Five hundred feet above the bottom of Ancho Canyon, Elizabeth Devane lay behind a screen of scrub oak and pinon, wondering if she could really stop the newest weapons test. Living among the other protesters in Santa Fe hadn’t helped her confidence in actually accomplishing something. She was fed up with pointless arguing, passing out leaflets, getting the brush-off from people.
Elizabeth didn’t like to call it “sabotage,” but this time the end would justify the means.
“What do you think?” Jeff’s voice came from behind her, carrying a nervous bite. “I see a rent-a-cop and a few guys packing up.”
Elizabeth didn’t turn. “Can you tell if they’re getting ready to leave?” She barely heard a sound as Jeff Maple crawled up beside her on his elbows. Thunder from an early New Mexican storm, still miles away, rolled into the canyon.
“Looks like they’re done with that NCP thing.”
“MCG,” corrected Elizabeth. “Get your acronyms right.” She squinted, wishing that she had packed her own pair of binoculars.’ ‘I can’t tell if they’re done with it or not.”
The Los Alamos workers moved away from the MagnetoCumulative Generator and stood at the edge of the concrete pad. A cement apron stretched fifty feet on a side with the MCG in the center. The ten-foot-long explosive generator looked like a fat cigar with thick cables wrapped around its circumference; the wires ran across the pad to a conduit that plunged into the ground.
All details of the MCG test were classified, so Elizabeth didn’t really know what she and Jeff would be destroying—only that it was important.
Several of the men walked away from the pad to a bunker in the shadow of the canyon wall. Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and tried to make out the figures in the dimness, but the sun was just over the top of the Jemez mountains, shining between clouds into her eyes. She shook her head in disgust and took out her canteen. “I can’t see what they’re doing.”
“Whatever it is, they’re done for today. Do you think they’re going to shoot the test tomorrow?” Again Jeff’s voice sounded nervous.
“If they’re on schedule. That means we’ve got to do our work tonight.”
Jeff nodded. For now, they would have to wait. Nobody could see them this high up the canyon. She wished Jeff had known how to ride a horse; then they would not have needed to backpack all the way around the rear of the canyon, coming down from the narrows, to where the Los Alamos security strung only barbed-wire and chain-link fence to keep intruders away.
Elizabeth looked down at her freckled arms, trying to see if she had been sunburned during the day’s hike. Her skin was pale, and with her reddish hair she burned easily, but she had used liberal amounts of unscented sunblock. She tied her shoulder-length hair back with a leather thong to keep it away from her neck.
The men below moved out of the bunker shadows, unrolling a tarp over the scrub-covered ground. They raised two metal poles in the center and secured the tent over the MCG, protecting it against rain. Finally finished, the workers stepped over a small stream that ran through the canyon, then made for gray government pickup trucks parked in the dirt. Snippets of conversation drifted up from the canyon floor, echoing off the rocky walls. Everyone left; not even the rent-a-cop remained behind. The lab workers wouldn’t expect that anyone could get past the five-hundred-foot cliffs. Elizabeth waited until the last man left the pad, then rolled over to her side.
Jeff continued to watch the experimental site as Elizabeth studied his face. His red-framed glasses contrasted with tanned and dusty skin. A sheen of sweat lingered in his curly brown hair. She remembered how his little body had moved against her the night before, for the first time in many years. “Glad you came down from Berkeley, Jeff,” she said.
Jeff hesitated, then said softly, “Yeah, it’s nice to see you again. I still think about us a lot.”
“I knew I could count on you to help. Everyone else is just talk.”
“That’s what you always said about me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Not having second thoughts, are you?”
He snorted, then reached out to grasp her shoulder. “No way.” But his hand shook as he squeezed.
He looked up suddenly and extended his arm. “Look, I found an easier way to get down. Once it’s dark we can get going.”
“Yeah, if we can beat the rain.”
She turned back to the canyon. Wisps of white steam-probably liquid nitrogen venting—came from the cables that ran up to the MCG under the tarp. Shadows extended over the entire mesa as the sun set; it looked like a race between the darkness and the clouds. The cliffs appeared steeper in the dusk.
As the last truck pulled out from the test site, guards chained and padlocked the gate behind them. Elizabeth waited for the truck to disappear from sight down the winding canyon road—it was a three-mile drive down to the main security gate at the highway.
“Still time to back out,” Jeff said hopefully.
Elizabeth’s eyes widened and she snapped at him. “I’m not backing out! If you and I don’t go tonight, all this testing is never going to stop. We have to make our point now, show them that we won’t stand for bigger and better weapons—the world doesn’t need the stuff anymore.”
Jeff smiled in the impish way that could always mollify her. “Just making sure you haven’t gotten too tainted by your trendy Santa Fe activists.” He didn’t sound convincing.
“Wimps,” she said with a scowl.
He surprised her by putting his hand behind her head and pulling her face to his. It was a spontaneous kiss, but not at all tentative. His skin was warm, and she ran her hand along his arm. They brushed tongues, lingered a moment, then broke off at the same time. “If we go now, we’re in it for good.”
“Then let’s get going,” Elizabeth said. “There’s nobody else around.”
The news of the accidental deaths at Los Alamos had shocked her—not so much from learning that the accident had been connected with the National Verification Initiative, but from the callous way in which the debacle had been covered up. A technician and some old scientist had died in the equipment foul-up; three other workers had suffocated when a fire-suppressant system dumped Halon into the sealed bay.
Five human beings had given their lives so a “test” of weapons technology could proceed. And what was the point anymore? The Berlin Wall had come down, the Iron Curtain rusted away. Iraq had been defeated in only a couple of months. Nuclear stockpiles were being dismantled around the world, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union behaved like friends. So why spend billions more dollars to develop super weapons? Were they afraid Brazil might send up a defensive shield to keep the U.S. from launching its own rockets?
She and her Berkeley activist friends, or even the Santa Fe members of the United Conscience Group, had different ideas about what the money might better be spent on— whether social programs, or AIDS research, or assisting the development of Third World countries. Even paying off the national debt would be a better use of the money!
After a beer or two Jeff would argue that the real fear now lay in the second-generation players in the nuclear game, Iraq, South Africa, Libya, North Korea. Simple nuclear weapons technology was well-known and available, and if not for the extraordinary difficulties in extracting fissionable material such as uranium-235 or plutonium, any tin-pot dictator could make his own Bomb. By this point in his conversation, Jeff’s voice was usually rising. Any resourceful terrorist could put together a “crude” Scotch-tape-and-bubble-gum bomb that had a yield larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima back in 1945.
Elizabeth agreed it was only a lucky fluke that the United States and the Soviet Union had survived their nuclear adolescence; she wasn’t confident that every other country would be so well-behaved. She wished the things had never been invented in the first place. But how could you close Pandora’s Box after the lid had been blown sky-high?