Ragnarok

by John Gribbin, D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The day of ice and fire, that brings in its wake devastation to the world. Dr Robert Graham, noted nuclear physicist, has campaigned hard and long for disarmament. Now his patience is at an end. With an ill-assorted handful of desperate, like-minded 'terrorists', he plans to hold the human race to ransom. His bargaining power is terrifying - nothing short of Ragnarok itself. The world governments must listen - or the countdown to nuclear winter has already begun . . .

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 340

Sample

The square metal rungs of the ladder were wet. The young woman went down them carefully, holding fast to the slippery handrail. The whole ship was beaded with moisture; last night’s heavy fog had lifted, but only to the masthead, giving perhaps half a mile’s visibility and leaving the air unseasonably cold and damp, even for Iceland. The first week in August, and already summer seemed to be over.

A rugged wooden workboat, painted black, was tied up alongside the research vessel. She stepped down into it. The woman was wearing an insulated wet suit, bright blue neoprene foam, and her long blonde hair was scragged back in an untidy pony-tail. Face mask, oxygen cylinders, insulated gloves and flippers were already on the centre thwart. She sidled past them, went back to the engine, started it, and checked the rudder lines to the wheel amidships. The man up on the research vessel’s deck threw down the stern rope to her. She caught it neatly, stowed it and went forward. Engine fumes gathered in the still air, the exhaust pipe bubbling as the motorboat rocked on the slight swell coming in from the Atlantic.

She cast off forward, moved back to the helm, and swung the boat away from the ship’s side. Ahead of her, the yellow minisub was already diving. She turned and waved to the man up on the deck. Black-bearded, massive in stained blue overalls, he gave her a thumbs-up in return, and shouted something she couldn’t hear. When she looked forward again, the submarine had disappeared, leaving only a swirling pattern of eddies.

Anxiously, she scanned the beach and the surrounding cliff tops. Nothing moved. Above, the sky was opaque, grey and lowering. Ideal for their purpose. The boat reached the submarine’s diving station, but she continued past it, maintaining the same steady speed and course. Her face, as she stared purposefully ahead, was emphatic rather than beautiful – a high forehead, deepset blue eyes above a generous mouth, good skin and marvellous teeth. American vividness, undimmed by the years spent in Britain.

Although the boat was equipped for diving, she hoped she wouldn’t have to. Icelandic waters were bitterly cold, even in summer. Her job in Helgavik that morning was to provide a marker, to locate the black-hulled boat at a point some five hundred metres from the cliffs to the east, and a similar distance from the shingle beach to the north, and anchor there. Directly beneath her, the two men in the tiny submarine would lay the first of the paired cylindrical units carried in the sub’s twin cargo pods.

She didn’t envy them. The submarine was built for deep-sea scientific research. Electrically powered, its hull was a flattened dish in the centre of which its two-man crew lay prone, side by side, navigating through armoured-glass observation ports. The heated and pressurised work space was designed to fit two human bodies, and not much else. Even though she didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, and had often crewed the submarine in warmer waters, she had never grown used to the close confinement, the sweating metal, the eerie sense of isolation. And she particularly didn’t envy her friends their task today – the risks involved, and the terrible weight of their responsibility.

She slowed the motorboat. Looking over the side, she could clearly see the flickering yellow shape of the submarine in the shallow water, slipping gently astern beneath her. She was reminded of how visible it would be from a coastguard helicopter, and instinctively glanced up at the sky again. Their cover story was excellent – but still … The overcast was still total. But it was thinning, with the sun’s pale disc occasionally showing above the cliffs on the eastern side of the bay.

Not helicopter weather – yet. Not for another hour at least. Time enough. Nor, beside this isolated fjord, would there be shore observers. To the north the cove was bounded by a long, flat beach, at one end of which stood a small, stone rescue hut. Behind this beach a deep valley, once a glacier bed, covered now with low, scrubby bushes and ragged patches of arctic grass, wound up to higher ground. Elsewhere the cove was surrounded by black lava cliffs, veined with red, a nesting place for sea birds. Above, the land was barren. The nearest village, Hellnar, lay three miles away, along the coast to the west.

