Fifeshire blew out another mouthful of smoke and watched it spread across the room, sinking here, rising there, spreading all the time.
‘Wind eddies, swirls, revolves. If you’re smoking your cigar outside, and I’m lying on the ground, with the wind blowing in the right direction, I’ll get a good helping of your smoke. The principal isn’t much different.
‘There’s a second major problem if the containment did blow to pieces: the blast would almost certainly sever the coolant pipes. The result would be that the core would become so hot that it would start to melt into a solid lump – and go on heating up.
‘This is the worst nightmare of the nuclear energy industry – the Americans call it the China Syndrome, because some believe, if this happened, the core would start burning its way down through the centre of the earth, down towards China, China being the other side of the globe from the United States. We would call it here the Australia Syndrome, I suppose. Of course, it would not actually get to Australia, it would come to a halt in the first water substrata layer – not that that would stop the reaction. It would sit in the water for the best part of a couple of weeks before it burned itself out.’
‘Sending up steam?’ said Fifeshire.
‘Yes, the steam would shoot straight up the funnel it had made, through the breached containment, and it would then spread out downwind.’
‘Highly radioactive?’
‘Highly.’
‘And what about this substrata water: does man come into contact with it?’
‘Good lord, yes, Sir Charles, elementary geography, you must have learned it at school: streams, rivers, lakes, rain, you name it.’
‘And it would be polluted?’
‘Couldn’t touch it for centuries.’
‘Didn’t you fellows consider this angle when you built your bloody reactors?’ asked Fifeshire, with more than a trace of anger in his voice.
‘When you are dealing with something as potentially hazardous as nuclear fission, it is impossible to cover all the angles. We have to go, to quite a large extent, by what we call “risk relativities”. By this, I mean, we have to say to ourselves, “How many people are going to be killed per thousand kilowatts of nuclear generated electricity, as opposed to other methods of generated energy? How many coal-mining accidents, for example? How many coal-miners would be killed mining the coal for coal-burning generators? How many drivers killed in road accidents delivering that coal? How many members of the public killed by the radiation and the carcinogens put in the atmosphere by the burning of the coal?”’
‘The ecologists say, for instance, what about water mills? Good question: water mills, why not indeed?’ Quoit took his glasses off and began chewing enthusiastically on the end of the arm. ‘Did you know that the average water mill kills someone once every two hundred years. A proven statistic. To get the same electricity output from water mills as is currently produced by Britain’s nuclear reactors, two hundred thousand water mills would have to be built. Based on proven statistics, that would kill, by drowning, one thousand people a year. There is no evidence to prove nuclear energy kills anyone at all.’
‘No one, bar the occupants of a Russian graveyard five hundred square miles in area, whose existence your predecessor, Sir John Hill, refused to acknowledge; an estimated four hundred thousand deformed babies in America; an estimated ten thousand premature widows of uranium miners; not to mention about fifteen thousand further completely substantiated incidences of death and disease I could let you have, Sir Isaac, if you would like; but I don’t want to put any ripples on your mill pond.’
Quoit looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Fifeshire kept out of it by concentrating on relighting his cigar. Quoit put his glasses back on. He wasn’t going to rise to my bait.
‘We have built in massive safety systems,’ he said, ‘against all operating accidents, and we have made nuclear power stations enormously difficult to sabotage, but it is impossible to guard against all eventualities. Whatever safeguards we come up with, if someone is determined to get through them, then sooner or later they will find a way. One just has to hope that no one is crazy enough to want to do this.’
‘It’s rather optimistic to hope that in this day and age, surely?’ I said. Quoit glared at me.
‘Isaac,’ said Fifeshire, ‘whatever you might think about the bunch of terrorists we are dealing with, however much we might all abhor their views and their methods, whatever they might be – zealots, fanatics – the one thing they most certainly are not is crazy.’
Quoit nodded.
‘Correct me if I am wrong, Isaac,’ he continued, ‘but a disaster of the magnitude you have outlined, if I understand you correctly, could be brought about by perhaps one man with a few accomplices?’
