Santorini

3

Vice-Admiral Hawkins was the first up the gangway. He shook Talbot’s hand warmly. The Admiral didn’t go in much for saluting.

‘Delighted to see you again, John. Or I would be if it weren’t for the circumstances. And how are you, my boy?’

‘Fine, sir. Again, considering the circumstances.’

‘And the children? Little Fiona and Jimmy?’

‘In the best, thank you, sir. You’ve come a long way in a short time.’

‘Needs must when the devil drives. And he’s sitting on my tail right now.’ He turned to the two men who had followed him up the gangway. ‘Professor Benson. Dr Wickram. Gentlemen, Commander Talbot, the captain of the Ariadne.’

‘If you will come with me, gentlemen. I’ll have your gear taken to your quarters.’ Talbot led them to the wardroom and gestured them to their seats. ‘You want me to get my priorities right?’

‘Certainly.’ Talbot pressed a bell and Jenkins came in. ‘A large gin and tonic for those two gentlemen,’ Hawkins said. ‘Lots of ice. They’re Americans. Large scotch and water for me. Quarters, you said. What quarters?’

‘You haven’t been aboard since before commissioning but you won’t have forgotten. For an admiral, an admiral’s quarters. Never been used.’

‘How perfectly splendid. Honoured, I’m sure. And for my two friends here?’

‘A cabin apiece. Also never been used. I think they’ll find them quite comfortable. I’d like to bring along some of my officers, sir.’

‘But of course. Whom did you have in mind?’

‘Surgeon-Commander Grierson.’

‘Know him,’ Hawkins said. ‘Very wise bird.’

‘Lieutenant Denholm. Our electronic Wunderkind. I know you’ve met him, sir.’

‘That I have.’ He looked at his two friends, smiling broadly. ‘You’ll have to mind your p’s and q’s here. Lieutenant Denholm is the heir to an earldom. The genuine article. Fearfully languid and aristocratic. Don’t be deceived for an instant. Mind like a knife. As I told General Carson, he’s so incredibly advanced in his electronic speciality that your high-tech whizzkids in Silicon Valley wouldn’t even begin to understand what he’s talking about.’

‘Then there’s Lieutenant McCafferty, our senior engineer, and, of course, Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder whom you’ve already met.’

‘For the first time. Favourably impressed. Very. Struck me as an able lad indeed.’

‘He’s all that. More. If I were laid low tomorrow you wouldn’t have to worry. He could take over the Ariadne at any moment and you wouldn’t notice the difference.’

‘From you, that’s worth any half-dozen testimonials. I’ll bear it in mind.’

Introductions completed, Hawkins looked at Talbot and his four officers and said: ‘The first question in your minds, of course, gentlemen, is why I have brought two civilians with me. First I will tell you who they are and then, when I have explained the purpose of our coming, you will understand why they are here. In passing, I might say how extraordinarily lucky I am to have them here with me. They seldom leave their home state of California: it just so happened that both were attending an international conference in Rome.

‘Professor Alec Benson here.’ Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties, grey of hair, cherubic and cheerful of countenance, and wearing a sports jacket, flannels and polo jersey, all of varying shades of grey and all so lived in, comfortable and crumpled that he could well have inherited them from his grandfather. ‘The Professor is the director of the seismological department of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He’s also a geologist and vulcanologist. Anything that makes the earth bang or shake or move is his field. Regarded by everybody in that line as the world’s leading expert – he chaired, or was chairing until I so rudely interrupted him, an international conference in seismology in Rome. You all know, of course, what seismology is.’

‘A rough idea,’ Talbot said. ‘A kind of science – I think “study” would be a better word for it – of the causes and effects of earthquakes.’

‘A kind of science?’ Hawkins said. ‘I am distressed. It is a science.’

‘No offence meant, I’m sure, and none taken,’ Benson said equably. ‘The Commander is perfectly correct. Far from being a science, we’re still only dabbling on the periphery of the subject.’

‘Ah, well. Dr Wickram is a physicist, as well known in his own field as Professor Benson is in his. He specializes in nuclear physics.’

Talbot looked at Dr Wickram who, in startling contrast to Benson, was thin, dark and immaculately dressed in a blue suit, white button-down collar and a black tie, the funereal hue of which went rather well with the habitual severity of his expression, and said: ‘Does your interest in nuclear physics extend to nuclear weaponry, Dr Wickram?’

‘Well, yes, it does rather.’

‘You and the Professor are to be congratulated. There should be some kind of civilian medal for this. Vice-Admiral Hawkins, of course, is acting in the line of duty. I would have thought you two gentlemen should have stayed in Rome. I mean, isn’t it safer there?’

Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘You wouldn’t dream of stealing a superior officer’s thunder, would you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

‘Well, to the point. Your two signals duly received. The first gave rise to some concern, the second was profoundly disturbing.’

‘The “tick… tick… tick” bit, sir?’

‘The “tick… tick… tick” bit. Both signals were sent to the Pentagon, the second one also going to the White House. I should imagine that the word consternation would suitably describe their reaction. Guessing, of course, but I think the speed of the reply to the second message showed how badly shaken they were. Normally, it can take forever – well, even months at times – to extract just a nugget of information from the Pentagon, but this time minutes only. When I read their reply, I could understand all too well.’ Hawkins paused, possibly for suitable dramatic effect.

‘So can I,’ Talbot said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If I were the Pentagon or the White House I’d be upset too if a US Air Force bomber or cargo plane, carrying a load of bombs, suddenly disappeared into the sea. Especially if the bombs – or missiles – that plane was carrying were of the nuclear variety. Even more especially if they were hydrogen bombs.’

‘Well, damn your eyes, Talbot, you do deprive ageing vice-admirals of the simpler pleasures of life. There goes my thunder.’

‘It wasn’t all that difficult, sir. We had already guessed it was a bomber. Civilian planes, with the exception of Concorde, don’t fly at the height at which we picked it up. We’d have had to be pretty stupid not to assume what we did. Bombers usually carry bombs. American reaction made it inevitable that it was an American plane. And you wouldn’t have come down here in such a tearing hurry, and be accompanied by an expert in nuclear weaponry, unless the bombs were of a rather nasty variety. I can’t imagine anything nastier than hydrogen bombs.’

‘Nor can anyone. When you put it the way you put it, I suppose I should have guessed that you had guessed. Even the Pentagon don’t know or won’t divulge what type of plane it was. They suggest an advanced design of the C-141 Starlifter cargo plane. It was refuelled in the Azores and heading for Greece. From your first message we gathered you saw the plane crash into the sea but couldn’t identify it. Why not?’

‘Number One, show the Admiral why not.’

Van Gelder produced a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hawkins who flipped through them quickly, and then, more slowly, a second time. He sighed and looked up.

‘Intriguing, I suppose, if you’re a connoisseur of the pattern effects of smoke and flame. I’m not. All I can make out is what I take to be the outer port engine and that’s no help at all. And it gives no indication as to the source or cause of the fire.’

‘I think Van Gelder would disagree with you, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘He’s of the opinion that the fire originated in the nose cone and was caused by an internal explosion. I agree with him. It certainly wasn’t brought down by ship-based anti-aircraft fire. We would have known. The only alternative is a heat-seeking missile. Two objections to that. Such a missile would have targeted on the engines, not the fuselage and, more importantly, there are no vessels in the area. Our radar would have picked them up. As a corollary to that, the missile didn’t come from an aircraft, either. The Admiral will not need reminding that the radar aboard the Ariadne is as advanced as any in the world.’

‘That may no longer be true, sir.’ Denholm’s tone was deferential but not hesitant. ‘And if it is true, then we can’t discount missiles just like that. This is not a dissenting opinion, I’m just exploring another possibility.’

‘Explore away, Lieutenant,’ Hawkins said. ‘Any light that can illumine the darkness of our ignorance, etcetera, etcetera.’

‘I’m not sure I’m all that good as a beacon, sir. I do know that I don’t go along with the belief that the Soviets always trail the West in technological advancement. Whether this belief is carefully and officially nurtured I do not know. I admit that the Soviets spend a certain amount of time and trouble in extracting military secrets from the West. I say “certain” because they don’t have to try all that hard: there appears to be a steady supply of scientists, both American and British, who, along with associates not necessarily involved in direct research at all, are perfectly willing to sell the Soviets anything they want – provided, that is, the price is right. I believe this to be true in the case of computers where they do lag behind the West: I do not believe it in the case of radar.

‘In this field, Plessey, of Britain, probably leads the West. They have developed a revolutionary new radar system, the Type 966, which is fitted, or about to be fitted, to Invincible-class aircraftcarriers, the Type 42 Sheffield-class destroyers and the new Type 23 Norfolk-class frigates. This new radar is designed not only to detect and track aircraft and sea-skimming missiles, but it also–’

Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Denholm. You may know this but surely it comes under the heading of classified information?’

