“Well, what are they saying, for Christ’s sake?”
“Oh, not sayin’, Yank. Just playin’. Ballads. Blues. Lot of John Lennon. Got myself one of your Moral Majority preachers. Blamin’ it all on abortions. Kill and ye shall be killed. Appreciated that, I did. Surprised you ain’t listenin’. Disciplined bunch, you guardians of democracy.”
Kazakhs loosened up. “We switched off on a commercial for Oxy-5.”
“Excedrin Headache number seventy-nine didn’t do much for me, either.”
“Okay, Klickitat, I guess I got a date on Easy Street.”
“One more thing, Yank. Think I’d haul ass if I was you. Elsie’s motor is runnin’ and she’s low on gas.”
“The refueling plane is running out of fuel?” Kazakhs asked incredulously. “You got any more partly sunny news?”
“Oh, she’s got some in the tank for you, Polar Bear One. Just not enough for the both of you. She was cruisin’ around on a practice run when all this happened. That’s why she’s the only girl in town.”
“God. So when’s the date?”
“Twenty minutes. Like I said, think I’d haul ass.”
“Haul ass? She’s forty minutes away.”
“I got her headin’ south soon as I picked you up on the screen. Intersecting courses, assumin’ you know how to navigate that beast. Date’s on. Twenty minutes.”
Kazakhs shivered. Refueling in midair with a troubled tanker. It was bad enough on a normal mission. But he was out of choices. Partly sunny it was.
“Thanks, pal,” the pilot said. “Run on over to Ruby’s and have a drink on me. Jack Daniel’s.”
“Naw. I can use the overtime. Somebody’s gotta watch the Pole for you guys. Don’t think you need any Red Stars comin’ over the top just yet. Thumbs up, Yank.”
Kazakhs felt the shiver run through him again. “Thumbs up, Canuck,” he said.
Eternal vigilance, Moreau thought bleakly.
SIX
• 0830 Zulu
In the New Mexico valley the Spanish called Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead, the heat storms roil out of the south, sucking up the dead mesquite and the fine sand particles in a choking desert wind that moves quickly through the wastelands and buffets finally into the deep-purple walls of the Oscuro Mountains. It started here, and even as a ten-year-old making an only partly understood pilgrimage with her father, Moreau knew that.
It was a forbidding place. The sandstorms could etch the skin off a foolish man. But by now, in the late sixties, the storms contented themselves with etching his relics instead, most of the foolish men having left long ago. In the loneliness, the winds carved at the stark, sun-petrified bunkers into which the desert rats darted for shelter at the first far-off whisper of the wind or visitors. The antelope bounded into the deepest purple clefts of the Oscuros. The buzzards, black scavengers of all desert foolishness, lifted themselves ponderously and reluctantly off the twisted scarecrow crosses, the Trinity crosses, from which the last men to work here draped their hearing wires a generation gone. The rattlers were the last to leave, catching the final rays of a sun that burned with the white-hot luminescence of dry ice. They slithered quickly into the snug safety beneath the rotting floorboards of man’s most conspicuous reifliche old adobe house known as the McDonald ranch. Standing in the middle of the desert’s hostile isolation, miles from any neighbor, the ranch house could be a testament to man’s unceasing efforts to challenge and control nature’s most unruly elements. But it isn’t. In the old adobe house he assembled the first nuclear explosive and then moved a few miles past the buzzards to unleash those elements.
The sands had stopped now and the freckled young Army lieutenant swung the jeep to a bumpy stop among the grease-wood scrub growing like weeds in the McDonalds’ abandoned yard. The child eagerly hopped out first, racing straight for an old windmill which tilted precariously from neglect, dry skeletons of tumbleweed clinging to its ankles. The general went next.
The general was a strange cluck, the lieutenant thought, taking a kid to a place like this. But General Moreau was one of the cold war’s living legends and the lieutenant imagined all such people were strange. He watched as the father tenderly took his daughter’s hand. But General Moreau walked as if he had the child in one hand, the world in the other. He cut an imposing, intimidating figure, befitting a legend—walking ramrod straight and unswervingly, his coal-black hair infiltrated by the first bristling strands of iron gray, his eyes frozen blue in their certainty. The lieutenant wondered briefly if he held the world’s hand as tenderly. The general made the lieutenant nervous. He accurately sensed the man wanted to be alone with his daughter, as if he had some private lesson to impart. But the young officer hurried after his two wards.
“What you want to see is in here, sir,” the lieutenant called out, cursing himself for what he thought was a squeak in his voice. He beckoned them back toward the sagging ranch house. “Watch your step. The porch is gone now.”
The general’s eyes paused on him in silent intimidation and then swept past. The girl, long-legged, skinny, and lithe, bounded around him and darted through a door swinging loosely on one hinge. He started to warn her, then thought better of it. It was a father’s place, dammit, to caution his kid against risks. The general said nothing and the two of them followed her into the empty living room.
She stood entranced. The windows were long gone, the panes ground by the desert winds into the dust from which they came, so that not even a glass shard remained. The ceiling rafters hung in cobweb shadows. The hardwood floors, once the pride of the McDonalds, were a swamp of dry-rot traps beneath which, the lieutenant knew, the rattlers still were curled up from the storm.
“You can almost feel the ghosts in here, can’t you, general?” the lieutenant volunteered. “Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, Bethe. Even those who are still alive seem like ghosts. Haunted by what they did. Getting senile, I guess.” The lieutenant hesitated, trying to think of something to please the general. “Too bad,” he added. “It was mankind’s greatest scientific achievement.”
The soldier moved gingerly across the floor, leading them into a second, smaller room.
“Critical mass room,” he explained. “Built the bomb—called it the gadget—up at Los Alamos, but this is where they got it ready for the test. Put the hemispheres together by hand. With a screwdriver. Imagine that. A few months later, when they were getting the Bikini bomb ready back up at Los Alamos, the screwdriver slipped. Guy reached in and pulled the spheres apart with his bare hands. Saved the barn, but he sure was a gone goose, even though it took nine days. Hair fell out, so they said, and his bones just turned to pulp. Helluva way to go”
The lieutenant could see the general’s back stiffen. Jesus, he was really blowing this.
The girl seemed oblivious to the tension between the two adults. She stared transfixed, as her father should have known a child would, at a far wall on which initials were carved crudely.
G. J. Loves J. J.
The general had been here before, not at the beginning but as a later visitor to the shrine. The initials left him vaguely uncomfortable. The ranch had been ignored for years, but it had remained deep inside the Army’s top-secret White Sands Missile Range since the end of the Second World War, surrounded by miles of untracked desert which, in turn, was surrounded by guards and fences and sensors. But G. J. and J. J., two unknown kids, had slipped through all that, come in here and carved their own memorial on one of man’s strangest monuments. You had to be a determinist, believe in man’s ability to control events, to do what General Moreau did. The initials seemed so random, so unlikely. General Moreau did not like random events.