The Westminster Disaster

Book 0: Fred Hoyle's World of Science Fiction

by Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Hoyle

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Westminster Disaster is based on the present world shortage of high-grade uranium and the action turns on a Soviet threat to use nuclear blackmail against London. When the British Ambassador to the U.N. seeks to veto a Soviet demand for sanctions against South Africa, the threat becomes a hideous reality. Writing from a position of intimate knowledge of advanced trends in research and science administration, in this novel the Hoyles give vivid expression to their deep fears about the present world situation and about carefully laid plans for Soviet domination...

Release date: June 24, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 209

Sample

Just as a big river is formed by the confluence of many streams, so a massive affair like the Westminster Disaster was woven from many threads, threads which at first sight seemed separated from each other. It was while I was investigating one of the threads, connected with a Soviet agent called Morales, that I first met my wife. Her maiden name was Annette Osborne. Thereafter we continued the investigation together. It was an investigation with fragments in New York, Washington, South Africa, the Babushkin suburb of Moscow, and the very heart of London itself. We found an article in an Amsterdam newspaper telling of a light aircraft which crashed over the Dutch coast on the morning of the Westminster Disaster. It was this article that eventually led us to J. J. Marquette, a young West Indian pilot for a firm, Pengelly Charter, ostensibly in the business of giving tourists a flip over the sights of London. Of the three charred bodies found in the wreck of that lightplane, those of the two passengers interested us most—but of that more later. In view of the family connection, it is natural that we should take as the first thread Annette’s own father.

Tom Osborne

It had been a beautiful day over the Lake of the Woods, near Sioux Narrows in the Ontario Province of Canada, with the water sparkling in the sunlight like untold millions of precious gems. As the evening shadows lengthened, Robert Morales silently and deftly changed his outer clothes for a skin-tight black outfit complete with hood. This he left rolled up on his forehead while he checked a waterproof bag containing photographic equipment. His companion, a heavyset man in a red check shirt, cut the outboard motor. With a grunt the man hauled the machine aboard, took up a paddle, and began with strong, measured strokes to propel the canoe toward the lakeshore.

Throughout the day, Robert Morales hadn’t allowed his attention to wander for a moment. He and his companion had kept their quarry within view. With binoculars and the powerful outboard motor this had not been particularly difficult, because the quarry had scarcely troubled itself to move about. In fact, the two men in the other boat appeared to have spent most of the day placidly fishing. Yet through the binoculars Morales had seen them talking intently. A good place to talk, he had thought, out there on the water.

By now the heavyset man had brought the canoe close to the shore. Instead of seeking to land he paddled carefully and silently along the lakeside.

A mile away from the silently moving canoe, Pieter van Elders was putting the finishing touches to his toilet. After the day on the lake he had showered and dressed carefully, far more carefully than was necessary in this remote spot. He had done so to keep a check on his excitement, to force himself into a routine. He picked up the file of papers which lay there on the dressing table beside the mirror. He and Tom Osborne would be talking about the papers after dinner, putting finishing touches to the formalities of their agreement. Van Elders hesitated, and then put the file down. He would return for it once dinner was over, he decided.

If Pieter van Elders had been in Toronto or New York, he would never have left such sensitive documents lying exposed in his bedroom. In the extreme remoteness of the Lake of the Woods he left them simply because it would be inconvenient to be clutching the file throughout the informal dinner with his host and hostess.

Tom Osborne stood looking into the cheerful log fire. Except that his dark, slightly thinning hair was cut short, he looked more like the conductor of an orchestra than the president of International Heavy Metals of Canada. He had no illusions about the deal he was getting into with the South Africans. He knew there would be political trouble, certainly if this thing ever came out. But in his judgement as a mining executive with twenty-odd years of experience, the risk was worthwhile. Miners were always taking risks, sometimes big risks. What made the risk worthwhile was the simple overwhelming fact that the whole darned world would be running quite soon into one hell of a uranium shortage. IHM’s own rich uranium deposit near Elliot Lake would be going thin by the nineteen nineties. So too would every other rich deposit, all over the world. In the long term much lower-grade ores would have to be used, and the biggest and most promising low-grade ores were in South Africa.

At this point in Tom Osborne’s thinking, van Elders appeared. The talk over drinks was general and relaxed. The Osbornes were good hosts. Dinner was not delayed, and an excellent wine accompanied the best trout van Elders could remember.

Robert Morales waited in the darkness outside, watching until the three people inside reached the second course of their meal. The window was open, and he could hear their wine-warmed voices clearly through the bug screen. The time had come for him to move. It took only a moment for Morales to slip like a black shadow through the house door and up the stairs. Swiftly and silently he found the South African’s bedroom. There all too obviously was a file of papers waiting to be fetched. Morales took two exposures of each of the twenty-three sheets of paper contained in the file. His camera was loaded with ultra-high-speed film, and the bedroom light itself gave him sufficient illumination. Each sheet took about fifteen seconds, so that the whole file cost him no more than six minutes. He spent a further few minutes searching for other papers. He found van Elders’ diplomatic passport, his ministerial identification, his wallet, traveller’s cheques, and airline ticket. Methodically he took pictures of the passport and identification documents. Finally he checked that all the articles, the file particularly, were just as he had found them.

