Across from Marshall sat another trusted crew member, the flight engineer, Sergeant Martin “Butch” Emerson, whose extra job on this mission consisted of helping the army explosives expert, an odd fellow by the name of Staff Sergeant Lawrence Ainsworth, known to the 509th as “Four Eyes.”
Ainsworth was over forty, unmarried, and a vegetarian. He had very little hair, only tufts of red around his ears. He looked more like an absent-minded professor, or a bookworm, or a manager of a library in some out-of-the-way prairie town in South Dakota. His job, however, was one of the most important of all. He would perform the final arming of Fat Baby. Clayton glanced down at Four Eyes sitting against the bulkhead, who was still sweating from the work he had done on the bomb. Ainsworth didn’t acknowledge Clayton at first because he was busy cleaning his glasses and probably couldn’t see inside the compartment. When he put his thick glasses back on, he looked up into the eyes of the commander standing over him.
“You OK, sergeant? You look… flustered.”
The navigator and radio operator exchanged glances, then stared at Ainsworth.
“Yes, captain,” the sergeant replied quickly and clearly. “I’m fine. It was getting a little warm in the bomb bay.”
To steady his nerves, Ainsworth turned and studied the bomb’s control panel console just inches away from him. The console — thirty inches high by twenty inches wide — contained colored indicator lights, switches, and meters, and was attached to the bomb through the forward end of the bomb bay by a set of four cables, with twenty-four wires each. It was Ainsworth’s job to monitor the console for any malfunction during the flight.
Clayton noticed a patch of powdery clouds drifting by through the Plexiglas nose as he made his way to the bombardier’s station. Captain Paul Lunsford, a cool-as-ice twenty-year-old Californian who took his job seriously, was waiting. Seated, Lunsford had his hand resting on the Norden bomb sight’s specially-constructed padded headrest, a device invented solely for the precise bombing accuracy of the atomic missions.
Glancing at the left side of the bombardier’s control panel, located on the side wall to Lunsford’s left, Clayton saw that the altimeter, remote reading compass, clock, and airspeed indicator all appeared to be functioning. On the right side were the bomb switches and warning lights.
“Don’t worry,” Lunsford announced with a grin. “I’ll drop the bastard right on target.”
Clayton smiled and turned in the direction of the cockpit. He tapped the pilot, the dark-skinned Carl Loran, on the shoulder. Loran gave the wheel back to the commander as he sat down. Loran was a young pilot — mid-twenties — from Minneapolis, cool and efficient. Got the job done. Clayton’s type.
Clayton was a dedicated Superfortress pilot, one of the reasons Colonel Phil Cameron had hand-picked him for the third atomic mission. Like Cameron, he had flown B-17s in the European campaign, where the two had met, following a posting to the same squadron in Great Britain. Clayton’s quick, perfectionist mind was a contrast to his slow-talking, Georgian drawl. On the ground, he was a good-natured individual, respected by his crew and others. But prior to every flight of the Mary Jane, Clayton became a different person. He’d take a trip to the bomber and hound the ground crew, making sure they checked everything. While they were busy working, Clayton would walk around the fuselage, pretending to see if any rivets were out of place and such, while out of the corner of his eye he would be watching the crew’s every move. Then he’d ask the crew chief, Bob Shilling, things like whether the brakes were checked, and sometimes would even do some unnecessary manual labor himself on the B-29, much to Shilling’s chagrin. To Shilling, Clayton was a pain in the ass.
Clayton didn’t really enjoy flying. After three years in the Army Air Forces, he treated it more or less as a job, a way to serve his country. He had wanted no part of the navy, the ground army, or the marines. Dropping a destructive plutonium bomb on Kyoto — the cultural capital of Japan — was part of that job. He was only obeying orders. He rationalized the mission the same way he had rationalized his way through his entire European tour of missions.
As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t dropping bombs on people.
He was dropping bombs on a point on a map.
Chapter ten
GUAM
Inside his son’s den, Robert Shilling flicked at the TV channel selector, while he and Phil Cameron leaned back in their comfortable chairs. Cameron was reading Pacific Crossroads, the local navy newspaper that was delivered free to every government home on the island. Les was on Midway. The women and kids were out shopping this cloudy Monday morning. Cameron and Robert had the house to themselves.
The two vets were both amazed to find that thirty-five cable TV channels serviced Guam. The Disney Channel, Country Music Television, The Movie Channel, and several Los Angeles stations flashed across the screen. Guam was no out-of-the-way post! Robert stopped at CNN, where a man was reading a weather report.
Cameron looked overtop his newspaper. “What’s this, a storm?” he asked, curiously.
Robert turned the sound up.
The Typhoon Center on Guam, the TV man said, had been tracking a disturbance near the Gilbert Islands, two thousand miles from Guam. Although the system was moving slowly, a storm warning — an upgrade from a small-craft and gale warning where the winds were much lighter — had been issued for the Gilbert area.
“Two thousand miles away shouldn’t be that big of a deal, should it, Phil?”
Cameron set his newspaper down on the stool. “It’s close enough.”
“Really?”
“Typhoons can actually be much more dangerous than Atlantic hurricanes. Storms spawned in this area of the Pacific have no large land masses to break them up and can reach quite an intensity by the time they hit the more populated Marianas.”
“You think we may be in trouble?”
“It’s possible. Typhoons can travel at three to four hundred miles a day. Which means it could—”
“Be here in less than a week,” Robert finished the sentence.
“Right. Providing it starts moving faster and builds strength over the open Pacific. So far, it hasn’t. Yet. But, if it does, we are in the line of fire,” Cameron concluded. “The Gilberts are southeast of here. The rotation of the earth causes spiraling storms to move northwest. Right smack where we are.”
Robert looked gravely over at the former pilot, then fell back to his channel flicking. Cameron returned to his newspaper. Robert left the screen on the USA Network and rested his head on the back of the chair. Tired, he flicked the sound down and closed his eyes. Suddenly, for no reason, he thought of Tinian. He was half-dreaming, half-thinking. Many years ago. August, 1945. He was in the second row of a large tent, seated on a bench with his Mary Jane ground crew. In the front row were the aircrew. An expressionless army air force colonel in his forties walked into the room and stopped beside an easel covered by a black tarp. Those in the tent rose to their feet, then sat when he motioned them to do so.
It was coming back to Robert now. The briefing. The only air force briefing he was ever involved in. But this was no regular briefing. Then… the colonel began to speak.