Goodbye California

‘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?’

‘They’ll have to handle that problem without me. It’s this generation I’m concerned with. Is this the first time nuclear fuel has been stolen from a plant?’

‘God, no. The first forced entry I know of, but others may have been hushed up. We’re touchy about those things, much more touchy than the Europeans who admit to several terrorist attacks on their reactor stations.’

‘Tell the man straight out.’ Ferguson sounded weary. ‘Theft of plutonium goes on all the time. I know it, Dr Jablonsky knows it. The Office of Nuclear Safeguards–that’s the watchdog of the AEC–knows about it best of all, but comes over all coy when questioned, even although their director did admit to a Congressional House energy sub-committee that perhaps one half of one per cent of fuel was unaccounted for. He didn’t seem very worried about it. After all, what’s one half of one per cent, especially when you say it quickly? Just enough to make enough bombs to wipe out the United States, that’s all. The great trusting American public know nothing about it–what they don’t know can’t frighten them. Do I sound rather bitter to you, Sergeant?’

‘You do a bit. You have reason to?’

‘I have. One of the reasons I resented your security report. There’s not a security chief in the country that doesn’t feel bitter about it. We spend billions every year preventing nuclear war, hundreds of millions from preventing accidents at the reactor plants but only about eight millions on security. The probability of those occurrences are in the reverse order. The AEC say they have up to ten thousand people keeping track of material. I would laugh if I didn’t feel like crying. The fact of the matter is they only know where it is about once a year. They come around, balance books, count cans, take samples and feed the figures into some luckless computer that usually comes up with the wrong answers. Not the computer’s fault–not the inspector’s. There’s far too few of them and the system is ungovernable anyway.

‘The AEC, for instance, say that theft by employees, because of the elaborate built-in protection and detection systems, is impossible. They say this in a loud voice for public consumption. It’s rubbish. Sample pipes lead off from the plutonium run-off spigot from the canyon–for testing strength, purity and so forth. Nothing easier than to run off a little plutonium into a small flask. If you’re not greedy and take only a small amount occasionally the chances are that you can get off with it almost indefinitely. If you can suborn two of the security guards–the one who monitors the TV screens of the cameras in the sensitive areas and the person who controls the metal detector beam you pass through on leaving–you can get off with it for ever.’

‘This has been done?’

‘The government doesn’t believe in paying high salaries for what is basically an unskilled job. Why do you think there are so many corrupt and crooked cops? If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘I don’t mind. This is the only way? Stealing the stuff in dribs and drabs. Hasn’t been done on a large scale?’

‘Sure it has. Again, nobody’s talking. As far back as nineteen-sixty-four, when the Chinese exploded their first nuclear bomb, it was taken for granted in this country that the Chinese just didn’t have the scientific know-how to separate-out U-235 from natural uranium. Ergo, they must have pinched it from somewhere. They wouldn’t have stolen it from Russia because Chinese, to say the least, are not welcome there. But they’re welcome here, especially in California. In San Francisco you have the biggest Chinese community outside China. Their students are received with open arms in Californian universities. It’s no secret that that’s how the Chinese came to have the secrets of making an atom bomb. Their students came across here, took a post-graduate course in physics, including nuclear physics, then high-tailed it back to the mother country with the necessary information.’

‘You’re digressing.’

‘That’s what bitterness does for you. Shortly after they exploded their bomb it came to light. perhaps accidentally, that sixty kilos of U-235 had disappeared from a nuclear fuel fabricating plant in Appolo, Pennsylvania. Coincidence? Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything. The stuff’s going missing right and left. A security chief in the east once told me that a hundred-and-ten kilos of U-235 somehow got lost from his plant.’ He broke off and shook his head dejectedly. ‘The whole thing is so damned stupid anyway.’

‘What’s stupid?’

