Chapter 9
Leslie lights the joint, then pushes halfway back on the recliner. Not all the way; she might doze off. She clicks on the TV. She’s missed the first 15 minutes of Beaches. Chemotherapy was not half as bad as she imagined. Carol’s best stash of Acapulco gold virtually eliminated the nausea. Yes, she lost her hair, but she kept waiting for the poison to knock her off her feet.
On screen, Bette Midler is making her off-Broadway debut in the Falcon Theater. She’s belting out some Wagnerian goofiness about war and industry. Then, before passing through the plastic flames to hell, she turns around to reveal the face of a hag.
Leslie asks herself: When would poison not feel like poison? When you have built up a resistance. Of course, she hadn’t taken any of those drugs before. Perhaps there was a link between mind and body. She had endured a lot of emotional poison in her life. Metaphor had become reality. Now she could endure poison, even thrive on it. She clicks the TV sound up a couple of notches.
⸎ " I think I’ve discovered how marijuana prevents nausea,” Leslie announces. The oncologist frowns. “You didn’t tell me you were taking something other than your prescriptions.”
Damn it, I’m trying to tell him something important and all he can think of is controlling me. Dr. Martin, as in martinet. “It happened last night. I had dozed off when I was wakened by the TV. The marijuana must have dulled my hearing, so I had turned up the sound. Then, when it wore off, the TV was loud again.” The doctor interjected, “It sounds like you’ve discovered another reason not to take drugs.”
She wants to bang his head with a skillet. This is your brain on chauvinism. “It’s not just hearing. Your inner ear also controls balance. That’s why people rocking in a boat get nauseated—because the fluid in their inner ear is sloshing around. Marijuana must desensitize your inner ear.”
The doctor is filling out a prescription pad. “You don’t want to be buying stuff off the street. It could be laced with LSD, angel dust, or God knows what. I’m going to prescribe Marinol, the legal form of THC.” Leslie wanted to tell him where to stuff his prescription. I didn’t get it off the street. I got it from a good friend. But she’ll play along. If he’s going to act like a narc, she’s certainly not going to give him any information that would betray her “dealer.”
⸎ In the lab gym, Dr. Haynes walks on a treadmill. Leslie steps on a treadmill next to him and turns it on at his speed. “Why haven’t you been asking me out?”
“You’re still recovering from your surgery.”
“I’m okay now. I’ve been okay for weeks.”
“I’ve had a lot of work to do.”
Leslie turns up the speed on her machine. “Maybe you’re just not man enough to keep up with me.”
⸎ Leslie, in bed, reaches over to the nightstand, opens a drawer, and pulls out a vibrator. She turns it on then slips it under the sheets. At the lab, another proton stack is being stimulated. In progressive stages of acceleration, protons move from the Cockroft-Walton generator to the linear accelerator, to a cycling synchrotron, to the Main Ring, and finally to the circular yin Tevatron. Moving faster and faster. A bead of sweat forms on Leslie’s upper lip as her heartbeat quickens. Protons collide with antiprotons, and Her mysteries are revealed.
⸎ David is called back to London after New Year’s. He is assigned the same hotel room.
On January 16, 1991, the air war against Iraq begins. In the port city of Basra, Iraqi soldiers enter a mosque. They place small charges around the edge of the dome in the central building, and larger charges along the walls and other structures. They set them off. Iraq accuses the U.S. of bombing a mosque.
February 19, 1991. Dr. Manilov, still nursing aches from his adventure in Iraq, watches TV in his hotel room. At a press briefing, an American officer stands behind an aerial photo that shows, he says, how the Iraqis have faked an air attack on a mosque. He noted that the dome was too nearly shaved off to be the result of a missile or bomb dropped from the air.
The dome was blown off. Manilov remembers. He puts on the snug, stuffy radiation suit. He and two other Russian scientists in protective suits walk down a corridor. Electrical cords dangle from the ceiling. Chunks of plaster clutter the floor. They enter a wide chamber, girded by twisted pieces of metal exposed by sunlight. A gaping hole has replaced the ceiling and roof of the No. 4 Reactor, Chernobyl. Of course.
⸎ February 21, 1991. In Hedley’s meeting room, Manilov stands next to the easel, on which is mounted the dream illustration of the snake emerging from the black cube. There are murmurs among the other men seated. Hedley, Latham, Winter and Compton. Manilov taps the easel with the pointer to call their attention.
“We agree black cube is nuclear reactor. I know tell you this: Reactor is not making weapon. The reactor is the weapon. Saddam Hussein is going to Chernobylize Kuwait.” David is doing a slow burn. Damn it, it’s so obvious now. Why hadn’t he thought of it first?
Manilov replaces the snake/stone drawing with an aerial photo of the damaged mosque in Basra. “This is a photo of mosque from the news program.” He points to the center square in the picture. “The Iraqis blew off dome to make us think they were faking U.S. bomb attack. They have something bigger in mind. Somewhere in Kuwait is mosque like this. They have put a reactor core inside it. They know we will not bomb mosque. They will melt reactor and dome will blow off.”
Manilov waves his arms to indicate an explosion. “Your pilots flying overhead . . . “He sweeps his left hand flat over this head, moving it like a jet. “will think Saddam was hiding ammunition in mosque and it exploded.”
He replaces the aerial photo with a map of Kuwait and the surrounding countries. In the center of Kuwait is a little black cube, surrounded by a shaded ellipse extending eastward into the Persian Gulf. “The meltdown will make poison cloud. Your soldiers liberate Kuwait, get sick, and die. Nobody can go in to put out oil fires.”
He points the stick to Saudi Arabia. “Radiation may even spread to Saudi oil fields. Mr. Hussein very clever. He makes nuclear accident into nuclear weapon.”
Winter is gleefully indignant. “Shit. That’s exactly the sort of thing that bastard would do.” A triple whammy: black oil spill, black oil fire, black nuclear cloud; an unholy Trinity.
The urgent, excited conversation blurs and fades around David. Something is wrong. Something is unreal. Nuclear fission was accomplished in 1942 and only now did someone figure out you could use a reactor as a weapon. Had all the scientist, generals, and politicians been asleep at the wheel for half a century? Nuclear plant accident, nuclear sub accident, nuclear factory accident. Package and deliver an accident and now it’s a weapon.
This is more than physics; this is metaphysics, philosophy, theology. A secret hidden in plain sight, invisible to the entire human race. Just a discovery? Seems like a Revelation to David.
A few hours later in the MI meeting room, Latham places before a seated Hedley an aerial photo of a mosque. “We estimate the Iraqis built this mosque in Kuwait four months ago. It appears that Manilov could be right.”
⸎ A soldier is taking photos requested by Hussain. Two men in white radiation suits pose in front of a Kaaba-shaped reactor sixteen feet high. Surrounding three sides of the core are brick arches that peak three feet above the core. Behind the core is a solid brick wall. Portable electric lights cast harsh shadows in the room. The floor is bare ground, a moonscape tracked by boot marks.
