Алистер Маклин: Goodbye California

‘Accepting that, how did they find their way to wherever they wanted to go? This place is a rabbit warren.’

Ferguson was on even surer ground now. ‘Nothing simpler. I thought you would know about that.’

‘A man never stops learning. Tell me.’

‘You don’t have to suborn an employee to find out the precise lay-out of any atomic plant. No need to infiltrate or wear false uniforms, get hold of copies of badges or use any violence what soever. You don’t have to come within a thousand miles of any damned atomic plant to know all about it, what the lay-out is, the precise location of where uranium and plutonium are stored, even when nuclear fuel shipments might be expected to arrive or depart. as the case may be. All you have to do is to go to a public reading-room run by the Atomic Energy Commission at Seventeen-seventeen H Street in Washington, DC. You’d find it most instructive, Sergeant Ryder – specially if you were a villain bent on breaking into a nuclear plant.’

‘This some kind of a sick joke?’

‘Very sick. Especially if, like me, you happen to be the head of security in a nuclear plant. There are card indexes there containing dockets on all nuclear facilities in the country in private hands. There’s always a very friendly clerk to hand – I’ve been there – who on request will give you a stack of more papers than you can handle giving you what I and many others would regard as being top-secret and classified information on any nuclear facility you want – except governmental ones, of course. Sure it’s a joke, but it doesn’t make me and lots of others laugh out loud.’

‘They must be out of their tiny minds.’ It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Sergeant Ryder was stunned – facial and verbal over-reactions were wholly alien to him – but he was unquestionably taken aback.

Ferguson assumed the expression of one who was buttoning his hair-shirt really tight. ‘They even provide a Xerox machine for copying any documents you choose.’

‘Jesus! And the Government permits all this?’

‘Permits? It authorized it. Atomic Energy Act, amended nineteen-fifty-four, states that citizen John Doe – undiscovered nut-case or not – has the right to know about the private use of nuclear materials. I think you’ll have to revise your insider theory, Sergeant.’

‘It wasn’t a theory, just a question. In either case consider it revised.’

Dr Jablonsky, the director of the reactor plant, came into the room. He was a burly, sun-tanned and white-haired man in his mid-sixties but looking about ten years younger, a man who normally radiated bonhomie and good cheer. At the moment he was radiating nothing of the kind.

‘Damnable, damnable, damnable,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Evening, Sergeant. It would have been nice to meet again in happier circumstances for both of us.’ He looked at Jeff interrogatively. ‘Since when did they call in CHPs on an–’

‘Jeff Ryder, Dr Jablonsky. My son.’ Ryder smiled slightly. ‘I hope you don’t subscribe to the general belief that highway patrolmen only arrest on highways. They can arrest anyone, anywhere, in the State of California.’

‘My goodness, I hope he’s not going to arrest me.’ He peered at Jeff over the top of rimless glasses. ‘You must be worried about your mother, young man, but I can’t see any reason why she should come to any harm.’

‘And I can’t see any reason why she shouldn’t,’ Ryder interrupted. ‘Ever heard of any kidnappee who was not threatened with actual bodily harm? I haven’t.’

‘Threats? Already?’

‘Give them time. Wherever they’re going they probably haven’t got there yet. How is it with the inventory of stolen goods?’

‘Bad. We have three types of nuclear fuel in storage here: Uranium-238, Uranium-235 and Plutonium. U-238 is the prime source of all nuclear fuel and they didn’t bother taking any of that. Understandably.’

‘Why understandably?’

‘Harmless stuff.’ Absently, almost, Dr Jablonsky fished in the pocket of his white coat and produced several small pellets, each no more than the size of a .38-calibre shell. ‘That’s U-238. Well, almost. Contains about three per cent U-235. Slightly enriched, as we call it. You have to get an awful lot of this stuff together before it starts to fission, giving off the heat that converts water to steam that spins the turbine blades that make our electricity. Here in San Ruffino we crowd six-and-three-quarter millions of these, two-hundred-and-forty into each of twenty-eight-thousand twelve-foot rods, into the nuclear reactor core. This we figure to be the optimum critical mass for fissioning, a process controlled by huge supplies of cooling water and one that can be stopped altogether by dropping boron rods between the uranium tubes.’

Jeff said: ‘What would happen if the water supply stopped and you couldn’t activate the boron rods or whatever? Bang?’

‘No. The results would be bad enough – clouds of radio-active gas that might cause some thousands of deaths and poison tens, perhaps thousands of square miles of soil – but it’s never happened yet, and the chances of it happening have been calculated at five billion to one. So we don’t worry too much about it. But a bang? A nuclear explosion? Impossible. For that you require U-235 over ninety per cent pure, the stuff we dropped on Hiroshima. Now that is nasty stuff. There was a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of it in that bomb, but it was so crudely designed – it really belonged to the nuclear horse-and-buggy age – that only about twenty-five ounces of it fissioned: but was still enough to wipe out the city. Since then we have progressed – if that’s the word I want. Now the Atomic Energy Commission reckons that a total of five kilograms – eleven pounds – is the so-called “trigger” quantity, enough for the detonation of a nuclear bomb. It’s common knowledge among scientists that the AEC is most conservative in its estimate – it could be done with less.’

Ryder said: ‘No U-238 was stolen. You used the word “understandably”. Couldn’t they have stolen it and converted it into U-235?’

‘No. Natural uranium contains a hundred-and-forty atoms of U-238 to each atom of U-235. The task of leaching out the U-235 from the U-238 is probably the most difficult scientific task that man has ever overcome. We use a process called “gaseous diffusion” – which is prohibitively expensive, enormously complicated and impossible to avoid detection. The going cost for a gaseous diffusion plant, at today’s inflated rates, is in the region of three billion dollars. Even today only a very limited number of men know how the process works – I don’t. All I know is that it involves thousands of incredibly fine membranes, thousands of miles of tubes, pipes and conduits and enough electrical power to run a fair-sized city. Then those plants are so enormous that they couldn’t possibly be built in secret. They cover so many hundreds of acres that you require a car or electric cart to get round one. No private group, however wealthy or criminally-minded, could ever hope to build one.

‘We have three in this country, none located in this State. The British and French have one apiece. The Russians aren’t saying. China is reported to have one in Langchow in Kansu Province. It can be done by high-speed centrifuges, spinning at such a speed that the marginally heavier U-238 is flung to the outside. But this process would use hundreds of thousands of centrifuges and the cost would be mind-boggling. I don’t know whether it’s ever been done. The South Africans claim to have discovered an entirely new process, but they aren’t saying what and US scientists are sceptical. The Australians say they’ve discovered a method by using laser beams. Again, we don’t know, but if it were possible a small group – and they’d all have to be top-flight nuclear physicists – could make U-235 undetected. But why bother going to such impossible lengths when you can just go to the right place and steal the damned stuff ready-made just as they did here this afternoon?’