Black Gold

by Paul Kenyon

  "It's broken through into number three tank!"

  As they watched, another needle began creeping upward.

  The first officer was sweating, despite the chill of the air conditioning. "Whatever it was, it wasn't an explosion. It was more like…" — he hesitated — "…a push!"

  The captain's mind was racing frantically. If it had been an explosion, they'd all have been dead by now. The thermal energy in all that oil was the equivalent of a five-megaton hydrogen bomb.

  He punched for a computer printout. The accordian sheafs of paper spewed out. He read them and frowned. There wasn't any excessive vapor buildup; in fact, the sniffer reading was strangely low. But the heavy steel plates were buckling.

  "It's into tanks number two and five now!" Mulchahy shouted.

  "I'm going down," the captain said. "Have the chief engineer meet me at the number four manhole with a work party."

  The first officer reached for the phone. Alarms were going off all over the board now.

  The engineer was waiting at the hatch when he got there, with four sailors carrying breathing apparatus. He was a bluff, ruddy-faced individual named Jamieson.

  "I've already flooded the compartments with inert gas, Captain," he said.

  The sailors looked scared. They were worried about being asked to go down. Four minutes of breathing hydrocarbon vapor was enough to kill you, or turn you into a vegetable.

  "Good." The captain nodded. "Undo that hatch."

  One of the sailors fitted a prybar into the manhole cover and, using it as a handle, unscrewed it. He looked down into the black hole and began to retch.

  The smell hit them all at once. It was nothing like the normal smell of crude oil or hydrocarbon vapor.

  It was overpowering. It was like the smell of rotten fish.

  The sailor who had opened the manhole was throwing up on the steel deck. The captain braced himself and, holding his breath, looked down into the hole.

  The surface of the oil was seething and bubbling. It looked thick and tarry — about the consistency of tapioca. Great black blobs welled up, climbing the steel walls of the tank.

  He recoiled, gagging at the odor. The engineer had nerved himself for a quick peek. He turned to the skipper, his face green.

  "Good God, Captain! What is it?"

  "I don't know," he said grimly. "But we're going to get rid of it."

  He took Jamieson's walkie-talkie from him and called the bridge. "Open your valves," he ordered. "We're dumping tanks two, three, four, and five."

  The first officer's voice sounded in his ear. "Captain, it's still spreading. We've got it in ten compartments. No, eleven now!"

  The huge ship shuddered again, as more of the internal bulkheads gave way. If the infection — whatever it was — reached the outer tanks, near the skin of the ship…

  The captain bit his lip. He made his decision.

  "Dump it all," he said, "the whole bloody cargo. And scrub out the tanks.

  A very small voice said in his ear, "Aye, aye, sir." The engineering officer was looking at him in awe. It was a momentous decision. There was more than a hundred million dollars' worth of oil in the tanks. The ship's owners weren't going to be very happy about losing it. And the pollution would be inconceivable. A supertanker this size carried five times as much oil as the ill-fated Torrey Canyon had at the time of the 1967 disaster. The oil slick would cover thousands and thousands of square miles. It would pollute the entire Indian Ocean, killing off birds and sea life, fouling the shores of three continents. The board of inquiry that was sure to be called would be very stern indeed.

  The walkie-talkie spoke again. "Nothing's happening, Captain! The stuff's too thick to flow through the valves! The cargo's solidifying!"

  The sailors were looking sick.

  "Look!" the engineering officer shouted.

  The taffylike black goo was beginning to well up from the manhole. As they watched, it rose and expanded like some obnoxious pudding. Its surface seethed with little bubbles of fermentation that released an evil stench when they popped.

  The men backed away. The doughy mass was spreading out over the deck in a thick carpet.

  "Blimey!" one of the sailors whispered.

  There was a noticeable tilt to the deck. The huge ship was listing as a half-million tons of — something — in the cavernous holds shifted its weight.

  "What's the pressure reading, Mulchahy?" the captain shouted hoarsely into the walkie-talkie.

  "Increasing, Captain," the first officer's frightened voice said. "The needles are going right off the dials!"

