by Peter James
Against the far end wall, looking imperiously down on the room, hung a portrait of the Queen; above it were the crossed flags of the Union Jack and the flag of St George. This end-piece was designed to impress visitors to this room, and it seldom failed to do so. It was a reminder to all who sat at this mahogany table that they were there to serve their Queen and country. In the business of spying, it was all too easy to lose one’s focus on reality and on one’s goal – if one was ever lucky enough to be given a clear one.
In the chair at the head of the table – his customary position – sat Fifeshire. Occupying another five of the eighteen available chairs, were Peter Nettlefold, Commander of C4; Sir William Atling, Director General of MI6; Kieran Ross, the Home Secretary; Sir Isaac Quoit; and myself. Everyone watched Fifeshire.
‘Littlejohn,’ he said, ‘had killed one hundred and forty thousand people by the day World War Two was over. Eighty-five thousand of those were either killed instantly or died within a few hours of the bomb exploding, the rest over the following months. Many thousands more who were in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki at the time the bomb was dropped there have died prematurely young, and there has been a high rate of deformed children born not only to women pregnant then, but women pregnant many years after. It is estimated that over a quarter of a million human lives were either lost or seriously and irreparably damaged as a result of the bomb on Hiroshima.
‘How many of those that died in Hiroshima died from the actual blast?’ asked Kieran Ross, the Home Secretary.
‘It’s difficult to be precise about figures,’ replied Fifeshire, ‘but the general view on those eighty-five thousand who died more or less immediately is that about twenty per cent died from the blast itself, the rest from a massive dose of radiation.’ He sucked a generous helping of not particularly radioactive Havana smoke into his mouth, and blew it out. ‘The principal effect of radiation is the destruction of the body’s tissues: the limbs malfunction, the digestive system packs up, hair falls out, vomiting starts, the brain malfunctions and delirium sets in. None of it is very pleasant, and what is even less pleasant is that, once someone has been exposed to that kind of radiation, there is very little that anyone can do to help. As far as radiation goes, medicine is still in the dark ages.
‘The secondary effects are slower-acting, but no less hideous. These effects are caused by the debris in a cloud of radioactivity, the fall-out left in the air. Strontium 90, for example, which attacks the bone tissues, causing bone cancer, it has a half-life of twenty-eight years. Iodine 131, which escaped from Windscale in 1957, attacks the thyroids. That has a half-life of only eight days; that means that after a mere twenty-seven days it would stop killing people. There’s Radium 226, which attacks the bones and has a half-life of one thousand six hundred and twenty years. There’s Plutonium 239 which attacks the sex organs, causing birth defects, mutations and miscarriages for several generations after exposure. Plutonium 239 spontaneously ignites on contact with the air and becomes Plutonium dioxide. Plutonium dioxide has a habit of clinging to dust particles; if just one particle – just one particle – is breathed into someone’s lungs, that tiny grain of plutonium will attach itself to a cell, lie dormant for fifteen years, and then after almost exactly fifteen years, it will cause that cell to start multiplying: the multiplying of that cell is called, in layman’s language, lung cancer. And the half-life of plutonium is a mere twenty-four thousand years.’
The group in the room listened in silence. Fifeshire drew on his cigar again, and continued.
‘Naturally, in most cases the strength of the dosage affects the seriousness of primary and secondary radiation exposure. A small degree of exposure might increase one’s risk of contracting cancer by one in a thousand – not much, you might say, since cancer already kills off prematurely one in four people on the face of the earth. And yet, as I have just mentioned, it is not always true that small doses are less harmful: just one particle of plutonium dioxide is all that’s required. You wouldn’t know if you breathed that particle in. You cannot see, smell or feel radiation, except with a Geiger counter. It is the potential of radiation as a killer that I find gravely disturbing, and the quantities of radioactivity inside nuclear reactors are positively alarming. The bomb that killed one hundred and forty thousand people within thirty days at Hiroshima, was a fifteen-kiloton bomb, a very small bomb indeed by today’s standards. Inside the containment building of the average nuclear reactor in service in the world today is seven hundred times the amount of radioactivity released onto Hiroshima by Littlejohn.’
