In the Adlerheim Morro and Dubois looked at each other and smiled. Morro reached out a hand for his bottle of Glenlivet.
In Los Angeles Ryder showed no reaction whatsoever, which was hardly surprising in view of the fact that he had helped draft the message himself. He asked Major Dunne for permission to borrow his helicopter and dispatched Jeff to pick up some specified articles from his, Ryder’s, home. Then he gave Sassoon a short list of other specified articles he required. Sassoon looked at him and said nothing. He just lifted a phone.
Exactly on ten the President appeared on TV screens throughout the country. Not even the first landing on the moon had attracted so vast a viewing – and listening – audience.
He had four men with him in the studio, and those he introduced as his Chief of Staff and the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, which seemed largely superfluous as all of them were nationally- and indeed internationally-known figures. Muldoon, the Secretary of the Treasury, was the one who caught the attention of everyone. Colour TV showed him for what he was, a very sick man indeed. His face was ashen and, surprisingly, almost haggard – surprisingly because, although not particularly tall, he was a man of enormous girth and, as he sat, his great stomach seemed almost to touch his knees. He was said to weigh 330 lbs, but his precise weight was irrelevant. What was truly remarkable about him was not that he had had three heart attacks but the fact that he had managed to survive any of them.
‘Citizens of America.’ The President’s deep, resonant voice was trembling, not with fear but with an outraged fury that he made no attempt to suppress. ‘You all know the great misfortune that has befallen, or is about to befall, our beloved State of California. Although the Government of these United States will never yield to coercion, threats or blackmail it is clear that we must employ every means in our power – and in this, the greatest country in the world, our resources are almost infinite – to avert the impending doom, the threatened holocaust that looms over the West.’ Even in the moments of the greatest stress he was incapable of talking in other than presidential language.
‘I hope the villainous architect of this monstrous scheme is listening to me, for, despite the best efforts – and those have been immense and indefatigable – of hundreds of our best law enforcement officers, his whereabouts remain a complete secret and I know of no other means whereby I can contact him. I trust, Morro, you are either watching or listening. I know I am in no position to bargain with you or threaten you’ – here the President’s voice broke off on an oddly strangled note and he was forced to have recourse to several gulps of water – ‘because you would appear to be an utterly ruthless criminal wholly devoid of even the slightest trace of humanitarian scruples.
‘But I suggest that it might be to our mutual advantage and that we might arrive at some mutually satisfactory arrangement if I, and my four senior government colleagues with me here, were to parlay with you and try to arrive at some solution to this unparalleled problem. Although it goes violently against the grain, against every principle dear to me and every citizen of this great nation, I suggest we meet at a time and a place, under whatever conditions you care to impose, at the earliest possible moment.’ The President had quite a bit more to say, most of it couched in ringingly patriotic terms which could have only deceived those mentally retarded beyond any hopes of recovery: but he had, in fact, said all that he had needed to.
In the Adlerheim the normally impassive and unemotional Dubois wiped tears from his eyes.
‘Never yield to coercion, threats or blackmail! No position to bargain or treat with us. Mutually satisfactory arrangement! Five billion dollars to begin with, perhaps? And then, of course, we proceed with our original plan?’ He poured out two more glasses of Glenlivet, handed one to Morro.
Morro sipped some of the whisky. He, too, was smiling but his voice, when he spoke, held an almost reverent tone.
‘We must have the helicopter camouflaged. Think of it, Abraham, my dear friend. The dream of a life-time come true. America on its knees.’ He sipped some more of his drink then, with his free hand, reached out for a microphone and began to dictate a message.
Barrow said to no one in particular: ‘I’ve always maintained that to be a successful politician you have to be a good actor. But to be a President you must be a superlative one. We must find some way to bend the rules of the world of the cinema. The man must have an Oscar.’
Sassoon said: ‘With a bar and crossed leaves.’
At eleven o’clock it was announced over TV and radio that a further message from Morro would be broadcast in an hour’s time.
At midnight Morro was on the air again. He tried to speak in his customary calm and authoritative voice, but beneath it were the overtones of a man aware that the world lay at his feet. The message was singularly brief.
‘I address this to the President of the United States. We’ – that ‘we’ had more of the royal than the editorial about it – ‘accede to your request. The conditions of the meeting, which will be imposed entirely by us, will be announced tomorrow morning. We shall see what can be accomplished when two reasonable men meet and talk together.’ He sounded genuinely aware of his incredibly mendacious effrontery.
He went on in a portentous voice: ‘This proposed meeting in no way affects my intention to detonate the hydrogen device in the ocean tomorrow morning. Everybody – and that includes you, Mr President – must be convinced beyond all doubt that I have the indisputable power to carry out my promises.
