The era of the Thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb had been born. It was October 31st, Halloween night in Berkeley, (07:15 local time on All Souls Day, Nov 1st in the Pacific). Teller’s people picked up the vibration half way across the globe in Berkeley, and he made a cryptic call to an associate seconds after, saying only: “It’s a Boy.”
The witching hour was said to be the time when the borders between this world and other worlds were at their thinnest. Demons and spirits could pass through from one world to another, and that would be very close to the truth.
Chapter 2
Red Flight was up that day, November 1, 1952, and it was led by Lt. Colonel Virgil Meroney, taking three Republic F-84 G “Thunderjet” fighters high into the red dawn, towards the terrible wrath of the world’s first hydrogen bomb. The detonation itself had occurred about 90 minutes earlier, and now the massive seething mushroom cloud had ascended to heights well above his plane flight ceiling at 55,000 feet. He and his mates would enter the cloud at 40,000 feet, hoping they would not have any problem with the B-17s.
If any had been close enough to see those planes, they would have thought a ghostly flight of old WWII bombers was lost at sea, wandering aimlessly through time to appear there in 1952. Had they flown close enough, Meroney and his mates would have seen the cockpits were empty, with no sign of any pilot or crew. They were drones, all radio controlled from another piloted B-17 that was guiding them into the great mushroom cloud. Their wings mounted special boxes with filter paper intended to capture tiny radioactive particles from the blast, stuff the world would come to call “fallout.” They were harvesting the last remnants of the island Harada and Fukada were staring at from the weather deck of Takami.
“Red Flight, Red Flight, this is Convair Control, do you copy. Over.”
Meroney toggled his radio and returned. “Roger that, Convair One. This is Red Flight Leader on final approach. Over.”
“Roger Red Flight Leader. You are cleared for stem entry. Go with God. Over.”
Stem entry…
They were all going to fly right through the stem of the massive mushroom cloud. It towered up and up, over 57,000 feet, a mass of black char and pallid red orange clouds. Meroney had no idea what they would find within that column of doom.
“Red Flight leader to group,” he called. “Follow me…”
He looked over and saw his wingman, Captain Bob Hagan, and Captain Jimmy Robinson just off his wing on the right.
“Lord almighty,” came Hagan. “It’s a dark boiling slice of hell on earth.”
“Roger, Red Flight,” said Meroney, “Watch your temperature and infrared in there, not to mention that Rad counter. If either one gets too hot, break off and take evasive maneuvers.”
Robinson would be the first man to get into trouble. Deep within the mushroom stem, he became disoriented, and then his temperature gauge warned him he was headed right into an inferno. He pulled on the stick, banking away from the heat mass, his plane stalling as he turned too tight, and soon he was plummeting down through the terrible mass of the column.
“I’m spinning out!”
Meroney heard Robinson’s distress call, and his was breath heavy as he struggled to regain control of his plane. It was a long tense moment, the Flight Leader listening to his mate struggling to survive, a fallen angel, felled by the power of that bomb. Then, Robinson’s voice came back reporting he had regained control at 20,000 feet. Meroney looked over his shoulder, seeing that Hagan was still there off his wing.
“Hold on down there, Jimmy. We’re coming down to look for you. Over.” He gave Hagan the thumbs up, then banked to begin the descent. Even as he sent that last message, the radio call broke up with static, and he could see his navigational readouts were all messed up. They had been told to expect electromagnetic interference from the bomb, but it was most disorienting when it happened. There they were, lost in that massive red black cloud, unable to see the way out, or read their true compass heading, and unable to speak to one another over the static.
Down at 20,000 feet they were going to eat up a lot more fuel, but there was a tanker down there somewhere, orbiting the stem of that mushroom, if they could find it. Meroney had lost contact with Hagan as they descended, but he was the first to break out in to the clear, having flown right through that mushroom stem. There was suddenly a clear spot in the static, the speaker wash fading out briefly, so Meroney ordered the other two pilots to get out of that cloud mass and head for home. He had decided he would continue to circle, looking for Robinson or that fuel tanker, though he never saw either plane.
A long hour passed, with the Flight Leader nervously watching his fuel gauge. If he had his wingtip fuel pods on, he wouldn’t have had to worry so much, but they had mounted the cloud filter pods there instead, and all he was carrying was radioactive fallout. He imagined it glowing softly within those collection pods at the tip of each wing, not really grasping what radiation truly was.
It wasn’t the first time his plane had flown a mission like this. There had been a whole series of tests before Ivy Mike lit up the skies over Eniwetok. The planes would fly through those mushrooms, much smaller than this one. Big Mike was the scariest thing he had ever seen in his life. Yet Meroney’s plane should have been towed into a pit, doused with kerosene and set on fire long ago. They would try to decontaminate it after every mission, washing down the wings and fuselage with “gunk” as they called it, but you couldn’t get at the insides of the engine. The air intake in the nose would suck in all that fallout as well, and it would be forever lodged within the long fuselage of the plane.
He was flying a radioactive fighter, but Meroney was a very skilled pilot, first learning his chops as a fighter pilot on a P-47. He got nine kills with that plane in Europe, before a lucky flak burst took down his fighter, and he spent the rest of the war as a P.O.W. in Germany.
After the war he served as a Flight Instructor at Luke Field, happy to trade in his P-47 Thunderbolt for the new F-84 Thunderjet. In 1952, he mustered out to Kwajalein Atoll, and now he was out there looking at Ivy Mike. His fuel low, now it was time to head for the field at Eniwetok, but he would later learn that one of his mates, Jimmy Robinson, never made it safely back to Kwajalein. Captain Hagan barely made it himself, coming in dry and flying by the seat of his pants as he glided the plane to a rough landing.
But there was no sign of Robinson. One of the rescue helo pilots said he thought he saw a plane low over the water, its canopy off, as if the pilot was planning to eject. That would have been a hazardous adventure, shooting up out of that lead lined cockpit, wearing that lead vest and a pair of lead lined gloves to help protect him from all that radiation in the mushroom cloud. Hit the water with that vest on, and you would sink like a stone.
But Robinson was never seen again, nor was his plane. If they hit the water off Kwajalein, they did not do so in the year 1952, and no one ever knew where Jimmy ended up—not even Robinson himself…. As for those B-17 drones, they were never seen by anyone again either, at least not anyone there in 1952.
“Con—Radar, Contact! Right on top of us!” Lieutenant Ryoko Otani gave Harada a wide eyed look. “It came from out of nowhere!”
“The first thing that entered Harada’s mind was that it was a stealth fighter, but that was just reflex. There were no stealth aircraft flying the skies of 1943. Then he heard it, the drone of heavy engines, very low, a long distended hum. He ran out onto the weather deck and Fukada was spellbound with his field glasses.