“It’s a nuclear weapon,” Doc said. “Once the Russians showed they had their bomb, President Truman, who I’ll get back to, demanded we build bigger bombs. Of course, he meant larger yield, but back in the late forties, larger yield literally meant a larger bomb. They used liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel—”
“Thus the requirement for it to be kept refrigerated.” Ivar couldn’t help resorting to playing a physics card.
“Of course,” Doc said. “This one was called Ivy Mike. Pretty much impractical as a weapon, as you can obviously see. But it had a big yield. Ten-point-four megatons.” He moved on to what was stored next to it. A large, cylindrical bomb, twenty-four feet long and six feet in diameter, rested in a metal cradle.
“They worked on making the bomb smaller,” Doc said, “and this was the first deployable, large-yield one they came up with. A Mark-17 thermonuclear bomb. It remains to this date the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built by the United States. Estimated yield around twenty-five to thirty megatons.”
“And we’re keeping one here in the Archives for…?” Ivar asked. “Isn’t that as stupid as the labs that keep the smallpox virus around?”
“And we keep this around for the same reason,” Doc said. “To study and understand. We keep a lot of deadly things in the Archives. Which answers your earlier question of why we need an Archive. Which brings me back to Operation Paperclip. While we led the way in developing, and using, nuclear weapons, the Germans and the Japanese led the way in other scientific fields associated with killing, particularly chemical and biological weapons.”
Doc tapped his chest as he led Ivar farther into the Archives. “We’ve faced down not only Rifts, but also nuclear weapons and some pretty serious biological and chemical mishaps over the years, including one or two cases of the smallpox virus you mentioned being played with in ways that weren’t smart or secure. You worked in a lab and look what happened there because your professor had visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head. He threw all caution to the wind and opened a Rift.
“You need to know the history of all of this. And you can come in here and study a lot of the things we, and our predecessors, have run into over the decades. I know Nada gave you a binder, but that has just an overview. The details, and they are important, are in here. In the original documents.”
Doc stopped in front of a missile pointing toward the roof. “A V-2 rocket. Mint condition. The Germans were the leaders in rocket development and if they’d had another year or so, the East Coast might have seen an advanced version of the V-2 rocket raining down from the skies. If the Nazi scientists had another two or three years, some of those rockets could have had nuclear warheads on them. Think about that. I like to think that every soldier who died storming those beaches in Normandy gave his life so we could stop that from happening.
“Of course, that’s the noble side of warfare. There’s another side.” Doc plinked one of the metal fins. “So at the end of World War Two, OSS operatives, along with intelligence officers from the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a mouthful like many military organizations are, were sent into Japan and Germany. Sometimes they were actually snatching scientists away from army war crimes units. Sometimes they got in firefights with similar units from the Russian Army. The Brits also were in on it, although their efforts came nothing close to us and the Soviets.”
Doc glanced at Ivar. “The Russians have had their own version of the Nightstalkers for a while and we’ve done some joint missions together, but things were tense for a long time during the Cold War. There were times we suspected the other side of doing things that looked a hell of a lot like developing new weapons of mass destruction.” Doc shrugged. “And to be honest, I think it was true on both sides. We cleaned up our own messes and theirs sometimes. And they probably cleaned up some of ours in different places.”
“World War Two?” Ivar said, trying to keep Doc on track.
“The worst of the Nazi and Japanese scientists everyone was looking for were the ones who worked on biological and chemical weapons. While the United States was still stockpiling World War One mustard gas as its primary chemical weapon should the need arise, the Germans had perfected tabun, soman, and sarin and proven their effectiveness with ruthless use in the camps. The Japanese had also developed some nasty bugs at Unit 731 in Manchuria and used them on prisoners of all nationalities, sometimes vivisecting the subjects to study the stages of the diseases.”
“You’re shitting me,” Ivar said. “Vivisection of humans?”
Doc snorted. “I’ll give the Russians this: They at least tried a bunch of the people from 731 they captured. Sentenced most to labor camps in Siberia, which was, in effect, a death sentence. We gave the Japanese scientists we got a free pass in order to get the knowledge they had. The Japanese even have a memorial to Unit 731 in Tokyo.”
Doc moved on, deeper into the Archives.
“At the end of World War Two, President Truman signed an executive order banning the immigration of Nazis into the United States. He also signed the executive order forming Majestic-12. Sometimes orders can conflict.”
“No shit,” Ivar said.
Doc ignored him. “NASA got the rocket engineers. But the nuke, bio, chem guys came here to Area 51. Both the Nazis and the Japanese. Also, not even known by most of the Paperclip operatives, we were grabbing the leading physicists from Germany and Japan. It was a plan with a double edge — not only gain the expertise of these people, but also deny their own devastated countries their abilities. It’s taken over a generation for those countries to begin to redevelop their brain trust. And, of course, we wanted to keep them from the Russians.”
“And those physicists opened the first Rift,” Ivar said. “Here.”
“Correct,” Doc said. “That is why we are here and why you must know the history. The men who opened the first Rift were not good men. They were evil men.”
“And the ones who built Little Boy and Fat Man?” Ivar observed.
Doc stiffened in anger and then gave a sad smile. “The victor writes history.”
“What happened to the ones who opened the first Rift?” Ivar asked.
Doc stared at Ivar. “You’re the only person who has opened a Rift and didn’t die or disappear through it.”
“So did they die?”
“No. They disappeared. And a lot of soldiers and scientists died and disappeared trying to close the Rift. Those were the first Nightstalkers.”
“You’re giving me the eye like you want to vivisect me,” Ivar said.
Doc ignored him and moved on, then halted in an aisle bounded on both sides by modern filing cabinets. “Ms. Jones, in fact most of the Black Ops world, doesn’t trust computers. They don’t even trust paper records, as evidenced by the destruction of your own file. But they do accept that we need to keep some sort of historical record of what we do. And our research.” He waved a hand. “This is Section Twenty-Two-Charlie. The section on Rifts and Fireflies.”
Ivar was overwhelmed and excited at the same time. There were at least sixty drawer cabinets.
“Where should I start?” Ivar asked
“At the beginning,” Doc said, pointing to the left.
“You were dead for under a minute,” Nurse Washington said. The resuscitation cart was behind her, wires for the defibrillator dangling. “Only took one jolt to bring you back.”
Only took one jolt to kill me, Neeley thought. She was still on the floor, her chest throbbing with pain. She tried to lift a hand. “My phone.”
“Gone. Along with the man who came here to visit Mr. Schmidt, who I assume wasn’t his son. Mr. Schmidt is no longer among the living and was past bringing back. And I assume you’re not just an FBI agent. There’s a lot of people outside. Lots of police. Lots of people with black sunglasses. And”—Washington looked down at Neeley as if to judge how much more bad news she could handle—“an army helicopter crashed just down the road. Four dead. I figure that has some connection to you and the man who was here.”