by R. R. Irvine
Marcia held the disk between her fingers, turning it under the magnifying lens. “This one in particular is a collector’s item. It belonged to an admiral, one Hitoshi Manabe. I’d take good care of it, if I were you.” She handed it back. “It ought to be wrapped in cotton and sealed in plastic.”
“I’ll put it in a safe deposit box as soon as I can. In the meantime”—Nick fitted the dog tag into place again, out of sight under her sweatshirt—”is anything known about this Admiral Manabe?”
Marcia plucked a reference book from a shelf directly behind her, checked it briefly, then retrieved another volume, this one in Japanese, which she studied for several minutes. Finally she said, “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.”
Marcia went back to her books, pulling another volume from her collection. “Here’s a reference. He was a member of the Japanese General Staff during the war. He died in 1945. It doesn’t say how.”
Marcia ran a hand through her blond hair, somehow without mussing it. Nick sighed. Her own hair, glimpsed in the bathroom mirror before leaving the apartment, had looked as though a cow had been licking it.
“I found the dog tag inaB-17, one of ours,” Nick said.
Marcia raised an eyebrow.
“In New Mexico. The tag was hidden inside a diary whose last entry was dated January, 1945, eight months before the war ended in the Pacific.”
“It’s probably a war souvenir.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“That B-17 got me hauled before the committee.”
Marcia arched an eyebrow. “And you think the dog tag has something to do with it, too?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“The military isn’t my specialty. Have you ever heard of Akihiro Yoshida?”
Nick shook her head.
“His book on the Japanese war machine is considered a landmark work. I’d like him to take a look at your dog tag.”
“Lead me to him,” Nick said.
“It’s not that easy. He’s retired from the faculty and a bit of a recluse. I don’t know if he’s even in town for the summer. Would you trust me enough to leave the tag with me? I’ll show it to him as soon as I can.”
Nick hesitated. If she involved Marcia, sooner or later word was bound to get back to the disciplinary committee. But Marcia had tenure now, so she’d be safe enough. Besides, Nick suddenly realized that she didn’t want her job back anyway, not on the committee’s terms anyway.
Nick handed her the dog tag. “You might as well know the rest of it. The B-17 I’m talking about didn’t crash in New Mexico. It was shot down, probably by our own air force.”
“Yoshida will love that.” Marcia slipped the tag over her head. “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve spoken with him, or I’ll leave a message on your machine. Now show me where you found it on the map.”
Marcia reorganized her desktop to accommodate a large atlas. As soon as she turned to the page featuring New Mexico, Nick fingered the spot.
“That’s pretty damned close to Los Alamos. Considering the importance of that place in 1945, it’s always possible the Japanese could have captured one of our planes and were using it on a suicide mission. In that case, it would have been hushed up.”
“Fifty years have passed. Besides, a B-17 couldn’t fly non-stop all the way from Japan, or from any of the islands they held in 1945.”
“Maybe they took off from an aircraft carrier.” Marcia rubbed her hands together as if warming to the subject. “Like Jimmy Doolittle’s planes.”
“A B-17“s too big.”
“In wartime, strange things happen. People innovate. Think about it. If the Japanese had bombed Los Alamos, history might have been changed.”
Memory brought back Ross McKinnon’s hurried diary entry. Our own planes are shooting us down.
“There are times when history should be changed,” Nick said.
Dismissing the comment with a wave of her hand, Marcia scooted around her desk and opened the door. “Let me call Bill Varney over at the Lawrence Lab and see what he has to say. He was one of the wunderkinder at Los Alamos back in 1945, He’s also my ex-father-in-law.”
Ellsworth Kemp eyed Dwinelle Hall with anxiety, hoping the morning rooftop fog wouldn’t settle any lower. The concrete building was huge, a monstrosity, not at all like the ivy-covered colleges you saw on TV. It had to cover a square city block at least, maybe more. And God alone knew how many exits it had.
To make matters worse, once every hour students swarmed in and out to the accompaniment of bells from the clock tower, another monstrosity as far as he was concerned. So chances were he’d seen the last of the Scott woman. For all he knew, she’d escaped him in that last crush of students. And if she’d come out another entrance, it was good-bye until he picked her up again at her apartment. Or until her car moved, activating the tracking device.
He munched on a Milky Way and shifted positions, moving from one concrete bench to another. Five minutes more, and he’d give it up.
He triggered the timer on his wristwatch. When he looked up an instant later, he grinned. Damn, he was good. And everybody else so damned stupid. People were like sheep, creatures of habit. They go in one door and come out the same way. More like lemmings than sheep, he amended. Two lemmings, because Scott had picked up a friend, a blonde. Perfect. Blondes stood out, allowing him to fall well back as the pair began walking.
Kemp smiled. He’d have to be blind to lose a blonde like that.
Their route took them past that damned clock tower, called the Campanile according to his map, then east across the campus all the way to Gayley Road. There, on a wide street, he fell back another fifty yards.
When Gayley ran into Hearst Avenue, the two women turned north. After a block or so, Hearst branched right and became Cyclotron Road.
