Jack Du Brul - Charon's landing

“Yeah, and what was that?” Collins asked with the sharpness of a cop who couldn’t take retirement.

“It took the full efforts of the FBI lab in Washington to figure out that a piece of steel I’d salvaged from the wreck was a fragment of a liquid nitrogen containment tank. Our best guess is the boat was smuggling cylinders of the stuff into Alaska.”

“Why would someone do that when it’s commercially available, and why would someone then try to kill to cover it up?”

“The Feds are working on that right now,” Mercer answered. “What concerns me is what they’re going to do with it.”

“You think this may have something to do with us?” Collins asked.

Before Mercer could answer, Lindstrom spoke. “How much liquid nitrogen are we talking about?”

“Before I left Washington, I called the Harbor Master in Seward, the boat’s home port. He told me that the Jenny IV had gone out eighteen times in the past year, yet none of the canneries or fish-processing plants that I called have any record of buying fish from her. The Harbor Master also told me her captain had just paid cash for a new pickup, so he was making money somehow. Figure she went on at least eighteen runs and had a capacity of about thirteen tons. You do the math. That’s a shitload of liquid nitrogen.”

“I still don’t get it. It’s not a drug or explosives or anything illegal. I mean, it’s just cold. What’s the big deal?”

“The only thing that makes sense to me, and I believe that Dick Henna of the FBI agrees, is sabotage,” Mercer continued over the startled looks of the two men. “Liquid nitrogen can alter the molecular strength of any material exposed to it. It weakens steel so badly that it can fracture under its own weight. And there would be no trace of tampering. Say someone sprays a piece of equipment with the stuff. Later, when it’s used, the equipment would fail with no logical explanation and no detectable cause. What if they use the nitrogen to weaken a section of the pipeline? When it collapses you’ve got a major spill on your hands for no reason. You’ve been under the media microscope since work started on the new pipeline from the North Slope, so I figured you guys would be tailor-made for this kind of terrorist action.”

Mercer could see he’d caught Andy Lindstrom’s attention. But by no means was the third-generation oilman convinced. Instinctively, Mercer stayed quiet, letting Lindstrom think through the logic. But still he had to struggle not to show his agitation. He’d just dropped a bombshell on the Operations Chief’s desk, and Lindstrom didn’t know that Mercer wasn’t given to paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories. Come on, damn it, come on. You know this could be a possible threat.

“The pipeline would make a choice target, but it wouldn’t work,” Lindstrom said at last, pulling a fifth of bourbon from a desk drawer and splashing some into three small cups. “The pipe walls are high-tensile steel, about a half-inch thick, with a maximum rated internal pressure load of nearly one thousand two hundred psi. Even if someone froze a section, they’d still need a bulldozer to crack it open, and our response team would be there long before they made their getaway.”

“What about the VSMs?” Mercer fired back, knowing he had to work fast or his warnings weren’t going to amount to anything.

The aboveground sections of the pipeline were supported above the frozen tundra by 78,000 VSMs or Vertical Support Members. The towers were spaced approximately sixty feet apart and were designed to allow the pipeline to shift within its bed up to twelve feet horizontally and two feet vertically to compensate for expansion and contraction of the pipe casing. The VSMs also served as a buffer in the event of an earthquake like the one that devastated Alaska on Good Friday of 1964. The bases of the stanchions were buried anywhere between fifteen and sixty feet deep, depending on the depth of the permafrost. They utilized passive ammonia cooling to ensure that conductive heat from the flowing oil didn’t melt the frozen soil that kept the pipeline stable.

“Same again. Even if you weakened the supports with liquid nitrogen, you’d still need heavy equipment to make them fail. Remember, it took 1347 state and federal permits to get the line constructed, and you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they covered their asses and made sure the whole system was so over-built that God himself couldn’t take it apart.”

“They said the same thing about the Titanic .” Mercer let his last statement hang in the air for a minute before continuing. “How about some of the bridges? Isn’t there one over a thousand feet long?”

“Where the pipeline crosses the Tanana River, there’s a suspension bridge of twelve hundred feet, but again, even after weakening the anchors and caisson supports, you’d need dynamite to bring it down. Why bother freezing the steel if you have to use explosives?”

“I know you guys have to put chemicals in the oil to augment its natural heat and make flow easier on the way from Prudhoe. What about just freezing the oil in the line, plugging it up solid? Would something like that cause severe damage?”

“If the oil froze, thermal expansion wouldn’t be enough to crack the pipe casings, and we could have the pipe cleaned out in just a few months,” Lindstrom retorted. Mercer could see that Lindstrom was ready to tear his idea apart. “And you’re also forgetting some other prime targets in Alaska like Elmendorf Air Force Base, or the string of radar-tracking stations along the north coast. And what about the new production facilities in the Refuge? A couple of them are already up and running, piping crude to Prudhoe Bay for transshipment here on the TAPline.” Lindstrom lit another cigarette while a new idea struck him. “The only place Alyeska could be targeted is up at our equipment depot in Fairbanks where we’ve got about half a billion dollars’ worth of drill string, cutter heads, and other equipment.”

“They spray a bundle of drill string, the sections of pipe used to bore into the ground, then smack them with a hammer.” Collins hadn’t detected the sarcasm in Lindstrom’s voice and was seriously considering the possibility. “The pipe wouldn’t crack — it’s too strong — but there would be microscopic fissures. When those turbines on the pads spool up, the string would shatter, fouling the bore hole for eternity.”

“What’s security like up there?” If Mercer could convince just one of the men about his fears, it was better than nothing.

“The expensive stuff, like the diamond cutter heads, are under lock and key, patrolled twenty-four hours a day,” Collins replied. “But the lengths of string are just lying around in big stacks ready to be transported to the North Slope.” Collins rubbed a hand across his balding head, a gold Marine Corps ring catching the final rays of the setting sun through the window.

“I suggest you beef up your force,” Mercer said mildly.

“I don’t see it,” Lindstrom remarked, still unconcerned. “If they shipped over two hundred and thirty tons of liquid nitrogen, they’re after something a hell of a lot more important than spare parts sitting in a warehouse.”

“What’s your estimation?” Mercer tried to draw Lindstrom in again, hoping that the Operations Director would take his warning more seriously.

“We’re secure here at the terminal, and Prudhoe Bay is so isolated it doesn’t make a logical choice.”

“Which leaves?”

“Not much. The pipeline is just too tough for something like you suggest. Alyeska may be a prime target for terrorism, and I’m not ruling us out before this crisis over the Refuge ends, but using liquid nitrogen just doesn’t make any sense.”