Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Dooley was glad he didn’t have to bother with those difficulties. He would have preferred to have the entire expedition depart from the Alameda Naval Air Station, a short hop away from the Teller Nuclear Research Facility. But the Navy destroyer assigned to take them out to the Marshall Islands was docked in San Diego. It was easier—and less conspicuous—to move the Bright Anvil device and all its equipment than it was to move an entire destroyer.

  Klantze turned about, ready to march off, then glanced over his shoulder in sudden embarrassment. “Oh, excuse me, sir—may I take your duffel, or your case?”

  “Sure.” Dooley handed over the soft-sided satchel that contained a week’s worth of clothes crammed into its various pockets. “I’ll carry the briefcase though,” he said—not that it was handcuffed to his wrist as in a spy thriller, but it contained classified documents crucial to the Bright Anvil Project. It was securely locked, and Dooley planned to hold on to it.

  “As you wish, sir.”

  The two of them strode along the dock, past several other chain-link fences and gates guarded by armed military police. Dark, creosote-covered planks formed the edge of the dock, while a narrow paved road ran along the center. Klantze walked down the middle of the road, keeping an eye out for government vehicles and puttering Cushman carts that traveled up and down the dock on military business.

  Finally, Dooley saw the large Navy destroyer that had been assigned to his project. The enormous, sleek ship looked like a skyscraper in the water, with weapons mounts and control towers, radar antennas, satellite uplink dishes, meteorologic instruments, and various superstructures Dooley could not identify. Navy stuff, he figured.

  Along the deck ran barricades of rope mesh, painted to look remarkably like a chain-link fence. Everything was the same shade of gray—the rails and pipes and rigging and steps and ladders. Even the long cannons. Only the bright orange life preservers mounted every fifty feet along the hull provided a few spots of color. The U.S. flag and Navy flags flew from all four corners of the ship.

  Dooley stopped and looked along the length of the gigantic cruiser. Despite his usual gruff demeanor, he was impressed with the vessel.

  “There she is, Mr. Dooley,” Klantze said. He snapped to attention and began to rattle off the ship’s statistics. They seemed to be a matter of pride with him, rather than a memorized speech.

  “The Dallas, Spruance Class, built in 1971. Five hundred sixty-three feet overall length, powered by four sets of GE gas turbines. She’s got a small captain’s gig for quick trips ashore, plus an entire surface-to-air missile battery, antisubmarine weapons, and torpedo tubes. This class of destroyer was designed primarily for antisubmarine warfare, but she’s lightly armed and carries a minimal crew. The Dallas is the finest vessel in her class, if you ask me, sir. She’ll get us out to the islands, no matter what the weather.”

  Dooley looked sharply at the exec. “You already know the details of our mission, then?” He had thought that very few of the crew members would have been briefed on the assignment out to Enika Atoll.

  “Captain Ives has explained it to me, sir,” Klantze said, then smiled faintly. “I am the executive officer, if you’ll recall. If my information is correct, and if your device is successful, nobody on board is going to be unaware of the test.”

  Dooley agreed. “I suppose it’s tough to keep a secret on board a ship.”

  “It’s also difficult not to notice a giant mushroom cloud, Mr. Dooley.”

  The exec led him up a wide gangplank the size of a freeway entrance ramp and marched him across the deck and up several flights of hard metal steps to the bridge tower, where he introduced Dooley to the captain of the Dallas.

  “Captain Ives, sir, this is Mr. Dooley,” Klantze said after he had exchanged salutes with the captain. The executive officer nodded to Dooley. “I’ll take your duffel to your stateroom, sir. I’m sure Captain Ives wishes to speak with you privately in greater detail.”

  “Yes I do,” the captain answered. Klantze spun about sharply, like a mechanical marionette on a glockenspiel, and marched off.

  “Pleased to meet you, Captain Ives. Thanks for your help.” Dooley extended his hand, and the captain took it with a firm shake. The captain’s arms, contained within his captain’s uniform, had muscles like steel wires. Dooley got the impression that he could crack walnuts in his fist.