  Around them, on the vast expanse of deck, hatches were popping. A manhole cover flew twenty feet into the air and fell with a clang.

  A dozen thick fingers of black slime crawled out of the holes and began to spread over the deck. It was a nightmare.

  They retreated from the advancing sludge. It formed a billowing wall that was already waist-high.

  "Back!" the captain yelled. "Everybody get back to the bridge!"

  They didn't have to be told. The sailors broke and ran, scrambling to get to the safety of the elevated stern structure. Elsewhere on the four-acre deck, other crew members dropped what they'd been doing and joined the rush.

  One sailor, working at the bow of the ship, was trapped. He looked around wildly as a solid wall of black putty oozed toward him. He dropped his bucket and ran for the steel tower that supported the forward antennae. He shinnied up the metal pole like a monkey and clung halfway up for dear life.

  The captain's small party was met at the aft companionway by a confused throng of crewmen fighting their way topside. Some were still in shorts and skivvies, roused from their bunks by the sirens. One big hairy fellow, entirely naked, grabbed the captain by the arm.

  "What's happening, Captain?" he said in a frightened tone.

  The captain shook him off. "Jamieson," he said to the engineering officer, "you come with me to the bridge. The rest of you men assemble in the wardroom and wait for orders."

  He pushed his way up the companionway, followed by Jamieson. Mulchahy was waiting for him. The spoiled-fish smell had penetrated the air-conditioned sanctuary of the bridge. He wrinkled his nose.

  "It's expanding," Mulchahy said, "whatever it is. I've got all the cocks open, but the stuff's clogging them. It's boiling out of all those open manholes like crazy, but not fast enough to relieve the pressure."

  The captain stared, horrified, out the big square windows at the scene below. The entire deck was covered with a writhing black mess, creeping higher and higher as he watched. He could make out a dozen or more points of bubbly upwelling, where the stuff was pouring out of the open manholes. The ship was overflowing now, pouring cascades of black gunk into the sea.

  At his shoulder, Jamieson the engineer spoke. "Remember the Cassiopeia, Captain?" he said quietly.

  The Cassiopeia had been a merchantman of Cypriot registry, carrying a cargo of rice out of Rangoon. The holds were stuffed with it. They'd run into a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, and the cargo had gotten soaked through faulty hatches. Crossing the equator a few days later, the temperature had risen to a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. It must have been hotter in the enclosed holds. The rice had started to swell. The entire ship had burst apart. There had been only a few survivors.

  "What can we do, Captain?" Mulchahy said shakily. The man's normally pink face had gone ashen.

  The captain turned to Jamieson. "The catwalk midships is still above that stuff. Can you rig scaffolding and lower it down the sides of the hull?"

  Jamieson thought it over. "Aye, Captain."

  "Get some men with cutting torches. Take as many as you need. Open up holes in the side of the ship. Big holes. All the way down to the water line. Let's hope it'll relieve the pressure on the hull."

  "Aye, aye, sir," Jamieson said smartly. He left the bridge.

  "Do you think it will do any good?" Mulchahy asked.

  "I don't know," the captain said honestly.<
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  He looked out across a thousand feet of bubbling black tapioca. It was puffing up like an insane living porridge, spilling over the sides in great thick sheets as big across as tennis courts. He could see the tiny figure of the trapped sailor near the bow, clinging desperately to the steel mast. The man was about fifty feet above the roiling muck. As the captain watched him in horror, the sailor lost his grip and fell. The stuff was too thick for him to sink all the way. He was stuck in it, chest-deep, like a fly caught in batter.

  "No way to get to him," the captain said.

  "He'll keep, skipper," said Mulchahy, "until Jamieson can clear the central catwalk and throw a rope to him."

  The man was waving his arms, struggling to keep his face away from the disgusting goop. The smell was getting worse, even up here.

  Figures emerged on the midships catwalk: Jamieson's torch crews. They looked tiny down there, a hundred feet below the bridge and half the length of the ship away. But they were working with astonishing efficiency. The first wooden platform was lowered over the side within minutes, two men with welder's masks riding it down.

