Алистер Маклин - Goodbye California

‘Further north, we’ve drilled deep down between Hollister and San Juan Bautista, a few miles to the west, partly because this is another dormant area – again there have only been comparatively minor shakes in this area – and because it’s just south of Hollister that the Hayward Fault branches off to the right to go to the east of San Francisco Bay, cutting up through or close by Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond then out under the San Pablo Bay. In Berkeley the fault actually runs under the university football stadium, which can’t be a very nice thought for the crowds of people who attend there regularly. There have been two very big earthquakes along this fault, in eighteen-thirty-six and eighteen-sixty-eight – until nineteen-o-six San Franciscans always referred to the latter as “the great earthquake” – and it’s there that we’ve drilled our ninth hole by Lake Temescal.

‘The tenth one we put down at Walnut Creek in the Calaveras Fault, which parallels the Hayward. Our suspicions about this fault are in the inverse proportion to what we know about it, which is almost zero.’

Barrow said: ‘That makes ten and that, I take it, is all. You spoke a few minutes ago about poor old Los Angeles. How about poor old San Francisco?’

‘To be thrown to the wolves, it would seem, the orphan left out in the snow. San Francisco is, geologically and seismologically, a city that waits to die. Frankly, we are terrified to tamper with anything up there. The Los Angeles area has had seven what you might call historic ’quakes that we know of: the Bay area has had sixteen, and we have no idea in the world where the next, the monster, may hit. There was a suggestion – frankly, it was mine – that we sink a borehole near Searsville Lake. This is close by Stanford University which had a bad time of it during the nineteen-o-six earthquake, and, more importantly, just where the Pilarcitos Fault branches off from the San Andreas. The Pilarcitos, which runs into the Pacific some six miles south of the San Andreas may, for all we know, be the true line of the San Andreas and certainly was some millions of years ago. Anyway, the nineteen-o-six shake ran through many miles of unpopulated hill regions. Since then, unscrupulous property developers have built cities along both fault lines and the consequences of another eight-plus earthquake are too awful to contemplate. I suggested a possible easement there, but certain vested interests in nearby Menlo Park were appalled at the very idea.’

Barrow said: ‘Vested interests?’

‘Indeed.’ Benson sighed. ‘It was in nineteen-sixty-six that the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research was established there. Very touchy about earthquakes, I’m afraid.’

‘Those boreholes,’ Ryder said. ‘What diameter drills do you use?’

Benson looked at him for a long moment then sighed again. ‘That had to be the next question. That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it?’

‘Well?’

‘You can use any size within reason. Down in Antarctica they use a twelve-inch drill to bore through the Ross Ice Shelf, but here we get by with a good deal less – five, perhaps six inches. I don’t know. Find out easy enough. So you think the ESPP drillings are a double-edged weapon that’s going to turn in our hands? Limit to what you can achieve by tidal waves, isn’t there? But this is earthquake country, so why not harness the latent powers of nature and trigger off immense earthquakes and where better to pull the triggers than in the very ESPP sites we’ve chosen?’

Barrow said: ‘It’s feasible?’

‘Eminently.’

‘And if–’ He broke off. ‘Ten bombs, ten sites. Matches up a damn sight too well. If this were to happen?’

‘Let’s think about something else, shall we?’

‘If it were?’

‘There are so many unknown factors–’

‘An educated guess, Professor.’

‘Goodbye California. That’s what I would guess. Or a sizeable part of it – bound to affect more than half of the population. Maybe it will fall into the Pacific. Maybe just shattered by a series of monster earthquakes – and if you set off hydrogen bombs in the faults monster earthquakes are what you are going to have. And radiation, of course, would get those the sea and earthquakes didn’t. An immediate trip back east – and I mean immediate – suddenly seems a very attractive prospect.’

‘You’d have to walk,’ Sassoon said. ‘The roads are jammed and the airport is besieged. The airlines are sending in every plane they can lay hands on but it’s hardly helping: they’re stacked heaven knows how many deep just waiting for a chance to land. And, of course, when a plane does land there’s a hundred passengers for every seat available.’

‘Things will be better tomorrow. It’s not in human nature to stay permanently panic-stricken.’

‘And it’s not in an aircraft’s nature to take off in twenty feet of water, which is what the airport might be under tomorrow.’ He broke off as the phone rang again. This time Sassoon took it. He listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘The Adlerheim does have a radio telephone. All quite legal. The Post Office doesn’t know the name or the address of the person who answers it. They assume that we wouldn’t want to make enquiries. Secondly, there is a very big man up in the Adlerheim.’ He looked at Ryder. ‘It seems you were not only right but right about their arrogant self-confidence. He hasn’t even bothered to change his name. Dubois.’

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ Ryder said. If he was surprised or gratified no trace of those feelings showed. ‘Morro has kidnapped twenty-six drillers, engineers – anyway, oil men. Six are being used as forced labour in the Adlerheim. Then he’ll have a couple of men at each of the drilling rigs – they’ll have guns on them, but he has to have experienced men to lower those damn things. I don’t think we need bother the AEC any more to find out about Professor Aachen’s design: whatever nuclear device he’s constructed it’s not going to be more than five inches in diameter.’ He turned to Benson. ‘Do the crews on those rigs work at weekends?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll bet Morro does.’

Benson turned to one of his assistants. ‘You heard. Find out, please.’

Barrow said: ‘Well, we know for sure now that Morro lied about the dimensions of the bomb. You can’t stick something twenty inches in diameter down a five- or six-inch borehole. I think I have to agree that this man is dangerously overconfident.’

Mitchell was glum. ‘He’s got plenty to be confident about. All right, we know he’s up in his fancy castle, and we know, or are as certain as can be, that he has those nuclear devices up there. And a lot of good that knowledge does us. How do we get to him or them?’

An assistant spoke to Benson. ‘The drilling crew, sir. They don’t work weekends. A guard at nights. Just one. Gentleman says no one’s likely to wheel away a derrick on a wheelbarrow.’

The profound silence that followed was sufficient comment. Mitchell, whose splendid self-confidence had vanished off the bottom of the chart, said in a plaintive voice: ‘Well, what in hell are we going to do?’

Barrow broke the next silence. ‘I don’t think that there’s anything else that we can do. By that, I mean the people in this room. Apart from the fact that our function is primarily investigative, we don’t have the authority to make any decisions on a national level.’

‘International, you mean,’ Mitchell said. ‘If they can do it to us they can also do it to London or Paris or Rome.’ He almost brightened. ‘They might even do it to Moscow. But I agree. It’s a matter for the White House, Congress, the Pentagon. Personally, I prefer the Pentagon. I’m convinced that the threat of force – and if this isn’t a threat of force I’ve never known of one – can be met only by force. I’m further convinced that we should choose the lesser of two evils, that we should consider the greatest good of the greatest number. I think an attack should be launched on the Adlerheim. At least the damage, though catastrophic, would be localized. I mean, we wouldn’t have half of the damn State being devastated.’ He paused, thought, then struck his fist on a convenient table.