Elizabeth turned and shouted toward the general, “What did you mean about him picking this place?”
“Fritz went out on a site-selection tour for the plutonium works. We gave him a handful of likely choices for the installation. He chose Hanford. He had worked with me on building the Pentagon, and he offered some advice on the gaseous-diffusion plant in Oak Ridge. I trust his judgment.”
Matthias brought the jeep to a stop so suddenly that the back wheels slewed to the left. “Almost passed it. Between these two poles up here.”
“What can you see of the explosion?” Groves asked.
“You’ll find out in a minute.” Matthias climbed over the side of the jeep and turned to offer his hand to Elizabeth.
“Not necessary,” she said, and scrambled after him. Groves, with his girth, needed the help more.
Matthias took off his sunglasses, swiped them across the front of his khaki shirt to brush away the dust, then planted them back on his face. Sweat caused the fine sand to stick to his forehead and cheeks. “Follow me.”
He trudged toward the nearest wooden power pole, avoiding mounds of scrub grass. Groves and Elizabeth came after. She could already see the blackened blasted mark on the ground, the gashes in the wood, and the shine of new electrical connections above. Small chunks of shrapnel lay scattered over the ground.
“We got the primary wiring rigged again in half a day,” Matthias said as he strode around the burned area. “This is the power line between Bonneville and the Grand Coulee dams. The Hanford Engineering Works installed special safeguards just so we wouldn’t lose power completely. I guess somebody must have thought a fifth of a second switching time was acceptable.”
“Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Groves said. “Find out who made that assumption and chew his ass. How long is everything going to be out of commission?”
“Three days, sir. Everything shut down, all safety systems kicked in just like they were supposed to. Sorry, sir.”
“Three days! For a fifth of a second blip?” Groves kicked a melted piece of metal from the sand. “Tell me what happened here.”
Matthias cleared his throat and straightened his sunglasses again. “The shrapnel is what’s left from a small thermite bomb. We also found some mechanism and tattered pieces of rice paper nearby in the desert.”
“A Fugo balloon?” Groves rolled his eyes. “Good God, what luck the Japs have!”
Elizabeth bent down to look at the scraps of slagged metal. “What’s a Fugo balloon? What are you talking about?”
“Fire balloons, a present from Japan,” Groves said.
“The Japs launched what must have been thousands of them,” Matthias explained. “Rice-paper balloons carrying fire bombs. They go up on the winds at about forty thousand feet, drift along the air currents, over to the United States. We’ve found a few intact over the past month or so—they seem to have a system of weights and altimeters that keeps them in the jet stream. When they’re over the U.S., the balloons explode their bombs, like this one did.”
“How come we never heard about this?” she asked. “Why weren’t people warned?”
“The first couple hit in remote parts of Montana and North Dakota,” Matthias said. “Nobody noticed except for a few local small-town newspapers—but the Jap press made a big deal of the stories, so we know their spies are reading even our dinkiest hometown rags. We stopped publishing any word about it.”
“The Japs don’t understand just how big this country is,” Groves said. “They can’t beat us by lobbing a few balloons at random across the entire western half of the United States. They just got lucky here, damned lucky.” He picked up a chunk of melted shrapnel, swaying as he bent his large body over. He inspected the lump, then hurled it out into the desert. “I’ve seen enough.”
He strode back to the jeep, moving with swift determination that looked awkward on him. “If that’s the best damned secret weapon they can come up with, we don’t have to worry about the Japanese. Come on, Fritz! I’ve only got another few days here before I catch a train to Oak Ridge.”
19
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
September 1944
“We have spent more than two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and we have won.”
“I feel immensely cheered and braced up. Oak Ridge is the largest, most extraordinary scientific experiment in history.”
Despite all the priority General Groves commanded, despite the Manhattan Project’s AAA war status to get every supply at the soonest possible moment, the streamliner train still took forever to get from one side of the country to the other.
Elizabeth had visited other parts of the U.S. before, but had mostly divided her time between California and New Mexico. She had flown in a plane wherever she vacationed—but as the passenger train moved across endless miles of desert, mountains, plains, she began to get a conception of the vastness of the United States. Seeing this, she thought how ludicrous the Japanese plot had been to drop untargeted balloon bombs on random sites, thinking to cause important damage.
Now that she had established her working relationship with General Groves, Elizabeth decided to slacken her hardline approach and be more cooperative. She had made her point, and Groves seemed uneasy enough around her that he watched his step more than he normally would.
So she helped arrange connections for the trains, working to avoid long delays and to determine the best route to get him to Tennessee. The two of them sat and talked sometimes; Groves ignored her often; he dictated letters; he smoked his cigar. She stared out the window at the 1944 landscape.
The two of them could have flown to Oak Ridge in a day, but Groves refused to risk himself or any of the Los Alamos scientists to the less-safe airplanes. “Listen, Miss Devane, every one of those scientists—and myself too— are vital national assets right now. We are needed for the war effort. You may not comprehend this yourself yet, but we will change the history of the world by what we do.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She knew that more than he did himself.
“I won’t even let the scientists drive themselves around,” the general continued. “One day when I rode with Dr. Lawrence up in the Berkeley hills, he was gesturing with both hands and wrapped up in his thoughts, talking to me and paying no attention to the road. The car was weaving back and forth—a few more feet and we would have gone over the hillside. For some of these eggheads, just letting them drive is dangerous. And I can’t let them do anything dangerous. I obtained a chauffeur for him that afternoon, and all the top scientists got one too.”
Groves puffed on his cigar. “For us, taking a plane is dangerous. We sit here on the train, and we take as long as it needs to take. Besides, we’re getting work done right here.”
Elizabeth thought of how she would rather be back in Los Alamos. But then she recalled her last fight with Graham Fox, and how much she had changed in the fifteen months she had been trapped here in the past. Her former life seemed unreal to her. She tried not to ponder it often.
Groves settled back in his train seat, sucked on his cigar, and dictated a letter. Elizabeth scribbled as fast as she could; she had never learned shorthand.
“I’ve done a lot of things,” the general said later in conversation as the sun set across the hilly farmland of Indiana, “but this is going to be my crowning achievement. I’ve seen duty in Hawaii, Europe, and Central America. I built the Pentagon, for God’s sake, but nothing compares to this… this dream. Two billion dollars’ worth, and we’ve only got a lot of construction and exhaustion and receipts to show for it. No Gadget yet.”