  The ship shuddered again. There was a frightening groan of tortured metal from the enormous steel caverns below.

  Mulchahy glanced at the banks of dials. "It's reached the outer tanks now," he said in a shaky voice.

  Down below on their improvised scaffolding, clinging like flies to the immense steel cliff that was the tanker's hull, Jamieson's work party was cutting through the thick plates with their torches. Two sides of a ten-foot square had been burned away, leaving an L-shaped wound that oozed a thick muck. They never had a chance to cut away the other two sides of the square. The pressure inside pushed the steel outward in a great triangular lip. The men grabbed for the ropes and hung on as the scaffolding tipped, spilling their equipment into the water below. A thick rope of black taffy burst through the opening and crawled down the hull, breaking off thirty-foot lengths that fell into the ocean.

  It wasn't good enough. As the captain watched from the bridge, the ship split at the bow. It came apart like a peeled banana, revealing a core of black pudding that bulged through the growing crack. The split traveled in seconds down a thousand feet of deck. When it reached the bridge, the entire superstructure buckled and toppled forward. With a cry, the two officers grabbed for handholds as they toppled toward the black swamp below.

  And then the entire ship opened like a clamshell and broke in two.

  The two halves sank like stones. They left behind a black floating island — a tarry loaf that was a fifth of a mile long. It smelled like spoiled fish. The gulls arrived, thousands and thousands of them, and began to feed.

  * * *

  "How many survivors were there?" Lord Cornston said.

  He was a small, neat man with an immaculate silver mustache and a baby-pink complexion. As head of the finance committee, he was also one of the most influential members of the board.

  The chairman of Anglia Petroleum, Ltd. looked around the table at the other directors before answering. He cleared his throat.

  "One," he said finally. "Quite mad, poor chap. He'd been floating in the sea for some days before they picked him up. He was… embedded… in a large mass of some sort of tarry residue. Claimed the gulls and the fish had been nibbling at it, making it smaller. Must have been a frightful experience."

  "And he said there had been no explosion?" Lord Cornston persisted.

  "That's what he said," the chairman admitted. "Mustn't take him at his word, of course. The ship must have gone down almost instantly."

  "How?"

  The chairman looked uncomfortable. "Faulty welding along the seams, I suppose. The new class of tankers is joined together in huge prefabricated sections. Only wav they can do it. The Japanese shipyards adapted the technique the Americans used for their Liberty ships. And we all remember how often the old Liberty ships broke apart at the seams. Sank like stones."

  "A ship that cost this company fifty million pounds ought not to come apart at the seams," Lord Cornston said mildly. "Ought it?"

  There was a snort from the far end of the table. Tt came from Anglia's president, a large, sagging man who resembled a mastiff in a Savile Row suit. Sixteen heads turned to look at him.

  "It's going to cost us a good deal more than fifty million pounds by the time the World Court gets through awarding damages for a half-million-ton oil spill," he said. He glared at them, his dewlaps quivering. "That makes Anglia Petroleum responsible for the biggest oil spill in the history of the world."

  One of the younger directors spoke up eagerly. "But the oil hasn't turned up anywhere. At least none that they can blame us for. Just the usual slicks you find in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic from all the tanker traffic there."

  "Nonsense! A half-million tons of crude oil doesn't just disappear!"

  "This oil did," the chairman said. He had an odd look on his face. "You don't suppose…"

  "Geoffrey!" Lord Cornston said sharply. "You're not going to bring up that nonsensical blackmail threat again? We agreed it was just a crank letter. No need to trouble the board with it."

  The chairman chewed his lip. "They said they'd arrange a demonstration — to show they could take our oil from us whenever they chose, they said. From our tankers, our storage tanks…"

  "What's this, what's this?" the company president sputtered. "A blackmail threat? Why wasn't I told?"

  "Because it was hard to take them seriously," Lord Cornston said soothingly. "I still don't take them seriously. They said they wanted a sum equal to half of our entire oil revenues. Imagine that! Half was better than nothing, they said."