⸎ Mars and Latham walk along the south shore of the Thames, approaching Westminster Bridge. Latham casts a contemptuous glance at the House of Parliament, where undisciplined politicians are surrendering the country to the multicultural hordes. Mars talks conspiracy. “If this idea gets out, every Third World dictator could build one of these in months. We could see a ship coming up this river with a melting reactor. Thousands will die and London will be abandoned for decades.”
“So, you want to reduce the number of people who know about the reactor as a weapon?”
“Yes. Immediately.” Latham decides not to contradict Mars. The Royal Docks had closed in 1981, though it was conceivable a cargo ship could sneak up the Thames a night.
⸎ At a writing desk, Manilov puts the latest touches to his sketch of a melting reactor, then sticks the drawing into a valise. He assumes his phone is bugged; he will make a personal visit.
He exits the taxi a block from the Soviet Embassy; he wants an opportunity to see who, if anyone, is following him. Manilov watches the taxi leave, then begins a measured pace toward the guarded gate, glancing at the figures and cars on both sides of the street. A man with an umbrella walks toward him. The posture and features are familiar, but the mustache hides something. Manilov clutches his valise tighter under his arm.
Three steps from him, two steps. The umbrella springs erect and a spray showers Manilov’s face. His free hand struggles to find a handkerchief. He is dizzy. The valise is grabbed from his numb hand. His knees buckle. Latham runs off.
A coroner will conclude Manilov suffered a heart attack.
⸎ February 25, 1991. The major allied ground assault on Kuwait enters its second day. A helicopter lands at an outpost in Saudi Arabia. David, wearing spackled camouflage wear, steps out and is met by Latham, who escorts him to a large tent. Inside is Winter and a gaunt Arab, who leaves as David and Latham enter. Winter reaches out to shake David’s hand. “Well, Mr. Compton, we meet again. Latham here is going to fly you and the others.”
“How many others?”
“Nine. A scientist and eight soldiers. This is going to be a low-profile mission. There are people in Washington who are very nervous about attacking a mosque. They think this may be a trap.”
“And what do you think?”
“That fellow who just left is a member of the Kuwaiti resistance. He said the Iraqis built the mosque in Kuwait just for their own solders. They won’t let the locals worship there, but yesterday the place seemed nearly vacant; just one flatbed truck and a jeep parked in front. That cinches it for me. I don’t care if it’s a mosque or the Sistine Chapel. If there are Iraqis in there with guns, we’re going after them.”
“So, why am I here?”
“I don’t know. Hedley had some kind of hippie, New Age reason. He said we needed somebody who can grasp the cosmetology of what is happening.”
“I believe he meant ‘cosmology’.”
“Whatever.” Winter knows David is smart, but here in the field, he’s just another Pont—person of no tactical significance, as useful as some pansy hairdresser.
Latham hands a holstered pistol to David. “You’ll need this.” David nods. “Just be careful. Give me the gun.” David hands it to Latham. “This is the safety. This is the safety on. This is the safety off.” He hands the gun back to David. Latham’s singsong explanation reminds David of the simplistic “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”
⸎ Dr. Noon, Pakistani, 40ish, wearing a white radiation suit and carrying a hood, gets out of a Chinook and walks over to Latham. “The soldiers don’t have radiation gear.” Latham has his explanation ready. “For their safety. The suits slow them down and block their peripheral vision. We can’t have that in a combat situation.” Noon walks back to the copter.
The Chinook takes off. David, in the cockpit with Latham, looks back into the interior of the chopper and sees eight black U.S. soldiers and Noon, who holds the suit hood on his lap. David turns to Latham. “Why are all the soldiers black?"
“Black Muslims. If they must send American soldiers into a mosque, they thought it would be better if they were all Muslim.” Latham knows that eight soldiers and himself is a marginal force, but it reduces the number of combatants who are privy to the mission. “And the other guy?”
“Dr. Noon, a nuclear scientist from London, Born in Pakistan. Muslim, of course.”
Leslie lights the joint, then pushes halfway back on the recliner. Not all the way; she might doze off. She clicks on the TV. She’s missed the first 15 minutes of Beaches. Chemotherapy was not half as bad as she imagined. Carol’s best stash of Acapulco gold virtually eliminated the nausea. Yes, she lost her hair, but she kept waiting for the poison to knock her off her feet.
On screen, Bette Midler is making her off-Broadway debut in the Falcon Theater. She’s belting out some Wagnerian goofiness about war and industry. Then, before passing through the plastic flames to hell, she turns around to reveal the face of a hag.
Leslie asks herself: When would poison not feel like poison? When you have built up a resistance. Of course, she hadn’t taken any of those drugs before. Perhaps there was a link between mind and body. She had endured a lot of emotional poison in her life. Metaphor had become reality. Now she could endure poison, even thrive on it. She clicks the TV sound up a couple of notches.
⸎ " I think I’ve discovered how marijuana prevents nausea,” Leslie announces. The oncologist frowns. “You didn’t tell me you were taking something other than your prescriptions.”
Damn it, I’m trying to tell him something important and all he can think of is controlling me. Dr. Martin, as in martinet. “It happened last night. I had dozed off when I was wakened by the TV. The marijuana must have dulled my hearing, so I had turned up the sound. Then, when it wore off, the TV was loud again.” The doctor interjected, “It sounds like you’ve discovered another reason not to take drugs.”
She wants to bang his head with a skillet. This is your brain on chauvinism. “It’s not just hearing. Your inner ear also controls balance. That’s why people rocking in a boat get nauseated—because the fluid in their inner ear is sloshing around. Marijuana must desensitize your inner ear.”
The doctor is filling out a prescription pad. “You don’t want to be buying stuff off the street. It could be laced with LSD, angel dust, or God knows what. I’m going to prescribe Marinol, the legal form of THC.” Leslie wanted to tell him where to stuff his prescription. I didn’t get it off the street. I got it from a good friend. But she’ll play along. If he’s going to act like a narc, she’s certainly not going to give him any information that would betray her “dealer.”
⸎ In the lab gym, Dr. Haynes walks on a treadmill. Leslie steps on a treadmill next to him and turns it on at his speed. “Why haven’t you been asking me out?”
“You’re still recovering from your surgery.”
“I’m okay now. I’ve been okay for weeks.”
“I’ve had a lot of work to do.”
Leslie turns up the speed on her machine. “Maybe you’re just not man enough to keep up with me.”
⸎ Leslie, in bed, reaches over to the nightstand, opens a drawer, and pulls out a vibrator. She turns it on then slips it under the sheets. At the lab, another proton stack is being stimulated. In progressive stages of acceleration, protons move from the Cockroft-Walton generator to the linear accelerator, to a cycling synchrotron, to the Main Ring, and finally to the circular yin Tevatron. Moving faster and faster. A bead of sweat forms on Leslie’s upper lip as her heartbeat quickens. Protons collide with antiprotons, and Her mysteries are revealed.
⸎ David is called back to London after New Year’s. He is assigned the same hotel room.
On January 16, 1991, the air war against Iraq begins. In the port city of Basra, Iraqi soldiers enter a mosque. They place small charges around the edge of the dome in the central building, and larger charges along the walls and other structures. They set them off. Iraq accuses the U.S. of bombing a mosque.
