Goodbye California

‘Four pairs of eyes are better than two. And because she’s my wife and Jeff’s mother and we know how she might have behaved and reacted we might be able to pick up something that Parker and Davidson might miss.’

Mahler, his chin in the heels of his hands, gazed morosely at his desk. Whatever decision he took the chances were high that his superiors would say it was the wrong one. He compromised by saying nothing. At a nod from Ryder both men left the room.

The evening was fine and clear and windless, and a setting sun was laying a path of burnished gold across the Pacific as Ryder and his son drove through the main gates of San Ruffino. The nuclear station was built on the very edge of the San Ruffino cove – like all such stations it required an immense amount of water, some 1,800,000 gallons of sea-water a minute, to cool the reactor cores down to their optimum operating temperatures: no domestic utility supply could hope to cope with the tiniest fraction of this amount.

The two massive, gleamingly-white and domed containment structures that housed the reactor cores were at once beautiful – in the pure simplicity of their external design – but sinister and threatening; if one chose to view them that way: they were certainly awe-inspiring. Each was about the height of a twenty-five-storey building with a diameter of about 150 feet. The three-and-a-half-feet-thick concrete walls were hugely reinforced by the largest steel bars in the United States. Between those containment structures – which also held the four steam generators that produced the actual electricity – was a squat and undeniably ugly building of absolutely no architectural merit. This was the Turbine Generator Building, which, apart from its two turbo-generators, also housed two condensers and two sea-water evaporators.

On the seaward side of those buildings was the inaptly named ‘auxiliary building’, a six-storey structure, some 240 feet in length, which held the control centres for both reactor units, the monitoring and instrumentation centres and the vastly complicated control system which ensured the plant’s safe operation and public protection.

Extending from each end of the auxiliary building were the two wings, each about half the size of the main building. These in their own ways were areas as delicate and sensitive as the reactor units themselves, for it was here that all the nuclear fuels were handled and stored. In all, the building of the complex had called for something like a third of a million cubic yards of concrete and some fifty thousand tons of steel. What was equally remarkable was that it required only eighty people, including a good proportion of security staff, to run this massive complex twenty-four hours a day.

Twenty yards beyond the gate Ryder was stopped by a security guard wearing an indeterminate uniform and a machine-carbine that was far from menacing inasmuch as the guard had made no move to unsling it from his shoulder. Ryder leaned out.

‘What’s this, then? Open house day? Public free to come and go?’

‘Sergeant Ryder.’ The little man with the strong Irish accent tried to smile and succeeded only in looking morose. ‘Fine time now to lock the stable door. Besides, we’re expecting lawmen. Droves of them.’

‘And all of them asking the same stupid questions over and over again just as I’m going to do. Cheer up, John. I’ll see they don’t get you for high treason. On duty at the time, were you?’

‘For my sins. Sorry about your wife, Sergeant. This’ll be your son?’ Ryder nodded. ‘My sympathies. For what they’re worth. But don’t waste any sympathy on me. I broke regulations. If it’s the old cottonwood tree for me, I’ve got it coming. I shouldn’t have left my box.’

Jeff said: ‘Why?’

‘See that glass there. Not even the Bank of America has armoured plate like that. Maybe a Magnum ’forty-four could get through – I doubt it. There’s a two-way speaker system. There’s an alarm buzzer by my hand and a foot switch to trigger off a ten-pound charge of gelignite that would discourage anything short of a tank. It’s buried under the asphalt just where the vehicles pull up. But no, old smarty-pants McCafferty had to unlock the door and go outside.’

‘Why?’

‘No fool like an old fool. The van was expected at just that time – I had the note on my desk. Standard fuel pick-up from San Diego. Same colour, same letters, driver and guard with the same uniforms, even the same licence plates.’

‘Same van, in other words. Hi-jack. If they could hi-jack it when it was empty why not on the return journey when it was full?’

‘They came for more than the fuel.’

‘That’s so. Recognize the driver?’

‘No. But the pass was in order, so was the photograph.’

‘Well, would you recognize that driver again?’

McCafferty scowled in bitter recollection. ‘I’d recognize that damned great black beard and moustache again. Probably lying in some ditch by this time.

‘Didn’t have time even to see the old shotgun, just the one glance and then the van gate – they’re side loaders – fell down. The only uniform the lot inside were wearing were stocking masks. God knows how many of them there were; I was too busy looking at what they were carrying – pistols, sawn-off twelve-bores, even one guy with a bazooka.’

‘For blasting open any electronically-locked steel doors, I suppose.’

‘I suppose. Fact of the matter is, there wasn’t one shot fired from beginning to end. Professionals, if ever I saw any. Knew exactly what they were doing, where to go, where to look. Anyway, I was plucked into that van and had hand and leg cuffs on before I had time to close my mouth.’

