The First Billion

A half mile north of Pump Station 2, Charlie Squad swarmed on top of and around a remote gate valve. The valve looked like the conning tower of a submarine. A red pennant flew from its uppermost walkway, crackling in the wind. Ninety-five such valves were placed up and down the length of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, eighty-six of them remote-controlled to close in event of a rupture or spill. Plastique was carefully formed to the joists and the undercarriage of the 78,000-pound valve. The charge used was minimal, enough to rupture the pipeline cleanly without igniting the oil inside.

Tasks accomplished, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Squads met up at their assembly point, one hundred yards from the periphery of Pump Station 2. No one spoke a word. All took a knee as Abel activated the TA9 transmitter. Three white pinlights came to life, indicating that the electronic fuses were primed and a signal established. Moving his thumb to the ignition switch, Abel paused and, in the second before he depressed the button, imagined the horror of what he was about to unleash.

The charges placed on the reservoirs would simulate a "sparking" incident that occurred when rusting, corroded pipes brushed against each other. The oil would ignite. The reservoirs would blow. The ensuing explosion would shoot hundreds of thousands of gallons of flaming oil hundred of yards in every direction, scorching the sensitive landscape, fouling the air, and incinerating the crew of Pump Station 2. Seventy miles distant from the nearest habitation, the explosion would go unnoticed until the next day when Pump Station 2 did not respond to its routine morning calls.

The charges placed a half mile north of the station would rupture the pipe and allow the crude oil to flow freely onto the Alaskan plain. Oil would spill at the rate of forty thousand barrels per hour. As each barrel held forty-seven gallons of oil, nearly a million gallons of North Slope crude would foul the pristine meadows of the Arctic National Refuge each hour. The oil would form first a pond, then a lake, and soon it would spread into a black viscous ocean. The oil would seep into the ground and foul the water table. It would leak into the streams and the nearby Yukon River. Entire colonies of steelhead trout and chinook, chum, and coho salmon would be destroyed, their pristine habitats forever fouled.

As the oil spread across the rolling plain, it would take with it rookeries of Canada geese. It would tar the nests of the sandhill crane. It would permanently spoil thousands of acres of feeding area for caribou, elk, moose, and Roosevelt elk. By the time the spill had been stopped, somewhere between three and seven million gallons of oil would have blackened the Alaskan landscape.

Abel pressed the button once, firmly. Clouds of green smoke burst from the oil reservoirs and, farther away, from the remote gate valve. But there were no explosions, no fireworks, no hellish cataclysm to light the early-morning sky.

The Klaxon sounded again, this time longer, a full three seconds.

The only explosion, if indeed it was one, came from the sky, where a hundred feet above the ground, rafts of fluorescent lights flickered to life. The lights hung from the ceiling of an enormous hangar, eight hundred yards by a thousand.

Alaska had come to Severnaya high on the Siberian Plain.

A digital clock hanging from the observation tower at the far side of the hangar stood frozen at 8:23:51. The soldiers cheered, if briefly. On this last dry run, they had bettered their time by twenty-two seconds.

Their cheer died down, replaced by a grim determination, a silent resolve. One man after the other met his comrades' eyes. The time for training was past. After four months, the operation was at hand.

Clapping one another on the back, they moved off at a jog to return to their barracks. It was time to write the letter. In a month or two, their parents, girlfriends, loved ones (none were married or had children), would receive the short note explaining simply that Jan, or Ivan, or Sergei had decided to leave the country to seek a new life outside of Russia. He didn't know where or how long he might be gone, only that his absence would be a long one and that they should move on with their lives without him.

One meal remained, one night's sleep. Tomorrow, they would board planes to take them east across the top of the world.

To their destiny.

To America.

48

They took off into the storm, the last plane out before the clouds enveloped the airport, and Gavallan wondered if the pilot had disobeyed the control tower and said, "To hell with it, I'm taking off whether you like it or not." The sky was black, absolutely black, the plane jolting up and down and every which way with sudden, violent tremors.

"I want to talk to Cate," he said to Boris. "Excuse me, I mean Miss Kirov. Your boss's daughter."