CONDITION BLACK (4 page)

He was white, he was European, he had
access.
He had justified the Colonel's faith. He was the only European in the restaurant, because all the bastards who were in town to fight like cocks in a pit for the reconstruction contracts would be in the restaurants of the Babylon Oberoi and the Sadir Novotel and the Mansour Melia. He wore his better jeans and a laundered shirt, open at the neck.

He had shot an American. So what?

He drank deep.

When he had finished his meal, when he had collected his guard from the hard chair by the entrance, then he would stride back to the Haifa Street Housing Project, and he would chew on the pistachio nuts that were loose in his trouser pocket, and he would write to his mother.

2

The first of the November frosts had settled on the lawn in front of the house, and the Sierra was an age starting. There were some mornings, Monday mornings in particular, when it would have been as quick for him to walk to the main gates and then catch an internal minibus to his office block. On Monday mornings there was a solid traffic line at the junction where Mulfords Hill joined the main road from Kingsclere to Burghfield Common.

But Frederick Bissett detested walking, and because his Sara's car was in the garage, and his own car sat outside overnight, he condemned himself to five minutes of scraping the ice from the windscreen and the back window and to revving the engine, blowing grey fumes away down Lilac Gardens. Sara seldom saw him off to work. She was generally too busy getting Frank and Adam ready for school.

His neighbour came through the front door of the house to the right. He was kissed. His wife always kissed him. His neighbour always wore grey overalls when he went to work. His neighbour was a plumber.

"Good morning, Fred."

Frederick Bissett, Senior Scientific Officer, loathed being called Fred. He waved his de-icer without enthusiasm.

"Better mornin' for cuddling up - eh? What?"

His other neighbour was twelve years younger than Frederick Bissett, wore white socks inside his black shoes, and sold Heinz products into local supermarkets. His other neighbour's child-

bride kissed her boy hero each morning, in her floating web dressing gown, as if he were going to the Falklands for three months. He drove an Escort XR.3i complete with fluffy toys, and had moved to Lilac Gardens in the eye of the housing price slump, aided by the bequest of a dead aunt. Bissett had been told that often enough, about the dead aunt and her bequest.

He had very little to say to his other neighbours. He could live in a cocoon of his own making. That was the way of his work, and that was the way of his life in Lilac Gardens.

Bissett laid his old briefcase on the back seat of the car. The case contained only his sandwich box and his thermos flask of coffee. He drove out onto Mount Pleasant and was stopped at the temporary lights where the new sewer pipe was going in. He was held up again when he needed to turn into Mulfords Hill because no one would let him into the flow. The next hold-up was outside Boundary Hall where a stream of cars was emerging from his left and not acknowledging his right of way. He was stopped outside the Lloyds Bank by the entrance to Boundary Hall. It was far too early for the manager to be coming to work. An hour at least before the manager turned up to write his acid little letters.

There was a short gap between the cars sprinting out from Boundary Hall, he gunned his engine and surged forward. The Audi that thought it had a clear run had to brake hard . . .

Excellent . . . He recognised the driver, one of the Principal Training Managers lodged at Boundary Hall, saw his annoyance and felt the better for it. Another hundred yards, and then held again at the Kingsclere-Burghfield Common crossing. It was the same every morning, only worse on some mornings. Eyes into his mirror. He recognised the man with the white handlebar moustache sitting high in a ridiculous Japanese jeep, Health Physics branch, and he heard the sharp horn blast before he saw that the road ahead of him was clear. He took his chance and crossed the road. Another queue of cars at the Falcon Gate. They had the rods out with the mirrors. No end to it . . . State Amber Black at the Falcon Gate . . . He always left the newspaper at home in the mornings for Sara. He never listened to radio news in the mornings, and in the evenings he usually turned his chair away from the television set, so that he could read. He had an idea there had been a car bomb at another barracks. He did not know where, and did not particularly care, except that it meant that the Establishment was on Amber Black, and every car had to have the magic mirror wand shoved underneath the chassis.