‘He would need several accomplices, some in quite senior positions, and he would need to be in a very senior position himself; but if that team was set up, and in place, none of them would have to do very much. Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 showed the problems that can develop from one jammed valve. An operator misinterpreted the signals and thought the core was cooling down too much, when in fact it was starting to overheat. It was nearly goodnight to most of Pennsylvania. A team who knew what they were doing could easily put any reactor into an irreversible meltdown situation. I would think about six people would be needed.’
‘We don’t know how many reactors are targets,’ said Fifeshire. ‘We know there are five countries and at least one in each, and quite possibly more. For each one, they need six men in key positions: that makes quite a lot of people to rely on.’
‘It does,’ said Quoit. ‘On the other hand, the average reactor has between four hundred and one thousand staff, so six out of that lot isn’t a large percentage.
‘However, in light of the connection with Mr Sleder, I am convinced it is the second option Operation Angel is going for: nuclear explosives. The most effective place to put a nuclear explosive would be actually inside the core itself. Only a very small device indeed need be used to set off a chain reaction that would completely vapourize the core – effectively turn the entire core into a massive atom bomb. The explosion itself would not be particularly large in comparison with other nuclear weapons, but the release of radioactivity would be on an unprecedented scale – many times larger than that any existing nuclear weapon might cause.’
‘How would someone get this nuclear explosive into a core?’ asked Fifeshire.
Quoit smiled. It was the first time I had seen him smile, and it wasn’t a particularly heartening sight. It reminded me of the face of a python I had once watched, just after it had swallowed a rabbit. ‘Disguised as a fuel element,’ he said.
There was a long silence, then Quoit continued.
‘Getting six men to infiltrate a power station might be a problem; but getting in one small fuel element, a few feet long, a few inches in diameter, would be the easiest thing in the world. No one would bat an eyelid. Hundreds arrive every week.’
‘Do all reactors use the same type of fuel?’ asked Fife-shire.
‘No, they don’t, and the elements vary from reactor to reactor; but the manufacturing companies usually make the fuel for a variety of reactors.’
‘And how is it put into the reactor?’
‘Again it varies. On some types – some older reactors, and the pressurized-water reactors – they have to be shut down at intervals – three months, six months, a year, it depends. But on many types, the refuelling is continual, done by a machine. The reactor might have twenty-eight thousand elements in it, which stay in for about a year. About thirty-five a day are taken out and replaced. Just one accomplice in the fuel storage would be all that was needed to slip the sabotaged element in on the right day.’
‘To how many reactors could this theory of yours apply?’
‘If this sabotage is to take place on a specific day, dependent on wind direction, it is unlikely that reactors that have to be shut down for refuelling would be chosen,
so that eliminates six, including Sizewell and Huntspill Head. We know that they are going to wait for a westerly wind, so power stations on the east coast can be eliminated, as a westerly would blow the radioactivity straight out to sea. That still leaves us with eleven power stations, that have between them twenty-eight reactors. And remember also, it is not just the sabotage of British reactors that could contaminate the south of England. There is Monts D’Arrée, in Brittany, Flamanville, in Normandy: both could contaminate the south-east of England if a southwesterly were blowing when they were hit. Similarly, there is the reactor at Bilbao which could contaminate the whole south of England.’
‘What about contamination from American reactors reaching Britain?’ I asked.
‘It would be pretty diluted by the time it got here, but if there was enough of it, it certainly wouldn’t be healthy to breathe it.’
‘But healthier than jumping into mill ponds?’
He looked at me, and I could have sworn he was beaming lethal doses of radiation at me from his eyes. I turned to Fifeshire. ‘Are you going to warn the other countries involved?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not. I’m not telling anyone, not anyone in this country nor anyone abroad, not the Prime Minister of this country, nor the President of the United States, nor anyone else. I think that our only chance lies in secrecy. You’ve established that those operating in this country don’t know what Ahmed told you, and suspect it wasn’t very much. The only other person who could have talked is stretched out on a mortician’s slab in Windhoek.
