“Yes, I had been at this site before the war but the current excavation was in a new sector.”
“I see.” Churchill reached for his cigar case. “Do you want one?” he asked. “No? Hope you don’t mind.” He struck a match and puffed vigorously until the room hazed up. “You know where we are seated, do you not, Professor?”
Atwood nodded blankly.
“Few people outside the inner sanctum have visited this room. I myself had not thought I would ever see it again, but I have been called in, out of semiretirement, as it were, to deal with your little crisis.”
Atwood protested. “I understand the implications of my discovery, Prime Minister, but I hardly think that the liberty of myself and my team should be at issue here. If it is a crisis, it is a manufactured one.”
“Yes, I take your point, but others might differ,” Churchill said with a coldness that disquieted the professor. “There are larger matters at stake here. There are consequences to be reckoned with. We can’t have you going off and publishing your findings in some damned journal, you know!”
The smoke made Atwood wheeze and he coughed a few times to clear the phlegm. “I’ve thought about this night and day since we were taken into custody. Please bear in mind that I was the one who contacted the authorities. I didn’t go off and ring Fleet Street, you know. I’m prepared to enter into a secrecy agreement and I’m certain I can persuade my colleagues to do the same. That should put any concerns to rest.”
“That, sir, is a very helpful suggestion which I shall consider. You know, in the course of the war, I made many difficult decisions in this room. Life and death decisions…” He drifted off, remembering one in particular, the horrific choice to allow the Luftwaffe to firebomb Coventry without ordering an evacuation. Doing so would have tipped off the Nazis to the knowledge that the British had broken their codes. Hundreds of civilians died. “You have children, Professor?”
“Two girls and a boy. The eldest is fifteen.”
“Well, no doubt they will want to see their father back at the earliest possible moment.”
Atwood teared up and became emotional. “You were an inspiration to all of us, Prime Minister, a hero to all of us, and today a personal hero to me. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your intervention.” The man was sobbing. Churchill gritted his teeth at the spectacle of a man letting loose like this.
“Think nothing of it. All’s well that ends well.”
Afterward, Churchill sat alone, his cigar half done. He could almost hear the echoes of war, the urgent voices, the static of wireless transmissions, the distant crunch of buzz bombs. The plumes and swirls of blue cigar smoke were like ghostly apparitions floating in the underground miasma. Major General Stuart, a man Churchill had casually known during the war, came in and stood erect, parade ready. “At ease, Major General. You’ve been told this mess is in my lap now?”
“I have been so instructed, Prime Minister.”
Churchill put the cigar out in his old ashtray. “You’re holding Atwood and his party down in Aldershot, correct?”
“That is correct. The professor believes he is being released.”
“Released? No. Take him back to his people. I’ll be in touch. This is a delicate matter. One can’t be hasty.”
The general peered at the portly man, clicked his heels together and saluted smartly.
Churchill gathered his coat and hat and without looking back slowly walked out of the War Rooms for the last time.
JULY 10, 1947. WASHINGTON, D.C.
Harry Truman looked small behind his enormous Oval Office desk. He was neat as a pin, his blue and white striped tie carefully knotted, his smoke-gray summer-weight suit fully buttoned, black wing-tips polished to a high gloss, every strand of thinning hair perfectly combed down.
Midway through his first term, the war was behind him. Not since Lincoln had a new President undergone such a trial by fire. The vagaries of history had catapulted him into an inconceivable position. No one, himself included, would have bet a plugged nickel that this plain, rather undistinguished man, would have ever risen to the White House. Not when he was selling silk shirts at Truman & Jacobson in downtown Kansas City twenty-five years earlier; not when he was a Jackson County judge, a pawn of boss Pendergast’s Democratic machine; not when he was a U.S. Senator from Missouri, still a patronage puppet; not even when FDR picked him to be his running mate, a shocking compromise forged in the hot sticky back rooms of the 1944 Chicago convention.
But eighty-two days into his vice presidency Truman was summoned urgently to the White House to be informed that Roosevelt was dead. Overnight he was obligated to pick up the reins from a man to whom he had hardly spoken during the first three months of the term. He had been persona non grata in FDR’s inner circle. He had been kept out of the loop of war planning. He had never heard of the Manhattan Project. “Boys, pray for me now,” he told a gaggle of waiting reporters, and he’d meant it. Within four months the ex-haberdasher would authorize the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By 1947 he had settled into the hard business of governing a new superpower in a chaotic world, but his methodical, decisive style was serving him well and he had hit his stride. The issues had come fast and furious-rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan, founding the United Nations, fighting communism with his National Security Act, jump-starting the domestic social agenda with his Fair Deal. I can do this job, he assured himself. Damn it, I’m up to this. Then something from way out of left field landed on his agenda. It was lying before him on his uncluttered desk next to his famous plaque, THE BUCK STOPS HERE.
The manila folder was marked in red letters: PROJECT VECTIS-ACCESS: ULTRA.
Truman recalled the phone call he had received from London five months earlier, one of those vivid events that would remain permanently and exquisitely etched in memory. He remembered what he was wearing that day, the apple he was eating, what he was thinking the moments before and after the call from Winston Churchill.
“I’m pleased to hear your voice,” he had said. “What a surprise!”
“Hello, Mr. President. I hope you are well.”
“Never been better. What can I do for you?”
Despite the static on the transatlantic line, Truman could hear the constriction in Churchill’s voice. “Mr. President, you can do a great deal. We have an extraordinary situation.”
“I’ll certainly help if I can. Is this an official call?”
“It is. I’ve been pulled in. There’s a small island off our south coast, the Isle of Wight.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“A team of archaeologists has found something there that is frankly too hot for us to handle. The discovery is vitally important but we are concerned we simply don’t have the capacity to deal with it in our postwar condition. We can’t take the risk of fumbling it. At best it would be a national distraction, at worst a national catastrophe.”
Truman could imagine Churchill sitting there, leaning into the telephone, his large frame indistinct in a haze of cigar smoke. “Why don’t you tell me what it is your fellows found?”
The unflappable little President listened, his pen poised to jot some notes. After a short while he let the pen fall away unused and began nervously drumming the desk with his free fingers. Suddenly his tie felt too tight and the job felt too big. He had reckoned that the atomic bomb was his trial of fire. Now it seemed like a warm-up to something larger.
Besides the President of the United States, only six other men in the government had Ultra Clearance, a security designation so guarded that its very name was Top Secret. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had known of the Manhattan Project in its heyday, but only a half dozen were privy to Project Vectis. The only member of Truman’s cabinet to have Ultra Clearance was James Forrestal. Truman liked Forrestal well enough personally, but he trusted him absolutely. This was a fellow, like him, who had been a businessman before committing to public service. He had been FDR’s Secretary of the Navy, and Truman kept him on in that role.