Warren Murphy - By Eminent Domain

Destroyer 124: By Eminent Domain

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

Sometimes, if he scrunched up his eyes tight enough and concentrated really, really hard, he could almost taste the warm apple pie. Other times it was roast pork, hot from the oven and spitting delicious, mouthwatering fat. This day, the last day of the rest of Brian Turski's young life, it was freshly baked chocolatechip cookies.

In his mind's eye, they were baked to perfection. Not cooked so much that they were brittle. Just soft enough that when they were broken in two, the chocolate formed drooping, gooey threads between the two halves.

He took a deep breath, savoring the remembered aroma.

The smell that flooded his nostrils was that of diesel exhaust and commingled human body odors. And the cold.

Here, cold was a living thing-assaulting all the senses at once. You could see it, taste it, smell it. On a still night, when the snow fell, you could hear it. Each flake hit like frozen thunder. Mostly, though, you could feel it. Seeping through boots and gloves. Leeching deep into bone.

It was the cold Brian had to deal with every day. His wife's cooking-including her trademark chocolate-chip cookies-was a million miles away.

Brian opened his eyes. He was in the back of a truck. Fifteen other men were arranged on two benches around him. They were bouncing along a rutted rural road.

"Your wife's cooking again, huh?" grunted the man beside him. Like Brian, he was tall and thin, his strong arms hidden beneath his heavy parka.

Brian nodded glumly.

"Why do you torture yourself?" his seatmate asked.

More than once, each one of the men in that truck had asked himself the same question. The answer they invariably gave was that it put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their families. For eight months each year, they trudged out into rural Alaska during the long, dark months of winter for the same reason the surgeon went to the hospital or the baker went to the bakery. It was their job.

"If you live in Alaska more than two years, your feet will be frozen in it." So went the old saying. For Brian Turski, frozen feet were just part of a bitter reality.

Insulated boots stomped the floor for warmth as the big truck drove along the rough access road. Another dry winter had yielded little snow in this part of the Last Frontier. Patches of white dotted the land. When the tired old truck finally rolled to a squeaking stop, brittle scrub grass crunched beneath the tire treads.

Cold steel doors popped open on a featureless plain. A stiff breeze-like icy fingers-curled inside the vehicle. As he stood, Brian pulled his hood over his long, matted hair, knotting it beneath his whiskers with freezing fingers.

There was only one native Alaskan in the group. He had the broad, flat face of an Aleut, with eyes that were weather-battered slits cut deep in dark flesh.

The Aleut was first out of the back. Brian followed, with the others filing rapidly out behind.

The wan light of perpetual dusk painted the landscape in an otherworldly gray. The men ignored the sallow sky.

On the sleeves of their matching parkas, each man wore the APSC insignia of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. The same logo adorned both sides of their truck.

Daylight was already at a premium. Their foreman-a burly, urgent man whose once delicate skin had been ravaged by years of exposure to the hostile climate-rounded to the back of the truck from the cab.

"Chopper spotted the break over that rise," Joe Abady said, pointing with his chin as he tugged on his Thinsulate gloves. "We've got maybe a couple of hours if the generators hold. You all know what to do. Let's do it fast."

A second truck had trailed the first. The men hurried over to it. Tools and ladders were hauled out onto frozen ground. Plastic canisters were dropped beside them. The sharp smell of gasoline sliced the cold air.

Two men struggled to haul the generators from far back in the truck.

"Can't we drive around?" one panted as they lowered the second generator to the road.

"Access is too far down," the foreman explained gruffly. "We're doing this the old-fashioned way." Brian Turski and three of the others hefted up the bulky portable generators. The rest of the men gathered the tools and the gas. They left the welding tanks to Joe Abady.

The foreman hooked a pair of leather straps around his shoulders and shrugged the big tanks onto his broad back.

With Abady in the lead, the group of twenty men struck off across the tundra.

Twenty yards off the path, the plain turned to hill. Brian Turski's breath was labored as he struggled under the weight of the generator. The hill had seemed gradual from the road but quickly grew steeper with each labored step.

"I'm not hauling this back," Brian panted.

"You wanna carry these?" Abady asked. The strain of the welding tanks stretched his leathery face.

"What I want is homemade apple pie," Brian said. His heart was straining in his chest. His lungs felt as if they'd been rubbed raw with sandpaper. "Or chocolate-chip cookies."

The words burned his hoarse throat.

Sweating and cursing, the men crested the hill. As soon as they reached the summit, they saw the problem.

The floor of the long, narrow valley below was stained black. Towering above the ground was a massive pipe that stretched in either direction. And in the side of that pipe, an angry hole was like the open mouth of Hell itself.

Moans rose all around.

"Swell," one man complained at the sight of the spilled crude oil. "We're gonna need a vacuum truck up here."

"Already on its way down from Wiseman," Abady said, not breaking stride. "Let's move it, ladies." Hitching up his tanks, the foreman began to pick his careful way down the far side of the hill to the wounded section of the massive Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

TEN MINUTES LATER, crude oil swamped Brian Turski's boots as he eyed the gash in the pipe.

"That's not from stress," he said to Joe Abady. "They only saw the spill from the air," the foreman replied with a frown. "Not this."

"Looks like someone took an ax to it," Brian said. Still frowning, Abady glanced down the broad ravine. Some of the men followed his line of sight. The pipeline slithered off like a great fat snake in either direction. To the north it was a straight run into the nothingness of the Alaskan wilderness. To the south it twisted around a bend in the ravine and was gone.

The forty-eight-inch pipe was built on raised pipeline support members that looked like field posts for Titans. Here and there below the pipeline were dark, uncertain patches and bits of brittle scrub. A few broad streaks of windswept snow hugged the ravine walls on either side.

"Just a rupture," Abady announced gruffly. "Probably froze, then popped. No one'd be stupid enough to come out here except us. Let's get to work."

With the drop in pressure that signified a rupture, the line had been shut down. Twelve pumping stations and two million gallons of crude oil sat idle until repairs could be made.

Stepping carefully through the thick pool of oil, Brian headed for one of the support members. As he walked he cast a casual glance down the ravine. And froze.

Something had moved.

It was subtle, ghostly, caught more with his peripheral vision than anything else. But though his eyes had almost ignored it, his brain wouldn't let them.

He squinted into the distance.

Nothing. No movement, no anything. Just the land and the sky and the pipeline that ran between them. For Brian Turski, an eerie silence descended on the ravine. The grunts of the men behind him faded to silence.

After a moment he grew less certain. He was about to chalk it all up to his imagination when the air seemed to coalesce. A shape suddenly appeared from the drab landscape where a moment before there had been nothing.