Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Caught unawares, reception took a few minutes to find a suitable minder to escort DI Gorrie to Horace’s office. When he arrived, he noted that the pile of papers had grown a bit, as had the smell of furniture polish. Horace himself remained unchanged, not quite dismissive, yet not what one might call polite either.

  “I can’t recall Ewie Cameron calling me. You can check the diary with my secretary,” Horace told him. He held a fountain pen in his hand, and every time he answered a question he glanced down at the paper at the top of his desk, applying another check.

  “Perhaps I will do that,” said Gorrie.

  “Mackay called him concerning the plant?”

  “I didnae know that he did.”

  “He didn’t bring anything to me,” said Horace. “No problem was reported.”

  Gorrie nodded. There might be many reasons Mackay wouldn’t talk to Horace about a problem, starting with the fact that he thought Horace was involved.

  “I might talk to your secretary then, and Mackay’s,” said Gorrie.

  “Please,” said Horace, who now put his head down practically onto the desk, checking off a succession of blanks on the paper in a wild flurry.

  The secretary had not recorded any meeting with Mackay during the week before his death, and according to the records they hadn’t spoken outside of regular staff meetings since he had come on. Gorrie formed no judgment of that, just as he did not hold Tora Grant’s frown against her when he appeared at her doorway. Mackay had not been replaced and she was obviously overworked trying to help handle some of the paperwork. Gorrie’s first request—for a roster of the department—was met with an even deeper frown.

  “Addie at Personnel,” she said, digging her fingernails into her folded arms.

  Gorrie nodded. “Miss Grant, what is the procedure for removing waste from the reactor?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know all the steps. The procedure—you’d have to talk to the men. It’s not like taking out the trash, Inspector. Spent fuel has to be carefully handled. The regulations are enormous. It has to be cooled in one of the ponds near the reactor. The spent rods stay quite long—years.”

  “Had there been a removal since Mr. Mackay arrived?”

  “I can check the records, but I believe the last was eight months. There’s no set schedule. You see, there are so few places for it to be reprocessed, and transport is quite a procedure. The spent rods have to travel in special containers, and can only be taken aboard a special ship.”

  “Who owns the ship?”

  Grant frowned, but pulled over the keyboard to her computer. Punching a few keys, she brought up an address book.

  “BNFL. British Nuclear Fuels plc. The amount of material is very small, you understand; it’s the way it has to be transported that complicates things. Sellafield is typically where it would be sent.”

  “What happened to the man who held Mr. Mackay’s job before his arrival?”

  “Matthew Franklin transferred to UKAE—the energy commission.”

  “Hard worker?”

  “I couldn’t say. I came on with Mr. Mackay.”

  Gorrie paused, considering how to proceed. The secretary pushed a piece of hair up at the side of her head behind her ear, her whole body heaving with a sigh. She seemed a good sort, slightly bewildered by the job and loss of her boss, he thought. She had a round, attractive face, but in five years, maybe less, her looks would muddle into a sort of plainness as her hips rounded and her legs grew thick. Gorrie thought of his own wife, which made him sympathetic toward the girl.

  “Do you know who Ewie Cameron is?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Did Mr. Mackay speak of any government official?”

  Another shake.

  “Would he have?”

  “The plant manager would generally handle any important matter, I believe,” said Miss Grant.

  Mackay had not kept an appointment book, and a look back at the department phone records did not turn up Cameron’s number, nor any besides Cardha Duff’s that seemed extraordinary. The secretary’s sighs grew as she showed Gorrie through the forms and papers Mackay had been working on before he died. To Gorrie, nothing was amiss—or everything was; he couldn’t tell.

  “Specialty Transport,” he said finally, “does the name mean anything?”

  “Trucking firm that handles the spent fuel and some of the items that are bulky,” said the secretary.

  “Are there reports here that pertain to it?”

  “The traffic file,” she said, going to the files and thumbing through.

  Gorrie took the folder and opened it on the desk. Four sheets sat at the top of the folder, out of order; they had been photocopied from other reports, which themselves were copies of thicker filings. The pages documented pickup times, routes, transmittals; all had blanks in the areas for “Incidents” and “Comments.”

  “They record when the waste was picked up and when it was transferred to the next shipper,” said the secretary. “The main copies are filed with the commission.”

  “UKAE.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would Mr. Mackay be looking through them?” Gorrie asked.

  “To help plan for another shipment of spent waste, if he was. Would you mind terribly, Inspector, if I went back to work?”

  Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard—the woman Ed . . .”

  “Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.

  Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.

  Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark—but the truck would have crossed over it.

  So that’s what Mackay had found.

  Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.

  NINE

  93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH

  MARCH 12, 2002

  MARKED AGAINST THE SUN’S 4.5 BILLION YEARS OF existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.

  A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers—and 85 percent of its radius—turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.

  The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:

  Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places . . . assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.