‘If it did, I wouldn’t talk about it even in this company, sir. It’s in the public domain. As I was about to say, it’s also able to control Sea Dart and Seawolf missiles in flight and home them in on their targets with great accuracy. I also understand they’re virtually immune to jamming and radar decoys. If Plessey have done this, the Soviets may well have also. They’re not much given to advertising such things. But I believe they have the know-how.’

Hawkins said: ‘And you also believe, in this case, that a missile was the culprit?’

‘Not at all, sir. I’m only suggesting a possibility. The Captain and Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder may well be right. Trouble is, I know nothing about explosives. Maybe there are missiles with such a limited charge that they cause only limited damage. I would have thought that a standard missile would have ensured that a plane it brought down would not have struck the sea with its fuselage relatively intact but in a thousand pieces. Again, I simply don’t know. I just wonder what the security was like at the base from which that plane took off in the States.’

‘Security? In the case of a super-sensitive plane such as this? Total.’

‘Does the Admiral really believe there is such a thing as total security?’ The Admiral didn’t say what he believed, he just sipped his scotch in silence. ‘There were four major air disasters last year, all four planes involved having taken off from airports which were regarded as having maximum security. In all four cases terrorists found the most stringent airport checks childishly easy to circumvent.’

‘Those were civilian airports. This would be a top-secret US Air Force base, manned exclusively by US Air Force personnel, specially chosen for their position, rigidly screened, backgrounds exhaustively researched, and all subjected to lie-detector tests.’

‘With respect to the Vice-Admiral, and our American friends, lie-detector tests – more accurately, polygraph tests – are rubbish. Any moderately intelligent person can be trained to beat the polygraph test, which, after all, depends on crudely primitive measurements of pulse rate, blood pressure and perspiration. You can be trained to give right answers, wrong answers or merely confusing ones and the scrutineer can’t tell the difference.’

‘Doesn’t measure up to your idea of electronics, eh?’

‘Nothing to do with electronics, sir. Polygraphs belong to the horse-and-buggy era. You’ve just used the word super-sensitive, sir. The Ariadne, if I may put it that way, is a hotbed of super-sensitivity. How many members of this crew have ever been subjected to a polygraph test? None.’

Hawkins considered his glass for a few moments, then looked up at Talbot. ‘Should the need arise, Captain, how long would it take you to contact the Pentagon?’

‘Immediately. Well, half a minute. Now?’

‘No. Wait. Have to think about it. Trouble is, even the Pentagon is having difficulty in extracting information from this Air Force base which is, I believe, somewhere in Georgia. The Pentagon’s own fault, really, although you can’t expect them to admit this. They’ve so inculcated this passion for absolute secrecy into the senior officers of all four services that no one is prepared to reveal anything without the permission of the commanding officer of the Air Force base or ship or whatever. In this particular case, the commanding officer who, to the Pentagon’s distress, would appear to have a human side to his nature, has elected to take twenty-four hours off. No one appears to know where he is.’

Van Gelder said: ‘Makes it a bit awkward, sir, doesn’t it, if war breaks out in the next half-hour?’

‘No. Base remains in full operational readiness. But there’s still no relaxation of the iron-bound rules concerning the release of classified information.’

Talbot said: ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here unless they’d released some information.’

‘Naturally not. The news they’ve released is vague and incomplete but all very, very bad. One report says there were twelve nuclear weapons aboard, another fifteen. Whether they were missiles or bombs was not disclosed: what was disclosed was that they were hydrogen devices, each one in the monster megaton range, twelve to fifteen megatons. The plane was also understood to be carrying two of the more conventional atom bombs.’

‘I think I’ll break a self-imposed regulation and have a scotch myself,’ Talbot said. A half-minute passed in silence, then he said quietly: ‘This is worse than I ever dreamed.’

‘Dream?’ Grierson said. ‘Nightmare.’

‘Dream or nightmare, it won’t matter to us,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘Not when we’re drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit.’

‘A hydrogen bomb, Dr Wickram,’ Talbot said. ‘Let’s call it that. Is there any way it can spontaneously detonate?’

‘In itself, impossible. The President of the United States has to press one button, the man on the spot another: the radio frequencies are so wildly different that the chances of anyone happening on the right combination are billions to one.’

‘Is there a chance – say a billion to one – that the Soviets might have this combination?’

‘None.’

‘You say it’s impossible to detonate in itself. Is there any other way, some external means, whereby it could be detonated?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does that mean you’re not saying or that you’re not sure? I don’t think, Dr Wickram, that this is the time to dwell on such verbal niceties.’

‘I’m not sure. If there were a sufficiently powerful explosion close by it might go up by sympathetic detonation. We simply don’t know.’

