Athabasca by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online

athleticism for his field operatives, stood five feet eight in his elevator shoes and turned the scales at around 240 pounds. Never a believer in travelling light, he brought with him on the flight from Houston not only his attractive, blond wife, Jean, but also his positively stunning daughter Stella, another natural blond, who acted as his secretary on these field trips. He left Jean behind at the hotel in Fort McMurray, hut kept Stella with him in the minibus that Sanmobil had sent to ferry him out to the plant.
    The first impression he made on the hard men of Athabasca was less than favorable. He wore a superbly cut dark-gray business suit -- it had to be well cut even to approximate a frame as spherical as his -- a white shirt and a conservative tie. On top of these indoor clothes, however, he wore two woolen overcoats and a vast beaver coat, the combined effect being to render his vertical and horizontal dimensions approximately equal. He sported a soft felt hat the same color as his suit, but this too was almost invisible, anchored by a gray woolen scarf that passed twice over the crown and under his chins.
    "Well I'll be damned!" he exclaimed. His voice was muffled by the ends of the scarf, tied across his face just below the eyes, which were the only part of him that could be seen. Even so, it was clear to his companions that he was impressed.
    "This sure is something. You boys must have a lot of fun digging away here and building these nice little ol' sand castles."
    "That's one way of putting it, Mr. Brady." Jay Shore spoke with restraint. "Not much, perhaps, by Texas standards, but it's still the biggest mining operation in the history of mankind."
    "No offence, no offence. You don't expect a Texan to admit there's something bigger and better outside his own state?" One could almost feel him bracing himself for a handsome admission. "That beats anything I've ever come across."
    "That" was a dragline, but a dragline such as Brady had never seen before. A dragline is essentially an engine housing with a control cabin that operates a crane like boom. The boom is hinged and swivelled at the base of the engine housing, and so can be both raised and lowered and swung from side to side. Control is achieved by cables from the engine housing which pass over a massive steel super-structure and reach out to the tip of the boom. Another cable, passing over the tip of the boom, supports a bucket which can be lowered to scoop up material, raised again and then swung to one side to dump its load.
    "Biggest thing that ever moved on earth," said Shore.
    "Move?" Stella said.
    "Yes, it can move. Walks, shuffles would be a better word, on those two huge shoes at the base, step by step. You wouldn't want to enter it for the Kentucky Derby -- it takes seven hours to travel a mile. Not that it's ever required to travel more than a few yards at a time. Point is, it gets there."
    "And that long nose..." she said.
    "The boom. The comparison most generally used is that it's as long as a football field. Wrong -- it's longer. From here the bucket doesn't look all that big, but that's only because everything is dwarfed out of perspective. It scoops up eighty cubic yards at a time or enough to fill a two-car garage. A large two-car garage. The dragline weighs sixty-five hundred tons -- about the same as a light-medium cruiser. Cost? About thirty million dollars. Takes fifteen to eighteen months to build -- on the site, of course. There are four of them, and between them they can shift up to a quarter of a million tons a day."
    "You win. This is a boomtown." Brady said. "Let's get inside. I'm cold." The other four -- Dermott, Mackenzie, Shore and Brinckman, the security chief-looked at him in mild astonishment. It seemed impossible that a man so extravagantly upholstered and insulated, both naturally and otherwise, could possibly feel even cool, but if Brady said he was cold, he was cold.
    They clambered into the minibus, which if a bit short on