Floodgate Read online

  Alistair Maclean

  Floodgate

  To David and Judy

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  By Alistair MacLean

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  The two oddly similar incidents, although both happening on the night of February 3rd, and both involving army ammunition storage installations, had no discernible connection.

  The occurrence at De Doorns in Holland was mysterious, spectacular and tragic: the one at Metnitz in Germany was a good deal less mysterious, unspectacular and faintly comic.

  Three soldiers were on guard at the Dutch ammunition dump, set in a concrete bunker one and a half kilometres north of the village of De Doorns, when, about one-thirty in the morning, the only two citizens who were awake in the village reported a staccato burst of machine-pistol fire—it was later established that the guards were carrying machine-pistols—followed immediately by the sound of a gigantic explosion, which was later found to have blasted in the earth a crater sixty metres wide by twelve deep.

  Houses in the village suffered moderately severe damage but there was no loss of life.

  It was presumed that the guards had fired at intruders and that a stray bullet had triggered the detonation. No traces of the guards or supposed intruders were found afterwards.

  In Germany, a group calling themselves the Red Army Faction, a well-known and well-organized band of terrorists, claimed that they had easily overcome the two-man guard at the US Nato arms dump near Metnitz. Both men, it had been claimed, had been drinking and when the intruders had left both were covered with blankets—it had been a bitterly cold night. The US Army denied the drinking allegation but made no mention of the blankets. The intruders claimed that they had acquired a quantity of offensive weapons, some so advanced that they were still on the secret list. The US Army denied this.

  The West German press heavily favoured the intruders’ account. When it came to penetrating army bases, the Red Army Faction had an impressive record: when it came to protecting them, the US Army had an unimpressive one.

  The Red Army Faction customarily list the nature of their thefts in meticulous detail. No such details of the alleged secret weapons were published. It has been assumed that, if the Faction’s account was true, the US Army or the US Army through the German government, had issued a stop order to the press.

  ONE

  ‘It is clear that it is the work of a madman.’ Jon de Jong, tall, lean, grey, ascetic and the general manager of Schiphol airport, looked and sounded very gloomy indeed and, in the circumstances, he had every justification in looking and sounding that way.

  ‘Insanity. A man has to be deranged, unhinged, to perform a wanton, mindless, pointless and purposeless task like this.’ Like the monkish professor he so closely resembled, de Jong tended to be precise to the point of pedantry and, as now, had a weakness for pompous tautology.

  ‘A lunatic.’

  ‘One sees your point of view,’ de Graaf said. Colonel van de Graaf, a remarkably broad man of medium height with a deeply trenched, tanned face, had about him an unperturbability and an unmistakable cast of authority that accorded well with the Chief of Police of a nation’s capital city. ‘I can understand and agree with it but only to a certain extent. I appreciate how you feel, my friend. Your beloved airport, one of the best in Europe—’

  ‘Amsterdam airport is the best in Europe.’ De Jong spoke as if by rote, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Was.’

  ‘And will be again. The criminal responsible for this is, it is certain, not a man of a normal cast of mind. But that does not mean that he is instantly certifiable. Maybe he doesn’t like you, has a grudge against you. Maybe he’s an ex-employee fired by one of your departmental managers for what the manager regarded as a perfectly valid reason but a reason with which the disgruntled employee didn’t agree. Maybe he’s a citizen living close by, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, say, or between here and Aalsmeer, who finds the decibel level from the aircraft intolerably high. Maybe he’s a dedicated environmentalist who objects, in what must be a very violent fashion, to jet engines polluting the atmosphere, which they undoubtedly do. Our country, as you are well aware, has more than its fair share of dedicated environmentalists. Maybe he doesn’t like our Government’s policies.’ De Graaf ran a hand through his thick, iron-grey hair. ‘Maybe anything. But he could be as sane as either of us.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better have another look, Colonel,’ de Jong said. His hands were clenching and unclenching and he was shivering violently. Both of those were involuntary but for different reasons. The former accurately reflected an intense frustration and anger; the latter was due to the fact that, when an ice-cold wind blows east-north-east off the Ijsselmeer, and before that from Siberia, the roof of the main concourse of Schiphol airport was no place to be. ‘As sane as you or I? Would you or I have been responsible for this—this atrocity? Look, Colonel, just look.’

  De Graaf looked. Had he been the airport manager, he reflected, it would hardly have been a sight to gladden his heart. Schiphol airport had just disappeared, its place taken by a wave-rippled lake that stretched almost as far as the eyes could see. The source of the flooding was all too easy to locate: close to the big fuel storage tanks just outwith the perimeter of the airport itself, a wide breach had appeared in the dyke of the canal to the south: the debris, stones and mud that were scattered along the top of the dyke on either side of the breach left no doubt that the rupture of the containing dyke had not been of a natural or spontaneous origin.

  The effect of the onrush of waters had been devastating. The airport buildings themselves, though flooded in the ground floors and basements, remained intact. The damage done to the sensitive electric and electronic machinery was very considerable and would almost certainly cost millions of guilders to replace but the structural integrity of the buildings was unaffected: Schiphol airport is very solidly built and securely anchored to its foundations.

