Stallion Gate (7 page)

“Doing a little native liaison for you,” Joe told Oppy.

“The blood—”

“Why was the cow white?” Joe demanded.

“White—”

“The cow I killed because it was hot.”

“Hair can react to low levels of radiation. So it’s cow blood.” Oppy stared at Joe. “You should see yourself.”

“What are you doing here?” Joe asked Ray.

“We went to the train station at Lamy. Early train from Chicago.”

Oppy said, “I told Sergeant Stingo to swing by here on the way back so I could ask you to drive Dr. Pillsbury around the high-explosive sites today. And remember, you’re guarding a party tonight.”

“Okay, but I want a weekend pass.”

“Joe, we’re one month from the test.”

“I need a pass.”

“Why?”

Joe spoke slowly, one word at a time. “To get the blood off. I don’t like killing cows.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Oppy looked at the car. “You think you can help us get the car back on the road?”

As the three men walked to the Buick, Joe saw that a rear window was rolled down. Of course—Ray and Oppy had gone to the train to meet a passenger. With the final rush to the test, all sorts of people were coming from Oak Ridge, New York, Chicago. In the dimness, he recognized her by her cool gray-eyed gaze. Fuchs’ partner from the Christmas dance. Joe hadn’t seen her since.

“He’s all right, Anna,” Oppy said. “It’s not his blood.”

“Whose is it?” she asked.

Joe stopped by the fender. The rear right wheel had made its own well in the mud.

“Get her out so I can move the car over.”

“Dr. Weiss?” Ray opened the door for her.

As she looked at Joe’s shirt she could have been scrutinizing the gore on a beast that walked on all fours. Joe noticed the white azalea in her blacker-than-black hair; it was Oppy’s favorite flower. He could just see him offering it to her as she stepped from the train.

“A real giant would be able to lift me, too.”

“Anna,” Oppy said, “be reasonable.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “Stay.”

“Joe, if the three of us—” Ray tried to say.

Lift me? Joe gripped the chrome handle of the bumper, rocked the car and tested the suction of the ooze on the tire. He could lift an elephant and kick its ass down the road. Through the rear window her eyes glittered. On the third push the tire ripped free of the mud; in
the same motion, he walked the rear end of the Buick onto the road. When he let the car drop, she laughed, as if nothing he did surprised her, let alone scared her.

“Don’t forget Harvey Pillsbury.” As he got in the car, Oppy gave Joe a worried glance.

He
had
forgotten Harvey, and the cow. Watching the taillights move away, he could swear he saw the flash of her looking back.

On Two Mile Mesa, south of Los Alamos, bulldozers had cleared piñon, cedar and cactus to make way for test pads and concrete bunkers. There were photo bunkers with spring-forced steel jaws that would snap shut before rocketing debris reached the cameras inside. There were X-ray bunkers, steel-sheathed and coffin-shaped, that resembled ironclad warships sinking into the sand. Also gauge and meter bunkers, magazine bunkers, control bunkers. On the raw plain the bunkers fought their own war, firing more than ten tons of high explosive a week.

The Hanging Garden was the biggest test site, an entire hilltop shaved level by Jaworski’s crew. It looked like an Aztec pyramid forty yards across at the top, but instead of a bloody altar there was a steel pad blackened by carbon and fire and attended not by priests but by a dozen draft-deferred graduate students in shorts and baseball caps. The overall litter of burned cables and broken glass gave a false impression of disorder. There was a pattern. At the outer edges were the periscopes for the flash and rotating prism cameras that would
record every microsecond of a blast. Halfway to the pad were deep trenches for pressure gauges. Nearer, the buried mother cable emerged from the ground to be attached to exposed detonator cables. Almost nudging the pad was an X-ray bunker with the distinctive aluminum nose cone from which the rays would emanate to take their ghostly pictures. On the pad itself was a waist-high wooden table stamped “U.S.E.D.,” for United States Engineers Detachment, and in the middle of the table was a quarter-size model of a plutonium bomb, a 20-inch sphere with a steel shell of bright pentagonal plates bolted together at the edges. The team in baseball caps was connecting black cables to the detonator ports in each plate.

Leopold Jaworski wore suit, suspenders, a military brush of gray hair and mustache dyed as dark as arrowheads. He had soldiered against Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Tsar Nicholas of Russia and Marshal Pilsudski of Poland. In fact, he was the only scientist on the Hill who knew anything about war.

