Atom Bomb Angel

26

A van drove swiftly through the thick fog that shrouded Shropshire. It was a real pea-souper, and the van was going swifter than a van should in these conditions. But its driver was well trained, damned well trained, at driving in conditions such as these; he almost preferred conditions such as these to plain clear daylight. All the usual dashboard instruments were to one side; the centre of the dash was occupied by a large radar screen. The screen told the driver that the road ahead was clear. Next to the driver sat another man, with an identical screen in front of him; like the driver, he too was glued to the screen.

The exterior of the van was painted a rather dreary brown colour, and was in need of a good polish; emblazoned along each side, and along the rear doors, were the words Harris the Bakers.

The interior of the van, sealed off from the driver and his mate, was altogether a different matter. It had six seats, in two rows of three, facing each other, all covered in Connolly hide, and there was an elegant mahogany table in the centre. There were no windows in the back, but at the touch of a button the occupants could see any direction outside that they wished, on the large television monitor attached to the top of the table. To the left of the monitor was a radiotelephone that could connect directly into the telephone system of almost any country in the world.

The air inside the back could be set to any temperature the occupants desired, and, if necessary, the outside air could be shut off completely and they could switch to the van’s own ten-hour supply. The equipment also included a refrigerator, well stocked with food and milk, and an equally well stocked cabinet of soft drinks, including a large quantity of Malvern water.

Behind the seats was a padded space which had been especially designed to accommodate a quantity of small dogs, and it was currently occupied by several puzzled corgis. The six seats also were occupied by six no less puzzled adults. They were the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the Prince and Princess of Wales with their baby in a carry-cot, and Prince Andrew. Two similar vans, a short way behind, one marked Latin’s Poultry and the other marked Brights for Fish, contained other members of the Royal Family, and an assortment of ladies-in-waiting and secretaries.

The bread van turned into what looked like the driveway to an old manor house, and indeed once had been, and headed up the twisting mile-long drive. The van drove past outbuildings which had once housed farm machinery, but now barracked special members of the Coldstream Guards, and pulled up outside what looked like a timbered Elizabethan manor.

The interior of the house was not exactly classic Elizabethan. There was a dome of reinforced concrete, a battery of TV monitors, and a massive descending stairwell. A silver-haired man in his late fifties, wearing the battle-dress uniform of a Brigadier, led the Royal group into the building and down the stairwell. On the first level down, they walked through a rounded doorway which had a massive, two-foot-thick steel door with a rotating plate in the centre, and a large dial, not unlike the door to a bank vault. The door was open, and secured back.

The party went down to the second level and through a second, identical doorway, then down to the third level and through yet another identical doorway. They came into a very large and brightly lit operations room of open-plan design. There were over one hundred desks in the room; each desk had two telephones and one computer terminal.

The Queen then parted company with the rest of her family who were taken on down into their living quarters, and she was led through the back of the operations room, down a short corridor, and into a room hung completely with maps and charts. In the centre of the room was a huge rosewood table, of elongated oval shape, around which sat the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and a battery of advisors.

In an office further down the same corridor, Fifeshire sat, shrouding himself in cigar smoke and firing his words through the cloud. I wondered if, perhaps, he was trying to simulate giving orders in battle conditions.

‘Did you have a good journey?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘flying in choppers through thick fog is not my scene.’

‘Nor mine. Damned foolish. Did you notice the wind getting up?’

I nodded. ‘Westerly.’

A massive cloud of Havana smoke appeared in front of my eyes, and his voice boomed through it. ‘You’re wondering what the devil is going on, so I’ll tell you everything first, and then you can ask questions.’

As the smoke lifted, I half-expected that he might have disappeared, but he was still there.

‘The Americans, the Canadians, the French, and the Spaniards: they all found AtomSled’s fuel bundles, in position in various reactors, ready for loading into the cores. Now for the bad news: at the Chinon reactor in France, at eleven o’clock last night, four men carrying explosive charges were arrested. A Spanish reactor at Lemoniz went critical at one o’clock this morning: there were no B-marked fuel bundles at Lemoniz. According to their latest report, the reactor is now completely out of control.’ Fifeshire took the cigar away from his mouth for some moments, and I could see his face was very white. ‘Do you know what this means?’

I nodded. I knew what it meant. I said something I don’t normally say when in the presence of a superior. I said, ‘Oh shit.’

‘I don’t think I could have put it better myself,’ said Fifeshire.

‘We’ve been duped. Hook, line and sinker.’

