World War III

It was on the back slope of one of the thousands of Philip Smith sweeps that connected ridges and tundra in the vast cordillera that was the Alaskan Brooks Range. White Hill might just as well have been called White Slope except that it didn’t look like a slope either. The sweep was so long as to make the angle of its grade deceiving so that a man standing on it might swear he was on level ground when actually there was a twelve-degree inclination. But no one even considered calling it White Inclination.

They called it White Hill which, all things considered, wasn’t any worse than calling the Little Big Horn a river.

The importance of White Hill to anyone who knew of it was that it was one of the booster pump stations along the 800-mile length of the pipeline to help maintain a constant 1180 psi of pressure of oil flow— manned by a rotating crew of five for half the year and self-maintaining during the heavy winter months. It had been a staging area for equipment and pipe during the pipeline’s construction phase, chosen because the area was relatively unaffected by crosswinds that swept down from the ranges. Its location was accessible and not considered dangerous to skyhook helicopters that delivered heavy machinery and equipment to work crews. The pumping station consisted of half a dozen wood-frame buildings, a four-bay garage for vehicles and the booster pump house through which the pipe ran.

The pump house was also the location of the emergency shut-down valve. It was, incidentally, from this assembly of buildings and, during construction, the machinery that supported it, that the pump station got its name. From a distance, after a snowfall, PS No. 3 looked like a snow-covered hill. But it wasn’t called Snow Hill because PS No. 7, forty miles north of Fairbanks, had already been named that… and it was a hill.

Jake Caffey didn’t give a damn what they called it. As far as he was concerned it was an intersection of coordinates on a very large map. But he’d never seen the pipeline and his first impression of it as the chopper made its way east, to find it, and then north, to follow it, was awe. It looked like an unending funeral procession — a frozen silver snake held above the ground by Tinkertoy pallbearers. Only the snake was a four-foot-diameter cast-metal pipe and the Tinkertoy supports were reinforced steel beams eight feet tall. The pipeline zigzagged across the rugged contours of the Alaskan frontier, dipping into the ground on one side of a river or stream and resurfacing on the other. A thirty-yard swath had been cut for it through densely wooded terrain.

When he saw White Hill from the air, Caffey knew exactly how he would defend it. The pump station was only approachable from north or south because it was in the middle of several hundred square miles of timberland. They weren’t enormous trees; nothing that grew above the permafrost line in the Arctic Circle got enormous. There were just millions of them — spruce, pine, yellow cedar, hemlock, willows — more than a column of men in a hurry could hack their way through easily. Probably the trees weren’t so formidable that they’d stop a heavy tank, but the Russians didn’t have a heavy tank. AH they had were two tracked, cold-weather vehicles. And the only way to approach White Hill was from the north or south — where the pipeline followed the fire break. The column’s line of march would bring it a few miles south of the pump station where it would turn north into the break. They’d have to come that way.

For a change, Caffey thought, he finally had some advantages — total surprise, position, complementary terrain and a weapon he hadn’t realized until he saw it… a million gallons of Alaskan crude oil.

1410 HRS

Caffey saw the first snowmobile top a slight rise about a mile and a half down the breaker. He passed the binoculars to Kate. “There’s the point,” he said in a whisper. “The main body can’t be more than four or five minutes behind.”

He’d selected the best vantage point from which to direct the assault — the pump house. It was the last building in the group of buildings on the site. It faced the south breaker, enabling an unobstructed view of the column’s approach. He and Kate had taken a position at a window on the catwalk above the pipe where it extended out of the main pump rig and through the insulated wall of the building. The catwalk vibrated with each stroke of the pump regulator. It was like sitting inside a heart chamber.

Shu-thum-de-DA… shu-thum-de-DA… Eleven and a half times a minute.

The regulator’s slow but methodically precise action gave the place an eerie sense of foreboding, Caffey thought. Just what he needed.