Stallion Gate

  Actually, life was very nice when he got to Manila. Mostly what the Army wanted him to do was box. Tour the airfields giving exhibitions against the local champions. Fight in the annual Boxing Festival at Rizal Stadium. Play piano at the Officers Club. When dependants were shipped out, the officers, like men freed from a domestic garden into paradise, came in with the most beautiful whores, coffee-colored Filipino girls and White Russians with paste jewels.

  When the invasion came, three days before Christmas, Joe led a platoon of Philippine Scouts. The first night they made contact was in a banana plantation, and in the dark among the rustling fronds he heard, "Hey, Joe! Over here, Joe." He'd figured out that Japs called all Americans "Joe", that the Japs hadn't come across the Pacific for him personally, but the voices were unnerving, like the dark come to life. "Joe…"

  He wished he could listen to the car radio and hear some big band from Albuquerque or, if the ether gave a lucky bounce, a jazz station from Kansas City. Ellington, like a black Indian in an invisible canoe, paddling through the clouds. Paddle, Duke! Rescue me.

  Groves was down to his last toffee. "The big picture is, no one else has the industrial base or the technology. Never forget the inherent inefficiency of the Soviet system. It will take them twenty years to develop an atom bomb, if ever."

  There was something in the clouds, dim lights moving in and out, and there was the sound of distant thunder.

  "A world without war," Oppy said.

  "A Pax Americana," Groves agreed.

  Lights appeared in the stars between the clouds. A more diffused glow grew in the snow below the lights. Nearer. The general's final caramel grew sticky between his fingers. Oppy cocked his head limply in the manner of the most ethereal saints. Fuchs stared through the flames reflected in his glasses. Joe counted until he heard thunder again.

  "Bombers, about six miles off."

  "Here?" Groves asked.

  "It's a bombing range, sir. Night practice."

  "What do they bomb, exactly?" Oppy asked.

  "At night," Joe said and looked at the campfire, "illuminated targets."

  He broke for the car, dived into the front seat and cranked up the field radio. Through the Buick's windshield he watched the three men kicking apart the fire. Groves was surprisingly nimble, Oppy disjointed as ever. Beyond, blooms of light moved laterally on the horizon. The radio held a roar of static untainted by any coherent transmission.

  By the time Joe returned, all that was left of the camp fire was a circle of soot. Fuchs was on his knees, slapping the last embers. With the fire out, the party could see how the moon had escaped the clouds and filled the range with an opalescent haze.

  "Can we get away?" Groves asked Joe.

  "I noticed on the way in that they like to bomb the stretch of road behind us. If we blink headlights at them, they'll try to drop a fifty-pounder on the hood. Run without headlights and we'll turn over in a ditch. We may as well stay here."

  "What if you're wrong?" Fuchs' face was smudged and his hair stood up straight. "This entire project should not be put in jeopardy because of a stupid Indian."

  "Shut up, Klaus," Oppy said softly.

  Joe said, "B-29s."

  The approaching bombers were bigger than anything he had ever seen in the air. Superforts, twenty tons of steel, twice as big as Flying Fortresses, each of their four engines the size of a fighter. Chutes spilled from the bays, floated, and sputtered into flares.

  "Good Lord," Oppy said, "this is beautiful."

  Why flares? Joe wondered.

  The lead bomber lifted reluctantly and the next in line took its place, settling lower with closer attention to the ground. Why so low? Joe wondered. The belly turret turned, its .50-calibre barrels swinging back and forth. He could make out the green light within the Plexiglass nose. A green bombardier not even bothering with his sight pointed straight down, and as if there were a magical connection with his finger a phosphorus bomb lit the valley floor. From the bomb came running shapes, horses, brilliant with lather and the glare of the bomb, racing under the wing. Mustangs out of the mountains for the night grazing and the mares the ranchers had left behind. Joe couldn't make out individual horses, only the motion of their rocking and straining, urged by the dazzle of tracers, and the way they wheeled from rays of burning phosphorus. At a distance of a mile, he thought he could hear not only their hooves but their breath, although he knew they were drowned out by the various sounds of pistons and hydraulics and .50-caliber rounds in the air. Then the mustangs and bombers moved on together, like a single storm, distance muting the sound, and nothing could be seen except a flash that resembled an occasional faraway stroke of lightning.

  What Joe remembered best was what Oppy said when they were alone in Alamogordo, after the half-track and jeeps had finally appeared and towed them to the base.

  "It was awful, but it was still… beautiful."

  JUNE 1945

  6

  In Santiago, calves were cut and branded in the hour before dawn so that the men could catch the morning bus to Los Alamos, where they worked as custodians and furnace stokers.

