Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“What about the tanker terminals?”

“Again easily guarded. I hardly think they’re likely to run to underwater demolition squads. Even if they did they couldn’t do much damage, and that would be easily repaired.”

“The tankers themselves?”

“Sink a dozen and there’s always a thirteenth. No way you can interrupt the oil flow by hitting the tankers.”

“The Valdez Narrows?”

“Block them?” Dermott nodded and Bronowski shook his head. “The Narrows aren’t as narrow as they look on a small-scale chart. Three thousand feet – that’s the minimum channel width – between the Middle Rock and the east shore. You’d have to sink an awful lot of vessels to block the channel.”

“So we cross off the unlikely targets. Where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us with eight hundred miles.” Bronowski shifted.

“The air temperature is the over-riding factor,” Houston said. “No saboteur worth his salt would consider wrecking anything except the pipeline itself. This time of the year any attack has to be in the open air.”

“Why?”

“This is only early February, remember, and to all intents we’re still in the depth of winter. As often as not the temperature is well on the wrong side of thirty below, and in these parts thirty below is the crucial figure. Rupture the pipeline at, say, thirty-five below, and it stays ruptured. Repair is virtually impossible. Men can work, although well below their norm, but unfortunately the metal they may try to repair or the machine tools they use to make the repairs won’t co-operate with them. At extreme temperatures, profound molecular changes occur in metal and it becomes unworkable. Given the right – or wrong – conditions, a tap on an iron rod will shatter it like glass.”

Brady said: “You mean, all I need is a hammer and a few taps on the pipeline–”

Houston was patient. “Not quite. What with the heat of the oil inside and the insulation lagging outside, the steel of the pipeline is always warm and malleable. It’s the repair tools that would fracture.”

Dermott said: “But surely it would be possible to erect canvas or tarpaulin covers over the fracture and bring the temperature up to workable levels by using hot-air blowers? You know, the way Poulson did at Station Four?”

“Of course. Which is why I wouldn’t attack the pipeline directly. I’d attack the structures that support the pipeline, those that are already frozen solid at air temperature and would require days, perhaps weeks, to bring up to a working temperature.”

“Structures?”

“Indeed. The terrain between Prudhoe and Valdez is desperately uneven and traversed with innumerable watercourses which have to be forded or spanned in one way or another. There are over six hundred streams and rivers along the run. The 650-foot free-span suspension bridge over the Tazlina River would make a dolly of a target. Even better would be the 1,200-foot span – a similar type of construction – over the Tanana River. But one doesn’t even have to operate on such a grandiose scale, and I, personally, would prefer not to.” He looked at Bronowski. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Completely. Operate on a much more moderate and undramatic scale but one equally effective. I’d go for the V.S.M.s every time.”

Dermott said: “V.S.M.s?”

“Vertical support members. Roughly half the length of the pipeline is above ground and lies on a horizontal cradle or saddle supported by vertical metal posts. That makes for a fair number of targets − 78,000 of them, to be precise. They would be a snip to take out – wrap-round beehive plastic explosives which would need all of a minute to fix in position. Take out twenty of those, and the line would collapse under its own weight and the weight of the oil inside it. Take weeks to repair it.”

“They could still use those hot-air canvas shelters.”

“A hell of a lot of help that would be,” Bronowski said, “if they couldn’t bring up the cranes and crawler equipment to effect the repairs. Anyway, there are places where, at this time of year, it just couldn’t be done. There is, for instance, one particularly vulnerable stretch which gave the designers headaches, the builders sleepless nights and security nightmares. This steep and dangerous stretch is between Pump Station Five and the summit of Atigun Pass, which is between four and five thousand feet high.”

Houston said: “4,775 feet.”

“4,775 feet. In a run of a hundred miles from the pass the pipe comes down to 1,200 feet, which is quite a drop.”

“With a corresponding amount of built-up pressure?”

“That’s not the problem. In the event of a break in the line a special computer linkage between Four and Five will automatically shut down the pumps in Four and close every remote valve between the stations. The fail-safe procedures are highly sophisticated, and they work. At the very worst the spillage could be restricted to 50,000 barrels. But the point is, in winter the line couldn’t be repaired.”

Brady coughed apologetically and descended from his Olympian heights.

“So a break in this particular section, about now, could immobilise the line for weeks on end?”

“No question.”

“Then forget it.”

“Mr Brady?”

“The burdens I have to bear alone,” Brady sighed. “Let me have men about me who can think. I begin to understand why I am what I am. I find it extraordinary that the construction company never carried out any tests to discover what happens to the viscosity of oil in low temperatures. Why didn’t they seal off a couple of hundred feet of experimental pipe with oil inside it and see how long it would take before it gummed up to the extent that it would cease to flow?”

“Never occurred to them, I suppose,” Bronowski said. “An eventuality that would never arise.”

“It has arisen. An estimate of three weeks has been bandied about. Based on scientific calculations, one assumes?”

Bronowski said: “I wouldn’t know. Not my field. Maybe Mr Black or Mr Finlayson would know.”

“Mr Black knows nothing about oil, and I doubt whether Mr Finlayson or any other professional oilman on the line has anything but the vaguest idea. Could be ten days. Could be thirty. You take my point, George?”

“Yes. Blackmail, threats, extortion, some positive and very material advantages to be gained. Interruption is one thing, cessation another. They require a lever, a bargaining counter. Close down the line completely, and the oil companies would laugh at their threats, for then they would have nothing to lose. The bargaining arm would have gone. The kidnapper can’t very well hold a kidnapee for ransom if it’s known that the kidnapee is dead.”

“I question if I could have put it better myself,” Brady said. He had about him an air of magnanimous self-satisfaction. “We are, clearly, not dealing with clowns. Our friends would have taken such imponderables into account and would err on the side of caution. You are with me, Mr Bronowski?”

“I am now. But when I was talking about hazards, I wasn’t taking that side of it into account.”

“I know you weren’t. Nobody was. Well, I think that will do, gentlemen. We appear to have established two things. It is unlikely that any attack will be carried out on any major installation – that is Prudhoe, Valdez or the intervening twelve major pump stations. It is further unlikely that any attack will be carried out in regions so inaccessible that repairs may be impossible for weeks on end.

“So we’re left with the likelihood that any further sabotage will take the form of attacks on accessible stretches of VSMs or the taking out of minor bridges – the possibility of destroying the Tazlina or Tanana bridges is remote, as those could well take weeks to repair. We may not have come up with too much, but at least we have clarified matters and established some sort of system of priorities.”