The young American woman stopped the boat’s engine, checking her position as she drifted on. Except for the cries of the seabirds, the cove was silent. She went forward, unshipped the anchor, waited a moment, then swung it overboard. Its line snaked after it, down through the ice-clear water. The bottom here had shelved to less than five fathoms. Behind her, in the centre of Helgavik cove and to the west, the water was deep; the chart showed eighteen fathoms at low tide. The research vessel was moored close under the far cliffs, sheltered by the headland from the gales they must expect during their stay here. Even in summer, the North Atlantic was seldom calm for more than a week or so.

She waited, trying to relax. The submarine, moving cautiously in such shallow water, would take time to find her. But it was the accessibility of these shallows, and the cove’s critical relationship to the fault lines of the Reykjanes Ridge, that had made them choose Helgavik. The Earth’s crust here on the seabed was very thin, and subject to continual spreading. Eruptions were frequent. Entire new islands, black and angry, sometimes rose hissing from the water.

She shifted her position, looking down again into the water. She could see the bottom, could imagine the tearing pressure of the molten magma close beneath it. How easily the crust might fracture, releasing the red-hot magma in lava flows that would seethe and bubble across the ocean floor, heating the water instantly to boiling point and beyond, engulfing her in a violent, lethal turmoil of superheated steam and sulphurous gases …

But not today. Today, the lava reservoir was contained. She stiffened: the submarine was under her now, settling on the bottom. She could see it clearly, the spare brown weed parting around it, the small puffs of lava dust it raised as it grounded. And – she could picture it almost as clearly, in her mind’s eye – when it lifted again, it would lurch slightly to the left, asymmetrically lightened by the release of the contents of its starboard cargo pod. With the thought, she scanned the silent cove and the sky yet again.

Now, at last, there was movement on the cliffs to the west. It was almost a relief to see it.

A well trodden track led down from the ridge. Two orange-jacketed figures had emerged from the mist and were briskly making their way down it. She reached for her binoculars. A bearded man and a lean, high cheekboned woman, both in green walking breeches and orange anoraks, wearing tall, aluminium-framed backpacks. Hikers, clearly. This was, after all, the tourist season. She followed their progress with the glasses. The man saw her, and waved. She waved back. They must be hikers. It was too soon for anything else. The opposition knew nothing. Could know nothing – yet.

The couple reached the beach and paused there, shading their eyes as they stared out across the water. She waved again. Cheerfully. She was grateful that the distance was too great for conversation. Glancing down over the side again, she saw that the yellow submarine had gone.

If all was going according to plan, it had left behind it on the seabed a thick metal cylinder, also painted yellow, which contained a side-scan sonar unit, the transmitting component of an electronic system for analysing underwater geological formations. This was their cover – a research technique which utilised a beam of ultrasound, travelling laterally through the material of the seabed to be received by a second component, where it provided information about the rock strata through which it had passed.

The submarine would now be positioning, a precise distance away, the cylinder disguised as this second, receiving component. Outwardly, it was in every respect identical to the real thing.

She leaned on the boat’s gunwale and folded her arms. Perhaps, to the watchers on the beach, she was fishing. She imagined the scene from their point of view: a moored motorboat with one idle occupant, the unbroken water of the cove, and in the background the shabby, rust-streaked research vessel at anchor. Not, she hoped, an intriguing prospect.

The two hikers conferred. The woman pointed to the rescue hut; the man shook his head. They turned and walked along the beach, stopping now and then to look back. The young woman in the boat didn’t move. Suddenly, she feared them. They were unknown, and the unknown was dangerous.

Dramatically, the water heaved upward between her and them. The submarine surfaced. She watched, horrified, as it emerged gently into view, a hundred metres or so to port. Water streamed from its flanks as it lay motionless, an upturned, dazzling yellow pie-plate, listing steeply, its starboard rim angled up out of the water. The central hatch, opened from within, fell back with a clang that echoed from the cliffs. A man’s head appeared, his face turned towards her. Beyond him, on the beach, the two hikers had stopped in their tracks, transfixed.

Before the man could speak, she knew what he was going to tell her. The sub’s angle allowed of only one explanation. She was already reaching for the oxygen cylinders on their harness as his words came across the water.