Ryder was sympathetic. ‘I can see it must have been a bit of a shock. Then?’

‘One of them jumped down and went into the box. Bastard had an Irish accent: I could have been listening to myself talking. He picked up the phone, got through to Carlton – he’s the number – two man in security, if you recollect: Ferguson was off today – told him the transport van was here and asked for permission to open the gate. He pressed the button, the gates opened, he waited until the van had passed through, closed the door, came out through the other door and climbed into the van that had stopped for him.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘All I know. I stayed in there – I didn’t have much option, did I? – until the raid was over, then they locked me up with the others.’

‘Where’s Fergusont?’

‘In the north wing.’

‘Checking on missing articles, shall we say? Tell him I’m here.’

McCafferty went to his guard box, spoke briefly on the phone and returned. ‘It’s okay.’

‘No comments?’

‘Funny you should ask that. He said: “Dear God, as if we haven’t got enough trouble here”.’

Ryder half-smiled a very rare half-smile and drove off.

Ferguson, the security chief, greeted them in his office with civility but a marked lack of enthusiasm. Although it was some months since he had read Ryder’s acerbic report on the state of security at San Ruffino Ferguson had a long memory.

The fact that Ryder had been all too accurate in his report and that he, Ferguson, had neither the authority nor the available funds to carry out all the report’s recommendations hadn’t helped matters any. He was a short stocky man with wary eyes and a habitually worried expression. He replaced a telephone and made no attempt to rise from behind his desk.

‘Come to write another report, Sergeant?’ He tried to sound acid but all he did was sound defensive. ‘Create a little more trouble for me?’

Ryder was mild. ‘Neither. If you don’t get support from your blinkered superiors with their rose-coloured glasses then the fault is theirs, not yours.’

‘Ah.’ The tone was surprised but the face still wary.

Jeff said: ‘We have a personal interest in this, Mr Ferguson.’

‘You the sergeant’s son?’ Jeff nodded. ‘Sorry about your mother. I guess saying that doesn’t help very much.’

‘You were thirty miles away at the time,’ Ryder said reasonably. Jeff looked at his father in some apprehension: he knew that a mild-mannered Ryder was potentially the most dangerous Ryder of all, but in this case there seemed no undue cause for alarm. Ryder went on: ‘I’d looked to find you down in the vaults assessing the amount of loot our friends have made off with.’

‘Not my job at all. Never go near their damned storage facilities except to check the alarm systems. I wouldn’t even begin to know what to look for. The Director himself is down there with a couple of assistants finding what the score is.’

‘Could we see him?’

‘Why? Two of your men, I forget their names –’

‘Parker and Davidson.’

‘Whatever. They’ve already talked to him.’

‘My point. He was still making his count then.’

Ferguson reached a grudging hand for the telephone, spoke to someone in tones of quiet respect, then said to Ryder: ‘He’s just finishing. Here in a moment, he says.’

‘Thanks. Any way this could have been an inside job?’

‘An inside job? You mean, one of my men involved?’ Ferguson looked at him suspiciously. He himself had been thirty miles away at the time, which should have put himself, personally, beyond suspicion: but equally well, if he had been involved he’d have made good and certain that he was thirty miles away on the day that the break-in had occurred. ‘I don’t follow. Ten heavily armed men don’t need assistance from inside.’

‘How come they could have walked through your electronically-controlled doors and crisscross of electric eyes undetected?’

Ferguson sighed. He was on safer ground here. ‘The pickup was expected and on schedule. When Carlton heard from the gate guard about its arrival he would automatically have turned them off.’

‘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?’

Ryder said: ‘How is it all stored?’

‘In ten-litre steel bottles each containing seven kilograms of U-235, in the form of either an oxide or metal, the oxide in the form of a very fine brown powder, the metal in little lumps known as “broken buttons”. The bottles are placed in a cylinder five inches wide that’s braced with welded struts in the centre of a perfectly ordinary fifty-five-gallon steel drum. I needn’t tell you why the bottles are held in suspension in the airspace of the drum – stack them all together in a drum or box and you’d soon reach the critical mass where fissioning starts.’

Jeff said: ‘This time it goes bang?’

‘Not yet. Just a violent irradiation which would have a very nasty effect for miles around, especially on human beings. Drum plus bottle weighs about a hundred pounds, so is easily moveable. Those drums are called “bird-cages”, though Lord knows why: they don’t look like any bird-cage I’ve ever seen.’

Ryder said: ‘How is this transported?’

‘Long distance by plane. Shorter hauls by common carrier.’

‘Common carrier?’

‘Any old truck you can lay your hands on.’ Ferguson sounded bitter.

‘How many of those cages go in the average truck shipment?’

‘That hi-jacked San Diego truck carries twenty.’