He nodded. ‘That’s what it looks like, I’m afraid. Total red herring, the fuel business; and it’s worked a treat. God knows how many stations are going to blow up today. And where the hell do we begin?’

I sunk my head into my hands. ‘How the hell have we been so stupid?’

‘I don’t think you or I have been in the slightest bit stupid. We are gatherers of intelligence, not scientists. We can’t be expected to understand every aspect of modern science — but we are expected to use good advisors. Sir Isaac is this country’s number one expert in nuclear energy; we used his advice.’

‘Maybe we should have left him on the bloody plane. Where is he now?’

‘In with the brass. He’s trying to explain how you split an atom.’

‘This is one hell of a time for a science lesson. Maybe he should have explained it to them before the country ever built its first sodding power station. Can we get him out?’

‘Do you need him?’

‘I have a hunch,’ I said. ‘If I’m right, then I’m going to need him and a helicopter fast.’

‘What’s your hunch?’

‘A power station that’s got a black university student doing a work-study course at a nuclear power station that’s East of London. That’s what we’ve got to find. I think they’re going to do one power station only. I don’t think they have the manpower to do more. We need to speak to the heads of personnel at Hinkley Point, Inswork Point, Bugle and Huntspill Head.’

Fifeshire again disappeared behind a screen of smoke. When he emerged, he was holding the telephone in his hand. He barked down it. Within ten minutes the phone rang back. Ben Tsenong was at Huntspill Head. So was Horace Whalley.

As the helicopter hurtled down across Wales, the fog thinned, then vanished behind us. We clattered over the Bristol Channel and looked down on water that was thick with white horses. The wind was whipping up — a strong Westerly. The weather conditions for Operation Angel were absolutely perfect.

Heading up the Channel, down below, was a powerful cabin cruiser. It seemed to be making for a small port on the Somerset coast. I thought it was an odd time of year for a luxury cabin cruiser to be out, but then it went from my mind as Huntspill Head nuclear power station appeared in view, hunched menacingly on the shore. It looked formidable and oppressive. Its four round domes and square vacuum chambers, in pale grey concrete, rose from the ground looking like the tomb of a Martian emperor. I wondered what was going on in there, whether it had already begun, if we were too late to do anything about it and were going down to certain death — and that didn’t worry me. What did worry me was a girl in London, a pissed-off girl whose boyfriend had stood her up for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, who had hung up on him when he’d called to apologize and tried to tell her that she had to get her ass out of London. I wasn’t going to let that crazy gorgeous girl get her lungs full of plutonium, and her thyroids full of iodine and her stomach full of gamma rays. I thought of a fanatic young black student, and a weak civil servant, and an anonymous zealot who dreamed of a free Ireland. I checked the magazine of my Beretta, took the safety catch off, switched to automatic fire, nodded to Quoit to follow me, and leapt to the ground before the skids of the chopper had even settled.

A figure came hurrying across to greet us. It was the man I had met only a few months ago, when I had come to see a nervous lecturer, Doug Yeodall, who was now dead, assure the world’s press that a nuclear power station could never blow up. Ron Tenney held out his hand. ‘Hi there, did you have a good flight?’ he said with his soft voice that had a hint of an Irish brogue.

I nodded back and gave his hand a firm shake, which were all the pleasantries I had time for. ‘Tsenong and Whalley,’ I said, ‘where are they?’

‘Why, what’s up?’

‘Do you know where they are?’

‘Sure I do. They’re at the number three reactor face.’

‘At the reactor face?’

‘Carrying out support point inspections.’

‘Is there a problem with your support points?’

‘No, not that I know of.’

‘Whalley’s meant to be on holiday in the Seychelles. What’s so special about your support points that he left his wife, without taking the time to tell her, and flew straight back to England to come and have a look at them?’

‘I don’t understand what you mean?’

We walked inside, past the security desk. I stopped and turned to him. ‘I’ll tell you what I mean. They’re about to blow your fucking power station up, that’s what I mean.’

Tenney led, I sprinted behind him, and Quoit did his best to keep up. We ran through several doors, past a massive tank of water, past stacks of barrels, radiation warning signs, vending machines, men in overalls, and then came up to a door with a large sign: Danger. Authorized personnel only. Protective clothing must be worn beyond this point.

Tenney opened a cupboard door, and pulled out a handful of clothing. ‘Got to put these on — none of us would last thirty seconds without them.’ It took several minutes for us to get dressed: first, black knee-high boots, then a white one-piece suit, complete with hood, visor and breathing apparatus. We stepped into these, and zipped them up; even the gloves were part of the suit.

