Taking the Heat

by Paul McDermott

  “My instincts scream there has to be some connection, somehow, but we’ve no hard, physical evidence to confirm this. We can’t allow ourselves the luxury of guesswork, either. We get one chance and one chance only to get this right.”

  “What’s happening locally, you say,” Brenda mused. “Dave, how long d’you reckon Eddie needs to arrive back home?”

  Joey and Errol looked at her blankly.

  “The friend of ours who had his holiday in France wrecked and did that detour through Wales?” Dave reminded Joey, who nodded in recollection and listened as Dave gave a potted summary of Eddie’s woes, finishing with, “Last we spoke, he was on the banks of the Dee, just about to cross back into England. He’s home by now, I imagine. Shall I call him?”

  “Can he keep his mouth shut?” Joey asked. “This is a matter of national security, and Groth’s paranoid. If I allow an unscreened civvy in on what we’re doing without his approval, he’ll string me up—or more likely, all of us.”

  Dave and Brenda exchanged the briefest of glances.

  “Eddie is Dave’s closest friend,” Brenda said, “and while I’ve always said there’s something about him…” She paused, then shook her head. “I won’t speak ill of anyone. It’s probably just me, anyway. I’d happily trust him in any situation, especially where sensitive issues are concerned. After all, he’s a banker. He’s used to dealing with confidential business.”

  “And he’s one of the good guys,” Dave added. “Not one of the chancers we’ve heard so much about recently. In fact, he told us the reason he took off on holiday was that he’d been given the bullet—probably because he’s too honest if you ask me—and he wanted some time to think and plan. He’s a bachelor, lives alone, never mentions any family, and now he’s no job to report back to, either. Considering the state the country’s in already, he’s ideally placed to drop off the map for a while and nobody would be any the wiser—at least in the short term. And I’m certain of this much. The Eddie I’ve known all my life is perfectly capable of keeping schtum on any subject.”

  Joey nodded. “Thanks for that, both of you—and especially you, Brenda. It must be difficult to admit there’s something of the night about a person and say in the same breath, ‘But I trust him.’ Believe me, that tells me a lot more about the man himself than you might think.”

  He glanced back at Dave. “This is what we’ll do. I’m not going to ask Groth for permission to bring your friend in on this. I’ll take the flak myself—if there is any. Yes, Dave. Call your friend. Find out where he is and what he’s doing at this very moment. If he hasn’t reached home yet, perhaps he could save time by coming straight here. He must have some clean clothes in the car if his hols were cut short, and we’ve got a laundry as well as a kitchen and plenty of beds. But in fairness, you’ll have to make it clear to him that once he’s here, he stays. That’s the only drawback of the Condition Red security level.”

  ***

  Outside the door was a narrow gravel track ending at an observation point bounded by a safety barrier between the River Mersey and the grass sward that was perhaps the length of a cricket pitch. Curving away from the hill, it had the effect of distracting the attention of a casual passer-by away from the unremarkable and apparently unused entrance to the bunker.

  Dave turned left, away from the river, and rounded the corner which led to the staff car park. Eddie had just arrived. He had his back to Dave and was removing his luggage from the car. Dave hailed him as he approached.

  “Have any trouble following our directions?”

  “Easy enough. I don’t trust satnav. I prefer to rely on my instincts to find my way around.”

  “I’ve a feeling this government facility isn’t listed on maps anyway, Eddie, and certainly not what lies below ground.”

  “Sounds very mysterious, Dave. You about to put a blindfold on me before you guide me through some sort of secret passage?”

  “No need for that. The place looks like it hasn’t been used for years.”

  Eddie said nothing when they rounded the corner and Joey waved them inside. He glanced all around to make sure they weren’t being observed.

  Back in the op centre, Brenda had a fresh pot of coffee waiting.

  “I gather Dave’s explained why you’re with us for the duration?”

