Charon's Landing - v4 Page 2

  “Find anything?” Jerry called.

  “No,” replied Mercer, noticing the damage to the net derricks for the first time.

  The top of the A-frame fishing gantry was gone, as if it had been removed with a cutting torch. He looked closely at the two steel stumps, all that remained of the net hauling crane, and saw that the breaks were clean and sharp. There was no evidence of explosive damage. Whatever had destroyed the derrick had sheared it off. Curious, he turned and saw that the antennas for the Jenny IV’s radios also had been snapped off, about a foot above the wheelhouse roof.

  He had no explanation.

  “Did you contact the Coast Guard?”

  “Yeah. They’re sending a cutter from Homer. It should be here in about an hour.”

  “Fine.” Mercer jumped back to the Wave Dancer after taking another look at the body on the commercial ship. “There’s no sense remaining tied up. Her lower decks are flooded and she could sink at any time.”

  Jerry fired up the engine while his son cast off the securing lines. Once they were fifty yards from the Jenny IV, Jerry idled his boat and kept her at a constant distance from the derelict. There was a mystery about the burned-out vessel and its skeletal crew that went beyond an engine explosion, and all four men knew it. They were silent for many long, unsettled minutes, watching the deathly quiet Jenny IV as she swayed with the rolling waves. The two bodies aboard her would never give them the answers they wanted.

  “Well, I guess that takes care of fishing for the day.” Jerry’s voice was unnaturally loud.

  Mercer turned to him and smiled back his own misgivings. “Hell, fishing’s just a reason to drink, and I’ve never really needed an excuse for that.”

  The White House October 19

  The President’s long-legged stride carried him easily across the informal dining room in the first family’s private quarters. He smiled warmly as his sole guest got to her feet to shake his hand. She was much shorter than his six foot two inches and somewhat squat. Her clothes looked as if they’d come from the matron section of a discount department store, and her makeup seemed to have been applied with a hand trowel. Even the kind early morning light streaming through the windows overlooking the Rose Garden could not hide her creped neck or heavy jowls. In a world dominated by media sound bites and personal appearance, her looks were incongruous. Tucked away from journalistic scrutiny, she had worked her way up through the government ranks on sheer determination and the simple fact that she was always the best person for any job. Her intensity and intellect had made her one of the President’s closest friends and most trusted advisers.

  “Good morning, Connie. It’s great to see you,” the President said as he sat across the table from his secretary of energy, Con-stance Van Buren.

  She smoothed her black polyester skirt against her nyloned legs as she retook her seat. “You know me, I never pass up a free meal.”

  “So what’s the latest one? Don’t spare me.”

  Connie took a sip of coffee, her eyes sparkling with humor. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, because this one is cruel. Stu Hanson at the EPA said he heard it on one of the late-night talk shows.” She paused. “According to the media, your latest poll was so limp that even Viagra can’t help you now.”

  The President burst into laughter, the tension lines around his eyes easing as he and his old friend began bantering back and forth. These meetings ostensibly were for presidential briefings on energy matters, but actually they served as a respite for the President from the pressures of his office. While the two did accomplish work during these bimonthly breakfasts, they looked forward to them just for the pleasure of being in each other’s company.

  “I was just thinking, Connie. When Lloyd Easton from State comes over for breakfast, he brings two aides, four briefcases, and a portable fax machine in case something happens while he’s here.”

  “Yeah, well, Lloyd had his sense of humor removed sometime between his acceptance into Mensa and receiving his Phi Beta Kappa key. What all you boys in the big offices have forgotten is that these are only jobs, important jobs, yes, but they are just jobs. I still spend weekends with my grandchildren and bake them cookies and berate my daughter for marrying a lazy husband and do all the other things normal people do.”

  A shadow passed across the President’s eyes before he spoke. “I told you I’ve decided not to run again, didn’t I?”

  “You said you were thinking about it.” She nodded. “I think it’s a good idea. We both know your marriage is rocky at best. You and Patricia need some time together. And I don’t know how your health is, but your hands never used to shake at eight o’clock in the morning.”

  The President looked down at his long tapered hands and was shocked to see a minor tremble. “Jesus, how anyone could volunteer to put himself through a second term is beyond me.”

  “Most of your predecessors never had to make the hard choices you’ve made to put this country back on track, so they never had to take the kind of political heat you’ve gotten.”

  “Like the oil thing.”

  “Like the oil thing,” Connie Van Buren agreed.

  The President had committed political suicide only nine months into his term, according to supporters and opponents alike. During his first prime-time address to the nation, he had laid out his new Energy Direction Policy. The President wanted the United States to end its dependence on foreign sources of oil within ten years. Through special discretionary funds, the administration would finance massive programs to create new sources of alternative energy throughout the country. He envisioned a nation running cleanly, cities freed from smog and the ecological disasters that had plagued the 80s and 90s. Sprawling windmill farms were to be built in the plains states and solar collector arrays set up in the Southwest. He proposed erecting a tidal power station off the coast of Maine that would provide nearly all the energy for the city of Boston.