February 19, 1991. Dr. Manilov, still nursing aches from his adventure in Iraq, watches TV in his hotel room. At a press briefing, an American officer stands behind an aerial photo that shows, he says, how the Iraqis have faked an air attack on a mosque. He noted that the dome was too nearly shaved off to be the result of a missile or bomb dropped from the air.
The dome was blown off. Manilov remembers. He puts on the snug, stuffy radiation suit. He and two other Russian scientists in protective suits walk down a corridor. Electrical cords dangle from the ceiling. Chunks of plaster clutter the floor. They enter a wide chamber, girded by twisted pieces of metal exposed by sunlight. A gaping hole has replaced the ceiling and roof of the No. 4 Reactor, Chernobyl. Of course.
⸎ February 21, 1991. In Hedley’s meeting room, Manilov stands next to the easel, on which is mounted the dream illustration of the snake emerging from the black cube. There are murmurs among the other men seated. Hedley, Latham, Winter and Compton. Manilov taps the easel with the pointer to call their attention.
“We agree black cube is nuclear reactor. I know tell you this: Reactor is not making weapon. The reactor is the weapon. Saddam Hussein is going to Chernobylize Kuwait.” David is doing a slow burn. Damn it, it’s so obvious now. Why hadn’t he thought of it first?
Manilov replaces the snake/stone drawing with an aerial photo of the damaged mosque in Basra. “This is a photo of mosque from the news program.” He points to the center square in the picture. “The Iraqis blew off dome to make us think they were faking U.S. bomb attack. They have something bigger in mind. Somewhere in Kuwait is mosque like this. They have put a reactor core inside it. They know we will not bomb mosque. They will melt reactor and dome will blow off.”
Manilov waves his arms to indicate an explosion. “Your pilots flying overhead . . . “He sweeps his left hand flat over this head, moving it like a jet. “will think Saddam was hiding ammunition in mosque and it exploded.”
He replaces the aerial photo with a map of Kuwait and the surrounding countries. In the center of Kuwait is a little black cube, surrounded by a shaded ellipse extending eastward into the Persian Gulf. “The meltdown will make poison cloud. Your soldiers liberate Kuwait, get sick, and die. Nobody can go in to put out oil fires.”
He points the stick to Saudi Arabia. “Radiation may even spread to Saudi oil fields. Mr. Hussein very clever. He makes nuclear accident into nuclear weapon.”
Winter is gleefully indignant. “Shit. That’s exactly the sort of thing that bastard would do.” A triple whammy: black oil spill, black oil fire, black nuclear cloud; an unholy Trinity.
The urgent, excited conversation blurs and fades around David. Something is wrong. Something is unreal. Nuclear fission was accomplished in 1942 and only now did someone figure out you could use a reactor as a weapon. Had all the scientist, generals, and politicians been asleep at the wheel for half a century? Nuclear plant accident, nuclear sub accident, nuclear factory accident. Package and deliver an accident and now it’s a weapon.
This is more than physics; this is metaphysics, philosophy, theology. A secret hidden in plain sight, invisible to the entire human race. Just a discovery? Seems like a Revelation to David.
A few hours later in the MI meeting room, Latham places before a seated Hedley an aerial photo of a mosque. “We estimate the Iraqis built this mosque in Kuwait four months ago. It appears that Manilov could be right.”
⸎ A soldier is taking photos requested by Hussain. Two men in white radiation suits pose in front of a Kaaba-shaped reactor sixteen feet high. Surrounding three sides of the core are brick arches that peak three feet above the core. Behind the core is a solid brick wall. Portable electric lights cast harsh shadows in the room. The floor is bare ground, a moonscape tracked by boot marks.
⸎ Mars and Latham walk along the south shore of the Thames, approaching Westminster Bridge. Latham casts a contemptuous glance at the House of Parliament, where undisciplined politicians are surrendering the country to the multicultural hordes. Mars talks conspiracy. “If this idea gets out, every Third World dictator could build one of these in months. We could see a ship coming up this river with a melting reactor. Thousands will die and London will be abandoned for decades.”
“So, you want to reduce the number of people who know about the reactor as a weapon?”
“Yes. Immediately.” Latham decides not to contradict Mars. The Royal Docks had closed in 1981, though it was conceivable a cargo ship could sneak up the Thames a night.
⸎ At a writing desk, Manilov puts the latest touches to his sketch of a melting reactor, then sticks the drawing into a valise. He assumes his phone is bugged; he will make a personal visit.
He exits the taxi a block from the Soviet Embassy; he wants an opportunity to see who, if anyone, is following him. Manilov watches the taxi leave, then begins a measured pace toward the guarded gate, glancing at the figures and cars on both sides of the street. A man with an umbrella walks toward him. The posture and features are familiar, but the mustache hides something. Manilov clutches his valise tighter under his arm.
Three steps from him, two steps. The umbrella springs erect and a spray showers Manilov’s face. His free hand struggles to find a handkerchief. He is dizzy. The valise is grabbed from his numb hand. His knees buckle. Latham runs off.
A coroner will conclude Manilov suffered a heart attack.
⸎ February 25, 1991. The major allied ground assault on Kuwait enters its second day. A helicopter lands at an outpost in Saudi Arabia. David, wearing spackled camouflage wear, steps out and is met by Latham, who escorts him to a large tent. Inside is Winter and a gaunt Arab, who leaves as David and Latham enter. Winter reaches out to shake David’s hand. “Well, Mr. Compton, we meet again. Latham here is going to fly you and the others.”
“How many others?”
“Nine. A scientist and eight soldiers. This is going to be a low-profile mission. There are people in Washington who are very nervous about attacking a mosque. They think this may be a trap.”
“And what do you think?”
“That fellow who just left is a member of the Kuwaiti resistance. He said the Iraqis built the mosque in Kuwait just for their own solders. They won’t let the locals worship there, but yesterday the place seemed nearly vacant; just one flatbed truck and a jeep parked in front. That cinches it for me. I don’t care if it’s a mosque or the Sistine Chapel. If there are Iraqis in there with guns, we’re going after them.”
“So, why am I here?”
“I don’t know. Hedley had some kind of hippie, New Age reason. He said we needed somebody who can grasp the cosmetology of what is happening.”
“I believe he meant ‘cosmology’.”
“Whatever.” Winter knows David is smart, but here in the field, he’s just another Pont—person of no tactical significance, as useful as some pansy hairdresser.
Latham hands a holstered pistol to David. “You’ll need this.” David nods. “Just be careful. Give me the gun.” David hands it to Latham. “This is the safety. This is the safety on. This is the safety off.” He hands the gun back to David. Latham’s singsong explanation reminds David of the simplistic “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”
⸎ Dr. Noon, Pakistani, 40ish, wearing a white radiation suit and carrying a hood, gets out of a Chinook and walks over to Latham. “The soldiers don’t have radiation gear.” Latham has his explanation ready. “For their safety. The suits slow them down and block their peripheral vision. We can’t have that in a combat situation.” Noon walks back to the copter.