‘Same material as they use for astronauts’ suits, for when they go out of their spacecraft — that’s what they were developed for originally, the moon landing,’ said Quoit, shouting through his visor at me.

‘I think the moon’s a lot more hospitable place than where we’re going now,’ shouted Tenney.

‘I wouldn’t disagree with you,’ said Quoit.

I was busy trying to get my gloved trigger finger in through the trigger guard. Tenney eyed the gun with a frown. ‘Don’t forget to wash that when you come back out — it’ll be contaminated.’

‘I think it already is,’ said Quoit distastefully.

Tenney strapped large watches onto our wrists. ‘We have one hour’s supply of oxygen. The buzzer will go in fifty-five minutes and if you hear it, just get the hell out. But we shouldn’t be in there anywhere near that long. Okay?’ I nodded through the visor and gripped the Beretta tightly. We walked through the door and Tenney shut it firmly behind us. We were in a small room with a massively thick porthole window. I looked through the porthole, expecting to see Dante’s Inferno, or worse. Instead, I saw a vast cavern, dome-shaped ceiling all around, and a massive blue steel structure, looking like a giant windowless space capsule, in the middle. This was the pressure vessel, inside which was the core. A mass of thick pipes ran from the side of it into a much smaller capsule, and from that into a tall, thin cylinder, about twenty-five feet high. The core itself was about thirty feet high, and sat on four massive hydraulically sprung struts.

A short way to the right was a massive steel robot arm with a giant pincer hand. The controls for this arm were underneath the porthole. It was used to carry out dismantling work on the core for refuelling, maintenance and for inspection purposes; this had to be done by remote control — no suit would protect a human being from an open core.

At the top of one of the metal struts was a figure in a white suit; even from here one could see clearly what he was doing: he was taping something to the strut. We went through a steel door and into the decontamination room which contained an enormous and powerful shower, followed by an air-drying chamber. We went through another steel door, closing that behind us, and into the pressurization chamber. We went through into another chamber, and finally came to the door into the reactor face. Tenney led the way in, and Quoit followed. I hung back some way behind him. Something was bothering me, bothering me a lot more than Whalley and Tsenong, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

I went through, and if the place hadn’t looked like the Inferno, it certainly felt like it. There was a heat stronger than I had ever felt before — intense, claustrophobic; I felt as though I had entered a microwave oven. I looked around for some solid object; just to my right was an enormous valve fixed to the floor. Quoit pointed at the figure up on the support strut; I could see from where I was standing that whatever he was taping to the strut, he had already taped the same to one other strut, and to several of the pipes at the point of connection to the core.

The figure turned his head and looked at us for a moment, before turning back to his work. I saw his face clearly through his visor; it was Whalley.

Quoit started to run over to the core. I hung back. I couldn’t see Tsenong, and I was looking around for him. Quoit reached the base of the strut and was about to start climbing up to Whalley, when two black holes appeared in the back of his suit. He shook violently twice, threw his arms out, and fell over sideways, I flattened myself behind the valve, my eyes doing the best they could, despite the restrictions of the visor, to scan the full three hundred and sixty degrees around me. I saw a flash of white behind a cluster of monitoring gauges, and I fired a burst of three bullets. A figure in white stood up, clutching his arm, and through his visor I could see clearly the face of Ben Tsenong. He had one arm clamped over the other, and he started to run for the door. I swivelled my gun round at him and was about to pull the trigger again when a bullet smacked off the handle of the valve right beside me, ripping a chunk out of the enamel paint; it was then that I knew what had been bothering me.

The voice of the man that Horace Whalley had met in the field, the voice that I had heard before and couldn’t place — it was here that I had heard it before, when I had come down on the day of the press conference and Ron Tenney had shown me around. Ron Tenney with that soft voice, that hint of an Irish brogue: Ron Tenney was Patrick Cleary. He had come around and was right behind me and I fired off three bullets without even aiming, just to scare; another bullet smacked the floor beside me. I saw the bastard, saw him grin, I was sure, as he stepped behind an air-vent housing. I sprawled myself flat on my stomach. There was a flash of white, and I fired another burst, then cursed myself; the white had vanished long before I pulled the trigger. I waited. I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, something moving. It was the pincer hand of the robot and it was moving over towards me, and it was moving damn quickly. I had fifteen rounds in the gun, nine had gone. I had to get the bastard fast.

