Goodbye California

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 done 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 had 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?’

‘I think congratulations are in order, Professor Aachen,’ Morro said. ‘Your little contraption seems to have worked quite well.’

Aachen gave him a look which was meant to be a glare, but wasn’t. A broken spirit can take a long time to heal.

For about the next thirty seconds the commentator stopped commentating. It was no instance of a gross dereliction of duty: he was probably so awe-struck that he could find no words to describe his emotions. It was not often that a commentator had the opportunity to witness the terrifying spectacle unfolding before his eyes: more precisely, no commentator had ever had the opportunity before. By and by he bestirred himself. ‘Could we have full zoom, please?’

All but the base of the centre of the fan disappeared. A tiny ripple could be seen advancing lazily across the ocean. The commentator said: ‘That, I suppose, must be the tidal wave.’ He sounded disappointed; clearly he regarded it as an altogether insignificant product of the titanic explosion he’d just seen. ‘Doesn’t look much like a tidal wave to me.’

‘Ignorant youth,’ Morro said sadly. ‘That wave is probably travelling something about four hundred miles an hour at the moment. It will slow down very quickly as it reaches shallower water, but its height will increase in inverse proportion to its deceleration. I think the poor boy is in for a shock.’

About two-and-a-half minutes after the detonation a thunderous roar, which seemed as if it might shake the TV to pieces, filled the room. It lasted about two seconds before it was suddenly reduced to a tolerable level. A new voice cut in.

‘Sorry about that, folks. We couldn’t reach the volume control in time. Whew! We never expected a deafening racket like that. In fact, to be quite honest with you, we didn’t expect any sound at all from an explosion so deep under water.’

‘Fool.’ Liberal as ever, Morro had supplied refreshment for the entertainment, and he now took a delicate sip of his Glenfiddich. Burnett took a large gulp of his.

‘My word, that was a bang.’ The original commentator was back on the air. He was silent for some time while the camera, still on full zoom, remained fixed on the incoming tidal wave. ‘I don’t think I like this too much. That wave might not be so big but I’ve never seen anything moving so fast. I wonder —’

The viewers were not to find out what he was wondering about. He gave an articulate cry, there was an accompanying crashing sound and suddenly the tidal wave on the screen was replaced by an empty expanse of blue sky.

‘He’s been hit by the blast shock wave. I should have warned them about that, I suppose.’ If Morro was covered with remorse he was hiding it well. ‘Couldn’t have been all that bad, or the camera wouldn’t still be functioning.’

As usual Morro was right. Within seconds the commentator was on the air again but was clearly so dazed that he had forgotten the fact.

‘Jesus Christ! My bloody head!’ There was a pause, punctuated by a fair amount of wheezing and groaning. ‘Sorry about that, viewers. Mitigating circumstances. Now I know what it’s like to be hit by an express train. If I may be spared a feeble joke, I know the occupation I’d like to have tomorrow. A glazier. That blast must have broken a million windows in the city. Let’s see if this camera is still functioning.’

It was functioning. As the camera was lifted back to the upright the blue sky was gradually replaced by the ocean. The operator had obviously advanced the zoom, for the fan was once again in the picture. It had grown no larger and appeared to be in the first beginnings of disintegration because it had become ragged and was gradually losing its shape. A faint greyish cloud, perhaps two miles high, could be seen faintly drifting away.

‘I think it’s falling back into the ocean. Can you see that cloud drifting away to the left — to the south? That can’t be water, surely. I wonder if it’s a radio-active cloud.’

‘It’s radio-active, all right,’ Morro said. ‘But that greyness is not radio-activity; it’s water vapour held in suspension.’

Burnett said: ‘I suppose you’re aware, you bloodless bastard, that that cloud is lethal?’

‘An unfortunate by-product. It will disperse. Besides, no land mass lies in its way. One assumes that the competent authorities, if there are any in this country, will warn shipping.’

The centre of interest had now clearly changed from the now-dispersing giant fan to the incoming tidal wave, because the camera had now locked on that.