He snorted. Goddamn eggheads and their word games. Where else would Cyclotron Road lead but to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Kemp whistled as he walked, pretending to shoot the red squirrels from the trees along the way.
CHAPTER 29
It was Nick’s first time at the Lawrence Lab. Because of the nuclear research done there, she’d been expecting armed patrols backed up by snarling guard dogs. What she had to settle for was a visitor’s badge and Marcia as an escort because Professor Varney’s secretary was on her break.
“Exactly what does Varney do?” Nick whispered as they approached the man’s office.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Marcia answered. “And I’m sure as hell not going to ask.”
“Weapons?”
Marcia put a finger to her lips and knocked on the man’s door.
Expecting a demented Dr. Strangelove, Nick could only blink in surprise at the man who ushered them into his office. He was short, round, and jovial, and reminded her of a cross between Burl Ives and Santa Claus. His office was large by university standards, with two windows, and enough clutter to house generations of insect life. Most of the piles of paperwork had brightly colored Post-it notes attached with Day-Glo instructions: Do Not Dust Or Remove. Two chairs, recently cleared of debris if the stacks on the floor next to them were anything to go by, faced his jumbled desk. The only wall not covered with bookshelves was a collage of framed photographs.
A perverse part of Nick’s brain couldn’t help thinking that buried somewhere in all that mess was a forgotten formula to blow up the world.
“I could make us tea.” Varney reached into one pile of litter and came up with a box of assorted herb teas. “There are cookies around somewhere.” The only cups in sight were filled with pencils, marker pens, and paper clips.
“Thank you, no,” Nick said. “I’ve already had too much coffee as it is.”
Marcia took her eyes off the cups long enough to decline his offer.
“Well, then,” he said, nodding at Marcia, “on the phone, you said you had a mystery concerning my days at Los Alamos.”
�
��Nick’s the one with the mystery.”
Varney smiled and the resemblance to Santa Claus became stronger. Had Nick been twenty years younger, she’d have climbed on his lap and given him her wish list. Instead, she recounted her discovery of the Scorpion, its condition, its eventual removal from the site, and the deaths surrounding it. All the while she spoke quietly, with only her fingers trembling at the exertion of holding her emotions in check. She concluded by pointing out that her discovery in the desert had gotten her suspended from the university.
When she finished speaking, Varney didn’t answer immediately, but leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his neck, and closed his eyes. After a while his head began nodding as if agreeing with some unspoken questions. When it changed direction, becoming negative, he said, “I don’t think there could have been an attempted attack on Los Alamos, by your B-17 or anything else, without rumors getting out. Besides, we were the best-kept secret of the war.”
His eyes opened to a squint. “I doubt if the Japanese had so much as a clue about us. As for your identity disk, my guess would be that it’s nothing but a war souvenir.”
“I thought the same thing,” Marcia said.
“There were eleven bodies on the plane,” Nick said. “A B-17 carries a crew of ten.”
Varney unlaced his hands and leaned forward. “There’s another possibility, though I hope it’s not true. That plane could have been part of some radiation experiment.”
“It was full of bullet holes,” Nick said.
“An atomic detonation stirs up a lot of debris. Rocks, even pebbles, are as good as shrapnel when hurled against a target with enough force.”
“And the P-38s?’’
Varney shrugged. “There are such things as coincidences.”
“You don’t cover up coincidences.” Nick was losing patience, both with Varney and herself. What had she expected from a physicist? She would have been better off consulting an aeronautical engineer.
“I can see that you believe what you’re saying,” Varney said. “Maybe I do, too, because I’ve spent half my life dealing with the military. They’d stamp everything top secret if they could get away with it. That way they wouldn’t have to answer to anyone. Which is damn near true when it comes to Los Alamos. If your airplane was connected to that place, you might as well forget about it. They’ll stonewall you to doomsday.”
He was probably right, Nick knew that, but she couldn’t let go. “Did you ever hear rumors about something unusual, any kind of sabotage?”
Varney“s laugh was pure Santa Claus. “Our biggest dangers were backbiting and infighting. One faction, I remember, me among them, was worried about burning off the earth’s atmosphere the moment we tested that first bomb. Another group, big guns we called them because they were so damned loud and explosive, had only one fear, that the war might end before they got the chance to test their new toy.”
He smiled grimly. “I can still see it as if it were yesterday, Army CIC agents swarming everywhere like flies on cow pies. Christ, they were all over Oppenheimer, thinking he might be a Communist spy, and all the time Klaus Fuchs was spoon-feeding the Russians everything there was to know. What a joke, but that’s the army for you.”
“Those must have been exciting times,” Marcia ventured.
“Most of the time, I felt like an imposter. Here I was, a kid really, in the same room with the likes of Teller, Enrico Fermi, and Leland Hatch. Those men are legends. Me . . .” He shrugged. “After the war, I settled for the peace and quiet of teaching. Sometimes, though, I wonder what it would have been like if I’d taken some of the offers I had when the shooting stopped.”
He snorted. “I’d be rich, that’s for sure. Leland Hatch himself offered me a job. He wasn’t head of CMI then, but was running some kind of start-up company in Chicago before he joined the Los Alamos project.”