‘The possibility has never been explored? I mean, no experiments?’

‘I should hope not,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘If such an experiment were successful, I wouldn’t care to be within thirty or forty miles at the time.’

‘That is one point.’ For the first time, Dr Wickram essayed a smile, but it was a pretty wintry one. ‘In the second place, quite frankly, we have never envisaged a situation where such a possibility might arise. We could, I suppose, have carried out such an experiment without the drastic consequences the Lieutenant has suggested. We could detonate a very small atom bomb in the vicinity of another. Even a charge of conventional explosive in the vicinity of a small atom bomb would suffice. If the small atom bomb went up, so then would the hydrogen bomb. Everybody knows that it’s the fissioning of an atom bomb that triggers off the fusion of a hydrogen bomb.’

Talbot said: ‘Is there any timing device, specifically a delayed one, fitted in a hydrogen bomb?’

‘None.’ The flat finality in the voice left no room for argument.

‘According to Vice-Admiral Hawkins, there may be a couple of conventional atom bombs aboard the sunken plane. Could they be fitted with timing devices?’

‘Again, I don’t know. Not my field. But I see no reason why they couldn’t be.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘Search me. Realms of speculation, Captain, where your guess is as good as mine. The only thing that occurs to me is a mine, a marine mine. Neatly dispose of any passing aircraft carrier, I should think.’

‘That’s thinking small,’ Van Gelder said. ‘A hydrogen mine would neatly dispose of any passing battle fleet.’

‘Whose passing fleet? One of ours? In wartime as in peacetime, the seas are open to all.’

‘Not the Black Sea. Not in wartime. But a bit far-fetched. How would this mine be activated?’

‘My continued ignorance must be a great disappointment. I know nothing about mines.’

‘Well, time was when mines were either magnetic or acoustic. Degaussing has made magnetic mines passé. So, acoustic. Triggered by a passing ship’s engines. Interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve passed over it several times since we first heard the ticking and we’ve triggered nothing. So far. So maybe that ticking doesn’t mean that the mine is set to go off any time. Maybe it’s not activated – by which I mean ready to go off when a vessel passes over it – until the ticking stops. Or maybe it’s just set to go up whenever the ticking stops. Trouble is, we’ve no idea what started the ticking in the first place. I can’t see any way it could have been deliberate. Must have been caused by the explosion that brought down the plane or by the impact of striking the water.’

‘You’re a source of great comfort, Van Gelder,’ Hawkins said heavily.

‘I admit, sir, that the alternatives aren’t all that attractive. My own conclusions, which in this case are probably completely worthless, are that this ticking represents a period of grace – I mean that it cannot explode – as long as the ticking lasts and that it’s not designed to explode when the ticking stops but is then activated and ready to explode when triggered by passing engines. A guess, sir, but not necessarily a wild one. I’m going on the assumption that this mine could well be dropped by a surface vessel as well as a plane. In that case, the ship would want to be a large number of miles away before the mine was activated. So it would start the timing mechanism running at the moment it dropped it over the side. I am sure, sir, that the Pentagon could provide some illumination on this subject.’

‘I’m sure it could,’ Hawkins said. ‘And your conclusions are far from worthless, they make a good deal of sense to me. Well, Captain, what do you propose to do about all this?’

‘I rather thought, sir, that your purpose in coming down here was to tell me what to do.’

‘Not at all. I just came to make myself au fait with the situation and to garner some information in return for some I give you.’

‘Does this mean, Admiral – I say this carefully, you understand – that I have a hand in making the decisions?’

‘You don’t have a hand. You damn well make them. I’ll endorse them.’

‘Thank you. Then my first decision – or, if you like, a suggestion respectfully made – is that you and your two friends depart for Rome immediately. It’s not going to help anyone, and will be a considerable loss to both the scientific and naval communities, if you three gentlemen elect for self-immolation. Besides, by asking me to make the decisions, you have implied that there’s nothing you can do here that my crew and I can’t. Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder is at your immediate service.’

‘The Lieutenant-Commander will have to wait. For me, at least. Your logic is sound but I’m not feeling very logical at the moment. But I do agree as far as my two friends are concerned. They could be back at their international conference in Rome tomorrow, without anyone having noticed their absence. We have no right to put the lives of civilians, not to mention two such eminent civilians, at risk.’

‘You’ve just put your finger on it, Admiral.’ Benson puffed comfortably on a sadly blackened pipe. ‘Eminent or not, we are civilians. Civilians don’t take orders from the military. I prefer the Aegean to Rome.’