  "Who?" the president demanded. "Who?"

  The chairman of the board glanced apologetically at Lord Cornston before he spoke.

  "They call themselves SPOILER," he said.

  * * *

  The troops were spread out all over the flat Dutch plain — six NATO divisions, with tanks, infantry, artillery support, and air cover. From his flying command post in the big Puma helicopter, General Vandergroot could see them all.

  His opposite number, General Guicciardini, was out there somewhere, waiting for the attack. Operation Bolster was NATO's major military exercise of the year. Its object was to protect Europoort and the Rotterdam refineries.

  The helicopter tilted as the pilot tried to give him a better look. He leaned outward and scanned a line of waiting tanks through his binoculars. There was a hell of a lot of armor down there, most of it on loan from the American Seventh Army in Germany.

  General Vandergroot sighed. It was time for the exercise to begin.

  "Attack," he said.

  Beside him, the radio operator grew busy. Down below on the tidy green landscape, smoke flares went off, sending threads of black into the clear Delft glaze of the sky.

  The tanks moved forward. Jeeps roared into life. From the airstrip behind the canal, Phantom jet fighters screamed into the air.

  It was an impressive sight. Through his binoculars he could see the forward line of tanks as they lumbered across a wheat field, raising a billowing cloud of dust.

  And came to a stop.

  "What's this?" he said. "Who gave those vehicles the order to stop?"

  The radio operator said, "I'll check with Colonel Altdorfer, sir." He bent over his instrument, a frown on his pink, boyish face.

  A few tanks were still struggling forward, like crippled beetles. They sputtered and died. A ragged line of disabled vehicles was strewn across the plain. Hatches popped open, and tiny uniformed figures climbed out to inspect treads and motors.

  Behind the advance line, more vehicles began to pile up. It was as if someone were waving a magic wand over the moving carpet of tanks and halftracks and army trucks. Where the wand passed, vehicles ground to a halt.

  Through his binoculars, the general could see a jeep driver frantically trying to put out an engine fire by flapping his jacket over it.

  A dispatch rider on a motorcycle was sudde
nly thrown into the air, as if he'd hit an obstacle. The motorcycle fell over on its side. The general had a moment to wonder why the wheels weren't spinning; then his attention was caught by an explosion toward the rear.

  Jet planes were pinwheeling from the sky. One of them tumbled past his vision, a mile ahead. It crashed into the canal bank in a great gout of orange flame.

  Another jet whistled overhead. Abruptly, there was a flameout. The pilot should have been able to glide it down, but he acted as if all his controls had locked. It dropped like a brick and exploded.

  "What's going on?" he demanded. "Get me General Guicciardini!"

  "Ja, ja!" the boy said, his eyes popping.

  They were flying over what looked like a vehicle graveyard. The flat expanse of fields was littered with dead tanks and trucks. Soldiers were milling helplessly around the immobile hulks. General Vandergroot felt a sudden twisting in his guts as he began to grasp the implications.

  NATO's entire Northern European Command was crippled. If a real attack were to come now, the allies would be helpless.

  It was a disaster. And not a shot had been fired. The general felt sick.

  He felt sicker a moment later when the helicopter went out of control.

  "What's the matter?" he shouted.

  "The controls are frozen!" the pilot yelled over his shoulder.

  The big helicopter was lurching and bucking. The general's maps slid off the chart table. He grabbed for a handhold as the Puma began to spin.

  "Tail rotor's stuck!" the pilot cried in horror.

  And then, as the fifty-foot blades of the main rotor abruptly stopped turning, the helicopter plunged straight down toward the neat Dutch fields. There wasn't even time for a prayer.

  * * *

  There were an unusual number of breakdowns on Route 10, the superhighway leading northwest toward Rotterdam from the area NATO had staked out for its maneuvers. They were pulled over on the shoulder every kilometer or two, hoods up, worried drivers peering underneath.

  Officer Kooning frowned behind his goggles at one of them: a red Volkswagen that was blocking the right-hand lane. He slowed his motorcycle to a stop and walked over, a stern expression on his broad Flemish face.