“…but that mankind, its inventor, would become extinct as a species and—” The president switched off the machine. “Yes, Wayne.”
“Better pick up line two, sir. General Olafson just got a hot-line request.” McKenna picked up. “Phil?”
“Mr. President, we just got a request from Moscow for a direct line hookup,” Olafson said. He sounded slightly out of breath. “Chairman Gorny would like to speak to you at 1530 hours, our time.” McKenna checked his watch. “That’s not for another five hours.” He cupped the phone. “Gorny’s decided he wants to talk,” he said to Farber. “But not until three-thirty. What’s he waiting for?” Farber glanced up over his glasses. “Another proposition?”
“He can proposition me now, for chrissake!”
“If he’s having trouble convincing his friends”—
Farber shrugged—”maybe he needs the time to do some old-fashioned arm-twisting. Whatever the reason is, I wouldn’t turn it down.”
“I don’t intend to.” The president spoke into the receiver. “Phil, that is a call I do not want to miss. I want you and all of the crisis-conference members present when I take it. We’ll meet here, in this office, at three o’clock.”
“Yes, sir.”
McKenna replaced the receiver. He leaned back into his chair. “Maybe the old bird has come to his senses.”
“And if he hasn’t?”
The president held his head in his hands. “Pray for a miracle,” he said. “Pray for Caffey to save our asses.”
WHITE HILL
1250 HRS
White Hill wasn’t a hill at all.
It was on the back slope of one of the thousands of Philip Smith sweeps that connected ridges and tundra in the vast cordillera that was the Alaskan Brooks Range. White Hill might just as well have been called White Slope except that it didn’t look like a slope either. The sweep was so long as to make the angle of its grade deceiving so that a man standing on it might swear he was on level ground when actually there was a twelve-degree inclination. But no one even considered calling it White Inclination.
They called it White Hill which, all things considered, wasn’t any worse than calling the Little Big Horn a river.
The importance of White Hill to anyone who knew of it was that it was one of the booster pump stations along the 800-mile length of the pipeline to help maintain a constant 1180 psi of pressure of oil flow— manned by a rotating crew of five for half the year and self-maintaining during the heavy winter months. It had been a staging area for equipment and pipe during the pipeline’s construction phase, chosen because the area was relatively unaffected by crosswinds that swept down from the ranges. Its location was accessible and not considered dangerous to skyhook helicopters that delivered heavy machinery and equipment to work crews. The pumping station consisted of half a dozen wood-frame buildings, a four-bay garage for vehicles and the booster pump house through which the pipe ran.
The pump house was also the location of the emergency shut-down valve. It was, incidentally, from this assembly of buildings and, during construction, the machinery that supported it, that the pump station got its name. From a distance, after a snowfall, PS No. 3 looked like a snow-covered hill. But it wasn’t called Snow Hill because PS No. 7, forty miles north of Fairbanks, had already been named that… and it was a hill.
Jake Caffey didn’t give a damn what they called it. As far as he was concerned it was an intersection of coordinates on a very large map. But he’d never seen the pipeline and his first impression of it as the chopper made its way east, to find it, and then north, to follow it, was awe. It looked like an unending funeral procession — a frozen silver snake held above the ground by Tinkertoy pallbearers. Only the snake was a four-foot-diameter cast-metal pipe and the Tinkertoy supports were reinforced steel beams eight feet tall. The pipeline zigzagged across the rugged contours of the Alaskan frontier, dipping into the ground on one side of a river or stream and resurfacing on the other. A thirty-yard swath had been cut for it through densely wooded terrain.
When he saw White Hill from the air, Caffey knew exactly how he would defend it. The pump station was only approachable from north or south because it was in the middle of several hundred square miles of timberland. They weren’t enormous trees; nothing that grew above the permafrost line in the Arctic Circle got enormous. There were just millions of them — spruce, pine, yellow cedar, hemlock, willows — more than a column of men in a hurry could hack their way through easily. Probably the trees weren’t so formidable that they’d stop a heavy tank, but the Russians didn’t have a heavy tank. AH they had were two tracked, cold-weather vehicles. And the only way to approach White Hill was from the north or south — where the pipeline followed the fire break. The column’s line of march would bring it a few miles south of the pump station where it would turn north into the break. They’d have to come that way.
For a change, Caffey thought, he finally had some advantages — total surprise, position, complementary terrain and a weapon he hadn’t realized until he saw it… a million gallons of Alaskan crude oil.
1410 HRS
Caffey saw the first snowmobile top a slight rise about a mile and a half down the breaker. He passed the binoculars to Kate. “There’s the point,” he said in a whisper. “The main body can’t be more than four or five minutes behind.”
He’d selected the best vantage point from which to direct the assault — the pump house. It was the last building in the group of buildings on the site. It faced the south breaker, enabling an unobstructed view of the column’s approach. He and Kate had taken a position at a window on the catwalk above the pipe where it extended out of the main pump rig and through the insulated wall of the building. The catwalk vibrated with each stroke of the pump regulator. It was like sitting inside a heart chamber.
Shu-thum-de-DA… shu-thum-de-DA… Eleven and a half times a minute.
The regulator’s slow but methodically precise action gave the place an eerie sense of foreboding, Caffey thought. Just what he needed.
Caffey flicked his walkie-talkie to transmit. He looked for Parsons’s position even though he knew he couldn’t see it. Parsons and PFC Merano manned one of the two machine guns in the thicket on the east side ‘ of the breaker a hundred and fifty yards away. The other was on the west side, offset so they wouldn’t be shooting each other in the crossfire.
“Able, we just spotted the point,” Caffey said. “They’re about a mile and a quarter from your position.”
The talkie squelched slightly as Parsons’s voice came back. “Yeah, we can hear it. Snowmobile.”
“Sit tight. Let the point through.”
“Right.”
Caffey searched the treeline across the breaker to the west. “Baker? You copy?”
“Yes, sir, Colonel. We wait for your signal.”
“Good boy. Charlie?”
The pilot didn’t respond immediately. “Charlie, here.”
“No screwing around, Lieutenant. Fast, low and out. Hit your primary and go. I need you guys.”
“We need us guys, too,” came the reply. “Don’t worry, sir, we’ll kick their balls off.”
Caffey set the talkie aside. He looked at Kate. “How about you?”
She gave a faint nod. “If you mean am I scared, Jake, you bet your ass I am. Right down to my wet little jockey shorts.” She patted the muzzle of her M-16. “But I’m ready.”
“Sorry you came?”
“And miss this show?” She shook her head. “Can you imagine what the ERA supporters could do with this bit of propaganda? First woman combatant? Christ, they’ll probably make me head of the first all-woman regiment.”