‘Agreed,’ Wickram said. ‘Ludicrous. Preposterous.’

‘You don’t seem to have any more clout with your two friends than I have with the three of you.’ Talbot produced two slips of paper from his inner pocket, ‘I suggest you sign those, sir.’

Hawkins took them, looked thoughtfully at Talbot, scanned the two sheets, then read from one of them.

‘“Request urgent immediate dispatch of nearest salvage or diving vessel to 36.21N, 25.22E due south Cape Akrotiri, Thera Island, to recover one sunken plane, one sunken yacht. Further request immediate dispatch by plane to Thera Island two deep-sea divers with diving equipment for four, repeat four. Priority one double A. Signed Vice-Admiral Hawkins.”’ Hawkins looked at Benson and Wickram. ‘This message is directed to Rear-Admiral Blyth, HMS Apollo. Rear-Admiral Blyth is the operational commander of European section of NATO sea forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. Priority one double A means drop everything else, this has absolute priority. Admiral Hawkins is, I take it, my good self. Why, Captain, the request for four diving suits?’

‘Van Gelder and I are trained divers, sir. Exsubmariners.’

‘I see. Second signal directed to Defence Minister, Athens. “Urgent contact Air Control Athens airport for information re aircraft, thought American, that crashed 1415 today south of Thera Island. Did it ask permission for flight path to, and landing in, Athens or other Greek airfield? Further request you enlist immediate aid of police and Intelligence re anything known about one Spyros Andropulos, owner of yacht Delos.” This message is also, I’m flattered to observe, signed by me. Well, well, well, Captain, I nearly did you a great injustice a minute or two ago, I thought you had not perhaps addressed yourself to the problem on hand. But you have, and in some style and quite some time before I arrived. Two questions.’

‘The aircraft and Andropulos?’ Hawkins nodded. ‘At 43,000 feet, the pilot didn’t have to bother to notify anyone about his presence. He knew he was alone in the sky. But once he started descending, it was a different matter entirely. He wouldn’t be too keen on bumping into anyone, especially not with the cargo he had on board. And, of course, he would require permission to land.’

‘But why Greece?’

‘Because the flight path he was following when we first located him would have taken him to Ankara in Turkey, or some place pretty close by. Now, even although Turkey is – nominally, at least – a member of NATO, I’m sure the Americans have no air bases at, or near, Ankara. I don’t even know if they have any air bases at all in Turkey. I’m certain they have no missile launching bases. In Greece, the Americans have both. So, Greece. As for Andropulos, several of my officers and I think he’s a leery customer and a suspicious one. Not one thing that could be proved in a court of law, of course. We suspect that he may know something about the downing of this plane that we don’t know he knows, if you follow me. He says the Delos was sunk as the result of an explosion. But it’s the old question of did he fall or was he pushed? In other words, was the explosion accidental or deliberate? If we could hoist the Delos to the surface we might well find out.’

‘We might well indeed. Still, first things first.’ Hawkins looked briefly at the signals again. ‘Seem to fit the task admirably. I’ll gladly sign.’ Hawkins produced a pen, signed and handed the papers to Talbot. ‘As you had all this figured out quite some time, I suspect, before I left Rome, why didn’t you send those signals yourself?’

‘Lowly commanders don’t give the instructions to Rear-Admiral Blyth. I haven’t the authority. You have. That’s why I asked you to join us as soon as was possible. Thanks for the signing, sir. That was the easy part. Now comes the difficult part.’

‘Difficult part?’ Hawkins said warily. ‘What difficult part?’

‘Have we the moral right to ask the crew of the salvage vessel or lifting vessel, not to mention the divers, to join us, in Lieutenant Denholm’s elegant phrase, in drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit?’

‘Ah. Yes. A point, of course. What do you think?’

‘Again, not a decision for lowly commanders. Admirals only.’

‘Dear, oh dear. Then, if things go wrong, you’ll have nothing on your conscience and everything in the world to reproach me with.’

‘If anything goes wrong, sir, I don’t think we’ll be having too much to say to each other when we’re in vaporized orbit.’

‘True. Mine was an unworthy remark. No one likes to bear the responsibility for such decisions. Send the signals.’

‘Very good, sir. Lieutenant Denholm, ask Myers to come here.’

Hawkins said: ‘I understand – I’m not making comparisons – that the President of the United States was faced with a problem similar to the one you’ve just confronted me with. He asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he should pull out the Ariadne which they knew, of course, was sitting over the crashed plane. The Chairman said, quite rightly, that that wasn’t his responsibility, the old and honoured American tradition of passing the buck. The President decided that the Ariadne should stay.’

