Stallion Gate

  "When you knocked out Gold at the Casa Mañana, you weren't just searching him. You were taking out the card."

  "Yes. When I took you out of the stockade, I told you you had a mission. That morning of the hunt when I let you live so you could bring Oppenheimer and GeneralGroves down here, it was so you could carry out that same mission. To deliver that card. Or a card like it. Or evidence like it."

  "What about the information you were always asking about?"

  "Sergeant, you're much too truculent to be a reliable informer. You do the important things well, though. Oppenheimer and Dr Weiss. So, what is your choice?"

  The rain came harder, more at an angle. He thought he could feel her turn south to Mexico.

  The card was cheap pasteboard. Frayed at the corners. It fitted neatly into Joe's palm, slipped easily into his pocket. He started the engine again. "Back to the tower?" he asked Augustino.

  "To our patriotic duty."

  29

  At 10 pm an anti-sabotage light was hung on the first landing of the tower for spotlights six miles away to train on. The weak beams that penetrated the rain lit an open jeep in which Eberly sat, drenched, a submachine-gun across his knees. Jaworski and Foote, in soaked clothes and dripping hats, had opened the door to the standing crate called the "privy" at the tower base. Oppy watched them, a damp, dead cigarette in his mouth, his porkpie hat wet through. The door of an Army sedan opened as Joe and Augustino drove up in the jeep.

  "Get in here, Sergeant," Groves shouted. "Finished with the Apaches?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Looks like you found them." Groves glanced at the tape on his brow as Joe slipped on to the rear seat with him. The car was small and steamy. The general's uniform seemed to be turning into toweling.

  "Yes, sir."

  "The problem isn't wild Indians." Groves rubbed condensation off the window to see the three men at the box. "Dr Oppenheimer is, you understand, a highly-strung individual. Anything can set him off now. He has to decide whether to call off the test or not and all the crackpots at the base camp want him to. That's why I brought him here, so he could make a calm, rational decision."

  Joe looked through the window at Captain Augustino, who had stayed in the jeep. Was this the moment to say, "General, your head of security wants to arrest your project director as Joe Stalin's secret agent?" No. Joe had figured it out. Augustino's whole plan depended on the test. There wasn't a chance in hell of the test being held in this weather. All he had to do tonight was stall. Tomorrow, when people were sane and dry, Joe would nail the captain's ass to a board.

  "It is raining, sir."

  "It will clear. Dr Oppenheimer doesn't need any more scientific cross-chatter, he needs some sensible advice. Fermi was talking about the end of the earth and we have GIs running all the way to Tularosa. Talk to him, he listens to you. Calm him down. Keep him away from pessimists."

  As Joe left the car, the steel tower turned chalk white. Faded. Two seconds later, thunder rocked the valley floor. Close, he thought.

  "All summer and all spring it hasn't rained." Oppy raised his face to the drops. "Here we are, four hours from Zero Hour, and it's pouring."

  Inside the "privy", wet electrical tape unraveled in black curlicues from coaxial cable. While Jaworski cut loose strands, Foote wound the cable with fresh tape.

  "Snakes and sunstroke we anticipated in the desert," Foote said. "Humidity took us by surprise."

  "How about lightning?" Joe asked.

  "I told you how lightning knocked out a rehearsal." Jaworski snipped away. "A power surge from lightning certainly could set off the high explosive."

  "Nonsense." Foote wiped the tape with Kleenex. "The tower is grounded."

  "Shut up!" Oppy said. "The bomb is a dud. You know and I know it, everybody knows it but the general. How can I think with you two nits picking at each other?"

  The ladder leaned against the first landing of the tower. Oppy climbed the ladder and rose up the tower rungs towards the shed. Once past the second landing and the faint beams of the spotlights, he vanished into the dark. Foote silently finished the taping and checked that the cable firing switch was in the open position before shutting the "privy" door and padlocking it.

  Groves worked his way from the sedan while Augustino sauntered over from the jeep. "Follow him," Groves told Joe.

  "Sir, if I might suggest," the captain said, "why don't I assign Sergeant Peña to the security of the bomb itself. That will give the sergeant a plausible reason to be with Dr Oppenheimer."