  Eddie nodded. “I imagine he’s also told you there’s nobody waiting for me at home—and no guarantee I’ll be able to continue to pay the mortgage unless another job comes up for grabs pretty soon.” He shrugged. “Maybe I can do something useful here.”

  “What we need more than anything else is a first-hand account of the conditions outside this weather station. There are limits to what we can work out from reading instruments, no matter how sensitive or accurate. Or, as Dave cynically puts it, as expensive as those we have to work with. You might not be a geologist or a trained met. expert, but even the smallest details of things you’ve noticed as you drove home could give us vital clues as to what’s happening right now, help us understand the situation developing, maybe even guess what might happen next.”

  Eddie sat back in his chair and sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. His brow furrowed as he focused on a completely random point somewhere in mid-air, recalling salient moments from the long haul north, perhaps, or maybe a page from one of the maps now scattered on his dashboard and passenger seat.

  He refocused and roused himself.

  “It’s like I said. There were times while I was driving through France when I felt exactly like Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoons—like it was personal, and the rain was falling on me and me alone.” He camped up a grotesque over-the-top sulky lower lip, then grinned as he continued. “It also gave me a new theory about why we call ’em Frogs. There’s bugger all else could survive in their climate.”

  For a split second, Brenda wondered if she ought to consider this politically inadvisable comment as a racial slur. She still had reservations about Eddie which she couldn’t quite define, but Dave’s eyes sparkled, and Joey chuckled; the moment had passed. Perhaps she was being too hard on him. Ease off, give him a chance. We’ve got to get along as a team in a sealed bunker for the foreseeable future. The last thing you need right now is to create unnecessary stress and discord.

  “The French aren’t exactly trying to win any popularity contests recently, anyway,” Dave offered, and even Brenda found herself nodding in wholehearted agreement.

  Eddie opened a shoulder bag he’d held on to when he stashed the rest of his luggage in a convenient bedroom. “I collected a full range of newspapers on the way home—I didn’t know how long you’ve been isolated from what’s happening in the outside world. There’s a few French dailies, and I’ve got every UK national published today.”

  “That’s useful,” Dave said. “The BBC News Channel has become a tad institutionalised in recent years. Sometimes I get the feeling they’ve become a Government mouthpiece of sorts. That should probably be spelt lowercase. It doesn’t seem to matter which party has a majority.”

  Brenda stirred. “Please, let’s not get into yah-boo politics. That’s all they seem to write about in the newspapers, and it bores me stiff.”

  “Point taken, sweetheart,” Dave said. He knew how his wife felt about this subject. “We can leaf through the papers we have and pick out anything we can find which sheds some light on the climate, the weather and such like. Any articles which wander off-topic into opinions or political point-scoring can be binned. Agreed?”

  “We’ve enough on our plates without going looking for more,” Joey said, reaching for the paper on top of the pile, which happened to be a Daily Mail. Dave grinned.

  “We could probably bin the whole of that paper, with the possible exception of the horse racing results, but never mind. Let’s see what the Telegraph has to offer.”

  Brenda was quite happy to be involved in filtering out useful articles and up-to-date information and picked up one of the French papers. She had studied French at university an
d still read French fashion magazines from time to time to keep her language skills up to the mark.

  There were a modest number of articles that satisfied the agreed criteria. These were deposited in a metal in-tray, and after being checked a second time by a different pair of eyes, the remainders of each newspaper were cleared to one side.

  Brenda was restless. Something was missing from the Big Picture they were trying to piece together.

  “Would it be worth putting all these events in some sort of order. A timeline, perhaps? The reports seem to be coming from every possible direction. There might be no connection between them at all.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Joey said. “Everything we’ve logged so far is time-dated. Give me a minute.” He punched a few keystrokes and sat back to let the computer do the hard work of cross-referencing the data on file.

  The first listing on the screen included a couple of items none of them had considered, which were not amongst those they’d plucked from the newspapers.

  “This one’s a fair bit outside the time frame we’re working with,” Dave said.

