Atom Bomb Angel

by Peter James

  ‘Radiate with what?’

  ‘Fall-out from the nuclear power stations we’re going to fucking blow apart, man.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘That would be telling.’

  ‘Go on, tell.’

  ‘All right – long as you promise not to tell anyone else.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I believe you. You’re a nice man. For a white man, you’re pretty nice.’

  I pushed in a drop more. ‘Who is going to blow up the power stations?’

  ‘Mossif Kaleb.’

  ‘He’s from the PLO?’

  ‘Yeah, nice man. Doesn’t talk a lot. But he acts! He and Ballard are going to sort out the US of fucking A. Wow! They’re going to sort out Canada too. Wow! They’ve got connections in Quebec. Big connections. Big fucking bang. Wow!’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Oh yeah, the fat man Rey – er – Jose Reythal. Spanish man. Spaniard man? Spanner man? Spandard man? Something like that!’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Don’t know. Posgnyet, but he’s only in charge, he doesn’t count, only a fucking Russian.’ He laughed. ‘They’re nice to us, the Russians.’

  ‘I’m glad, Lukas. Tell me about Angel? What is Angel?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you, man?’

  ‘No, you forgot.’

  ‘Angel – Anti Nuclear Generated Electricity. Simple, eh?’

  ‘Very simple, Lukas. Did you think that up yourself?’

  ‘No. The Russians did.’

  ‘Tell me more about the Russians.’

  ‘Yes, they’re nice. Lovely Russians; blonde ladies and vodka. They pay bills – big bills, small bills – and screw blonde ladies.’ He giggled.

  ‘Which power stations are you going to blow up?’

  ‘All over. I can’t move my hands.’

  I pushed the plunger again. There wasn’t much left in the syringe.

  ‘Which countries?’

  ‘United States, Canada, France, Spain, England. All going to be big fucking bangs. All the contact states, man. Except Germany, Spain instead of Germany.’

  ‘Why Spain instead of Germany?’

  ‘Winds. Russians don’t want radiation blowing over East Germany and into Russia. ETA in Spain keen to take action against nuclear energy – everyone decided it would be pity not to include them.’

  ‘Which power stations in each country?’

  ‘Whichever they decide on, man.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re being screwed by everyone.’

  ‘No, I’m not, they love me. I am big man.’

  ‘There’s a plot to kill you. I’m the only one who can save you, Lukas. I want to save you, Lukas, I want to save you very much.’

  ‘Thank you. Please save me.’

  ‘If you want me to save you, you’d better tell me everything, and tell it fast. Now, which power stations?’

  ‘I don’t know, I tell you, all over, some here, some there, some fucking everywhere!’ He began to giggle again.

  ‘Which power stations, Lukas?’

  ‘Wherever the wind is good.’

  ‘Why are you doing all this?’

  ‘Whole goddam world’s going to stop raping our land, going to stop digging their greedy fists into that uranium, man. That’s no-good stuff. We want to leave it in the land, man, and cover it up again – almost as much, man, as we want our freedom. Yeah! To be free! We are going to make the world take notice of us, man. After next month, nobody’s going to ignore Namibia, man. No fucking way!’ He laughed.

  ‘Why are the Russians helping you?’

  ‘Different Russians got different reasons,’ he giggled. ‘Konyenko – he’s our contact here – he help us because we fix him up with blonde girls.’

  ‘And Posgnyet?’

  ‘He control Operation Angel. From Moscow. I don’t remember why he help us.’

  ‘Try and remember.’ I squeezed in more of the drug. There was now only a tiny drop left.

  ‘Russia helps us, because it is good for Russia, maybe. I don’t know. Things not good for those countries are good for Russia. Who knows? Who knows with Russians at all?’ He giggled. ‘First they make things good and easy for us – then maybe later they make them hard. We must be on guard, eh? They think we are simple. But we are not. We will outsmart them.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ I said.

  ‘Of course we will,’ he agreed.

  ‘Now why don’t you tell me which power stations?’