Fifeshire looked at a sheet of notepaper. ‘That, by calculations that have been prepared for me, is enough to kill eighty-four million people – or, if you like, the entire population of the British Isles, Canada and Australia, with ten million to spare – and this from the contents of just one reactor. There are, in the British Isles, at the present time, sixteen operating nuclear power stations, with a total of forty-two reactors – and I am excluding other nuclear establishments, such as fuel-reprocessing plants like Windscale. There are thirteen reactors in Canada, two hundred and four reactors in the United States. You will probably remember the fire at Windscale in 1957, which caused the release of a cloud of radio-isotopes into the atmosphere. As a result of this, a million gallons of milk from cows within a two-hundred square-mile radius had to be thrown away – and this was a very minor incident indeed. The locals report a greatly increased incidence of cancer in the region, but this has not been substantiated, as no records were kept.
‘During the past week, I have myself spoken to a number of eminent scientists in the nuclear energy industry, including Sir Isaac. Some are anti nuclear and some pro. I put to each the same question: What would be the immediate, the short-term and the long-term effects of a nuclear reactor being blown up? I asked them to concentrate on the three systems in use in this country: the magnox, the advanced gas-cooled reactors, and the pressurized-water reactors. We have only two of the latter at the present time – at Sizewell and at Huntspill Head – but it is the most commonly used system in the United States and France, and more will be built in this country.
‘Each of the ten men I spoke to prefaced their replies by saying that, basically, they had no real idea what would happen, and gave me educated guesses. I find that incredible. No real idea! There are few other man-made potential disasters the results of which could not be reasonably accurately predicted. The scientists said that the blowing up of a nuclear reactor would result in an uncontained disaster of a magnitude that would depend on force and type of explosion – whether it was caused by internal malfunction, or by a conventional bomb, or a nuclear device – and on the strength and direction of the wind, and the general weather conditions at the time.
‘If a crowded jumbo crashes into a town, everyone on board is likely to be killed, as is everyone within two hundred yards of the crash, but it would go no further than that. Similarly, a car careering off a road might kill the people on board, and anyone in its path, but the effects would go no further. Nor would a terrorist’s bomb in a street kill more than those people within the immediate vicinity. But with nuclear reactors, the situation would be quite different.
‘A massive range of permutations were fed into a computer at the Atomic Energy Research Commission, and this is what the machine came up with.’ Fifeshire paused for a moment, and relit his cigar. Then he picked up a computer print-out and read aloud. ‘“Worst conceivable accident: likely to be achieved only by sabotage with a nuclear explosive device. Assuming wind speed of fifteen miles per hour, there would be a cloud of radiation fifteen miles long and forty-five miles wide within one hour. In three hours it would be forty-five miles long and nine miles wide and would be lethal to anyone in this area. Further it would be almost certainly fatal for anyone to enter this area for at least four weeks, and this area would be permanently uninhabitable for at least one hundred years. In twenty-four hours the cloud would be three hundred and sixty miles long and eighty miles wi
de, and fifty per cent of the people in its path would die within ten years, if they were not evacuated for a very minimum period of at least one year. There would be long-term restrictions on agriculture, and dairy farming would be prohibited for ever in this area. The cloud would continue to expand and still be sufficiently dangerous to warrant, for a period of one to six months, the evacuation of the population in its path within a radius of between one thousand and two thousand miles.”’
Fifeshire put down the print-outs. ‘If we just take the first twenty-four hours: in this area, everyone would have to be evacuated for one year. The total size of this area is just under thirty thousand square miles. It may be of help to know, if you are trying to work out exactly what kind of area we are talking about, that the entire land mass of England, Scotland and Wales combined comes to only 89,038 square miles.’ He paused for a few moments. ‘These figures are not based purely on calculated estimates; they are also based on hard factual evidence. Data from previous instances of leakage of radiation, and from atomic blasts, was fed into the computer, including details of the nuclear-waste explosion that occurred at Kyshtym in the Urals in the winter of 1957. That was a small explosion, but it totally devastated an area of five hundred square miles.
