Goodbye California - Страница 5

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‘We have three in this country, none located in this State. The British and French have one apiece. The Russians aren’t saying. China is reported to have one in Langchow in Kansu Province.’

‘It can be done by high-speed centrifuges, spinning at such a speed that the marginally heavier U-238 is flung to the outside. But this process would use hundreds of thousands of centrifuges and the cost would be mind-boggling. I don’t know whether it’s ever been done. The South Africans claim to have discovered an entirely new process, but they aren’t saying what and US scientists are sceptical. The Australians say they’ve discovered a method by using laser beams. Again, we don’t know, but if it were possible a small group — and they’d all have to be top-flight nuclear physicists — could make U-235 undetected. But why bother going to such impossible lengths when you can just go to the right place and steal the damned stuff ready-made just as they did here this afternoon?’

Ryder said: ‘How is it all stored?’

‘In ten-litre steel bottles each containing seven kilograms of U-235, in the form of either an oxide or metal, the oxide in the form of a very fine brown powder, the metal in little lumps known as “broken buttons”. The bottles are placed in a cylinder five inches wide that’s braced with welded struts in the centre of a perfectly ordinary fifty-five-gallon steel drum. I needn’t tell you why the bottles are held in suspension in the airspace of the drum — stack them all together in a drum or box and you’d soon reach the critical mass where fissioning starts.’

Jeff said: ‘This time it goes bang?’

‘Not yet. Just a violent irradiation which would have a very nasty effect for miles around, especially on human beings. Drum plus bottle weighs about a hundred pounds, so is easily moveable. Those drums are called “bird-cages”, though Lord knows why: they don’t look like any bird-cage I’ve ever seen.’

Ryder said: ‘How is this transported?’

‘Long distance by plane. Shorter hauls by common carrier.’

‘Common carrier?’

‘Any old truck you can lay your hands on.’ Ferguson sounded bitter.

‘How many of those cages go in the average truck shipment?’

‘That hi-jacked San Diego truck carries twenty.’

‘One hundred and forty pounds of the stuff. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘A man could make himself a fair collection of nuclear bombs from that lot. How many drums were actually taken?’

‘Twenty.’

‘A full load for the van?’

‘Yes.’

‘So they didn’t touch your plutonium?’

‘More bad news, I’m afraid. When they were being held at gunpoint but before they were locked up some of the staff heard the sound of another engine. A diesel. Heavy. Could have been big — no one saw it.’ The telephone on his desk rang. He reached for it and listened in silence except for the occasional ‘who?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ He hung up.

‘Still more bad news?’ Jablonsky asked.

‘Don’t see it makes any difference one way or another. The hi-jacked van’s been found. Empty, of course, except for the driver and guard trussed up like turkeys in the back. They say they were following a furniture van round a blind corner when it braked so sharply that they almost ran into it. Back doors of the van opened and the driver and the guard decided to stay just where they were. They say they didn’t feel like doing much else with two machine-guns and a bazooka levelled six feet from their windscreen.’

‘An understandable point of view,’ Jablonsky said. ‘Where were they found?’

‘In a quarry, up a disused side road. Couple of young kids.’

‘And the furniture van is still there?’

‘As you say, Sergeant. How did you know?’

‘Do you think they’d have transferred their cargo into an identifiable van and driven off with it? They’d have a second plain van.’ Ryder turned to Dr Jablonsky. ‘As you were about to say about this plutonium—’

‘Interesting stuff and if you’re a nuclear bomb-making enthusiast it’s far more suitable for making an atom bomb than uranium although it would call for a greater deal of expertise. Probably call for the services of a nuclear physicist.’

‘A captive physicist would do as well?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They — the villains — took a couple of visiting physicists with them this afternoon. From San Diego and Los Angels, I believe they were.’

‘Professor Burnett and Dr Schmidt? That’s a ludicrous suggestion. I know both men well, intimately, you might say. They are men of probity, men of honour. They’d never co-operate with the blackguards who stole this stuff.’

Ryder sighed. ‘My regard for you is high, Doctor, so I’ll only say that you lead a very sheltered life. Men of principle? Decent men?’