He paused at the head of the stairs, for there were noises of people moving below. Suddenly van Elders appeared, taking the stairs two at a time. Morales withdrew into one of the other bedrooms and waited.

A moment later van Elders emerged from his bedroom clutching the file firmly, and pounded rapidly down the stairs. Robert Morales stood motionless, listening. Three minutes. Five minutes. It was the woman he was alert for now. No one came. In an instant he was down the stairs. Once more he paused to listen. Satisfied that he could hear the woman’s voice, he stepped noiselessly out of the house and on through the undergrowth to the canoe, where the thickset man in the red check shirt awaited him. As the canoe put silently out from the lakeshore, Morales breathed deeply in the night air. His mission was complete.

That was on the evening of the 7th. Pieter van Elders left Sioux Narrows the following morning, satisfied that his job was well and truly done. He planned to take an evening flight to London, and thence to return immediately home to Johannesburg.

By the late afternoon of the 8th, phone calls reached Tom Osborne, from both Sudbury and Ottawa, informing him of political manoeuvres at the United Nations, manoeuvres affecting the proposed agreement between International Heavy Metals and the South Africans. The Canadian government was itself being asked for an explanation of the agreement. Osborne was consumed by an inner white-hot anger at the thought that a leak had occurred within IHM itself. Somebody in Sudbury, or Ottawa, had been talking, he decided, never suspecting that the information had actually been snatched from under his own nose. And even if he had entertained such a suspicion he would have dismissed it in the incorrect belief that an uproar at the United Nations could not have been stirred up so quickly.

Although he said nothing to his wife, Roberta Osborne knew that her husband was in a high old temper. She knew it from the tight-lipped way he was going about the house, and from his sudden decision to return to Sudbury.

The long drive to Sudbury, by way of Kenora, Thunder Bay, and Sault St. Marie, occupied the night of the 8th and the early morning of the 9th. Throughout the drive, Tom Osborne began to see, really for the first time, what a huge tiger he had gotten by the tail. It seemed like a small detail, to control the frequency of a laser to within one or two parts in a million. But once you could do that you could separate the isotopes of the heavy metals, separate them far more easily than with the old centrifuge technique. Nobody was going to fuss very much so long as your heavy metal was platinum or gadolinium or mercury. But once your metal was uranium, the situation was different, because once you had separated out the rare U-235, you could easily make nuclear bombs from it. The technique, once you knew how, was actually much less trouble than the older roundabout business of making plutonium from U-238.

The huge tiger, of course, was the politics of Africa. And standing behind the politics of Africa there was always the unremitting world struggle for oil, and for strategic materials of all kinds, materials like South African chrome in which Tom Osborne had long wanted to gain an interest. There were also diamonds, platinum, coal, as well as the chrome, and, of course, the uranium itself. The rocks of southern and central Africa, like those of Canada, were old, and because of that they were rich in mineral deposits of nearly every kind. The prize was a glittering one, and it was now well within his grasp, provided the political threat of the United Nations could be overcome.

Of course there would be an uproar, because the capability of South Africa to separate U-235 would change everything throughout the whole of Africa. There would be no more cheap successes for the Marxists, not against a South Africa equipped with easily made nuclear weapons. The Marxist route would lie elsewhere now, through pressure at the UN, through pressure from the UN to Ottawa.

It was Canadian government policy to appear to the world like a thoroughly good fellow, anxious to do whatever was right, whatever “right” might be, and the UN had become the self-appointed arbiter of that. For Canada, a country self-sufficient in almost everything—self-sufficient thanks to the farmers and to companies like IHM—it was a craven stupid policy. A policy, Osborne saw, that was going to be damned hard to change.

It took until the morning of the 10th to arrange an extraordinary meeting in Toronto of the Board of International Heavy Metals. The meeting was intended by Tom Osborne to inform the nonworking directors of the Board of the discussions with the Republic of South Africa. But even before the meeting could take place each of his directors received an anonymous, specially delivered letter, a letter describing with a fair amount of accuracy the general terms of the deal he had discussed with Pieter van Elders.

Nor was this the whole story. On the 9th, the stock of IHM had risen five whole points on the Toronto exchange. This rise had of course been due to heavy buying, which the IHM executive had traced to orders placed by Swiss banks. The sharp rise was still continuing, as Tom Osborne had just been informed by his secretary. Major movements in the price of a stock can be produced by the sudden purchase or sale of no more than a percent or two of all the shares outstanding. With seventy-one million shares of IHM outstanding, this implied a purchase of about a million and a half of them. At the present share price of about $40, the sum placed by the Swiss banks must therefore have been in the region of $60 million. A big sum for a private investor, or even for an institution, but not a big sum for a government, especially if that government happened to be a superpower.