‘Thousands of people died then, and thousands are still dying from the effects of the fall-out today. Ten years after the explosion, women who had lived nearby were still being advised to abort if they became pregnant, and today, over a quarter of a century later, massive signs on the north-south highway which runs through the entire region warn drivers to drive at maximum speed for thirty miles, to keep windows closed, and not to stop for any reason.
‘Also fed into the computer was data derived from the analysis of ash movements from volcanic eruptions during the past three decades. There are many recorded instances of volcanic ash pouring down thousands of miles away from the volcanoes,
‘This print-out is, I believe, a soundly researched document. It might, perhaps, be exaggerating the dangers; but, equally, it might be underestimating them. I know that Sir Isaac, in more than broad outline, agrees with it.’
Quoit nodded his head. He looked a good deal more compos mentis than he had a week ago after being freed from a portable chicken coop on the Illushyn.
‘In the event of the worst happening to a single reactor, a major portion of the United Kingdom would have to be evacuated, and evacuated within hours. This would be impossible. Air-raid shelters might be some solution, but air-raid shelter filter-systems cannot filter out all the very fine particles of fall-out that would come from a power station. Their filters would be effective against fall-out from nuclear bombs, but not as effective against nuclear reactor fall-out. The basic difference is that nuclear reactor fall-out is much finer. It actually dissolves into the air itself, making it very hard – in fact, impossible – for filtration systems to keep it out. Wherever air, however finely filtered, gets in, so will nuclear reactor fall-out. Only those places with their own internal air supplies would be completely protected. The second problem is that after a bomb attack the fall-out level would subside to the point where people could come back out into the open within a few weeks. But with reactor fall-out, this period would be very much longer. Within twenty-four hours downwind, they would have to stay in their shelters for a year. And in any event, we are only talking about a tiny minority who would have any shelter protection at all. For the majority, we would have an insurmountable problem in that nothing could be grown on massive areas of British soil for years. We know it is impossible to evacuate the population, but it may well be equally impossible to feed the people if they stay – and survive.
‘And this would be the result of blowing up one, just one, of the forty-two reactors in the sixteen nuclear power stations on this island.’ He tapped the ash off his cigar.
‘I have read out to you the worst that could happen. With conventional explosives, or with an explosion caused by malfunction due to sabotage, the radiation hazards would be considerably reduced. But we should think in terms of the worst, and if something less bad happens, we can regard it as a bonus. There are plenty of people who say it is not possible to blow up a reactor and cause a serious radiation leakage; so far as I am concerned, they are the direct descendants of those people who knew the Titanic could never sink.
‘It is my opinion, from the evidence that has been presented to me, that somewhere out beyond these walls people are plotting against one or more of our nuclear power stations – and not only against our power stations, but those of other countries as well. There are three nuclear power stations on the north coast of France. If any of these were blown up when there was a southerly wind, great tracts of this country would be in grave danger.
‘We cannot take the kidnapping of Sir Isaac by the Russians too seriously. We must examine all the possible motives, and take every possible step to safeguard ourselves.’
Everyone in the room nodded in assent. I looked at Quoit, and the strain showed in his face. From the time the van with the two men in it had pulled up beside him while he was walking his dog, to the time a man in a balaclava had stuck his head into the chicken coop in the hold of the Illushyn and said, ‘All right, Sir Isaac, you’re safe now!’, he had lived in a drugged half-world, with little conception of time, and none at all of place. Since arriving back in England, he had been under almost continuous hypnosis, as the MI5 interrogation team had attempted, as kindly and gently as they could – two things which didn’t come naturally to them – to prise from out of the deeper recesses of his mind descriptions of his captors, of where he was taken and held, of the making of the videotape, of the food he had eaten, of the taste of the water he had drunk, the crockery, the cutlery, right down to the name Thomas Crapper & Sons inscribed on the porcelain at the bottom of the lavatory bowl. He had produced very little that was of help; the only detail of his entire ordeal that he was able to recall clearly and accurately was the clucking noise of the chickens.
