Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

He wondered what might have happened if they’d never bothered to attack the Russians in the first place.

He found his mind lazily pursuing ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’, the recreational pastime of historians and history teachers, as his eyes began to feel heavy and his head light, drifting with surprising ease towards sleep. The drone of the three remaining engines, and the roar and whistle of the wind past the portholes and over the ragged punctures in the fuselage, soon became a surprisingly relaxing lullaby.

Mark drove them for half an hour up the coast. At some instinctive level it had felt safer to them driving north-east out of town, and further into the New England coastal wilderness, rather than head out south-west back through Connecticut towards New York State. Mark drove them along the interstate, following it as it swung north, hugging the coastline where the Atlantic became Narragansett Bay.

They found a small motel just a few miles east of Kingston, beside an intersection coupled with a neon-lit, twenty-four-seven diner. Mark checked in and got them three rooms, while Chris and Wallace found a table inside the diner and ordered some strong coffee. Chris recognised ‘Counting Crows’ playing in the background. Someone here liked college radio.

When Mark had returned and the waitress had brought them the coffee, Chris turned to study Wallace.

‘Okay, Wallace, it’s show and tell time,’ he said, leaning forward on his elbows. ‘I think you can tell me and Mark here what’s down in that plane, and why it’s so goddamn important that we have a pair of hired killers set loose on us.’

The old man was looking less shaken and upset now as they sat in the diner. Chris hoped it had sunk in that he had been ‘rescued’, not abducted, that he and Mark meant no harm, that in fact they had put themselves at great risk to save him. Wallace was looking more composed, and Chris decided, frail old man or not, he was going to get the story out of Wallace one way or another, right now. And the old guy had better realise that the time for buggering around was over.

‘So? Let’s have it,’ added Chris.

‘Gentlemen,’ Wallace replied, ‘the less you know the better. Those men in that van, they’re after me, not you. It is me that represents a danger to them, or at least, who they work for, not you.’

‘Well, you know what? I don’t think they’re too fussy about taking us guys down alongside you, so I reckon that puts all three of us in the same boat. What do you think?’ Chris replied.

Wallace said nothing.

Chris had a gut instinct that the old man wanted to tell them what he knew, but something was holding him back. ‘Come on, man, both Mark and I are in this up to our balls now. What’s this all about?’

Wallace cleared his throat. ‘I met up with you only to warn you away from this, not to encourage you further. You’re in danger now, young man; you’d be in far greater danger if you knew what I knew.’

‘I think we’re past that point now. Come on, Wallace, what’s in that fucking plane?’

Then a thought struck Chris. ‘Or was there someone aboard that plane? Someone important? A defector perhaps, one of Hitler’s top men?’

Wallace said nothing.

‘Hitler?’

‘The less you know the better,’ replied Wallace.

Chris smacked the table with frustration. ‘Sorry, I don’t buy that shit any more. Those bastards are after all three of us. So just tell me what you know!’

Wallace leaned forward. ‘I have to go take a leak.’

Exasperated, Chris watched the old man shuffle out from behind the table and make his way slowly across the diner and through a swing door to the toilets.

‘Mark, he’s driving me bloody mad!’

‘Well, you wanted to rescue him. Maybe he’s right though. Maybe we don’t want to know what he knows. In fact, the more I think about it, I’d be quite happy to walk away from this not knowing any more. What if we drop him off into the care of the police and just walk away from this… whatever it is?’

Chris shrugged. ‘We could, but aren’t you curious?’

‘Not if it means being like him, spending the rest of my life jumping at shadows. There’s a point at which you’ve got to be sensible about things and just back off. I think when guys start turning over your room and shooting at you, that’s a pretty good sign you’ve reached that point.’

Chris nodded. ‘But you see, I reckon we’re already targets now. Don’t forget, that bastard in my room was trying to take us down, and Wallace wasn’t with us then. I think we’re already targets whether we know what he knows, or not. We’re targets because we’ve been down on that wreck, because we’ve seen someth-’

Chris froze.

‘What is it?’ asked Mark.

‘It’s that gadget that was in the bomb bay, isn’t it?’

Mark looked puzzled and ran a big hand through his thick, coarse black hair. ‘What?’

‘You remember the thing I photographed? It was hanging in the bomb bay.’

‘Yeah.’

‘The bomb-bay doors were ripped off, gone. They must have been knocked away when the plane hit the sea. Think about it… they were probably open when it hit the sea.’

‘And?’

‘And, my friend… And? Don’t you see? The doors were open. They were planning to drop that thing on America.’

Mark’s eyes widened. ‘Do you think it was an — ?’

‘An atom bomb? A German nuke? Shit… I bet that’s it!’ Chris said a little too loudly, and quickly looked around to see if his words had carried across the diner. The only other customers, three truck drivers propping up the counter, seemed lost in individual worlds of their own.

‘That’s the big deal… they got the atom bomb before the Americans, that’s got to be it.’

‘So why does someone want kill us, and your friend in the toilet?’

‘Why? Because… because of the political embarrassment? I don’t know.’

Mark shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see the US government wanting to kill us over something like that. It’s history for chrissakes, maybe embarrassing history, but it’s all in the past.’

‘Yeah? I’m pretty sure there have been people shut up in this country for less; especially these days, my friend.’

‘Not for something like that… so the Germans had a nuke, so what?’

‘I dunno, maybe there’s more to it. We’ve got to go down and do another dive on the plane. I’ve got no bloody pictures any more. We have to go down and look at that thing again.’

‘If that thing down there is what this is all about, then there could be a risk of radiation leakage,’ warned Mark.

‘Fine, then we can take down a radiation meter, a Geiger counter. If it starts pinging, then that’ll confirm it, all the better,’ said Chris. He looked up from the table. There was still no sign of Wallace. ‘He’s taking his time isn’t he?’

At that moment the swing door to the toilets opened, and Wallace appeared.

‘Ah, there he is,’ said Mark. ‘So, you’re going to mention the bomb to him? See how he reacts?’

‘Yeah, let’s see how this wily old bugger responds to that.’

Surrender: Mission Time: 10 Hours, 6 Minutes Elapsed

5.11 a.m., EST, the White House, Washington, DC

The meeting was still in session and it had been since midnight. The President, the Joint Chiefs and his war cabinet were looking ragged and tired. There had been a break, ostensibly for refreshments, but mainly it had been an opportunity to cool down fraying tempers.

The first hour of the meeting, up until 1.30 a.m., had been spent drafting high-level emergency orders to be despatched directly to General Eisenhower in France. The orders had been wired immediately, and confirmation that Eisenhower had received and read them had returned within the hour. The orders had contained a number of precautionary measures. Many, Wallace suspected, were probably too late to have any effect on whatever plan the Nazis had put in motion. No large planes were permitted to fly for the next twenty-four hours, all fighters based in southern England, France, Holland and Belgium with a suitable range had been issued orders to patrol the Channel and the north-west coast of France. In reality, there were going to be very few fighters they could mobilise at such short notice to cover this kind of area. Wallace considered it a desperate panic measure, but there was little else Truman could do, so it seemed.