‘Pilfering a few grams at a time from a plant or breaking into one to steal it on a grand scale. That’s being stupid. It’s stupid because it’s unnecessary. If you’d wanted a king-size haul of U-235 or plutonium today what would you have done?’

‘That’s obvious. I’d have let the regular crew of that truck load up and hi-jack it on the way back.’

‘Exactly. One or two plants send out their enriched nuclear fuel in such massive steel and concrete drums–transported in big fifteen-to-twenty-ton trucks–that the necessity for a crane effectively rules out hi-jacking. Most don’t. We don’t. A strong man on his own would have no difficulty in handling our drums. More than one nuclear scientist has publicly suggested that we approach the Kremlin and contract the Red Army for the job. That’s the way the Russians do it–a heavily armored truck with an escort armored vehicle in front and behind.’

‘Why don’t we do that?’

‘Not to be thought of. Same reason again–mustn’t scare the pants off the public. Bad for the nuclear image. Atoms for peace, not war. In the whole fuel cycle transportation is by so far the weakest link in security that it doesn’t deserve to be called a link at all. The major road shippers–like Pacific Intermountain Express or Tri-State or MacCormack–are painfully aware of this, and are worried sick about it. But there’s nothing their drivers can do. In the trucking business–many would prefer the word “racket”–theft and shortages are the name of the game. It’s the most corrupt and criminal-ridden business in the State but no one, especially the drivers, is going to say so out loud for all the world to hear. The Teamsters are the most powerful and widely feared union in the States. In Britain or Germany or France they would just be outlawed, and that would be that; in Russia they’d end up in Siberia. But not here. You don’t buck or bad-mouth the Teamsters–not if you place any value on your wife or kids or pension, or, most of all, your own personal health.

‘Every day an estimated two per cent of goods being transported by road in this country just go missing: the real figure is probably higher. The wise don’t complain: in the minority of cases where people do complain the insurers pay up quietly, since their premiums are loaded against what they regard as an occupational hazard. “Occupational” is the keyword. Eighty-five per cent of thefts are by people inside the trucking industry. Eighty-five per cent of hi-jackings involve collusion–which has to involve the truck-drivers, all, of course, paid-up members of the Teamsters.’

‘Has there ever been a case of a nuclear hi-jack on the open road?’

‘Hi-jacks don’t happen on the open road. Well, hardly ever. They occur at transfer points and driver’s stop-overs. Driver Jones visits the local locksmith and has a fresh set of keys for ignition and cab doors cut and hands it over to Smith. Next day he stops at a drivers’ pull-up, carefully locks the door and goes–either himself or with his mate–for his hamburger and french fries or whatever. When he comes out, he goes through the well-rehearsed routine of double-take, calling to heaven for vengeance and hot-footing it to the nearest phone box to call the cops, who know perfectly well what is going on but are completely incapable of proving anything. Those hi-jackings are rarely reported and pass virtually unnoticed because there are very rarely any crimes of violence involved.’

Ryder was patient. ‘I’ve been a cop all my life. I know that. Nuclear hi-jacks, I said.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know or you aren’t telling?’

‘That’s up to you to decide, Sergeant.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ It was impossible for anyone to say whether Ryder had decided anything or not. He turned to Jablonsky.

Okay. Doc, if we go and have a look at Susan’s office?’

Jablonsky’s voice was dry. ‘Unusual of you, Sergeant, to ask anybody’s permission for anything.’

‘That’s downright unkind. Fact is, we haven’t been officially assigned to this investigation.’

‘I know that.’ He looked at Jeff. ‘This is hardly the stamping ground for a highway patrolman. Have you been expressly forbidden to come here?’

‘No.’

‘Makes no difference. Heavens, man, in your place I’d be worried to death. Search the whole damned building if you want.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suggest I come with you.’

‘“The whole damned building”, as you call it, can be left to Parker and Davidson, who are already here, and the lawmen in their droves who will be here in any moment. Why do you want to come with us to my wife’s office? I’ve never tampered with evidence in my life.’