Goodbye California by Alistair MacLean

The seismologist chose his next few words carefully.
   'California is a State apart - the only State in the Union where, in the back of the mind of any reasonably intelligent person, lies the thought of tomorrow. Not when tomorrow comes, gentlemen. If tomorrow comes.'

18 April, 1906, five-thirteen in the morning - the date San Francisco was torn apart by a massive earthquake. Over four hundred and fifty people died; three hundred thousand rendered homeless. When it came to counting the cost, the final estimate was sixty million pounds.
   That 1906 disaster is past history; the likelihood of it happening again is not. For throughout California runs the San Andreas Fault, part of the active earthquake and volanic belt that lies beneath the Pacific. It was on this 'ring of fire', as the ring is called, that the greatest earthquakes ever recorded have occurred (in Japan in 1906 and South America in 1933), and Californians now wait to see whether another monster earthquake, forecast as likely to be eight times as fierce as the one that struck in 1906, is soon to engulf them. At a conservative estimate it would reduce San Francisco to floating debris in the middle of the Pacific and destroy much of California itself. And that earthquake is now overdue.
   It is little consolation to learn that this earthquake could come about from any one of three separate causes. A combination of the sun and solar winds could do it, considerably altering the earth's atmosphere and then the earth's crust itself. Gravitational forces by other planets could have a similar effect, and scientists are waiting apprehensively for the year 1982, when all nine planets will be in alignment. The third possible cause, quite simply, is man. Might someone have the motive - and the power - to trigger off the earthquake themselves?
   It is this final possibility where Alistair MacLean has taken the last three years to research - and which forms the exciting and all-too-plausible theme to his new book - Goodbye California.