Goodbye California
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Authors: Alistair MacLean
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Goodbye California
Gisela
It was at twenty seconds to six o’clock on the morning of 9 February 1972 that the earth shook. As such tremors go it could hardly even be called noteworthy; it was certainly no more remarkable than those that afflict the citizens of Tokyo and its surrounding countryside scores of times a year. Pendant lamps oscillated briefly, some precariously balanced objects fell from their shelves, but those were the only discernible effects of the passing of the earth ripple. The aftershock, considerably weaker, came twenty seconds later. It was learnt afterwards that there had been four more aftershocks, but those were of so low a magnitude that they registered only on the seismographs. Altogether a rather inconsequential affair, but memorable for me, at least, inasmuch as it was the first-ever tremor I had experienced: having the ground move beneath your feet provides a distinctly disquieting sensation.
The area where the maximum damage had occurred lay only a few miles to the north and I drove out to see it, but not until the following day – partly because of reports of fissured roads, damaged viaducts and burst water mains but chiefly because the authorities bend an unkindly eye on rubber-neckers whose unwanted presence interferes with the efforts of rescue and medical teams.
The township of Sylmar, which had borne the brunt of the earthquake, lies in the San Fernando Valley in California, some miles north of Los Angeles – in fact, so unconscionably sprawling is that city that it encompasses Sylmar within its boundaries. To the untutored eye the scene in that town appeared to be one of considerable confusion, with wreckers, bulldozers and trucks milling around at apparent random, but this was entirely illusory: all activities were highly organized and under central control. Unlike their more unfortunate brethren in, say, Nicaragua or Guatemala or the Philippines, places sadly accustomed to being side-swiped by much more than their fair share of earthquakes, the Californians are not only prepared for but are highly geared to deal efficiently with the aftermaths of natural disasters: the San Franciscans, for instance, have fifteen hospitals in kit form distributed at various key points around their city in preparation for the next earthquake which is widely and more than a little fearfully regarded as inevitable.
Damage to buildings was widespread but not severe – except in one very localized area. This was, or to a considerable extent had been, the Veterans’ Administration Hospital. Before the earthquake it had consisted of three parallel blocks of buildings. The two outer blocks had remained virtually intact: the central one had collapsed like a house of cards. Destruction was total; no part of it was left standing. Over sixty patients died.
The contrast between this ruin and the virtual immunity of the two sister blocks would have seemed incomprehensible to anyone without some knowledge of the Californian building codes. With some such knowledge it was all too readily understandable. The city of Los Angeles has the misfortune to have its very own private and personal structure fault running under its streets. This is known as the Newport-Inglewood Fault, and when one side of the fault suddenly jerked forward in respect to the other in 1933 it produced the Long Beach earthquake in which a disconcertingly large number of buildings fell down, solely because they had been shoddily built on unreinforced, made-up ground.
This prompted the authorities to introduce a new building code, designed to result in structures as nearly earthquake-proof as possible, a code that is as rigorously enforced as it is rigorous in nature, and it was under the enforcements of this code that the two outer blocks of the Veterans’ Hospital had been built, one in the late 1930s, the other in
the late 1940s: the destroyed block had been constructed in the mid-twenties.
Nevertheless, it
had
been destroyed by an earthquake the epicentre of which had been some eight miles distant to the north-east. But what was important – and significant – about the earthquake that had caused this considerable damage was the factor of its power – or lack of it. The power, or magnitude, of an earthquake is registered on an arbitrarily chosen Richter scale which ranges from zero to twelve. And what is important to bear in mind is that the Richter scale progresses not arithmetically but logarithmically. Thus, a six on the Richter scale is ten times as powerful as a five or a hundred times as powerful as a four. The San Fernando earthquake which levelled this hospital block in Sylmar registered six-point-three on the Richter scale: the one that wreaked havoc on San Francisco in 1906 registered seven-point-nine (according to the recent modifications of the Richter scale). Thus, the earthquake that caused this damage in Sylmar was possessed of only one per cent of the effective power of the San Francisco one. It is a sobering and, to those burdened with an over-active imagination, a fearful reflection.
