Stallion Gate (5 page)

“We’re depending heavily on this site being right. The alternative test sites are some islands off California, sandbars off Texas, some dunes in Colorado. The last place I want to hide an atomic blast in is California,” Groves said.

“That depends on how big it is, of course,” Oppy said.

“Well, how big will it be?” Groves demanded.

“Five hundred tons of TNT is the current estimate of the yield,” Fuchs answered. He was along because he was part of the Theoretical Group estimating the blast.

“Couldn’t it be much larger?”

“Theoretically it could be five thousand tons, fifty thousand tons. Almost no limit.”

“Five hundred is a start.” Groves was mollified. “I’m going to tell the President we’re going to set it off on the Fourth of July.”

“Wonderful,” Oppy said.

Too bad we missed Christmas, Joe thought. Maybe
this was the time to tell the general that the head of security on the Hill was of the considered opinion that Joe Stalin’s special agent was Robert Oppenheimer and they ought to pull off the road and get the whole thing sorted out. Even if there was nobody capable of taking Oppy’s place, and even if test, bomb and ultimate victory had to be scuttled. But maybe this wasn’t the time. Perhaps this was the best time to be a dumb sergeant, the “Indian companion.”

As soon as they hit the highway at Esperanza, Joe stepped on the gas. The wartime speed limit was 35 mph, but the general always preferred to cruise at 85. Gas rationing had largely emptied the roads, and the Buick could roll on a blacktop of two lanes, sometimes one, with wide shoulders for slow-moving donkey trains, carts, wagons.

Santa Fe passed as an electric glow under an ashcolored sky. An Army hospital was pumping money into the town. Signs offered drinks, boots, curios.

As Oppy and Groves droned on about problems of the isolation of isotopes and allotropic states of plutonium, Joe wondered why he had gone to bed with Mrs. Augustino. Was it her he wanted? Some other woman? Any woman?

Like a conscience a state trooper’s motorcycle emerged, siren wailing, from behind a sign that said,
WAR BONDS ARE BULLETS
!

The general’s travels were secret; it was understood he didn’t want to talk to any local justice of the peace. Joe floored the accelerator. New Mexico troopers had
black uniforms and black cycles. At 100 mph, the dark silhouette became a dot in the rearview mirror. Swaying on passenger straps, Groves and Oppy went on talking about construction schedules. Fuchs spoke only when asked.

In the fields the breeze rattled rows of chili, unpicked because a farmer could walk into Boeing’s Albuquerque office, keep going straight to Seattle to build B-29s and draw more money in a month than he’d ever seen in a year.

“Explode. Implode. Two apparently contradictory events at the same moment,” Oppy was saying. “I wouldn’t suggest trying to explain it to the President. Still, it’s a sweet concept.”

Past Albuquerque and through the lower valley, crossing the Rio so often it seemed a dozen rivers, Oppy and Groves discussed problems ranging from plutonium assembly to sugar for the commissary. The car pressed against a headwind toward dull clouds that built and receded at the same time. At Antonio, a farm town of dimly lit windows, they left the highway for an eastbound single lane of frayed macadam, crossed the Rio one last time and entered a vast, tilted basin of scrub and low cactus. Here the clouds moved forward and snow began to fall, lightly to begin with, tracing the wind, more heavily as the sun was covered, packing on the wipers and coating the headlights.

“If Hitler has the bomb …” Groves was saying. “We get reports that this winter offensive of the Germans is just to stall while he finishes some secret weapon.
Suddenly he has jet-propelled planes, new rockets.”

“If Hitler has the device, he’ll use it on the Russians,” Oppy said.

“Is that a bad idea?” Groves asked.

Joe swung off the road and stopped the car, its nose pointed at barbed-wire fence and white flakes. The fence posts were split pine as gray as bones, spaced eight feet apart and leaning by habit away from the wind. There was no proper crossarm or hinges, just a section with two strands of barbed wire stretched to a stick hung by plain wire to the far post, so stick and section could simply be unhung and dragged out of the way. Inside the fence was meager grazing land, chamiza and sage flattened by the headlights. Yucca spines dipped and waved in the snow.

“Stallion Gate,” Joe announced.

“There’s no one here.” Groves looked up and down the road. “There’s supposed to be a half-track and two jeeps waiting for us.”

“Yes, sir. They would have come through the gate.”