  Ives was a lean man in his late fifties, as tall as Dooley but less burly. His stomach remained washboard flat. He moved with a spare grace, as if every exertion counted for something important. His chin was narrow, his eyes slate gray under heavy salt-and-pepper eyebrows. A bristling mustache rode his upper lip, and steel-gray hair lay neatly beneath his white captain’s cap. He showed no sign of sweating in the heat. Perhaps he didn’t allow it.

  “Mr. Dooley, I’m sure your first concern is for your delicate equipment. Let me reassure you that everything arrived safely and intact, as far as we can tell.”

  “Good,” Dooley said, his voice curt. He wanted to make certain at the outset that the captain understood that Dooley was in charge and that his instructions were not to be questioned. “If that equipment is damaged, we might as well not even bother to go. When do we set sail?”

  “The Dallas can leave port at about four o’clock this afternoon.” Captain Ives said. “But you may have noticed that this vessel has no sails.”

  Dooley blinked at him, then understood. “Oh, just a turn of phrase,” he said, annoyed. “Do you have any weather charts or updates for me?”

  “We received an encrypted signal,” the captain said, “a report from a fast flyby of an aircraft out of our Kwajalein tracking station. Enika Atoll checks out. We’ll be heading out for the Marshall Islands at full throttle, but it’ll still take us five days.”

  “Five days?” Dooley said. “I was afraid of that.”

  Ives met his look with a steely gaze. “This isn’t an aircraft, Mr. Dooley. It takes a long time to get a ship this size across that much water.”

  “All right, all right,” Dooley said. “I suppose I knew that. Do we have weather satellites? Is the storm system still doing what we expected?”

  Ives led him over to a chart table where weather maps and satellite photos lay spread out. With one long finger the captain indicated the swirl of clouds out over the deep, featureless water. “The tropical depression is worsening, as expected. Within a few days it should be at full hurricane strength. According to our projections it is heading straight toward the atoll.”

  “Good, good.” Dooley leaned over, rubbing his hands together. Though he was a physicist and an engineer, he had learned a great deal about meteorology during the preparations for this test.

  Captain Ives leaned closer and lowered his voice so that the other crewmen would not hear him from their communications or navigation stations. “Let me be blunt, Mr. Dooley. I have already notified my superiors of my extreme objections to the entire purpose of this mission. I have grave doubts about the wisdom of resuming aboveground nuclear tests, no matter where they occur.”

  Dooley stiffened, pausing just a moment to scratch his beard and allow his blood pressure to drop slightly. “Then maybe you just don’t understand the necessity, Captain.”

  “I understand all right—more than you know,” Ives replied. “I’ve been present at several hydrogen bomb tests already, one of which I doubt even you know about, since all results were highly classified.”

  Dooley raised his eyebrows. “When?”

  “Back in the fifties,” Ives said. “I was just a seaman recruit then, but I was there, out in the islands, Eniwetok, Bikini, even Johnston Atoll near Hawaii. I worked with plenty of eggheads who were completely amazed by their own calculations, absolutely confident in what they had invented. But I can tell you this, Mr. Dooley: every single time, those weapons developers, like yourself—people who were so smug about their own abilities—were literally turned to jelly with awe when they watched their devices go off.”

  “I look fo
rward to it then,” Dooley said crisply. “You have your orders. Let me take care of the test details.”

  Captain Ives stood straight, backing away from the chart table. He adjusted his white cap. “Yes, I have my orders,” he said, “and I will follow them, despite my objections—not the least of which is that it goes against all of my years of seamanship to head deliberately into a brewing hurricane.”

  Dooley walked around the bridge, puffed up with his own importance, glancing offhandedly at the outdated computer monitors, the various tactical stations. He turned to look back at the reluctant captain.

  “The hurricane is the only way we can pull this test off. Let me do my work, Captain Ives. You just keep the ship from sinking.”

  TWELVE

  Jornada del Muerto Desert, Southern New Mexico

  Thursday, 3:13 P.M.