What is even more sobering and frightening is the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no great earthquake – ‘great’ is arbitrarily taken to be anything eight and above on the Richter scale – has ever occurred beneath or in the immediate
vicinity of any major city. (Such a disaster may have occurred in that awesome North Chinese earthquake of 1976 when a third of a million people are reported to have died: but the Chinese have dropped a total news blanket over this tragedy.) But the law of averages would indicate strongly that somewhere, some time, a major earthquake will occur in a place which is not conveniently uninhabited or, at least, sparsely populated. There is no reason not to imagine, unless one chooses to take refuge behind I-don’t-want-to-know mental blinkers, that this possibility may even today be a probability.
The word ‘probability’ is used because the law of averages is strengthened by the fact that with the exception of China, Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Italy, earthquakes largely tend to take place in coastal areas, whether those coastal areas be of land masses or islands; and it is in those coastal areas, for the purposes of trade and because they are the points in ingress to the hinterland, that many of the world’s great cities have been built. Tokyo, Los Angeles and San Francisco are three such examples.
That earthquakes should be largely confined to those areas is in no way fortuitous: their cause, as well as that of volcanoes, is now a matter of almost universal agreement among geologists. The theory is simply that in the unimaginably distant past when land first appeared it was in the form of one gigantic super-continent surrounded
by – inevitably – one massive ocean. With the passage of time and for reasons not yet definitely ascertained this super-continent broke up into several different continental masses, which, borne on what are called their ‘tectonic plates’ – which float on the still molten magma layer of the earth – drifted apart. Those tectonic plates occasionally bang or rub against one another; the effects of the collisions are transmitted either to the land above or the ocean floor and appear in the form of earthquakes or volcanoes.
Most of California lies on the North American plate which, while tending to move westward, is not the real villain of the piece. That unhappy distinction belongs to that same North Pacific plate which deals so hardly with China, Japan and the Philippines and on which that section of California lying to the west of the San Andreas Fault so unhappily lies. Although the North Pacific plate appears to be rotating slightly, its movement in California is still roughly to the north-west and, now and then, when the pressure between the two plates becomes too much, the North Pacific plate eases this pressure by jerking north-west along the San Andreas Fault and so producing one of those earthquakes that Californians don’t care so much about.
The extent of the dislocation along this right-slip fault – so called because if you stand on either side of the fault after an earthquake the other side appears to have moved to the right – is crucial
in relation to the magnitude of the shock. Occasionally there may be no lateral slip at all. Sometimes it may be only a foot or two. But, even though its consequences are not to be contemplated lightly, a lateral slip of forty feet is eminently possible.
In fact, and in this context, all things are possible. The active earthquake and volcanic belt that circumgirdles the Pacific is commonly – and appropriately – known as the ‘ring of fire’. The San Andreas Fault is an integral part of this, and it is on this ring of fire that the two greatest monster earthquakes (in Japan and South America) ever recorded have occurred. They were on the order of eight-point-nine on the Richter scale. California can lay no more claim to divine protection than any other part of the ring of fire and there is no compelling reason why the next monster, about six times as powerful as the great San Francisco one, shouldn’t occur, say, in San Bernardino, thus effectively dumping Los Angeles into the Pacific. And the Richter scale goes up to twelve!
Earthquakes on the ring of fire can show another disadvantageous aspect – they can occur offshore as well as under land. When this occurs huge tidal waves result. In 1976 the town of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines was inundated and all but destroyed and thousands of lives were lost when an undersea earthquake at the mouth of the crescent-shaped Morro Bay caused a fifteen-foot tidal wave that engulfed the shores of
the bay. Such an ocean earthquake off San Francisco would devastate the Bay area and, in all probability, wouldn’t do any good to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.
As it is said, it is the wandering nature of those tectonic plates that is the prime cause of earthquakes. But there are three other imponderable possibilities that could well act as triggering factors which could conceivably cause earthquakes.
