Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

Shore said: “Ten o’clock this morning.”

“You have it with you?”

“Not exactly. It came by phone.”

“Where from?”

“Anchorage. International call.”

“Who took the message?”

“I did. Bill here was with me, listening in. Caller gave us his message twice. Word for word he said: ‘I have to inform you that Sanmobil will be incurring a slight interruption in oil production in the near future. Not much, I assure you, just sufficient to convince you that we can interrupt oil flow whenever and wherever we please.’ That was all.”

“No demands?”

“No – surprisingly.”

“Don’t worry. The demands will come when the big threat does. Would you recognise this voice again?”

“Would I recognise the voices of a million other Canadians who talk exactly as he does? You take this threat seriously?”

“I do. We take most things seriously. How good is security at the plant?”

“Well – fair enough for normal circumstances. I suppose.”

“These promise to be highly abnormal circumstances. How many guards?”

“Twenty-four, under Terry Brinckman. He knows what he’s doing.”

“I don’t doubt it. Guard dogs?”

“None. The usual police dogs – Alsatians, Dobermans, boxers – can’t survive in these extreme conditions. Huskies can, of course, but they make lousy watch-dogs – they’re more interested in fighting each other than looking for intruders.”

“Electric fences?”

Shore rolled his eyes upwards and looked sorrowful. “You want to equip the environmentalists with a gallows right on the site? Why, if even the meanest old wolf were to singe its mangy hide…”

“Okay, okay. I suppose it’s pointless to ask about electronic beams, sensor devices and the like?”

“Pointless is right.”

Mackenzie said: “How big is this plant site?

Reynolds looked unhappy. “About eight thousand acres.”

“Eight thousand acres.” Mackenzie’s voice was all doom. “What kind of perimeter would that make for?”

“Fourteen miles.”

“Yes. We have a problem here,” Mackenzie said. “I take it your security duties are twofold: the guarding of vital installations in the plant itself and patrolling the perimeter to keep intruders out?”

Reynolds nodded. “The guards are in three shifts, eight men per shift.”

“Eight men, without any protective aids at all, to guard the plant itself and at the same time patrol fourteen miles of perimeter in the blackness of a winter night.”

Shore was defensive. “Ours is a 24-hour operation. The plant is brilliantly lit day and night.”

“But the perimeter isn’t. A blind man could drive a coach and four – hell, why go on? A couple of army regiments might help, although I doubt even that. As I say, a problem.”

“Not only that,” Dermott said. “All the brilliant illumination in the world isn’t of the slightest help. Not when you’ve got hundreds of workers on each of the three shifts a day.”

“Meaning?”

“Subversives.”

“Subversives! Less than two per cent of the work-force are non-Canadians.”

“There’s been a royal decree abolishing Canadian criminals? When you hire, you investigate backgrounds?”

“Well, not intensive questioning, third degree, lie-detector tests or any of that rubbish. Try that and you’d never hire anyone. We check on previous experience, qualifications, recommendations, and, most important, criminal records.”

“That’s the least important. Really clever criminals never have criminal records.” Dermott looked like a man who had been about to sigh, explode, curse, or quit, but had changed his mind. “Well – it’s late. Tomorrow, Mr Mackenzie and I would like to talk to your Terry Brinckman and look over the plant.”

“If we have a car here at ten o’clock–”

“How about seven o’clock? Yes, seven will be fine.” Dermott and Mackenzie watched the two men go, looked at each other, emptied their glasses, signalled the barman, then looked out through the windows of the Peter Pond Hotel, named after the first white man ever to see the Tar Sands.

Pond went down the Athabasca River by canoe almost exactly two hundred years before. He did not take too much interest in the sands, it appears, but ten years later the much more famous explorer Alexander MacKenzie was intrigued by the sticky substance oozing from outcrops high above the river, and wrote: “The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the Indians’ canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal.”

Oddly, the significance of the words “sea-coal” wasn’t appreciated for more than a hundred years; nobody realised that the two 18th-century explorers had stumbled across one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fossil fuels. But had they not so stumbled, there would have been no Peter Pond Hotel where it is today nor, indeed, the township beyond its windows.

Even in the mid-nineteen-sixties Fort McMurray was little more than a rough, primitive frontier outpost, with a population of only thirteen hundred and streets covered with dust, mud or slush according to season. By now, though still a frontier town, it had become a frontier town with a difference. Treasuring its past, but with an eye to the future, it was the epitome of a boom-town and, in terms of burgeoning population, the fastest-expanding township in Canada. Where there were thirteen hundred citizens fourteen years earlier, there were thirteen thousand. Schools, hotels, banks, hospitals, churches, super-markets and, above all, hundreds of new houses were or were being built. And, wonder of wonders, the streets were paved. This seeming miracle stems from one factor and one factor only: Fort McMurray sits squarely in the heart of the Athabasca Tar Sands, the biggest such known deposits in the world.

It had been snowing heavily earlier in the evening and had still not completely stopped. Everything – houses, streets, car-tops, trees – was under a smoothly unbroken cover of white. Hundreds of lights shone hospitably through the gently falling flakes. The scene would have gladdened the eye and heart of a Christmas postcard artist. Some such thought had occurred to Mackenzie.

“Santa Claus should be here tonight.”

“Indeed.” Dermott sounded morose. “Especially if he brought along some of that peace on earth and goodwill to all men. What did you make of that telephone message to Sanmobil?”

“Same thing you did. Practically identical to the letter Finlayson received up in Prudhoe Bay. Obviously the work of the same man or group of men.”

“And what do you make of the fact that Alaskan oil people got a threatening message from Alberta, while the Albertan oil interests received the same threat from Alaska?”

“Nothing – except that both threats had the same origin. That call from Anchorage. For a certainty, from a public call-box. Untraceable.”

“Probably. Not certainly. I don’t know if you can dial direct from Anchorage to here. I don’t think so, but we can find out. If not, the telephone operator will have a record. There’s a chance that we might locate the phone.”

Mackenzie briefly surveyed Fort McMurray through the base of his glass and said: “That’ll be a big help.”

“It might be a small help. Two ways. That call came in at ten this morning. That’s 6 a.m. Anchorage time. Who except a nut – or some night-shift worker – is going to be out in the black and freezing streets of Anchorage at that hour? That sort of odd behaviour, I suggest, isn’t likely to go unnoticed.”

“If there’s anyone there to notice.”

“State Troopers in a patrol car. Taxi driver. Snow-plough driver. Mailman on the way to work. You’d be surprised the number of people who go about their lawful occasions in the dark watches of the night.”