‘Well, there she comes.’ There was just a hint of a tremor in the commentator’s voice. ‘It’s slowed down, but it’s still going faster than any express train I’ve ever seen. And it’s getting bigger. And bigger.’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘Apart from hoping that the police and army are a hundred per cent right in saying that the entire lower area of the city has been evacuated, I think I’ll shut up for a minute. I don’t have the words for this. Nobody could. Let the camera do the talking.’

He fell silent, and it was a reasonable assumption that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world did the same. Words could never convey to the mind the frightening immensity of that massive on-rushing wall of water: but the eyes could.

When the tidal wave was a mile away it had slowed down to not much more than fifty miles an hour, but was at least twenty feet in height. It was not a wave in the true sense, just an enormously smooth and unbroken swell, completely silent in its approach, a silence that served only to intensify the impression that here was an alien monster, evil, malevolent, bent upon a mindless destruction. Half a mile away it seemed to rear its head and white showed along the tip like a giant surf about to break, and it was at this point that the level of the still untroubled waters between the tidal wave and the shore perceptibly began to fall as if being sucked into the ravenous jaw of the monster, as indeed they were.

And now they could hear the sound of it, a deep and rumbling roar which intensified with the passing of every moment, rising to such a pitch that the volume controller had to turn down the sound. When it was fifty yards away, just as it was breaking, the waters by the foreshore drained away completely, leaving the ocean bed showing. And then, with the explosive sound of a giant thunder-clap directly overhead, the monster struck.

Momentarily that was all there was to it as all visual definition was lost in a sheet of water that rose a hundred vertical feet and spray that rose five times that height as the wave smashed with irresistible power into the buildings that lined the waterfront. The sheet of water was just beginning to fall, although the spray was still high enough to obliterate the view of the dispersing fan of the hydrogen explosion, when the tidal wave burst through the concealing curtain and laid its ravenous claws on the waiting city.

Great torrents of water, perhaps thirty to forty feet high, seething, bubbling, white like giant maelstroms, bearing along on their tortured surfaces an infinity of indescribable, unidentifiable debris, rushed along the east-west canyons of Los Angeles, sweeping along in their paths the hundreds of abandoned cars that lay in their paths. It seemed as if the city was to be inundated, drowned and remain no more than a memory, but, surprisingly, this was not to be so, largely, perhaps, because of the rigid building controls that had been imposed after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933. Every building lining the front had been destroyed: the city itself remained intact.

Gradually, with the rising lift of the land and the spending of its strength, the torrent slowed, its levels fell away, and finally, exhausted, began, with an almost obscene sucking sound, its appetite slaked, to return to the ocean whence it had come. As always with a tidal wave there was to be a secondary one, but although this too reached into the city it was on such a comparatively minor scale that it was hardly worth the remarking.

Morro, for once, bordered almost on the complacent. ‘Well, I think that possibly might give them something to think about.’

Burnett began to swear, with a fervour and singular lack of repetition that showed clearly that a considerable part of his education must have been spent in fields other than the purely academic, remembered belatedly that he was in the presence of ladies, reached for the Glenfiddich and fell silent.

Ryder stood in stoical silence as a doctor removed splinters of glass from his head: like many others he had been looking out through the windows when the blast had struck. Barrow, who had just suffered the attentions of the same doctors, was mopping blood from his face. He accepted a glass of some stimulant from an aide and said to Ryder: ‘Well, what did you think of that little lot?’

‘Something will have to be done about it, and that’s a fact. There’s only one thing to do with a mad dog and that is to put it down.’

‘The chances?’

‘Better than even.’

Barrow looked at him curiously. ‘It’s hard to tell. Do you look forward to gunning him down?’

‘Certainly not. You know what they call us — peace officers. However, if he even looks like batting an eyelid —’

I’m still unhappy about this.’ Brigadier-General Culver’s expression bore out his words. ‘I think this is most inadvisable. Most. Not that I doubt your capabilities, Sergeant. God knows, you’re a proven man. But you have to be emotionally involved. That is not a good thing. And your fiftieth birthday lies behind you. I’m being honest, you see. I have young, fit, highly trained — well, killers if you want. I think —’

‘General.’ Culver turned as Major Dunne touched his arm. Dunne said gently: I’ll give you my personal affidavit that Sergeant Ryder is probably the most emotionally stable character in the State of California. As for those super-fit young assassins in your employ — why don’t you bring one of them in here and watch Ryder take him apart?’

