Goodbye California. Alistair MacLean

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 the 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.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘No fool like an old fool. The van was expected at just that time–I had the note on my desk. Standard fuel pick-up from San Diego. Same colour, same letters, driver and guard with the same uniforms, even the same licence plates.’

      ‘Same van, in other words. Hi-jack. If they could hi-jack it when it was empty why not on the return journey when it was full?’

      ‘They came for more than the fuel.’

      ‘That’s so. Recognize the driver?’

      ‘No. But the pass was in order, so was the photograph.’

      ‘Well, would you recognize that driver again?’

      McCafferty scowled in bitter recollection. ‘I’d recognize that damned great black beard and moustache again. Probably lying in some ditch by this time.

      ‘Didn’t have time even to see the old shotgun, just the one glance and then the van gate–they’re side loaders–fell down. The only uniform the lot inside were wearing were stocking masks. God knows how many of them there were; I was too busy looking at what they were carrying–pistols, sawn-off twelve-bores, even one guy with a bazooka.’

      ‘For blasting open any electronically-locked steel doors, I suppose.’

      ‘I suppose. Fact of the matter is, there wasn’t one shot fired from beginning to end. Professionals, if ever I saw any. Knew exactly what they were doing, where to go, where to look. Anyway, I was plucked into that van and had hand and leg cuffs on before I had time to close my mouth.’

      Ryder was sympathetic. ‘I can see it must have been a bit of a shock. Then?’

      ‘One of them jumped down and went into the box. Bastard had an Irish accent: I could have been listening to myself talking. He picked up the phone, got through to Carlton–he’s the number–two man in security, if you recollect: Ferguson was off today–told him the transport van was here and asked for permission to open the gate. He pressed the button, the gates opened, he waited until the van had passed through, closed the door, came out through the other door and climbed into the van that had stopped for him.’

      ‘And that’s all?’

      ‘All I know. I stayed in there–I didn’t have much option, did I?–until the raid was over, then they locked me up with the others.’

      ‘Where’s Fergusont?’

      ‘In the north wing.’

      ‘Checking on missing