He was waved ahead

He drove forward.

He was inside the perimeter fence of his workplace.

There are five such workplaces in the world. There is the L o s Alamos National Laboratory in the desert uplands of New Mexico.

There are the Institutes and Design Laboratories of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural mountains. In France, there are the Centres d'Etudes of the Directions des Applications Militaires which is a sub-division of the Commission d'Energie Atomique at Ripault. There are the design facilities of the Ministry of Nuclear Energy at Lanzhou in Gansu province in the People's Republic of China. And in Great Britain there is the Atomic Weapons Establishment which has been built upon a World War T w o airfield in the countryside of Berkshire, 50 miles from London and overlooking the Thames Valley.

When Bissett had left home the sky had been clear. No longer.

The chill of the early morning was dispersing under the grey cloud base that spread in from the west.

He took the central avenue, along the old runway. Where he drove, surrounded by cars and bicycles and mopeds and minibuses, there had once been the strained drone of Dakotas pulling gliders into the air for the flights to the bridges and crossroads behind the D - D a y beaches of Normandy, and for the flights t o the Dutch town of Arnhem. He drove slowly down the wide Third Avenue. Grey concrete buildings that had been thrown up, always wherever they could be fitted in, on either side. The coiled wire above the fences that surrounded the A area where the plutonium was worked, and the B area where the chemical explosives were fashioned, and the contaminated areas, and the waste storage areas, all separated by their own grey wire barricades. The four great chimneys to his left spewing out their fumes into the grey cloud.

Bissett drove to the H area.

His workplace was H3.

The building was single-storey, red-brick walls, metal window frames, flat-roofed. The H3 building had been put up hastily in the early 1950s to get the scientists out of their first accommodation that had been little more than Nissen huts. There should have been a lifespan of twenty years for H3, but other priorities had been higher, and every four years since 1973 there had been a doctoring of the patient, a new lick of paint on the inside, an attempt to reinforce the roofing against damp, new wiring to carry the power of the computer that ran their lives. There was also a new fence around H area, all a part of the new security drive.

Once more he showed his I/D card to the Ministry policeman.

Carol was at the coffee machine, stoking up for the day, the cover not yet off her typewriter.

"Morning, Dr Bissett."

Wayne was lighting his first cigarette. He was the most recent recruit into H 3 , and only had a Lower Second from Aston.

"Morning."

Reuben Boll was unwrapping the first of the boiled sweets he bought each morning in Tadley. The door to his office was always open. He was the Superintendent, Grade 6. He was the man in charge of H 3 , and he spoke with his emigre parents' guttural Central European accent although he had been born in Ipswich, and he had been in H area for 26 years.

"Morning, Frederick."

Basil Curtis slammed the door behind him. He had been there since ever. Basil shrugged out of his dufflecoat. The dufflcoat would have been the one he had worn when he first came to work at the Establishment. There were no Civil Service retirement regulations applicable to Basil. The stitching of the rent in his corduroy trousers was his own work, the runs in his pullover were his cat's.

Bissett thought him the most brilliant man he had ever met.

"Morning, Bissett."

They were the first in. There would be others on the clerical staff who were always late, always pleading that the school bus hadn't turned up, or that their dog had to be walked. And others on the scientific level who would claim the excuse of a school run, or taking the wife to Surgery. Bissett was never late.

He went down the corridor that led off the central area. Third on the right. He unlocked the door with the key that was on his chain. His routine was invariable. Each morning he first switched on the power for his terminal. Then he took his sandwich box and his thermos of coffee from his briefcase. They went onto the shelf behind his chair, between the photographs of Sara and of the two boys. Then he went to his wall safe, opened it with the second key on the ring attached by a chain to his trouser belt, and took out his papers.

His Personal Air Sampler, the size of a small matchbox, hanging by a cord from his neck, banged on the desk top. It always banged on the desk top, each morning, before he remembered to tuck it below his tie.

