Stallion Gate (31 page)

Groves came over from the sedan while Augustino sauntered over from the jeep. “Follow him,” the general 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 him a plausible reason to be with Dr. Oppenheimer.”

“Whatever, get up there,” Groves ordered.

Rain pulled at Joe and the cold steps swayed. At one
hundred 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 last seen it, 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. 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. He bent his head, fumbled, and lifted a match to 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 at least a week.”

“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.” He 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, the right piece of water and the right wind. As we’re doing right now, Joe. Struggling.”

A low, unbroken belly of clouds stretched from one
end of the valley to the other. They 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?” he 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.” He lit a cigarette off 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 anymore. 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 had gone to Corregidor and we were too far from the depot at Mariveles or Manila. I knew the Japs would shoot me because I couldn’t walk. So the scouts took me down the water because 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. 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 in to shore because I could see ammo dumps going up in Mariveles, fuel dumps going up in Manila, and Long Toms, the 155mm’s, answering from Corregidor, the whole thing reflected in the water like the end of the world, and I wanted to get back in the fight.

“Have you ever had dysentery? You pass out and you shit blood. Finally I couldn’t sit up any longer, no matter what was happening. I lay 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 them in the water when they first came in, 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 I only had a paddle, if I only had a gun, if I only had wings. If I only 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.”

He 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 it 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 heroically escaped from Bataan, by finding out that fighting the tide may not be a test of courage so much as a sign of stupidity. That’s the last time I went sailing.”

He 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 wind 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 he turned around he was laughing. Either tears or rain was 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
toward 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, and Paul Robeson intoned “The Volga Boatmen” while someone read off a checklist of gammameters. It was about two hundred miles from Antonio to El Paso, four hours of travel for Anna and passengers. But any rain meant washouts, so the time could be doubled. Didn’t matter. It would be a week before another test and he’d have Augustino 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 postponed the shot only from 2:00
A.M
. to 4:00
A.M
.? Well, the weather wasn’t going to improve, he 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.

While the rainstorm went on, 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, but winds had built. He knew Groves was keeping Oppy out because everyone inside wanted the test scrubbed. They made an interesting couple, Joe thought, out in the rain by themselves, circling, almost male and female in 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 five thousand pounds of high explosive in the shed, but the lightning blew nothing except the target light on the first landing of the tower. He 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. Captain Augustino called on the field radio by the ‘privy’ and told me to go to your jeep and make sure there were a couple of yellow sticks in there. Then 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 evidence of the lightning wands in the jeep, as well as a spy, with Harry Gold’s card in his pocket. “Don’t shoot, I’ll be right back.”

He 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 he 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 blacktop. In the shed the radio said the shot had been postponed again to 0530. Joe hid the wands behind loose ropes and slipped the stub into his pocket.

“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.

“Did Captain Augustino return with you?” Joe asked.

“He’s down with Groves, yes. See, at five-thirty 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, five-thirty is the last possible moment you can run your goddamn 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 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, an appreciater 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 it 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.”

“Augustino says it’s a dud and you’re Stalin’s master spy. He’s taking you straight from Trinity to jail. Call the shot off and I’ll take care of Augustino for you.”