Дональд Уэстлейк: Forever and a Death

Wayarabo, with a faint smile, said, “You’d have environmentalists all over you.”

“We may have anyway,” Curtis told him, and nodded to Manville: “Go on, George.”

“Having enlarged the island,” Manville said, “the Japanese installed structures and equipment to make it a listening post, to track cargo convoys or military fleets. Most of the equipment was in a honeycomb of tunnels cut into the landfill. At the end of the war, most of the equipment was removed. The rest, and the buildings, were abandoned and are now a ruin.”

“Normally,” Curtis said, “what we would have to do, with such a place as that, is bring in bulldozers, heavy equipment, barge them all in and living accommodations for the crews, and painstakingly reconfigure the whole island to our needs.”

“Expensive,” Madame deCastro said.

“Even impractical,” Wayarabo suggested.

“Which is why,” Curtis said, “we’re trying this experiment.”

Manville said, “What we’re going to use today is a wave, sea water itself, a very special kind of oscillating wave called a soliton. The soliton is usually created deep in the ocean, caused by a seismic shift in the ocean floor, and it’s the root cause of the tsunami, the huge destructive wave that every once in a while marches across the Pacific.”

“But not around here,” Curtis hastened to add. “The tsunami normally hits farther north, sometimes gets all the way to Japan.”

Manville said, “The soliton has been recreated in laboratory conditions, by scientists who want to study it, possibly learn how to control it. They’ve written papers on their work. We’re adapting those papers to our own needs. What we’re doing here, we’ve flooded the tunnels the Japanese dug, we’ve sealed off all the exits, we’ve placed small dynamite charges at specific spots in the tunnels, radio-controlled, and they’ll discharge serially, just about ten minutes from now. If we’ve done our job right—” Manville shrugged, while Curtis looked grim “—the charges will create a laboratory-style soliton, an oscillating wave.”

Wayarabo said, “Which will do what?”

Curtis said, “The Japanese increased the size of the island with landfill. The tunnels are in the landfill, because the coral beneath is too porous and the sea would come in. Landfill, no matter how well done, is unstable. In the Los Angeles earthquake a few years ago, several pieces of elevated freeway collapsed, and every one of them was built on landfill. One of the most serious collapses was at a place called La Cienega Boulevard, and in Spanish ‘la cienega’ means ‘the swamp.’ ”

Hardy said, “You mean to break up the landfill with this wave?”

“We mean to turn it into soup,” Curtis told him.

Manville said, “The soliton, once it gets started, feeds itself, builds its own energy for quite a long time. That oscillating wave will break down the tunnel walls and spread through the landfill, breaking it up, so that when it finally wears itself out, the entire island, if our projections are right, will be nothing but a lake of mud, held in by the concrete retaining wall.”

Hardy said, “If the wall doesn’t go.”

“We’ve tested the wall,” Manville assured him, “and it should stand firm.”

Madame deCastro said, “If the wave keeps generating its own force, won’t it eventually push down into the coral, start breaking that up? Then at the end you wouldn’t have any island at all, and possibly some damage to the reef.”

“That’s what some of the environmentalists are bleating about,” Curtis told her, “and they’re wrong.”

Manville said, “The power has exits, through the landfill and eventually upward. Force always takes the easiest route, and the coral isn’t the easiest route.”

Curtis said, “What’s going to happen is, the buildings will break up and sink into the mud. The tunnels will fill in. Nothing will be left but mud, which we think will dry in five to six weeks, draining downward through the coral, to leave a clean, flat, absolutely empty island. Then we come in with our own soil, our plantings, our construction crews. As a way to clear a site—”

“If it works,” Manville said. He had to express that engineer’s caution, he had to keep doing it.

“Yes,” Curtis said, irritated. “If it works, and in my heart I know it will, it can save us millions, not only on this project, but on other projects in the future.”

A steward had appeared in the doorway while Curtis was speaking, and had waited for Curtis to be done. Now he said, “Sir, the captain asks me to inform you, a ship is moving toward the island.”

Jerry Diedrich stood beside Captain Cousseran on the bridge of Planetwatch III and looked out at Kanowit Island, so near and yet so far. It seemed deserted, but with some new low metal structures among the crumbling barracks buildings; controls for the explosion? Well off from the island to port waited the yacht, Mallory , solid, starkly white, hardly moving in the small sea. To Jerry, the yacht looked mostly like a dove, impossibly large, resting in the water, wings folded; and what a wrong image that was!

Captain Cousseran, a heavyset Belgian, a man who’d captained Dutch cargo ships until his retirement, when he’d volunteered to join Planetwatch, probably most out of boredom, spoke in French to his steersman, then said to Jerry, “This is as close as we can go.”

“We’ll send a launch ashore,” Jerry said, and the radioman, at his desk behind the others, said, “Captain, the Mallory is calling us.”

Jerry grinned. “I thought he might. Full of threats, I suppose.”

“I’ll take it,” Captain Cousseran said, reaching for his microphone.

Jerry said, “Put it on the loudhailer, let the whole ship hear it.”

“Yes, good.”

When next he spoke, Captain Cousseran’s voice echoed outside the bridge, loud and distorted, but plain enough to be heard and understood anywhere on the ship. The sound, so strong here, would fade away almost to nothing long before it reached the Mallory . “ This is Captain Cousseran .”

“This is Captain Zhang Yung-tsien of the Mallory. I am asked to inform you that you are too close to Kanowit Island for safety.”

“It is the intention of some members of our party to go ashore.”

“You cannot approach any closer, the sea is too shallow.”

“They will go by launch.”

“I am asked to inform you that a series of explosions will shortly take place on the island, and it will not be safe there, or anywhere close by. There will be a considerable shock wave.”

“Since my party is determined to go ashore, Captain Zhang, I would ask you to delay the explosion until we can have a face-to-face meeting.”

“I am asked to inform you that that is impossible. The timing devices on the island have been set, and it is too late to change or stop them.”

Jerry, angry, feeling the old frustration, clenched his fists. “He’s lying!”

“Surely, Captain Zhang, there is a fail-safe mechanism to permit you to abort the explosion.”

“There is not. I am asked to inform you that the timing equipment for the explosions is on the island, that they are set to begin the operation in under four minutes from now, and that it would be impossible at this point to get to the island in time to stop them. Anyone who tries to approach the island now is in very grave danger.”

“Lying, lying.” Jerry gritted his teeth, partly because he was afraid Captain Zhang was telling the truth. He needed to stop Richard Curtis, stop him now, stop him for good.