  As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks—wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun
’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.

  These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.

  Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

  We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun—an area ten times larger than our planet—and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.

  On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.

  Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.

  Nothing extraordinary.

  As the time line of human history goes, it was without documented scientific precedent.

  Later, debate would arise over a suggestion by some scholars that the last comparable episode occurred in the summer of 480 B.C., a year for which Chinese, Korean, Babylonian, Celtic, and Mesoamerican records—including glyph-dated early Mayan stelae—present what has been interpreted as correlative evidence of rapidly changing sunspot patterns, and brilliant, tempestuous displays of the northern and southern lights many thousands of miles from the poles. That is the same summer King Leonidas I and his three hundred Spartan warriors made their heroic resistance against thousands of invading Persians at the Hot Gates, a narrow mountain pass between the Aegean coast and central Greece, only to be undone by a local betrayer, who showed the Persian force a route that led them over the mountains to a rear assault upon the defenders, killing them almost to a man.

  A coincidence? Likely so. Although the oracle Leonidas consulted before deciding to hold the pass is said to have been influenced by his interpretation of some obscure cosmic portent.

  Such speculation aside, it remains doubtful that a magnetic storm of even the greatest severity would have had a consequential impact on affairs in Greece or elsewhere in that ancient era.

  This was, after all, many centuries before civilization became dependent on the telecommunications networks and electrical power grids that would be thrown into utter chaos by its shock waves.

  Cold Corners Base, Antarctica

  In more than one sense, Pete Nimec’s trip to the hallway rest room was another step up the learning curve he’d foreseen at McMurdo.

  Nimec supposed it was partly his own fault. The three or four cups of coffee he’d drunk in Willy’s passenger lounge had worked their way through him soon after the Herc was off-deck, but a peek behind the shower curtain enclosing its cargo section’s makeshift latrine—a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with an attached funnel for a urinal, and a loathsome, sloshing plastic honey bucket—persuaded him to try to hold out until after he reached Cold Corners. And he’d succeeded, asking Megan to show him where he could make a pit stop on the way to her office.

  Inside the unisex rest room’s single stall, Nimec had found tugging himself out from under his boxers, long johns, flannel-lined blue jeans, and various overlapped shirts an uncomfortable exercise in patience and control. But he managed to get his business done without embarrassment.

  Now he filled the sink, soaped his hands under the automatic dispenser, and washed them in the plugged basin, complying with a sign above the sink that said its taps weren’t to be left running while you cleaned up. Nimec was about to splash his face with some fresh, cold water when he read the second item on the extensive list of dos and don’ts, and discovered the limit was one basinful per person. So much for that.

  He dried his hands with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash receptacle, went to the door. A coin-operated condom machine was on the wall beside it. He paused and checked the sign. Unsurprisingly, the machine’s contents weren’t rationed.

  Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.

  He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.

  “I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”

  She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.

  “That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.

  He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”

  “Old Antarctic Explorers . . . longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”

  “And exactly how’s that supposed to have something to do with their attitude?”

  “Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”

  “Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”

  Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.

  He got the smile completely.

  “Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics . . . the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers—”

  “And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.

  “One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”

  “You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”

  “Worded it myself.”

  “Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”

  They were both smiling now.

  “Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”

  Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Meg
an’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent. Shaped like a giant manta ray. The other showed the rugged topography of the Dry Valleys. There were three colored pins—red, yellow, blue—marking different points in the latter.

  Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic, letting the world know she was playing to win with a pricey designer suit and a smart wedge-cut hairstyle that just brushed the tops of her shoulders. Now her hair went tumbling loosely down over bib overalls and a maroon twill shirt, framing her face with thick auburn waves, highlighting her large emerald eyes like the deepest of sunsets over a wood of Irish pines. Nimec supposed she could dress herself in sackcloth and still be as lovely as ever.

  He sat there a while, looking at her. He could think of a dozen matters they had to discuss, every one of them pressing, every one relating to the incidents that had brought him so far from home. But he was uncertain how to approach the subject he really wanted to talk about first.

  “So,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  She shrugged, her hands on the desk.

  “Cold,” she said. “And generally busy.”

  “How about when you aren’t busy?”

  “Cold and lonely.”

  Nimec gave her a little nod. There had been photographs in her San Jose office. Vases with fresh flowers from the shop down the street. And abundant sunlight.

  “I hear people come to Antarctica to find themselves,” he said. “Or reinvent themselves. It’s being away from everything they know. And the emptiness. I suppose they must feel like they’re filling it in. Writing their lives over on a blank page.”

  Megan shrugged again.

  “That may be true for some,” she said.

  “And you?”

  She paused a beat, but otherwise did a good job of seeming unaffected by the question.

  “There’s no place else like this on earth. It’s magnificent. Beautiful in its way. It gives you the room and time to contemplate. But I’m doing this because Gord needed me here to get our operations off the ground.”