‘Our regard is mutual so I’ll just content myself with saying that I don’t have to repeat myself.’

‘Men of compassion, no doubt?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘They took my wife, and a stenographer—’

‘Julie Johnson.’

‘Julie Johnson. When our hi-jacking thieves start feeding those ladies through a meat grinder what do you think is going to win out — your friends’ high principles or their compassion?’

Jablonsky said nothing. He just lost a little colour.

Ferguson coughed in a sceptical fashion, which is a difficult thing to do, but in his line of business he’d had a lot of practice. ‘And I’d always thought you were devoid of imagination, Sergeant. That’s stretching things a bit, surely.’

‘Is it? As security chief it’s your job to vet everybody applying for a job here. This stenographer, Julie. What’s her background?’

‘Typist making a living. Shares a small flat, nothing fancy, with two other girls. Drives a beat-up Volkswagen. Parents dead.’

‘Not a millionairess doing the job for kicks?’

‘Kicks. No chance. A nice girl, but nothing special there.’

Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘So. A stenographer’s pay-cheque. A sergeant’s pay-cheque. A patrol-man’s pay-cheque. Maybe you think they’re going to hold those ladies to ransom for a million dollars each? Maybe just to rest their eyes on after a long day at the nuclear bench?’ Jablonsky said nothing. ‘The meat grinder. You were talking about this plutonium.’

‘God, man, have you no feelings?’

‘Time and a place for everything. Right now a little thinking, a little knowledge might help more.’

‘I suppose.’ Jablonsky spoke with the restrained effort of a man whose head is trying to make his heart see sense. ‘Plutonium — Plutonium 239, to be precise. Stuff that destroyed Nagasaki. Synthetic — doesn’t exist in nature. Man-made — we Californians had the privilege of creating it. Unbelievably toxic — a cobra’s bite is a thing of joy compared to it. If you had it in an aerosol in liquid form with freon under pressure — no one has as yet got around to figuring out how to do this but they will, they will — you’d have an indescribably lethal weapon on your hands. A couple of squirts of this into a crowded auditorium, say, with a couple of thousand people, and all you’d require would be a couple of thousand coffins.

‘It’s the inevitable by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor. The plutonium, you understand, is still inside the uranium fuel rods. The rods are removed from the reactor and chopped up—.’

‘Who does the chopping? Not a job I’d fancy myself.’

‘I don’t know whether you would or not. First chop and you’d be dead. Done by remote-controlled guillotines in a place we call the “canyon”. Nice little place with five-foot walls and five-foot-thick windows. You wouldn’t want to go inside. The cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid then washed with various reactive chemicals to separate the plutonium from the uranium and other unwanted radioactive fission products.’

‘How’s this plutonium stored?’

‘Plutonium nitrate, actually. About ten litres of it goes into a stainless steel flask, about fifty inches high by five in diameter. That works out about two and a half kilograms of pure plutonium. Those flasks are even more easily handled than the uranium drums and quite safe if you’re careful.’

‘How much of this stuff do you require to make a bomb?’

‘No one knows for sure. It is believed that it is theoretically possible although at the moment practically impossible to make a nuclear device no bigger than a cigarette. The AEC puts the trigger quantity at two kilograms. It’s probably an over-estimate. But you could for sure carry enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb in a lady’s purse.’

‘I’ll never look at a lady’s purse with the same eyes again. So that’s a bomb flask?’

‘Easily.’

‘Is there much of this plutonium around?’

‘Too much. Private companies have stock-piled more plutonium than there is in all the nuclear bombs in the world.’

Ryder lit a Gauloise while he assimilated this. ‘You did say what I thought you did say?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are they going to do with this stuff?’

‘That’s what the private companies would like to know. The half-life of this plutonium is about twenty-six thousand years. Radioactively, it’ll still be lethal in a hundred thousand years. Quite a legacy we’re leaving to the unborn. If mankind is still around in a hundred thousand years, which no scientist, economist, environmentalist or philosopher seriously believes, can’t you just see them cursing their ancestors some three thousand generations removed?’