  ‘They only know in each country. Security, man. If we don’t know, we can’t tell. Good, man, eh? Smart!’ He grinned.

  I squeezed in the last of the drug.

  ‘I like you,’ he said.

  ‘What else would you like to tell me?’

  ‘Anything. I like talking to you. I want to go on talking to you for ever.’

  ‘Who went to Libya last August?’

  ‘Everyone, man, that was the big meeting. Yes, that was the big one!’

  ‘Who was everyone?’

  ‘Everyone I told you.’ His eyelids closed.

  ‘You, Hadino Dusab, Felix Wajara, Gunther Keller-Blaus, Jose Reythal, Mossif Kalib, Patrick Cleary, Joel Ballard and Ben Tsenong?’

  ‘Not Tsenong, man, he had to go back to England.’

  Ogomo was not lying.

  ‘Tell me about Patrick Cleary, Lukas.’

  ‘Irish. I don’t know more. Met him only once. Nice man. Kind.’

  He was showing signs of coming round. I placed the chloroformed cloth over his nose; he went unconscious at once. I removed the Elastoplast and pulled out the syringe. Then I untied him, rolled down his shirt sleeve, put his jacket on, and carried him over and put him behind the wheel of his own car. Then I took one of the large nails I had bought that afternoon, and pushed it up hard in the gap in the tread of his front off-side tyre. I didn’t want it to burst the tyre then and there, but equally, I didn’t want it to fall out.

  I went to my car, and drove a short way further up the road, turned around, switched off the engine and the lights, and waited. After half an hour, I heard the sound of an engine starting, and then lights came on and what I presumed to be Ogomo’s Toyota headed off back in the direction of Windhoek. I threw the syringes and the cloth out of the window into a thick clump of bushes. Ogomo, I figured, would have a pretty thick head at the moment, and be wondering just what on earth had been happening. He would have a pretty good idea and wouldn’t be feeling too happy about it all. He wouldn’t be able to remember much about what he had said, but he would remember enough to know that he had probably said a damned sight too much. He needn’t have worried, however, about whatever anyone was going to say to him.

  I looked at my watch. Four minutes had passed; that should be about right. I started up, but did not switch on the lights. My eyes were well accustomed to the dark now. I drove about a quarter of a mile, and came up over the brow of a hill. There, some way in front, were the tail-lights of a car that was certainly Ogomo’s. I drove down into another dip, and put my headlights on. When I came to the next brow, the Toyota was only a few hundred yards ahead. It was at the side of the road and leaning slightly to the right.

  I could see a figure kneeling by the front off-side wheel, winding up what looked like a jack. One hundred yards and there was no mistaking it was Ogomo. I kept my speed steady. He turned to look at me for a moment, then turned back to his jack. Then he turned to look at me again, and must have wondered why I wasn’t giving him a wider berth, in fact, why I wasn’t giving him any berth at all. By the time he realized that I was coming straight at him at sixty miles an hour and tried to do something about it, he had left it too late. The near-side section of the Datsun’s bumper hit him straight in the chest, and the headlight hit him full in the face; the car shook, there was a sharp report, no louder than the sound of a light bulb popping, and Ogomo’s smashed body was catapulted through the air.


  Although I stopped to check, I knew he would be dead before he landed. I left him where he was, and climbed back into the Datsun. It was half past eleven. At nine o’clock in the morning, I would be on a plane heading back to London. I had a heavy heart. Yet again, a white man had come to Namibia and killed.

  19

  A rich blue-grey cloud of Bolivar corona smoke unfurled itself across the room, some of it rising to the stuccoed ceiling, some of it sinking to the Axminstered floor, some of it drifting sideways and turning into a mad eddy in front of the massive window. Somewhere out beyond the double-glazing, beyond the clacking of the wiper blades and the slashing of tyres through wet roads of London’s Christmas-week traffic, was a man who called himself Patrick Cleary, who had to be found and found fast. Horace Whalley had gone on holiday to the Seychelles, and Ben Tsenong had gone into Tesco’s in Oxford and vanished from the face of the earth. The mood in the room was not unlike the mood in a solicitor’s office at the reading of a will, when the relatives, expecting to learn they have all been left vast fortunes, have just been told that the deceased died in debt.