‘Well. No. I still —’

‘General.’ It was Ryder, and still showing no emotion. ‘Speaking with my accustomed modesty / tracked Morro down. Jeff, here, devised the plan for tonight. My wife is up there, as is my daughter. Jeff and I have the motivation. None of your boys has. But, much more importantly, we have the right. Would you deny a man his rights?’

Culver looked at him for a long moment, then smiled and nodded acceptance. ‘It is perhaps a pity. I think, that you’re about a quarter century beyond the age for enlistment.’

As they were leaving the viewing room Susan Ryder said to Morro: ‘I understand that you are having visitors tonight?’

Morro smiled. As far as it was possible for him to form an attachment for anyone he had formed one for Susan. ‘We are being honoured.’

‘Would it — would it be possible to just see the President?’

Morro raised an eyebrow. ‘I would not have thought, Mrs Ryder —’

‘Me? If I were a man instead of the lady I pretend to be I would tell you what to do with the President. Any President. It’s for my daughter — she’ll talk about it for ever.’

‘Sorry. It’s out of the question.’

‘What harm would it do?’

‘None. One does not mix business with pleasure.’ He looked curiously at her. ‘After you’ve seen what I’ve just done — you still talk to me?’

She said calmly: ‘I don’t believe you intend to kill anyone.’

He looked at her in near-astonishment. ‘Then I’m a failure. The rest of the world does.’

‘The rest of the world hasn’t met you. Anyway, the President might ask to see us.’

‘Why should he?’ He smiled again. ‘I cannot believe that you and the President are in league.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be either. Remember what he said about you last night — an utterly ruthless criminal wholly devoid of even the slightest trace of humanitarian scruples. I don’t for a moment believe that you intend any harm to any of us, but the President might well ask to view the bodies as a preliminary to negotiations.’

‘You are a clever woman, Mrs Ryder.’ He touched her once on the shoulder, very gently. ‘We shall see.’

At 11 a.m. a Lear jet touched down at Las Vegas. Two men emerged and were escorted to one of five waiting police cars. Within fifteen minutes four other planes arrived and eight men were transferred to the four other police cars. The police convoy moved off. The route to their destination was sealed off to all traffic.

At 4 p.m. in the afternoon three gentlemen arrived at Sassoon’s office from Culver City. They were warned upon arrival that they would not be allowed to leave until midnight. They accepted the news with equanimity.

At 4.15 p.m. Air Force One, the Presidential jet, touched down at Las Vegas.

At 5.30 p.m. Culver, Barrow, Mitchell and Sassoon entered the small ante-room off Sassoon’s office. The three gentlemen from Culver City were smoking, drinking and had about them an air of justifiable pride. Culver said: ‘I’ve just learned about this. Nobody ever tells me anything.’

Ryder said: ‘If my young daughter saw me do you think there’s any power on earth that would stop her from crying out “Daddy”?’

Ryder now had brown hair, brown moustache, brown eyebrows and even brown eyelashes. The well-filled cheeks now had pouches in them, and there were slight traces of a long-healed double scar on the right cheek. His nose was not the one he’d had that morning. Susan Ryder would have brushed by him in the street without a second glance. Nor would her son or Parker have merited a second glance either.

At 5.50 p.m. Air Force One touched down at Los Angeles International airport. Even a tidal wave has no effect on the massively reinforced concrete of a runway.

At 6 p.m. Morro and Dubois were seated before a voice-box. Morro said: ‘There can be no mistake?’ It was a question, but there was no question in his voice.

‘Presidential seal, sir. They were met by two unmarked police cars and an ambulance. Seven men disembarked. Five of them were the men we saw on TV last night. My life on that. Mr Muldoon seems to be in very poor shape. He was helped down the steps by two men who took him to the ambulance. One was carrying what I took to be a medicine bag.’

‘Describe them.’

The observer, obviously highly trained, described them. Down to the last detail his description tallied exactly with the way both Jeff and Parker looked at that moment.

