The westminster disaster, p.1
The Westminster Disaster, page 1
07-10-2023
WESTMINSTER DISASTER
A gripping new novel -nuclear blackmail threatens London
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Westminster Disaster
Sir Fred Hoyle, f.r.s., well-known as astronomer, writer, broadcaster and television personality, was bom in Bingley, Yorkshire, in 1915, and educated at Bingley Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, he was a university lecturer in mathematics from 1945 to 1958, when he was appointed to the post of Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy (1958-73). He was later made Director of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (1966-73), which be himself bad founded. In 1972 be was knighted, and in 1974 be was awarded a Royal Medal by Her Majesty the Queen in recognition of his distinguished contribution to theoretical physics and cosmology.
Sir Fred Hoyle’s publications include The Nature of the Universe (1950; in Pelican), A Decade of Decision (1953), Frontiers of Astronomy (1956), Of Men and Galaxies (1964), Ten Faces of the Universe (1977), Stonehenge (1977) and (with N. C. Wickramasinghe) Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978). His novels include The Black Cloud (1957), Ossian’s Ride (1959) and October the First is Too Late (1966). Fifth Planet (1963), Rockets in Ursa Major (1969), Seven Steps to the Sun (1970), The Molecule Men (1971), The Inferno (1972) and The Incandescent Ones (1977) were written with Geoffrey Hoyle. Fred Hoyle has also published a play. Rockets in Ursa Major (1962), and is the joint-author of A for Andromeda (1962), a television serial.
Born in 1942, Geoffrey Hoyle is Fred Hoyle’s son. He was educated at Bryanston and Cambridge University, which he left in order to work in modern communications and motion pictures. He is now a full-time writer, working sometimes in collaboration with his father but often independently.
Fred Hoyle Geoffrey Hoyle
The Westminster Disaster
Edited by Barbara Hoyle
Penguin Books
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England
Penguin Books. 625 Madison Avenue, New York,
New York 10022, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,
Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1978
Published in Penguin Books 1980
Copyright © Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle, 1978
All rights reserved
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Set in Linotype Times
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Contents:-
1. August 7th-11th - The Threads
2. August 12th - The Threads Interweave
3. August 13th - Hermann Kapp and Others
4. August 14th - The Terrorists Assemble
5. August 15th - The Construction Begins
7. August 17th - A Matter of Timing
8. August 18th - The Westminster Disaster
The following characters, appearing in this story, have no relation to any persons known to the authors:
The President of the U.S.A.
The British Prime Minister
The Party Chairman
Heisal Woods, U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Fielding, British Home Secretary
Victor Kuzmin, Soviet Ambassador to the U.N.
Pamplin Forsythe, British Ambassador to the U.N.
Hermann Kapp, a terrorist Anna Morgue (alias Félix) a terrorist Abu l’Weifa (alias Pedro-the-Basque), a terrorist Al Simmonds, a terrorist
Chief Inspector Cluny Robertson
Superintendent Willy Best Sir Stanley Farrar, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
Robert Becker, head of the C.I.A.
Valas Georgian, high official in the K.G.B.
Igor Markov, subordinate to Valas Georgian
Colonel Barry Gwent, British Military Intelligence
General Holland, British Military Intelligence
Couriers:
Alex Semjanov
Captain Luri Otto
Klaus Harstein
Father O’Donovan
Sunion Webb, an intellectual
Ernest Carruthers, an intellectual
Reporters:
Jack Hart
Stan Tambling
Agents:
Robert Morales
Rollie Schooners
Maxwell Burt
Ole Gröte
Ron Weld
Tom Osborne, President of I.H.M. of Canada
Roberta Osborne, his wife Pieter van Elders, a minister of the South African government David Kemp, a British lawyer
Paco Palmgren. a Swedish lawyer
Susi, a girl friend of Hermann Kapp
Jane Barrow, secretary to Becker
Colonel Abdul Hassim, a Libyan minister
Louis-le-Poisson
J. J. Marquette
Others, unnamed
1. August 7th-11th - The Threads
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 separate 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 light plane, 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 skintight 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. I.H.M.’s own rich uranium deposit near Elliot Lake would be going thin by the ninetee
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-highspeed 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 I.H.M. 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 U.N., through pressure from the U.N. 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 U.N. 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 I.H.M. - 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 non-working 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 I.H.M. had risen five whole points on the Toronto exchange. This rise had of course been due to heavy buying, which the I.H.M. 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 per cent or two of all the shares outstanding. With seventy-one million shares of I.H.M. 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 I.H.M. 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 I.H.M. 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 U.N. 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 I.H.M. to call off the deal.