  Because of its unusual electromagnetic properties, the recently discovered element bikinium would be used to multiply the output of current generating stations. Eventually it would become a source of power itself. The automotive industry, which had been sitting on battery technology for years because it wasn’t profitable, would be forced to fully develop electric cars. At the end of the President’s ten-year schedule, half of all vehicles sold would have to be electrically powered. He’d said that the technology was there; America just had to have the courage to use it.

  The President had given the nation a tough challenge, and they seemed eager to accept. The people were galvanized with the same sense of expectant optimism that President Kennedy generated when he promised to put a man on the moon. Environmentalists saw the glorious end to fossil fuel’s rapacious destruction of the ecology. Economists agreed that the transition period would be difficult, but the ban on oil imports would help end the nation’s decades-long trade imbalance. Technocrats were eager to see the emerging technology that would wean America from her dependence on oil. And the State Department was thrilled to see the Middle East’s diplomatic trump card, the threat of another oil embargo, taken away from them.

  Within a few short weeks of his plan, political reality reared its ugly head.

  The world’s seven major oil companies, known collectively as the Seven Sisters, have a combined economic power larger than many industrialized nations. They knew their largest market was about to vanish, and they began to exert their massive influence. In what amounted to economic blackmail, the Seven Sisters began bumping up the price of gasoline in ten-cent increments until it had nearly doubled. Then, they quietly made it known within the beltway that prices would continue to rise if certain concessions weren’t made. The President was realistic enough to know that the oil giants could spiral the global economy into a slide that would make the Great Depression seem like a boom time.

  By pulling in every political favor he had acquired during his terms in the House and Senate and making promises that would take the rest of his term to honor, the
President pressured Congress to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration. The millions of acres of virgin tundra on Alaska’s north coast just east of Prudhoe Bay were the last major source of domestic oil and one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet. The Arctic refuge was known to hold oil deposits many times larger than those found at Prudhoe, and it was a prize that the Seven Sisters had wanted for years. That was the price the Sisters demanded for their cooperation, and that was what the President got for them. The bill had been quietly tucked in with other legislation only minutes before passage, forestalling any debate on the floor. Environmental lobbyists and activists never knew what was happening until it was too late.

  Environmental concerns had always blocked earlier attempts to open the Refuge to exploitation. However, the President had no choice but to sweep those aside, knowing that he had negotiated for the lesser of two evils. He knew that no matter how many precautions the oil companies took in their scramble for this new source of crude, the land would be destroyed virtually forever. But he also felt that it was a small price to pay if his new policy led to a cleaner life for the rest of the country and eventually the world.

  He never expected the severity of the uproar when the nation learned of the deal. Overnight, it seemed every citizen became a champion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. People who couldn’t find Alaska on a map suddenly started spouting off statistics about the damage that oil exploration would do to the wilderness. Posters, T-shirts, and talk show guests materialized out of thin air. The arctic fox and the polar bear became immediate media sensations; hours of programming chronicling their plight choked the airwaves. Thundering herds of caribou raced across television screens night after night while serious-voiced commentators described how they would be nearly extinct within eighteen months of the first oil rig start-up. People were outraged, and dozens of environmental groups burgeoned after the President’s announcement.

  Boycotts of the oil companies that had been granted drilling licenses erupted across the nation. The hardest hit, Petromax, started legal proceedings against several groups, including Greenpeace, for organizing the protests. Greenpeace welcomed the media attention a pending trial would generate. They wanted to send their ship, the Rainbow Warrior III, into Prince William Sound as an act of defiance, but she was stationed in the South Pacific to protest the latest round of French nuclear tests.

  What had started as a chance to finally cure many of America’s problems turned into a pitched battle that was dividing the nation as nothing had since Vietnam. Like so many hard decisions, everyone saw the Energy Direction Policy as a good idea, but no one wanted to pay the price for its success.

  The President and Secretary of Energy Van Buren had weathered the storm together, both shouldering even more criticism as now, almost a year later, men and equipment poured into the wildlife refuge to begin spudding, the start-up procedure for drilling. People seemed to forget about the benefits of the President’s moratorium on oil imports. All that mattered was the protection of the Arctic tundra and its inhabitants, even if that meant another generation of smog and acid rain and greenhouse gasses.

  “I’m not even going to ask if we’ve done the right thing,” the President remarked tiredly, for he’d covered the issue a million times before. “I know I’m right. We need to wean ourselves from oil. Period. At our present rate of consumption, the planet will run out by the middle of this century anyway, so why not be prepared for it? Europe and Japan will be screaming for our clean technology, and we’ll hold all the cards. Doesn’t anyone see that this is for the best?”

  Connie Van Buren had heard all of these arguments before and said nothing. Though not well known to the general population, the Department of Energy was a favorite lobbying spot for the Seven Sisters and all the other oil concerns. She had come under even more pressure than the President. But with a forbearance found only in women, she had taken the criticism and complaints in stride, while keeping an open ear for the President to vent his frustration.