“You see,” he explained to Joe, “a uranium bomb is child’s play compared to this. Simply put half your uranium at one end of a barrel, half at the other end, shoot them together with gun cotton and you have your critical mass and chain reaction. But plutonium has to be brought together into a critical mass much faster with high explosive, at three thousand yards per second. Explosion is not good enough. The explosive in this device crushes and
implodes
a plutonium core into a critical mass.”

“That will take a lot of explosive,” Joe said, trying to sound intelligent.

“Joe, the energy released by the nuclear fission of one kilogram of plutonium is equal to seventeen thousand
tons
of TNT.”

Joe nodded to the model on the pad. “You don’t have a plutonium core in this, do you?”

“No.” Harvey arrived, puffing; he’d gone back down to the jeep for his clarinet, which he carried around like a riding crop. “Leo wants to blow up the table, not the mesa.”

“I used a squash ball for this test,” Jaworski said. “I assume the core in the full model will be the size of a croquet ball.”

“About,” Harvey said.

“About?” Jaworski sounded at once horrified and delighted. “Dr. Pillsbury, you are head of the schedule committee and you don’t know how large the core will be? Isn’t the core your very particular assignment?”

“There’ll be enough credit to go around if the gadget fizzles.”

“Harvey, if this gadget ‘fizzles,’ no one will ever hear of it. The Manhattan Project will be the American doughnut hole of history.”

“What are you testing now?” Harvey wanted to change the subject.

“Now? We are testing some new detonators that must fire through a bank of high-voltage condensers in the same one-millionth of a second. We are testing lenses of Baratol explosive to focus the shock wave. And we
are testing a flash technique for shadow photography.”

“We have thirty days until Trinity. All this information is absolutely necessary?”

Jaworski turned to Joe. “Hitler goes to Hell. The devil takes him to different rooms to choose his punishment. In the first room, Goering is nailed to a wheel and rolled through boiling oil. In the second room, Goebbels is being devoured by giant red ants. In the third, Stalin is making love to Greta Garbo. ‘That’s what I want,’ Hitler says, ‘Stalin’s punishment.’ ‘Very well,’ says the devil, ‘but actually it’s Garbo’s punishment.’ ” He turned back to Harvey. “See, it helps to have as much information as possible. Don’t worry, I’ve tested weapons for thirty years. I know the military mind. General Groves wants this bomb. I’m confident he will drop something on Japan.”

While Jaworksi’s team had been connecting cables the sky had changed. June and July were the rainy season. This year, rain was replaced by dry electrical storms that rolled like loose cannons down from the Jemez and across the valley. A pair of black clouds exchanged lightning bolts as they moved in an eerie calm toward the Hanging Garden. The thunder was too far away to hear and the entire mesa was falling quiet because orders were that there was to be no testing of high explosives while there was lightning and the chance of a power surge. Unperturbed, Jaworski led his men down the control bunker for lunch.

“Coming?” Joe asked Harvey.

Harvey held up his clarinet. “Might as well stay here and practice. Then I’ll sound the all clear.”

“Good place. Next to a bomb on a hill in a storm.”

“You said I needed practice. Besides, it helps me think.”

On his way down, Joe glanced back. Harvey looked like a duckling beside a gray and ugly egg.

The Hanging Garden got its name from the scarlet gilia, paintbrush and yarrow that had taken root and flourished in the turned soil of the hillside. The wildflowers were a brief, improbable splurge of colors—every shade of red, orange and madder—that turned and waved in any breeze crossing the dun drabness of the mesa. They twined around the periscopes, overflowed and made the timber facing of the hill into terraces. Speculation claimed that the flowers tapped a broken water pipe. Others said that Jaworski came in the night with watering cans. Whichever, the Hanging Garden so thrived that the loading platform of the bunker built into the base of the hill seemed more a garden bower.

Jaworski asked Joe to join the team in the shadow of the loading platform for lunch. But the Hungarian was a devotee of Spam and all there was to drink was milk. The Army had decided that milk counteracted the health hazard of working with TNT, so it supplied tubs filled with ice and bottles of fresh milk. On one side the bottles said, “Buy War Bonds!” Since the siege of Stalingrad, another side said, “Praise Russia!” Joe
stayed alone on the apron, the only place at the Hanging Garden where smoking was allowed.

