by Paul Kenyon
The driver was a harried-looking blonde girl with two young children in the back. She stuck her head out the window as he approached and looked at him hopefully.
"Dat spijt mij," she said. "I don't know what happened."
"It is forbidden to block the road," he said. "Couldn't you pull over?"
"The oil warning light went on," she said. "I just turned off the motor and stopped. My husband told me that is what one must do so that the engine is not ruined."
He helped her push the automobile over to the side of the road. Then he checked the oil for her. He looked incredulously at the dipstick, then checked it again. There was no oil, absolutely none, just a brownish sludge that clung to the dipstick. He sniffed it. It didn't smell like motor oil. More like rotten fish.
He looked at the road where the car had been stopped. There was no pool of oil there. No sign of a leak. And yet, she must either have lost all her oil at once, in a massive flood, or she had been driving without oil.
On an impulse, he checked the gas tank. That was empty, too. The same rotten-fish smell came from it.
"That's impossible," she said when he told her. "I filled up in Dordrecht."
"Stay here," he told her. "There's a call box a few miles ahead. I'll have them send help."
There would be a lot of competition for that help, Kooning thought as he mounted his motorcycle. The breakdown vans had their work cut out for them today. He turned his face toward Rotterdam. The breeze was coming from the northwest. He could smell the stink from the refineries. Rotterdam had grown to be the world's biggest oil port in the last few years.
He sniffed again. Something else was riding that breeze. It was a smell like rotten fish. He frowned disapprovingly. The oil had brought prosperity, but it also killed the fish. Officer Kooning prided himself on being a conservationist. The fishermen had to make a living, too.
He kicked the motorcycle into life and started out along the broad ribbon of highway toward the call station. As he got closer to Rotterdam, the stalled cars became more and more frequent. There were dozens of them every kilometer or so, then scores. The side of the road was beginning to look like a city curb full of parked cars.
Kooning tightened his lips. This was not normal. Something odd was going on. He'd better report it as quickly as possible.
He gunned the motor. His bike leaped ahead, streaking northwest as fast as he could urge it.
That was his mistake. The motor suddenly coughed, and before he had time to wonder about it, he lurched to a halt as violently as if someone had thrown a crowbar into the spokes. Officer Kooning flew over the handlebars, a wildly flailing figure in goggles and crash helmet.
He hit the asphalt with a sickening thud. The crash helmet didn't save him; his spine was snapped. His dead eyes couldn't see the wheels of his machine. If he'd been alive, he might have wondered why they weren't spinning.
* * *
The refinery technician stared at the gauge in utter disbelief.
"Empty," he said. "Eight hundred thousand barrels of petroleum. Gone. Just like that!"
Beside him in the control room, the operations manager for Hollandia-American's Rotterdam subsidiary stared out the huge glass windows at the port beneath. There were only two tankers moored at the refinery terminals at the moment; it was a slow day. Both of them must be very nearly empty by now. They'd been pumping oil into the giant storage tanks for more than seven hours.
It looked like a checkerboard, he thought, with those immense red and black steel storage tanks for the pieces. But it was a checker game whose stakes were inconceivably huge: thirty billion dollars a year for Hollandia-American alone, to say nothing of the other oil companies.
He turned to the technician, a fair-haired man in his thirties named Wentz. "Perhaps your instruments are out of order," he suggested.
Wentz shook his head. "Impossible. We have computer feedback. All the monitoring equipment is operating perfectly."
"Check again."
Wentz sighed. He turned in his swivel chair to the center of the monitor board. It was a row of computer cabinets in jolly enamel colors, studded with fights, illuminated grids, and CRT screens. He flipped switches, his eyes on the screens. Glowing dots traced graph lines. Numbers appeared in the grids. He turned to the manager again.
"Just as before. There's no liquid in the tank to operate the floats. The computer says its sensors are picking up signals consistent with a solid mass."
"Solid?" The manager's face grew red.