  As if playing a scene from an old John Wayne movie, Oscar McCarron slid out of the saddle and tied his horse, a spry two-year-old palomino mare, to the fence post outside the General Store. He made sure to stomp his worn, pointy-toed cowboy boots on the boardwalk porch. The spurs gave a satisfying jingle as he ambled—the English language had no other word for it—to the store entrance.

  McCarron’s face was as seamed and leathery as his old boots, and his pale blue eyes wore a perpetual squint from a lifetime spent in the pounding desert sun. He eschewed sunglasses—they were only for sissies.

  He had shaved this morning for his weekly trip into town, though the grizzled old whiskers could barely punch their way through his tough cheeks anymore. He didn’t bother wearing gloves; with the several layers of calluses on his hands (calluses that penetrated to the bones themselves) gloves would have been redundant. His squash-blossom silver-and-turquoise belt buckle was so large it could have been used as a coaster for cold drinks; it was one of his most prized possessions.

  McCarron rode into the don’t-blink-or-it’s-gone town from his outlying ranch no more often than once every seven days to pick up his mail. There were limits to the amount of human companionship one man could stomach.

  The door creaked as it always did when he stepped inside the General Store. He moved his left boot over by one floorboard so he wouldn’t step on the loose plank.

  “Afternoon, Oscar,” said Fred, the store owner. His elbows rested on the countertop, but other than shifting his gaze, Fred didn’t move a muscle.

  “Fred,” he replied. It was all the greeting he could manage. A man who was eighty years old couldn’t afford to change his public personality this late in life. “Get any mail this week?”

  He had no idea what Fred’s last name was. He still considered the shopkeeper a newcomer to the area, though Fred had bought the General Store from an old Navajo couple a full fifteen years earlier. The Navajos had run the store for thirty-five years or so, and McCarron had considered them part of the landscape. Fred, on the other hand…well, Fred he still wasn’t too sure about.

  “We’ve been waiting for you to come in, Oscar. You’ve got the usual junk mail, but there’s a letter here from Hawaii. Postmark says Pearl Harbor. Imagine that! It’s a package. Any idea what it is?”

  “What it is, is none of your damn business,” McCarron said. “Just get me my mail.”

  Fred levered himself off of his elbows and disappeared behind the counter to the small post office and storeroom in the back. McCarron brushed his hands down the snaps of his denim shirt and pants, knocking the whitish desert dust away. He knew everyone else called them “blue jeans” these days, but he hadn’t gotten used to thinking of them as anything other than dungarees.

  Fred returned with a handful of mail, junk newspapers, solicitations, advertising circulars, a few bills, and no letters. Nothing interesting—except for a medium-sized padded manila envelope.

  McCarron took the stack and deliberately flipped through the junk mail first, driving back his own curiosity, knowing it would fluster Fred to no end. The junk mail always did a good job of starting his campfire when he slept out under the stars every Thursday night after coming into town. Finally, he held up the padded envelope, squinted at the postmark: Honolulu, Hawaii. The package bore no return address.

  Fred leaned over the counter, cracking his big knuckles and blinking his brown eyes eagerly. His cheeks sagged on his lantern-jawed face. When he got a little older the shopkeeper would have jowls like a bulldog’s. “Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Fred asked.

  McCarron glared at him. “Not in front of you, I ain’t.”

  He had never forgiven Fred for his blatant indiscretion two years back of opening one of McCarron’s packages when he was a day late coming into town. It had happened to be a boxed set of videotapes, the old Victory at Sea series, one of McCarron’s favorites. He had always been fascinated by World War II.

  Fred had been scandalized, not because of the subject matter of the tapes—McCarron suspected the old store owner had a few girlie films hidden back in his own house behind the store—but because Oscar McCarron had ordered the tapes at all, thereby exposing the secret that the old man actually had a television set and a videotape player. That went completely against the rancher’s carefully cultivated image of living off the land and scorning all modern conveniences.

