Atom Bomb Angel

27

The day Huntspill Head blew its top was a day the locals would remember for a long time to come. The town was five miles from the power station, but the Shockwave rippled through like an earthquake. People fell over in the streets and in their houses. According to official records, four hundred and twelve claims were received for new window panes, as buildings contorted slightly and glass dropped out. The tremor lasted no more than ten seconds, and then it was over. It happened three hours and ten minutes after I had left.

Almost everyone in the town looked westwards, towards the nuclear power station which they had fought so hard to stop being built, convinced that finally their fears had come true. They saw first a small plume of smoke rise; it rose for several seconds and then curved over westwards; then the containment building of reactor number three ceased to exist. It turned into a brown, grey and blue cloud, billowing out for several minutes in all directions, and then the billowing stopped and nothing more came out of the blackened crater in the ground.

The cloud rose, and spread out, until it was vaguely the shape of a fat cigar; it was four miles wide and fifteen miles long, and expanding quite quickly. It moved swiftly, blown by the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind westwards, straight down the Bristol Channel and out towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Only four people died as a result of the explosion and the subsequent lethal cloud; shipping in the Channel and out in the Atlantic was warned of the cloud’s size and direction, and was able to steer clear — all shipping, that was, except for an expensive cabin cruiser which had broken down in the mouth of the Channel. The cabin cruiser had sailed only a few hours before from a tiny marina near Huntspill, and was bound for Kinsale. On board the cabin cruiser were the skipper and three technicians from Huntspill Head; one was an electrical inspector, one a computer programmer and one a hydraulics engineer. There were three empty seats on the boat: these should have been filled by Patrick Cleary, Horace Whalley and Ben Tsenong. The centre of the cloud travelled straight across the boat, and although the four men went below, the polished teak decking offered them little protection. By the time the cloud had passed by, neither the men nor the boat were very nice to look at. Within half an hour, the last of the four men had died.

I had flown from Huntspill Head straight back to Strategic Headquarters in Shropshire; the reactor was still intact, and the southwesterly was blowing strongly.

‘It’s out of control,’ said Fifeshire. ‘The technical expression for it is a “power excursion accident” — except it’s not an accident.’ Surprisingly, he did not look as grim as he might have done; something was up, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t think that anything, right now, could be anything but bad. I thought about Gelignite again. I had tried three times to get her on the phone to tell her to head north and keep going north as far as she could go. I nodded at Fifeshire.

‘The way I understand it,’ he continued, ‘is that two of the four struts on which the pressure vessel containing the core sits, have been blown away; the coolant pipes have also all been fractured. The core has fallen upside down, breaking its outer pressure vessel, and therefore losing all of its coolant.

‘Being upside down has caused the control rods to fall out. They are situated at the top of the core, and normally in an emergency, if all other precautions and systems fail, would drop straight down into the core, under the force of gravity, and the reaction would stop. Being upside down has of course stopped this, and in fact, the reverse had happened: the rods having fallen out completely means that the temperature of the core is rising at a fantastic rate — no one ever figured that the control rods might be removed altogether.

‘The net result is that the containment of reactor number three is filling with steam, and the core is expanding this steam fast. All the escape valves and filtration systems have been jammed by Whalley, Tsenong and their chums, so the pressure is building up, and any moment there is going to be an almighty bang. Apparently, a very big bang is preferable to a small one. The boffins believe that if the bang is sufficiently big, it will blow the core to pieces rather than let it continue to heat and have a situation that Isaac Quoit described as — what was it… an Australia… no, a China Syndrome. If the core is blown to pieces, there will be a short emission of radioactivity, making a cloud that will be large, but which will be a once-only cloud. If the core stays intact, there will be stuff pouring out of the ground for days.’

‘Is there anything anyone can do to make sure it does blow to pieces?’

‘Yes. By just leaving everything as it is and not attempting to open any valves, or anything. They are ninety-nine per cent sure that the bang will be big enough.’ Fifeshire smiled broadly, and pulled a cigar from the box. ‘Mind you, if you think we’ve got a few problems, you want to thank your lucky stars you’re not in America: they’ve got five reactors down the West Coast doing exactly the same as this.’

‘What about the Canadians?’

‘They’ve caught them. The French, as you know, they caught last night, and the Spaniards have somehow managed to shut down.’

‘So it’s just us and the Americans in the soup?’

Fifeshire’s smile turned to a large grin. I decided he was definitely cracking up. He started shaking a piece of paper at me. ‘Volcanoes!’ he said. ‘Volcanoes!’

I wondered if there was anybody here who could certify him.

‘Coguana des Tyq, Mount St Helens,’ he said. ‘Look at this weather report!’ He thrust the sheet of paper at me. I read it. It was an emergency weather report, put out to all shipping at half past twelve. It stated that the wind would be starting to veer and that easterly gales were imminent.

‘What do you mean, “Coguana des Tyq”?’ I said.

‘Haven’t you read your newspapers?’

‘I’ve had quite a busy schedule lately, in case you hadn’t noticed, sir.’

‘Volcanoes — two erupting at the same time.’

‘I was aware,’ I said.

‘Well, it often happens, apparently, when there’s a volcanic eruption, that the world’s weather pattern gets disrupted. This is precisely what has happened — only with two, it’s even worse. There’s some vortex or something they’ve created, I don’t quite understand it all, but the point is that it’s causing our winds to veer to the east. All the stuff from Huntspill is going to go straight out into the middle of the Atlantic, and then probably get blown north up into the Arctic. It’ll have dispersed almost completely by the time it gets up there.’

‘All the same, I wouldn’t want to be a penguin right now. What about America?’

‘Same thing. The idea was obviously to blow up the west coast stations, so the fall-out would blow eastwards over the whole of America. Now it’s going to blow over Siberia.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘the Russians won’t be pleased!’

‘No.’ he smiled, ‘I don’t expect they will.’

I sat back and lit a cigarette. There was a long silence.

‘You look glum, Flynn,’ he said.

‘I don’t like to fail.’

‘You didn’t fail.’

‘What do you mean? Of course I did. The reactor is going to blow up. So, okay, all the stuff’s going to be blown out to sea; fifteen million Englishmen aren’t going to be decimated; but that’s no thanks to me, to any of us — it’s all a bloody fluke. Next time, it could be very different.’

‘There isn’t a “this time” and a “next time” in our business,’ said Fifeshire, ‘there’s no official beginning and end. Ours is an ongoing process. We’re forever walking down a dark tunnel, snatching at patches of light. We win some and we lose some; but often we don’t know whether we have really won, any more than we know whether we have really lost.’

I looked at him. His talk of dark and light had reminded me of something. ‘Are you any good at crosswords, sir?’

‘Try me.’

‘“Short Richard’s offspring divides nation with friendly underground railroad.” Three words. Five letters, five letters, and four.’

‘Where’s the crossword from?’

‘The New York Sunday Times.’

He thought for about three seconds. ‘It’s from the civil war days, the division between the northern and southern States; Mason Dixon Line.’

‘Of course, staring me in the face,’ I said.

‘Any other clues you’re stuck with?’

‘No, but there’s one puzzle we haven’t yet solved: Sir Isaac Quoit.’

Fifeshire nodded. ‘You know what I think? I think the whole damned business with him was a red herring. Like the fuel; it was to distract us from what was really going on.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, sir. But what the hell do we do with his body?’

‘Smuggle it into Russia, Flynn. Unless you can think of a better idea?’

I sat in silence for a long time, trying to think of a better idea.