  "Whatever, get up there," Groves ordered.

  Rain pulled at Joe and the cold steps swayed with him. At 100 feet, the tower seemed to be on a fixed tilt. The shed's sixty-watt bulb illuminated a floor of pulleys, cables and ropes, striped walls of corrugated steel and the bomb in its cradle. Since he had seen it last, the bomb had lost its lunar smoothness because two exterior detonator boxes had been bolted on. Cables connected the sphere's sixty-four detonator ports to the boxes, and out of the boxes' switchboard backs an equal number of cables hung down to the firing unit, a padlocked aluminum case between the cradle's feet. Out on the open platform, Oppy clung to the hoist with one hand and to his hat with the other.

  "You look like fucking Ahab in the rigging." Joe stepped out with him.

  From the platform it appeared that lightning was striking everywhere, as if the low clouds, black as smoke from a fire, were launching a climactic attack. In every arc of the horizon a bolt was hitting. One report of thunder overlapped and muffled another. A mile off, the silver barrage balloon that had been earthbound before was now lifted by winds. The balloon was anchored to a jeep, which dangled below, only its rear wheels touching the ground. The two men were trying to save the jeep, but the lightning built static charges that ran down the steel cable and exploded like cannon under the bouncing wheels.

  "General Groves has dismissed the meteorologists." Oppy wiped the rain from his face and grinned. "The general is the new weatherman of the Trinity shot."

  "It's your decision, though, isn't it?"

  "That's what the general tells me." Oppy twisted his eyes away from Joe. He bent his head and fumbled, and it wasn't until Joe saw the small flare that he realized Oppy was lighting a cigarette. "Thanks for coming back."

  "Call it off," Joe watched the two men running from the jeep.

  "It's not as if we could just do it tomorrow. To get to the same pitch, to ready the men and the equipment again would take a week at least."

  "You said this bomb was a dud. You said you wanted an extra week, anyway."

  "Like Ahab?" Oppy laughed.

  "That's what you looked like."

  "I did sail when I was a boy, you know. I had my own sloop and sailed all around Long Island." Oppy stared at the clouds. "This was the sort of weather I liked most, in fact. I'd run with the wind and go out on the tide race just to fight my way back in, one reach after another. There was one inlet in particular you had to clear. The riptide would curl around and try to take you into the breakers. It was the first time I knew I had courage. First time I proved it." Oppy cupped his cigarette from the rain. "It would take hours to clear the inlet and reach the bay. You see, it was the struggle that was important, the patience and the strength to find the right angle, Joe, the right piece of water and the right wind. As we're doing right now. Struggling."

  A low, unbroken belly of clouds stretched from one end of the valley to the other, and the clouds seemed to be descending by their very weight, bringing a second, thicker night. Joe could see pinpoints of light on the ground where another party had abandoned another jeep and were running with flashlights.

  "Did I ever tell you how I got out of Bataan?" Joe asked.

  "No. You never told anyone. I thought it was a point of honor."

  "No honor involved. It's a sailing story."

  "On Bataan?"

  "I got shot in the ass and in the back, then I caught some kind of jungle crud and a fever." Joe lit a cigarette from Oppy's.

>   "I had five Filipino scouts and we had a field piece we moved from hill to hill, holding the line though there wasn't any line to hold any more. When I got the fever and went off my head, the Filipinos ditched the piece to carry me. Problem was, there wasn't any place to take me. The last barges were gone to Corregidor and we were too far from the depots at Mariveles or Manila. They said the Japs would shoot me because I was too big. I knew the Japs would shoot me because I couldn't walk. So the scouts took me down to the water; there was no place left to go. They stole a fishing boat and put me in. I could just sit up and I was still trying to give orders. Like an officer, you know. It was low tide. I could see the shark net sticking out of the water, so I knew there were mines right below the surface of the water. There were mines off all the beaches."

