The tone stopped.
Tamir watched the blip on the radar scope turn sharply to the right and reverse course. He glanced at one of the screens linked to a TV camera with a telephoto lends that was tracking the descending parachute. Again, he looked at the clock. Then he stood up and stared at the screen that was slaved to the TV camera aboard the old freighter. He could clearly see the parachute.
The screens flared into incandescent brightness as filters automatically snapped into place, protecting the lenses and circuitry. The picture from the freighter went blank — the camera was destroyed. Another TV camera aboard the command ship recorded the explosion as the fireball grew to over a half mile across. At two seconds into the explosion, the top of the fireball began to rise. At three seconds, a neck appeared under the fireball and narrowed into a twisted, left-handed screw — the stem. On top, the fireball mushroomed into a canopy cloud of bright, spectral blue as the air superheated from the fireball condensed in the cooler layers of the upper atmosphere. It was not the gigantic, thick-stemmed mushroom of a thermonuclear bomb but of a less powerful atomic bomb. Still, the pillar of steam would rise more than twelve miles above the earth.
“The shock wave,” Van Dagens said, pointing to another screen. The men could see a shimmering wall of air rushing at them. But they were far enough away that the wave was little more than a sharp gust of wind when it passed over the ship.
“My God,” Tamir whispered. The Israeli scientist felt what no camera can record — fear, terror, and shock. The old freighter had disappeared and Avi Tamir was awestruck by the forces he had unleashed. “I had no idea…”
The equipment hummed as the web of telemetrically linked ships and sensor buoys that had been positioned in the ever expanding circles around ground zero transmitted data to the commanding ship. For Tamir, the numbers the readouts reported had reality and meaning. “The fireball touched the surface,” he said. “We were wrong about the size.” Again, he glanced at the fresh numbers pouring in. How grossly had he miscalculated? How much else had he underestimated?
“More fallout then,” Van Dagens grunted, all business. “We must take that into account. What force do you calculate for the weapon?”
Tamir looked at the instruments around him. “We’ll have to retrieve the data and …” He was still shaken by what he had just seen.
Van Dagens walked up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay. The important thing is that we now have a fully operational bomb.” It was September 2, 1979.
Shoshana sighed and gazed into the mirror, willing the image in front of her to change. Nothing happened and the round chubby face with the same pair of big brown eyes stared back at her. She shook her head. The twelve-year-old face in the mirror shook and its long black hair flopped back and forth. It was her. In disgust, she fumbled through the wreckage of her aunt’s dressing table and found a pair of scissors. Without pausing, she grabbed her hair and started hacking, throwing the long ringlets that had reached to her waist into a pile on the floor.
“Shoshe,” her grandmother called, pronouncing her name “Show-she.” “Hurry. Your uncle has gone to get the car.” Shoshana could hear her grandmother complaining to her aunt while she finished the job. “That child, always daydreaming in front of a mirror.”
“It’s allowed,” her aunt replied, not really arguing. Shoshana liked her aunt and wished she could live with her instead of her grandmother. Everything about her aunt was stylish — her clothes, her figure, this modern apartment in Jerusalem — everything. Unfortunately, her aunt and uncle’s apartment was too small for another person and, Shoshana decided to be honest with herself, she did like her grandmother’s spacious and airy flat on the hillside in Haifa. She dropped the scissors and walked into the living room.
Both of the women gasped when they saw the girl. Her grandmother kept whispering, “Shoshe, Shoshe,” as tears ran down her cheeks.
Her aunt took charge. “Mother, it will be all right. She is twelve years old and it is time her hair was cut. Go tell Doron we’ll be fifteen minutes late. Wait with him.” With that, she hustled Shoshana back into the bedroom and set her down. “Well, Miss Shoshana Tamir, it’s time to see the new you.” She deftly cut the girl’s hair even shorter, turning it into a stylish bob.
“Aunt Lillian, will I ever be thin and pretty like you?” Shoshana asked. Tears were rolling down her cheeks now as she watched her aunt work, sorry she had been so rash.
“Shush, girl. You’ve got a lot of growing to do yet. You’ll never be thin, but you’ll be pretty. Oh, you will be pretty.” Fifteen minutes later, Shoshana and her aunt piled into the car, all giggles about the girl’s “new look.”
Doron, Shoshana’s uncle, smiled, reassuring her, and pulled out into traffic. Within minutes, they were past the university where he taught history. The mood in the car turned somber as they neared their destination, Yad Vashem, the museum dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. Doron held Shoshana’s hand as they walked from the parking lot and entered the Avenue of the Righteous, the treelined walk leading to the museum. “Those are carob trees,” he explained. “Each one has a plaque with the name of a gentile that helped our people during the Holocaust. Many of them were killed by the Nazis.”
Shoshana gave her uncle’s hand a squeeze. “I know. We studied this in school and I remember from the last time I was here.” She was trying to act grown up and responsible now. They joined the line of people filing into the museum, into the first hall where photographs chronicled the twelve horrible years from Hitler’s rise to power to the final cataclysmic days of 1945.
“One of the ironies of history,” Doron explained to the girl, “is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President of the United States when Hitler ruled Germany. One history will remember as a great man and the other as an evil genius. It’s as though they were fated to oppose each other. Both came to power in 1933 and both died in 1945.”
But it was the art museum that drew Shoshana and she sought out the sketch of the hollowed-eyed children that had been smuggled out of Theresienstadt, the Czech ghetto the Nazis had created as a showplace concentration camp. For a few minutes, she stood transfixed before she let her uncle lead her away. “Why did they have to die?” she asked him.
“Because many people, good people, did not believe such a thing could happen. No one stopped Hitler when they could. Then it was too late.” It was the best answer he could give a twelve-year-old. The reality was so complicated that even he was unsure of the full truth.
They joined another line in the courtyard and entered the Hall of Remembrance, the heavy, brooding crypt of basalt and concrete that was a memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust. And then they were finished, back in the parking lot.
“Well,” her uncle said. “We have plenty of time to get you two to the station to catch the train to Haifa.”
Shoshana didn’t answer and only crawled into the backseat where she fell into a deep silence. The three adults marked it up to be one of the moods of a girl entering adolescence. They were surprised when she asked, “That’s what my father does, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?” her grandmother replied.
“He makes sure that it won’t happen again.” There was pride in her voice.
“We don’t know exactly what he does,” Doron said. “But yes, he makes sure that won’t happen again. That’s why he’s gone so much.”
“I know I won’t ever be pretty,” Shoshana announced. “But-”
“Oh, Shoshe,” her grandmother interrupted.