‘The bloody thing won’t release,’ he shouted. ‘The pin must’ve jammed. You’ll just have to come down with us and free it. I told you the thing was too heavy. Christ, what a mess …’

Quickly, she pulled the cylinder harness up between her legs and snapped the buckle; a weighted belt went over it, around her waist. He was over-reacting. Of course he was. She rinsed her face mask over the side and put it on, high on her forehead. She reached up for the air hose, wriggling the mouthpiece into position under her lips, and tested the flow. She fixed the nose-clip, and pulled the mask down over her eyes. Hell, she’d have over-reacted herself in his position, on the seabed, struggling with the release mechanism, knowing the delicate and lethal nature of the cargo he was trying to get rid of.

Slipping on her insulated gloves, watchers on the shore forgotten, she backed up to the boat’s side and launched herself over it, down into the merciless arctic water.

Day One AUGUST 4. WEDNESDAY.

Professor Graham had been up since before dawn, sitting on the beach in front of his house, on a massive rib of sun-bleached driftwood. He sat at his ease, cultivating stillness, legs crossed. One bare foot was planted firmly in the dry sand; the other leg, equally motionless, was crossed over this anchor. Only his hands, which he kept in his lap, anxiously picked and fussed at one another whenever he forgot to check them.

He was waiting for his daughter Colly to telephone from the research vessel.

A tall, big-boned old man, he wore shabby white canvas slacks, belted high and showing improbable amounts of blue-veined shin, with a heavy, shapeless, oatmeal-coloured sweater. His face was tanned and firmly fleshed, still handsome, with clear, bright brown eyes deepset beneath a high, wide forehead. His beard, grizzled and cut short, was barely more than stubble; his silver-grey hair so fine and frail that it stirred even now, in the almost imperceptible breeze coming in off the ocean. He waited on the beach, carefully relaxed, turning his face up to the pale warmth of the newly risen sun.

He liked Maine summers: they spared him the heat and humidity of places further south, around Boston or New York. He was in excellent health, lean, his back straight; but he still appreciated the huge, cloudless skies, the gentle, undemanding radiance of the season. Summers in Maine were good for an old man’s bones.

The tide was low that morning, surf rolling in distantly along the wide, two-mile sweep of the glass-bright sand. Behind him a pair of bluejays darted noisily through the pine trees growing in the dune grass along the shore. The big rambling houses among the trees were mostly summer homes for wealthy New York and Philadelphia families, plus a growing contingent down from Canada.

Robert Graham hadn’t slept well. Now, although he waited with a show of patience, gazing quietly out to sea, into the eye of the rising sun, his thoughts were straining far beyond the horizon, two thousand miles and more, to a cove on the bleak Icelandic coastline. The ship must be there by now. He could picture her vividly, anchored within the curve of the high, black lava cliffs. He pictured the minisub, stealing down through the dark water, following the fault lines … In the house behind him the parlour clock chimed briefly. Six thirty. Colly should have called by now. He plucked nervously at the frayed hem of his sweater. Something had gone wrong.

He’d bought the house for his retirement, then never retired. It was old, from the nineteenth century, and big – built to no particular style or plan. Wooden, like most Maine houses, grey weathered shingles under a grey-green roof, with a turret at one corner to view the islands, a Dutch gable somewhere else, Edwardian fretwork here and there, and a wide screened porch along the front. A big house. Far too big for one old man on his own. But he preferred dust and the occasional cobweb to a live-in housekeeper. Now that his wife was dead he chose to manage on his own – up here on the coast, and also in his apartment down near the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

He stilled his twitching hands. Anything could have happened. Something trivial. It was much too early to start worrying. He told himself not to fuss.

His daughter’s call came through twenty minutes later, via the High Seas Operator on the ship-to-shore link. The time was six fifty: ten fifty in Iceland. When the big extension bell rang on the side of the house, Professor Graham got stiffly to his feet. He knew Colly would wait for him, but he still ran, back up the beach, across the porch and into the sun parlour. He stumbled on the last two steps, caught frantically at the doorpost, saved himself. He snatched up the telephone.

‘Colly?’ His voice was anxious, his breathing laboured.

The receiver gave out explosive crackles. Then: ‘Fard? Father? Is that you? Sorry I’m so late, Fard. There was a hell of a wait for the connection.’

‘Colly? My dear, it doesn’t matter. So good to hear your voice.’