‘Do you have any idea, Sir Charles, what the Soviets’ motives might have been in kidnapping Sir Isaac?’ asked the Home Secretary.
‘There are a number of possibilities. The first is that the Russians simply want to stir up unrest, as they do from time to time. They often do this to distract Western attention from something that is going on inside the Soviet Union – a trial of dissidents, or a purge of some minority sect, something like that. But I don’t think it is so in this case.’
‘The television programme that the BBC put out has certainly stirred up unrest – the Energy Secretary has made my life merry hell for letting that go out.’
Fifeshire grinned. ‘You mean he actually had to answer questions about nuclear energy? I should think it did him some good. It’s about time, after two years in office, that he actually read a book on the subject.’ Fifeshire turned his eyes away from the Home Secretary, summarily dismissing him from his attention, and stared for a brief moment at the rest of us, one by one. ‘The second possibility is that the Russians are becoming concerned about the world supplies of uranium. We know that the Soviet Union has very large uranium reserves in the ground, but we are also beginning to learn, from intelligence sources, that because of its geographical locations, and its relatively low grade, much of it cannot be mined economically.
‘The Soviet Union has at the present time forty-seven operating nuclear reactors; in five years’ time, this figure will have trebled. They’re going to have to get their uranium from somewhere. Perhaps they feel that by stirring up anti-nuclear-energy fever in the West, they will effectively cause a reduction in the nuclear construction programme, leaving more uranium available for them.
‘But really, we’re just guessing at the moment what the Russians are up to, and trying to make sense of the new facts we have. The first information we had on this whole business that was in anyway tangible was from the Arab named Ahmed that Flynn met in the lavatory of the Royal Lancaster. But before he could really tell us much of value, the unfortunate
man was killed – not by Flynn, I should add, which does make a welcome change.’
There was a titter of laughter from everyone except the Home Secretary, who just glared at me. I wasn’t convinced I liked the image of me, as the Security Services’ hangman, that Fifeshire was cultivating.
‘The information this Arab gave Mr Flynn,’ Fifeshire continued, ‘was, firstly, that one of our operatives in Libya, who had penetrated a terrorist training camp, had been blown – and from the sound of it, probably captured and killed. Secondly, he mentioned the words “Operation Angel”. He said it was to do with nuclear power stations, that many countries were involved. He wasn’t terribly specific, was he, Flynn?’
‘No, sir. He said that many power stations would be blown up, presumably in many countries – but that was all he managed to get out.’
‘Couldn’t you have prevented him from being killed?’ asked Ross.
‘If I’d been sharing the same lavatory cubicle with him, I might have done,’ I said. I saw Fifeshire conceal a grin, and Ross glared at me.
‘The man who killed this Arab,’ continued Fifeshire, ‘fled in a car with three others. Due to a spot of carelessness on Flynn’s part, all four of them met an untimely death under the wheels of an articulated lorry.’
There was another titter from all except Kieran Ross. I had the distinct feeling I had not made a big hit with the Home Secretary.
‘All four men were from Libya. The Libyans are claiming that they were high-grade politicians and diplomats, but on looking into these claims, our sources suggest that they were nothing but a bunch of hit-men.’
I caught Fifeshire’s eye, and he winked at me. Sometimes, I decided, he wasn’t so bad.
‘As a result of this, we decided to take a very close look at the British nuclear energy industry – power stations and all other related areas. A short while after this incident, the controller of system safeguards at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, a man called Horace Whalley, was invited to spend a short holiday on a yacht in the South of France by none other than Deke Sleder, the German industrialist. Sleder is a man on whom we have always kept an eye. His business practices are nothing if not sharp, and his allegiances have from time to time been a trifle dubious. In the last two years, Sleder has made big strides into the nuclear energy business – not in this country, yet, I might add. Sleder was joined, on this jolly boating trip, by a total of a dozen men from five countries: from the United States, Canada, France and Spain, and the United Kingdom was represented by Mr Whalley. Judging by the bevvy of girls on board, it wasn’t just a working holiday.
