After spending another far from comfortable night in his draughty hide-out, Robbie went to a barber's, had himself shaved, then met Stephanie on the corner of Liberty Square. As soon as he was in the car, she said with an excitement which she could not altogether conceaclass="underline" 'At the G.P.O. I picked up a letter from Vaclav. He is arriving by the evening plane and, as I suggested, has asked me to meet him.'
'Thank God for that!' Robbie exclaimed. 'I can't say that I am looking forward to taking him to pieces, but the way things are developing, it has become terribly urgent to force him to talk. I've just got to put any scruples about fair play behind me.'
'How did you get on last night with Henry?' she asked.
'Very well, although he's still no wiser than we are about the so-called oil prospecting. I told him that your husband had tried to do you in, and that you had since come over to us. But he wouldn't take my word for that. I have to meet him at the Candia Palace at midday.'
'Then that knocks on the head a trip down to Malea to see the windmills. We couldn't possibly get back in time. How would you like to fill in the morning?'
'We might run out to Knossos and spend an hour there. I'm sure there are lots of it that we haven't yet seen.'
Without comment she accepted his suggestion and, twenty minutes later, they left the car in the parking place, took tickets and again made their way across to the vast pile of ruins.
After exploring the treasury and store-rooms on the eastern side of the slope and admiring the giant oil jars which—shades of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves—could each have held four men, they made their way up again to the reconstructed parts with their curious red pillars, broader at the top than at the base, and gaily painted walls. For the second time they strolled through the room of the Double Axes, the room of the Dolphin frescoes and the Throne Room, in which the throne—a leaf-back stone chair with a hollowed seat, and the oldest throne in the world—still stood.
In all the principal rooms, to one side or in a corner, steps led down to a sunken area several feet below the level of the floor. On their first visit, a guide had told them that these pits had been filled with sacred water, because the Minoans were so superstitious that they were constantly feeling the need to purify themselves by total immersion.
Looking down into one of the pits, Stephanie remarked: 'You know, I can't believe that a people so civilized as the Minoans were so obsessed by their religion that, every time they ate or kissed or told a naughty story, they felt such a compulsion to cleanse themselves by jumping into holy water that they couldn't wait but had to have a bath of it in every room.'
Robbie smiled. 'No, I'm sure the guide was wrong about that. The Minoans were so far advanced as architects, with their drainage and that sort of thing, I should think it certain that these pits in every room have something to do with minimizing the effects of the earth tremors. That ties up with the established fact that the Minoans held all their public ceremonies in the great open courtyards, and built only small rooms indoors; so that they would stand up better against earthquakes.'
As Robbie said this last word, his mouth remained open on the last syllable and his eyes suddenly grew wide.
'Whatever is the matter?' Stephanie asked, giving him an anxious look.
'Earthquakes,' he repeated. 'Earthquakes; earthquakes. My God, I've got it! That's the answer.'
After a quick look round to make sure that no guides or visitors to the ruins were within earshot, he hurried on: 'Don't you see? Every site to which we've been has suffered from a series of earthquakes. All the Aegean islands are subject to them. Many were thrown up by them, even, according to the ancient chronicles, the great island of Rhodes. Barak and Co. mean to drop H-bombs down those holes and, when the time comes, explode them underground. Explosions in a confined space have many times the power that the same amount of explosives would have in the open. These won't only rend vast holes in the earth; the shock will operate downwards, too. The crust of the earth is thin here and violent fires are always raging beneath it. The shock of each explosion will link up with that on the next in the chain. Rents scores of miles long will be torn in the land and under the water. The sea will boil, whole mountains will come sliding down. It will be just like another war of the gods and titans. The bomb at Corinth will destroy the isthmus so that the Peloponnesus will become an island. All round Greece, and right up to the Dardanelles, the whole coastline will be changed.'
Taking Stephanie by the arm, he added: 'Come along. I mustn't lose a moment in letting Henry know about this.'
As they hurried back to the car, she said: T can't believe that even a dozen H-bombs would have quite such terrible results But say you are right; what is the object of destroying great chunks of Greece? What have the Soviets to gain by churning the Aegean into a raging lake, just for a day or two?'
Tt will be far more than that. Parts of it would become impassable, owing to the vast quantities of molten lava and mud thrown up. That would take months to settle. In the meantime, the levels of its bottom would have altered so much that all navigational charts would be rendered useless. Every ship in it would be wrecked, and that's what they are guoning for. They are planning to bring about this cataclysm in order to knock out at one stroke every U.S. submarine in the north eastern Med.'
Sixteen minutes later, Stephanie pulled the car up outside the Candia Palace Hotel. As Robbie was about to jump out, she said quickly: 'Shall I wait for you or shall we meet somewhere?'
Stepping on to the pavement, he replied: 'I may be some time. Better go to some small restaurant and wait for me. I know; go to that little place where we lunched on Sunday. It was called the Ariadne. We'll lunch there again.'
It was only twenty to twelve, so he was early for his appointment. At the desk, he learned that Mahogany Brown was up in his room; so he rang through, said he wanted to see him urgently and asked if he might come up. Two minutes later he was shown into a bedroom where the American was sitting with his coat off, working at some papers at a small table by the window.
After one look at Robbie's face, he grinned and asked: 'What's cooking? Have you just heard that the police are on to you at last?'
Robbie gave a quick shake of his head and launched straight into his theory. Hardly pausing to draw breath, he spoke for three minutes. As Mahogany Brown listened, his expression changed gradually from mild scepticism to wondering dismay. Having heard Robbie out, he exclaimed:
'Hell's bells! I believe you've hit it. And if you're right about ail these places being so susceptible to earthquakes, this could lose us the war.'
There is no question about the situation of the earthquake belt,' Robbie assured him. 'It runs from Naples in the north and Sicily in the south, right across Greece and the Aegean to Turkey. Any geologist will confirm that. They may be playing some game similar to this in Italian territory; but I doubt it. You were saying last night that the nearer your submarines could get to Rumania and the Balkan wells, the better their aim would be. From that it follows that they wouldn't be stationed off Italy, but in the Gulf of Corinth and the Aegean. The only thing which might make nonsense of my theory is if a dozen nuclear bombs with intervals of so many miles between them would be insufficient to do the trick.'
Mahogany Brown considered for a moment, then he said: 'One of those Czechs you overheard talking at Gortyne spoke of dropping cylinders five feet long. Given an eight-inch diameter, now that the mechanism to explode such bombs has been so much reduced in size, they could contain as much fissionable material as would go into a warhead of an I.C.B.M. and, of course, they could be exploded by remote control. The Russians are believed to have about fifty I.C.B.M.s, and with those they reckon they could flatten most of the principal cities in the West. Things have gone a long way since Hiroshima. It's calculated now that the bomb used there was only about the power of old-fashioned T.N.T., compared with the power of the stuff we have now. One megaton of it would render a thousand square miles of territory uninhabitable. That should give you the picture.'