‘And now the line’s terrible. Fard? It is you?’

‘It’s fine my end.’ Raising his voice. ‘I can hear you perfectly.’

‘What? How are you, Fard? You sound kind of breathless.’

‘I was down on the beach.’ He checked, thinking how crazy he’d been. What if he’d fallen and broken something, a leg or a hip or something, what then? The whole operation in ruins. He winced. ‘How are things up there, Colly?’

‘Fine. Fine … It’s been foggy, but it’s clearing now. We came in around dawn, dropped anchor just where we’d planned. Great place. Flynn’s a wizard.’

‘I always knew it.’

‘You’re sure you’re all right?’

‘I ran, that’s all.’

‘Wouldn’t you just know it?’ She laughed. ‘We’ve checked in again with the coastguards. They’ll be round to fix our permits, but not until the fog lifts down their way, too.’

It was small talk. Trivial. Simply filling in. But everything about her interested him. Everything about the ship. ‘It’s good to hear your voice, child.’

‘Me too.’ She paused. Her voice changed. ‘Werner’s been down in the sub. Werner and Kass. No problems.’ She cleared her throat. ‘No problems at all. Went like a dream. We’re in business.’

They were in business. The pre-arranged phrase. They were in business … He put off believing the words. He had to wait. What she had told him was so momentous.

He asked her, unnecessarily, ‘Really no problems?’

‘Well, a release pin stuck. But we soon fixed it. Otherwise, fine.’

The pins had always been a bother. ‘You’re sure? You really mean that?’

‘You have to trust us, Fard. Everything’s fine. I really mean it.’

He didn’t answer. He’d run out of questions; run out of excuses not to believe. She spoke again, but he wasn’t listening. His hand was shaking so much that he could scarcely hold the receiver to his ear. Everything was fine. The two units were in position on the seabed, and the countdown to Ragnarok had begun. They were in business. The next move, dear God, was up to him.

He grasped the telephone receiver firmly in both hands, fighting sudden blind terror. He wasn’t up to it. He’d fail. He was too old … Outside on the beach, the sun shone, warm and golden, and the surf came rolling in. He gazed at it, unseeing. A small dark cloud passed across the sun. As the scene dimmed, then lightened, his own mood lifted again with the return of the sun. It had just been a momentary nervousness. Nothing important.

He and Colly said little more. There was little more to be said. He sent the four of them his love. She told him to take care, and he promised that he would. She rang off. There was no point in prolonging the conversation; the line was terrible, anyway.

He leaned against the faded pine panelling in the sun parlour, trying to drum up the courage he’d believed would sustain him. Ragnarok. The end of the world. Ragnarok, the time of destruction … He closed his eyes, but couldn’t escape it. The poet’s vision came to him. He saw the ocean rise, engulfing villages and fields and forests. He saw volcanoes pour forth fire as the long winter of ice and snow gripped the bones of men. The sun at noon grew dark, the moon was lost in blackness, even the brightest stars faded from the sky. Ice-clouds and fire did battle until the flames reached up to heaven, and earth sank into the ocean, black and smouldering. Now there was naught but darkness and silence unbroken. The end had come – Ragnarok …

He shuddered deeply. Save us from that, dear Lord, he prayed, to whatever God might be listening.

Eventually, he found the necessary strength: or if not the strength, the ability to accept. The decisions had been taken long before. It was impossible to go back on them. He didn’t want to. Suddenly, he straightened his back, stood away from the wall, and phoned for a cab to take him to the airport.

While he waited, he changed into his smartest lightweight city clothes. They made him feel a different, braver person. His suitcase was already packed, so to fill in the time that still remained until the cab got there he walked down the beach to his neighbours’ house. The Grahams had had a key to the Abernatheys’ place for years. The Abernatheys never came to the beach in August – they said the tennis club got too crowded – so either Ruth or Robert had always kept an eye on things. Now his wife was dead. Ruth had been dead for more than a year, and he still grieved. If Ruth had not been dead, he wouldn’t have teamed up with Colly in this enterprise, and wouldn’t be flying down to New York today.

