"Jesus!" Bronowski fortified himself with some of Brady's malt. "That's more than a sixty-four-dollar question. It's an eight-hundred-mile question ― and every damned mile is virtually a sitting target."
"The boss is right," Tim Houston said. "If we sit here and drink your whiskey while pretending to help, we're only abusing your hospitality. There's nothing we or anyone else can do to help. A combat-ready division of the U. S. Army would be about as useful as a gaggle of Girl Scouts. The task is impossible and the line indefensible."
Mackenzie said, "Well, George, at least we're operating on a bigger scale than with the tar-sands boys in Athabasca. There they said a battalion wouldn't be big enough to guard their installation. Now it's a division." Mackenzie turned to Bronowski. "Let's switch hats with the enemy. Where wouldn't you strike next?"
Bronowski said, "Well, I wouldn't strike at any of the pump stations again on the assumption that, until this matter is cleared up, they will be heavily guarded. I'd have been sorely tempted to go for Pump Station Ten at the Isabel Pass in the Alaska Range, or Number Twelve at the Thompson Pass in the Chugach Mountains. All pump stations are vital of course, but some are more vital than others, and those are Number Ten and Number Twelve ― along with Number Four here." He considered briefly. "Or maybe I would go for them… I mean, maybe you'd be so damned certain that I wouldn't hit again in the same place that you wouldn't much bother ― "
Dermott held up his hand. "Start in on the double-guessing, and we're up all night. On with the hazards ― the low priority ones, I mean."
"I wouldn't go for the two Master Operations Control Centers at Prudhoe Bay. They could be taken out easily enough and, sure, they'd stall all production from the wells immediately, but not for long. It's no secret that contingency plans for bypassing the centers are already in hand. Repairs wouldn't take all that long. In any event, security will be now tightened to the extent that the game wouldn't be worth the candle. So we can be pretty certain that there will be no attempt made to sabotage the oil supply before it enters the pipeline. Same goes for when it leaves the pipe at Valdez. Maximum damage there could be inflicted at the Oil Movements Control Center, where the pipeline controller can monitor and control the flow of oil all the way from Prudhoe to Valdez, and the terminal controller ― he's in the same room, actually ― controls practically everything that moves in the terminal itself. Both of those, in turn, are dependent on what's called the Backbone Supervisory System Computer. Knock out any of those three and you're in dead trouble. But they're pretty secure as they are. From now, they'll be virtually impregnable. Again, not worth it."
Dermott said, "How about the storage tanks?"
"Well, now. If one or two of them were attacked or ruptured ― it would be impossible to get them all at once ― the containment dikes would take care of the spillage. Fire would be another thing, but even then the snow would have a blanketing effect ― we may only have an annual dusting of snow up here, but down there they have over three hundred inches. Anyway, the tank farms are the most open and easily guarded complex on the entire pipeline. There's no way you can really get at them without bombing the area. Not very likely, one would think."
"What about the tanker terminals?"
"Again, easily guarded. I hardly think they're likely to run to underwater demolition squads. Even if they did, they couldn't do much damage, and that would be easily repaired."
"The tankers themselves?"
"Sink a dozen and there's always a thirteenth. No way you can interrupt the oil flow by hitting the tankers."
"The Valdez Narrows?"
"Block them?" Dermott nodded and Bronowski shook his head. "The Narrows aren't as narrow as they look on a small-scale chart. Three thousand feet ― that's the minimum channel width ― between the Middle Rock and the east shore. You'd have to sink an awful lot of vessels to block that channel."
"So we cross off the unlikely targets. Where does that leave us?"
"It leaves us with eight hundred miles." Bronowski shifted.
"The air temperature is the overriding factor," Houston said. "No saboteur worth his salt would consider wrecking anything except the pipeline itself. This time of the year any attack has to be in the open air."
"Why?"
"This is only early February, remember, and to all intents we're still in the depth of winter. As often as not the temperature is well on the wrong side of thirty below, and in these parts thirty below is the crucial figure. Rupture the pipeline at, say, thirty-five below, and it stays ruptured. Repair is virtually impossible. Men can work, although well below their norm, but unfortunately the metal they may try to repair or the machine tools they use to make the repairs won't co-operate with them. At extreme temperatures, profound molecular changes occur in metal and it becomes unworkable. Given the right ― or wrong ― conditions, a tap on an iron rod will shatter it like glass."
Brady said, "You mean, all I need is a hammer and a few taps on the pipeline ― "
Houston was patient. "Not quite. What with the heat of the oil inside and the insulation lagging outside, the steel of the pipeline is always warm and malleable. It's the repair tools that would fracture."
Dermott said, "But surely it would be possible to erect canvas or tarpaulin covers over the fracture and bring the temperature up to workable levels by using hot-air blowers? You know, the way Poulson did at Station Four?"
"Of course. Which is why I wouldn't attack the pipeline directly. I'd attack the structures that support the pipeline, those that are already frozen solid at air temperature and would require days, perhaps weeks, to bring up to a working temperature."
"Structures?"
"Indeed. The terrain between Prudhoe and Valdez is desperately uneven and traversed with innumerable watercourses which have to be forded or spanned in one way or another. There are over six hundred streams and rivers along the run. The six-hundred-fifty-foot free-span suspension bridge over the Tazlina River would make a dilly of a target. Even better would be the twelve-hundred-foot span ― a similar type of construction ― over the Tanana River. But one doesn't even have to operate on such a grandiose scale, and I, personally, would prefer not to." He looked at Bronowski. "Wouldn't you agree?"
"Completely. Operate on a much more moderate and undramatic scale, but one equally effective. I'd go for the VSMs every time."
Dermott said, "VSMs?"
"Vertical support members. Roughly half the length of the pipeline is above ground and lies on a horizontal cradle or saddle supported by vertical metal posts. That makes for a fair number of targets ― seventy-eight thousand of them, to be precise. They would be a snap to take out ― wrap-around beehive plastic explosives which would need all of a minute to fix in position. Take out twenty of those, and the line would collapse under its own weight and the weight of the oil inside it. Take weeks to repair."
"They could still use those hot-air canvas shelters."
"A hell of a lot of help that would be," Bronowski said, "if they couldn't bring up the cranes and crawler equipment to effect the repairs. Anyway, there are places where, at this time of year, it just couldn't be done. There is, for instance, one particularly vulnerable stretch that gave the designers headaches, the builders sleepless nights and security nightmares. This steep and dangerous stretch is between Pump Station Five and the summit of Atigun Pass, which is between four and five thousand feet high."