Bombshell (8 page)

According to Valerie Solanas:

“Both destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate. SCUM is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots, with no clear objective in mind, and in which many of your own kind are picked off. SCUM will never instigate, encourage, or participate in riots of any kind or any other form of indiscriminate destruction. SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill. Destruction will never be such as to block off routes needed for the transportation of food or other essential supplies, contaminate or cut off the water supply, block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can't get through or impede the functioning of hospitals.”

It was evening before Cash felt well enough to work on the improvised rocket-propelled petrol bomb she had intended to launch, and she
found herself too depleted to make even the short journey to the north of Santa Fe that she had imagined. Cash called her petrol bomb the Harry K. Daghlian Jr. Memorial Rocket, and it was to be launched at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Area G facilities. It would shriek above the trees and across the barbed-wire fences, leaving a comet's tail of bright green sparks. Where it crashed, the gasoline would ignite and start a fire close to the plutonium barrels. Attached to it would be a small metal canister. This she intended to survive the fire, but to be discovered by forensics investigators almost immediately. Inside the canister, shining from the scorched earth, agitating the leaching radiation in the dirt, they would find a Xeroxed photograph of Harry Daghlian's radiation-burnt palm and his wretched fingers. She had little sympathy for Daghlian, a man who had irradiated himself in one of the deathly waves of 1945. He perished from radiation poisoning after dropping a tungsten carbide brick upon a plutonium core at Los Alamos. She had no time for the complicit—for the pilots, the engineers, the nuclear physicists, in weaponry or power—unless they walked away in rational disgust. She told herself that she had no sympathy even for the workers at Chernobyl, for they toiled in the service of nightmares without end. That included her father. She had lost a day. It would have to wait until the following night.

April 6, 2011. As night fell, Cash rode her motorcycle north to Los Alamos. Her lips curled as she tracked through the dire names high on the ominous mesa skirted by Omega Road and split by Trinity Drive and decorated with the quaintly referential Manhattan Loop. Nearby lay Oppenheimer Drive, Bikini Road, and Eniwetok Drive. Los Alamos National Laboratory had developed and spread across the mesa and canyons of the region, but Cash rode toward the point of origin: the crest where Los Alamos Ranch School for boys had once been; alma mater for
William Burroughs and Gore Vidal, elder statesmen of Queer. Here was the incubation space of the bomb, another tourist trap. She studied the cops loitering along Bathtub Row where the Oppenheimer House stood. Evidently, her attack on the Trinity marker had made someone edgy. Yet, this was not what she had come for. Cash arrived at her target, wearing her black jeans and a black leather jacket. Her khaki pack was slung over her back. Between the Jemez and Pajarito roads lay Material Disposal Area G, sixty acres concealing sixty thousand cracked plutonium drums under tarpaulins or partly submerged in sand pits, surrounded by a blackened vista of deforestation where the wildfires had blown in.

Cash parked her motorcycle beside the moonlit road through the Pajarito Canyon. She lay in the dirt shoulder and dug the shaft of her rocket into the cold-hardened ground. When it would not dig in, she hacked into the surface with her ignition key. Making subtle adjustments she decided the trajectory, as she had practiced covertly when she and Molly would drink tequila and shoot fireworks from the black hills surrounding their town. She taped the improvised timing mechanism to the pole with the rocket. At the moment when her timer struck, and the touch paper of the Harry K. Daghlian Jr. Memorial Rocket was lit, she would be at least five miles away.

The rocket poured its luminous glittering tail over the forest, a radium-green arc howling above the pines and bombing down toward the rusting barrels. A security guard watched it fall toward the tarps and threw himself to the ground, his Doberman barking into the brittle black tree line. The rocket fell rapidly, weighed down by its metal canister, showering the scene with brilliant ivy embers. There was a low concussion as it smashed against a metal office building, and gasoline flames splashed the wall and set light to the surrounding brush. The guard grabbed for his radio as the threat of wildfire ruptured the silence of the mesa.

Cash rode out of the forest to where the Douglas firs, pines, and Gambel oaks gave way to swarms of tenacious piñon and juniper foregathering in the moonlight along 502 and onto Highway 285. She had been born in a city surrounded by such a great forest as this one, but the trees had been destroyed by the dragon-vapor of Chernobyl before she could lay her eyes upon it. The nights of New Mexico were so clear; the profound fires of the Milky Way arched over her. It was a nuclear universe. Tomorrow, she would leave New Mexico forever, and travel east.

She gazed down on the stardust strip of Madrid from a tall slag heap, coal slipping from beneath her boots like melting black ice. There, far below her, were the iron locomotive and derelict boxcars from the Santa Fe Railroad. Pale lanterns swiveled on wires in the limbs of the trees flanking the narrow line of Highway 14 that was the spine of the town. She felt herself to be an alien, charged with the perils of saving her distant dying planet from a catastrophe. Moonlight stroked the green and colored beer bottle walls between some of the disintegrating
casitas
. Wind chimes pealed along the boardwalk of gallery shacks, with coyote feedback in the nubs of the hills. In the darkness, she vacillated between acute sorrow and a profound awareness of her own power. Listening for the throb of their rotors, she watched remote helicopter lights moving toward Los Alamos.

She reeled her bicycle chain necklace from inside her T-shirt, pulling the shard of weakly luminous trinitite away from her small, muscular chest. She let it hang in front of her, a cursed firefly.