Carol knocked, came in before he was able to tell her to. Her husband was a lathe operator in B area. She always said she could have done a better job running the place than the Director or his boss, Controller Establishment Research and Nuclear.

"This got delivered here, Dr Bissett."

The envelope was marked Personal and Confidential.

As at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is a workplace governed by secrecy.

Behind the grey wire, beyond the uniformed guards with their sub-machine guns and automatic pistols and attack dogs, 5000

people daily go about their work, to research, design, test and finally manufacture an independent source of nuclear weapons.

Much of the work moving from the A . W . E . consoles and design tables and laboratories and workshops is considered, by the few who so jealously guard their knowledge, as information too sensitive to be transmitted to any but those in the topmost reaches of government. Infinitely too sensitive to be shared, even in the most vague terms, with the general public, for whom the nuclear shield remains the ultimate defence.

Nine tenths of the work done here would be known to the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou. But Los Alamos and Chelyabinsk and Ripault and Lanzhou and Aldermaston form the club with the greatest exclusivity yet devised. No helping hand will be offered to newcomers. The door is closed to new members, and the membership protects itself against what it calls Proliferation with wire, guns, attack dogs, certainly, but above all with a suffocating cloak of secrecy.

It was noon.

He had arrived at the forward brigade post three hours earlier.

His car was mud-splattered, parked amongst the jeeps and armoured personnel carriers, a hundred yards from the helicopter pad. He was Dr Tariq. Dr Tariq had never liked the featureless flatland of the Fao peninsula before the war. After seven years as a battlefield it was now an unearthly, hellish landscape. Around the excavated brigade post were gun positions, and trench patterns, and mud. As a scientist, Dr Tariq despised the waste and confusion of the place. His back was to the waterway. He had no wish to look out over the Shatt al-Arab, the narrow glistening strip that divided his country from the Islamic Republic of Iran, He did not care to look beyond the semi-sunken hulks of the bombed merchantmen towards the clear flames rising from the refinery tower of Abadan He waited. He paced close to his car.

As far as he could see back up the Basra road were the headless date palms, lopped by the shrapnel.

As soon as he had received news of the death of Professor Khan he had requested a meeting with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, at the Chairman's earliest convenience. As Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Tariq was familiar with the dark undercurrents of Iraq's body politic. He knew of the coup attempt of seven weeks earlier and he had heard the rumour that nine Air Force officers had been put to death. It did not surprise him at all that the Chairman's answer should come, hand-delivered, to his villa at four o'clock in the morning, and that the rendezvous would be away from Baghdad. He knew that the routine and itinerary of the Chairman were a closely guarded secret. Dr Tariq would not have said that he
liked
the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, but he admired him. Nothing was possible, not any movement, without the clearance of the Chairman. He admired in particular the durability of the man, and his capacity to absorb succinctly presented detail, and his ability for work. So he awaited his summons without impatience.

Dr Tariq had rehearsed what he wished to say. When, eventually, he was admitted to the presence of the Chairman he would have perhaps fifteen minutes to explain himself. It was well known amongst that elite of which he was a part that the Chairman detested news of crisis. But the killing of Professor Khan, no doubt at the hands of Zionist agents, and a letter bomb to one of his scientists at Tuwaithah, that was crisis and had to be confronted. The defection of foreign personnel from his programme, that too was crisis. Like every man who had direct contact with the Chairman, Dr Tariq had a most sincere fear of his master.

He knew of the disappearances, the torturings, the hangings. He had been told that the Chairman had with a handgun shot dead a general who had dared to argue with his strategy during the dark days of the war. So he had prepared his words with care.

The officer approached him.

Dr Tariq, five foot two inches in height, thin as a willow wand, stood erect. He raised his arms, to permit the officer to frisk him.

Then, without fuss, Dr Tariq opened his briefcase for inspection.