Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

As the jet came to a halt, a brightly-lit minibus pulled up alongside and slid open a front door. Brady, third out of the aircraft, was first into the bus. The others followed him in and the door was quickly closed. As the bus moved off the man who had ushered them aboard came and sat down beside them. Aged anywhere between forty and fifty, he was a broad, chunky man with a broad, chunky face. He looked tough but he also looked as if he could be humorous – although he had nothing worth smiling about at that moment.

“Mr Brady, Mr Dermott, Mr Mackenzie,” he said, in the unmistakably, flat accent of one who had been born within commuting distance of Boston. “Welcome. Mr Finlayson sent me to meet you – as you can imagine he’s right now practically a prisoner in the master operations control centre. My name’s Sam Bronowski.”

Dermott said: “Security chief.”

“For my sins.” He smiled. “You’ll be Mr Dermott, the man who’s going to take over from me?”

Dermott looked at him. “Who the hell said that?”

“Mr Finlayson. Or words to that effect.”

“I’m afraid Mr Finlayson must be slightly overwrought.”

Bronowski smiled again. “Well, now, that wouldn’t surprise me either. He’s been talking to London and I think he suffered some damage to his left ear.”

Brady said: “We’re not out to take over from anyone. That’s not how we work. But unless we get co-operation – I mean total co-operation – we might as well have stayed home. For instance, Mr Dermott here wanted to talk to you right away. The chairman of your company himself had guaranteed me complete co-operation. Yet Finlayson refused point-blank to co-operate with Dermott and Mackenzie.”

“I’d have come at once if I’d known,” said Bronowski quickly. “Unlike Mr Finlayson, I’ve been a security man all my life, and I know who you are and the reputation you have. In a set-up like this I can do with all the expert help I can get. Go easy with him, will you? This isn’t his line of country. He treats the pipeline as his favourite daughter. This is a new experience for him and he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t stalling – just playing it safe until he’d consulted on the highest level.”

“You don’t need lessons in sticking up for your boss, do you?”

“I’m being fair to him. I hope you will be, too. You can imagine how he feels. Says that if he hadn’t been so ornery those two men up at Pump Station Four might be alive now.”

“That’s plain daft,” Mackenzie said. “I appreciate his feelings, but this would have happened if there had been fifty Dermotts and fifty Mackenzies here.”

“When,” Brady asked, “are we going out there?”

“Mr Finlayson asked if you and your colleagues would come first to see him and Mr Black. The helicopter is ready to go any moment after that.”

“Black?”

“General manager, Alaska.”

“You been out at the station?”

“I was the man who found them. Rather, I was the first man on the scene after the attack. Along with my section chief, Tim Houston.”

“You fly your own plane?”

“Yes. Not this time, though. That section of the Brooks Range is like the mountains on the moon. Helicopter. We’ve been making a continuous check on the pump stations and the remote gate valves since this damned threat came through, and we’d stayed at Station Five last night. We were just approaching Gate Four, a mile away, I’d reckon, when we saw this damned great explosion.”

“ Saw it?”

“You know, oil smoke and flames. You mean, did we hear anything? You never do in a helicopter. You don’t have to – not when you see the roof take off into the air. So we put down and got out, me with a rifle, Tim with two pistols. Wasting our time. The bastards had gone. Being oilmen yourselves, you’ll know it requires quite a group of men and a complex of buildings to provide the care and maintenance for a couple of 13,500 horsepower aircraft-type turbines, not to mention all the monitoring and communications they have to handle.

“It was the pump room itself that was on fire, not too badly, but badly enough for Tim and me not to go inside without fire extinguishers. We’d just started looking when we heard shouting come from a store room. It was locked, naturally, but the key had been left in the lock. Poulson – he’s the boss – came running out with his men. They had the extinguishers located and the fire out in three minutes. But it was too late for the two engineers inside – they’d come down the previous day from Prudhoe Bay to do a routine maintenance job on one of the turbines.”

“They were dead?”

“Very.” Bronowski’s face registered no emotion. “They were brothers. Fine boys. Friends of mine and Tim’s.”

“No possibility of accidental death? From the effects of the explosion?”

“Explosions don’t shoot you. They were pretty badly charred, but charring doesn’t hide a bullet-wound between the eyes.”

“You searched the area?”

“Certainly. Conditions weren’t ideal – it was dark, with a little snow falling. I thought I saw helicopter ski marks on a wind-blown stretch of rock. The others weren’t so sure. On the remote off-chance I contacted Anchorage and asked them to alert every public and private airport and strip in the State. Also to have radio and TV stations ask the public to report hearing or sighting a helicopter in an unusual place. I haven’t but one hope in ten thousand that the request will bring any results.”

He grimaced. “Most people never realise how huge this State is. It’s bigger than half Western Europe, but it’s got a population of just over three hundred thousand, which is to say it’s virtually uninhabited. Again, helicopters are an accepted fact of life in Alaska, and people pay no more attention to them than you would to a car in Texas. Third, we’ve still only got about three good hours of light, and the idea of carrying out an air search is laughable – anyway, we’d require fifty times the number of planes we have, and even then it would be sheer luck to find them.

“But, for the record, we did find out something unpleasant. In case anything should happen to the pump station, there’s an emergency pipeline that can be switched in to bypass it. Our friends took care of that also. They blew up the control valve.”

“So there’s going to be a massive oil spillage?”

“No chance. The line is loaded with thousands of sensors all the way from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and any section of it can be closed down and isolated immediately. Even the repairs would normally present no problem. But neither metal nor men work too well in these abnormally low temperatures.”

“Apparently that doesn’t apply to saboteurs,” Dermott said. “How many were there?”

“Poulson said two. Two others said three. The remainder weren’t sure.”

“Not a very observant lot, are they?”

“I wonder if that’s fair, Mr Dermott. Poulson’s a good man and he doesn’t miss much.”

“Did he see their faces?”

“No. That much is for certain.”

“Masked?”

“No. Their fur collars were pulled high up and their hats low down so that only their eyes were visible. You can’t tell the colour of a man’s eyes in the darkness. Besides, our people had just been dragged from bed.”

“But not the two engineers. They were working on the engines. How come at that very early hour?”

Bronowski spoke with restraint. “Because they had been up all night. Because they were going home to their families in Fairbanks for their week’s leave. And because I had arranged to pick them up there shortly after that time.”

“Did Poulson or any of his friends recognise the voices?”