FLOODGATE
by
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
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 Dooms 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 Dooms,
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 well7known
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’
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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 eustomarily 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.
8
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 imperturbability 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
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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 1jsselmeer, 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 un-
affected: 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
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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, 737’s and DC9’s, and threeengined planes,
Trident 3’s and 727’s 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 747’s, the Tri-Stars, the DC i o’s, 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 ofthe starboard wings were visible, 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 f”ed. 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
lift-off 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 ofwater 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.
I I
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