WASHINGTON, D.C.
President Vaccaro, as well as everyone in the Situation Room, stared at the large screen on the back wall with disbelief.
The supertanker cruised across the harbor, crushing everything in its way while triggering massive waves as the Coast Guard tried to catch up.
“They’re too far away, John,” Vaccaro said, looking at the cutters’ relative speed as captured by the high-resolution cameras aboard a pair of circling drones, which unfortunately were not armed with Hellfire missiles.
“An armed drone will be within range in five minutes. F-22s in ten,” he replied while reading on his iPad the update provided from the Pentagon.
Vaccaro shook her head.
That’s too late.
But even if they could get there in time and fire on the Goliath, she was having a hard time wrapping her head around the ecological disaster that would create. Destroying a supertanker and causing it to spill its load of crude oil in the harbor would trigger an environmental catastrophe.
The Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 in Prince William Sound, Alaska, involved a spillage in the vicinity of half a million barrels of oil. By comparison, the report that Wright had shared with the staff indicated that the Seawise Goliath carried over three million barrels of crude oil in its colossal tanks.
The situation certainly called for a more surgical approach to the problem.
Turning to Wright, who was sitting next to the secretary of the navy, she asked, “Where are my SEALs?”