“What can I do for you, Bill?” he asked.
“Well,” replied Price, “I’m a little confused. We just received a hand-out from the Pentagon concerning something called ‘Operation Move.’ I wondered if you people were involved in this thing.”
Barnes chuckled and then said, “Well, you know the Pentagon, Bill. They like to make things a lot more mysterious than they need to be. Fact is, the exercise is something that’s been talked about for some time. No big deal. But, the actual details are classified, so I can’t really say much.”
“Tell me what you can say.”
“Well, as long as you don’t attribute this to me.”
“That’s a deal.”
“OK. Well, what they’re doing is seeing just how fast certain contractors can move out of an area. It’s not just here, it’s all over the country. They want to see if it’s possible to move the essential elements, including the people, from one city to another, in the event that something unforeseen might happen.”
“Are you telling me that your whole company is being moved to some other location?”
“Not the whole company, Bill. And it’s temporary. It’s just the critical stuff. Certain dies, jigs, computer programs, stuff like that. Things you wouldn’t want lying around.”
Bill Price rubbed his head with the pencil again. “You gotta be kidding me. Where the hell are you moving to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know when?”
“No. We’re supposed to react when we get the word. It’s sort of a test. Like I say, no big deal.”
“No big deal? Sounds like it to me. You said the people go too?”
“Again, not all, just some.”
“You?”
“I can’t say.”
“Have you any idea of the cost?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“Who’s picking up the tab?”
“I can’t talk about that either, Bill.”
Price shook his head. “Lester, this is nuts. You say they’ve been working on this for some time?”
“It’s something that’s been discussed for at least two years, far as I know. To tell you the truth, I never thought they’d actually go through with it, ’cause it’s such a pain in the ass, but I guess I was wrong. But what can we do? When the customer says do it, we do it.”
“What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing much. As far as I know, we pack up when we get the word, load up some trucks and we’re outta here. Then, within four weeks, we’re back. Later, we get compared to the others and I guess there’s some grading system to tell us how we did.”
They talked some more, but there wasn’t much information that Lester felt free to impart. Finally, Price grunted and said, “OK, Lester. Thanks a lot.”
Price hung up the phone and looked at his watch. The morning conference, the first of many conferences that determined the content of tomorrow’s newspaper, would begin in half an hour. Time enough to make a couple more calls.
He looked through the names on his computer list again and found one he recognized. Jim Sokol was the P.R. man for a company called Triad Electronics. Price remembered Sokol. They’d been paired in a charity golf tournament a month ago. He picked up the telephone and punched the number. In a moment, Sokol was on the line.
“Jim? Bill Price, Los Angeles Globe.”
Sokol’s voice was cheery. “Morning, Bill. How’s the handicap?”
“Getting worse. No time. Listen, I just got a Pentagon release this morning regarding a thing they call ‘Operation Move.’ You know anything about this?”
There was a hesitation and then, “Some.”
“Is your company one of those involved?”
Again, there was a hesitation. This time, it was a long one. Too long.
“Jim? You there?”
The voice that answered was decidedly less cheerful. “Yeah, I’m here. Look … I can’t talk about it, Bill. Sorry, but this whole thing is classified. You understand, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see ya.”
“Right. Have a nice day.”
Price slammed the phone down and looked at the computer list once more. Then, the phone beeped. He picked up the receiver, and still angry, barked, “Price!”
“Bill Price?”
“Yeah! Who’s this?”
It was a woman’s voice, and she sounded terrified. “Mr. Price, this is Mary Davis. You and my husband used to work out together when you were both in Detroit. Do you remember?”
The anger vanished. He smiled as he remembered. “Sure,” he said. “I remember both of you. Jeez! It seems a hundred years ago. I was going through a divorce and Michael was fed up with the business world. We both took karate lessons just so we could bash some people around. You treated me like a long-lost brother. How the heck are you two?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “Michael’s in terrible trouble.”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“Well, it’s a rather long story, but he works for the government now and he …” She was starting to cry.
Price lowered his voice an octave. “Take it easy, Mary. Just take a deep breath and tell me all about it.”
Bill Price’s mind was racing as he went back to his work station after the morning conference, a conference that had seen him strangely silent throughout. Instead of concentrating on the business at hand, hundreds of previous stories were being replayed in his mind’s eye. He was trying to sort out those that might have a bearing on what he had just heard. By the time he sat down at his desk, one set of stories stood out above all others. He brought one of them up on the computer and read it over.
The story was one of several that dealt with an official hearing that was scheduled to begin Monday morning in Sacramento. The hearing had been receiving a lot of interest from both the electronic media and the press because it was looking into the behavior of the insurance industry, always a popular subject.