  “I remember it, though. I was Stateside at the time,” Errol drawled. “It made a helluva mess, and the lawsuits look like bankrupting a couple major players.”

  The reference was to a pipeline disaster off the coast of Haiti in April 2010.

  “It can only be something in the archives downloaded by someone or other at an earlier date. I never even considered the possibility of researching our in-house historical data, but there’s probably a lot of gen there we can access if we need it.”

  Joey’s eyes gleamed at the thought, but he scrolled on to avoid the possibility of being sidetracked. “Seems the jury’s still out on whether it was human error which caused the pipelines to rupture or a tragic natural disaster. The Northern Hemisphere has just been through the warmest winter since records began—over one hundred and forty years ago.”

  “I remember seeing daffodils poking through the snow in Calderstones Park in January,” Brenda chipped in. “Now that was weird.”

  “The next item, however, is one we did log ourselves. Thank you, Brenda, for clipping this account of the storms that chased Eddie all the way through France.”

  “And from the other direction,” Dave added. “Up north, not just one but two eruptions from the same volcano in Iceland which hasn’t caused any problems for…?”

  “Hundreds of years, Dave. They even thought they could harness its power and put it to some use.”

  “Instead of which, we had a month or so of total disruption of all air traffic throughout Europe.”

  Joey nodded. “Let’s look at the problems further afield. The last few months have been one catastrophe after another in the Southern Hemisphere. Storms and flooding in Australia. Two severe quakes in New Zealand soon after. And the worst of ’em all, the tsunami which hit the east coast of Japan and took out a nuclear plant. We may never know how many people were killed and made homeless.”

  A sad silence settled on the room. None of them had been personally affected by the tragic events in Japan, but the sheer scale of the devastation had been mind-boggling, and they wouldn’t have been normal human beings if they’d reacted in any other manner.

  Joey reached into a drawer on his desk and pulled out a handful of blank templates. Dave recognised them as large-scale Mercator projections, with the familiar shapes of the major landmasses of the world spread in the usual 2D representation, which he always thought looked slightly distorted or stretched.

  Joey peeled one off the pile and laid it out. It was big enough to use as a wall chart, covering most of his desk. Using a metre ruler and a freshly sharpened pencil, he began plotting lines on the map, taking coordinates from one or other of his scribbled notes.

  “I’m looking at the readings we have from the Southern Hemisphere events,” he explained to nobody in particular, as if thinking aloud while he worked. “These vectors aren’t exact—nobody could navigate the Pacific Ocean from them—but they ought to give us a good general sense of where and when the tides and other underground disturbances have struck. Most important is some guidance of the direction of travel, where they started from, where they finished up.”

  “Are you looking for a common cause, a pattern of some sort?” Eddie asked.

  Joey shrugged. “As if we could be that lucky. In an ideal research-lab world, that’s what I’d be looking for. In the real world, however, that just don’t happen. There may be something interesting, though. Look at this.”

  He bent closer and enhanced two of the first lines he’d drawn with two different coloured felt markers. They crossed on a vacant stretch of open water with nothing obvious in the immediate vicinity.

  “Forget about the times for the moment. They’re more of a distraction than a help. But look at the distance travelled from that point to where they reach the coastlines, northeast in Japan and southwest at New Zealand. What if some powerful force originating somewhere out there were to be the cause of both tsunami and earthquakes?”

  Errol padded across and studied the map.

  “I’m not a navigator nor a weather expert, but I can tell you, that’s a lonely stretch of ocean. The only speck of land big enough to put up anything bigger than a tent is Guam. I did some exploratory drilling out that-a-way several years ago, but we didn’t stay there too long.”

  “Why’s that? Superstitious sailors, here be dragons, or maybe mermaids with seductive smiles luring you?”

  “Sorry to disappoint, but it was boring old practical considerations. It’s the deepest part of the seas, anywhere. The extraction of any oil reserves we might have found would have been too difficult and expensive to make it worthwhile. It would never have been an economic feasibility.”

