Alistair MacLean: Santorini

Hawkins considered his glass for a few moments, then looked up at Talbot. ‘Should the need arise, Captain, how long would it take you to contact the Pentagon?’

‘Immediately. Well, half a minute. Now?’

‘No. Wait. Have to think about it. Trouble is, even the Pentagon is having difficulty in extracting information from this Air Force base which is, I believe, somewhere in Georgia. The Pentagon’s own fault, really, although you can’t expect them to admit this. They’ve so inculcated this passion for absolute secrecy into the senior officers of all four services that no one is prepared to reveal anything without the permission of the commanding officer of the Air Force base or ship or whatever. In this particular case, the commanding officer who, to the Pentagon’s distress, would appear to have a human side to his nature, has elected to take twenty-four hours off. No one appears to know where he is.’

Van Gelder said: ‘Makes it a bit awkward, sir, doesn’t it, if war breaks out in the next halfhour?’

‘No. Base remains in full operational readiness. But there’s still no relaxation of the iron-bound rules concerning the release of classified information.’

Talbot said: ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here unless they’d released some information.’

‘Naturally not. The news they’ve released is vague and incomplete but all very, very bad. One report says there were twelve nuclear weapons aboard, another fifteen. Whether they were missiles or bombs was not disclosed: what was disclosed was that they were hydrogen devices, each one in the monster megaton range, twelve to fifteen megatons. The plane was also understood to be carrying two of the more conventional atom bombs.’

‘I think I’ll break a self-imposed regulation and have a scotch myself,’ Talbot said. A half-minute passed in silence, then he said quietly: ‘This is worse than I ever dreamed.’

‘Dream?’ Grierson said. ‘Nightmare.’

‘Dream or nightmare, it won’t matter to us,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘Not when we’re drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit.’

‘A hydrogen bomb, Dr Wickram,’ Talbot said. ‘Let’s call it that. Is there any way it can spontaneously detonate?’

‘In itself, impossible. The President of the United States has to press one button, the man on the spot another: the radio frequencies are so wildly different that the chances of anyone happening on the right combination are billions to one.’

‘Is there a chance—say a billion to one—that the Soviets might have this combination?’

‘None.’

‘You say it’s impossible to detonate in itself. Is there any other way, some external means, whereby it could be detonated?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does that mean you’re not saying or that you’re not sure? I don’t think, Dr Wickram, that this is the time to dwell on such verbal niceties.’

‘I’m not sure. If there were a sufficiently powerful explosion close by it might go up by sympathetic detonation. We simply don’t know.’

‘The possibility has never been explored? I mean, no experiments?’

‘I should hope not,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘If such an experiment were successful, I wouldn’t care to be within thirty or forty miles at the time.’

‘That is one point.’ For the first time, Dr Wickram essayed a smile, but it was a pretty wintry one. ‘In the second place, quite frankly, we have never envisaged a situation where such a possibility might arise. We could, I suppose, have carried out such an experiment without the drastic consequences the Lieutenant has suggested. We could detonate a very small atom bomb in the vicinity of another. Even a charge of conventional explosive in the vicinity of a small atom bomb would suffice. If the small atom bomb went up, so then would the hydrogen bomb. Everybody knows that it’s the fissioning of an atom bomb that triggers off the fusion of a hydrogen bomb.’

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