This time, the attention was focused on a small segment of the insurance market, specifically, earthquake insurance. In recent years this insurance, something that was purchased by less than 5 percent of the population of California, had increased dramatically in cost while benefits had been reduced. Some large corporations had been refused any coverage, while others had been denied the opportunity to renew existing policies. The uproar had finally caused the California legislature to schedule a hearing to investigate the matter.
It was all coming at a bad time for the insurance industry. One of the insurance associations had already been sued by the State of California and seven other states on antitrust violations. Another association had gone to court, trying to avoid appearing at the hearings, claiming the inquiry was unconstitutional. All in all, the industry as a whole was bound to come out of this with bloody noses. For what? Unless …
For the last few days, the Globe had run several stories on the pending hearings, focusing attention on the fact that many scientists had contended that a great earthquake, one destined to cause massive damage, was expected to strike California within twenty or thirty years. The Globe had speculated that the insurance companies had reacted to that certainty by reducing their risk, further supporting the view that an earthquake was inevitable.
The Globe had championed a program that would further educate Californians on the steps to be taken before, during and after an earthquake, as a public service.
There were some other related stories. Price read them all. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
He picked up the telephone and punched the number for the communications center.
“Communications.”
“Yeah, this is Bill Price. Get me Darlene Yu in Washington, will ya?”
“Yes, sir.”
Darlene Yu was the Globe’s chief Washington correspondent. Equipped with a beeper and mobile phone, she was usually available at a moment’s notice. Once, she’d held a telephone convers
ation with her boss while using the rest room facilities of one of Washington’s posher restaurants, to the consternation of some other patrons. She was, by any standard, an over-achiever of the best kind. Today was no exception. She was on the line in seconds.
“Where are you?” Bill asked. “You sound like you’re in the bottom of a well.”
“I’m on the Beltway,” she answered, “on my way to Langley for a CIA press conference. What’s up?”
“Did you read the latest from the Pentagon?”
“Not in depth, but yes. Any one in particular?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “This ‘Operation Move.’ What’s that all about?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “I read the release but I don’t know what it means. You want me to find out?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said. “Forget Langley, will you? I don’t think it’s all that important. Swing by the Pentagon and see if you can get some sort of explanation. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
There was a short burst of interference on the line and then he heard her say, “I’m on my way. Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Price answered. “I have an old friend in Washington. Works for the Pentagon. He’s a civilian. I tried to get ahold of him last night but there was no answer. See if you can track him down for me, will ya?”
“Sure! What’s his name?”
“Michael Davis. I’m not sure what department he works in, but they should be able to find him.”
“Okay, I’m on it. When I find him, what do you want me to say?”
“Just tell him to give me a call.”
“That’s it? Why don’t you just call him at work?”
“I could do that,” he said, “but I thought he’d get a kick out of seeing a beautiful woman like you asking after him.”
“Really.”
“Really. He and I were pals in Detroit a few years ago, if anybody asks.”
“OK.”
Price hung up the phone and looked around the room again. He spotted just the man he was looking for. He walked over to Rusty Coleman’s desk and said, “Rusty, I need you for a bit. Let’s head down to the lounge where I can smoke.”
Coleman grinned and followed his boss down the elevator and into the basement lounge. As soon as they were seated, Price lit up, leaned back with a satisfied smile on his face and closed his eyes.
“God! I’ve waited an hour for this. It’s almost as good as …”
Coleman laughed and said, “Never! Don’t even say it.”
Price opened his eyes and leaned forward. “Yeah … come to think of it …”
They both laughed.
“Rusty,” Price said, nonchalantly, “about two years ago, you did a multi-day feature on earthquakes. Ran about thirty thousand words if I remember. You researched the hell out of it. Talk to me about that. Especially the part about preparation.”
Coleman grinned and shook his head. It was always like this when Price was on to something. He’d start out with a question from left field and then keep pursuing it, like an enthusiastic middle-aged teenager. His freshness was one of the qualities that kept employee turnover low at the newspaper, despite the crummy wages.
“I’ve still got prints of that if you want.”
“No,” Price said. “I don’t have the time. Give me the main points.”
Rusty Coleman shrugged and started talking. “Well, there are the Red Cross and the Civil Defense teams that …”
“No,” Price interrupted, “I mean the big picture. Didn’t you attend some seminar where they said that a full-scale evacuation of L.A., assuming they knew there was going to be a big earthquake, was impossible?”
Coleman thought about it for a moment and nodded. “Sure. I remember. There were three days of seminars, all told. They were talking about what would happen if everyone knew there was going to be a really big one, you know, like Mexico City had, only worse, and the consensus was that evacuation was out of the question.”
“Totally?”
“Well, it was all hypothetical, of course. Right now, there’s no way to predict an earthquake, so, like most of these seminars, not a hell of a lot was said that was worthwhile.”