The first of those is emissions from the sun. It is known that the strength and content of solar winds alter considerably and wholly unpredictably. It is also known that they can produce considerable alterations in the chemical structure of our atmosphere which in turn can have the effect of either accelerating or acting as a brake on the rotation of the earth; an effect which, because it would be measurable in terms of only hundredths of a second, would be wholly undetected by many but could have (and may have had in the past) an influence ranging from the considerable to the profound on the unanchored tectonic plates.
Secondly, there is a respectable body of scientific opinion that holds that the gravitational influences of the planets act on the sun to modulate the strength of these solar winds. This is of immediate concern since a rare alignment of all the planets of the Solar System is due in 1982. If this theory, known as The Jupiter Effect from the title of a book by Drs John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, is correct that alignment will be the
trigger for unprecedented solar activity, with repercussions on the stability of planet Earth. So scientists are waiting for 1982 with considerable interest, and not a little trepidation.
And, apart from war, this concept can be employed for a variety of other interesting purposes, which is what this book is about.
Ryder opened his tired eyelids and reached for the telephone without enthusiasm. ‘Yes?’
‘Lieutenant Mahler. Get down here right away. And bring your son.’
‘What’s wrong?’ The lieutenant customarily made a point of having his subordinates call him ‘sir’, but in Sergeant Ryder’s case he’d given up years ago. Ryder reserved that term for those he held in respect: no friends or acquaintances, to the best of their knowledge, had ever heard him use it.
‘Not over the phone.’ The receiver clicked and Ryder rose reluctantly to his feet, pulled on his sports coat and fastened the central button, so effectively concealing the .38 Smith & Wesson strapped to the left-hand side of what had once been his waist. Still reluctantly, as became a man who had just finished a twelve-hour non-stop duty stint, he glanced around the room, all chintzy curtains and chair covers, ornaments and vasefuls
of flowers: Sergeant Ryder, clearly, was no bachelor. He went into the kitchen, sniffed sorrowfully at the aroma coming from the contents of a simmering casserole, turned off the oven and wrote ‘Gone down-town’ at the foot of a note instructing him when and to what temperature he should turn a certain switch: which was as near to cooking Ryder had ever come in his twenty-seven years of marriage.
His car was parked in the driveway. It was a car that no self-respecting police officer would care to have been found shot in. That Ryder was just such a policeman was beyond doubt, but he was attached to Intelligence and had little use for gleaming sedans equipped with illuminated ‘police’ signs, flashing lights and sirens. The car–for want of a better word–was an elderly and battered Peugeot of the type much favoured by Parisians of a sadistic bent of mind whose great pleasure it was to observe the drivers of shining limousines slow down and pull into the kerb whenever they caught sight of those vintage chariots in their rear-view mirrors.
Four blocks from his own home Ryder parked his car, walked up a flagged pathway and rang the front-door bell. A young man opened the door.
Ryder said: ‘Dress uniform, Jeff. We’re wanted downtown.’
‘Both of us? Why?’
‘Your guess. Mahler wouldn’t say.’
‘It’s all those TV cop series he keeps watching. You’ve got to be mysterious or you’re nothing.’ Jeff Ryder left and returned in twenty seconds, tie in position and buttoning up his uniform. Together they walked down the flagged path.
They made an odd contrast, father and son. Sergeant Ryder was built along the general lines of a Mack truck that had seen better days. His crumpled coat and creaseless trousers looked as if they had been slept in for a week: Ryder could buy a new suit in the morning and by evenfall a second-hand clothes dealer would have crossed the street to avoid meeting him. He had thick dark hair, a dark moustache and a worn, lined, lived-in face that held a pair of eyes, dark as the rest of him, that had looked at too many things in the course of a lifetime and had liked little of what they had seen. It was also a face that didn’t go in for much in the way of expressions.
Jeff Ryder was two inches taller and thirty-five pounds lighter than his father. His immaculately pressed California Highway Patrolman’s uniform looked like a custom-built job by Saks. He had fair hair, blue eyes–both inherited from his mother–and a lively, mobile, intelligent face. Only a clairvoyant could have deduced that he was Sergeant Ryder’s son.