“You’re sure this is it?”

“Yes, sir.” Joe pointed to the slightly whiter double track of an access road that ran under the bottom wire. “I’ll see if I can raise them.”

The field radio was a prewar crank model with a range in good weather of forty miles, and the answer, when it came, hovered on static. The party from the Alamogordo base had lost a track and lost time, but would still meet them at the fence.

As Groves slumped back in his seat the entire car
moved on its springs. “I’m supposed to be in Washington tomorrow and here we are twiddling our thumbs at a barbed-wire gate.”

“Joe, you’re the only one who’s ever been here before,” Oppy said. “What’s your advice?”

“The weather’s getting worse. I suggest we wait.”

“Sergeant, I have never accomplished anything by standing still.” Groves sat forward, decision made. “There’s no more than an inch on the ground. We’ll meet them en route.”

It took ten minutes for Joe to put chains on the rear tires, untie the gate, drive through and, for etiquette’s sake, tie it back up. Back in the car, slapping flakes from their coats, they started off on the faint trail that wandered across the field.

Joe drove in second gear, trying to keep his lights on the ruts without getting his wheels into them. Fuchs studied a grazing service map.

“How do you think they lost a track?” Oppy asked.

“Link pins,” Groves said. “Tanks, half-tracks, bulldozers—same thing. If they had trouble with a drive wheel, they’d be stopped dead.”

Joe shifted to low as the road vanished.

“We’re almost in Mexico. How much snow can there be?” Fuchs wiped condensation from the windshield. “They said they were coming to meet us, yes? We should be seeing them any minute.”

After a long silence Joe said, “We should have seen them half an hour ago.”

Snow rushed in sheets against the car as it pushed
over the rise and fall of the ground. When he found the road again, Joe was happy to lay his wheels in the ruts and try to stay in them. He put his head out the window to avoid Fuchs’ urgent wiping. There were signs of humped earth, craters frozen in the snow.

“It’s like sailing.” Oppy was delighted. “Same dark sky, same white, same swells.”

“I remember my first time at sea,” Fuchs said. “It was when the British shipped us to Canada as enemy aliens at the start of the war. U-boats attacked the convoy. They sank the ship just before us.”

“I didn’t know you were an enemy alien,” Groves said.

“I’m British now,” Fuchs assured him.

“German and British,” Groves added it up dryly.

Implode. Explode. Two events at the same time. On the troopship to Manila, Joe had watched the ocean. For lack of anything else to do, the officers so tight-ass because they were going to serve under MacArthur Himself that there was no card playing on board either, he had stood on deck and observed the sea. He watched for big events and small events, from surfacing whales to families of dolphins to haphazard flying fish. One day he noticed a new occurrence: contradiction. The wind was stiff and easterly, driving rows of whitecaps from stern to bow. But the ship was plunging, trudging like a farmer in boots, through heavy swells churned up by storms a thousand miles ahead in the west. The surface of the water, the ragged spume, was merely sliding, a deception, over the true internal intent of the
sea. The hidden intent. Joe remembered because it was the first moment he realized that he and everyone else on the ship might not be coming back from Manila.

“Sir, I think we’re there.” Joe killed the car engine and lights. An easier snow of fewer, fatter crystals fell.

Fuchs sat bolt upright and said like a vaudeville comic,
“Was ist das?”

Heading over a rise and toward the car were three men carrying rifles.

“Mescaleros,” Joe said. “Apaches.”

“Talk to them,” Oppy said.

Groves said as Joe got out, “Keep them away from the car so they don’t recognize us.”

Two of the men were father and son, each almost as big as Joe, both in snowshoes. They wore long hair, wool hats, greasy jackets, one sheepskin and the other corduroy. Clothes and hair were dusted with snow and their faces shone with sweat. The third man had a slightly squarer head, shorter hair, a plaid Pendleton jacket, rags wrapped around his hands and feet. Navajo, Joe thought. None of them looked as if he would recognize Groves and call Tokyo, but what the hell was a Navajo doing down here?

“See the horses?” the old man asked Joe.

“Horses?”

“Horses everywhere,” the old man said.

Joe passed out cigarettes. Apaches were Chinese to Joe. Navajos were thieves. Likewise, Apaches and Navajos thought all Pueblos were women. The Navajo moved close enough to take a smoke and stepped back.
Flakes drifted down. The storm was resting, not leaving. The Navajo’s rifle was held casually toward the car.