"Something gummy, like tapioca."
"Tapioca? See here, Wentz…"
A red light flashed on the board. Wentz looked at it worriedly.
"And it's growing," he added.
The manager spoke with heavy sarcasm. "And has it occurred to you to make a visual check, in case your computer is mistaken?"
"There's a man looking into it now." He hooked a thumb toward the window.
The manager squinted through the glass. He could just make the man out, a mere speck against the enormous cylindrical tank, climbing a ladder. He picked up a pair of binoculars on the windowsill and took another look. Now he could see the safety helmet, the protective goggles, the walkie-talkie slung from the man's shoulder.
A buzzer sounded. Wentz picked up a phone. "Ja," he said. He listened. "I'll get back to you," he said, and hung up.
"What now?" the manager said.
"The first mate on the Ganymede. He says they've had to stop pumping. Something's clogging the hoses."
"What…"
Another buzzer sounded. Wentz picked up another phone. "Wentz here," he said. He listened, frowning. "You, too?" he said. "Better check Maartens." He hung up.
"Who was that?"
"Van Gaasbeek, over at Global. He's a friend of mine. He says that there's no oil in his tanks, either. Just some kind of muck."
"Now see here…" The manager broke off and began sniffing the air. "What's that?"
Wentz wrinkled his nose. "Smells like bad fish."
"I've told you before, no food in the control booth. If one of your assistants…"
A beeper went off. Wentz picked up a walkie-talkie lying on the apron of one of the computer cabinets. "I read you," he said. He frowned. "Are you sure?" There was another pause. "Can you get a sample? You'll have to do it from the top, with a scoop and a lone handle… Yes, I'll wait."
The manager said, "It's disgusting. It must be in a desk drawer somewhere."
"That was the inspector," Wentz said. "He's looking straight down into the tank. He says he can make out something moving, like boiling oatmeal."
The manager said, "I'd better call headquarters. Keep on it, Wentz." He started toward his office.
"He says it smells," Wentz said.
A frantic buzzing came from the monitor board. Lights flashed. The center screen went blank, then came alive with the words CONDITION YELLOW.
The manager stopped. "What's the matter?"
"The computer says pressure's building up in the tank. That solid stuff's reached the top."
"Bleed it off, man, bleed it off!" the manager said. Wentz was pushing buttons. "I can't. It's too thick to go through the valves."
On the top of the storage tank, the helmeted inspector was backing away in horror from the open hatch. A gummy blob of some blackish-brown material crept over the edge and began to expand.
The inspector reached the ladder and looked down. The ground was twenty stories below. He began to climb down as fast as he could.
The monitor board was going crazy. Lights were flashing all over it, like a blinking Christmas tree. The center screen said CONDITION ORANGE.
"Can't you do anything?" the manager said.
"No," Wentz said. He got up and went to the window.
Figures were scurrying back and forth at the base of the steel tank. The inspector was a quarter of the way down.
CONDITION RED, the computer screen said. A siren went off somewhere outside.
The enormous storage tank sp
lit down the sides. The inspector disappeared in a huge gob of goo, like a fly caught in bubble gum. The two halves of the tank — tons and tons of steel — clattered to the ground, making the entire port shake. A great round quivering mass stood there, like a twenty-story aspic out of a mold.
It shimmered in the afternoon sun, a titanic gelatinous mountain that rose out of two-hundred-foot petals of crumpled steel. It sagged a little under its own enormous weight, but it seemed firm enough to hold its shape. The refinery workers who had been fleeing from its ballooning base stopped and looked up at it in awe.
All over the sprawling Europoort complex, other storage tanks were bulging and splitting. Sirens screamed as ambulances and emergency vehicles raced down roadways and quays. An obscene black slime was everywhere, advancing in billowing waves, burying storage sheds, and lapping at the bases of fractionating towers. The stench was overpowering.
