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‘It means that if those two men have families they should be under immediate police guard.’ Mahler, Ryder could see, wasn’t quite with him so he went on: ‘If those two men have been kidnapped then it’s with a special purpose in mind. Their co-operation will be required. Wouldn’t you co-operate a damn sight faster if you saw someone with a pair of pliers removing your wife’s fingernails one by one?’
Possibly because he didn’t have a wife the thought had clearly not occurred to Lieutenant Mahler, but, then, thinking was not his forte. To his credit, once the thought had been implanted he wasted no time. He spent the next two minutes on the telephone.
Jeff was grim-faced, edgy, his voice soft but urgent. ‘Let’s get out there fast.’
‘Easy. Don’t go off half-cocked. The time for hurry is past. It may come again but right now it’s not going to help any.’
They waited in silence until Mahler replaced his phone. Ryder said: ‘Who reported the break-in?’
‘Ferguson. Security chief. Day off, but his house is wired into the San Ruffino alarm system. He came straight down.’
‘He did what? Ferguson lives thirty miles out in the hills in the back of nowhere. Why didn’t he use his phone?’
‘His phone had been cut, that’s why.’
‘But he has a police band car radio–’
‘That had been attended to also. So had the only three public phone boxes on the way in. One was at a garage–owner and his mechanic had been locked up.’
‘But there’s an alarm link to this office.’
‘There was.’
‘An inside job?’
‘Look, Ferguson called only two minutes after he had arrived there.’
‘Anybody hurt?’
‘No violence. All the staff locked up in the same room.’
‘The sixty-four-million-dollar question.’
‘Theft of nuclear fuel? That’ll take time to establish, according to Ferguson.’
‘You going out there?’
‘I’m expecting company.’ Mahler looked unhappy.
‘I’ll bet you are. Who’s out there now?’
‘Parker and Davidson.’
‘We’d like to go out and join them.’
Mahler hesitated, still unhappy. He said, defensively: ‘What do you expect to find that they won’t? They’re good detectives. You’ve said so yourself.’
‘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?’
