Алистер Маклин - Santorini

‘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.’