“Further, we suspect that the oil leaking from hundreds of ruptured well heads will be rather difficult to stop. The well heads are located on the seafloor at depths ranging from one hundred to five hundred feet and are not easily accessible. Shutting them down will not be so simple a matter as putting out the oil well fires in Kuwait, or as easy a cleanup as the effort to repair the damage caused a few years ago by the Exxon Valdez. Those tasks were completed in a number of months. How long will it be before the radioactivity reaches levels at which it will be safe to send divers or submarines into the area? I leave that to the experts to decide. Frankly, we believe that the majority of the North Sea oil deposits, what is left of them anyway, will be forever unusable simply because it will be too expensive to reopen them. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil will be released over a period of time, much of it contaminated by radiation. The smoke from the oil fires left burning on the surface could blacken Europe’s skies for months. The soot and the resultant rains will be radioactive. Beaches and seaside towns and cities from Oslo to Calais, from Aberdeen to Hamburg, could be threatened, depending on the wind and weather patterns and on the prevailing sea currents.
“Finally, the blast will hurl a tremendous amount of radioactive water into the sky. Again, depending on the weather patterns, the ‘footprint’ of radioactive fallout will almost certainly threaten densely populated areas in England, in Scandinavia, or on the Continent, and quite possibly all three. The cost in human life and suffering would be appalling.
“Believe me when I say that we have no wish to unleash this horror. No sane people would. But in the interests of national sovereignty, we will do what we must do to preserve our cause and our sacred mission to the disenfranchised peoples of the world.
“It is now five past eleven, GMT. By the time this message is broadcast, it will be early afternoon of Wednesday, May 2nd. While I realize that it will take time to discuss my, ah, demands, you must understand that I have neither unlimited time nor unlimited patience. We will expect to see Ms. Chun here by 2400 hours on Friday. All other demands, including the transfer of funds to our accounts, must be carried out and confirmed by noon, GMT, Saturday. If all of these conditions have been met, the nuclear device will not be detonated. Armageddon, for the North Sea, will have been averted.
“I will not negotiate and I will not tolerate attempts to wear me down or play psychological games. Your next communication with me will signal your agreement to my terms, or you will suffer the consequences.”
The static hissed on for a moment, punctuating the echo of Adler’s words.
“Extortion, plain and simple,” Schellenberg said, shaking his head. “Never mind the crocodile tears for the disenfranchised. That character’s just hitting us for the money.”
“Interesting point,” Hemminger observed. “How interested is he, really, in the people he claims to represent? Is he serious about this stuff?”
“If he is, he’s a complete lunatic,” Clayton said, shrugging. “This ‘country without borders’ idea sounds okay, but it would never work in practice. Do its citizens still pay taxes to the government of the country where they live? Do they obey two sets of laws? Is the country where they live going to have to treat them as aliens, complete with green cards and visas and all of that? Do citizens of the United States lose all the entitlements, food stamps, welfare, Social Security, whatever, that they had before they join the PRR?” He shook his head. “None of it makes sense. It seems to me it’s not very well thought out.”
Caldwell laughed. “Doesn’t need to be, Mr. Clayton. It just has to sound good… one of the great evils of our age. You think people are going to wait for all the loose ends to be tidied up first?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the wall behind him. “Soon as word of this gets around, there’s going to be lines a mile long looking for where they can sign up. We could be facing a complete breakdown of the social order.”
“I don’t see how you can equate a bit of social disorder with the catastrophe that this nuclear explosion would bring on Europe,” Sir George said softly. “Tens of thousands could die. Great Britain’s economy will be plunged into chaos… and not simply from the loss of North Sea oil, though that loss would be staggering. An ecological disaster of the scale this man is proposing, my God. We could lose half of our fishing industry, or more. Whole cities would have to be evacuated, their citizens moved and resettled into camps of some kind, I suppose. Industry would be brought to a standstill. Presumably, the Arab countries would raise oil prices as well. Gentlemen, this catastrophe could ruin the economy of the entire world!”
“Which, of course, is what Adler is threatening us with,” Buchalter said. “Compared to all of what Sir George has just said, six billion dollars is chicken feed.”
“Six billion dollars?” Schellenberg asked with a sniff. “That’s hardly enough for a national treasury. Is it possible we’re dealing with simple thieves here? Con artists?”
“It’s a possibility,” Caldwell said. “I don’t believe for a moment that their demands will stop with six billion dollars. They’ll be back to hit us again once we show that all they need to do is rattle a nuke at us to get us to give them whatever they want.”
“Yeah,” Clayton said. “That could be. But maybe they’re bluffing too. Maybe they don’t have an atomic bomb after all.”
“You really want to take that chance?” Hemminger said. Clayton glared back at him.
“They have a bomb,” Marlowe said, speaking for the first time. “At least, we have to assume that they do.” Briefly, he outlined for the others the events of the past few days in England, particularly the SAS raid in Middlebrough. Most of the men present had heard about the assault, of course, but the information about the North Korean woman captured in the raid and the traces of radiation picked up on her clothing was new.
And shocking. “Good God,” Clayton shouted at the CIA man. “Why weren’t we told?”
“We were… we are still assessing the situation. We’re still trying to acquire independent corroboration.”
“Corroboration be hanged,” Hemminger put in. “We’ve got a crazy out there who claims to have an atomic bomb! This requires action!”
“And just what, Mr. Secretary,” Marlowe said coldly, “would you have us do?”
“Easy!” Hemminger declared. “This fucking PRR wants to be treated like a real country? Declare war on ’em!”
“And what targets do we attack?” General Caldwell said quietly. “Their, ah, national capital in the UN building? Their treasury in London? Or do we simply attack their population, which happens to be the poor or the homeless or the underdogs or the radical militants in any of a hundred countries?”
“Including our own,” Clayton put in. “This Adler guy’s message is going to play great with black extremists right here in the U.S.A.”
“And Hispanics,” Buchalter added. “Native Americans. Hell, radical environmentalists. Even militant feminists, maybe. Anybody in the damned country who claims to have a beef with the government or with society as a whole could sign on to this guy’s PRR movement. General Caldwell is right. If this gets going, it means social chaos, a complete breakdown in order.”
“Did you hear his comment about this being their first device?” Hemminger said. “What about that, Victor? How many bombs do these guys have?”
“Unknown,” Marlowe said.
“Actually,” Hadley said, leaning forward on the table, “since we suspect that North Korea is the agency responsible for supplying these people with a nuclear device in the first place, we have to assume that they could have provided the PRR with more than one, but that they probably did not do so.”