  The Director General of MI5 put the cigar back into his mouth and drew hard; the tip glowed bright red, and a good thirty-pence worth of Havana-flavoured exhaust went into his mouth and then out into the room in pursuit of the fast-vanishing first cloud. The officially dead chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was busy doodling on a small card he held against the back of his diary. He was drawing short little men with big noses. He didn’t like being officially dead and felt that the charade was being taken too far. He had been a prisoner in this building ever since his release from the Illushyn. No one outside, not even his wife, knew he was in England. But he had agreed to carry on like this until after 4 January, and he was reluctantly sticking to his word.

  I was jet-lagged from my flight back the day before, and feeling the damp cold more than usual after my brief spell in the Namibian heat. The death of Ogomo certainly wasn’t being used by the British press to sell their newspapers, not that it was likely he would have been plastered over the headlines. I didn’t think the efforts of his life would have exalted him to a pole position in The Times obituaries, but I did think they might have been worth more than the only mention they did get in the British press, which was two lines on the overseas news page of the Guardian – Not that I was about to start writing letters to The Times about it. I had a feeling that if the authorities had looked hard enough, and found the car that hit him, and connected it to a German geologist that didn’t exist, there might have been a few more lines; but knowing the type of man that had died, and the type of authorities they were, it was unlikely they would look hard enough to find the car and make the connection, and even if they did, they would probably assume it was the work of a right-wing German organization.

  I had just finished relating to the two men everything that Ogomo had told me, and the not particularly pleasant method by which I had obtained his silence. Quoit made it plain, from the expression on his face, that he would have preferred the company of the chickens in the hold of the Illushyn to being in this room with me. He gave me the sort of expression that is normally reserved for a prospective house-purchaser’s first sight of a damp patch on a bedroom wall. Fifeshire wasn’t moved; deaths of enemies only upset him when they attracted publicity and he was called upon to explain them. He sucked in and blew out another massive cloud of smoke before he finally broke the silence.

  ‘It is now crystal clear, from what you tell us, that we are dealing not with a bunch of ideologically motivated social misfits, nor a bunch of savages suffering from delusions of grandeur, but with the crème de la crème: top table of the Worshipful Company of International Terror-Weavers and Blood-Mongers. They’re having a nuclear cocktail party on 4 January, and half the Western world is cordially invited. Isn’t that about right, Flynn?’

  ‘I think that sums it up very well, sir.’

  ‘England, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. Are they going to blow up one nuclear power station in each country, or the whole damn lot? And how are they going to do it? What do you think, Isaac?’

  Quoit eyed me nervously, looked at Fifeshire for a brief moment, then shot his eyes back to me again, as if he were afraid that if he took his eyes off me for too long, I might dash out of the room and reappear in a motor car. ‘Mr Flynn,’ he said, ‘did this – er – Ogomo chap give any hint at all about how they might – er – blow up these power stations?’ Quoit took his metal-framed glasses off and chewed for a moment on the end of one of the arms; then he took it out of his mouth. ‘What I mean – er – is …’ He squinted at Fifeshire, ‘it is very important to establish this, Sir Charles—’ he turned his head back towards me and squinted furiously, then put his glasses on for a moment to make sure I was still seated, and hadn’t crept out and got behind the wheel of a motor car, then took his glasses off again. ‘Did you get the impression that the purpose was merely to put the power stations out of action, for example, by knocking out the power cables, or – er – was the purpose to cause a leakage of radiation?’

  ‘To cause a leakage of radiation, without doubt.’

  Quoit bit furiously on the arm of his glasses again, then once more removed them from his mouth. ‘You don’t think it might possibly be a bluff?’

  ‘These people don’t bluff,’ said Fifeshire, ‘not the team the Namibians have put together.’

