Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

He had to turn the lights on when they hit the switchbacks. As the jeep climbed, Anna acted busy by cleaning bits of corn stalk from the floor. She found two items that had shaken loose from under the seat, two zigzags of carved wood.

"What are these?" she asked, without directly meeting Joe's eyes. This is how it ends, he thought. Without real words, without even looks.

"Roberto's crazy wands."

"What are you supposed to do with them?"

"Call down lightning. Water your fields. Bring back the buffalo. Stop the bomb."

"You can do that?"

Joe took the wands from her and threw them sideways from the jeep. They spun, glittered and then plunged into the dark of the canyon.

"Not any more," he said.

25

FRIDAY

Orders were no stopping en route, but as Joe went through Antonio, he slowed by the Owl Bar and Cafe enough to see Army engineers and MPs stationed in the motel courtyard. He gained speed again, leading a convoy of two jeeps, two CID sedans, a carry-all truck of spare parts and a covered truck bearing Jaworski and the sphere of steel and high explosive that was the implosive shell of the bomb.

"The MPs are there to evacuate the town in case of, you know…" Ray Stingo rode in the lead jeep with Joe.

"What's it like down here?" Joe asked. Ray had been in and out of Trinity for a week.

"Typical Army fuck-ups. We got some scientists, some of the million-dollar whiz kids, laying some wires out in the bushes and a B-29 comes over shooting some antelope. Fifty-calibre machine-guns. Scientists are running, diving, trying to fly. You see, the rest of the Army doesn't know about this." They were already out of Antonio. Ray took a long, swivelled view of a far-off, flat horizon of buffalo grass, gray sage, yucca spears. "Fucking place for a test. You gotta shake your shoes every morning to get out the scorpions. You gotta bang a wrench on the jeep to chase the rattlers. There's gypsum in the water to fuck up your plumbing. Every five minutes you gotta run into the bushes and then it's you and the shit and rattler all over again." There was alkali in the water, too. Ray's black spit curl was plaster-hard. "It may be a new weapon, but it's the same Army."

"The odds?" Joe asked.

"Two to one. Odds on the fight are so good they scare me. I was thinking, I could be real set up on the Hill. I'd just piss away the money back in Jersey. I think I'll stay."

"There won't be any Hill after the war."

"Chief, I got one smart idea my whole life, okay? We didn't build this bomb for the Japs, we built it for the Reds. And we didn't even fight them yet."

Besides the convoy, Joe had seen no other Army traffic on the road. Stallion Gate was little changed. New barbed wire, new fence posts. A checkpoint that consisted of a tarpaulin-covered lean-to that provided a miserly wedge of shade. The MPs had been issued with pith helmets. Before leaving the Hill, each man in the convoy had been given a pink pass with a T for Trinity, which they exchanged at the gate for round white badges.

"Foreign Legion, Chief." Corporal Gruber was one of the MPs at the gate. His arm was still in a sling. His eyes were red from alkali dust. "A hundred degrees every day for two weeks. Fucking badges? Security? There must be fifty guys every night who walk off the desert for a beer. Single file between the snakes." He wrote Joe's name under the proper date and time on his clipboard. "Friday the 13th. Some day to bring down the bomb. Feeling good, Chief?"

"Good enough." Gruber licked dry lips. "It's a question of confidence, right?"

"To a point."

Gruber waved him through. "One more fight, that's all we ask."

The ranch access road that Joe remembered as a faint trail in the snow was newly graded and topped with colichi , a sand-and-clay compound that had quickly disintegrated into fine white powder. Clouds of dust followed another convoy far ahead. Jaworski joined Joe and Ray in the lead jeep. He had a portable FM receiver and around his neck he wore the Polaroid all-purpose red goggles issued for the test. With his dark moustaches, he looked like a touring grandee,

"We're supposed to monitor the receivers at all times here,in case of an accident," Jaworski said. "Keys are supposed to be kept in ignitions at all times, in case of evacuation. That's why the roads are so wide. Myself, I wonder what you're supposed to do if there is an accident and you're not near a road and you don't have a real field radio you can actually transmit on."

Some static-ridden communications were erupting from the FM. Mainly, there was music. Carmen Miranda.

"Don't ask me how," Ray said. "The Army spent months finding a special channel just for us? It's the same channel as the Voice of America. The Latin edition. Orders are, ignore the sambas and the bombers."

"Well, what do you do if you're stuck out in the open and the bomb, accidentally, goes off?"

"The flash, the burst of gamma rays and neutrons would kill anything within a mile and a half of the tower. If you could get a couple of miles away and find a depression, a stream -"

"A stream in the Jornada del Muerto ? That sounds like planning. There couldn't really be an accident, though, could there?"

"Yesterday, Joe, they were testing the firing circuits on a dummy bomb in the tower. Out of the blue, a lightning bolt. Imagine if the real bomb had been there. By the way, Anna Weiss asked me to tell you goodbye. She left early this morning for Chicago. She borrowed Teller's car to drive there, otherwise I suppose you would have driven her to the train station."

"I suppose so."

There were a couple of hundred men at Trinity, but they were so spread out over hundreds of acres that only a few could be seen at a time. Still, the closer the convoy got to Ground Zero, the more evidence of activity there was. A cable strung on a seemingly infinite line of stakes. The first blast-wave gauge, a box designed to bounce in the springs of a hoop. Photographic bunkers gray as shells on a beach, periscope stalks aimed south at a tower seven miles off in the clear, trembling air. Ground Zero. Six miles from the tower, the convoy reached the North 10,000-metre shelter, a timber bunker that sank into a protective slope of raw earth. Bulldozers browsed on the slope, tamping it. From North-10,000, a fresh tarmac road ran straight to the shot tower. Single cables multiplied into racks of wires. Planted in dead sage was an unmanned instrument bunker, a concrete block with portholes for cameras.

"Skyshine hole." Jaworski pointed to the single socket aimed away from the tower. "To monitor the general neutron scatter." Skyshine? It sounded pretty, like the glitter of sequins shot in the air.

"Nervous?" Joe asked.

"Things have changed," Jaworski said. "We used to detonate shells using a long string. No one had a gauge. A charge worked or it didn't. No oscillographs or ionization chambers. What hasn't changed is that there will only be a handful of men who actually assemble the bomb. There'll be a hundred others screaming that this seismograph is vital or that pressure gauge must be repaired, but the only thing that counts is the weapon, right? Of course, in the war against the Kaiser we dropped nothing much greater than grenades from planes, and there was no background neutron scatter."

The tower at Ground Zero looked like an oil rig without the pipes, a spindly structure of steel beams and tie braces that rose 100 feet to a platform and galvanized-iron shed perched in the sky. One tower leg had steel steps with landings every twenty feet. A wooden ladder reached from the bottom landing to the ground. Foote was waiting on the ground in his sombrero and British Army shorts. His high explosives team of half a dozen draftees sat in undershirts, bathing shorts and handkerchiefs worn on the head pirate-style. As the convoy wound around and stopped at the tower base, CID officers jumped from the two security sedans and formed a skirmish line, pointing submachine-guns at cactus and rabbitbrush. Foote ambled at their backs. " They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in Heaven, is he in Hell, that demmed elusive Pimpernel? Joe, you brought my goods?"