While the past quarter century is full of stories of supertanker accidents, the Exxon Valdez, the Amaco Cadiz, and the Torrey Canyon being the most famous, many of the giant vessels have been lost through storm or accident or mechanical fault. During a single month in 1969, three tankers of over two hundred thousand tons were lost or severely damaged, and few outside of the oil industry ever knew of these incidents. While the causes of disasters vary, it’s rare that a single fault can sink one of these behemoths. Many factors, from weather to a simple human mistake to a complete design flaw, are necessary to pull a supertanker under the waves. Not until the space shuttle has a single device possessed so many backup systems and fail-safes — all designed to prevent the type of disaster about to unfold in the waters leading to Puget Sound.
In Ivan Kerikov’s plan, the destruction of the tanker was to occur shortly after the cancellation of her sale to Southern Coasting and Lightering. Since the crippled ship could not make it as far south as San Francisco Bay, the plug had been pulled on the deal a few days early, a minor detail that only slightly altered the intended outcome of the operation. Captain Hauser’s valiant actions merely shifted the target city to Seattle. While not as sentimental as San Francisco, it was an equally fragile ecosystem that would suffer just as cruelly when the crude washed up on its coastlines.
JoAnn Riggs’ job now was to ensure that as much oil as possible was dumped into the sea, while making her actions appear accidental rather than intentional. With the ship’s crew shortly to be killed and the extraction boat on the way, there would be no witnesses and no physical evidence that the largest oil spill in history was an act of sabotage. The most conservative estimate predicted oil spreading from Bellingham to Everett, and the best-case scenario saw a slick covering a 174-mile stretch of coast from Vancouver to Tacoma, an area that included thousands of miles of irregular shoreline and numerous inlets, islands, and bays.
Giving the order to kill the remaining crewmen was a decision that gave JoAnn Riggs pause. It was an order that should have fallen to Captain Albrecht but now was her responsibility. While the million dollars that was to be her share for this operation would go a long way to assuaging her guilt, she was still reluctant to give Wolf the nod to do it.
Sensing her unease as they stood on the port side bridge wing, Wolf knew he would have to kill them without getting the direct order. There were so many murders in his past that a few more didn’t cause him undue concern. However, he did lose some respect for the woman who had executed the takeover of the tanker as if born to terrorism. As he turned to go, he took Riggs’ silence as a tacit approval. While Wolf would be doing the actual killing, the responsibility was still hers. Riggs gathered herself to finish what she had been paid to accomplish.
Max Johnston had made certain when the Petromax Arctica was built that she incorporated every automatic and systematic safety device to prevent her from ever spilling even a drop of her cargo. Therefore, to intentionally sink the vessel and make sure that crude poured from the hull in such volume that nothing could prevent it took the concerted effort of the entire terrorist cadre except for Wolf and one man he kept to assist him, each of them assigned a specific task and timed with military precision.
The great hull of the Arctica was segmented into eighteen separate tanks, a system used not only to prevent the entire cargo from being lost if she were ever holed but also to make the vessel much more stable in rough water. A complex system of valves and pumps connected the tanks, used mostly to keep an even keel when part of the cargo had been pumped off the ship. The computer that monitored the level of oil in each of the cavernous tanks prevented the ship from ever becoming unbalanced in even the roughest storms, compensating automatically to the conditions of the vessel and of the sea.
Riggs and her team had to take the computer off-line and manually operate the pumps, valves, and float cocks that controlled oil movement. The computer could not produce the conditions necessary for dumping her cargo — there were mechanical checks as well as those programmed into the system. Human hands, driven by greed or madness, would have to run many of the controls, opening them wide even as the computer was demanding they close. The machine’s binary morality put that of humans to shame.
The first part of their plan to dump the Arctica’s cargo was the sea suction inlet located at the stern of the vessel. This thirty-inch-diameter pipe, in conjunction with the Arctica’s three cargo pumps, was used to draw seawater into the tanks during cleaning and ballasting operations. To allow the cargo to drain from the hull out through the inlet, eight different valves of the double-segregated system had to be opened. Then, gravity would force the two hundred thousand tons of crude into the open sea. Perversely, the ship would rise in the water as its cargo discharged, increasing the pressure through the outlet and spraying oil in a two-hundred-foot jet when it cleared the waterline. Unless a salvage diver explored the tank control room after the ship had been scuttled and checked each of the valves, there would be no evidence of sabotage.
The second part of the plan involved temporarily removing the deck covers over several tanks and using the manifold system to flood the deck with oil. Once Riggs was ready to open the sea suction inlet, the covers would be replaced, again — to remove evidence of tampering. The crude would then be ignited as the remainder drained away. Spill response teams would waste precious time battling the flames, never realizing that much more significant damage had already been done in the pump room. Third, shaped explosive charges were to be detonated in the crawl spaces between the vessel’s double hulls, timed so that much of her oil would already be oozing toward shore when her bottom was blown out. If things went according to design, the reasons behind the sinking of the Petromax Arctica would remain a mystery.
Riggs waited in the pump control room while some members of her team were in the labyrinthine tangle of the inner hull spaces planting explosives and others removed the covers to six of the tanks. So far, the computer monitors showed that the system was nominal. The tanks were in perfect trim, the ratio of gases in the inert mixture that prevented the oil from ever catching fire was within the proper range.
Riggs had wanted to coordinate efforts with handheld walkie-talkies, but they appeared to all have failed at the same time. She couldn’t get even a faint whisper from any of the units. Thinking it was a bad batch of batteries, JoAnn never suspected that the signals were being jammed. Relying on a quickly drawn up schedule, she waited for the appointed time to deactivate the computer and spool up the huge pumps that controlled the oil flow within the ship.
As soon as a hatch cover was removed from one of the brimming tanks, an alarm sounded in the control room that indicated the gas ratio had changed and was becoming dangerously explosive. At each alarm, Riggs flipped several switches, and the valves controlling oil flow forced crude into the open-hatched tank. It came bubbling through the openings in thick clots like some primordial tar pit, spreading in ever widening pools. At fifteen thousand tons an hour, it took only a few seconds for the pumps to coat the main deck in an inches-deep slick, heavy ropes of oil draining through the scuppers to pour into the Strait. The alarm for the Saab ullage radar, which measured the height between the top of the cargo and the tops of the tanks, wailed an even more strident note than the other sensors. Riggs ignored it, making certain that the entire four-and-a-quarter acres of the deck were awash with North Slope crude. The mixture of oil vapor and air became a destructive cloud over the hull. Satisfied, she shut down the pump and waited for the crews to wrestle the hatches back into place through the stinking black slime.