  Joe was alone in the second corral, where steers were brought in for sale. With meat rationing, there was a market for Indian cattle and it was Joe's job to go over them with a Geiger counter. It consisted of a metal wand, wire, and a case with twenty pounds of batteries and a micro ammeter that was useless in the middle of a herd in the dark. The Geiger counter was emitting the audible clicks of gamma rays. At least from one cow. Joe slipped a rope over its head and led it out of the corral and around a hay rick, where a path led to a copse of cottonwoods and willows. A rare rain had fallen the day before and mud sucked on his shoes. In the middle of the copse were cans, mattress springs, shoes and bones cemented in a great mound of sodden ash. He yanked the cow into the pile up to its knees, put his .45 where the vertebrae of the neck joined the dome of the skull and fired. At the last second, the cow, curious, looked up and the bullet tore through the artery of its neck. Blood shot in a solid, black stream over Joe's chest and arm. He held the animal tight and fired again. The cow dropped like a weight. Joe picked up a can of kerosene and poured it over the dead animal, lit it and staggered back from the blaze. In the yellow flames, Joe could see two things. The cow was mottled, its hide half-bleached. Every canyon around Los Alamos had cattle and every canyon had sites where poisonous isotopes were vented or exploded; either way, the isotopes were sown into the soil and water. Which was why the personnel on the Hill underwent nose wipes, ass wipes and radioactive urine checks, but as for the ignorant animals that wandered the sites, Army policy was "kill them, burn them, bury them", and the perfect instrument was Joe.

  A hide turned white? That was new. The other thing was that through the greedy roar of the fire he could see that the cow was pregnant. He remembered why he was so upset with Augustino when they'd gone hunting. He'd never thought of it since then. Not shooting an animal that was carrying was an Indian stricture, a primitive taboo. Not against the killing the life, but against killing the seed of life. He started for the cow as if he could pull it out of the flames. Realized how stupid it was. Staggered back. Jesus, what a butcher. The way the cow had turned its large, marble eyes up to him. The sideways fountain of blood. As the pyre burned and crackled, he thought of the second heart within the cow.

  One moment he was so close to the fire that his shirt was steaming, the next he was in the tangled dark of the willows forcing his way to the road where he'd left the jeep rather than pass by the corrals, rather than see anyone or have anyone see him. As he stumbled out of the woods, headlights ambushed him, as if the burning cow had risen and stalked him.

  The lights swerved. A Buick fish tailed to a stop, its rear end in the mud of the shoulder of the road. Ray Stingo and then Oppy came running to Joe, shouting at the same time.

  "You okay?"

  "What happened?"

  "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's 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 labored each word. "To get the blood off."

  "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 to the Hill from Oak Ridge, New York, Chicago. In the dimness, Joe 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 bumper. 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.

  She looked at Joe's shirt and could have been scrutinizing the gore on a beast that walked on all fours. Joe noticed the white azalea in her hair; white azaleas were Oppy's favorite. He could just see Oppy 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 began.

  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 and in the same motion Joe straightened and walked the rear end of the Buick on to 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 Oppy got into the car, he gave Joe a worried glance.

  Joe had forgotten Harvey, and the cow. Watching the tail-lights move away, Joe could have sworn 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. Plus 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 HangingGarden 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 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 to the pad, 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 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 model of a plutonium bomb, a twenty-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, braces, a military brush of gray hair and moustaches 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 device 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 3,000 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, to sound intelligent.

  "The energy released by the nuclear fission of one kilogram of plutonium is equal to 17,000 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 horrified and delighted at once. "Dr Pillsbury, here 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, ever hear of it. The Manhattan Project will be the American doughnut hole of history."

  "What are you testing now?" Harvey asked to change the subject.

  "Ah, 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.'" Jaworski turned back to Harvey. "It helps to have all the information. 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 Jaworski's team had been connecting cables the sky had been changing. June and July were the rainy season. This year, though, 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 towards the HangingGarden; the thunder was too far away to hear. The entire mesa was falling quiet because orders were, no testing of high explosives while there was lightning and the chance of a power surge. Unperturbed, Jaworski led his men down to 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 look
ed like a duckling beside a gray and ugly egg.

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

  "It's one big if," Jaworski told Joe. "It's like Oppy had invited the greatest minds in the world to come and design the greatest– if ever seen. But if it works… What was the estimate of the blast?"

  "Five hundred tons of TNT. You'd know better than me."

  "No one knows. Maybe ten times that. Or twenty times. Or forty times."

  Jaworski asked Joe to join the team in the shadow of the loading platform and have 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. The bottles said on one side, "Buy War Bonds!" Since the siege of Stalingrad, another side said, "Praise Russia!" Joe stayed alone on the apron, the only place at the HangingGarden 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 four-inch-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 doors. Joe took out his cigarette and lighter and walked towards the magazine to check the padlock on the latch. Joe had switched locks months before. This lock was his.