Atom Bomb Angel

19

A rich blue-grey cloud of Bolivar corona smoke unfurled itself across the room, some of it rising to the stuccoed ceiling, some of it sinking to the Axminstered floor, some of it drifting sideways and turning into a mad eddy in front of the massive window. Somewhere out beyond the double-glazing, beyond the clacking of the wiper blades and the slashing of tyres through wet roads of London’s Christmas-week traffic, was a man who called himself Patrick Cleary, who had to be found and found fast. Horace Whalley had gone on holiday to the Seychelles, and Ben Tsenong had gone into Tesco’s in Oxford and vanished from the face of the earth. The mood in the room was not unlike the mood in a solicitor’s office at the reading of a will, when the relatives, expecting to learn they have all been left vast fortunes, have just been told that the deceased died in debt.

The Director General of MI5 put the cigar back into his mouth and drew hard; the tip glowed bright red, and a good thirty-pence worth of Havana-flavoured exhaust went into his mouth and then out into the room in pursuit of the fast-vanishing first cloud. The officially dead chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was busy doodling on a small card he held against the back of his diary. He was drawing short little men with big noses. He didn’t like being officially dead and felt that the charade was being taken too far. He had been a prisoner in this building ever since his release from the Illushyn. No one outside, not even his wife, knew he was in England. But he had agreed to carry on like this until after 4 January, and he was reluctantly sticking to his word.

I was jet-lagged from my flight back the day before, and feeling the damp cold more than usual after my brief spell in the Namibian heat. The death of Ogomo certainly wasn’t being used by the British press to sell their newspapers, not that it was likely he would have been plastered over the headlines. I didn’t think the efforts of his life would have exalted him to a pole position in The Times obituaries, but I did think they might have been worth more than the only mention they did get in the British press, which was two lines on the overseas news page of the Guardian — Not that I was about to start writing letters to The Times about it. I had a feeling that if the authorities had looked hard enough, and found the car that hit him, and connected it to a German geologist that didn’t exist, there might have been a few more lines; but knowing the type of man that had died, and the type of authorities they were, it was unlikely they would look hard enough to find the car and make the connection, and even if they did, they would probably assume it was the work of a right-wing German organization.

I had just finished relating to the two men everything that Ogomo had told me, and the not particularly pleasant method by which I had obtained his silence. Quoit made it plain, from the expression on his face, that he would have preferred the company of the chickens in the hold of the Illushyn to being in this room with me. He gave me the sort of expression that is normally reserved for a prospective house-purchaser’s first sight of a damp patch on a bedroom wall. Fifeshire wasn’t moved; deaths of enemies only upset him when they attracted publicity and he was called upon to explain them. He sucked in and blew out another massive cloud of smoke before he finally broke the silence.

‘It is now crystal clear, from what you tell us, that we are dealing not with a bunch of ideologically motivated social misfits, nor a bunch of savages suffering from delusions of grandeur, but with the crème de la crème: top table of the Worshipful Company of International Terror-Weavers and Blood-Mongers. They’re having a nuclear cocktail party on 4 January, and half the Western world is cordially invited. Isn’t that about right, Flynn?’

‘I think that sums it up very well, sir.’

‘England, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. Are they going to blow up one nuclear power station in each country, or the whole damn lot? And how are they going to do it? What do you think, Isaac?’

Quoit eyed me nervously, looked at Fifeshire for a brief moment, then shot his eyes back to me again, as if he were afraid that if he took his eyes off me for too long, I might dash out of the room and reappear in a motor car. ‘Mr Flynn,’ he said, ‘did this — er — Ogomo chap give any hint at all about how they might — er — blow up these power stations?’ Quoit took his metal-framed glasses off and chewed for a moment on the end of one of the arms; then he took it out of his mouth. ‘What I mean — er — is…’ He squinted at Fifeshire, ‘it is very important to establish this, Sir Charles—’ he turned his head back towards me and squinted furiously, then put his glasses on for a moment to make sure I was still seated, and hadn’t crept out and got behind the wheel of a motor car, then took his glasses off again. ‘Did you get the impression that the purpose was merely to put the power stations out of action, for example, by knocking out the power cables, or — er — was the purpose to cause a leakage of radiation?’

‘To cause a leakage of radiation, without doubt.’