  Aircraft, unfortunately, when not operating in their natural element, are very delicate artifacts and, of course, have no means at all of anchoring themselves. A momentary screwing of de Graaf’s eyes showed that this was all too painfully evident. Small planes had drifted away to the north. Some were still floating aimlessly around. Some were known to be sunk and out of sight, and two had their tail-planes sticking up above the water—those would have been single-engined planes, carried down head-first by the weight of the engines in their noses. Some two-engined passenger jets, 737s and DC9s, and three-engined planes, Trident 3s and 727s had also moved and were scattered randomly over a large area of the airfield, their noses pointing in every which direction. Two were tipped on their sides and two others were partially submerged, with only parts of their upper bodies showing: their undercarriages had collapsed. The big planes, the 747s, the Tri-Stars, the DC10s, were still in situ, held in position by their sheer massive weight—these planes, fuelled, can weigh between three and four hundred tons. Two, however, had fallen over to one side, presumably because the undercarriages distant from the onrush of water had collapsed. One did not have to be an aeronautical engineer to realize that both planes were write-offs. Both port wings were angled upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees and only the roots of the starboard wings were visib
le, a position that could only have been accounted for by the fact that both wings must have broken upwards somewhere along their lengths.

  Several hundred yards along a main runway an undercarriage projecting above the water showed where a Fokker Friendship, accelerating for take-off, had tried to escape the floodwaters and failed. It was possible that the pilot had not seen the approach of the flood waters, possible but unlikely: it was more likely that he had seen them, reckoned that he had nothing to lose either way, continued accelerating but failed to gain liftoff speed before being caught. There was no question of his plane having been engulfed: in those initial stages, according to observers, there had been only an inch or two of water fanning out over the airfield but that had been enough to make the Fokker aquaplane with disastrous results.

  Airport cars and trucks had simply drowned under the water. The only remaining signs of any wheeled vehicles were the projecting three or four steps of aircraft boarding ramps and the top of a tanker: even the ends of two crocodile disembarkation tubes were dipped forlornly into the murky waters.

  De Graaf sighed, shook his head and turned to de Jong who was gazing almost sightlessly over his devastated airfield as if still quite unable to comprehend the enormity of what had happened.

  ‘You have a point, Jon. You and I are sane, or at least I think the world at large would think so, and it is not possible that we could have been responsible for such appalling destruction. But that doesn’t mean that the criminal responsible for this wanton destruction is insane: we will doubtless find, either through our own efforts or because he chooses to inform us, that there was a very compelling reason for what he did. I shouldn’t have used the word “wanton” there, you shouldn’t have used words like “mindless” and “pointless”. This is no random, arbitrary, spur-of-the-moment act of an escaped mental patient: this is a deliberately calculated act designed to produce a deliberately calculated effect.’

  Reluctantly, as if by a giant effort of will, de Jong looked away from the flooded airfield. ‘Effect? The only effect it has on me is one of sheer outrage. What other effects could there be? Do you have any suggestions?’

  ‘None. I’ve had no time to think about it. Don’t forget I’ve only just come to this. Sure, sure, we knew yesterday that this was promised, but like everyone else, I thought the idea was so preposterous as to be not worth considering. But I have two other suggestions. I suggest that we’ll achieve nothing by staring out over Lake Schiphol: and I suggest we’re not going to help anyone or anything by hanging around here and getting pneumonia.’ De Jong’s briefly pained expression showed what he thought of the term ‘Lake Schiphol’ but he made no comment.

  The staff canteen was an improvement on the roof-top inasmuch as there was no wind but it wasn’t all that much warmer. All electric heating had inevitably been short-circuited and the butane heaters that had been brought in had as yet had a minimal effect on the chilled atmosphere. An abundance of hot coffee helped: something rather more sustaining, de Graaf reflected, would have been in order, but for those with a taste for schnapps or jonge jenever the presence of the airport manager had a markedly inhibiting effect. As became his ascetic appearance, de Jong was a lifelong teetotaller, a difficult thing to be in Holland. He never made a point of this, he had never even been heard to mention this, but, somehow, people just didn’t drink anything stronger than tea or coffee when de Jong was around.

  De Graaf said: ‘Let’s summarize briefly what we know. It has to be brief because we know virtually damn all. Three identical messages were received yesterday afternoon, one to a newspaper, one to the airport authorities—in effect, Mr de Jong—and one to the Rijkswaterstaat of the Ministry of Transport and Public Works.’ He paused briefly and looked across at a burly, dark-bearded man who was placidly polluting the atmosphere with the smoke from what appeared to be a very ancient pipe. ‘Ah! Of course. Mr van der Kuur. The Rijkswaterstaat Deputy Projects Engineer. How long to clear up this mess?’

