Dangerous Encounters

Chapter 1 The Americans, the protesters, and Ruth.

The banshee wail of the shot-warning siren cut, leaving a silence broken only by the friendly sound of jackdaws calling and echoing in the bowl of the quarry. Then came the whump of the explosive charge followed by the rushing crumbling noise of the rock broken from the working face. Dusty air roiled past us as we sheltered behind the Caterpillar D8 'dozer blade.

The gritty sound of big diesel engines being restarted heralded the beginning of another workshift winning the hard limestone rock which would be later crushed into controlled sizes of stone to feed the construction industry.

The jackdaws' cries were overwhelmed in the thrash and roar of the day's work.

The 'dozer started up behind us. Alan Wentworth shouted over the din, "Seen enough? You'll appreciate now - we have the kit to fulfill your contract. Five thousand tons of concrete in one continuous pour. Five hundred ready-mixed loads in a maximum of one hundred hours."

In the face of his youthful enthusiasm I felt old and tired. My company had taken on a contract, probably in desperation during the 1992 recession, which had too tight a specification and too close a deadline.

We walked the hundred yards to where he'd parked the Range Rover, and shut the noise of the quarry out. "Look,Graham," he said, "I know you have a specification to make the foundations for that thing in one piece. The point is if you had the hole dug and the reinforcement laid we could start pouring today. If you make the mix on the site you have to get your plant up and running and your lab quality control set up. We have all that here and now, ticking like clockwork, ready to roll."

"And what if you get a pile-up on the M18?" I asked.

"And what if the main motor fails on your on-site mixer? Damn it, man, you can get too hysterical with these what-ifs. There's fifteen trucks on the road at any one time about six miles apart. If there is a pile up it'll only take one out, and we'll radio the others to go round on the side roads, and put another truck or two on the circuit. I have twenty five of 'em."

"All right Alan, you've made your point. Let me discuss it with my client. It's his baby, I'm just making him a big slab for him to bolt his toy onto."

"What is it anyway?"

"Oh, it's hush-hush, some bloody great radar widget inside a white sphere. The client's at an installation near Harrogate. They need another to get a baseline whatever that might be, and so they're sticking one in the flatlands east of Doncaster. They get all tight-lipped when I ask what it is they're looking at, or for. Come on. Take me back to your office, and I'll take your proposition up to Harrogate today, and decide tomorrow which way to go."

Another roughly one hundred mile journey through England's busy motorways and roads. The Granada was a good car in most respects, but the seat never seemed comfortable. I put a call through to the base, and talked to Sam Carlton, rubbing my aching back as I used the car phone.

"I'd like to discuss the sourcing of the concrete, sorry you call it cement, before I finally decide."

"Well if you must, you must. When do you expect to arrive?"

"Latish afternoon. I can't be very precise - depends on the traffic."-

"I'll be around."

I was approaching the base as the late January sun was setting. The different-sized spheres, the biggest some 100 metres high, made of pentagonal white glassfibre panels; looked mysterious in the grey dusk, like some monster fungoid growths on the plain green fields, one side rosy pink, the other in blue grey shadow. I showed my pass at the gate, and my face was scanned by a computer, and accepted. The car was searched, and my overnight bag and briefcase opened.