TUESDAY, MARCH 28
On the fifth day, the lost war starts. The slick from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is now estimated at 500 square miles. Exxon, the Coast Guard, and the state of Alaska snipe at each other over whose fault it is that the oil wasn't contained within hours after it leaked. Only about 5,000 of the 240,000 spilled barrels have been recovered, but Dietrich tells the press that, frankly, no one is really trying to recover oil now. "We're beyond that," he says. "All effort is now in the defense of very sensitive areas."

Across the street from the state building, at Prince William Sound Community College, the state has taken over a couple of buildings for a wildlife rescue center. A few oiled otters, ducks, and seabirds have been brought in, but not many boats are out looking for them yet because winds in the sound remain high.

At 6 a.m., after two hours of sleep, a small group of fishermen gathers at the DEC offices. Those "very sensitive areas" Dietrich is talking about are theirs: the three hatcheries and the few most important bays in the herring and salmon fisheries.

"We walk in and they say, `Here's phones,' " says Grimes. " `Here's tables and stuff.' They give us a courtroom, and we convert it into an office. Someone comes in and tosses us the keys to a van. Stan Stephens Charters opens up their yacht so we can use their computer."

The fishermen go to work. Lamb parks his briefcase on the judge's rostrum and telephones Cordova. Until today, only 15 fishing boats have been officially employed in the cleanup effort. Before the day is out, another 80 vessels will have headed from Cordova into the sound, without their skippers knowing whether there will be anything for them to do when they get where they're going. Their main tools will be floating containment booms, which can be linked together and stretched across bay mouths or towed in a loop between boats to drag oil. Exxon has dispatched only about a mile of the booms into the sound so far, and they're all in constant use by the boats already at work.

Within the next few days, Exxon and the fishermen will locate more than 260,000 feet of booms—about 50 miles' worth—throughout North America, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. When Exxon hesitates to pay the transportation bill, the Cordovans will recruit the Coast Guard to fly the booms in.

They also find enough additional boats to swell the defense fleet to some 200 vessels—plus skimmers, tugs and barges, "supersuckers" that vacuum 8,000 gallons per minute, generators, portable living quarters, floodlights for night work, food and clothing, and skiffs for shoreline cleanup. On their behalf, the state commandeers two of its own passenger ferries to anchor near the hatcheries as floating bases for research and cleanup efforts.

At the fishermen's request, a big Sikorsky Skycrane goes whapping off across the sound with the heavy stuff, and smaller Bell helicopters make dozens of daily trips, ferrying light supplies, researchers, photographers, writers, video crews, politicians, and delegates from probably every major conservation organization in the world. Semis loaded with North Slope oil gear come tearing the 800 miles down the still-frozen highway from Prudhoe Bay.

In the windowless courtroom, the fishermen live what Steiner has come to call the absolute nightmare of trying to juryrig a war. "It's a war driven by equipment rather than planning," he says. "It's not like you can say, `Let's draw what we need from some vast inventory'; you have to say, `Look what I've found, let's ship it out there and see if somebody can use it.' "

Exxon says it will pay the bill, and the Cordovans run it up into the millions. The whites of their eyes are vein-laced from sleeplessness, but they stay wired; it's a heady atmosphere.

But underneath, says Grimes, is an "enormous grief and anger" that occasionally drags them into a pit. Steiner's girlfriend, Claudia Bain, is a therapeutic masseuse, a toucher, and she coaxes people into corners for back rubs when she senses tempers close to the edge. This night, when all the hatchery reports are bad and countless animals are dying out there in the darkness, she herds the group back to Sea Hawk Seafoods, insisting that they get some sleep.

Instead, they pick up a fifth of Old Bushmills and sit on the floor, drinking until they cry. They sing. They read poetry, or rather Grimes reads poetry, a long one first, a ballad by Irishman Michael Coady that he copied from the wall of O'Connor's Pub in Dodin, County Clare: "The tiding old sea is still taking and giving and shaping," he intones. "The gentians and violets break in the spring from the stone./The world and his mother go reeling and jigging forever,/In answer to something that troubles the blood and the bone."