There was a flash of white. I sprang onto my knees, fired another burst and sprinted madly forward, if the lumbering motion that is all one is able to perform in these suits could be called sprinting. I reached the other side of the housing. Cleary would be wondering where the hell I was. He might know how to pull a trigger, but he sure hadn’t been taught much about gun-fighting.

I sat, knowing he was over the far side, and the pincers still moved steadily and swiftly towards me. I hoped it would bring Cleary out in curiosity; it did. He stood up behind the housing, I sprang my arms up and fired a burst of three bullets straight through his neck.

I leapt up, ran around the back of the housing and grabbed his gun, a Walther automatic. I gripped the gun firmly in both hands and aimed at Whalley. A crashing blow hit me in the side of my shoulder, flinging me over onto the ground. I got to my knees and the shadow of the robot arm, pincer jaw wide open and coming down at my head was right over me. I rolled out of the way, making a grab for the gun and getting it, but the arm followed; I ran back several steps, but the arm ran back; any move I made, it could make too, and almost as quickly. It made a dive at me, and I sidestepped just as the jaws clamped shut.

I sprinted for the door; half-way there, the jaws knocked me to the ground. I rolled over, got up again, the jaws smashed me down again, then came back down towards my face. I don’t know where the effort came from, but somehow I managed to fling myself sideways. I grabbed the door-handle, turned, pulled, and fell through the doorway. The arm smashed into the doorway, the pincers closed over the door, then pulled back. The door must have weighed the best part of five hundred pounds, and the pincer pulled it straight back, ripping it from its hinges, and lifting it up in the air.

I ran through the chambers, not stopping at the shower room, but carrying straight through: Tsenong was there, by the porthole, but semi-slumped, one hand on the robot controls, one hand holding an automatic. He was looking very ill, whether from loss of blood or from radiation poisoning through the massive rip in his suit along his arm, I did not know. Through his glass visor I could see his eyes; they were burning with hate, and I remembered what I had read in the psychologist’s report. He deliberately and slowly brought his gun up towards me. I pulled the Walther’s trigger twice. He jerked back sharply against the wall. The hatred in his eyes seemed to vanish, and was replaced with an expression of surprise; his eyes stayed open and he did not move.

I grabbed the controls of the robot. They were simple. I swung the arm over towards where Whalley was still feverishly working. He didn’t notice anything. I brought the pincer right up behind him, then grabbed him just below the shoulders, pinning his arms to his side. I plucked him up and carried him through the air over towards where the door had been. His legs were kicking frantically. I put the pressure on a little harder, just to make sure he couldn’t escape, then left him, about four feet in the air, and ran back through the chambers to him.

His face was a picture of terror. ‘Where is the detonator?’ I yelled.

‘Individual, on each charge,’ he screamed. ‘Two minutes, they’re all going off in two minutes, you’ll never stop them, never be able to stop them in time. Get me down, get me down!’

‘You’d better stop them.’

‘I can’t, I can’t, I just finished the last one, I can’t stop anything. Please put me down, put me down quickly.’ He was screaming hysterically.

‘It’s your firework party, you get the front row seat!’

‘No, help, please, I’ll tell you anything you want!’

‘Which other power stations?’

‘None, this only!’

‘How can you stop those charges?’

‘I can’t, really can’t, we must get out, we’re all going to go up, oh please, oh please!’

I turned and left the bleating creature, and ran back to the controls. If he was telling the truth, then the only chance was if he did the defusing while I carried him to the charges. No other way would give us enough time. I started the arm moving and swung him back over to the last charge he had attached. His legs were kicking like a rabbit’s. Long before he reached it, the charge blew. Then the one on the other strut also blew. The struts disappeared and the whole core tilted crazily to one side, held from falling only by the battery of piping. Whalley’s legs were bicycling crazily. I hoped he was enjoying his seat in the Royal box. Then, in rapid succession, three charges attached to the pipes blew, the core, in a cloud of steam, crashed upside down to the ground, and part of its steel casing fell away.

The room began to get brighter and brighter, a strange, creamy-white light, that just kept on brightening, even though steam poured everywhere from a hundred directions, the light just kept getting brighter. I rushed out into the corridor, looking desperately for someone to tell. I had the choice of about five hundred different people. All hell had broken loose, and a klaxon started, wailing and stopping, wailing and stopping. I stood in the middle of it all, feeling like a prize lemon, wondering if I ought to go and take a shower.