Firespill by Ian Slater

to the growing mood of helplessness. “No, sir, not a chance. It’s been caught in a pincer movement—completely surrounded by a large fire zone which could come in fast.”
    On the map Blane’s finger moved westward from Sitka out to sea. “This is where the Vice-President is—about fourteen or fifteen miles from the collision site. You can see the spill was already in front of her, to the east, between her and Baranof Island, before it caught fire. Pretty soon after, two arms of it circled back around her, then joined up again and spread back of her, making a kind of bone-shaped spill. The clear area, with the boat in it, is in the center of the eastern part of the bone, as it were. Now, as I say, how fast the fire comes in towards the boat is—well, anybody’s guess. It all depends on the hydrostatic head at what was the Russian tanker site.”
    Blane’s cool professionalism irritated the President. “Come on, Norman, put that in English I can understand.”
    The aide’s arms moved flamboyantly as he explained. “Hydrostatic head? Oh, well, it’s the pileup of oil as it leaks up from the sunken tanks, sir. Like pouring whipped cream on coffee, only from underneath the surface.” Blane smiled, congratulating himself on the analogy. “Its dispersal rate depends on wind and currents. And temperature. Oil will normally move at around four percent of wind velocity, but with strong currents and winds it can do a lot better than that. Those gases can race across the sea like a regular prairie fire.”
    Sutherland grunted. “Has anybody found out yet if any of our ships are in the area?”
    Henricks quickly read the shipping report. “No, sir, no U.S. surface craft now that the Tyler Maine has gone. There is a Canadian sub. That’s all.”
    The President thought for a moment, then asked, “What about our subs?”
    Henricks checked the report again but shook his head. “No, sir. We have four nuclear subs on northwestern patrol—two in the Bering Strait, two in the Beaufort Sea—and one conventional a hundred miles south of the Aleutian chain. They’re all too far away to get there in time, even at maximum speed.”
    Sutherland barely heard Henricks’s last remark. For a moment his mind had fled from the present crisis to the memory of a much happier time—to Elaine’s face, flushed with excitement, the first time he had shown her how to snorkel on Kauai, the northernmost island of the Hawaiian chain. He could still hear her voice, her words almost tripping over one another, eager to tell of the wonders she had seen for the first time: the kaleidoscope of colors; the polished black, yellow, and blue of the Moorish Idol gently nibbling the seaweed just a few feet below her; and the long white eels with their eyes like marbles, immobile and piercing, as they hung suspended like stiff pieces of kelp below the surface of the gently rolling surf. Her mood had been so infectious that the thrill of his own youthful discoveries had come flooding back to him.
    It was the sheer vigor of her childlike curiosity which had first drawn him to her, had revived in him emotions far removed from the daily machinations of power, and had filled him with a desire to shrug off the inhibitions imposed by the often secret nature of his work as a congressman in the Armed Services Appropriations Committee. The long hours, the constant pressure from generals and admirals to increase the size of defense contracts, and the almost flagrantly ill disguised bribes offered by hopeful contractors had made him suspicious of nearly everyone in Washington.
    But with Elaine, he found, he could relax. She possessed a candor so well balanced by a sense of humor that no one could take offense. He had once seen her fix a large and importunate electronics tycoon with a winning smile and announce, “I hope you’re not trying to bribe me into voting yes on that new import quota bill, Jack, because if you are, I’ll vote the other way, just to prove