At 3:51 the U.S.S. Swordfish surfaced on the starboard beam of the Sun King and was now boarding crew members who could be spared.
Just before 4 A.M. Admiral Hodge reported that the three tankers had been intercepted, but all three captains had come up missing.
For the moment, Ripley Forte had done all he could do. Several hundred nonessential personnel would be out of danger within the next half hour. They would be transferred to Task Force 71 Able by 0600. Then the Swordfish
would return, standing by to evacuate the other personnel when it got too hot to remain aboard.
Three minutes now stood between him and the fateful decision. There was only one way now to save the Sun King and the Alamo. But Forte knew instinctively that he couldn’t push the President; he would have to be gently shepherded in the right direction so that, in the end, Turnbull would believe that he himself had been father of the idea.
As he watched the clock running down to the moment of truth, he became aware that he and his three busy radio operators were no longer alone in the big communications room.
By the door stood Jennifer Red Cloud.
She was dressed in white sharkskin coveralls with a flaring collar and white high-heeled shoes. Her hands nursed a cup of coffee as she leaned against a bulkhead with an air of quiet amusement as she regarded Forte making his last-ditch effort to save the Alamo.
Well, the hell with her. He had more important things on his mind than Jennifer Red Cloud.
“Stand by, Mr. Forte,” said one of the officers monitoring the circuits. A red light above the main console blinked on.
“Mr. President, this is Forte again.”
“It’s your party, Mr. Forte,” replied Turnbull. “But I have taken the liberty of adding to the guest list by asking my scientific adviser, Dr. Sid Bussek, to be with me.”
Dr. Sidney Bussek was an ace in the hole Forte hadn’t counted on. Suddenly things looked brighter.
“Dr. Bussek is most welcome, Mr. President,” said Forte. “First off, I’d like to have Mr. Al Seifert of San Antonio give us his opinion on the best way to handle a fire like this.”
“Well, Rip,” came a gravelly voice. “I’ve been up against a lot of oil fires but never one like the one you’ve described. From my experience, I’d have to say that if there’s really three million tons of crude afire down there, it’s going to have to burn itself out.”
“That’s not the problem, Al. We don’t give a damn
about the fire, only about blasting a path which will be kept open by the wakes of ships cruising back and forth at high speed until we can slip the Sun King and the Alamo through.”
“Yeah, I got all that the first time round, Rip,” said Seifert dryly. “But if you want me to blast your way out, I’ll need at least 3,500 liters of nitroglycerine.”
“Will that do it?”
“It’ll blast a half-mile path, no question about it.”
“Can you do it?”
“Could, but can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Time factor. It would take at least twenty-four hours to get that much liquid thunder together. Then I’d have to have a cellular container constructed–couldn’t have all that nitro sloshing around, you know–and that could take forty-eight hours from a standing start, and then there’s transport time, plus the tricky business of placing the charge, and even if–”
“You’re saying it’s impossible to create a path through that burning crude within eight hours, right?”
“Sorry, Rip. Now, if I–”
Ripley Forte made a slashing motion with the edge of his hand against his throat. The radio operator cut off Al Seifert’s voice in midsentence.
“Mr. Rockwell?”
“On the line, Mr. Forte, but speak up. My fire’s a lot closer than yours, and it’s pretty noisy.”
His own voice barely came through the crackling and popping of a forest being consumed, according to Rockwell, at better than an acre every fifteen seconds.
“You’ve heard the problem, Mr. Rockwell.”
“If it were up to me, I’d use several relays of five or six aircraft crossing the fire low and at right angles, dumping bentonite clay slurries on it. It could cover a large area, and we could keep it up indefinitely, provided we had the aircraft.”
“Is the bentonite slurry available in large enough quantities?”
“What with this five-year drought and an average of three major fires in the northwest every week, we could drown you in the stuff. At a guess, eight hundred or a thousand tons would do the trick.”