  Van der Kuur removed his pipe. ‘We have already started. We seal off the breach in the canal with metal sheeting—a temporary measure only, of course, but sufficient. After that—well, we do have the best and biggest pumps in the world. A routine job.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Thirty-six hours. At the outside.’ There was something very reassuring about der Kuur’s calm and matter-of-fact approach. ‘Provided of course that we get a degree of cooperation from the tugboat men, barge men and private owners whose boats are at the moment resting on the mud at the bottom of the canal. The boats that settled on an even keel are no problem: those which have fallen over on their sides could well fill up. I suppose self-interest will ensure cooperation.’

  De Graaf said: ‘Any loss of life in the canal? Or anybody hurt?’

  ‘One of my inspectors reports a considerable degree of high blood pressure among the skippers and crews of the stranded craft. That apart, no one was harmed.’

  ‘Thank you. The messages came from a man or a group signing themselves FFF—it was not explained what those initials were meant to stand for. The intention, it was said, was to demonstrate that they could flood any part of our country whenever and wherever they wished by blowing up a strategically placed dyke and that accordingly they intended to give a small scale demonstration that would endanger no one and cause as little inconvenience as possible.’

  ‘As little inconvenience! Small scale.’ De Jong was back at his fist clenching. ‘I wonder what the devil they would regard as a large-scale demonstration?’

  De Graaf nodded. ‘Quite. They said the target was Schiphol and that the flooding would come at 11 a.m. Not one minute before eleven, not one minute after. As we know, the breach was blown at precisely 11 a.m. At police headquarters, quite frankly, this was regarded as a hoax—after all, who in his right mind would want to turn Schiphol airport into an inland sea? Perhaps they saw some symbolic significance in their choice—after all, the Dutch navy defeated the Spanish navy at this very spot when the present Schiphol really was a sea. Hoax or not, we took no chances. The canal was the obvious choice for any saboteur so we had both sides of the north bank of the canal closely examined. There were no signs of any kind of disturbance that could have indicated a preparation for the blowing of the dyke. So we assumed it was some kind of practical joke.’ De Graaf shrugged, palms uplifted. ‘As we know too late nothing was further from the mind or minds of the FFF than fun and games.’

  He turned to the man seated on his left side. ‘Peter, you’ve had time to think. Have you any idea—sorry, gentlemen, sorry. Some of you may not know my colleague here. Lieutenant Peter van Effen. Lieutenant van Effen is my senior detective lieutenant. He is also an explosives expert and, for his sins, the head of the city’s bomb disposal squad. Have you figured out yet how it was done?’

  Peter van Effen was an unremarkable figure. Like his boss, he was just over medium height, uncommonly broad and looked suspiciously as if he were running to fat. He was in his mid or late thirties, had thick dark hair, a dark moustache and an almost permanent expression of amiability. He didn’t look like a senior detective lieutenant, in fact he didn’t even look like a policeman. Many people, including quite a number of people in Dutch prisons, tended to take van Effen’s easygoing affability at its face value.

  ‘It didn’t take much figuring, sir. Anything’s easy with hindsight. But even had we had foresight there was nothing we could have done about it anyway. We’ll almost certainly find that two boats were tied up bow to stern alongside the north bank. Unusual, but there’s no law, say, against an engine breakdown and a sympathetic owner of a passing vessel stopping to lend a hand. I should imagine that we’ll find that those boats were almost certainly stolen because there is traffic on the canal and any habitual waterway user would have been able to identify them.

  ‘The two boats would have been very close or even over—lapping, leaving a clear, hidden area where scuba divers could work. If this took place during dusk or night-time, as I’m su
re it did, they would have bright lights on deck and when you have those on, anything below gunwale level is in deep shadow. They would have had a drilling machine, something like the ones you use on oil-rigs only, of course, this one would have been on a very small scale and operated horizontally not vertically. It would have been electrically powered, either by batteries or a generator, because the exhausts of a petrol or diesel plant make a great deal of noise. For an expert, and there are literally hundreds of experts operating on or around the North Sea, this would have been a childishly simple operation. They would drill through to, say, a foot of the other side of the dyke—we may be sure they would have taken very careful measurements beforehand—withdraw the bit and insert a waterproof canvas tube packed with explosives, maybe just plain old-fashioned dynamite or TNT, although a real expert would have gone for amatol beehives. They would then attach an electrical timing device, nothing elaborate, an old-fashioned kitchen alarm clock will do very well, plug the hole with mud and gravel—not that there would be a chance in a million of anyone ever looking there—and sail away.’

  ‘I could almost believe, Mr van Effen, that you masterminded this operation yourself,’ van der Kuur said. ‘So that’s how it was done.’

  ‘It’s how I would have done it and within the limits of a slight variation that’s how they did it. There is no other way.’ Van Effen looked at de Graaf. ‘We’re up against a team of experts and the person directing them is no clown. They know how to steal boats, they know how to handle them, they know where to steal drilling equipment, they know how to use that equipment and they’re obviously at home with explosives. No wild-eyed, slogan-chanting cranks among this lot: they’re professionals. I’ve asked head office to notify us immediately if they receive any complaints from factories, wholesalers or retailers of the theft of any equipment from the manufacturers or distributors of drilling equipment. Also to notify us of the theft of any vessels from that area.’