  Joe let his voice drop the way Oppy did to make a listener lean forward. Oppy hunched closer. "As soon as it was dark, the Filipinos pushed me and the boat out. No motor, no oars. I couldn't believe my own scouts wanted to kill me, but that's what they seemed to be doing. I mean, if they wanted to kill me, I couldn't stop them. They could have brought my head in to the Japs and made some money. I tried to paddle back to shore because I could see ammo dumps going up in Mariveles, fuel dumps going up in Manila, and Long Toms, the 155mms, answering from Corregidor, the whole thing reflected in the water like the end of the world and I wanted to get back into it.

  "Have you ever had dysentery? You pass out and you shit blood. I couldn't sit up any longer, no matter what was happening. I laid back in my own shit and piss in a drifting boat under the fireworks. There were holes in the shark net from when the Japs landed. We'd caught the Japs in the water when they first came and the sharks followed them and finished them off. Once the sharks were in, they didn't leave. They'd bump into the boat, give it a spin. It was a leaky boat. Sharks have an amazing sense of smell. I raised my head and there must have been fifty sharks around the boat, slowly swimming in a big circle. I did see the humor in the situation. I mean, how many New Mexico Indians get eaten by sharks? I kept thinking, if only I had a paddle, if only I had a gun, if only I had wings. If only I could kill myself, I thought, but I didn't have the strength to hold my breath. The main thing was to keep thinking, I told myself. Keep struggling. The problem was, every time I stirred so did the sharks. Those fucking Filipinos, they should have told me."

  Joe stopped talking to watch the beam of a searchlight swing above the West-10,000 bunker. The beam no sooner found the erratic, diagonal ascent of a weather balloon than the target vanished into clouds.

  "Told you what?" Oppy asked.

  "To stop struggling. During the night, the tide came in and lifted the boat over the shark nets and when the tide went out I went with it into the bay. A gunboat picked me up and put me on a sub and that's how I escaped heroically from Bataan, by finding out that fighting the tide may not be a test of courage so much as a sign of stupidity, and that's the last time I went sailing." Joe held up a damp butt. "Son of a bitch went out."

  "You're suggesting that fighting the rain is like fighting the tide? You're suggesting I'm stupid?"

  "Was I?"

  "I just can't decide how subtle you are."

  "Well." Joe flipped the butt and watched the rain snatch it into the dark. "If the dud works, I think you got the right angle and the right wind now to carry radiation all the way to Amarillo."

  Oppy turned away to lean on the rail. His clothes snapped around him like a sheet. At first, Joe thought Oppy was having a pneumonic spasm, but when Oppy turned back to Joe, he was laughing. Either tears or rain were running down his cheeks.

  "You're right. I'll call it off." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "Let's go down together."

  "My orders are to baby-sit the beast. You go."

  After Oppy climbed down and drove away with Groves towards South-10,000, Joe went into the shed, made a seat for himself out of the ropes on the floor and lit a dry cigarette.

  Half the shed was taken up by the bomb, its loops of cables, its cradle. The bomb that was dropped on Japan would be stuffed into a teardrop casing with tail fins just narrow enough to slip through the bay of a B-29. Otherwise, it would be the twin of this one. Same dull gray shell. Interlocking, inward-aiming lenses of explosive. Warm and silvery Dragon's heart. From the firing unit emerged the single coaxial cable that dropped through the floor and down the tower to the open switch in the "privy", a switch that wouldn't be closed for a week now if Oppy's estimate was correct. The FM receiver still mixed shelter communications with the Voice of America; Paul Robeson intoned "The Volga Boatmen" while someone read a checklist of gamma meters. A week until another test, Joe thought. He'd have Augustino's ass in a sling before then. He'd drive Groves back to the Albuquerque Hilton himself tomorrow and fill him in on the captain. Augustino could deny everything but the captain would be nailed by the same item he wanted to nail Oppy with.

  At midnight, the word came over the radio receiver. "Zero Hour has been postponed. Due to weather conditions, Zero Hour has been postponed from 0200 to 0400. Zero Hour is now 0400."

  Two hours? Joe asked himself. Oppy only postponed the shot from 2 am to 4 am?

  Well, fuck, the weather wasn't going to improve, Joe thought. Wind hit the tower broadside. The lamp swayed and the bomb in its cradle seemed to shuffle like a fat man on short legs.