‘Well, I could come all over bitter and say that’s very noble and gallant of the President, especially as there’s no chance of his being blown out of his seat in the Oval Office when this little lot goes up, but I won’t. It’s not a decision I would care to have to make. I assume he gave a reason for his decision?’

‘Yes. The greatest good of the greatest number.’

Myers came in. Talbot handed him the two messages.

‘Get these off at once. Code B in both cases. To both messages add “Immediate, repeat Immediate, confirmation is requested.”’ Myers left and Talbot said: ‘It is my understanding, Admiral, that in your capacity as officer commanding the naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean you have the power to overrule the President’s instructions.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you done so?’

‘No. You will ask why. Same reason as the President. The greatest good of the greatest number. Why the questioning, Captain? You wouldn’t leave here even if I gave a direct order.’

‘I’m just a bit puzzled about the reason given – the greatest good of the greatest number. Bringing a rescue vessel, which admittedly is my idea, will only increase the greatest danger to a greater number.’

‘I don’t think you quite appreciate just how great the greatest number is in this case. I think Professor Benson here can enlighten you. Enlighten all of us, for I’m rather vague about it. That’s why Professor Benson is here.’

‘The good Professor is not at his best,’ Benson said. ‘He’s hungry.’

‘Most remiss of us,’ Talbot said. ‘Of course you haven’t eaten. Dinner, say, in twenty minutes?’

‘I’d settle for a sandwich.’ Talbot looked at Hawkins and Wickram, both of whom nodded. He pressed a bell.

‘I’m a bit vague about it myself,’ Benson said. ‘Certain facts are beyond dispute. What we’re sitting on top of at this moment is one of them. According to which estimate of the Pentagon’s you choose to believe, there’s something like a total of between 144 and 225 megatons of high explosive lying down there. Not that the difference between the lowest and highest estimate is of any significance. The explosion of a pound of high explosive in this wardroom would kill us all. What we are talking about is the explosive power of, let me see, yes, four and a half billion pounds. The human mind cannot comprehend, differences in estimates become irrelevant. All we can say with certainty is that it would be the biggest man-made explosion in history, which doesn’t sound so bad when you say it quickly as I’m saying it now.

‘The results of such an explosion are quite unknown but stupefyingly horrendous however optimistic your guess might be, if optimistic is the word I’m looking for, which it isn’t. It might fracture the earth’s crust, with cataclysmic results. It might destroy part of the ozone layer, which would permit the sun’s ultra-violet radiation either to tan us or fry us, depending upon how large a hole had been blasted in the stratosphere: it might equally well cause the onset of a nuclear winter, which is so popular a topic among both scientists and laymen these days. And lastly, but by no means least, are the tsunami effects, vast tidal waves usually generated by undersea earthquakes: those tsunami have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people at a time when they struck low-lying coastal areas.’

Benson reached out a grateful hand for a glass that Jenkins had brought. Talbot said: ‘If you’re trying to be encouraging, Professor, you’re not doing too well at it.’

‘Ah, better, much better.’ Benson lowered his glass and sighed, ‘I needed that. There are times when I’m quite capable of terrifying even myself. Encouraging? That’s only the half of it. Santorini’s the other half. In fact, Santorini is the major part of it. Gifted though mankind is in creating sheer wanton destruction, nature has him whacked every time.’

‘Santorini?’ Wickram said. ‘Who or what is Santorini?’

‘Ignorance, George, ignorance. You and your fellow physicists should look out from your ivory towers from time to time. Santorini is less than a couple of miles from where you’re sitting. Had that name for many centuries. Today it’s officially known, as it was five thousand years ago at the height of its civilization, as Thera Island.

‘The island, by whatever name, has had a very turbulent seismic and volcanic history. Don’t worry, George, I’m not about to sally forth on my old hobby-horse, not for long anyway, just long enough to try to explain what the greatest number means in the term the greatest good of the greatest number.

‘It is commonly enough imagined that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are two faces of the same coin. This is not necessarily so. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary states that an earthquake is specifically a convulsion of the earth’s surface caused by volcanic forces. The dictionary is specifically wrong: it should have used the word “rarely” instead. Earthquakes, especially the big ones, are caused when two tectonic plates – segments of the earth’s crust that float freely on the molten magma beneath – come into contact with one another and one plate bangs into another or rubs alongside it or dives under it. The only two recorded and monitored giant earthquakes in history were of this type – in Ecuador in 1906 and Japan in 1933. Similarly, but on a lesser scale – although still very big – the Californian earthquakes of San Francisco and Owens Valley were due to crustal movement and not to volcanoes.