‘With reference to my promises, I have to tell you that the devices I still intend to detonate on Saturday night will produce a series of enormous earthquakes that will have a cataclysmic effect beyond any natural disaster ever recorded in history. That is all.’
Barrow said. ‘Well, damn your eyes, Ryder, you were right again. About the earthquakes, I mean.’
Ryder said mildly: ‘That hardly seems to matter now.’ At 12.15 a.m. word came through from the AEC that the hydrogen bomb, code-named ‘Aunt Sally’, designed by Professors Burnett and Aachen, had a diameter of 4.73 inches.
That didn’t seem to matter at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At eight o’clock the next morning Morro made his next contact with the anxious and – such is mankind’s morbidly avid love of vicarious doom and disaster – vastly intrigued world.
His message he delivered with his now accustomed terseness.
He said: ‘My meeting with the President and his senior advisers will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. However, I insist that the presidential party arrives in Los Angeles – if the airport is functioning, if not, San Francisco – by six o’clock this evening. The meeting place I cannot and will not specify. The travel arrangements will be announced late this afternoon.
‘I trust the low-lying regions of Los Angeles, the coastal regions north to Point Arguello and south to the Mexican border, in addition to the Channel Islands, have been evacuated. If not I will accept no responsibility. As promised, I shall detonate this nuclear device in two hours’ time.’
Sassoon was closeted in his office with Brigadier-General Culver of the Army Air Force. Far below a deathly hush lay over the totally deserted streets. The low-lying regions of the city had indeed been evacuated, thanks in large part to Culver and over two thousand soldiers and national guardsmen under his command, who had been called in to help the hopelessly overworked police restore order. Culver was a ruthlessly efficient man and had not hesitated to call in tanks in number close to battalion strength, which had a marvellously chastening effect on citizens who, prior to their arrival, had seemed hell-bent not on self-preservation but on self-destruction. The deployment of the tanks had been co-ordinated by a fleet of police, coastguard and army helicopters, which had pinpointed the major traffic bottlenecks. The empty streets were littered with abandoned cars, many of which bore the appearance of having been involved in major crashes, a state of affairs for which the tanks had been in no way responsible: the citizens had don
e it all by themselves.
The evacuation had been completed by midnight, but long before that the fire brigades, ambulances and police cars had moved in. The fires, none of them major, had been extinguished, the injured had been removed to hospital and the police had made a record number of arrests of hoodlums whose greed in taking advantage of this unprecedented opportunity had quite overcome their sense of self-preservation and were still looting away with gay abandon when policemen with drawn guns had taken a rather less than paternal interest in their activities.
Sassoon switched off the TV set and said to Culver: ‘What do you make of that?’
‘One has to admire the man’s colossal arrogance.’
‘Over-confidence.’
‘If you like. Understandably, he wants to conduct his meeting with the President under cover of darkness. Obviously, the “travel arrangements”, as he calls them, are linked with the deadline for the arrival of the plane. He wants to make good and sure that the President has arrived before he gives instructions.’
‘Which means that he’ll have an observer stationed at both San Francisco and Los Angeles airports. Well, he has three separate phones with three separate numbers in the Adlerheim, and we have them all tapped.’
‘They could use short-wave radio communication.’
‘We’ve thought of that and discounted the possibility. Morro is convinced that we have no idea where he is. In which case, why bother with unnecessary refinements? Ryder has been right all along: Morro’s divine belief in himself is going to bring him down.’ Sassoon paused. ‘We hope.’
‘This fellow Ryder. What’s he like?’
‘You’ll see for yourself. I expect him within the hour. At the moment he’s out at the police shooting range practising with some fancy Russian toys he took away from the opposition. Quite a character. Don’t expect him to call you “sir”.’
At 8.30 that morning a special news broadcast announced that James Muldoon, Secretary of the Treasury, had had a relapse in the early hours of the morning and had had to have emergency treatment for cardiac arrest. Had he not been in hospital and with the cardiac arrest unit standing by his bedside it was unlikely that he would have survived. As it was he was off the critical list and swearing that he could make the journey out to the west coast even although he had to be carried aboard Air Force One on a stretcher.
Culver said: ‘Sounds bad.’
‘Doesn’t it just? Fact is, he slept soundly the whole night through. We just want to convince Morro that he’s dealing with a man in a near-critical condition, a man who clearly must be treated with every consideration. It also, of course, gives a perfect excuse for two additional people to accompany the presidential delegation: a doctor and a Treasury Under-Secretary to deputize for Muldoon in the event of his expiring as soon as he sets foot in the Adlerheim.’
At 9 o’clock an Air Force jet lifted off from Los Angeles airport. It carried only nine passengers, all from Hollywood and all specialists in their own arcane crafts. Each carried a suitcase. In addition, a small wooden box had been loaded aboard. Exactly half an hour later the jet touched down in Las Vegas.
