As he brought his cigarette to the flame, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Magazine bunker, mesa, sky fused into one white light. The flames slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. 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 peony red, the fireball rise and expand in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air in his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the pain of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.
"Harvey!" Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. He heard Jaworski and the others following, 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 out of 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 dived to the ground.
Cordite was another hazard of the HangingGarden. 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 blonde hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a moustache. 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 the last triumphant drop, then sat down and rolled back into the trench.
7
"The Japanese soldier is fanatical and 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 Peking, 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. Three lieutenants from MacArthur's general staff had come to exhort them, taking turns on the concrete pad that served for the market. Today was market day, and behind the soldiers the vendors patiently waited 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. Selling coconut, breadfruit, green bananas, red bananas, tins of ghee, bricks of tea and coffee, cosmetics, love potions and douches. The villagers were small, brown, broad-nosed: 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 Japanese –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 barrio teniente, the village leader. When he nodded, they nodded. A dog wandered up to the pad, sniffed and pissed. In its cage, a cock ruffled and settled into green, iridescent feathers.
"It is your Christian duty to defend the Philippines. You recruits will be trained by the finest instructors in the US Army. They will be equipped with the most modern weapons. They will be led by the greatest general. You will be the bastion of Christian democracy in the Pacific. When the Japanese hordes descend on the Philippines, we will stop them on the beaches, we will push them back into the sea, we will sink their adventure to the bottom of ManilaBay."
The barrio teniente held a pet iguana on a string. Around its neck the lizard had a chain of gold with a crucifix. It raised its crest and hissed with each tug of the string and the cross sparkled against scales.
"This American sergeant has come from a great desert over the ocean to help defend your islands. He has been especially assigned to turn your patriotic young men into a great new Philippine Army. Listen to him, obey him, follow him, and the Philippines will never fall. Thank you."
The lieutenants stepped back. The barrio teniente hesitated, then clapped. Everyone else clapped, so softly it sounded like rain. The lieutenants saluted. Joe saluted and, at once, the recruits did too. But a week later the Japs didn't sail into ManilaBay: they wiped out the air bases at Clark Field and Iba, landed at Vigan and Legaspi, at each end of LuzonIsland, and started marching towards Manila in the middle. Joe remembered one of his recruits who pissed on a bomb, a dud that had torn through the bell tower of a church. It was an act of frustration because the anti-aircraft ammunition was so old and corroded it detonated under 5,000 feet. Mitsubishi bombers flew at 6,000 feet and dropped bombs all day long. So the recruit stood on the edge of the hole this bomb had made in the sacristy and unleashed his personal torrent of scorn down on to the dud. He was big for a Filipino, in a loose shirt, shorts, American boots. Joe was having a smoke by the altar. Only it wasn't a dud, the bomb had a time-delayed fuse. High explosive expanded at about 10,000 feet per second (that's all explosions were, expanding gases), but Joe always believed there had to be some moment, however brief, of shock, understanding and disappointment in the boy's mind before he was dead. Before the bomb turned the church tower into the barrel of a gun and turned the boy into the projectile that was shot up through it. Some moment, some understanding. If brief, at least bright.
Across the mesa, an afternoon caravan of MPs moved slowly, avoiding each rock and possible snake. As the men and horses passed out of sight, Joe slipped out from under a piñon tree and down the chute of the HangingGarden to the loading apron. He flipped a whittled stick in one hand. The control bunker was empty. He had thirty minutes before he was supposed to be at one of Oppy's rare parties back on the Hill.
When Joe had replaced the padlock on the magazine bunker months before, he'd left a key inserted which the scientists used and meticulously guarded as if they were carrying out strict Army security. He opened the lock with his own copy of the key, squeezed through the door, shut it, turned on a flashlight and set it on a shelf. On both sides were shelves of meters, gauges, film magazines, copper and alloy tubes. In a cage at the back was the high explosive. Joe could make out Torpex, Baratol, Comp B, Pentolite, all TNT-based explosives. Also cordite, Primacord, smoke pots, gelignite, primers and Navy powder. The cage went from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling and its door had a combination lock. He could reach over the cage top and nearly touch the high explosive.