  ‘It’s very difficult to know quite what they mean when they say “blow up” a nuclear power station. As you know, nuclear power stations are huge complexes, comprising a number of buildings and spread out over fairly large areas. They would need vast amounts of explosives to blow up entire power stations – hundreds of tons of high explosives. They could never smuggle that sort of quantity in. How could they? They could just go for the core, but unless they breached the containment building, that wouldn’t do them a lot of good. And they would need a tremendous amount of explosives to do that.’ He started to chew again on the plastic on the end of one arm of his glasses.

  ‘What if they used an atomic device?’ I asked.

  Quoit was silent for a moment. He appeared to be having a problem. He looked up, turning his head from side to side in short, violent jerks. At first I thought he was having a seizure or a heart attack. ‘Hrr,’ he said, ‘whrreer.’ He stood up, holding his hand to his mouth, and took several paces around the room, with his head tilted first to one side and then the other. With the hand that was free, he pointed at his mouth with repeated stabbing movements. Fifeshire followed him around the room with his eyes, a thick frown on his forehead. Quoit bent himself almost double, shook his head wildly three or four times, then stood upright once more holding his spectacles out in front of his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I got my glasses stuck in between my teeth.’

  I caught Fifeshire’s eye. Fifeshire looked worried – not about atomic devices, but about Quoit.

  ‘It would be possible to blow up power stations using nuclear explosives, certainly, and it would be very effective. If the objective of these people is to create widespread radiation fall-out, vapourizing the core by means of a nuclear explosive would be the best way. You see, the higher the explosion lifts the debris, the greater the distance down-wind over which it would spread. Conventional explosives would lift the debris a few hundred feet at the most; a nuclear explosive that succeeded in vapourizing the core could make a plume fifty to sixty thousand feet high – and that would travel a very long way downwind.

  ‘I think there are two ways these people could achieve their aims. The first would be to organize an internal sabotage of the power stations. One person in the control room of each power station, with the assistance of key accomplices, could achieve this quite simply. There would be no need for any explosives to be brought in. By creating malfunctions and taking the wrong corrective action, a lethal situation could be created in any reactor.’

  ‘I thought the systems were meant to b
e foolproof?’ said Fifeshire.

  ‘They are foolproof provided fools are at the controls. Put a smart crook at the controls and the situation changes very rapidly. He can do a lot of damage, a very great deal.’ He squinted at me through his glasses, looking a trifle unsure about whether he should be telling a confirmed mass-killer like myself information of this nature. He decided to go on, although the expression of doubt remained on his face. ‘All nuclear reactors rely on a delicate balance of rods in their cores, and computers which are monitored by the controllers maintain this balance. If the rods are pushed too far in, the reaction stops completely; if they are pulled too far out, the heat builds up too much, and as the heat builds up, so does the pressure. There are escape valves for when the pressure gets too high, and emergency filtration systems for releasing coolant into the air, but if those escape valves are shut off, and the filtration systems jammed, the containment building’s going to turn into a pressure cooker. The walls of the containment buildings are built strong enough to withstand jumbo jets crashing into them, and to withstand two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure from the inside; but in the event of the safety valves jamming when the reactor is out of control, there could be a build-up of one hundred times that amount within a couple of hours – and the containment isn’t going to hold that. It will either start to crack, or it will just blow to smithereens. Whichever it does, it’s going to release an almighty amount of fallout that would start travelling downwind, and cause serious contamination for a good hundred miles. The average nuclear reactor has several hundred times the radioactive content of, for instance, the Hiroshima bomb.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Fifeshire, ‘that the British gas-cooled reactors use carbon dioxide as a coolant? Surely carbon dioxide, being lighter than air, would just rise straight into the atmosphere?’

  ‘The carbon dioxide is lighter than air, but the radioactive materials that it picks up aren’t, and they would start to drop out into the air as it rose. And don’t forget, we don’t just have gas-cooled reactors in Britain now – we have two PWR power stations, each with four pressurized-water reactors. They would send steam pouring out, and that all comes back down to earth.’