Алистер Маклин - Death Train

‘Coffee?’ she asked.

‘I had some before I left the hotel. I’d like to get started if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ she replied as she shuffled her papers into a neat pile.

She waited until they were clear of the office before speaking again. ‘How’s your shoulder this morning?’

He wriggled his arm. ‘No after-effects, yet. I soaked it in a hot bath last night; it should be okay now.’

‘I was worried about you.’

The sincerity in her voice surprised him.

Once inside the lift she pressed the button for the floor she wanted and handed him a folded sheet of paper. On it were four names written neatly underneath each other.

‘They’re my four suspects. Especially Dr Leitzig. I’ve arranged for you to meet him first.’

‘What’s his position?’

‘He’s the senior plant technician. That entails overseeing the entire reprocessing operation.’

‘Does he do the monthly stocktaking?’

‘Along with the plant manager and other members of the scientific staff. It’s very strictly controlled.’

‘Is he involved in writing up the stocksheets?’

The doors parted and they emerged into another carpeted corridor.

‘No, that’s all done by computer. As I said last night, it’s diversion as opposed to MUF. The plutonium’s being siphoned off before the figures reach the computers.’

He grabbed her arm as she was about to knock on a frosted-glass door halfway down the corridor. ‘You’ve made a lot of accusations but you haven’t come up with a single shred of evidence to back them up.’

‘I told you, I don’t have any evidence–’

‘Then what are your grounds for these suspicions?’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she snapped. ‘You don’t believe me.’

‘Right now I don’t know what to believe. You’ve got to give me something constructive to work on, can’t you see that?’

Her eyes were blazing. ‘All I have to do is make one phone call to the plant manager and I can blow your cover.’

‘And what good would that do either of us?’ he asked calmly.

She sighed deeply and nodded. ‘I’m sorry, C.W., I’m just not used to confiding in the people around here. I’ll tell you everything I know after you’ve seen Leitzig. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ he answered reluctantly, wishing he had more to go on before meeting Leitzig.

Karen knocked on the door, then opened it without waiting. A middle-aged woman looked up from her typewriter and smiled at them. The two women spoke rapidly to each other in German, their conversation punctuated with laughter.

Karen finally turned to Whitlock. ‘It’s back to German I’m afraid. She doesn’t speak any English.’

‘And Leitzig?’

‘He does but it’s a case of getting him to speak it. He can be very stubborn at times. I’ll see you later.’

He exchanged a polite smile with the secretary after Karen had left, then picked up the only magazine on the coffee table and leafed through it, his interest not overly stimulated by a computer programming manual written in German.

The inner door opened. The man who emerged was in his late fifties with short grey hair and round, wire-framed glasses.

Whitlock stood up and shook the extended hand, unwilling to speak until he knew which language Leitzig intended to use.

‘I am Dr Hans Leitzig.’

Whitlock was relieved that it was English.

‘I am on my way down to the reprocessing area. Perhaps you would like to come along so you can see the plant in operation?’

‘Thank you, I would,’ Whitlock replied.

‘Which hotel are you staying at?’

‘Europa.’

‘Good choice,’ Leitzig said, then spoke briefly to his secretary.

Whitlock studied him. He could have been the driver of the Mercedes at the Hilton Hotel, but then so could the majority of Mainz’s male population. It had all happened so quickly.

‘Karen was telling me you are writing about the workforce rather than about the plant’s operational side. I think that is a good idea, especially in the light of the bad publicity the industry has had since Chernobyl.’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ Whitlock said, hoping the sycophancy came through in his voice.

Leitzig led him to the changerooms where they pulled on white overcoats. Whitlock had to be reminded to clip on his compulsory dosemeter badge.

‘How much of the reprocessing area did Karen show you yesterday?’

‘She was unavailable. I was shown around by her assistant. He didn’t bring me down here at all.’

‘How much do you know about the reprocessing operation?’ Leitzig asked as they left the changerooms.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ he lied.

‘It is not too difficult to understand. Come on, I’ll show you where it all starts.’

Leitzig led him through a succession of corridors until they reached an area marked STORAGE PONDS with a no-entry sign beside it and the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in black paint underneath. Leitzig fed his ID card into one of the steel doors. It swung open to reveal a lime-green cavern over three hundred feet long and another eighty feet high above the waterline. The water, Leitzig told him, was thirty feet deep. Two sets of catwalks spanned the length of the cavern and four smaller catwalks led out into the water, all of them enclosed by safety railings.

Leitzig pointed to the rows of steel containers submerged in the water, and described how they had been transported to the plant in 100 tonne flasks with walls fourteen inches thick.

‘How long are they stored here for?’

‘Ninety days here, and another ninety days at the nuclear power station prior to transportation.’

‘So presumably the water acts as a coolant?’ Whitlock asked as he looked over the railing at the water fifty feet below him.

‘Correct. It acts as a shield for the operators. We’d already be irradiated if the water wasn’t there to absorb the radiation emitted by the fuel.’

‘Sobering thought,’ Whitlock muttered, then followed Leitzig out of the cavern.

Next they went into the main building where part of the reprocessing cycle took place. They watched from behind a protective glass partition, seemingly erected to shield the visiting public from any of the harmful gamma rays. Leitzig explained that it was actually there to blot out any outside noises which might distract the skilled operators from their delicate and sensitive work.

All work was carried out using remote-controlled equipment and monitored on closed-circuit television screens.

‘After the quarantine period’s over,’ he went on, with an air of simplifying an impossibly complex process, ‘the containers are transferred into the decanning cave through a series of sub-ponds leading off from the main storage pond. Once inside the cave, which is constructed of concrete walls seven feet thick, the fuel element can be observed both on closed-circuit television and through specially designed windows built into the walls. Each window is filled with a solution of zinc bromide which, although transparent, is able to absorb the short wavelengths of gamma radiation. The element is first placed on the stripping machine where the contaminated cladding is cut away, then dropped on to a conveyor belt to be stored under water in concrete storage silos. The bare fuel rods are then loaded into a transfer magazine, which can hold up to thirty-eight rods at any given time, and dissolved in nitric acid. The nitric acid solution is then mixed with an organic solvent and the uranium and plutonium are separated from the waste products. The waste products, which contain radioactive fission products, iron from the plant machinery and chemical impurities from the fuel, are then reduced by evaporation and stored near the plant in tanks at temperatures of 50°C. The acid solution enters another section of the plant where it passes through a second organic solvent to remove any lingering waste products, then, on coming into contact with a water-based solution, the uranium and plutonium separate, the plutonium returning to the water solution and the uranium remaining in the solvent. They emerge as uranyl nitrate and plutonium nitrate, ready to be used in the fuel cycle again.’