  TRINITY, JULY 16

  30

  While the rainstorm continued, the shot was postponed another hour, from 0400 to 0500. Through the platform binoculars Joe watched a heavy man in uniform and a gaunt man in civvies pacing in the headlights of a sedan outside the South-10,000 shelter. Not only was the rain as bad as before, winds had built. Joe knew Groves didn't take Oppy inside because everyone else wanted the test scrubbed. They made an interesting couple, Joe thought, out in the rain by themselves, circling a golden pool of water, almost male and female the way Groves patiently tended Oppy's nervousness.

  At 0400, a bolt exploded by the tower. Joe held on to the platform hoist and remembered what Jaworski had said about the 5,000 lbs of high explosive in the shed, but the lightning blew nothing except the target light on the first landing of the tower. Joe climbed down the steps with another bulb. The searchlights trained on the target light half-blinded him and it took him a moment to notice that Eberly had climbed up the ladder from the ground. Beads of water ran from his poncho, nose and Adam's apple and from the barrel of his submachine-gun.

  "I thought you ought to know, Chief. There's a regular field radio by the 'privy'. Captain Augustino called and told me to go to your jeep and make sure there were a couple of yellow sticks in there. And he told me to shoot you if you tried to leave the tower. I don't get it. If he thinks you're a saboteur, why are you guarding the bomb? If you're the guard, why should I guard you? This is the Army system?"

  "The Augustino system." If Joe was dead, he was an arsonist, by the lightning wands in the jeep. A spy, by Harry Gold's card in his pocket. "Don't shoot, I'll be right back."

  Joe descended the ladder and ran to the jeep. The photos were gone, but the wands still lay on the front seat. He grabbed them and returned to the ladder.

  Eberly had seen everything. As Joe reached the landing, Eberly said, "I hate the Army."

  From the platform, Joe saw what he expected. Oppy and Groves were no longer outside South-10,000. Headlights approached on the tarmac road. In the shed the radio said the shot had been postponed again to 0530. Joe hid the wands behind loose ropes.

  "Five thirty in the morning is the best possible time." Oppy's jacket hung like a sopping rag, but he strutted within the confines of the shed and around the bomb with a new, jaunty confidence.

  "Captain Augustino return with you?" Joe asked.

  "He's down with Groves, yes. See, at 0530 we have the dark that's necessary to photograph the blast accurately and then quickly we have the daylight to bring in the tank and perform the rest of the recovery process."

  "You mean, 0530 is the last possible moment you can run your godd
amn test if the weather clears."

  "Also, the best moment. We should have thought of it before."

  Oppy stopped to cough as if he were emptying his lungs. A paperback book stuck out of his jacket pocket, a collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal. If Joe wanted to plant Gold's card, that was the pocket.

  "That's your pose for the countdown, a carefree appreciator of poetry?" Joe asked.

  "You know your Baudelaire? It's perfect." Oppy opened the door to the platform. "I am like the king of a rainy country, wealthy but helpless, young and ripe with death."

  "It's pouring. Your cables are going to short, your cameras won't see shit and the observer plane won't even find the tower."

  "That's what everyone else says."

  "Then call it off."

  "The general says the weather will clear. The general wants optimum conditions–"

  "The general needs Trinity. The general needs Trinity because he's never seen combat and the Army is going to dump him back to colonel if he doesn't produce a bomb."

  "I say it will clear."

  "You say it will clear? Now you're the weatherman?"

  "I'm a scientist. We should hold out until the last–"

  "You're going to tell me about your fucking sailboat again? We're a hundred feet up with a bomb in the rain, we're not reliving your happy childhood."

  Oppy leaned against the door and turned to Joe.

  "The dude from Riverside Drive? Do you remember him?"

  "Yeah."

  "The one you turned from Jewboy into cowboy? But the world demands success on a somewhat grander scale, Joe. I need Trinity. I need to end the war before it ends without me. That's why we'll try tonight."

  "Augustino wants you to try tonight."

  "The captain was the one who suggested we return to the tower. Groves wanted to get me away from the crowd." Oppy crossed the shed and rested his hand on the bomb. "I wanted to see it again."