‘It is true that practically all the world’s 500-600 active volcanoes – someone may have bothered to count them, I haven’t – are located along convergent plate boundaries. It is equally true that they are rarely associated with earthquakes. There have been three large volcanic eruptions along such boundaries in very recent years: Mt St Helens in the state of Washington, El Chichón in Mexico and one just north-west of Bogotá in Columbia. The last one – it happened only last year – was particularly nasty. A 17,000-foot volcano called Nevada del Ruiz, which seems to have been slumbering off and on for the past four hundred years, erupted and melted the snow and ice which covered most of its upper reaches, giving rise to an estimated seventy-five million cubic yards’ mudslide. The town of Armero stood in its way. 25,000 people died there. The point is that none of those was accompanied by an earthquake. Even volcanoes in areas where there are no established tectonic frontiers are guiltless in this respect: Vesuvius, despite the fact that it buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stromboli, Mt Etna and the twin volcanoes of the island of Hawaii have not produced, and do not produce, earthquakes.

‘But the really bad apples in the seismic barrel, and a very sinister lot those are, too, are the so-called thermal hot-spots, plumes or upswellings of molten lava that reach up to or through the earth’s crust, giving rise to volcanoes or earthquakes or both. We talk a lot about those thermal plumes but we really don’t know much about them. We don’t know whether they’re localized or whether they spread out and lubricate the movements of the tectonic plates. What we do know is that they can have extremely unpleasant effects. One of those was responsible for the biggest earthquake of this century.’

‘You have me confused, Professor,’ Hawkins said. ‘You’ve just mentioned the really big ones, the ones in Japan and Ecuador. Ah! But those were monitored and recorded. This one wasn’t?’

‘Certainly it was. But countries like Russia and China are rather coy about releasing such details. They have the weird notion that natural disasters reflect upon their political systems.’

‘Is it in order to ask how you know?’

‘Of course. Governments may elect not to talk to governments but we scientists are an incurably gabby lot. This quake happened in Tangshan province in north-east China and is the only one ever known to have occurred in a really densely populated area, in this case involving the major cities of Peking and Tientsin. The primary cause was undoubtedly a thermal plume. There are no known tectonic plate boundaries in the area but a very ancient boundary may be lurking in the area. The date was July 27, 1976.’

‘Yesterday,’ Hawkins said. ‘Just yesterday. Casualties?’

‘Two-thirds of a million dead, three-quarters of a million injured. Give or take a hundred thousand in each case. If that sounds flippant or heartless, it’s not meant to be. After a certain arbitrary figure – a hundred thousand, ten thousand, even a thousand, it all depends upon how much your heart and mind can take – any increase in numbers becomes meaningless. And there’s also the factor, of course, that we’re referring to faceless unknowns in a far-off land.’

‘I suppose,’ Hawkins said, ‘that that would be what one might call the grand-daddy of them all?’

‘In terms of lives lost, it probably is. We can’t be sure. What we can be sure of is that Tangshan rates as no more than third in the cataclysmic league. Just over a century ago the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia blew itself out of existence. That was quite a bang, literally – the sound of the explosion was heard thousands of miles away. So much volcanic material was blasted into the stratosphere that the world was still being treated to a series of spectacular sunsets more than three years afterwards. No one knows the height of the tsunami caused by this eruption. What we do know is that much of the three great islands bordering the Java Sea – Sumatra, Java and Borneo – and nearly all of the smaller islands inside the sea itself lie below an altitude of 200 feet. No tally of the dead has ever been made. It is better, perhaps, that we don’t know.’

‘And perhaps it’s also better that we don’t know what you’re going to say next,’ Talbot said. ‘I don’t much care for the road you’re leading us along.’

‘I don’t much care for it myself.’ Benson sighed and sipped some more gin. ‘Anyone ever heard of the word “kalliste”?’

‘Certainly,’ Denholm said. ‘Means most beautiful. Very ancient. Goes back to Homeric times.’

‘My goodness.’ Benson peered at him through his pipe smoke. ‘I thought you were the electronics officer?’

‘Lieutenant Denholm is primarily a classicist,’ Talbot said. ‘Electronics is one of his hobbies.’

‘Ah!’ Benson gestured with his thumb. ‘Kalliste was the name given to this little lady before it became either Thera or Santorini, and a more singularly inapt name I cannot imagine. It was this beautiful lady that blew her top in 1450 BC with four times the explosively destructive power of Krakatoa. What had been the cone of a volcano became a circular depression – we call it a caldera – some thirty square miles in area into which the sea poured. Stirring times, gentlemen, stirring times.