‘One hundred and forty pounds of the stuff. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘A man could make himself a fair collection of nuclear bombs from that lot. How many drums were actually taken?’

‘Twenty.’

‘A full load for the van?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they didn’t touch your plutonium?’

‘More bad news, I’m afraid. When they were being held at gunpoint but before they were locked up some of the staff heard the sound of another engine. A diesel. Heavy. Could have been big – no one saw it.’ The telephone on his desk rang. He reached for it and listened in silence except for the occasional ‘who?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ He hung up.

‘Still more bad news?’ Jablonsky asked.

‘Don’t see it makes any difference one way or another. The hi-jacked van’s been found. Empty, of course, except for the driver and guard trussed up like turkeys in the back. They say they were following a furniture van round a blind corner when it braked so sharply that they almost ran into it. Back doors of the van opened and the driver and the guard decided to stay just where they were. They say they didn’t feel like doing much else with two machine-guns and a bazooka levelled six feet from their windscreen.’

‘An understandable point of view,’ Jablonsky said. ‘Where were they found?’

‘In a quarry, up a disused side road. Couple of young kids.’

‘And the furniture van is still there?’

‘As you say, Sergeant. How did you know?’

‘Do you think they’d have transferred their cargo into an identifiable van and driven off with it? They’d have a second plain van.’ Ryder turned to Dr Jablonsky. ‘As you were about to say about this plutonium –’

‘Interesting stuff and if you’re a nuclear bomb-making enthusiast it’s far more suitable for making an atom bomb than uranium although it would call for a greater deal of expertise. Probably call for the services of a nuclear physicist.’

‘A captive physicist would do as well?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They – the villains – took a couple of visiting physicists with them this afternoon. From San Diego and Los Angels, I believe they were.’

‘Professor Burnett and Dr Schmidt? That’s a ludicrous suggestion. I know both men well, intimately, you might say. They are men of probity, men of honour. They’d never co-operate with the blackguards who stole this stuff.’

Ryder sighed. ‘My regard for you is high, Doctor, so I’ll only say that you lead a very sheltered life. Men of principle? Decent men?’

‘Our regard is mutual so I’ll just content myself with saying that I don’t have to repeat myself.’

‘Men of compassion, no doubt?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘They took my wife, and a stenographer –’

‘Julie Johnson.’

‘Julie Johnson. When our hi-jacking thieves start feeding those ladies through a meat grinder what do you think is going to win out – your friends’ high principles or their compassion?’

Jablonsky said nothing. He just lost a little colour.

Ferguson coughed in a sceptical fashion, which is a difficult thing to do, but in his line of business he’d had a lot of practice. ‘And I’d always thought you were devoid of imagination, Sergeant. That’s stretching things a bit, surely.’

‘Is it? As security chief it’s your job to vet everybody applying for a job here. This stenographer, Julie. What’s her background?’

‘Typist making a living. Shares a small flat, nothing fancy, with two other girls. Drives a beatup Volkswagen. Parents dead.’

‘Not a millionairess doing the job for kicks?’

‘Kicks. No chance. A nice girl, but nothing special there.’

Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘So. A stenographer’s pay-cheque. A sergeant’s pay-cheque. A patrolman’s pay-cheque. Maybe you think they’re going to hold those ladies to ransom for a million dollars each? Maybe just to rest their eyes on after a long day at the nuclear bench?’ Jablonsky said nothing. ‘The meat grinder. You were talking about this plutonium.’

‘God, man, have you no feelings?’

‘Time and a place for everything. Right now a little thinking, a little knowledge might help more.’

‘I suppose.’ Jablonsky spoke with the restrained effort of a man whose head is trying to make his heart see sense. ‘Plutonium – Plutonium 239, to be precise. Stuff that destroyed Nagasaki. Synthetic – doesn’t exist in nature. Man-made – we Californians had the privilege of creating it. Unbelievably toxic – a cobra’s bite is a thing of joy compared to it. If you had it in an aerosol in liquid form with freon under pressure – no one has as yet got around to figuring out how to do this but they will, they will – you’d have an indescribably lethal weapon on your hands. A couple of squirts of this into a crowded auditorium, say, with a couple of thousand people, and all you’d require would be a couple of thousand coffins.

‘It’s the inevitable by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor. The plutonium, you understand, is still inside the uranium fuel rods. The rods are removed from the reactor and chopped up –’

‘Who does the chopping? Not a job I’d fancy myself.’

‘I don’t know whether you would or not. First chop and you’d be dead. Done by remote-controlled guillotines in a place we call the “canyon”. Nice little place with five-foot walls and five-foot-thick windows. You wouldn’t want to go inside. The cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid then washed with various reactive chemicals to separate the plutonium from the uranium and other unwanted radioactive fission products.’