“They kicked off the white ranchers,” the father said. “They,” Joe knew, meant the Army. “Still horses, though. If we don’t take them, they just shoot them.”

“They come over in planes and machine-gun them,” the son said. “Sometimes they bomb them. Day and night.”

“Could be Texans,” Joe said.

The Apaches erupted. They slapped each other on the shoulder and then slapped Joe. Even the Navajo laughed nervously.

“Those bastards,” the son said. “Army planes, they’re crazy.”

“Army bought the ranchers out,” the father confided, “but they made it in one payment so the ranchers had to give it all back in taxes, and if the ranchers try to get back on the land, they bomb them.”

“Sheep up north.” The Navajo had a high voice and clipped his words in half. “Someone in Washington says an Indian can only have eighty-three sheep. Part of the war effort. What do sheep have to do with the war?”

“Nothing,” Joe said.

“Indian Service comes and kills the sheep. Shoot you if you get in the way.”

Now Joe remembered. Near Gallup, a gang of Navajos had taken a couple of Service riders hostage and then vanished. Across the state, newspapers were treating it like an uprising. The Indian Service and the FBI
were looking for the fugitives all the way north to Salt Lake City. Not south, with Mescaleros.

The young Apache looked speculatively at Joe. “You ever fight in Antonio?”

“Yeah.”

“You fought my brother in Antonio. They put up a ring at the motor lodge behind the cafe. Kid Chino?”

“He was drunk, he shouldn’t have got in the ring.”

“He was sure sober when you were done.” He stomped his snowshoe for emphasis. “That was the soberest I ever saw him.”

Joe recalled the brother, all piss and steam the first round, about throwing up in the second.

“Pretty good fighter, your brother.”

“A good boy.” The old man glared at the son with him.

Joe passed the pack around again. The Apaches examined the lighter, a Zippo.
Battery C, 200th Coast Artillery
was engraved on one side.

“Bataan.” The son handed it back.

The father looked up. “Good weather. Bombers can’t fly and it’s easy tracking in the snow.”

Joe didn’t see any signs. He was a fair tracker, but he was no Apache.

“Better you get the horses than no one.”

Finally the Navajo shivered and lowered his rifle. The four men smoked, contemplating the quiet between the low sky and snow-covered ground. Then the father and son killed their butts and nodded to Joe. The Navajo followed. The three, the Navajo on the outside, moved
off to the north, making a wide arc around the car. Wouldn’t that have been an interesting end to the atom bomb, though—Groves and Oppy gunned down in the snow in return for sheep?

Joe opened the general’s door. “I don’t think they recognized you, sir. I told them they were trespassing on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range and would have to leave.”

“Seemed a little touch and go,” Oppy said.

The Apaches and their friend were already moving out of sight, not so much getting smaller as disappearing between points of snow. The real horizon could be five hundred yards, a thousand, a mile. Oppy emerged from the car, lit his cigarette and Fuchs’, too, with a flourish of relief. Groves stepped onto the snow and tilted his head back to perform a professional sweep of the four directions.

Oppy spread the map over the hood. “This is where we are. Latitude 33-40-31, longitude 106-28-29.”

“So where is that?” Groves asked.

“East are the Oscura Mountains.” Joe pointed. “South, Mockingbird Gap; west, three volcanoes the locals call Trinity; north, Stallion Gate.” Each way was a wall of white.

Where Joe had pinned the map down with his finger, Fuchs made an X with a soft pencil and drew a perfect freehand circle around it.

“If this is Ground Zero, the point of detonation, we will desire a distance of ten kilometers, or six miles, to the first control shelters.”

Groves set a surveying transit in the snow. With the three legs planted firmly, the air bubble sat in the middle of the transit level. Flat ground. Confidence was on the general’s face; he sniffed the air with anticipation. The errant party from Alamogordo was forgotten.

“Just the way we chose Los Alamos,” he called to Oppy, “the top men on the spot.”

While Groves sighted through the transit telescope, Joe paced off fifty yards with a tape, flags, stakes. Oppy and Fuchs paced off another direction.

When Groves waved, Oppy set a red flag at Joe’s feet.

“Captain Augustino tells me there’s a spy on the Hill,” Joe said.