The First Billion

The twelve members of Team 7 crouched low on the riverbank, knees dug into the sandy moraine, watching, waiting. Fifty yards away, inside the compound, a man left the administration building and headed toward the pump house. He walked slowly, taking time to stretch and light a cigarette.

"Mark?" whispered Team Leader Abel. Each member of Team 7 was known only by his operational name. Personal details were not to be shared.

"Mullen. Jonathan D. Shift supervisor," responded Baker, his second in command. He did not add that Mullen was thirty-four years of age, an engineer who had received his degree at Purdue University in the state of Indiana. They had long ago memorized the faces and vital statistics of the crew who worked here. Mullen was easy. He never went without a Yankees windbreaker.

The American stopped a few feet from the pump house, flicked his cigarette to the ground, then opened the door and disappeared from sight.

To a man, Team 7 focused their eyes on the industrial landscape that lay beyond the fence, a dull metallic carcass sprawled beneath the half light of the midnight sun. Pump Station 2 of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, or TAPS, lay at the foot of the Endicott Range on the border of the Arctic National Refuge. Its job was to guarantee that crude oil flowed smoothly through a sixty-five-mile section of pipe along the environmentally sensitive south fork of the Koyukuk River. The pipeline began two hundred miles to the north at Prudhoe Bay and cut south in a zigzagging pattern to Valdez, the southernmost Alaskan port that remained free of ice year-round. There, the oil was loaded through one of four primary pumping berths onto the giant supertankers that carried it to points south in America, Europe, and Asia. Over a million barrels of oil arrived at Valdez each day, and at any time some nine million barrels filled the length of the pipeline.

Pump Station 2 was built on a flat rectangle of land five hundred yards long and two hundred yards wide that had been razed from surrounding grasslands and forest. Three oil storage reservoirs stood in a row on the western side of the station, mint green lozenges two stories high and a hundred feet in diameter capable of holding 420,000 barrels of oil. Due to the breakdown of two of the Valdez Marine Terminal's four pumping berths, the reservoirs were topped out.

In the center of the facility, a power plant had been constructed capable of generating four megawatts of electricity daily. It took fuel to make energy and energy to move fuel. The power plant stood gleaming in the dusky night, an elaborate steel Tinkertoy with blue and red lights blinking from catwalks and stairways and metal mesh terraces.

Dormitories, administrative offices, and the pumping station itself occupied the grounds on the eastern side of the compound. Staffing ran between ten and twenty-five persons, depending on whether maintenance was being performed. Current manpower stood at eleven. The exclusively male complement worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days on, seven off. In five minutes, at the designated strike time of 2 A.M., a skeleton staff was set to be on duty: a foreman and a technician. Others were asleep, catching up on some precious rack time before suiting up for their grueling shifts at 6 A.M. Six days into their shift, the lot could be counted on to be tired, irascible, and unobservant.

The pipeline entered the complex from the north, a giant stainless steel tube forty-eight inches in diameter lifted three feet above the ground by a series of vertical support members, or VSMs, located every sixty feet. From afar, the pipeline looked as if it had been built yesterday. But Team 7 knew different.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was a disaster waiting to happen. Defective berthing pumps at one end. Rusted and corroding pipeline in between. Hazardous drilling practices on the North Slope. Over 50 percent of all shutoff valves- valves strategically placed to isolate sections of the pipe and minimize the volume of spills- were inoperative. The earthquake monitoring system designed to cut flow through the pipeline no longer functioned. A year earlier, a temblor measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale had shaken the residents of Central Alaska out of their beds. The monitor hadn't given a peep. Oil had continued to flow as normal. Not a single valve closed automatically, not one pump station shut itself down. It was a miracle the pipeline had not snapped clean in two.

Completed in 1977, the TAPS was an aging, brittle dinosaur, one slip from an ecological disaster of heartrending proportions.

Team 7 had arrived to give it the push.

Ghosts no longer, the members of Team 7 had exchanged their anoraks, fatigues, and combat boots for the casual attire favored by American blue-collar workers. They wore blue jeans and corduroys, denim jackets and parkas, work boots and baseball caps. In place of rank, they boasted the insignia of western apparel: North Face, Nike, and Levi's. The uniform of the enemy.