‘If I tell anyone in any other country, I might as well send a memo straight to Russia, that’s how watertight their security services are. The same applies, quite frankly, to the PM here, and just about everyone else. I am not going to tell anyone at all until either I can tell them who to arrest and where to arrest them, or until I feel there is nothing more we can do. Right now, we, or rather you, Flynn, can do one hell of a lot. As they say in the RAF, right now, we have the height of them, and the sun behind us.’
I nodded. The chief of MI5 was being uncommonly lyrical. When he was lyrical, it meant he was enthusiastic, and when he was enthusiastic, it was usually bad news for me. I wasn’t wrong.
Fifeshire turned to Quoit. ‘If you are right about the fuel, Isaac, and what you have said certainly sounds plausible, then our friend Deke Sleder fits into this little circle very neatly, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘For sure. SledAtom – no, the other way around – Atom-Sled could certainly assemble such an element. But why has Sleder picked on Whalley? That doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t do the buying of fuel. That whole department belongs to British Nuclear Fuels – and they don’t buy in fuel, they make the stuff themselves.’
‘Does Whalley have any dealings with them?’
‘Yes, he does. They come under his authority, but rather tenuously. He wouldn’t often have any direct dealings with them – not unless there was a major problem.’
‘Have there been any major problems?’ asked Fifeshire.
‘Not that I know of – certainly not until the time of my – enforced holiday.’
‘Could that have been a reason,’ said Fifeshire, ‘for your kidnapping – to get you out the way?’
‘I think someone ought to go and take a look at British Nuclear Fuels rather quickly,’ said Quoit.
‘I’ll get straight on to it.’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, Flynn, I’ll deal with them,’ said Fifeshire, ‘I want you to take your magnifying glass and your spade along to AtomSled. We’re going to need some fast digging. They’re based in New York, although they’ve offices in the Sleder headquarters in Hamburg. I think New York is where you’d better start.’
I nodded, not particularly enthusiastically.
Fifeshire looked at his watch. ‘The last flight to New York is a British Airways flight at 12.45 – if you hurry you should be able to make it. Did you have anything important lined up for Christmas Day?’
‘I did particularly want to hear the Queen’s speech.’
‘I’m sure someone can record it for you.’
A certain young lady was not going to be too happy with me when I broke the news that I wasn’t going to be joining her on Christmas Day after all.
‘If you’re going to go snooping around AtomSled, what better time than the Christmas holidays – everything slack and shut down for most of the time.’
‘Of course, Sir Charles.’ He was right, bugger him; he was always bloody right.
20
I had been in New York during Christmas week two years before, and it all looked familiar to me. It was a bitterly cold, overcast day and sleeting as I sat in the back of the cab in a tail-back on the Triboro Bridge.
The driver watched the jam through a haze of cigarette smoke. He drew on his cigarette in short puffs, inhaled very deeply, and then blew the smoke out quickly in front of him. Every time he blew the smoke out, he would shake his head three or four times and make a tutting sound. The plastic driver-identity card informed me his name was Enzo Roscantino, and the face that stared out from the cheap photo looked glum and faintly startled. It was a greasy, pug-shaped face, with high jowls, thick eyebrows and straight, thinning hair, covered in grease. For a bulky man, he spoke with a surprisingly gentle voice. ‘Fucking Chreesmiss,’ he said, ‘whole of NewYork go fucking crazy at Chreesmiss. Why they don’t stay at home – why they gotta go out block the strits?’
I didn’t know why they had to go out and block tha strits; I told him.
‘Well, I don’t a know either. You home for Chreesmiss?’
If I came here this time of year much more often, it was going to start feeling like home. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not home for Christmas.’
‘You come to NewYork for Christmas? You crazy?’
‘You got it in one.’
We were driving down Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, passing around the edge of Harlem. Across the sidewalk, through a wire fence, I could see into a school playground. A teenage negro was standing there, all alone, watching a ball of paper burn. He looked as cheerful as I felt.