The Chinook takes off. David, in the cockpit with Latham, looks back into the interior of the chopper and sees eight black U.S. soldiers and Noon, who holds the suit hood on his lap. David turns to Latham. “Why are all the soldiers black?"
“Black Muslims. If they must send American soldiers into a mosque, they thought it would be better if they were all Muslim.” Latham knows that eight soldiers and himself is a marginal force, but it reduces the number of combatants who are privy to the mission. “And the other guy?”
“Dr. Noon, a nuclear scientist from London, Born in Pakistan. Muslim, of course.”
Chapter 10
Leslie, sitting on the couch, picks a plush monkey from the corner table and tries to make light of her visit. “Do I get one of these if I’m a good girl?”
Seka has moved her chair halfway to the couch. “I give them to men who cry. It’s harder for them to show their emotions.” Leslie puts the monkey back.
“It’s been a while. You shouldn’t stay away if you have issues to work out.” Leslie lies. “I needed more time to remember.” She wasn’t sure if she could trust Seka. This seemed like a conflict of interest: asking Seka to interpret Seka’s place in her memories. But Leslie decided there was more at stake than her emotional well-being. There was a mystery to be solved and Seka seemed to have the keys to the locks. “Where did we leave off?” asked Seka.
“It was 1966. There was a nuclear war but as the bombs dropped, I was swept back in time.” Leslie picks up a toy car. “You were taking me for a ride. We were going to Chicago. It was November 1942. And I wasn’t me.”
⸎ The black DeSoto is parked in front of a Chicago diner. Seka and Leslie sit at a booth, each sipping a mug of coffee. On the table, next to the wall, are salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of catsup, a napkin holder, and a toothpick dispenser. A waitress in a pink uniform walks up and puts a plate with two frosted chocolate donuts in front of Seka. The waitress hovers over Leslie. “You sure you don’t want anything else, sweetie?”
“No, thank you.” The disappointed waitress jots down the small total on her order and then leaves. “How can I be here and be someone else?” asks Leslie Seka takes two toothpicks from the dispenser and holds up a donut. “Time is like the surface of this donut.” She pokes one toothpick into the surface. “This is the past.” She pokes the other toothpick into the opposite side. “This is the future.” She twirls the donut around. “There is no forward or backward.” She puts the donut down. “I’m giving you a chance to change history, to stop those men from hurting you.”
Leslie responds, “That still doesn’t explain my new identity.”
“Our minds and bodies are just streams of data that can be rearranged.” That seems a bit too glib, but Leslie has another objection. “If you are some kind of time traveler, why do you need me?" Seka is impatient. “I write the music. I conduct the orchestra. Do I have to play all the instruments too?
⸎ Leslie and Seka enter the third-floor room of the hotel, located just two blocks from the university. Seka explains, “These are temporary quarters, so you won’t have to interact with your mother. You need to call her and say you need to stay a couple of days on campus for some urgent work. Tell her digging for potatoes will have to wait.”
It’s Sunday; the experiment is on Wednesday. “Do I have enough time?” Seka replies, “It’s very straightforward. Your office, with your name on the door, is two doors down from Fermi’s. Three more doors down is the equipment lab. Leona has been experimenting with different wires and other materials, so you should have all you need to sabotage and replace the equipment.” She hands Leslie a folded sheet of paper. “Here is a map of the campus and the squash court.”
⸎ Monday morning. Following the map, Leslie heads straight to her office and closes the door. She checks her calendar and any other notebooks on the top of the desk to know what appointments and assignments she will need to make. Her morning is free; she is to review the block instruments in the afternoon. Nothing on her calendar past December 3.
Fermi knocks on her door and enters. “Too busy to say good morning?” Leslie looks up from her desk at the intense black eyebrows and the hairline that circles Fermi’s head like a pair of earphones, She has prepared an excuse for being curt and noncommunicative. “There are some problems at home.” Fermi asks, “Is your mother okay?”
“She is fine. There are other things going on.”
“Well let me know if I can be of help.”
Fermi leaves and returns to his office. On his desk is a large ring of six keys, including a small old black one that seems out of place. Leslie checks the drawers of her desk. Just office supplies; notepads, rulers, a box of paper clips, a bottle of glue.
She heads for the equipment lab, where there are three long worktables and metal shelves lining the walls, and a desk at the back of the room. The shelves are full of various instruments and labeled boxes with instrument parts, rolls of wires of different compositions, and four canisters of gases. She spots two Geiger counters of different sizes on one shelf. On another shelf are two identical thermocouples for measuring heat from the reactor, and a boron trifluoride neutron detector. She also discovers a large, zippered leather bag with a handle at the top, big enough to carry a Geiger counter and thermocouple but not the neutron detector. On still another shelf is a large box marked, “Used, Faulty.” Was Leona a hoarder or just meticulous?
In the desk are files containing instruction manuals, experiment logs, screwdrivers, pliers, various cutting tools, rulers and tape measures, rolls of tape and bottles and tubes of glue. There are various tools scattered atop the tables.
Leslie walks up to the Geiger counters and notices a small box labelled “Windows.” She opens it. Inside are small glass-like mica disks of two different sizes. Apparently, Leona has been assembling her own counters. The transparent disks fit in the front of the detector tube and have a precise density to allow radiation particles to enter the device. If they are too dense, they will underestimate the radiation.
The front of the counter tube extends nearly an inch beyond the mica disk. She takes one of the extra disks and tries inserting it in the front but it’s too large. The disk inside must be lodged in a groove cut into the metal. It is larger than the interior tube width. She doesn’t risk disassembling the tube. The gases inside would leak out. She tries a disk designed for the smaller instrument. It falls directly on the disk inside but doesn’t fit snugly; it will drop out.
Leslie finds a glue tube with a long narrow nozzle. She puts one drop in the center of the disk, then drops it down the tube. She then squeezes a narrow band of glue around the edge of the smaller disk. There is still a half inch margin from the second disk to the front of the tube. Nobody will notice unless they know what to look for. She figures the extra disk will halve the radiation detection or more if the blocking effect is exponential.
Screwing with the thermocouples will take more thought. The Geiger counters are freestanding and can be easily switched. The thermocouple will be connected to the reactor block, and she needs to discover where it can be disconnected.
Leslie, sitting on the couch, picks a plush monkey from the corner table and tries to make light of her visit. “Do I get one of these if I’m a good girl?”
Seka has moved her chair halfway to the couch. “I give them to men who cry. It’s harder for them to show their emotions.” Leslie puts the monkey back.
“It’s been a while. You shouldn’t stay away if you have issues to work out.” Leslie lies. “I needed more time to remember.” She wasn’t sure if she could trust Seka. This seemed like a conflict of interest: asking Seka to interpret Seka’s place in her memories. But Leslie decided there was more at stake than her emotional well-being. There was a mystery to be solved and Seka seemed to have the keys to the locks. “Where did we leave off?” asked Seka.