  Back at his own ranch, McCarron kept an outhouse in plain sight of the main building and had a pump out front for water that came up pure and sweet from the White Sands aquifer. But in truth, he had modern bathroom facilities inside the house, electricity, and not only a TV and VCR but also a large satellite dish hidden back behind the adobe main house. He had purchased all the equipment up in Albuquerque, had it brought down and installed without telling anyone in the small town. McCarron enjoyed keeping up his “old codger” image, but not at the expense of his own comfort.

  Fred had indeed kept his mouth shut over the past two years, at least as far as McCarron could tell, but he would never forget the offense.

  “Awww, come on Oscar,” Fred said. “I’ve been waitin’ all day for you to come in just so’s I could see your smiling face.”

  “Ain’t that sweet,” McCarron said. “Next thing, you’re gonna be asking me to marry you, like one of them California faggots.” He slapped the padded envelope unopened on the top of his junk mail and tucked the pile under his armpit. “If the package contains anything that concerns you, I’ll be sure to tell you next time I come in.” He turned and ambled back toward the door, intentionally stepping on the creaking board this time.

  Outside, the still-hot afternoon sun had turned a buttery yellow as the light slanted toward the black lava teeth of the San Andres Mountains.

  The palomino whickered when she saw him and stamped her foreleg, impatient to be off and trotting again. Seeing no one else out on the sleepy street, McCarron allowed himself to break into a smile of delight. The young mare was so eager. She seemed to love these pack trips even more than McCarron did.

  His curiosity burned within him to see the contents of the mysterious envelope. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to show any outward interest, not within sight of the General Store, where Fred was probably even now peering at him through the fly-specked windows.

  He untied the horse and mounted up, stuffing the mail into one of the saddlebags before he rode off down the street, and then headed east overland into the sprawling open desert of the White Sands Missile Range.

  Through long habit, McCarron found the loose gate in the barbed-wire fence that ran for hundreds of miles along the government-owned wasteland. He slipped the wire loose and led the palomino through the fence, fastening the gate behind him.

  He fingered the bent but laminated old pass card that had been issued to him so long ago that every one of the original signers had died years ago. Oscar McCarron’s right to go onto the missile site hadn’t been questioned for several years now, not even by the hot-rodding young MPs who loved to roll over the dazzling gypsum sands in their all-terrain vehicles, as if they were surfers in dune buggies going to a beach party. But McCarron had a deep r
espect for authority and for the government itself, after all Uncle Sam had done for him.

  Besides, he didn’t want to mess with patriotic young enthusiasts who were willing to defend even such a desolate wasteland against foreign invaders. That kind of mindset was something you didn’t play around with.

  McCarron rode toward the low craggy foothills. The desert was stark and flat, like a huge stretch of Nebraska sprayed with weed killer, then plopped down inside a ring of volcanic mountains. The bleakness somehow had made it an appropriate place to have hosted the world’s first atomic explosion.

  Oscar McCarron’s family once had owned all of this land, a worthless swath of New Mexico, not good for ranching or even mining, since it was devoid of desirable minerals and ore. But back in 1944 the Manhattan Engineering District had expressed a passionate interest in the land—and McCarron’s father had been only too happy to strike a deal. He had sold the spread for a small price, but still far more than it was worth.

  The government paid extra when McCarron’s father agreed to allow them to doctor the Land Bureau documents, removing his name from original ownership, keeping the land transfer secret so that it would show on archival documents that the government had leased it from a fictitious ranch family, the McDonalds.

  The government and its Manhattan Project engineers had erected farm buildings and a windmill, concocting a story of the McDonalds who had lived at the Trinity Site. Only later, after the Trinity atomic bomb test in July 1945, had McCarron understood the reason for such secrecy. The nuclear detonation had taken place in what would have been the landowners’ backyard. But reporters and, much later, protesters never located the mythical McDonalds.

  McCarron’s father had driven another hard bargain as part of the deal. It was during the bleakest part of World War II, when the Germans seemed to be making great strides toward global conquest and the Japanese Empire was sweeping the Pacific Rim. American soldiers were dying in record numbers. McCarron’s father had not wanted to count his young, strong son as one of the casualties. He had exchanged the land in a secret transfer in order to make his son forever exempt from military service.