On the way, they spoke only once. Jeff said: ‘Mother’s late on the road tonight–something to do with our summons to the presence?’
‘Your guess again.’
Central Office was a forbidding brownstone edifice overdue for demolition. It looked as if it had been specifically designed to depress further the spirits of the many miscreants who passed or were hauled through its doorway. The desk officer, Sergeant Dickson, looked at them gravely, but that was of no significance: the very nature of his calling inhibits any desk sergeant’s latent tendency towards levity. He waved a discouraged arm and said: ‘His eminence awaits.’
Lieutenant Mahler looked no less forbidding than the building he inhabited. He was a tall thin man with grizzled hair at the temples, thin unsmiling lips, a thin beaky nose and unsentimental eyes. No one liked him, for his reputation as a martinet had not been easily come by: on the other hand, no one actively disliked him, for he was a fair cop and a fairly competent one. ‘Fairly’ was the operative and accurate word. Although no fool he was not over-burdened with intelligence and had reached his present position partly because he was the very model of the strict upholder of justice, partly because his transparent honesty offered no threat to his superiors.
For once, and rarely for him, he looked ill at ease. Ryder produced a crumpled packet of his favoured Gauloises, lit a forbidden cigarette–Mahler’s aversion to wine, women, song and tobacco was almost pathological–and helped him out.
‘Something wrong at San Ruffino, then?’
Mahler looked at him in sharp suspicion. ‘How do you know? Who told you?’
‘So it’s true. Nobody told me. We haven’t committed any violations of the law recently. At least, my son hasn’t. Me, I don’t remember.’
Mahler allowed acidity to overcome his unease. ‘You surprise me.’
‘First time the two of us have ever been called in here together. We have a couple of things in common. First, we’re father and son, which is no concern of the police department. Second, my wife–Jeff’s mother–is employed at the nuclear reactor plant in San Ruffino. There hasn’t been an accident there or the whole town would have known in minutes. An armed break-in, perhaps?’
‘Yes.’ Mahler’s tone was almost grudging. He hadn’t relished the role of being the bearer of bad news, but a man doesn’t like having his lines taken from him.
‘Who’s surprised?’ Ryder was very matter of fact. For any sign of reaction he showed Mahler could well have remarked that it looked as if it might rain soon. ‘Security up there is lousy. I filed a report on it. Remember?’
‘Which was duly turned over to the proper authorities. Power plant security is not police business. That’s IAEA’s responsibility.’ He was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, one of the responsibilities of which was to supervise the safeguard system for the protection of power
plants, specifically against the theft of nuclear fuels.
‘God’s sake!’ Not only had Jeff failed to inherit his father’s physical characteristics, he was also noticeably lacking in his parent’s massive calm. ‘Let’s get our priorities right. Lieutenant Mahler. My mother. Is she all right?’
‘I think so. Let’s say I have no reason to think otherwise.’
‘What the hell is that meant to mean?’
Mahler’s features tightened into the preliminary for a reprimand but Sergeant Ryder got in first. ‘Abduction?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Kidnap?’ Jeff stared his disbelief. ‘Kidnap? Mother is the director’s secretary. She doesn’t know a damn thing about what goes on there. She’s not even security classified.’
‘True. But remember she was picked for the job; she didn’t apply. Cops’ wives are supposed to be like Caesar’s wife–beyond suspicion.’
‘But why pick on her?’
‘They didn’t just pick on her. They took about six others, or so I gather: the deputy director, deputy security chief, a secretary and a control room operator. More importantly–although not, of course, from your point of view–they took two visiting university professors. Both are highly qualified specialists in nuclear physics.’
Ryder said: ‘That makes five nuclear scientists to have disappeared in the past two months.’
‘Five it is.’ Mahler looked acutely unhappy.
Ryder said: ‘Where did those two scientists come from?’
‘San Diego and UCLA, I believe. Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. It may be too late already.’
‘What’s that meant to mean, Sergeant?’
‘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 tlhe 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.’