“It was 1966. There was a nuclear war but as the bombs dropped, I was swept back in time.” Leslie picks up a toy car. “You were taking me for a ride. We were going to Chicago. It was November 1942. And I wasn’t me.”
⸎ The black DeSoto is parked in front of a Chicago diner. Seka and Leslie sit at a booth, each sipping a mug of coffee. On the table, next to the wall, are salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of catsup, a napkin holder, and a toothpick dispenser. A waitress in a pink uniform walks up and puts a plate with two frosted chocolate donuts in front of Seka. The waitress hovers over Leslie. “You sure you don’t want anything else, sweetie?”
“No, thank you.” The disappointed waitress jots down the small total on her order and then leaves. “How can I be here and be someone else?” asks Leslie Seka takes two toothpicks from the dispenser and holds up a donut. “Time is like the surface of this donut.” She pokes one toothpick into the surface. “This is the past.” She pokes the other toothpick into the opposite side. “This is the future.” She twirls the donut around. “There is no forward or backward.” She puts the donut down. “I’m giving you a chance to change history, to stop those men from hurting you.”
Leslie responds, “That still doesn’t explain my new identity.”
“Our minds and bodies are just streams of data that can be rearranged.” That seems a bit too glib, but Leslie has another objection. “If you are some kind of time traveler, why do you need me?" Seka is impatient. “I write the music. I conduct the orchestra. Do I have to play all the instruments too?
⸎ Leslie and Seka enter the third-floor room of the hotel, located just two blocks from the university. Seka explains, “These are temporary quarters, so you won’t have to interact with your mother. You need to call her and say you need to stay a couple of days on campus for some urgent work. Tell her digging for potatoes will have to wait.”
It’s Sunday; the experiment is on Wednesday. “Do I have enough time?” Seka replies, “It’s very straightforward. Your office, with your name on the door, is two doors down from Fermi’s. Three more doors down is the equipment lab. Leona has been experimenting with different wires and other materials, so you should have all you need to sabotage and replace the equipment.” She hands Leslie a folded sheet of paper. “Here is a map of the campus and the squash court.”
⸎ Monday morning. Following the map, Leslie heads straight to her office and closes the door. She checks her calendar and any other notebooks on the top of the desk to know what appointments and assignments she will need to make. Her morning is free; she is to review the block instruments in the afternoon. Nothing on her calendar past December 3.
Fermi knocks on her door and enters. “Too busy to say good morning?” Leslie looks up from her desk at the intense black eyebrows and the hairline that circles Fermi’s head like a pair of earphones, She has prepared an excuse for being curt and noncommunicative. “There are some problems at home.” Fermi asks, “Is your mother okay?”
“She is fine. There are other things going on.”
“Well let me know if I can be of help.”
Fermi leaves and returns to his office. On his desk is a large ring of six keys, including a small old black one that seems out of place. Leslie checks the drawers of her desk. Just office supplies; notepads, rulers, a box of paper clips, a bottle of glue.
She heads for the equipment lab, where there are three long worktables and metal shelves lining the walls, and a desk at the back of the room. The shelves are full of various instruments and labeled boxes with instrument parts, rolls of wires of different compositions, and four canisters of gases. She spots two Geiger counters of different sizes on one shelf. On another shelf are two identical thermocouples for measuring heat from the reactor, and a boron trifluoride neutron detector. She also discovers a large, zippered leather bag with a handle at the top, big enough to carry a Geiger counter and thermocouple but not the neutron detector. On still another shelf is a large box marked, “Used, Faulty.” Was Leona a hoarder or just meticulous?
In the desk are files containing instruction manuals, experiment logs, screwdrivers, pliers, various cutting tools, rulers and tape measures, rolls of tape and bottles and tubes of glue. There are various tools scattered atop the tables.
Leslie walks up to the Geiger counters and notices a small box labelled “Windows.” She opens it. Inside are small glass-like mica disks of two different sizes. Apparently, Leona has been assembling her own counters. The transparent disks fit in the front of the detector tube and have a precise density to allow radiation particles to enter the device. If they are too dense, they will underestimate the radiation.
The front of the counter tube extends nearly an inch beyond the mica disk. She takes one of the extra disks and tries inserting it in the front but it’s too large. The disk inside must be lodged in a groove cut into the metal. It is larger than the interior tube width. She doesn’t risk disassembling the tube. The gases inside would leak out. She tries a disk designed for the smaller instrument. It falls directly on the disk inside but doesn’t fit snugly; it will drop out.
Leslie finds a glue tube with a long narrow nozzle. She puts one drop in the center of the disk, then drops it down the tube. She then squeezes a narrow band of glue around the edge of the smaller disk. There is still a half inch margin from the second disk to the front of the tube. Nobody will notice unless they know what to look for. She figures the extra disk will halve the radiation detection or more if the blocking effect is exponential.
Screwing with the thermocouples will take more thought. The Geiger counters are freestanding and can be easily switched. The thermocouple will be connected to the reactor block, and she needs to discover where it can be disconnected.
The first nuclear reactor
After lunch, she walks to the squash court. A chorus of lab coats hang from hooks along a hallway. Inside, a grayish-black balloon cloth lines the ceiling, floor, and three walls of the court, leaving only the spectators’ balcony undraped. Rising from the floor is a black behemoth, fifty-seven layers of graphite bricks, forming a cubed ellipsoid twenty feet tall and twenty-seven feet wide. Squaring the circle, pushing female form to male purpose.
A Geiger counter and thermocouple are on one table, with wires from the latter leading to the pile. On another table in the spectator section is a boron trifluoride neutron detector, a much bulkier instrument, with a wire leading to a counter on Fermi’s table in the balcony. Six other scientists are in the room, discussing aspects of the experiment.
She goes outside and surveys the court building and other athletic facilities. She finds an outdoor garden faucet behind a building next to the court.
⸎ Leslie finds Seka in her room when she returns to the hotel. “Made any progress today?” asks Seka. “I found a way to sabotage the Geiger counter, but this is getting complicated. Sometimes I think it would be simpler if you just gave me a gun and I killed everybody and let the reactor run wild.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the incident must look like an accident and there is something fundamentally wrong with the experiment.”
Not really enthusiasm, thinks Leslie. More like weariness and exasperation. “So, what happens to me after the experiment? Do I run away?”
“No, you must stay and be there with the other scientists. Don’t worry. I got you into that body and I will get you out before things become too uncomfortable.” Maybe she can trust Seka, but this could be a suicide mission.
⸎ Tuesday morning. Time is running out, but Leslie still fears Fermi or another scientist will ask her a question that tests her knowledge. She pours through the experiment logs, which includes inspections and test results of the equipment. One entry catches her eye: a note that Leona had replaced an oxidized chromel wire in the thermocouple. Bingo. The “green rot” reduces the emf output and the thermocouple reads low. Leslie rummages through the “Used, Faulty” box until she finds an envelope marked “chromel” with the wire inside. She unscrews a panel of the thermocouple and replaces the good wire with the bad.
