"Mount Hekla," he said.
"Isn't that the one that erupted not so long ago?" Roberta asked.
"In 1973," Carter read from the inscription on the map.
The truck suddenly appeared as they came around a bend in the road. Its brake lights were on, and Carter cautioned her to slow down and then stop. In the dim Arctic twilight he could barely make out the shape of a guardhouse on the road ahead.
"It's a checkpoint," he said. He turned around and looked the way they had come. "We'd better turn around here and see if there is some way around it."
She made a quick U-turn and backtracked nearly half a mile until they came to what appeared to be a very old track in the sand leading off to the east. She swung on to it and carefully picked her way around huge boulders strewn everywhere.
"This is nothing but a dried creek bed," she shouted. The car was bouncing and pitching all over the place. The car wouldn't take much of this.
"Can we make it to the top of the ridge ahead?" Carter shouted.
"I'll try."
They bottomed out several times, and the temperature gauge began to climb as the car labored over the extremely rough terrain.
The ridge, when they reached it, turned out to be the rim of a wide, shallow canyon. Lights twinkled far out in its center.
They eased up over the final rise and stopped. Roberta shut off the engine. "What is it?" she asked, looking down at the floor of the canyon.
"I'm not sure," Carter said. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of the overlook. A hundred yards down the hill a chain link fence ran along the landscape, topped by three strands of barbed wire. On the other side a huge hole had been dug out of the valley, and in the distance he could see that some sort of huge building project was rising. The wind brought sounds of engines running.
He motioned for Roberta, and when she joined him she strained to listen. "They're working on it now." She looked at Carter. "You were right after all; they've already started it."
"And we're going to un-start it," Carter said.
"How?"
"I don't know, but…" Carter started to say when a movement below, just at the fence, caught his eye. "Down," he whispered urgently, and he shoved Roberta down behind a jumble of rocks.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"A guard, I think," Carter said. As he watched a uniformed guard sauntered along the fence from the west. An automatic rifle was slung over his shoulder. It looked like an M-16.
He stopped for a moment or two almost directly below them, then continued on. When he was out of sight, Carter sat back.
"It's a reactor, all right, and probably the processing plant for the spent fuel rods as well," he said.
"Odessa's own little bomb factory," Roberta said. "So how do we stop it?"
"We blow it up, what else?"
They got back to the hotel a couple of hours later, after they had hiked along the fence line for a short distance so that they could get a better view of what was going on below.
Carter dropped Roberta off, telling her to keep watch on the harbor, but he refused to tell her where he was going despite her indignant questions.
"Are you going back out there tonight?" she demanded.
"No, I promise you, Roberta. I'll be back in a couple of hours."
She looked at him. "What do you plan to do alone? I want a chance at Ziegler for what he did to me," she said.
"You'll have it. I'm not doing anything tonight except gathering information. Nothing more."
After he left her, Carter drove immediately across town to the American embassy on Laufasvegi, where he woke up a sleepy chancellery clerk who telephoned the charge d'affaires; the charge d'affaires checked with the ambassador himself, and the ambassador ended up calling in the embassy's chief military officer.
"Do you realize what time of the morning it is?" the officer, an air force colonel, fumed when he arrived.
"Thank you for coming down on such short notice, Colonel," Carter said.
"What do you want?"
"The use of your crypto facilities."
"What?"
"I need to set up a crypto teletype circuit with D.C. It can be routed through the Pentagon."
"Impossible," the officer said.
They were sitting in the chancellery office. Carter turned to the clerk. "Telephone the ambassador for me like a good sport."
"Yes, sir," the man said, and he reached for the telephone.
"I suppose you have the clout," the colonel said. The clerk hesitated.
"Yes," Carter said. "But if you want to check with someone, I'll understand."
"It's not necessary; the ambassador vouched for you. Highly irregular, though, I might say."
They went down to the basement, where the colonel and Carter were let into a small room filled with electronic equipment. The colonel explained Carter's needs to the young technician on duty, and Carter supplied the routing code for the circuit he wanted.
Within fifteen minutes it was set up, and Carter had an encrypted teletype line open with AXE's technical section in the basement of the Dupont Circle building.
The colonel and the tech moved off to the other side of the room while Carter operated the teletype.
CARTER HERE FOR CAIRNES
STAND BY N3
Carter sat back and lit a cigarette. It was one of his custom-made cigarettes that he picked up from a small shop around the corner from his apartment building. The paper was black, and his initials were stamped in gold near the tip. Cairnes was back before Carter finished his smoke.
CAIRNES HERE
HAVE YOU SOMETHING FOR ME?
As completely as possible, Carter described for the head of AXE's technical section what he and Roberta had seen outside Reykjavik.
When he was finished, the teletype was silent for nearly an hour until Cairnes came back on.
UNITS YOU DESCRIBE ARE PROBABLE REACTOR TO WEST PROCESSING PLANT NEAREST PERIMETER.
WHAT DO YOU DESIRE, N3?
Carter smiled to himself He typed:
MEANS FOR CERTAIN DESTRUCTION.
STAND BY.
Again the teletype was silent for at least an hour. The colonel had become fidgety, and he finally left. The tech remained across the room, his feet up, reading a magazine, totally unconcerned about Carter.
When the teletype came to life again, it clattered at a hundred words per minute. The chief scientist had evidently cut a tape and was running it off now.
COMMENTS ON METHODS OF DESTROYING A NUCLEAR REACTOR AND/OR A NUCLEAR FUEL PROCESSING INSTALLATION.
IF THE CORE IS ALREADY IN PLACE DESTRUCTION OF THE REACTOR COULD LEAD TO SERIOUS AIR AND WATER CONTAMINATION LOCALLY.
IN AN EFFORT TO INSURE COMPLETE DESTRUCTION AND NOT MERELY A DELAY IN CONSTRUCTION, CONSIDERATION MUST BE GIVEN TO THE VULNERABLE AREAS.
AT THE BASE OF THE REACTOR CORE ITSELF WILL BE SEEN A LARGE BLOCK OF REINFORCED CONCRETE WHICH SUPPORTS THE MECHANISM WHICH IN TURN CONTROLS THE CONTROL RODS.
DESTRUCTION OF THIS CONSTRUCTION COULD RESULT IN A MAXIMUM DELAY IN CONSTRUCTION FOR THE MINIMUM USE OF FORCE.
SPECIFICATIONS TO FOLLOW.
Carter lit another cigarette as the teletype spewed out various specifications for explosives, for placing the charges, and for probable effects.
When it was finished, Carter teletyped back his acknowledgment, then shut down the circuit. He reread the instructions, then pulled off the paper, the carbon, and the ribbon, and brought them to the shredder set up in one corner where he destroyed them.
"Get the colonel back down here, if you would," he asked the tech, and by the lime he had finished destroying the message and copy, the colonel was back.
Carter quickly explained what he needed, and within half an hour, his trunk loaded with plastique and the timers, he drove back to the hotel and parked at the back of the lot.