Athabasca

by Alistair MacLean

  “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 emergenc
y 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.”

  4

  It was half-past two in the afternoon, Alaskan time, almost dark, but with good visibility, a ten-knot wind and a temperature of — 4°F −36° below—when the twin-jet touched down again on one of the Prudhoe Bay air-strips. Brady, Dermott and Mackenzie had moved quickly after receipt of the message from Houston. They had driven back to Fort McMurray, packed essentials, which in Brady’s case consisted primarily of three flasks, said goodbye to Jean and Stella and driven straight to the airport. Brady was asleep when they entered Yukon airspace, and Mackenzie dozed off shortly afterwards. Only Dermott remained awake, trying to puzzle out why the enemy, in carrying out what they said would be—and, in fact proved to be—no more than a token demonstration, should have found it necessary to kill in the process.

  As the jet came to a halt, a brightly-lit minibus pulled up alongside and slid open a front door. Brady, third out of the aircraft, was first into the bus. The others followed him in and the door was quickly closed. As the bus moved off the man who had ushered them aboard came and sat down beside them. Aged anywhere between forty and fifty, he was a broad, chunky man with a broad, chunky face. He looked tough but he also looked as if he could be humorous—although he had nothing worth smiling about at that moment.

  “Mr Brady, Mr Dermott, Mr Mackenzie,” he said, in the unmistakably, flat accent of one who had been born within commuting distance of Boston. “Welcome. Mr Finlayson sent me to meet you—as you can imagine he’s right now practically a prisoner in the master operations control centre My name’s Sam Bronowski.”

  Dermott said: “Security chief.”

  “For my sins.” He smiled. “You’ll be Mr Dermott, the man who’s going to take over from me?”

  Dermott looked at him. “Who the hell said that?”

  “Mr Finlayson. Or words to that effect.”

  “I’m afraid Mr Finlayson must be slightly overwrought.”

  Bronowski smiled again. “Well, now, that wouldn’t surprise me either. He’s been talking to London and I think he suffered some damage to his left ear.”

  Brady said: “We’re not out to take over from anyone. That’s not how we work. But unless we get co-operation—I mean total co-operation—we might as well have stayed home. For instance, Mr Dermott here wanted to talk to you right away. The chairman of your company himself had guaranteed me complete co-operation. Yet Finlayson refused point-blank to co-operate with Dermott and Mackenzie.”

  “I’d have come at once if I’d known,” said Bronowski quickly. “Unlike Mr Finlayson, I’ve been a security man all my life, and I know who you are and the reputation you have. In a set-up like this I can do with all the expert help I can get. Go easy with him, will you? This isn’t his line of country. He treats the pipeline as his favourite daughter. This is a new experience for him and he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t stalling—just playing it safe until he’d consulted on the highest level.”

  “You don’t need lessons in sticking up for your boss, do you?”

  “I’m being fair to him. I hope you will be, too. You can imagine how he feels. Says that if he hadn’t been so ornery those two men up at Pump Station Four might be alive now.”

  “That’s plain daft,” Mackenzie said. “I appreciate his feelings, but this would have happened if there had been fifty Dermotts and fifty Mackenzies here.”

  “When,” Brady asked, “are we going out there?”

  “Mr Finlayson asked if you and your colleagues would come first to see him and Mr Black. The helicopter is ready to go any moment after that.”

  “Black?”

  “General manager, Alaska.”

  “You been out at the station?”

  “I was the man who found them. Rather, I was the first man on the scene after the attack. Along with my section chief, Tim Houston.”

  “You fly your own plane?”

  “Yes. Not this time, though. That section of the Brooks Range is like the mountains
on the moon. Helicopter. We’ve been making a continuous check on the pump stations and the remote gate valves since this damned threat came through, and we’d stayed at Station Five last night. We were just approaching Gate Four, a mile away, I’d reckon, when we saw this damned great explosion.”

  “Saw it?”

  “You know, oil smoke and flames. You mean, did we hear anything? You never do in a helicopter. You don’t have to—not when you see the roof take off into the air. So we put down and got out, me with a rifle, Tim with two pistols. Wasting our time. The bastards had gone. Being oilmen yourselves, you’ll know it requires quite a group of men and a complex of buildings to provide the care and maintenance for a couple of 13,500 horsepower aircraft-type turbines, not to mention all the monitoring and communications they have to handle.

  “It was the pump room itself that was on fire, not too badly, but badly enough for Tim and me not to go inside without fire extinguishers. We’d just started looking when we heard shouting come from a store room. It was locked, naturally, but the key had been left in the lock. Poulson—he’s the boss—came running out with his men. They had the extinguishers located and the fire out in three minutes. But it was too late for the two engineers inside—they’d come down the previous day from Prudhoe Bay to do a routine maintenance job on one of the turbines.”

  “They were dead?”

  “Very.” Bronowski’s face registered no emotion. “They were brothers. Fine boys. Friends of mine; and Tim’s.”

  “No possibility of accidental death? From the effects of the explosion?”

  “Explosions don’t shoot you. They were pretty badly charred, but charring doesn’t hide a bullet-wound between the eyes.”

  “You searched the area?”

  “Certainly. Conditions weren’t ideal—it was dark, with a little snow falling. I thought I saw helicopter ski marks on a wind-blown stretch of rock. The others weren’t so sure. On the remote off-chance I contacted Anchorage and asked them to alert every public and private airport and strip in the State. Also to have radio and TV stations ask the public to report hearing or sighting a helicopter in an unusual place. I haven’t but one hope in ten thousand that the request will bring any results.”