She puts the altered Geiger counter and thermocouple in the tote bag. She finds a small tool kit bag and fills it with assorted small tools, including a Phillips screwdriver and regular screwdriver, gator clips, and a needle nose pliers, then places the kit bag in the larger bag. There is still some room left over for the face towel she will steal from the hotel room. In her office, she finds a brown paper shopping bag. She will take it home tonight.
⸎ Wednesday morning. No one questions the contents of the bag Leslie brings to work. She goes straight to the lab and stuffs the towel from the bag into the equipment tote, which she takes to her office. She heads to the squash court, minus the bag, where 49 scientists are assembled for the experiment in the viewing stand.
Samuel Allison stands ready with a bucket of cadmium nitrate solution, which he will throw on the pile if the reaction appears to be out of control. Walter Zinn removes the zip emergency control rod, which is now suspended by a scram line over the pile. In an emergency, a scientist will cut the line with an ax, allowing it to fall into the pile hole.
Leslie loudly calls out the count from the baron trifluoride detector. George Weil, the only one on the floor, withdraws all but one of the control rods. He then slowly withdraws the last control rod six inches at a time, with measurements taken at each step. At 11: 25 Fermi orders the control rods reinserted and announces a lunch break. They will reconvene at 2 p.m. to continue the experiment.
The crowd leaves the court. Leslie walks quickly to her office, picks up the equipment bag and immediately heads back to the court. She finds Seka inside the front door. “Has there been a change of plans?”
“No,” says Seka. “I will stay here to see that you are not disturbed.” Leslie wonders how she can stop any intruders but doesn’t press the matter.
She is relieved to find the room is empty. First, the easiest part; replace the Geiger counter. Next, detach the wires from the thermocouple and replace it with the faulty instrument. She sets the untampered instruments at the end of the table.
The trifluoride detector will require a lot of hands-on work. No, wait. She doesn’t need to do that. She is manning the instrument; she can announce any reading she wants. She doesn’t have to change anything. It will be a lot easier to fiddle with the counter at Fermi’s station. She steps up into the viewing stand with her tool kit and the towel.
Leslie unscrews the top of the counter. Inside the machine, the graph arm is connected to a coiled copper spring. Leslie takes a gator clip from the tool bag and uses it to bind two spirals of the spring, then she adjusts the internal calibration screws so the instrument will underreact even more to the neutron emissions.
She then scrambles to the top of the reactor and stuffs the towel into the zip hole, to prevent the rod from descending. Back on the floor, she picks up the bucket of cadmium nitrate solution and heads for the door. She nods to Seka and goes outside. Behind the court, she dumps the solution on a patch of grass. She then goes to the garden faucet and refills the bucket with water, returns to the court, and places the bucket where she found it.
She places the original Geiger counter and thermocouple in the equipment bag, along with her tool kit, and heads straight for the equipment lab. She puts the untampered instruments on the shelves. She pauses to catch her breath. She has 20 minutes left to get back to the court.
⸎ Scientists are returning to the squash court. Fermi ascends the stairs. On the observation deck, he sits as the table with the cylindrical pen counter. The crowd pressing around him has grown larger; another dozen scientists have joined the show. Fermi places his ring of keys on the table. He peers over the railing to see Weil standing next to the base of the reactor.
Fermi starts where they left off, ordering all but one control rod removed. He orders Weil to pull the last rod seven feet out. Fermi studies the instrument. The pen is etching a small hill. “Another three feet,” Fermi calls out. Weil complies. Scientists crowd the railing, watching intensely.
Fermi taps the chart recorder box with his knuckles then tells Weil to remove the rod completely. The chart records a modest spike. Fermi calls out to Leslie, “What are you getting?” She calls out a low false reading.
Fermi stares at the instrument for another twelve minutes. The Geiger counter clicks at a leisurely pace. The thermocouple registers a small heat increase. The spectators grow restless. Weil places his right hand in front of one of the holes. Perspiration gathers on the hand. He looks up at Fermi. “I think something may be wrong.” Fermi replies, “Okay, shut down the block.”
Weil lifts a rod and puts it into a hole, but half the rod won’t go in. Inside the block, melting graphite is already blocking the holes. Fermi has abandoned the chair and is now leaning over the railing. Weil starts reinserting the other rods, but they also stop short. Fermi looks at the ZIP rod. “Cut the rope,” he calls to the scientist hovering with the ax. The physicist chops the rope; the rod falls into the hole but stops at 15 inches.
“What is blocking that?” Fermi calls out. The scientist pulls the ZIP rod out, peeks into the hole but can’t make anything out. He yells to Allison, “Release the solution.” He tosses the water on the pile, which quickly turns to steam on the quickly heating pile. He calls to Fermi, “This isn’t cadmium.”
A thin stream of melting black liquid trickles out of three of the control rod holes. In a carefully measured but loud voice, Fermi tells the crowd, “I would recommend that we leave immediately.” The bricks begin to disassemble and clatter. Black liquid is now leaking from all the control rod holes. Smoke starts bellowing from the top of the reactor, then quickly envelopes the entire room as the scientists try to grope their way out.
⸎ Seka again sits before the computer screen. She opens the Leona folder. Inside is the Leslie folder. Seka moves Leslie’s folder back to the display screen.
⸎ Wisps of smoke rise from the reactor ruins. A congealed blob of graphite the size of a small desk rests among pieces of broken masonry and charred timber. A figure in a black hood and a long black robe enters the site. Seka’s face is young, but her hair is gray. She stoops down to pick up Fermi’s ring of keys. She removes the small, black ancient one.
⸎ The accident requires the evacuation of the university, businesses, and residences in a three-mile radius under the guise of a chemical explosion. Cancer incidence statistics for the metropolitan Chicago area are suppressed under wartime censorship rules. As knowledge of the long-term effects of the radiation leak out, the circle of abandoned buildings grows larger.
⸎ September 26, 1966. Leslie stares glassy-eyes toward the front of the class—the introductory physics class at the University of New Chicago. A voice trails in her head. “Maybe you’ve changed things.” Professor Haynes bends over her and squeaks, “Leslie, Leslie, dear . . . It’s Aunt Em, darling.” The class laughs. Leslie awakes, startled.
Haynes smugly addresses the class. “Leslie is going to tell us what happened on December 2, 1942. I’m sure she knows this so well, she could tell it to us in her sleep.” Leslie stalls. “1942.” She looks down at the book on her desk and begins to turn a page, but Haynes slams his hand down on the book. She strains to remember. “December 2, 1942.” Then she perks up. “The date on which Fermi’s nuclear reactor melted down at the University of Chicago.”
“And why was this important during the war?”
“Three years later we sent ships with melting reactors into the ports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Leslie opens her book. For some reason, she feels compelled to confirm the obvious. She flips to page 40. In one photo, smoke rises from a ship in the port of Hiroshima. The other picture shows radiation victims in a hospital.
⸎ Leslie, walking with her friend Carol, stops at a newsstand. The newspaper headline “Savannah Sinks” tops a large aerial photo of a burning ship. The subhead reads: “Nuclear-Powered Ship Lost in Mid-Atlantic.”