The two clouds drifted closer. He looked for a bowed veil of rain, but it wasn’t there, just the sudden step of lightning two miles off. On the mesa road he could see MPs on horseback searching for cover. Directly across the apron was a magazine bunker. It had twin fourinch-thick doors and was set at an angle in its own earth mound so that any accidental explosion would be directed away from the control bunker,
NO SMOKING
was painted in red above the door. While Joe took out his cigarette and lighter he walked close enough to check the padlock on the magazine latch. It was slashed. He had switched locks months before. This lock was his.

As he brought his cigarette to the flame, Joe felt his hair rise on the back of his neck. The flame slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. Bunker, mesa and sky fused into one white bolt. He didn’t have time to look up at the top of the Hanging Garden—that was illusion—but he felt it erupt, the light turning from white to red, the fireball rising and expanding in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air from his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the ache of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.

“Harvey!” Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. Jaworski and the others followed, yelling as they came.

The wooden table and steel sphere were gone, erased
from the pad. The exposed cables had disappeared and the ground around the pad was baked and reverberating, without a weed or an ant, only a shimmer of the finest particles of graphite and gold. In a wider radius were glass and the metal commas of broken gauges. At the edges of the hilltop, the gilia and sage burned. Overhead, the black clouds were gone, as if blown from the sky. The mountains rose and fell on heat waves. There was no Harvey.

“It was the lightning.” Jaworski caught up with Joe. “An electrical surge.”

“Cordite!” someone shouted and everyone dove to the ground.

Cordite was another hazard of the Hanging Garden. There was no more reliable explosive than slotted-tube cordite, but it had the habit of blowing free of a blast, then catching fire and detonating at a later test. His face in the dirt, Joe saw smoke sputtering near a cable trench. It was the acetone in the cordite that smelled.

A figure rose from the trench. It held half a clarinet in one hand, half in the other. Its head looked like a sunflower, a carbon-smudged face in the center of stiff blond hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a mustache. The front of his shirt hung down over his belly, which sparkled with black and gold.

“Harvey!” Joe called. “Get down!”

Harvey dropped the separate halves of the clarinet as he stepped up to the smoldering cordite and, with elaborate fumbling, opened his fly. A pink organ popped
into view. He hesitated, scanning the bodies lying around the test pad until he spotted Jaworski.

“I’ve thought about it. The plutonium core will be exactly the size of a croquet ball.”

Then he played his golden stream upon the burning cord to the last faint whiff and last triumphant drop.

“The Japanese soldier is fanatical, well trained and confident. He has seized the Korean peninsula and he has routed the armies of China. He holds sway from Singapore to Saigon, and from Shanghai to Peiping, dominating his larger Asiatic counterparts and surprising the British. But—and this is a big but—he has yet to face the prepared forces of the United States and the Philippines.”

Joe and some fifty recruits from the Philippine Army were assembled in the village plaza. Taking turns on the concrete pad that served for the market, three lieutenants from MacArthur’s general staff had come to exhort them. Behind the soldiers the vendors waited patiently in the mud. They bent under the weight of pots, knives, sharpening wheels, orange bags of saffron, wicker baskets of fish, bottles of quinine tablets, plaster saints, bolts of Dutch cloth, cages of fighting cocks, coconut, breadfruit, green bananas, red bananas, tins of ghee, bricks of tea, coffee, cosmetics, love potions and douches. The villagers were small, brown, broadnosed:
men in loincloths, women in grass shawls, babies riding hips. The previous day’s rain rose from the nipa huts in a heavy vapor redolent of jasmine, rotting fish and pig shit. Flies swam in a shaft of light. The recruits had been issued shorts and bamboo rifles. Joe wore a flat campaign hat and Sam Browne belt; the lieutenants sported white pith helmets and sharp creases.

“And he has yet to fight American and Philippine Christians. The Jap—whether Buddhist, Taoist or Hindu—regards life as cheap. His soul is his Emperor’s, not his own.”

The villagers, vendors and recruits nodded blandly. They spoke Tagalog, little Spanish, no English. Their eyes were on the
teniente del barrio
, the village leader. When he nodded, they nodded. In its cage a cock ruffled and settled into green iridescent feathers.