A Thousand Suns

by Alex Scarrow

  It’s not going to make a great news story without any pictures or evidence is it? By now, what you discovered beneath the sea will be long gone. So why not let it go? It’s no longer a news story . . . it’s just a story now. Hell, it might even make a good book one day. I’ll be watching you. W.

  The wily old bastard had played Chris like a fiddle - cosying up and playing new best friend, while all the time, behind his back, his bloody hired thugs were hoovering up the evidence. Now he was starting to wonder how much of what Wallace had told him was the truth anyway, and how much of it was just a yarn he had spun to keep Chris out of his motel room long enough for his men to sweep it thoroughly.

  He could dive again on the wreck, but something told him that all he would find this time would be the plane . . . he was sure even the bodies would be gone.

  He kicked at the sand with frustration. It would have been a great story. Better than Nixon and Watergate, better than Bush and Bin Laden, the Hitler Diaries. It would have set him up for life.

  Nazi Germany Came Within an Ace of Nuking New York - the sort of tagline that would give a tabloid editor a permanent hard-on. He could have licensed the picture of the bomb itself for hundreds of thousands to the right publication.

  But it was pointless beating himself up like this. There were no pictures now, thanks to that old bastard. It was game over.

  How about counting your blessings, Chris, me old mate?

  ‘Yeah? And what blessings would those be, exactly?’ he muttered.

  People have been known to go missing for knowing a whole lot less.

  Perhaps there was some truth in that. If that shit Wallace really had been a government spook he could surely have made him and Mark just vanish. Those men who had jumped him in his motel room had come within a few moments of wasting him. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. If that old man Wallace - if that was his name - had really been their boss, shit . . . he and Mark were pretty lucky to have woken up this morning.

  And they had been in his room last night. God knows, while he’d been sleeping like a baby, they must have been standing over him, guns raised, aimed at his face, and he could imagine Wallace silently doing an eeny-meenyminy-mo .

  Chris heard the Cherokee’s horn. Mark was getting impatient. He wanted to get the hell out of here. Chris couldn’t blame him.

  It was time to head back to New York. Elaine Swisson was going to go ballistic when he turned up empty-handed. He knew damn well if he switched his mobile back on, there would be a dozen frantic messages from her, that deadline almost upon them. He wondered what exactly he was going to tell the woman. Perhaps he could come up with something between now and hitting New York.

  Well, Elaine, I’ll tell you what happened. A legal eagle from the US Air Force paid me a visit and asked me not to exploit what they consider to be a war grave . . . and they suggested they might take legal action if the pictures appeared in the public domain. So I guess we’re screwed.

  Chris nodded. That would probably do it. News Fortnite readers generally seemed to be of the blue-rinse variety or elderly, medal-wearing vets. If the mention of legal action didn’t cool her enthusiasm, the possibility of alienating her readers would. He wasn’t looking forward to lying to her. He respected Elaine, but the lie would keep things uncomplicated.

  Chris decided he would hand some of the advance back to the magazine, and keep a couple of thousand to cover the costs he had incurred in the last week, including paying Mark. That seemed to be the best he could do in the circumstances. And once he’d dealt with Elaine, he was going to have to drop Mark back home in Queens and then return the car to Hertz.

  After that, he fancied maybe he would grab a plane at JFK and go back home to London. The old man, Wallace, was right about one thing, though - it might make for a good book. He could always have a go, write up the tale Wallace had told him, as a work of fiction, of course.

  Chris turned the dog tags over in his hand and studied the name stamped into the brass surface. He had found them on his bedside table, a parting gift from Wallace.

  ‘M. Kleinmann, I guess whatever it is you did, or didn’t do, is . . . well, I suppose it just never happened.’

  He turned away from the sea, as rolling surf once more reached out for his feet. He began to make his way back across wet pebbles and drying sand towards grass-topped dunes and the roadside beyond, where Mark was gunning the engine impatiently.

  Without a story behind it, it was nothing but a disc of brass with a name stamped in it. He ran his finger across the indented name one last time before tossing it away as he took a step up out of the dunes and headed across hard gravel towards the jeep.

  The little brass disc rolled down the side of the dune, gathering a miniature avalanche of loose sand in its wake. With a gentle tap, it came to rest against the base of a weathered, old, wooden cross that poked out of the sand and was embraced by the coarse grass. The cross had been crudely fashioned from two pieces of driftwood nailed together a long time ago, but had stood the test of time. Engraved on the coarse wood by a boy with a penknife was a simple sentence. The letters now were worn by the elements, scoured by wind-borne sand, but still legible, just:

  Here was found the body of an unknown airman.

  Died April, 1945.