Quoit bit furiously on the arm of his glasses again, then once more removed them from his mouth. ‘You don’t think it might possibly be a bluff?’

‘These people don’t bluff,’ said Fifeshire, ‘not the team the Namibians have put together.’

‘It’s very difficult to know quite what they mean when they say “blow up” a nuclear power station. As you know, nuclear power stations are huge complexes, comprising a number of buildings and spread out over fairly large areas. They would need vast amounts of explosives to blow up entire power stations — hundreds of tons of high explosives. They could never smuggle that sort of quantity in. How could they? They could just go for the core, but unless they breached the containment building, that wouldn’t do them a lot of good. And they would need a tremendous amount of explosives to do that.’ He started to chew again on the plastic on the end of one arm of his glasses.

‘What if they used an atomic device?’ I asked.

Quoit was silent for a moment. He appeared to be having a problem. He looked up, turning his head from side to side in short, violent jerks. At first I thought he was having a seizure or a heart attack. ‘Hrr,’ he said, ‘whrreer.’ He stood up, holding his hand to his mouth, and took several paces around the room, with his head tilted first to one side and then the other. With the hand that was free, he pointed at his mouth with repeated stabbing movements. Fifeshire followed him around the room with his eyes, a thick frown on his forehead. Quoit bent himself almost double, shook his head wildly three or four times, then stood upright once more holding his spectacles out in front of his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I got my glasses stuck in between my teeth.’

I caught Fifeshire’s eye. Fifeshire looked worried — not about atomic devices, but about Quoit.

‘It would be possible to blow up power stations using nuclear explosives, certainly, and it would be very effective. If the objective of these people is to create widespread radiation fall-out, vapourizing the core by means of a nuclear explosive would be the best way. You see, the higher the explosion lifts the debris, the greater the distance down-wind over which it would spread. Conventional explosives would lift the debris a few hundred feet at the most; a nuclear explosive that succeeded in vapourizing the core could make a plume fifty to sixty thousand feet high — and that would travel a very long way downwind.

‘I think there are two ways these people could achieve their aims. The first would be to organize an internal sabotage of the power stations. One person in the control room of each power station, with the assistance of key accomplices, could achieve this quite simply. There would be no need for any explosives to be brought in. By creating malfunctions and taking the wrong corrective action, a lethal situation could be created in any reactor.’

‘I thought the systems were meant to be foolproof?’ said Fifeshire.

‘They are foolproof provided fools are at the controls. Put a smart crook at the controls and the situation changes very rapidly. He can do a lot of damage, a very great deal.’ He squinted at me through his glasses, looking a trifle unsure about whether he should be telling a confirmed mass-killer like myself information of this nature. He decided to go on, although the expression of doubt remained on his face. ‘All nuclear reactors rely on a delicate balance of rods in their cores, and computers which are monitored by the controllers maintain this balance. If the rods are pushed too far in, the reaction stops completely; if they are pulled too far out, the heat builds up too much, and as the heat builds up, so does the pressure. There are escape valves for when the pressure gets too high, and emergency filtration systems for releasing coolant into the air, but if those escape valves are shut off, and the filtration systems jammed, the containment building’s going to turn into a pressure cooker. The walls of the containment buildings are built strong enough to withstand jumbo jets crashing into them, and to withstand two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure from the inside; but in the event of the safety valves jamming when the reactor is out of control, there could be a build-up of one hundred times that amount within a couple of hours — and the containment isn’t going to hold that. It will either start to crack, or it will just blow to smithereens. Whichever it does, it’s going to release an almighty amount of fallout that would start travelling downwind, and cause serious contamination for a good hundred miles. The average nuclear reactor has several hundred times the radioactive content of, for instance, the Hiroshima bomb.’

‘I thought,’ said Fifeshire, ‘that the British gas-cooled reactors use carbon dioxide as a coolant? Surely carbon dioxide, being lighter than air, would just rise straight into the atmosphere?’

‘The carbon dioxide is lighter than air, but the radioactive materials that it picks up aren’t, and they would start to drop out into the air as it rose. And don’t forget, we don’t just have gas-cooled reactors in Britain now — we have two PWR power stations, each with four pressurized-water reactors. They would send steam pouring out, and that all comes back down to earth.’

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.