Goodbye California - Alistair [123]
‘Well?’
‘You can use any size within reason. Down in Antarctica they use a twelve-inch drill to bore through the Ross Ice Shelf, but here we get by with a good deal less – five, perhaps six inches. I don’t know. Find out easy enough. So you think the ESPP drillings are a double-edged weapon that’s going to turn in our hands? Limit to what you can achieve by tidal waves, isn’t there? But this is earthquake country, so why not harness the latent powers of nature and trigger off immense earthquakes and where better to pull the triggers than in the very ESPP sites we’ve chosen?’
Barrow said: ‘It’s feasible?’
‘Eminently.’
‘And if –’ He broke off. ‘Ten bombs, ten sites. Matches up a damn sight too well. If this were to happen?’
‘Let’s think about something else, shall we?’
‘If it were?’
‘There are so many unknown factors –’
‘An educated guess, Professor.’
‘Goodbye California. That’s what I would guess. Or a sizeable part of it – bound to affect more than half of the population. Maybe it will fall into the Pacific. Maybe just shattered by a series of monster earthquakes – and if you set off hydrogen bombs in the faults monster earthquakes are what you are going to have. And radiation, of course, would get those the sea and earthquakes didn’t. An immediate trip back east – and I mean immediate – suddenly seems a very attractive prospect.’
‘You’d have to walk,’ Sassoon said. ‘The roads are jammed and the airport is besieged. The airlines are sending in every plane they can lay hands on but it’s hardly helping: they’re stacked heaven knows how many deep just waiting for a chance to land. And, of course, when a plane does land there’s a hundred passengers for every seat available.’
‘Things will be better tomorrow. It’s not in human nature to stay permanently panic-stricken.’
‘And it’s not in an aircraft’s nature to take off in twenty feet of water, which is what the airport might be under tomorrow.’ He broke off as the phone rang again. This time Sassoon took it. He listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up.
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘The Adlerheim does have a radio telephone. All quite legal. The Post Office doesn’t know the name or the address of the person who answers it. They assume that we wouldn’t want to make enquiries. Secondly, there is a very big man up in the Adlerheim.’ He looked at Ryder. ‘It seems you were not only right but right about their arrogant self-confidence. He hasn’t even bothered to change his name. Dubois.’
‘Well, that’s it, then,’ Ryder said. If he was surprised or gratified no trace of those feelings showed. ‘Morro has kidnapped twenty-six drillers, engineers – anyway, oil men. Six are being used as forced labour in the Adlerheim. Then he’ll have a couple of men at each of the drilling rigs – they’ll have guns on them, but he has to have experienced men to lower those damn things. I don’t think we need bother the AEC any more to find out about Professor Aachen’s design: whatever nuclear device he’s constructed it’s not going to be more than five inches in diameter.’ He turned to Benson. ‘Do the crews on those rigs work at weekends?’
‘I don’t know.’
I’ll bet Morro does.’
Benson turned to one of his assistants. ‘You heard. Find out, please.’
Barrow said: ‘Well, we know for sure now that Morro lied about the dimensions of the bomb. You can’t stick something twenty inches in diameter down a five- or six-inch bore-hole. I think I have to agree that this man is dangerously overconfident.’
Mitchell was glum. ‘He’s got plenty to be confident about. All right, we know he’s up in his fancy castle, and we know, or are as certain as can be, that he has those nuclear devices up there. And a lot of good that knowledge does us. How do we get to him or them?’
An assistant spoke to Benson. ‘The drilling crew, sir. They don’t work weekends. A guard at nights. Just one. Gentleman says no one’s likely to wheel away a derrick on a wheelbarrow.’
The profound silence that followed was sufficient