From his pocket Joe took a buckskin strap and tied it to one end of the stick. When he was a kid, he and his friends used to hide along the Rio in the winter and trap juncos. The fat gray birds liked to flock on banks where the snow had melted. The boys tied horsehair nooses to willow branches above the river's edge and caught two birds at a time, singed the feathers off in a fire and ate them hot. Delicately, Joe slid the buckskin noose o
ver a brick of gelignite. The explosive would go to Santo Domingo, a pueblo south of Santa Fe; there were some veterans among the Domingos, some real experts in explosives. The gelignite fell on its side. He shook the stick to draw the noose tight, gently lifted the brick clear of the shelf and brought it over the top of the cage to his free hand. It was cool as clay. The second brick slid loose as it came over the top and Joe caught it waist-high.
The New Mexico National Guard had arrived in Manila in September 1941. They were chosen, supposedly, because New Mexicans were brown and spoke Spanish and would mix well with Filipinos. Rudy Peña had volunteered for the Guard because of his brother Joe.
Joe hardly remembered Rudy. He was ten years younger, pudgy, quick to cry. His black hair stood up like rooster feathers. He was a wetter of the bed he shared with Joe. A longtime crawler, a late talker. During the worst winter, when the Army came through Santiago and threw from their trucks 50-lb sacks of dried milk that were frozen hard as cement bags, Joe dragged a sack in each hand while his little brother clung to his leg and bawled, his face a mask of frozen snot. The harder Joe tried to kick him off, the tighter he held on.
By sixteen, Joe had left the pueblo and all he saw of Rudy were the photos from Dolores: Rudy and rabbits, Rudy on a horse, Rudy in a tie; the soft and surly face developing into a stranger with dark, nearly Arab looks who was growing up in a world that, to Joe, consisted entirely of letters and pictures. After the years of fighting and music in New York, it was a shock to Joe to hear he'd meet his brother in the middle of the Pacific.
Joe was training the newly constituted Philippine Army, and when he got back to Manila the Guard had already rolled out to Clark Field. The history of the Guard was a huge and intricate joke. Coming from land-locked New Mexico, they were trained in coast artillery. On arrival they were given British First World War surplus cannons. Within a week of the invasion, they were fighting as infantry in the jungle. General MacArthur said the Philippines would never fall and President Roosevelt dispatched convoys of ammunition and supplies to Manila. But out at sea the convoys turned round and headed for Europe. And MacArthur slipped away one night in a torpedo boat.
Before Joe ever found him, Rudy vanished on Bataan. The New Mexico National Guard vanished on Bataan. Joe escaped. When he arrived Stateside and toured defense plants, the colonel in charge of publicity called him a walking advertisement for the Army, which seemed illogical to Joe, since he was one of a handful of men who got out of the Philippines while thousands didn't. Dolores seemed to agree with Joe. She wrote to tell him not to come to Santiago because as far as she was concerned her only real son, Rudy, was dead. So, instead of going home, Joe took the colonel's wife to bed and got shipped to Leavenworth.
One trick of the Japs was to tie themselves high up in the fronds of a coconut palm. A sniper would eat a handful of rice, then swallow water from a canteen to make the rice swell and the stomach feel full. A Jap could stay up in a tree for three days. But this Jap had been up for a week or more, tied so tight he couldn't come down. Swaying in the breeze and watching the world go by: planes, patrols, clouds. Joe wouldn't have seen him if he hadn't stepped on a rifle and looked up at the face staring down from the palm. The head was black as a coconut, holes for eyes, hole for a mouth, shirt and stomach burst open. A flying advertisement for Bataan.
Joe often wondered, when at night the Japs called "Hey Joe!", "Over here, Joe!", did Rudy Peña ever think there was some confusion, that they'd come for the wrong man?
Without even trying to be quiet, he closed the magazine bunker door, snapped the padlock shut and followed his flashlight across the apron towards the Hill. Joe figured he owed the Army nothing.
8
Oppy had taken over the house of the headmaster of the old RanchSchool. It was a stone and timber cottage behind a stand of spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The sun had just set over the Jemez, leaving the sky bright and the mesa dark. Joe had strapped on his Sam Browne belt and .45. His guard post was the garden.
Seen through the windows, the cocktail party had the quality of the pages of an illustrated book being idly turned. The Oppenheimers entertained infrequently and briefly, and when they did only the highest level of the Hill's scientific community was invited, so the guest list was basically European. Their faces were rosy with tension and drink. Joe saw Fermi and Foote arguing, the bemused Italian rocking impassively on his heels while the Englishmen gesticulated with a highball. Fermi's wife and Tellers wife, two small dark women, leaned close for a conference on the sofa. The ensemble of faces changed from moment to moment, but everyone inside seemed to glow.
"Sergeant you look lonely", Kitty Oppenheimer brought out a Scotch for Joe. With a smile she would have been a pretty woman. Her brown hair was a tangle. She managed to look blowsy and sharp at the same time.