It was after midnight. Before packing her bag, Cash colored her hair. She bleached the black out of it with peroxide, putting in a deep red dye. In the small bathroom, the pigment splashed the shower curtain, dripped onto the pale concrete, and flecked the mirror over the white enamel sink. The scene looked as though someone had been murdered.

AT HIS HOME ON CONSTITUTION AVENUE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
, Robert Dresner's ghost phone rang at 3
AM
, startling him from sleep. Without switching on his lamp, he clawed at the modern bureau at his bedside, finally locating the call. The chrome voice on the other end penetrated the vinous fur of his exhaustion and the whisky he had forced down to help him sleep against the flow of his jet lag.

“Robert, there's been a firebomb attack at LANL. Almost setting fire to Area G.”

“A firebomb? Jesus. It's got to be linked, right?”

“Almost certainly.”

“How did they get close enough? I thought we had firewalls.”

“You should be able to assume that, but no. Los Alamos is
gentrified
. The one witness, a security guard, stated that it resembled a large green firecracker launched over the tree canopy, or what's left of it.”

“So, what about the uranium or plutonium pits?” Dresner climbed from his bed and felt for the switch for the overhead lights. The room blurred before him: the pale blue walls, the beige carpet, the copy of
Hustler
splayed out on his black micro suede comforter. He paced toward the bed and straightened the magazine so that he could study it while he talked with his director; beside the brunette in her underwear, he read the pink and gray headlines: B
UILDING A
B
ETTER
V
AGINA
(W
E
H
AVE THE
P
HOTOS!
)

“The fire was a minor one. Also, an obscure reference to Harry Daghlian.”

“Who's Harry Daghlian?”

“I'm sending you a scan of material discovered at the site.”

“Casualties?”

“Negative. Not
that
gentrified.” The metallic Voice attempted an ironic tone. “But we are culling information from the sundry New Mexican authorities, including any traces, glimpses, or suspicions they had but couldn't resolve regarding the wildfires that made news last year.”

“Those were set deliberately, yes, right. I'll call Langley and make certain that any and all incidents related to nuclear facilities, however abstract, are forwarded to me. If this is our alien, we can work on the nexus.”

“Someone wants our attention, Robert. Give it to them.”

Dresner pulled on his white cotton robe and paced dully to his kitchen, where he would make coffee before descending to his basement office to pick up the scans. The basement was warm from the machinery there, a soft electronic drone played in the gloom. He signed in, and the screens at his desk lit up, making him squint and complain. The light from the screens illuminated the other items scattered across his desk, the strange typewritten letter from the Trinity bomber, and his amorphous photograph, the blade of black hair across his brow like a cartoon Nazi. There was more. Greenish night-sight images and video stills that the terrorist would not know Dresner possessed, drone camera images of him crawling along the desert floor, part-deflected lurid thermal photographs of the bomb being attached to the obelisk. He studied the images, estimating the build of the figure. He guessed that the saboteur was approximately five feet six inches tall—short for an American, but perhaps not outside of expectations for
one born in the Soviet Union without first-world nutrition. What do you want? He had seen exploits similar to this before. The problem was always that where the enemy believed they were taunting, they were transparent: the narcissism of terrorism. Lower-level CIA operatives would be scouring the speed cameras and traffic flow sentinels for a target vehicle to cross-reference from Radium Springs and Los Alamos. Sipping his coffee, he clicked open the feed and a series of photographs appeared before him: a close-up of a dog sniffing the tattered cardboard of the projectile, a narrow metal canister beside a strip of measuring tape. “I don't care about the scale of the thing, just what's
inside
it.” The final image was evidently a scan of a monochrome photograph that was not contemporary. It was the image of a man's stricken hand, having sustained some kind of wound, the skin stripped from the palm, and the fingers contorted and blistered. Dresner wondered if the hand was an amputation. There was handwriting on the photograph, from a black ballpoint pen. He enlarged the image to read the scrawl that was evidently so agitated that it had nearly torn through the glossy paper it was written on. Reading, his jet lag made him panic.

This is the Hand—the Hand that takes . . .

APRIL 7, 2011. THURSDAY MORNING, HAVING BARELY SLEPT, AFTER
struggling though thirty push-ups and fifty abdominal crunches, and coughing up bile, Cash called on Molly. Stray dogs roamed the strip as the sun lit the rough-seamed hills.

“You changed your hair,” Molly said as Cash let herself in.

“Yeah. Like it?”

“Definitely.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth!
”

“That's what I was going for: fucked-up Martian rust-red.”

“Caffeine, girly? It's made.”

“Why not?” Cash made herself at home on the couch, turning the pages of one of Molly's hot rod magazines, pausing on the pinup pages where
teenage girls adorned luridly painted machines. “Juanita is
muy caliente
,” she murmured as Molly brought coffee and started playing a bootleg James Chance and the Contortions live cassette. “Look, Moll,” Cash said above the soul-shouts and slabs of dissonant saxophone coming from across the room, “I'm going away for a while, but I need a car. Can I trade you my bike for your car for a few weeks, please? I'll be extremely careful with it.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“East. Yeah, east.”

“So, you, Cash, you actually want to drive my low-rider through Texas, you, with that hair? You know that all of those mean, burly, butch, born-again cops will totally adore you? You'll be pulled over every mile. Be sure to stash your Bible in your glove box, and use your registration as a bookmark for a pertinent passage, you know, something about Sodom and Gomorrah.”