The Abernatheys’ downstairs telephone lived in a dark little lobby off what Chuck Abernathy called his ‘den’. Robert didn’t much like Chuck, and he doubted if Chuck much liked him, but they’d always been neighbourly. He let himself into the empty house and checked the small Zenith computer he’d already set up in Chuck’s den, and the modem that connected it, via the telephone, with the international network. As a physicist, communications technology was second nature to him now. His daughter could call at any time, and leave her news safe in the memory of the Zenith: he could do the same, from wherever he was. And either of them could read the messages stored in the computer’s memory. But there were no outgoing calls from the Abernatheys’ house, nothing that could be traced back to this point. Usually, gadgets like this delighted him. An electronic dead-letter drop, the spy stories would call it. But today, the fun had gone. He checked everything was in order, and locked the house up securely once more.

Robert walked back along the beach to his own house very slowly. He could see the taxi waiting now, where the dirt road ran into the sand, and he waved to the driver. But he didn’t hurry. He was saying goodbye. There was a lot of his life, and Ruth’s, wrapped up in this mile or so of sand dunes and rocks and sea and sky. He knew he’d never see any of it again, and it wasn’t easy, as he grew older, letting things go.

The cab driver carried his case out, grunting at the weight – on the sandy path the rollers built into its bottom edge were useless – and heaved it into the car’s trunk. Since this was Maine rather than one of the big cities, Robert sat beside him on the wide front seat, his briefcase between his legs. The driver was friendly. He asked the professor where he was from. He said he liked the accent – that he had a son in England himself, in Oxfordshire, a medical orderly in the USAF, and two grandchildren there. The professor told him he had a daughter, not yet married, and not in England. He found it hard to be frank and companionable. Already a chasm had opened between himself and what he now thought of as the real world.

He tried to find a word for himself. Only terrorist would do. It seemed at first ridiculous, melodramatic. He didn’t have the terrorist’s arrogance, or his exultation. He shared their amateurism, certainly, and perhaps their anger – but an intellectualised sort of anger that most terrorists, surely, would hardly recognise. Apart from that he was merely determined, optimistic, and secretly very afraid that someone might cause him physical pain.

Nevertheless, his weapons were undeniably those of the terrorist. The ultimatum, the deadline, the explosive device, the threats of death and destruction. He was, tout court, a terrorist.

The taxi got Professor Graham to Portland airport a few minutes after the Delta businessman’s flight to New York had left. It didn’t worry him. He caught the next, an hour later, and was still at La Guardia by mid-morning. From there he took a taxi to the United Nations building on the East River, at the corner of East 42nd Street and First Avenue. There was a hold-up on the Triboro Bridge, a minor collision blocking the westbound traffic lane, and the twelve-mile journey took almost as long as the flight down from Maine.

Once at the UN, Robert asked his driver to wait. He was an old enough New York hand not to leave his suitcase in the back. Troublesome though this was, the case was in fact well worth driving off with. It contained three thousand dollars in cash, one very expensive and sophisticated portable computer and other electronic equipment, as well as the usual clothes and personal effects – plus a shabby homburg hat and a blue double-breasted suit, now shiny in places and slightly too big for the professor, which his wife would have liked him to throw away at least ten years earlier. And it all belonged to a criminal, a terrorist, a man with no possibility of legal redress.

The city was stifling. He stood on the pavement by the cab for a moment, leaning on its roof gutter, gasping for breath. A thin yellow haze hung over Manhattan, mitigating none of the sun’s heat; intensifying it rather, battering it to and fro between the buildings. There was brightness, but there were no shadows. The hundred and forty-nine flags of the member nations drooped limply down their staffs along the front of the UN Plaza. A yellow school bus, lights flashing, was unloading children too enervated to do more than wait in a docile group until their teachers had counted them. Back in Maine, scarcely heeded news reports had warned over the past week of drought worse than ’88, with temperatures set to reach a new record high for the whole year. Here, it was easy to believe them.

At the onset of his wife’s final illness Professor Graham had given up his campaigning work for SANE – Scientists Against Nuclear Extinction: work that had gained him a Nobel Peace Prize some six years before. Since then, he had not thought to renew his UN pass, so he was obliged to go in by the same door as the tourists. One trust fewer, he told himself, for him to betray.