"Thanks." Joe took the glass.
"Shoot to kill."
"I will."
"Shit." She tripped over a boy’s scooter and landed on her back in a flower bed. "My zinnias. Nothing's going right. Let me rest, for Gods sake." She waved away Joe's hand. They're singing "Marseillaise" again in there. Give me a smoke."
Joe set the drink in the grass, put a Lucky in her mouth, lit it. He said, "You’re pissed as a skunk."
"Goddamn right I am Sergeant, what I meant to say when I came out is you look lovely. You do. All dark and Byronic out here in the gloaming. She’s pretty, isn't she, Joe. And young. He was engaged to her sister once, did you know that?"
"Who?"
Kitty rambled on. "He was a real hero to Anna, I suppose. Men do that to little girls. Then when the girls grow into women, the men try to stay romantic figures. There are any number of psychological aspects. I have my breath back."
Kitty gave Joe her hand and he pulled her to her feet. The story was that she was part European nobility, related to Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr.
"Can you stand?
"I must return to my duties as hostess of the Royal Society of Prickless Physicists."
"Can you walk?"
"The funny thing is, at a certain point you don't worry about other women at all. If you’re smart you worry about girls."
"Take a deep breath. Today Germany, tomorrow the world." Joe picked a flower from her shoulder. "You can do it."
"I look like Ophelia." Kitty had a throaty, corroded laugh. "I always thought I'd be Lady Macbeth."
After Kitty returned to the house, Joe poured out the Scotch. The party would be over soon. He'd go to Santa Fe to deliver the gelignite waiting in his jeep and then he'd have his drink. Besides, some guests were wandering into the garden now to take advantage of the evening, the hour between the heat of the June day and the cold of the mountain night. The altitude of the Hill was 7,000 feet. Voices seemed to carry, or maybe voices were louder. In the last month, since the defeat of Germany and the death of Hitler, all the émigrés seemed wrapped in rubicund patriotism, as if their Americanism had been confirmed. They'd make Trinity work, no matter what. He saw Kitty inside with Oppy and the woman who had been in Oppy's car that morning. Joe didn't remember her name. Kitty sat on the hearth and the new arrival stood at the far end of the fireplace while between the two women Oppy leaned, almost contorted, at an angle across the mantelpiece. The toe of his Wellington touched Kitty's knee and his long fingers stroked the glass that the younger woman had set on the corner of the mantelpiece. He looked like a poet dictating. Kitty, a toughened muse. The redhead both cool and fascinated.
"One grenade here could change the history of physics, couldn't it, Sergeant?"
Captain Augustino had rolled up to the garden gate and stopped his jeep behind Joe's.
Joe saluted.
"Yes, sir."
"What in the world are they doing now?"
A radio was being handed out through a window. The sound of piano drifted across the garden to the cars. Joe hadn't realized until that second that the mesa crickets were chirping away. Beethoven. A sonata with insects luring the entire party ou
tside, except for Oppy and the two women.
"I think that's the Hill station, sir. I think that's Teller playing."
Los Alamos transmitted a signal that died before it reached the valley. Teller was sloppy on technique, but his playing had a lot of momentum.
"Sergeant, what would you say if I told you that Mrs Augustino was dead? That she was shot by an intruder back in Texas and that the intruder had escaped?"
The Beethoven was coming to a crescendo. No one in the garden could hear what was said by a captain and sergeant at the gate.
"I'd say you were lying, sir. Why would you kill her when you can make her pay for the rest of her life?"
"Sergeant, you show real promise. Come closer."
In the garden the music was followed by light static. There was a hush of anticipation as people stood around the radio. There was a glow of cigarettes in the shadows.
"Sir?"
"Wait," Augustino said.
"Once upon a time in a dark wood there lived three little pigs," a deep voice with a middle-European accent issued from the radio in the grass. Teller again, reading bedtime stories. "The first little pig was a poet. The second little pig was an artist. But the third little pig was a practical pig who enjoyed working with hammers and saws."
"Go on," Augustino urged Joe.
"I didn't drive Oppy today. I have nothing to report."
"With Dr Oppenheimer, there's always something to report. He went all the way to the railroad station to pick up a Dr Weiss. They came by Santiago. You met them. What did they say?"
"Nothing. Their car went off the road and I helped them out, and that was it."
"Sergeant, it wasn't the grace of God that got you out of the stockade, it was me. I can send you back to that hole any time I want. We have a deal."