  “Depth. Errol, that’s something I haven’t even thought about in my calcs.”

  Joey was suddenly busy again, manipulating three or four different calculators and scribbling hieroglyphics nobody else could have interpreted as he worked.

  “Dave, there are some maps in that end cabinet over there. Find me a world map—one that’s labelled ‘topographical’—so I can cross-reference the depths of the oceans. We may be on to something here.”

  There was nothing practical for any of them to do at that moment or for however long it might take Joey to translate the data into a series of vector lines on the world map projection.

  Brenda wandered around, collecting mugs and plates. Dave took the opportunity to start a fresh brew of NATO-issue coffee. Errol caressed his cheroot case and replaced it in his inner pocket with a pang of regret. He wasn’t going to smoke in a closed environment, where the air supply had to be cleansed and recirculated. To distract himself, he glanced at the nearest TV monitor, showing the twenty-four-hour BBC News Channel. A ‘Breaking News’ banner marched across the bottom of the screen and grabbed his attention immediately.

  Two oil rigs 150 miles offshore from Aberdeen evacuated while gas leaks are investigated. An aerial shot of what appeared to be a calm, orderly evacuation process accompanied the report. Errol looked around, decided not to disturb Joey, and caught Dave’s eye.

  “Come and look at this. I might be getting paranoid, but this could be relevant.”

  Dave brought two coffees with him, passing one to Errol as he sat down.

  “Aberdeen? North Sea rigs?”

  “I haven’t been on that particular rig in the Elgin field, but I’ve spent some time on a couple of others. They’re all dealing with similar downhole conditions, and they tend to be set up in much the same manner. It all depends on the cause of the gas leak—if it’s confirmed that there is a gas leak, of course—and how they decide to deal with it. If it’s a mechanical failure or down to human error, there are, or certainly ought to be, established procedures. On the other hand, if the leak is the result of an unexpected fault in the seabed…”

  Dave didn’t need to be an expert geologist to work out the implications of Errol’s incomplete sentence
. As they looked at each other, a phone rang. Dave was closest and picked it up. Conscious of security restrictions, he waited for the caller to speak first.

  “Aberdeen. Doctor Hart—”

  “One moment, I’ll fetch him.”

  Joey wasn’t so deeply engrossed in his calculations and reacted immediately on hearing his name.

  “Caller won’t identify himself, but he asked for you and says you gave him this number.”

  “Yes, I know who that will be, and I’ve a shrewd idea of why he doesn’t want to give his name to anyone he doesn’t know. Listen, I’m not being rude, but give me a few minutes alone. Errol, you can smoke in any dorm where there’s no bedding on the bunk frames. You don’t need to go outside.”

  ***

  Half an hour later, the red internal phone on the restroom wall shrilled. Dave had been expecting the call but still leapt out of his seat like a startled rabbit. Errol had been in an adjacent room, chain-smoking cheroots, but burst through the door as Dave collected himself and answered it.

  “Okay. On our way.”

  He replaced the handset and relayed the message.

  “Joey’s got some fresh news, and it’s not good. We’d better go and find out.”

  Joey was still plotting vectors on a map and added one more line before pushing the chart to one side and giving them his full attention.

  “My source in Aberdeen is one of our leading geologists. He’s not prone to wild conjecture, and he knows what he’s talking about. There aren’t many details as yet about the gas leak reported on the news, other than that it’s located one hundred and fifty miles offshore, everyone’s been evacuated and there were no casualties. Nobody can be sure until they’ve had a chance to investigate the rig, but they’re drilling three thousand feet down and that’s going to take some time.

  “My colleague has run the available figures through a set of hoops of his own devising and says he is all but certain that the cause of the leak is a shift in the bedrock, or rather the layers of rock under the sea. He reckons they’ve been disturbed by a tremor passing from north to south at a depth of perhaps five thousand feet below the seabed, where you’d need to have equipment already installed to record any seismic activity.”