‘Unfortunately those stirring times are still with us. Santorini has had, and continues to have, a very turbulent seismic history. Incidentally, mythology has it that there was an even bigger eruption about 2500 BC. However it hasn’t done too badly since 1450 BC. In 236 BC another eruption separated Therasia from north-west Thera. Forty years later the islet of old Jaimeni appeared. There have been bangs and explosions, the appearances and disappearances of islands and volcanoes ever since. In the late sixteenth century the south coast of Thera, together with the port of Eleusis, vanished under the sea and stayed there. Even as late as 1956 a considerable earthquake destroyed half the buildings on the west coast of the island. Santorini, one fears, rests on very shaky foundations.’

Talbot said: ‘What happened in 1450 BC?’

‘Regrettably, our ancestors of some thirty-five centuries back don’t seem to have given too much thought to posterity, by which I mean they left no records to satisfy their descendants’ intellectual curiosity. One can hardly blame them, they had too many urgent and pressing matters on hand at the time to worry about such things. According to one account, the explosion caused a tidal wave 165 feet high. I don’t know who worked this out. I don’t believe it. It is true that water levels on the Alaskan coast, caused by tsunami, earthquake-related tidal waves, have risen over three hundred feet but this only happens when the sea-bed shallows close inshore: in the deep sea, although the tsunami can travel tremendously fast, two, perhaps three, hundred miles an hour, it’s rarely more than a ripple on the surface of the water.

‘The experts – an expert may be loosely defined as any person who claims he knows what he’s talking about – are deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It’s an archæological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That’s one view. In 1950 a scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely – man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame – he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.

‘There’s no doubt there was a huge natural disaster all those millennia ago. As to its cause, take your pick – your guess is as good as mine. Reverting to the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, there are four facts that can be regarded as certainties or near-certainties. Santorini is about as stable as the proverbial blancmange. It’s sitting on top of a thermal plume. Thirdly, the chances are high that it is sitting atop an ancient tectonic boundary that runs east-west under the Mediterranean – this is where the African and Eurasian plates are in contention. Lastly, and indisputably, we are sitting atop the equivalent of roughly 200 million tons of TNT. If that goes up I would say it is highly probable – in fact I think I should use the word inevitable – that both the thermal plume and the temporarily quiescent earthquake zone along the tectonic fault would be reactivated. I leave the rest to your imagination.’ Benson drained his glass and looked around hopefully. Talbot pressed a bell.

Hawkins said: ‘I don’t have that kind of imagination.’

‘None of us has. Fortunately. We’re talking about the combined and simultaneous effect of a massive thermonuclear detonation, a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. This lies outwith the experience of mankind so we can’t visualize those things except to guess, and it’s a safe guess, that the reality will be worse than any nightmare. The only consolation, of course, is that we wouldn’t be around to experience anything, nightmare or reality.

‘The extent of potential annihilation beggars belief. By “annihilation” I mean the total extinction of life, except possibly some subterranean or aquatic forms. What lava, volcanic cinders, dust and ashes don’t get, the blast, air percussion waves, fire and tsunami will. If there are any survivors – and this could be in an area of thousands of square miles – the massive radio-active fall-out will attend to them. It hardly seems necessary to talk about such things as nuclear winters and being fried by ultra-violet radiation.

‘So you can see, Commander Talbot, what we mean when we talk about the greatest good of the greatest number. What does it matter if we have two ships or ten out here, two hundred men or two thousand? Every extra man, every extra ship may, just may, be of a tiny percentage more help in neutralizing this damn thing on the sea-floor. What’s even two thousand compared to the unimaginable numbers who might perish if that device does detonate sooner or later – almost certainly sooner – if we don’t do something about it?’

‘You put things very nicely, Professor, and you make things very clear. Not that the Ariadne had any intention of going anywhere but it’s nice to have a solid reason to stay put.’ Talbot thought briefly. ‘Solves one little problem, anyway. I have six survivors from the yacht Delos aboard and had thought to put three of the innocent parties among them ashore but that seems a little pointless now.’

‘Alas, yes. Whether they are aboard here or on Santorini it will be all one to them when they join us in what Lieutenant Denholm is pleased to call vaporized orbit.’

Talbot lifted a phone, asked for a number, listened briefly and hung up.

‘The sonar room. Still tick… tick… tick.’

‘Ah,’ Benson said. ‘Tick… tick… tick.’