A few minutes before ten Morro invited his hostages along to his special screening room. All the hostages had TV sets of their own, but Morro’s was something special. By a comparatively simple magnification and back-projection method he was able to have a screened picture some six feet by four-and-a-half, about four times the width and height of a normal twenty-one-inch set. Why he had invited them was unclear. When not torturing people – or, more precisely, having them tortured – Morro was capable of many small courtesies. Perhaps he just wanted to watch their faces. Perhaps he wanted to revel in the magnitude of his achievement and the sense of his invincible power, and the presence of an audience always heightened the enjoyment of such an experience; but that last was unlikely as gloating did not appear to be a built-in factor in Morro’s mental make-up. Whatever the reasons, none of the hostages refused the invitation. In the presence of catastrophe, even although such catastrophe be at second hand, company makes for comfort.
It was probably true to say that every citizen in America, except those engaged in running absolutely essential services, was watching the same event on their screens: the number watching throughout the rest of the world must have run into hundreds of millions.
The various TV companies filming the incident were, understandably, taking no chances. Normally, all outdoor events on a significantly large scale, ranging from Grand Prix racing to erupting volcanoes, are filmed from helicopters, but here they were dealing with the unknown. No one had even an approximate idea of what the extent of the blast and radiation would be, and the companies had elected the same type of site for their cameras – on the tops of high buildings at a prudent distance from the ocean front: the viewers in the Adlerheim could see the blurred outline of the city abutting on the Pacific in the lower segment of their screens. If the nuclear device was anywhere near where Morro had said it was – between the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina – then the scene of action had to be at least thirty miles distant; but the telescopic zoom lenses of the cameras would take care of that with ease. And, at that moment, the zoom lenses were fully extended, which accounted for the out-of-focus blurring of the city front.
The day was fine and bright and clear with cloudless skies which, in the circumstances, formed an impossibly macabre setting for the convulsion the watchers were about to witness, a circumstance that must have pleased Morro greatly, for it could not but increase the emotional impact of the spectacle: a storm-wracked sky, lowering clouds, driving rain, fog, any face of nature that showed itself in a sombre and minor key would have been far more in keeping with the occasion – and would have lessened the impact of the spectacle of the explosion. There was only one favourable aspect about the weather. Normally at that time of the day and at that time of year the wind would have been westerly and on-shore: today, because of a heavy front pressing down from the north-west, the wind was slightly west of southerly and in that direction the nearest land-mass of any size lay as far distant as the Antarctic.
‘Pay attention to the sweep-second hand on the wall-clock,’ Morro said. ‘It is perfectly synchronized with the detonating mechanism. There are, as you can see, twenty seconds to go.’
A pure measure of time is only relative. To a person in ecstasy it can be less than the flicker of an eyelid: for a person on the rack it can be an eternity. The watchers were on no physical rack but they were on an emotional one, and those twenty seconds seemed interminable. All of them behaved in precisely the same way, their eyes constantly flickering between the clock and the screen and back again at least once in every second.
The sweep second reached sixty and nothing happened. One second passed, two, three and still nothing. Almost as if by command the watchers glanced at Morro, who sat relaxed and apparently unworried. He smiled at them.
‘Be of good faith. The bomb lies deep and you forget the factor of the earth’s curvature.’
Their eyes swivelled back to the screen and then they saw it. At first it was no more than a tiny protuberance on the curve of the distant horizon, but a protuberance that rose and swelled with frightening rapidity with the passage of every second. There was no blinding white glare of light, there was no light whatsoever of any colour, just that monstrous eruption of water and vaporized water that rose and spread, rose and spread until it filled the screen. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb but was perfectly fan-shaped in appearance, much thicker in the centre than at the edges, the lowermost sides of which were streaking outwards just above and almost parallel with the sea. The cloud, had it been possible to see it from above, must have looked exactly like an inverted umbrella, but from the side it looked like a gigantic fan opened to its full 180 degrees, much more dense in the centre, presumably because there the blast had had the shortest distance to cover before reaching the surface of the sea. Suddenly the giant fan, which ha
d run completely off the screen, shrunk until it occupied no more than half of it.
A woman’s voice, awed and shaky, said: ‘What happened to it? What’s happened to it?’
‘Nothing’s happened to it.’ Morro looked and sounded very comfortable. ‘It’s the camera. The operator has pulled in his zoom to get the picture inside the frame.’
The commentator, who had been babbling on almost incoherently, telling the world what they could see perfectly well for themselves, was still babbling on.
‘It must be eight thousand feet high now. No, more. Ten thousand would be nearer it. Think of it, just think of it! Two miles high and four miles across the base. Good God, is the thing never going to stop growing?’