⸎ That night Leslie walks past hedges and blind corners, past unlit spots on the winding walkway. What did she hear? She stops. Behind a row of bushes, a hand grips the nape of Carol’s neck, and a knife flashes near her eyes. “Keep quiet or die,” he whispers.
The sound stopped. Leslie resumes walking.
⸎ Back in the present, Leslie now lies on the couch. Seka is still in the chair facing her. “What do you think the meltdown means?” Seka asks. “I was angry.”
“Yes, that too. The nuclear meltdown signifies the long-term emotional poison of your rape and incest. In the dream, you turned that poison against the men who represent your father.”
“What are you talking about? My father didn’t hurt me.”
“Is that what you want to remember?” Leslie tries to change the subject. “What if it’s more than a dream? What if we face some real nuclear disaster?”
“Leslie, I know you want to intellectualize this. You have to look at this with your heart, not your head.”
Chapter 11
Lieutenant Nayif sees the approaching Chinook and ducks inside the mosque minaret. The helicopter flies over and around the clouds of burning oil. The mosque is about two thousand feet below and a mile away. Along the walkway facing the approaching chopper are a pickup truck with a tarp-covered long bed, and a Russian jeep. “Are we too late?” David asks.
The truck starts to move. Latham pushes the copter into a sharp descent. David braces himself. Lathan fires the anti-tank cannon, punching holes into the cab and bed. The full gas tank explodes, the tarp pops like a balloon and black shards rocket through the flames and smoke.
Latham circles the mosque and sees no further activity below. He lands the Chinook about fifty yards from the mosque and a few yards from the burning truck. He tells David, “You may want to stay here until they secure the building.” Everyone except Latham and David jump out. Dr. Noon is carrying his suit hood in one hand. The soldiers and Noon position themselves behind the arches of the two nearest walkways.
The covered, arched walkways are 10 feet wide and border a courtyard of bare ground about 90 feet across. In the center of the yard is a brick cube building 24 feet square and 30 feet tall. At the southeast intersection of two walkways is a minaret about 40 feet high, topped by a dome cupola. An open well filled with water is at the opposite corner of the courtyard.
Captain Malik is with Noon, who leans against the walkway arch. He feels a slight give; what is this, particle board? A rush job, built on the cheap.
Three soldiers, Maktar, Omar, and Salim, run from the walkway to the single door of the building at the center of the yard. They stand flush against the wall next to the door.
Another soldier, Radhi, approaches the minaret door. He kicks it open and, rifle pointed, enters. He looks up from the straw-covered floor to see a circular metal staircase rising to the top. “Anyone up there?” he yells. He could walk up the stairs, but if someone opens the hatch and fires, he will have no cover. Radhi pulls a card from his pocket and loudly reads the Arabic words for “Surrender now and you will be protected by the rules of the International Geneva Convention.” After waiting for a response, Radhi fires one shot at the floor of the observation deck. The bullet ricochets off the metal-plated deck and the metal stairway. Radhi flinches.
Hearing the shot from the tower, the three soldiers take cover behind the center building. They peer toward the tower. Radhi comes out of the minaret, walks a few steps away and looks up at the observation deck. He sees nothing.
Lieutenant Nayif, clutching a rifle, squats on the cupola floor. He peeps through a small hole in the wall of the minaret, seeing Radhi below.
The three American soldiers resume their position at the door of the central building. Omar opens the unlocked door and all three rush in. There is no one inside. The inside walls are made of the same plain brick as the outside. The soldiers peer down into the square opening and see the smooth black top of the cubic reactor. Maktar exclaims, “Look at that mutha.” Salim goes to the doorway and signals a thumbs up to those still in the walkways.
Noon, the captain, and the three other soldiers—Abdi, Masud, and Yazuf—enter the building, carrying bags of equipment. Radhi, still facing the minaret, backs into the doorway, catching the captain’s attention. “Radhi, I want you to stay outside with Masud. There must be another entrance.”
Noon turns on his Geiger counter, which clicks rapidly. “Captain, we need to act quickly.” He looks down at the smooth surface of graphite bricks on the reactor top. Where are the holes for the control rods? You drop the rods from the top; gravity works for you to contain the reaction. He mentally chides himself. Oh, you silly goose! You’re still thinking like an engineer, not a terrorist.
Peering past the edges of the reactor, the captain can see only part of the floor below. “Abdi and Yuzuf, the flash grenades.” In the reactor cavern, a blinding light shatters four instruments on a nearby table. Maktar, Oman and Salim jump on top of the reactor and aim their M16s in arcs across the cavern, but don’t fire. Maktar yells up, “Nobody down here, captain.”
David, who has been standing about 30 feet from the chopper, runs back to the helicopter. “I think I heard explosions.” Latham is unfazed. “They’ll let us know if they need help.”
Maktar, Omar and Salim climb down ropes to the floor of the reactor caverns. Noon, now wearing his hood, steps down a rope ladder, the Geiger counter strapped around one arm, sill clicking rapidly. Noon examines the reactor, which is at one end of a room about 24 feet wide and 48 feet long. Five holes at the front of the reactor form points of a pentagram around a sixth hole in the center, which is about five feet from the floor. Wires from the reactor lead to the broken instruments. Noon peers into the dark, empty holes, then scans the room. “The control rods are gone.”
Omar jumps at the conclusion. “The truck.” Just as he thought. That white pilot—whatizname—is a trigger-happy asshole.
Whiffs of smoke rise from the demolished truck. Three scorched, contorted bodies sit in the cab. Control rod pieces, ranging from six inches to two feet, some melted, lie on the tilted truck bed or are strewn about the ground. Wind covers two pieces with sand. Yuzuf, the captain, and Abdi run up the wreck. Yuzuf touches a rod and flinches from the heat. “Shit.” He puts down his rifle, takes off his flak jacket and shirt. He rolls the shirt around his hand and uses it to gingerly pick up and cradle three foot-long pieces in the jacket. The captain and Abdi follow his example.
In the minaret cupola, Nayif examines, for the 18th time, a surrender pass showing a cartoon of two Iraqi prisoners eating a feast. The Arabic caption reads “Prisoners enjoy full meals and complete medical care.” He then pulls from his jacket a photo of himself, in a row of soldiers, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Nayif looks through the peephole and sees Yuzuf carrying the rod pieces toward the central building. Nayif chooses loyalty and the role of fedaie. He rises and points the rifle out the cupola window.
Two bullets rip Yuzuf’s chest. He drops the rods and collapses forward. Radhi, waiting near the central building, swivels, and fires at Nayif. Masud ducks under a walkway and takes a shot at the Iraqi. The captain and Abdi, about 50 feet behind Yuzuf, drop their rods and run behind the walkway arches. Latham starts the copter engine. David jumps into the chopper.
Radhi, who has retreated behind a corner of the building, fires three more rounds at the Iraqi. Hearing the approaching chopper, Nayif opens the cupola floor hatch and descends into the stairwell. Latham fires the anti-tank cannon, shredding the cupola to pieces. Nayif rushes down the stairs as debris showers on his head and shoulders. The chopper turns and approaches the minaret again. Cannon fire shatters another six feet of the structure. Nayif opens the floor hatch as bricks and plaster pour down on him. Latham blows away another section of the minaret.