“Why didn’t you take him up on the offer?”
“When the Germans surrendered he was brokenhearted. He thought the Japanese would collapse immediately and that his beloved bomb would never get a proper testing—on human targets.”
Varney shook his head. “Come to think of it, if the Japanese had been flying that B-17 of yours, Leland Hatch should have been their target. He and his group of followers. Like I said, he asked me to join his gang once. They called themselves the wasps or some damned thing, because they had what Hatch called radioactive stingers.”
Hair prickled on the back of Nick’s neck. Someone like that might have seen nothing wrong with using soldiers as guinea pigs. Maybe the crew of her B-17 had been exposed to radioactivity, perhaps during the Trinity test even, and then shot down to hide the evidence.
Varney swiveled his chair, spilling papers from his desktop, so he could point at the photos on the wall. “That’s my memory wall. Hatch and his wasps are in one of those pictures.”
“I’d like to see it,” Nick said.
With a grunt, he eased himself out of the chair and walked along the wall, peering at the dozens of photographs. Finally he nodded, took one from its hook, and wiped the frame on his trouser leg before handing it to Nick.
Pictured were three men, one an army officer in uniform, his rank not distinguishable in the photo. All looked young, no more than their late twenties or early thirties.
“Hatch is the one in the middle. He always insisted on that.”
“How old was he?” Nick asked.
Varney shrugged. “They say he got his Ph.D. at twenty. Back then, he looked like a teenager, but he had to be twenty-four or five at least.”
“And the others?” she said.
“The one in uniform was a general, Tom Gault, I think. Hatch loved having military men around him. I always thought he would have worn a uniform if he could have gotten away with it, Wehrmacht gray or American khaki, it wouldn’t have mattered as long as the rank was high enough.”
Varney thumped himself on the forehead. “Now I remember. They called themselves scorpions, not wasps.”
Nick dropped the photograph, breaking the glass. “The plane I found in the desert,” she said, “it had a scorpion painted on its nose.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Did they ever use B-17s at Los Alamos, maybe to drop dummy bombs or something like that?”
Varney shook his head. “That kind of thing was done up in Wendover, Utah. At least as far as I know. I was a junior man back then, you’ve got to understand. Look at the pictures.” He waved at the wall. “You don’t see me standing with Oppenheimer or General Groves, do you? Not like Hatch. Sure, he was younger than me, but he had the drive.” Varney hunched his shoulders. “Obsession would be closer to the mark. And he was a member of the inner circle. That’s where the real power lay. If a B-17, your B-17, went down anywhere near their precious security zone, those men would have known about it.”
He went from photograph to photograph, tapping a fingernail against a face here and there. “Not many of us are still around now. Those that are left, like me, have signed too damned many oaths to tell the truth anymore.”
“The picture I dropped,” Nick said, “would you have a copy of it?”
“It’s one of a kind, I’m afraid.”
“Could I make a copy?”
“Why not? We’ve got a pretty good Xerox. Old Hatch may be a little grainy but still recognizable. Just what do you have in mind for him?”
“I’d like to ask him about his scorpions.”
“Good luck to you.”
“That sounds like a eulogy,” Marcia said.
Varney stared at Nick for a long time. Finally he shook his head sadly. “My advice to you, young woman, is to forget you ever found an airplane or heard the name Leland Hatch. He’s one of those men with eyes that burn right through you. He’s a believer. To him, ground zero was Mecca. He worshiped there. He worshiped power, and there was nothing more powerful than the bomb. I cried when we dropped it. Leland Hatch danced a jig.”
CHAPTER 30
Leland
Hatch ground his teeth as he listened to Kemp’s report. When the report ended, Hatch took a deep breath to calm himself. Finally he said, “How long was she with Varney?”
“A little more than an hour.”
“I didn’t think she’d get that far.” With a shake of his head, Hatch condemned his own stupidity. He should never have put the Scott woman in a box. Thanks to him, her job was gone, her career threatened, and her friends were dying. He’d given her no way out. Thinking about it now, he realized he should have tried bribing her the moment she found that B-17.
“What now?” Kemp said.
“Back off.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know where she’s going next.”
Hatch tossed the phone aside and strode to the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down on New York’s Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t true that people looked like ants from this high up, he thought. Ants were more organized, they had a purpose, a common goal.
Technically speaking, of course, he could push a button, activate a phone line, and order any one of them squashed. It was also true, technically speaking, that to do so would involve him in a criminal conspiracy.
He smiled at the thought. He was already a conspirator, he and Ellsworth Kemp.
But the time was coming when Kemp would have too much accumulated knowledge. Then he’d have to be silenced. Such an act would require participation in still another conspiracy, unless Hatch himself performed the act.
At his age, though, that might not be so easy. That left his son, Lee, who still had a clear conscience as far as the Scorpion was concerned.
Hatch sighed. It would have to be Lee. Only blood was safe. Blood was immortality.
Still, he hated the thought of destroying Lee’s illusions. Yet the only other option was to let Nick Scott run her course. And that could be dangerous, even if Hatch did know her every move in advance. Good intelligence went only so far. After that you had to be on the killing ground personally.