Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“I’d agree with half of that. The fact that we’ve had little to do up to now doesn’t mean we’ve been superfluous. Presence is important. You don’t heave a half-brick through a jeweller’s window if there’s an interested cop standing by five feet away. As to the future, yes, I agree. I feel pretty helpless.”

“If you were carrying out an attack somewhere, what would you go for?”

Brinckman was in no two minds. “The conveyor belting every time.”

Brady looked at Dermott and Mackenzie. Both men nodded.

“Mr Shore?”

“Agreed.” Shore was absentmindedly sipping some Scotch that had found its way into his hand. “Apart from the fact that there’s so damn much of it, it’s fragile. Six feet wide, but the steel cord belting is only an inch and a half thick. With a sledgehammer and chisel I could wreck it myself.” Shore looked and sounded tense. “Not many people are aware of the vast quantities of material that are processed here. To keep the plant operating at capacity and to make the project commercially viable, we need close on a quarter of a million tons of tar sands a day. As I said, the biggest mining operation ever. Cut off the supplies, and the plant closes down in a few hours. That’s a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day lost. Even Sanmobil couldn’t stand this kind of loss indefinitely.”

“How much did it cost to set up this plant?” Brady asked.

“Two billion, near enough.”

“Two billion dollars. And a potential operating loss of a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day.” Brady shook his head. “No-one’s arguing about the brilliance of the men who dreamed up this idea. Same goes for the engineers who made it work. But there’s another thing no-one would question – at least I would never question – and that is that those towering intellects had a huge blind spot. Why didn’t the bosses foresee this? I know it’s easy to be wise after the event, but, goddamn, you don’t need much foresight to think of that. Oil is not just another business. Couldn’t they have seen the giant potential for hate or crackpots – or blackmail? Couldn’t they have foreseen that they’d built the biggest industrial hostage to fortune of all time?”

Shore gazed gloomily at his glass, gloomily drank its contents, and maintained a gloomy silence.

Dermott said: “Well, not quite.”

“What do you mean ‘not quite’?”

“Sure, it’s an industrial hostage to fortune. But not the biggest of all time. That dubious distinction belongs without any question to the trans-Alaskan pipeline. Their capital outlay wasn’t two billion: it was eight billion. They don’t transport a hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day: they transport one million two hundred thousand. And they don’t just have sixteen miles of conveyor belting to guard: they have eight hundred miles of pipeline.”

Brady handed his glass back for a refill, digested this unpleasant thought, fortified himself and said: “Don’t they have any means of protecting the damned thing?”

“To the extent that they can limit damage, certainly. They have magnificent communication and electronic control systems, with every imaginable fail-safe and back-up device, even to the extent of a satellite emergency control station.” Dermott produced a paper from his pocket. “They have twelve pump stations, locally or remotely controlled. They have sixty-two remote gate valves, all radio-controlled from the pump station immediately to the north. Those gate valves can stop the flow of oil in either direction.

“There are eighty check valves to prevent the oil from flowing backwards and, well, all sorts of other weird valves that would only make sense to an engineer. Altogether they have a remote-control capability at well over a thousand points. In other words, they can isolate any section of the line at any time they want. Because it takes six minutes to shut down a big pump, some oil is bound to escape – up to fifty thousand barrels, it’s estimated. That may seem a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s in the pipeline. But there’s no way the oil can keep on pumping out indefinitely.”

“All very interesting.” Brady sounded cool. “You can bet they try harder to protect the environment. You can also bet that crooks and extortioners don’t give a damn about the environment one way or another. All they want is to interrupt the flow of oil. Can the line be protected?”

“Well, about this huge blind spot you mentioned–”

“What you’re trying not to tell me is that the pipeline can be breached any place, any time.”

“That’s right.”

Brady looked at Dermott. “You’ve thought about this problem?”

“Of course.”

“And you, Donald?”

“Me, too.”

“Well then, what have you come up with?”

“Nothing. That’s why we sent for you. We thought you might come up with something.”

Brady looked at him maliciously and resumed his pondering. By and by he said: “What happens if there’s a break and the oil is stopped in the pipe? Does it gum up?”

“Eventually. But it takes time. The oil is hot when it comes out of the ground and it’s still warm when it reaches Valdez. The pipeline is very heavily insulated, and the oil passing through the pipe generates friction heat. They reckon they might get it flowing again after a 21-day standstill. After that–” He spread his hands.

“No more oil-flow?”

“No.”

“Not ever again?”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t really know. Nobody’s talked to me about it. I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about it.”

No one did. Until Brady said: “Do you know what I wish?”

“I know,” Dermott said. “You wish you were back in Houston.”

The radio-phone rang. The driver listened briefly then turned to Shore.

“Operations manager’s office. Will we return immediately. Mr Reynolds says it’s urgent.” The bus driver picked up speed.

Reynolds was waiting for them. He indicated a phone lying on his table and spoke to Brady. “Houston. For you.”

Brady said “Hello”. Then he made a gesture of irritation and turned to Dermott.

“Horseshit. Damn code. Take it, huh?” This was hardly reasonable of Brady, since it was he who had invented the code and insisted on using it for almost everything except “Hello” and “Goodbye”. Dermott reached for a pad and pencil, took the phone and started writing. It took him about a minute to record the message and two more to decode it.

He said into the phone: “Is that all you have?” A pause. “When did you get this message, and when did this happen?” Another pause, “Fifteen minutes and two hours. Thank you.” He turned to Brady, his face bleak. “The pipeline’s been breached. Pump Station No. 4. Near Atigun Pass in the Brook Range. No hard details yet. Damage not severe, it seems, but enough to close down the line.”

“No chance of an accident?”

“Explosives. They took out two gate valves.”

There was a brief silence while Brady surveyed Dermott curiously.

“No need to look so goddamned grim, George. We were expecting something like this. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It is for two of the men on Pump Station Four. They’ve been murdered.”

It was half-past two in the afternoon, Alaskan time, almost dark, but with good visibility, a ten-knot wind and a temperature of -4°F – 36° below – when the twin-jet touched down again on one of the Prudhoe Bay air-strips. Brady, Dermott and Mackenzie had moved quickly after receipt of the message from Houston. They had driven back to Fort McMurray, packed essentials, which in Brady’s case consisted primarily of three flasks, said goodbye to Jean and Stella and driven straight to the airport. Brady was asleep when they entered Yukon airspace, and Mackenzie dozed off shortly afterwards. Only Dermott remained awake, trying to puzzle out why the enemy, in carrying out what they said would be – and, in fact proved to be – no more than a token demonstration, should have found it necessary to kill in the process.