“But, they did say that evacuation was impossible,” Price insisted.
“Right. For a lot of reasons.”
“Like?”
Coleman walked over to the soft drink machine and deposited some coins. A can clattered down the chute, and he picked it up, popped the top and took a swallow. Turning back to his boss, he said, “I’ll get the article and give you the basics. I can’t remember all of the points that were made, but there wasn’t all that much interest anyway because nobody knows exactly when the big one’s gonna hit. So what the hell difference does it make?”
Price took the Pentagon announcement out of his shirt pocket and handed it to his reporter. “What do you make of this?” he asked.
Coleman looked it over and shook his head. “Not much, on the face of it. Looks silly to me. Obviously, you’ve got an angle.”
“I’m not sure,” Price said. “But supposing the Pentagon knew there was going to be an earthquake and wanted to protect some of the more critical defense contractors?”
Rusty Coleman grinned. “Boss … you’ve been working too hard. There’s no way they could know that.”
“Why not?”
“I just told you! Because earthquakes can’t be predicted.”
“You said otherwise in your piece.”
Coleman’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh? You remember that part but you don’t remember the seminars? What is it with you? Selective memory cells?”
“Never mind,” Price said brusquely. “The fact is, you said that they could predict earthquakes.”
“Not really,” Coleman said. “What I wrote was that there was a lot of research being done, especially by the Russians. This is one case where they can honestly say they’re ahead. Sure, some techniques have been developed, but the big problem, like everything else, is money.”
“Explain, please.”
Coleman took a deep breath and said, “In order to accurately predict an earthquake, you’d need to have probes in the ground, covering, say, twenty-five square miles. That’s just to cover one small part of a known fault line. One small area, where there is evidence that the plates are locked. With a probe every three hundred feet, running down as deep as three miles, you’d have in the neighborhood of seven or eight thousand probes. The cost of drilling the holes, all by itself, would be around half a million bucks per. Right there, you’ve got a cost of three or four billion dollars. And that’s just to cover one possible problem area. In California alone, we’ve got hundreds of them. Then, you’ve got …”
“What do these probes do?”
“Well, for one thing, they can be used to measure ground movement over a long period of time. But a stick in the ground can do the same thing. The probes measure heat, conductivity of the rock to electric current, P waves, S waves, the time variations between the two …”
“Hold on,” Price barked. “Are you telling me that you can predict earthquakes? It’s just a question of money?”
Rusty shook his head. “No. Not really. Let me put it another way. There are some scientists who claim they can predict earthquakes if given enough time and money. There are some theories that seem to work, but no one, at least not in this country, has been able to really check them out. There’ve been some earthquakes predicted, but most of those in the scientific community put that down to chance.
“If, for example, there was a portion of the San Andreas fault line that was known to be locked, and if they spent about ten billion bucks checking it out, they might be able to prove that the theories were right. But nobody is about to lay out that kind of money. It would take years before they’d know enough. So the theories are just that. Theories. Nothing more. Except for Hollister, which seems to have a quake every day, there isn’t much going on in the way of serious research.”
“But,
” Price protested, “somebody seems to know something. We’ve been saying for years that there was going to be a biggie within twenty years at the outside, either here or up north.”
“True,” Coleman said. “But that’s based on past history. The San Andreas fault is something you can actually see. It’s right there on top of the ground. The movement has been measured and access is relatively inexpensive. That’s why there’s so much interest in Hollister, which lies right in the middle of the fault line. Also, they’ve been able to track every earthquake along the whole thing. It’s got a record of quakes that allows them to make calculations about the future. But most faults are far below the surface. First you have to find them, then you have to find the location of the pressure points. You’re talking big bucks.
“The Geological Survey people have been trying to score some funds to really track both ends of the San Andreas for years and they just can’t shake them loose. The attitude is that if there is a big quake, the losses will be less than the cost of trying to predict the quake.”
Bill Price’s eyes lit up. He stubbed out the cigarette and quickly lit another one. “Rusty, I was just going over that piece Helen did about the earthquake insurance flap and the hearings next week.”
“So?”
“They raised the deductible limits, right? And stopped renewing policies, right?”
“That’s what I understand.”
“And now we get this announcement from the Pentagon, saying that they’re not only going to move a bunch of military personnel, but they’re moving critical defense contractors as well.”
Rusty Coleman was beginning to get the drift. “Boss, I see what you’re getting at, but you’ve got a problem.”
“Which is?”
“There are no probes! Except for Hollister. Hollister is the earthquake capital of the world, so a lot of research is going on there. But outside of that, there aren’t any signs that the kind of research needed is being done. Without the research, how could they have discovered something that would indicate a big earthquake was coming?”
The Big One Page 7