  Author’s Note

  There’s an old tale I was told, a long long time ago. It concerned one Enrico Fermi, if I recall correctly, an Italian-born physicist who had emigrated to America during the war and produced the first artificial nuclear fission chain reaction. The story goes that, as he readied himself to initiate the experiment, he turned to his assistant and nervously confessed he wasn’t sure whether the chain reaction would go on indefinitely or quickly come to a halt.

  And then, of course, he went and hit the button anyway.

  I’ve never been able to confirm that story, and perhaps it’s urban myth, but it’s a story that stuck in my mind for many years afterwards . . . that a scientist might theoretically gamble the world on the back of an experiment.

  In 1945 when J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team prepared Trinity, the first American atom bomb, to let rip with a test blast in the deserts of New Mexico on 16 July, it was known that he was intensely wary of what would happen at the moment of detonation. And as the mushroom cloud of flame and churning destruction rose up into the sky, he was seen to exhale a long-held breath and mutter those few words, ‘I am Vishnu, become death, Destroyer of worlds, Shatterer of worlds, The Mighty One . . . A thousand suns Bursting in the sky.’

  At the time they were dabbling with this new technology, nothing was certain, and until the day of Trinity, over two months after Germany’s surrender, there was a chance, in their minds, a remote chance, that they were meddling with something they might not be able to control.

  With regard to Schenkelmann’s fast-cycle emitter, as any physics student will know, the idea is mere fancy. Fission only continues as long as there is fissionable material to burn up. Perhaps back in 1945 a theory like that might have sounded convincing; after all, there was some disagreement amongst the leading minds in this field as to how much U-235 would need to be in one place to initiate a chain reaction.

  A good example of this uncertainty amongst brilliant minds is Werner Heisenberg, the man in charge of the German attempt to build an atom bomb. He initially miscalculated the amount of pure, refined uranium needed as being in the hundreds of tons, as opposed to ounces! When Heisenberg made that miscalculation and reported his findings to the German Army Weapons Department, the Nazis effectively back-pedalled their efforts to produce an atom bomb, thinking that it was impractical if not impossible to refine enough uranium to produce even a solitary bomb. The German nuclear effort was further hampered by Adolf Hitler’s lack of enthusiasm for what he called the ‘Jewish science’.

  It was worryingly close, though. If Heisenberg had done the maths correctly, the Germans might well have beaten the Americans to the bomb.

  After the war Heisenberg mainta
ined that he understood the principles of the atomic bomb, but that he had deliberately misled the German programme into concentrating on reactors instead of building a weapon. Shortly after the war, Heisenberg and nine of his colleagues were being held and debriefed at Farm Hall, a British country house, when news of the bombing of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb was relayed to them. Hidden microphones recorded their reactions, and Heisenberg condemned his reputation when he exclaimed that the Hiroshima announcement was simply not possible.

  On a completely separate note, Chris Roland was based entirely on a bloke I used to work with - the mannerisms, his description, the way he talked. I liked the guy, his self-effacing charm, his gangly frame and unflattering ginger hair, buzz-cut like a marine’s. The last I heard, he’s doing really well in the computer games industry. But he’ll never know I used him as a character, and hopefully no one will ever spot my character is him.

  Acknowledgements

  Perhaps this kind of thing is best done in some sort of chronological order. I owe thanks to Frances, backdated, for seventeen years of love and support - most of those misguided years spent making music and computer games. I really should’ve started writing earlier. I owe her for all of that first-class proofreading and the copious red ink in the margins, and for helping me make some pretty critical plot choices.

  Thanks also due to my author-brother Simon, and my dad, Tony. You see, both of them read a screenplay of mine a few years back, entitled Silent Tide. I never finished the damned thing. I think I got about three-quarters of the way through and couldn’t decide whether the Germans should . . . tsk tsk, nearly . . . anyway, both agreed it would make a fine book and I should pull my finger out and get on and write it. Well, here it is, guys, several revisions later. Thanks for nudging me towards writing the novel. And Dad, thanks for the help on the research side, and boy, was there was a lot of it, painstaking fact-checking. You pointed me in the right direction more than once.

  Merric Davidson, I thank you. You spotted the potential in that first draft and nursed it through some early surgery, and, of course, found an excellent home for it with Orion.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to my editor Jon Wood and assistant editor Genevieve Pegg over at Orion for truly taking the story to another level and holding down our patient while I indulged in a little more keyhole surgery. Thanks also due to them for showing such unstinting enthusiasm for the book and for Jon’s infectious evangelising.

  And of course Eugenie Furniss at William Morris; a good agency, a great agent.

  Finally . . . a little thank you to that piece of cheese I had the night before that dream . . . the one that led to the screenplay that ultimately led to the book. Cheers, bud.