She mounted the steps rapidly, nodding perfunctorily to Boris as she entered the cabin. Over the wind, Gavallan was only just able to hear what he said to her.
"Good evening, Miss Kirov. Your father sends his regards."
47
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.
They had buried their parachutes, jumpsuits, and altimeters two miles away in holes four feet deep, now filled and covered with stones and moss and the natural vegetation of the region. Each wore a compact backpack no different from one a college student might be likely to carry. In it they hefted eight 125-gram sticks of C-4 explosives, a length of det cord, three electronic fuses, and a model TA9 remote detonator no larger than a transistor radio. All traces of the C-4 would theoretically vanish in the blaze following the explosion. If, however, investigators were to discover a trace of the plastique and to analyze its chemical signature, they would learn it belonged to a shipment stolen from an American armory two years earlier.
No one carried a weapon. Ghosts did not leave behind corpses.
From somewhere in the wilderness, a foghorn sounded. One bleat, rude and ominous, then silence.
The members of Team 7 scattered.
They were divided into three squads of four persons each, designated, in American military vernacular, as "Alpha," "Bravo," and "Charlie." Alpha and Bravo Squads climbed from the protective cornice of the riverbank and ran at a crouch to the fence surrounding the enclosure. The fence stood only six feet high. It was designed to keep animals away, not to deter intruders. Coldfoot was the nearest town and it was seventy miles away. Springing over the fence, they landed softly on the balls of their feet, eyes peeled for oil workers.
Alpha Squad moved to the right, toward the giant reservoirs filled to capacity with North Slope crude, oil from the mammoth field at Prudhoe Bay. Skirting the rear of the reservoirs, they kept out of sight of the supervisor's office (located some two hundred feet across an open concrete field) until they reached the fat, white intake pipes that fed oil into the tanks. Team Leader Abel slung his pack to the ground and removed two sticks of the green C-4, several fuses, and a length of det cord. He gave Baker one stick. One stick he kept for himself.
Immediately, Baker began to roll the stick between his palms to soften the putty. As the C-4 grew malleable, he broke the explosive in two, affixing a slim strip to joints in the pipe that had recently been welded together.
At the same time, Abel ran up the metal staircase attached to the side of the reservoir. He stopped halfway to the top where a blunt valve extended from the side of the wall. The valve allowed for the manual release of oil from the reservoir. After softening the explosives, he fashioned a long tubular section and wrapped it around the valve. With his fingers, he worked the putty into the crease at the base of the valve, as if stanching a leak. Plastique was a forgiving mistress, he thought as he pressed the putty against the cold metal; hit it with a hammer, burn it, shoot it even, and still it would not ignite.