The sky was black with seagulls swarming in from the North Sea. They wheeled and swooped, screaming with excitement, dipping down to tear with their beaks at the foul-smelling black mounds rising out of the ruins.
It was a feast. A billion-dollar feast.
* * *
"We have no choice," the minister for economic development said.
He was standing at the rail of a Norwegian Navy cutter with a group of industrialists, a handsome long-jawed man in a pea jacket he had borrowed from one of the sailors. The other men, four of them, were large and florid, dressed in expensive overcoats with fur collars.
It was a raw, gray day. The ocean was choppy, and there was a chill wind coming from the Orkneys, some fifty miles west across the North Sea. Knutsen was below decks, seasick, but he'd authorized Bergmann to speak for him.
"I say no," Bergmann said. "I don't think they can do what they say they can do."
"You can say that?" Pedersen protested. "After what happened in Rotterdam?"
"Rotterdam!" snorted Bergmann. "When all is said and done, they'll find that it was some kind of natural disaster. This SPOILER outfit just took credit for it. That's the way these cranks work!"
"They sent advance warning," Pedersen said.
"Coincidence!" snapped Bergmann.
Garborg spoke up. "I lost over a billion kroner in Rotterdam. We have an interlocking subsidiary with Global Petroleum there."
Bergmann tightened his lips. "Even if these SPOILER people can do what they threatened, it's only one floating supertank. Fifty million kroner worth of oil. We can spread the loss among us." He looked at the minister. "The government can help. What do you say, gentlemen?"
The minister stroked his long jaw. "One tank isn't that important, I agree. Better to risk losing it than to give in and encourage future blackmail. But we have more at stake. If they go on to contaminate our entire oil reserves in the North Sea, then the Norwegian economy will collapse. Gentlemen, you know as well as I do that the future of Norway in the next two decades depends on those North Sea oil revenues."
"Well, we'll soon know," Garborg said gloomily.
The pounding of the cutter's engines slowed. The five men crowded the rail, straining to see through the gray mist.
"There it is!" Pedersen said.
A man-made island of concrete emerged from the fog. At this distance its steep sides looked as if they were perforated with tiny pinholes — baffles for the violent sixty-foot waves. Its crown was topped with an array of giant cranes.
It held a million barrels of oil, temporary storage for the rich flow from the Norwegian sector of the ocean. Beyond it they could see an array of floating rigs stretching in the direction of the Scottish coast and the British sector.
"What time is it?" the minister said.
Pedersen looked at his watch. "Just one o'clock. We won't have long to wait, if SPOILER is really going to do anything."
"All they have to do is get past a Norwegian Navy patrol," Bergmann said sarcastically.
"Look!" Garborg shouted.
Cracks were appearing in the concrete. They widened with dramatic suddenness. As they watched, the concrete island broke apart. Huge jagged slabs splashed into the sea. The giant cranes toppled.
Bergmann turned pale. "The devil!" he swore.
There was another island there now, a black puddinglike mass that floated on the waves. It was still expanding, like a rising loaf. Pieces of it were breaking away, drifting with the current.
The minister turned to the other four, his face drained. "There'll be a cabinet meeting tonight," he said. "We'll pay SPOILER what they ask."
"No!" Bergmann shouted. "Half of our oil? Six million kroner a day until the wells run dry? It's ridiculous!"
"Look at it this way, Bergmann," Pedersen said. "Half is better than nothing."
* * *
"I say it's the Russians," the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency said. "This SPOILER thing is just a cover-up."
He glared across the conference table at the other members of the Special Group. He was wearing his admiral's uniform with all the braid. As head of the smallest of the three major intelligence agencies present, he had a front to maintain.
"I agree," said the CIA director. "The real purpose of what happened in Holland was to cripple NATO. The Rotterdam refineries were just an incidental casualty."
He settled back in his chair and puffed on his pipe. He was a mild-looking, bespectacled man in a conservative gray suit. He wore civilian clothes because he was a civilian. He had five times the budget of the DIA and three times as many employees. He could afford to agree with the admiral.
