Barrow said. ‘Well, damn your eyes, Ryder, you were right again. About the earthquakes, I mean.’
Ryder said mildly: ‘That hardly seems to matter now.’ At 12.15 a.m. word came through from the AEC that the hydrogen bomb, code-named ‘Aunt Sally’, designed by Professors Burnett and Aachen, had a diameter of 4.73 inches.
That didn’t seem to matter at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
At eight o’clock the next morning Morro made his next contact with the anxious and — such is mankind’s morbidly avid love of vicarious doom and disaster — vastly intrigued world.
His message he delivered with his now accustomed terseness.
He said: ‘My meeting with the President and his senior advisers will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. However, I insist that the presidential party arrives in Los Angeles — if the airport is functioning, if not, San Francisco — by six o’clock this evening. The meeting place I cannot and will not specify. The travel arrangements will be announced late this afternoon.
‘I trust the low-lying regions of Los Angeles, the coastal regions north to Point Arguello and south to the Mexican border, in addition to the Channel Islands, have been evacuated. If not I will accept no responsibility. As promised, I shall detonate this nuclear device in two hours’ time.’
Sassoon was closeted in his office with Brigadier-General Culver of the Army Air Force. Far below a deathly hush lay over the totally deserted streets. The low-lying regions of the city had indeed been evacuated, thanks in large part to Culver and over two thousand soldiers and national guardsmen under his command, who had been called in to help the hopelessly overworked police restore order. Culver was a ruthlessly efficient man and had not hesitated to call in tanks in number close to battalion strength, which had a marvellously chastening effect on citizens who, prior to their arrival, had seemed hell-bent not on self-preservation but on self-destruction. The deployment of the tanks had been co-ordinated by a fleet of police, coastguard and army helicopters, which had pinpointed the major traffic bottlenecks. The empty streets were littered with abandoned cars, many of which bore the appearance of having been involved in major crashes, a state of affairs for which the tanks had been in no way responsible: the citizens had done it all by themselves.
The evacuation had been completed by midnight, but long before that the fire brigades, ambulances and police cars had moved in. The fires, none of them major, had been extinguished, the injured had been removed to hospital and the police had made a record number of arrests of hoodlums whose greed in taking advantage of this unprecedented opportunity had quite overcome their sense of self-preservation and were still looting away with gay abandon when policemen with drawn guns had taken a rather less than paternal interest in their activities.
Sassoon switched off the TV set and said to Culver: ‘What do you make of that?’
‘One has to admire the man’s colossal arrogance.’
‘Over-confidence.’
‘If you like. Understandably, he wants to conduct his meeting with the President under cover of darkness. Obviously, the “travel arrangements”, as he calls them, are linked with the deadline for the arrival of the plane. He wants to make good and sure that the President has arrived before he gives instructions.’
‘Which means that he’ll have an observer stationed at both San Francisco and Los Angeles airports. Well, he has three separate phones with three separate numbers in the Adlerheim, and we have them all tapped.’
‘They could use short-wave radio communication.’
‘We’ve thought of that and discounted the possibility. Morro is convinced that we have no idea where he is. In which case, why bother with unnecessary refinements? Ryder has been right all along: Morro’s divine belief in himself is going to bring him down.’ Sassoon paused. ‘We hope.’
‘This fellow Ryder. What’s he like?’
‘You’ll see for yourself. I expect him within the hour. At the moment he’s out at the police shooting range practising with some fancy Russian toys he took away from the opposition. Quite a character. Don’t expect him to call you “sir”.’
At 8.30 that morning a special news broadcast announced that James Muldoon, Secretary of the Treasury, had had a relapse in the early hours of the morning and had had to have emergency treatment for cardiac arrest. Had he not been in hospital and with the cardiac arrest unit standing by his bedside it was unlikely that he would have survived. As it was he was off the critical list and swearing that he could make the journey out to the west coast even although he had to be carried aboard Air Force One on a stretcher.
Culver said: ‘Sounds bad.’
‘Doesn’t it just? Fact is, he slept soundly the whole night through. We just want to convince Morro that he’s dealing with a man in a near-critical condition, a man who clearly must be treated with every consideration. It also, of course, gives a perfect excuse for two additional people to accompany the presidential delegation: a doctor and a Treasury Under-Secretary to deputize for Muldoon in the event of his expiring as soon as he sets foot in the Adlerheim.’
At 9 o’clock an Air Force jet lifted off from Los Angeles airport. It carried only nine passengers, all from Hollywood and all specialists in their own arcane crafts. Each carried a suitcase. In addition, a small wooden box had been loaded aboard. Exactly half an hour later the jet touched down in Las Vegas.
A few minutes before ten Morro invited his hostages along to his special screening room. All the hostages had TV sets of their own, but Morro’s was something special. By a comparatively simple magnification and back- projection method he was able to have a screened picture some six feet by four-and-a-half, about four times the width and height of a normal twenty-one-inch set. Why he had invited them was unclear. When not torturing people — or, more precisely, having them tortured — Morro was capable of many small courtesies. Perhaps he just wanted to watch their faces. Perhaps he wanted to revel in the magnitude of his achievement and the sense of his invincible power, and the presence of an audience always heightened the enjoyment of such an experience; but that last was unlikely as gloating did not appear to be a built-in factor in Morro’s mental make-up. Whatever the reasons, none of the hostages refused the invitation. In the presence of catastrophe, even although such catastrophe be at second hand, company makes for comfort.
It was probably true to say that every citizen in America, except those engaged in running absolutely essential services, was watching the same event on their screens: the number watching throughout the rest of the world must have run into hundreds of millions.
The various TV companies filming the incident were, understandably, taking no chances. Normally, all outdoor events on a significantly large scale, ranging from Grand Prix racing to erupting volcanoes, are filmed from helicopters, but here they were dealing with the unknown. No one had even an approximate idea of what the extent of the blast and radiation would be, and the companies had elected the same type of site for their cameras — on the tops of high buildings at a prudent distance from the ocean front: the viewers in the Adlerheim could see the blurred outline of the city abutting on the Pacific in the lower segment of their screens. If the nuclear device was anywhere near where Morro had said it was — between the islands of Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina — then the scene of action had to be at least thirty miles distant; but the telescopic zoom lenses of the cameras would take care of that with ease. And, at that moment, the zoom lenses were fully extended, which accounted for the out-of- focus blurring of the city front.
The day was fine and bright and clear with cloudless skies which, in the circumstances, formed an impossibly macabre setting for the convulsion the watchers were about to witness, a circumstance that must have pleased Morro greatly, for it could not but increase the emotional impact of the spectacle: a storm-wracked sky, lowering clouds, driving rain, fog, any face of nature that showed itself in a sombre and minor key would have been far more in keeping with the occasion — and would have lessened the impact of the spectacle of the explosion. There was only one favourable aspect about the weather. Normally at that time of the day and at that time of year the wind