Morro said: ‘Thank you. Return.’ He switched off, smiled and looked at Dubois. ‘Mumain is the best in the business.’

‘He has no equal.’

Morro picked up a microphone and began to dictate.

Sassoon switched off the wall-box and looked around the room. ‘He does seem quite gratified at the prompt arrival of his guests, doesn’t he?’

At 7.30 p.m. the next and last message came through from Morro. He said: ‘It is to be hoped that there was no loss of life this morning. As I have said, if there were the fault was not mine. One regrets the considerable physical damage inevitable in the circumstances. I trust that the display was sufficiently impressive to convince everyone that I have in my power the means to implement my promises.

‘It will come as a surprise to no one to know that I am aware that the presidential party landed at ten minutes to six this evening. They will be picked up by helicopter at exactly nine o’clock. The helicopter will land in the precise centre of Los Angeles airport which will be fully illuminated by searchlights or whatever means you care to employ. No attempt will be made to trace or follow the helicopter after take-off. We will have the President of the United States aboard. That is all.’

At 9 p.m. the presidential party duly boarded the helicopter. Considerable difficulty was experienced in hoisting Muldoon aboard, but it was finally achieved without precipitating another heart seizure. For air hostesses they had two guards, each equipped with an Ingram machine-gun. One of them went around and fitted each of the seven men with a black hood, which was secured at the neck by draw-strings. The President protested furiously and was ignored.

The President was Vincent Hillary, widely regarded as the best character actor Hollywood had ever produced. Even without make-up he had borne a remarkable resemblance to the President. By the time the make-up artist had finished with him in Las Vegas the President himself would have stood in front of a plate of transparent glass and gone on oath that he was looking into a mirror. He had a remarkable capacity for modulating his voice so as to imitate a remarkably wide range of people. Hillary was expendable and was cheerfully prepared to acknowledge the fact.

The Chief of Staff was a certain Colonel Greenshaw, lately retired from the Green Berets. Nobody knew the number of deaths that lay at his door, and he had never cared to enumerate. It was widely said that the only thing he really cared about was killing people: and he was unquestionably very good at this.

The Defense Secretary was one Harlinson, a man tipped to be one of the choices to succeed Barrow as head of the FBI. He looked almost more like the Defense Secretary than the Defense Secretary did. He was said to be very good at looking after himself.

The Secretary of State was, of all things, a remarkably successful attorney-at-law who had once been an Ivy League professor. Johannsen had nothing in particular to recommend him — he wouldn’t even have known how to load a gun — except the intense patriotism of a first-generation American and his uncanny resemblance to the real Secretary. But his own private make-up men had improved even on that.

The Assistant Treasury Secretary, one Myron Bonn, had also some pretensions towards being a scholar, and uncannily bore out a statement earlier made by Ryder. He was at present in the throes about writing a thesis for his external Ph.D., and remarkably erudite it was, but then the thesis was about prison conditions and the suggested ameliorations thereof upon which he was an undoubted expert: the thesis was being written in a cell in Death Row, where he was awaiting execution. He had three things going for him. Being a criminal does not necessarily make a man less a patriot. His original resemblance, now perfected, to the Assistant Secretary, had been astonishing. And he was widely regarded by the police as being the most lethal man in the United States, behind bars or outside them. He was a multiple murderer. Oddly, he was an honest man.

Muldoon, the Treasury Secretary, was unquestionably the pièce de résistance. Like Hillary — both of whom were to put up performances that night worth platinum Oscars — he was an actor. It had taken the unremitting efforts of no less than three of the best special-effects make-up men in Hollywood — it had taken them six hours — to transfer him into what he was. Ludwig Johnson had suffered in the process and was still suffering, for even a man weighing two hundred pounds to begin with does not care to carry another unnecessary sixty pounds around with him. On the other hand, the make-up men had made that sixty pounds look like one hundred and thirty, and for that he was reasonably grateful.

So, purely by chance and not from necessity, three of them were men of unquestionable action while three would not have said boo to the proverbial goose. Ryder would not have cared if all six were in the latter category. But so the cards had fallen.