Alistair MacLean: Athabasca

Dermott saved Brinckman the embarrassment of a long silence. “Five pounds of commercial Amatol would take out the bucketwheel for an indefinite period. A similar amount would take care of the reclaimer’s bridge. Two pounds to buckle the separator plate. That’s four ways. Getting at the radial stackers would be another excellent device – that would mean Sanmobil couldn’t even get the tar sands stock-piled in the surge piles down below for processing. And then, best of all, is this little matter of sixteen unpatrolled miles of conveyor belting.”

There was quiet in the bus until Dermott rumbled on. “Why bother sabotaging the separation plant when it’s so much simpler and more effective to interrupt the flow of raw material? You can’t very well carry out a processing operation if you’ve got nothing to process. It’d be childishly simple. Four draglines. Four bucketwheels. Four reclaimers’ bridges. Four separators. Four radial stackers. Sixteen miles of conveyor, fourteen miles of unpatrolled perimeter, and eight men to cover. Situation’s ludicrous. I’m afraid, Mr Brady, there’s no way in the world we can stop our Anchorage friend from carrying out his threat.”

Brady turned what appeared to be one cold, blue eye on the unfortunate Brinckman. “And what do you have to say?”

“What can I say except to agree? Even if I had ten times the number of men at my disposal, we still wouldn’t be geared to meet a threat like this.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even dream of anything like this.”

“Nor did anyone else. Nothing to reproach yourself’ about. You security people thought you were in the oil business, not a war. What are your normal duties, anyway?”

“We’re here to prevent three things – physical trouble among members of the work-force, petty pilfering, and drinking on the plant site. But so far we’ve had few instances of any of them.”

Visibly, Brinckman’s words struck a chord in Brady. “Ah. yes. Trouble in moments of stress and all that.” He turned in his seat. “Stella!”

“Yes, Dad.” She opened a wicker basket, produced a flask and glass, poured a drink and handed it to her father.

“Daiquiri,” he said. “We also have Scotch, gin, rum –”

“Sorry, Mr Brady,” Shore said. “No. The company has very strict regulations –”

Brady gave him some terse suggestions as to what he could do with company regulations and turned to Brinckman again.

“So, in effect, you’ve been pretty superfluous up till now and, if anything, are going to be even more so in the future?”

“I’d agree with half of that. The fact that we’ve had little to do up to now doesn’t mean we’ve been superfluous. Presence is important. You don’t heave a half-brick through a jeweller’s window if there’s an interested cop standing by five feet away. As to the future, yes, I agree. I feel pretty helpless.”

“If you were carrying out an attack somewhere, what would you go for?”

Brinckman was in no two minds. “The conveyor belting every time.”

Brady looked at Dermott and Mackenzie. Both men nodded.

“Mr Shore?”

“Agreed.” Shore was absentmindedly sipping some Scotch that had found its way into his hand. “Apart from the fact that there’s so damn much of it, it’s fragile. Six feet wide, but the steel cord belting is only an inch and a half thick. With a sledgehammer and chisel I could wreck it myself.” Shore looked and sounded tense. “Not many people are aware of the vast quantities of material that are processed here. To keep the plant operating at capacity and to make the project commercially viable, we need close on a quarter of a million tons of tar sands a day. As I said, the biggest mining operation ever. Cut off the supplies, and the plant closes down in a few hours. That’s a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day lost. Even Sanmobil couldn’t stand this kind of loss indefinitely.”

“How much did it cost to set up this plant?” Brady asked.

“Two billion, near enough.”

“Two billion dollars. And a potential operating loss of a hundred and thirty thousand barrels of oil a day.” Brady shook his head. “No-one’s arguing about the brilliance of the men who dreamed up this idea. Same goes for the engineers who made it work. But there’s another thing no-one would question – at least I would never question – and that is that those towering intellects had a huge blind spot. Why didn’t the bosses foresee this? I know it’s easy to be wise after the event, but, goddamn, you don’t need much foresight to think of that. Oil is not just another business. Couldn’t they have seen the giant potential for hate or crackpots – or blackmail? Couldn’t they have foreseen that they’d built the biggest industrial hostage to fortune of all time?”

Shore gazed gloomily at his glass, gloomily drank its contents, and maintained a gloomy silence.

Dermott said: “Well, not quite.”

“What do you mean ‘not quite’?”

“Sure, it’s an industrial hostage to fortune. But not the biggest of all time. That dubious distinction belongs without any question to the trans-Alaskan pipeline. Their capital outlay wasn’t two billion: it was eight billion. They don’t transport a hundred and thirty thousand barrels a day: they transport one million two hundred thousand. And they don’t just have sixteen miles of conveyor belting to guard: they have eight hundred miles of pipeline.”

Brady handed his glass back for a refill, digested this unpleasant thought, fortified himself and said: “Don’t they have any means of protecting the damned thing?”

“To the extent that they can limit damage, certainly. They have magnificent communication and electronic control systems, with every imaginable fail-safe and back-up device, even to the extent of a satellite emergency control station.” Dermott produced a paper from his pocket. “They have twelve pump stations, locally or remotely controlled. They have sixty-two remote gate valves, all radio-controlled from the pump station immediately to the north. Those gate valves can stop the flow of oil in either direction.

“There are eighty check valves to prevent the oil from flowing backwards and, well, all sorts of other weird valves that would only make sense to an engineer. Altogether they have a remote-control capability at well over a thousand points. In other words, they can isolate any section of the line at any time they want. Because it takes six minutes to shut down a big pump, some oil is bound to escape – up to fifty thousand barrels, it’s estimated. That may seem a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s in the pipeline. But there’s no way the oil can keep on pumping out indefinitely.”

“All very interesting.” Brady sounded cool. “You can bet they try harder to protect the environment. You can also bet that crooks and extortioners don’t give a damn about the environment one way or another. All they want is to interrupt the flow of oil. Can the line be protected?”

“Well, about this huge blind spot you mentioned –”

“What you’re trying not to tell me is that the pipeline can be breached any place, any time.”

“That’s right.”

Brady looked at Dermott. “You’ve thought about this problem?”

“Of course.”

“And you, Donald?”

“Me, too.”

“Well then, what have you come up with?”

“Nothing. That’s why we sent for you. We thought you might come up with something.”

Brady looked at him maliciously and resumed his pondering. By and by he said: “What happens if there’s a break and the oil is stopped in the pipe? Does it gum up?”

“Eventually. But it takes time. The oil is hot when it comes out of the ground and it’s still warm when it reaches Valdez. The pipeline is very heavily insulated, and the oil passing through the pipe generates friction heat. They reckon they might get it flowing again after a 21-day standstill. After that –” He spread his hands.