As he approached the barrier he paused, gratefully rested the suitcase by his foot, opened his briefcase and took out two thin, sealed blue plastic folders, which he tucked under his arm. Then he struggled on. Just past the barrier, a guard in a booth relieved him of both his pieces of luggage, giving him a numbered plastic disc instead. He slowly crossed the hexagonal stones of the plaza and entered the public lobby to the General Assembly Building.

The air conditioning chilled him instantly, drying the sweat on his forehead. Beneath the famous Foucault pendulum he joined the queue passing through the metal detector. The need for such precautions was sad, he thought, in a place like this, dedicated to peace and conciliation. Then he frowned, realising the irony of his own purpose there.

The huge silver ball swung silently on its wire, not so much to demonstrate the earth’s rotation, perhaps, as to suggest its tranquil continuance.

Once through the scanner, he went straight to the central public information desk and begged the use of one of their internal phones. Pressing the receiver close to his ear, he punched in the private four-digit number for the Secretary-General’s office, up on the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat Building. He found the contained sibilance of the crowded concourse intrusive, making it difficult for him to hear.

A woman answered. He recognised her voice: Donna Maclntyre, a motherly person, the Secretary-General’s private assistant.

‘Bob Graham here, Donna. Is Georg around anywhere?’

‘Professor Graham!’ She sounded genuinely pleased. ‘What a surprise. We haven’t had sight nor sound of you in ages.’

‘A year or so. I’ve not been doing much. My wife died, you know.’

‘I heard. I was truly sorry. We all were.’

‘That’s kind of you, Donna. Is Georg available?’

‘The Secretary-General’s engaged. Can he call you back?’

Robert had hoped as much. Even as betrayals went, that of their long and close friendship would have been particularly difficult, face-to-face. The betrayal of the Peace Prize he could live with, even justify. But to use an old and wise friend, to cheat him and lie to him and use him, was ugly, no matter what. This way, at least it could be done through an intermediary.

‘I’m afraid not, Donna. I’m downstairs, at the public information desk. And I have something for him. It’s very important.’

She hesitated. ‘He’s with an ambassador, Professor. I really don’t think I can disturb –’

‘No. No, of course not. May I see his Chef du Cabinet, then?’

‘It really is important? Hold on, then, Professor. I’ll see if I can fix it.’

He held. He was amused, as always, that Georg’s right-hand man should be known as his Chef du Cabinet. Possibly the title had been chosen to suggest Gallic urbanity – was not French, for all its Cartesian exactitudes, still the true language of diplomacy?

Donna fixed it. He’d known she would. It was precisely this ability to reach important people, the leverage of his many years in the peace movement, that made the operation possible. Powerful men knew him. If not on Bill and Harry terms, then they knew of him. Bob Graham, the Peace Prize man – and hadn’t he won the Nobel for Physics, too, some time back? Something to do with lasers? Prizes made a difference, as did creating a public nuisance for a very long time. He’d been a professional peacemaker, and powerful men listened to professional peacemakers. They might do so only for the look of the thing; but, although that was a pity, it was better than not listening at all.

These, then, were the privileges he was principally betraying: the goodwill, the trust, the respect, the honour.

He waited with these bleak thoughts by the information desk, until a security guard came to take him up. Once out of the public lobby he was frisked with embarrassing thoroughness – clearly the guard had little faith in electronic metal detectors – then they went up together in the lift to the thirty-eighth floor, and through a hushed reception area to the office of the Chef du Cabinet.

Robert had seen the Secretary-General’s ‘Chef’ before, distantly, at various receptions, but they had never been introduced. He found the man ill-judged, disappointingly brash. He shook Robert’s hand over-vigorously, clapped his shoulder, called him Bob, and jovially suggested that he call him Henry.

‘Sit down, Bob. Relax … Donna tells me you’ve something for the boss. Maybe we can help you. Just say the word. We’ll sure as hell try.’

His manner provided a distraction – almost – from the moment’s fearsome significance. He was gesturing Professor Graham to a chair. His office, like that of the Secretary-General, looked out across the East River. It was an impressive panorama, but Robert turned the low, black leather chair away from the view, settling with his back to the window. He must focus his attention, his whole being, on the single, terrifying purpose of his visit. As a result of this meeting, for better or worse, the course of world events would be changed. The months of planning were at an end. Now, suddenly, was the moment when theory became practice, when the full burden of responsibility was understood, weighed, and