The rise was big enough to encourage quite a number of other investors to sell, taking profit on their holdings of IHM stock. Indeed, brokers’ reports showed that this natural process was happening already. Eventually the profit taking would become large enough to moderate the rise. If at that point the big purchaser of a million and a half shares were suddenly to unload on the market, the price of IHM stock would plummet to well below the price of $35 per share at which the whole exercise had started. The price would be likely to fall even below $25, and it would take some months to recover, because investors generally would think something was badly wrong with the stock, especially with the South African deal under acute controversy at the UN. True, the foreign government would lose some $20 million in the manoeuvre, but such a sum might be thought well spent if it should cause IHM to call off the deal.

Tom Osborne began to address the meeting. Although he forced himself to speak quietly, he found it impossible to keep the smouldering rage out of his voice. He began by saying that first and foremost he was a miner. He said that although mining and politics were intertwined—they had been so for thousands of years, since mining first began—experience showed that miners did best if they could manage to ignore the politics. For the good reason that politics was short term and mining was long term. A hot political potato today was often completely forgotten tomorrow. Of course South Africa might be different, but that was always said about every political issue; it was always different. What was overwhelmingly clear in this issue was that IHM could buy into the South African mining scene at very little cost to itself. If South Africa eventually went to the wall, very little would have been lost.

A voice asked about the recent upswing of the IHM share price. How much might eventually be lost due to that? Nothing at all was Tom Osborne’s answer. In fact, there was money to be made in it. His proposal was that IHM take advantage of a sharp downswing of the share price, should the anonymous purchaser decide to unload, by buying up the dumped stock, buying it into the company treasury. This would soon bring the share price back to the region of $35, and the anonymous purchaser’s loss would become IHM’s eventual gain, since the stock could be let out of treasury gradually, at the higher price.

Then Tom Osborne asked his directors to decide in their minds just how far they were prepared for their company to be pushed around. Did they really want their decisions to be made for them by politicians, not even by their own politicians in Ottawa, but by politicians in Moscow? Casting expediency aside, was there not a point at which a stand simply had to be made? Otherwise how far might the encroachment on their decision making go? As he spoke, his voice strengthened gradually, for he could detect from the subtle combination of small sounds—of his directors moving slightly in their seats, of their breathing even—that he was beginning to carry the meeting.

Another day passed in the life of Tom Osborne. It was just 9:30 A.M. on the morning of the 11th when he emerged from the midtown Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. He had come down from Toronto to New York the previous evening. He didn’t quite know why he had come, for there was little he could do about the situation developing at the United Nations. It was really a matter of being close to the scene of the action.

Tom Osborne had arranged several business meetings, to give him the excuse to be there in New York, and it was toward the first such meeting that he was now heading. He thought of walking to his appointment, but then caught sight of a taxi standing some fifty yards away down the street. The taxi was apparently free, for its light was on. Deciding he might not have quite sufficient time to walk after all, Tom Osborne moved quickly toward the taxi. Then he stopped because there was no driver to be seen. His first instinct was to move closer. After a few quick steps he stopped again, not quite knowing why, or what caused the sudden prickling of the hairs on his neck. A policeman strolled by the taxi, so surely everything had to be all right?

If the explosion had been a small one, Tom Osborne’s caution would have saved his life, but the explosion was violent enough to cause a man standing more than a hundred yards away to be knocked down flat onto the sidewalk. A crowd assembled quickly around the crumpled remains of the taxi and the rag-doll-like corpse of Tom Osborne. Of the policeman there was nothing to be seen.

Moscow

Returning to August 8th, the day following the activities of Robert Morales, in one minute the Kremlin bells would toll for 11:30 A.M. General Valas Georgian walked the short distance that would bring him to the offices of the Chairman. He was five feet ten inches in height, deep of chest, and fifty-three years old. Which gave him time, he often told himself, to wait until old age and death swept away the thin crust of political authority that still lay above him. Because he looked more formidable in uniform than in an ill-fitting, baggy suit, he always wore his uniform on duty. His voice was powerful, with rich overtones to it, as if he were a member of the Red Army Choir—which indeed in his earlier years he had actually been. Although the dark brown eyes were not Mongolian in their slant, the face was big and rounded, almost surely with a Siberian strain to it.

Valas Georgian was now a high-ranking KGB officer, but he still continued to emphasise his earlier connexion with the regular army. He did so in simple, practical ways rather than by open statement, such as always turning up for a meeting precisely at the agreed time, to within the last second or two. So it was that he now walked into the Chairman’s suite exactly at 11:30 A.M. The Chairman rose to greet him. Then the two of them settled back in comfortable chairs, a low table between them carrying two small glasses, a decanter of vodka, and a slender blue file.

Even granted the efficiency of the Soviet intelligence machine, of its external tentacles and of its home-based analytical offices, it was remarkable that the papers p. . .