Enzo Roscantino dropped me at the Warwick. He studied the fairly generous tip I gave him carefully, his brow screwed in thought as he did his mental arithmetic; either his arithmetic was bad, or his idea of a generous tip and mine differed widely, but he just gave a curt nod and drove off. ‘And a merry fucking Chreesmiss to you,’ I said to the fast-disappearing, dented rear end of the Plymouth.
The front desk at the Warwick found me a room with a balcony that looked across onto an office block that was having a Christmas party on every floor. It was Wednesday afternoon; Christmas was on Friday. Provided I could get into AtomSled, I would have three clear days to go through Sleder’s business to my heart’s content. My heart didn’t exactly leap with joy at the prospect. I flipped open my suitcase and began to unpack. It was nearly dark outside, and I was tired from my flight. I opened the French windows and stepped out onto the green astroturf on the balcony, leaned over the stone balustrade, and looked down at the traffic queuing up the Avenue of the Americas, and down West Fifty-Fifth Street, and listened to the blaring of the horns as taxi cabs and private cars hurled their mournful insults at each other.
It was bitterly cold, and a few flakes of snow drifted about. Across the street, on the same level as I was, I saw a light come on in an empty office, and a man and a blonde girl stepped in. He shut the door behind them and started kissing her. She resisted for some moments, but he persisted, then suddenly she seemed to fling her reservations to the wind, and started responding equally vigorously. Another affair was no doubt beginning. Another number, or perhaps two numbers, had started their short journey into the vast gullet of the American divorce courts. But that man, who was just disappearing below my eyeline with that blonde girl, right now, I envied him. Maybe she didn’t look so hot close up. Perhaps she had a hooked nose and spots, and bad breath and dirty, scurfy hair, and stank of cheap perfume. Maybe she did, but I had a
feeling that she didn’t, and that he and she were having a good time over there, and I wasn’t having a good time over here at all. There was nothing I was going to be able to do about that until I had found what I wanted and got my ass back on a plane to England and presented myself on Gelignite’s doorstep; I hoped that maybe, just maybe, she might forgive me. But from what she’d said when I’d called her from London Airport, it didn’t seem likely that she would.
I went to bed, and bad thoughts crashed around in my head all through the long night. I woke at eleven and thought it was four in the morning, and woke at a quarter to twelve and thought it was seven in the morning, and sat in bed until after midnight, too tired from my jet lag to get out of bed and do anything, and yet not tired enough to sleep.
I felt better after breakfast in the morning, and walked through bitter sleet to the New York headquarters of Gebruder Sleder, at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, where AtomSled was based. I crossed the road and walked up to the entrance of the copper and smoked-glass monolith that surged towards the sky, and in through the revolving door, which was the only entrance in sight. Glancing up and down inside the door, I could see it was fitted with a securi-counter, an electric security device which works on the simple principle of counting all the people that enter and leave the building throughout the day; if by the time the building is due to be locked up at night the counter has on record more people who have entered than have left, it signals an alarm to the security office. A simple and effective end to my plan A.
I looked up at the name boards; Gebruder Sleder and AtomSled occupied the sixty-fourth floor to the seventy-fourth – the top floor. The rest was a mixture of law firms, United Nations offices, and a plethora of anonymous-sounding corporate names.
I stepped into an elevator and noticed it only went up as far as the sixty-fourth floor – no doubt a security precaution on the part of the Sleder organization. I pushed the top button, the doors shut with a swoosh of air, and my stomach dropped to the ground like a balloon filled with water, whilst invisible hands tried to lift my head and neck up off my shoulders. A digital display before my eyes reeled off floor numbers faster than a bookie writing odds, then the water-filled balloon flew up from the floor and into the base of my neck, and a hefty foot trod on my head, and pushed it down into my shoulders. The digital read-out stopped, and the doors opened, and I wanted her, wanted all of her, wanted right now to own her, take her away to a warm, dark nest, to climb into it and never emerge.