  “The long-term benefits of what I’ve proposed far outweigh the destruction of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and hell, it isn’t a foregone conclusion that the animals there will be wiped out like the doomsayers predict.”

  That last statement felt sour to the President’s ears even as he spoke it. The flora and fauna of Alaska’s north coast were found nowhere else on earth and were so delicate that even the most minor damage was virtually permanent. Arctic moss required a minimum of a hundred years to recover from the passage of even a light vehicle. Once the rigs and pipelines and all the other support structures were built, the land would never come back.

  “But, Christ,” the President continued, his voice thundering, “it’s a small price.”

  Connie threw up her hands in mock defense. “Remember, I’m on your side.”

  “I’m sorry.” He smiled ruefully. “It’s just the pressure. How in the hell do you handle it?”

  Connie laughed. “I just remind everyone that America’s nuclear arsenal falls under the Energy Department’s jurisdiction. I tell them that I control over twenty thousand warheads and I’m prone to PMS. That seems to back them off.”

  The President smiled tiredly. “What’s the latest from the native rights groups?”

  The rights of Alaska’s native people had become a hot topic as well. Connie shifted in her seat, resting her knife and fork on the china plate still heaped with congealed eggs and soggy bacon. “They’re relatively quiet so far. Because they lack the international exposure of the big environmental groups, the native advocates are keeping a low profile to see how far the administration is willing to back up this initiative. Though I just heard Amnesty International is threatening to call the entire Inuit population political prisoners of the United States if we continue to infringe on their rights to the land.”

  “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the President. “You call that a low profile?”

  “Compared to what this group called PEAL has done, that’s nothing.”

  “PEAL?” He cocked a bushy eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of them. Are they another environmental group?”

  “More like eco-terrorists.” Connie lifted an expandable briefcase from the floor and set it on the table. After rummaging through the detritus cluttering the case, she slid a manila file over to the President. “This is the dossier INTERPOL has compiled of crimes that PEAL has been directly or indirectly linked to in Europe. And this is just from the last year.”

  As the President leafed through the summary reports of bombings, protests, and assaults, Connie Van Buren gave him a brief rundown on the organization. “PEAL is the acronym for Planetary Environment Action League. It was founded four years ago by a Dutch science professor who had fallen from grace with mainstream academia. Jan Veorhoven is a classic study of the charismatic leader. He’s young, not yet forty, good-looking, from a wealthy family with name recognition in his native Amsterdam, and possesses above-average intelligence.”

  Connie spoke as if reciting the material arrayed before the President. It was obvious that she’d been over the file many times before.

  “Until this year, PEAL had remained inconsequential. They printed pamphlets and Veorhoven lectured at rallies all over Western Europe, but the group was relatively small, about one hundred active members. Many in the environmental movement saw PEAL as too radical for even their tastes.

  “Veorhoven espouses a kind of pseudo-religious communing with nature, where the rights of man are second to those of the earth. He flew to Bangladesh after a monsoon that killed eleven thousand villagers and denounced those who survived for cheating nature of her just dues. Last December, after some nonradioactive cooling water escaped from a French reactor, PEAL was thrust to prominence when Veorhoven challenged the director of the plant to drink some of it. It was a media stunt of epic proportions because the director is hyperallergenic and can tolerate only distilled water, a fact Veorhoven was aware of.

  “Beginning this year,
PEAL became the ‘in’ group to join among the professional protesters. Their ranks have soared, as has their budget. In March, they bought a mothballed survey ship and renamed her Hope. They opened satellite offices in London, Paris, New York, Washington, and San Francisco. And they started getting violent.

  “Members of the group have been arrested in Mozambique with enough explosives to destroy the Cabora Bassa dam. In Brazil, they’ve taken responsibility for demolishing about ten million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment used in forest clearing. In Washington State, a PEAL activist is facing manslaughter charges after the steel spike he put into a tree caused a chainsaw to kick back and kill the logger operating it. Your own Secretary of the Interior had a sack full of dead spotted owls left on his doorstep. The bag had the PEAL logo on it. Nothing is beyond them.

  “They’ve destroyed gas stations in Germany, Holland, and Belgium. They are suspected of breaking into a German chemical company and destroying several million dollars’ worth of experiments. They’ve broken into laboratories to release test animals, many of them infected with diseases or experimental vaccines with unknown side effects. In short, they are highly motivated, well funded, and dangerous, and their next target will undoubtedly be Alaska.”

  The President was startled by Connie’s summation. “How can you be sure that they will target Alaska?”

  “Because their ship, Hope, is currently anchored in Prince William Sound, just outside the safety zone set up around the tanker shipping lanes headed into Valdez. And because Jan Veorhoven is said to be aboard.”

  “Have they taken any action?”

  “Not yet, but I consider their very presence a threat, don’t you?”

  “In light of what you’ve just said, yes,” the President agreed. “But there isn’t a goddamn thing we can do about it.”