The man in the anorak went below to the galley, rubbing hands and shivering repeatedly. In the galley he found one of his colleagues and helped himself to a piping mug of coffee. When he had finished he returned to the bridge and sought out his own clothes, the black tracksuit and sweater he had come aboard with.
“Jeez,” he told the man on the bridge in his American accent, “you sure didn’t miss. I could feel the wadding from those blanks slapping into the back of the windbreaker.”
The bridge watch grinned.
“Andriy said to make it good,” he replied. “It worked. Mishkin and Lazareff are coming out at eight tomorrow morning. By afternoon they’ll be in Tel Aviv.”
“Great,” said the Ukrainian-American. “Let’s hope Andriy’s plan to get us off this ship works as well as the rest.”
“It will,” said the other. “You better get your mask on and give those clothes back to that Yankee in the paint locker. Then grab some sleep. You’re on watch at six in the morning.”
Sir Julian Flannery reconvened the crisis management committee within an hour of his private talk with the Prime Minister. She had told him the reason why the situation had changed, but he and Sir Nigel Irvine would be the only ones to know, and they would not talk. The members of the committee would simply need to know that, for reasons of state, the release of Mishkin and Lazareff at dawn might be delayed or canceled, depending on the reaction of the German Chancellor.
Elsewhere in Whitehall, page after page of data about the Freya, her crew, cargo, and hazard potential were being photographically transmitted direct to Washington.
Sir Julian had been lucky; most of the principal experts from the committee lived within a sixty-minute fast-drive radius of Whitehall. Most were caught over dinner at home, none had left for the countryside; two were traced to restaurants, one to the theater. By nine-thirty the bulk of UNICORNE were seated in conference once again.
Sir Julian explained that their duty now was to assume that the whole affair had passed from the realm of a form of exercise and into the major-crisis category.
“We have to assume that Chancellor Busch will agree to delay the release, pending the clarification of certain other matters. If he does, we have to assume the chance that the terrorists will at least activate their first threat, to vent oil cargo from the Freya. Now we have to plan to contain and destroy a possible first slick of twenty thousand tons of crude oil; secondly, to envisage that figure being multiplied fifty-fold.”
The picture that emerged was gloomy. Public indifference over years had led to political neglect; nevertheless, the amounts of crude-oil emulsifier in the hands of the British, and the vehicles for their delivery onto an oil slick, were still greater than those of the rest of Europe combined.
“We have to assume that the main burden of containing the ecological damage will fall to us,” said the man from Warren Springs. “In the Amoco Cadiz affair in 1978, the French refused to accept our help, even though we had better emulsifiers and better delivery systems than they did. Their fishermen paid bitterly for that particular stupidity. The old-fashioned detergent they used instead of our emulsifier concentrates caused as much toxic damage as the oil itself. And they had neither enough of it nor the right delivery systems. It was like trying to kill an octopus with a peashooter.”
“I have no doubt the Germans, Dutch, and Belgians will not hesitate to ask for a joint allied operation in this matter,” said the man from the Foreign Office.
“Then we must be ready,” said Sir Julian. “How much have we got?”
Dr. Henderson from Warren Springs continued.
“The best emulsifier, in concentrated form, will emulsify—that is, break down into minuscule globules that permit natural bacteria to complete the destruction—twenty times its own volume. One gallon of emulsifier for twenty gallons of crude oil. We have one thousand tons in stock.”
“Enough for one slick of twenty thousand tons of crude oil,” observed Sir Julian. “What about a million tons?”
“Not a chance,” said Henderson grimly. “Not a chance in hell. If we start to produce more now, we can manufacture a thousand tons every four days. For a million tons, we’d need fifty thousand tons of emulsifier. Frankly, those maniacs in the black helmets could wipe out most marine life in the North Sea and English Channel, and foul up the beaches from Hull to Cornwall on our side, and Bremen to Ushant on the other.”
There was silence for a while.
“Let’s assume the first slick,” said Sir Julian quietly. “The other is beyond belief.”
The committee agreed to issue immediate orders for the procurement during the night of every ton of emulsifier from the store in Hampshire; to commandeer tanker lorries from the petroleum companies through the Energy Ministry; to bring the whole consignment to the esplanade parking lot at Lowestoft on the east coast; and to get under way and divert to Lowestoft every single marine tug with spray equipment, including the Port of London firefighting vessels and the Royal Navy equivalents. By late morning it was hoped to have the entire flotilla in Lowestoft port, tanking up with emulsifier.
“If the sea remains calm,” said Dr. Henderson, “the slick will drift gently northeast of the Freya on the tide, heading for North Holland, at about two knots. That gives us time. When the tide changes, it should drift back again. But if the wind rises, it might move faster, in any direction, according to the wind, which will overcome the tide at surface level. We should be able to cope with a twenty-thousand ton slick.”
“We can’t move ships into the area five miles round the Freya on three sides, or anywhere between her and the Dutch coast,” the Vice Chief of Defense Staff pointed out.
“But we can watch the slick from the Nimrod,” said the group captain from the RAF. “If it moves out of range of the Freya, your Navy chaps can start squirting.”
“So far, so good, for the threatened twenty-thousand-ton spillage,” said the Foreign Office man. “What happens after that?”
“Nothing,” said Dr. Henderson. “After that, we’re finished, expended.”
“Well, that’s it, then. An enormous administrative task awaits us,” said Sir Julian.
“There is one other option,” said Colonel Holmes of the Royal Marines. “The hard option.”
There was an uncomfortable silence around the table. The vice admiral and the group captain did not share the discomfort; they were interested. The scientists and bureaucrats were accustomed to technical and administrative problems, their countermeasures and solutions. Each suspected the rawboned colonel in civilian clothes was talking about shooting holes in people.
“You may not like the option,” said Holmes reasonably, “but these terrorists have killed one sailor in cold blood. They may well kill another twenty-nine. The ship costs one hundred seventy million dollars, the cargo one hundred forty million dollars, the clean-up operation treble that. If, for whatever reason, Chancellor Busch cannot or will not release the men in Berlin, we may be left with no alternative but to try to storm the ship and knock off the man with the detonator before he can use it.”
“What exactly do you propose, Colonel Holmes?” asked Sir Julian.
“I propose that we ask Major Fallon to drive up from Dorset and that we listen to him,” said Holmes.
It was agreed, and on that note the meeting adjourned until three A.M. It was ten minutes before ten o’clock.
During the meeting, not far away from the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister had received Sir Nigel Irvine.