"I think it was the other way around," said the director of the National Security Agency. He was an air force general, but he had worn civilian clothes to the meeting: an old tweed sport jacket and flannel slacks. He had more employees than the CIA and the DIA combined, and nobody knew what his budget was, not even the president.
"Why is that, Sam?" the president's man said warily. He sat at the head of the table, his briefcase open in front of him. His suit was rumpled, and his eyes were red from lack of sleep. He'd been up all night in the plane, and he had called the meeting as soon as he landed.
"Because the wind was blowing from Rotterdam," NSA said. "Not toward it."
"Means nothing," said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "How do we know that the two events are even connected?"
"Oil," NSA said. "The oil in the Rotterdam refineries turned to… something else. So did all the oil in NATO's tanks and jeeps and aircraft. Lubricating oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, jet fuel…"
"The fact remains," said DIA's admiral, "that we're helpless. Billions of dollars' worth of ordnance ruined, burned out. It'll take us a year before we're on our feet again. If the Russians have any inkling as to how badly we're hurt, they could overrun Western Europe any time they felt like it, and we wouldn't be able to do a thing about it."
"Except incinerate them with H-bombs," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs suggested.
"What about Norway?" NSA said mildly.
"What about it?" CIA said.
"They got a blackmail threat from SPOILER, too. A million barrels of their oil turned to fudge. They're planning to pay off."
"Another diversion of the Russians," DIA growled. "Something to do with NATO's northern flank."
The president's man pounded the table for order. "The fact remains," he said, "that NATO's temporarily crippled. Whatever agency crippled it can do the same thing to the United States. Gentlemen, we're in deadly peril. I want your suggestions."
CIA put down his pipe. "I'll get our Russian network working on it," he said. "We'll rev up to go operational, if necessary."
"What do you mean, operational?" the president's man said cautiously.
CIA's eyes flashed with sudden fire behind the spectacles. "Those bastards are just as vulnerable as we are. We can set fire to their wells in Baku and Neftyanyye Kamni as an object lesson."
The president's man cleared his throat. "Let's get the facts first," he said.
NSA said, "Then t
here's Scotland."
"What about Scotland?" the president's man said carefully.
"One of the oil wells in the North Sea, off the Scottish coast, stopped pumping. Trouble about some kind of sludge. The Illingford Petroleum Company's rig, I believe."
"I've got the report on that," CTA said triumphantly. "There was no threat from SPOILER."
"That we know of," NSA said.
CIA frowned. "I've got a man in MI6."
"And MI6 has a man in your shop. See me after the meeting and I'll tell you his name."
CIA's ears got very red. He puffed on his pipe and said nothing.
"All right," the president's man said. "Whatever the explanation is, this country's neck is in the noose. I'm giving this matter the highest priority. I want all your resources behind it, starting one minute from now." He turned to the CIA head. "Get your Russian network hopping."
The CTA director got up without a word and knocked on the door. The marine sentry on duty outside unlocked it and let him out.
The president's man turned to the NSA chief. "You have a hunch. Follow it up. I want you to get Coin working on this problem."
NSA sat back in his chair, a smile creasing his lean, leathery face. He looked at his wristwatch.
"Minute's almost up," he said. He touched the stem of his watch. "Coin's on it," he said. He looked at his watch again. "Been on it fifteen seconds now."
Chapter 3
John Farnsworth looked at his watch. It said thirteen hundred hours. Farnsworth sighed.
"Excuse me, gentlemen," he said, and got up from the conference table.
The other men at the table looked up at him in surprise. "Wait a minute, John," said Ken Danforth, the head of the TV production company, "you can't leave yet. It's going to take at least another hour to wrap this thing up."
"Sorry about that," Farnsworth said, packing up his attache case. "You fellows settle the details. I'll be in touch."
