“Go!” Llamos yelled out to her. “Jimmy and I’ll look after him. You need to reach the raft. Transmit our—” He didn’t finish, his voice drowned in a gush of superheated steam, a boiler beneath them exploding, splitting the ship’s port after section, the stern heaving, the stack spewing boiling water swept forward for hundreds of yards in the gale force winds. The stern was now split and sliding back into the sea, rolling, revealing the flanges of its enormous prop blades. Llamos and the other three were toppling out of control down the cliff of the deck. A lifeboat wrenched from its davits swung upward like a trapeze, smashing itself to splinters. The hissing roar of the stern was so loud it could be heard above the gale by the few crewmen still battling the second tanker’s fires. Unable to save Sandra or the others, the two-man helo crew watched helplessly as the rear half of the MV Sitka disappeared. Then they turned their attention to the tiny frantic figures on the stern of the second tanker.
The chopper’s pilot had ordered his assistant to jettison the bodies of the two dead men they’d hauled up, lessening the chopper’s weight so the helo might try to pick up as many survivors as possible from the twenty-five-man crew on the second tanker and any others who, inconceivable as it appeared, might be alive on the forward section of the first tanker. Though still afloat, it was certain to go under within minutes.
The pilot shouted his instructions regarding excess weight into the throat mike, and his assistant, after having grabbed the auto-flash Canon and taking head shots of the two dead men for later identification, pushed the bodies out. The chopper banked in the darkness toward the stern of the second tanker, its fire now so fierce, there was no hope of the ship’s hoses extinguishing it. The hot air currents streaming up from the blazing ship were so powerful that the pilot knew there was no chance of getting anywhere close to the deck.
Cautiously he brought the chopper toward the stern, his visibility now reduced to zero because of the continuing oil smudge on his windscreen combining with the buildup of salt crust, a combination the wipers couldn’t handle. His assistant saw a crimson streak several hundred yards away to the east— a flare — and in its flickering light the Day-Glo of a Beaufort “Teepee.” Yelling at the pilot and gesturing eastward, the assistant guided them to the point seventy feet away. The chopper hovered above the raft and lowered the harness, swiveling in the C clip. But then seeing the raft was overcrowded with survivors from both tankers and that this could easily lead to a capsize should the chopper be suddenly caught in an updraft, the pilot shouted into the mike, “We’re only a few miles from shore. Best leave ‘em for Air Sea Rescue in the morning. Stand a better chance, I reckon.”
“I dunno,” yelled the assistant. “Could go belly-up anyway in the swells.” During the second of hesitation the Bell 212, which could not fly on one engine unless traveling in excess of one hundred miles per hour, gave a shudder. An engine coughed, then the other cut out, its air filter jammed solid with soot from the oil fire. The chopper plunged, its rotors chopping into the loaded raft. Then, catching a swell, the blades cartwheeled the chopper several hundred feet, splashing into the mousse of bunker “C,” parts of the main rotor whistling through the gale. Everyone aboard the tent raft was drowned, in effect suffocated by the oil, including Sandra Thompson and the two-month-old child she was carrying.
General Grey had thought nothing of Freeman’s call about the peculiar condition of winter ice in the Bering Strait. Surely the Pentagon planners would know this. Grey called downstairs to make sure. They didn’t know. This shocked Grey, but even so it wasn’t Freeman’s familiarity with the minutiae that now impressed him but rather the simple yet profound realization that for Freeman to think of such a detail in the midst of his wife’s catastrophic injury meant that the soldier in Freeman was not only alive and well, but there was only the soldier — that Freeman was straining at the leash. With his genius for logistical detail as well as strategic thought he was unquestionably the man for the job. America had never fought a sustained Arctic war, but now, with the Mideast oil wells afire and the Siberians having answered President Mayne with the sinking of the two American tankers, which by itself constituted an immediate threat to the U.S. oil supply from the Alaskan North Slope, the U.S. had no option. It was war.
Grey lifted his Pentagon scrambler phone, got the Joint Chiefs’ approval, including that of the CNO, Admiral Horton; then he rang the White House and suggested that General Douglas Freeman be appointed commander in chief, Operation Arctic Front, the moment he landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base Alaska. The president approved.
The call came through to Freeman in Monterey as Marjorie was watching a news flash cutting into “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno announcing that America was at war.
“My glory—” began Marjorie, in a state of shock, one hand clasped before her mouth as the other worked the remote to bring in CBN. “You hear that, Douglas?” she called out. “Russian submarines have attacked two of our ships. We’re at war again.”
Freeman had put the phone down and was already doing up his necktie in an old-fashioned Windsor knot, so old that it was now said to be back in style. He had already called Fort Ord to make transport arrangements and issued a series of orders marshalling elements of the marines’ rapid deployment force.
“My glory!” Marjorie repeated, slumped down in the recliner. “That’s terrible.”
“Yes,” Freeman agreed. “Sure as hell is.” It may have been the light of the TV flickering, but for a moment Marjorie could have sworn Douglas was smiling.
“Still, Marjorie,” he added, “must have been meant to be.” She suspected in a vague sort of way that it might be a jibe at her, but it was clear he also believed it.
“I hope it’ll be quick,” said Marjorie, “like Iraq.”
Freeman’s smile was devoid of condescension — one of those a parent gives when obliged to break a truth of life gently to his offspring, the truth that in life you couldn’t hope for nonstop, easy victories. He took nothing away from the men who had fought in Desert Storm, in which he himself had led part of the Seventh Armored in the decisive outflanking movement north that caught the Republican Guard with their pants down. But the Iraqi war, for all its moments of undeniable American and Coalition bravery, had been, when all was said and done, a hundred-hour ground war. Even the dimmest private would see that Siberia was a far different situation, that any comparison to Desert Storm was naive to say the least.
He spoke quietly. “Marjorie — Iraq is desert. Some high country to the north, but in the main, a desert. Siberia has everything, by which I mean every natural land, water, and ice barrier on God’s earth. And taiga — pine, birch, and fir forests — far as the eye can see. Wermacht used to talk of ‘distance illness,’ the endlessness of Russia. And Marjorie—” He was looking in the mirror, straightening the khaki tie. “—the Krauts didn’t even get to Siberia. They were in the small part of Russia.” He buttoned up his coat, the rows of campaign ribbons and decorations attesting to the battles he had fought for America from Southeast Asia to Iraq to the Minsk-Moscow line, his reflection in the mirror at once eager for and awed by his responsibility. “There is,” he said, pulling on his cap, “another minor detail.”