Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

He looked through the window at the dragline. “So that’s the end of the line.”

“The beginning of it,” Shore said. “The tar sands may lie as deep as fifty feet down. The stuff above, the overburden, is useless to us – gravel, clay, muskeg, shale, oil-poor sand – and has to be removed first of all.” He pointed to an approaching vehicle. “Here’s some of that rubbish being carried away now – it’s been excavated by another dragline on a new site.

“To impress you further, Mr Brady, those trucks are also the biggest in the world. A hundred and twenty-five tons empty, payload of a hundred and fifty, and all this on just four tyres. But, you will admit, they are some tyres.”

The truck was passing now and they were indeed some tyres; to Brady they looked at least ten feet high and proportionately bulky. The truck itself was monstrous – twenty feet high at the cab and about the same in width, with the driver mounted so high as to be barely visible from the ground.

“You could buy a very acceptable car for the price of one of those tyres,” Shore said. “As for the truck itself, if you went shopping for one at today’s prices, you wouldn’t get much change from three quarters of a million.” He spoke to his driver, who started up and moved slowly off.

“When the overburden is gone, the same dragline scoops up the tar sand – as the one we’ve just looked at is doing now – and dumps it in this huge pile we call a windrow.” A weird machine of phenomenal length was nosing into the pile. Shore pointed and said: “A bucketwheel reclaimer – there’s one paired with every dragline. Four hundred and twenty-eight feet long. You can see the revolving bucketwheel biting into the windrow. With fourteen buckets on a forty-foot diameter wheel, it can remove a fair tonnage every minute. The tar sands are then transported along the spine of the reclaimer – the bridge, we call it – to the separators. From there–”

Brady interrupted: “Separators?”

“Sometimes the sands come in big, solid lumps as hard as rock which could damage the conveyor belts. The separators are just vibrating screens which sort out the lumps.”

“And without the separators the conveyor belts could be damaged?”

“Certainly.”

“Put out of commission?”

“Probably. We don’t know. It’s never been allowed to happen yet.”

“And then?”

“The tar sands go into the travelling hoppers you see there. They drop the stuff on to the conveyor belt, and off it goes to the processing plant. After that–”

“One minute.” It was Dermott. “You have a fair amount of this conveyor belting?”

“A fair bit.”

“How much exactly?”

Shore looked uncomfortable. “Sixteen miles.” Dermott stared at him and Shore hurried on. “At the end of the conveyor system radial stackers direct it to what are called surge piles – just really storage dumps.”

“Radial stackers?” said Brady. “What are they?”

“Elevated extensions of the conveyor belts. They can rotate through a certain arc to direct the tar sands to a suitable surge pile. They can also feed bins that take the sands underground to start the processes of chemical and physical separation of the bitumen. The first of those processes–”

“Jesus!” said Mackenzie incredulously.

“That about sums it up,” Dermott said. “I have no wish to be rude, Mr Shore, but I don’t want to hear about the extraction processes. I’ve already heard and seen all I want to.”

“Good God Almighty!” exclaimed Mackenzie by way of variation.

Brady said: “What’s the matter, gentlemen?”

Dermott picked his words carefully. “When Don and I were talking to Mr Shore and Mr Reynolds, the operations manager, last night, we thought we had reason to be concerned. I now realise we were wasting our time on trifles. But, by God, now I’m worried.

“Last night we had to face the fact – the ridiculous ease with which the perimeter can be penetrated and the almost equal ease with which subversives could be introduced on to the plant floor. In retrospect, those are but bagatelles. How many points did you pick up, Don?”

“Six.”

“My count also. First off, the draglines. They look as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar: they are, in fact, pathetically vulnerable. A hundred tons of high explosive would hardly dent the Rock of Gibraltar; I could take out a dragline with two five-pound charges of wrap-round explosive placed where the boom is hinged to the machine house.”

Brinckman, an intelligent and clearly competent person in his early thirties, spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He said: “Fine, if you could approach the dragline – but you can’t. The area is lit by brilliant floodlamps.”

“Jesus!” Mackenzie’s limited repertoire was in use again.

“What do you mean, Mr Mackenzie?”

“What I mean is I would locate the breaker or switch or whatever that supplies the power to the floodlights and immobilise it by smashing it or by the brilliantly innovative device of turning it off. Or, I’d cut the power lines. Simpler still, with a five-second burst from a sub-machine gun I’d shoot them out. Assuming, of course, that they’re not made of bullet-proof glass.”

Dermott saved Brinckman the embarrassment of a long silence. “Five pounds of commercial Amatol would take out the bucketwheel for an indefinite period. A similar amount would take care of the reclaimer’s bridge. Two pounds to buckle the separator plate. That’s four ways. Getting at the radial stackers would be another excellent device – that would mean Sanmobil couldn’t even get the tar sands stock-piled in the surge piles down below for processing. And then, best of all, is this little matter of sixteen unpatrolled miles of conveyor belting.”

There was quiet in the bus until Dermott rumbled on. “Why bother sabotaging the separation plant when it’s so much simpler and more effective to interrupt the flow of raw material? You can’t very well carry out a processing operation if you’ve got nothing to process. It’d be childishly simple. Four draglines. Four bucketwheels. Four reclaimers’ bridges. Four separators. Four radial stackers. Sixteen miles of conveyor, fourteen miles of unpatrolled perimeter, and eight men to cover. Situation’s ludicrous. I’m afraid, Mr Brady, there’s no way in the world we can stop our Anchorage friend from carrying out his threat.”

Brady turned what appeared to be one cold, blue eye on the unfortunate Brinckman. “And what do you have to say?”

“What can I say except to agree? Even if I had ten times the number of men at my disposal, we still wouldn’t be geared to meet a threat like this.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even dream of anything like this.”

“Nor did anyone else. Nothing to reproach yourself about. You security people thought you were in the oil business, not a war. What are your normal duties, anyway?”

“We’re here to prevent three things – physical trouble among members of the work-force, petty pilfering, and drinking on the plant site. But so far we’ve had few instances of any of them.”

Visibly, Brinckman’s words struck a chord in Brady. “Ah. yes. Trouble in moments of stress and all that.” He turned in his seat. “Stella!”

“Yes, Dad.” She opened a wicker basket, produced a flask and glass, poured a drink and handed it to her father.

“Daiquiri,” he said. “We also have Scotch, gin, rum–”

“Sorry, Mr Brady,” Shore said. “No. The company has very strict regulations–”

Brady gave him some terse suggestions as to what he could do with company regulations and turned to Brinckman again.

“So, in effect, you’ve been pretty superfluous up till now and, if anything, are going to be even more so in the future?”