Athabasca

“To impress you further, Mr Brady, those trucks are also the biggest in the world. A hundred and twenty-five tons empty, payload of a hundred and fifty, and all this on just four tyres. But, you will admit, they are some tyres.”

The truck was passing now and they were indeed some tyres; to Brady they looked at least ten feet high and proportionately bulky. The truck itself was monstrous – twenty feet high at the cab and about the same in width, with the driver mounted so high as to be barely visible from the ground.

“You could buy a very acceptable car for the price of one of those tyres,” Shore said. “As for the truck itself, if you went shopping for one at today’s prices, you wouldn’t get much change from three quarters of a million.” He spoke to his driver, who started up and moved slowly off.

“When the overburden is gone, the same dragline scoops up the tar sand – as the one we’ve just looked at is doing now – and dumps it in this huge pile we call a windrow.” A weird machine of phenomenal length was nosing into the pile. Shore pointed and said: “A bucketwheel reclaimer – there’s one paired with every dragline. Four hundred and twenty-eight feet long. You can see the revolving bucketwheel biting into the windrow. With fourteen buckets on a forty-foot diameter wheel, it can remove a fair tonnage every minute. The tar sands are then transported along the spine of the reclaimer – the bridge, we call it – to the separators. From there –”

Brady interrupted: “Separators?”

“Sometimes the sands come in big, solid lumps as hard as rock which could damage the conveyor belts. The separators are just vibrating screens which sort out the lumps.”

“And without the separators the conveyor belts could be damaged?”

“Certainly.”

“Put out of commission?”

“Probably. We don’t know. It’s never been allowed to happen yet.”

“And then?”

“The tar sands go into the travelling hoppers you see there. They drop the stuff on to the conveyor belt, and off it goes to the processing plant. After that –”

“One minute.” It was Dermott. “You have a fair amount of this conveyor belting?”

“A fair bit.”

“How much exactly?”

Shore looked uncomfortable. “Sixteen miles.” Dermott stared at him and Shore hurried on. “At the end of the conveyor system radial stackers direct it to what are called surge piles – just really storage dumps.”

“Radial stackers?” said Brady. “What are they?”

“Elevated extensions of the conveyor belts. They can rotate through a certain arc to direct the tar sands to a suitable surge pile. They can also feed bins that take the sands underground to start the processes of chemical and physical separation of the bitumen. The first of those processes –”

“Jesus!” said Mackenzie incredulously.

“That about sums it up,” Dermott said. “I have no wish to be rude, Mr Shore, but I don’t want to hear about the extraction processes. I’ve already heard and seen all I want to.”

“Good God Almighty!” exclaimed Mackenzie by way of variation.

Brady said: “What’s the matter, gentlemen?”

Dermott picked his words carefully. “When Don ana I were talking to Mr Shore and Mr Reynolds, the operations manager, last night, we thought we had reason to be concerned. I now realise we were wasting our time on trifles. But, by God, now I’m worried.

“Last night we had to face the fact – the ridiculous ease with which the perimeter can be penetrated and the almost equal ease with which subversives could be introduced on to the plant floor. In retrospect, those are but bagatelles. How many points did you pick up, Don?”

“Six.”

“My count also. First off, the draglines. They look as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar: they are, in fact, pathetically vulnerable. A hundred tons of high explosive would hardly dent the Rock of Gibraltar; I could take out a dragline with two five-pound charges of wrap-round explosive placed where the boom is hinged to the machine house.”

Brinckman, an intelligent and clearly competent person in his early thirties, spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes, then immediately wished he hadn’t. He said: “Fine, if you could approach the dragline – but you can’t. The area is lit by brilliant floodlamps.”

“Jesus!” Mackenzie’s limited repertoire was in use again.

“What do you mean, Mr Mackenzie?”

“What I mean is I would locate the breaker or switch or whatever that supplies the power to the floodlights and immobilise it by smashing it or by the brilliantly innovative device of turning it off. Or, I’d cut the power lines. Simpler still, with a five-second burst from a sub-machine gun I’d shoot them out. Assuming, of course, that they’re not made of bullet-proof glass.”

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.

“No more oil-flow?”

“No.”

“Not ever again?”

“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t really know. Nobody’s talked to me about it. I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about it.”

No one did. Until Brady said: “Do you know what I wish?”

“I know,” Dermott said. “You wish you were back in Houston.”

The radio-phone rang. The driver listened briefly then turned to Shore.

“Operations manager’s office. Will we return immediately. Mr Reynolds says it’s urgent.” The bus driver picked up speed.

Reynolds was waiting for them. He indicated a phone lying on his table and spoke to Brady. “Houston. For you.”

Brady said “Hello”. Then he made a gesture of irritation and turned to Dermott.

“Horseshit. Damn code. Take it, huh?” This was hardly reasonable of Brady, since it was he who had invented the code and insisted on using it for almost everything except “Hello” and “Goodbye”. Dermott reached for a pad and pencil, took the phone and started writing. It took him about a minute to record the message and two more to decode it.

He said into the phone: “Is that all you have?” A pause. “When did you get this message, and when did this happen?” Another pause, “Fifteen minutes and two hours. Thank you.” He turned to Brady, his face bleak. “The pipeline’s been breached. Pump Station No. 4. Near Atigun Pass in the Brook Range. No hard details yet. Damage not severe, it seems, but enough to close down the line.”

“No chance of an accident?”

“Explosives. They took out two gate valves.”

There was a brief silence while Brady surveyed Dermott curiously.

“No need to look so goddamned grim, George. We were expecting something like this. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It is for two of the men on Pump Station Four. They’ve been murdered.”

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