In the cavern Noon looks up as Abdi and the captain peer into cavern. The captain calls down, “Watch out. This stuff is hot.” Noon, Omar, Salim and Maktar step back as nine rod pieces are hurled down into the cavern. Noon picks them up with his gloved hands and shoves them into the reactor holes. The three soldiers stand idly by. Abdi calls down to them. “Use your shirts.”
In the building above, the captain covers Yusuf’s body with a blanket, then joins Abdi, Radhi and Masud, who are again collecting rod pieces at the truck site. David watches the soldiers at the truck as Latham casually lights a cigarette. “Shouldn’t we be helping them?”
“You don’t want your hands on that stuff.”
In the reactor cavern, more rods tumble down to Noon and the soldiers. Salim follows one that rolls under a dingy Oriental rug hanging from a wall. He pulls the rug aside and discovers a tunnel entrance. He calls back to the others, “I’m going to check this out.” Salim picks up his rifle, switches from three-shot to single-shot, pulls a small flashlight from his belt, and enters the tunnel. He sees a ladder at the end of the tunnel, dimly lit from a light source at the left. The light goes out. Realizing he’s an easy target, Salim turns off the flashlight and slowly walks ahead.
The ladder is again lighted but from a source above. Salim rushes forward and sees Nayif atop the ladder, his body halfway through the hatch. Salim fires three rounds into his butt. Nayif, grasping at straws, falls back down the hatch, landing face up. Salim turns his flashlight back on and examines the body. He reaches into the soldier’s inside jacket pocket and pulls out the photo of Nayif shaking Hussein’s hand. He drops the photo to the floor and spits on it.
Back in the cavern, Omar pushes rod pieces into reactor holes. He’s not going to complain but he suspects something is wrong. He volunteered for this mission because he thought it would be a no-brainer. The Iraqis were a pushover. But now they were trying to fix something before it blew up. Nobody told them they were going to be a bomb squad. Noon’s wearing protective clothes. So, blacks are expendable, as usual.
Already hot under the hood, Noon feels a new flush of panic. If the uranium is concentrated in the center of the block, maybe only half or three-quarters of each rod length contains the cadmium suppressant. He may have been putting “blank” end pieces into the center of the reactor. Well, it’s too late now.
Standing next to the chopper, David watches Abdi, Masud and Radhi vainly search for more rod pieces. Latham, still in the pilot’s seat, is reviewing the Mission Data form. Sections I and II will be completed at the unit’s discretion. He’ll skip that. Secrecy is discretion. Section III is mandatory for all sorties. He scans the fuel column. David cautiously interrupts the colonel. “I have to find out what’s going on.” Latham sees the restless Davis shifting from leg to leg, as if he had just asked the teacher to go to the washroom.
David turns and runs to the mosque building. Inside, he finds the captain alone. “What’s going on?” asks David. “Noon says we don’t have enough rod pieces.” In the cavern, the Geiger counter still clicks rapidly. Maktar, Omar and Salim stand idly by. Noon yells up to David and the captain, “Not enough pieces are reaching the core elements.”
David stares at the top of the reactor, recalling every image of the cube: the Kaaba in Mecca, the Fermi block, the drawings of Hussein and the cube. The snake coming out, becoming a sword. The snake is the rod. The sword is a rod. “If we had a sword or something.” The captain suggests, “Or a bayonet?” The soldiers down below hear the remarks and fix bayonets to the ends of their carbines. They shove them into the reactor holes, pushing the rod pieces further toward the reactor center. The Geiger counter slows to two clicks per second.
Maktar, Salim and Omar grin spontaneously and give each other high fives. Noon pulls a dosimeter from his suit pocket and sees the needle in the red. “We’re finished here. Let’s get out.”
A half mile from the mosque, binoculars emerge from a mound of sand. A motorized radio antenna rises from the earth.
⸎ In an underground bunker in Baghdad, a glowering Saddam Hussein nervously pushes the wooden dowel in and out of the model reactor cube. Saddam sits at the head of the conference table; farther down the table are three generals to the right, three to the left. They stare ahead silently but one casts a furtive glance a Saddam, who continues to push the rod in and out.
In the bunker radio room, a young military aide is listening to a short-wave radio. He pulls the headphones off and gets up from the table. He walks down a winding metal staircase and through a narrow corridor. He approaches a guard who stands next to an armored bulkhead door, like that found in submarines. The guard turns the wheel on the door and opens it.
The aide walks over to Hussein, stoops down and whispers something in his ear. The aide leaves. After a moment, Saddam’s face turns livid. His hands clench and break the dowel in the cube. Saddam glares at the cube in one hand and the dowel piece in the other. He shakes the cube but the dowel piece inside the cube won’t come out. He holds the cube up to his face and peers into the hole. He bangs the cube on the table. Finally, he throws the cube down the length of the table, and it bounces off a wall. The generals cringe.
Lieutenant Nayif sees the approaching Chinook and ducks inside the mosque minaret. The helicopter flies over and around the clouds of burning oil. The mosque is about two thousand feet below and a mile away. Along the walkway facing the approaching chopper are a pickup truck with a tarp-covered long bed, and a Russian jeep. “Are we too late?” David asks.
The truck starts to move. Latham pushes the copter into a sharp descent. David braces himself. Lathan fires the anti-tank cannon, punching holes into the cab and bed. The full gas tank explodes, the tarp pops like a balloon and black shards rocket through the flames and smoke.
Latham circles the mosque and sees no further activity below. He lands the Chinook about fifty yards from the mosque and a few yards from the burning truck. He tells David, “You may want to stay here until they secure the building.” Everyone except Latham and David jump out. Dr. Noon is carrying his suit hood in one hand. The soldiers and Noon position themselves behind the arches of the two nearest walkways.
The covered, arched walkways are 10 feet wide and border a courtyard of bare ground about 90 feet across. In the center of the yard is a brick cube building 24 feet square and 30 feet tall. At the southeast intersection of two walkways is a minaret about 40 feet high, topped by a dome cupola. An open well filled with water is at the opposite corner of the courtyard.
Captain Malik is with Noon, who leans against the walkway arch. He feels a slight give; what is this, particle board? A rush job, built on the cheap.
Three soldiers, Maktar, Omar, and Salim, run from the walkway to the single door of the building at the center of the yard. They stand flush against the wall next to the door.
Another soldier, Radhi, approaches the minaret door. He kicks it open and, rifle pointed, enters. He looks up from the straw-covered floor to see a circular metal staircase rising to the top. “Anyone up there?” he yells. He could walk up the stairs, but if someone opens the hatch and fires, he will have no cover. Radhi pulls a card from his pocket and loudly reads the Arabic words for “Surrender now and you will be protected by the rules of the International Geneva Convention.” After waiting for a response, Radhi fires one shot at the floor of the observation deck. The bullet ricochets off the metal-plated deck and the metal stairway. Radhi flinches.
Hearing the shot from the tower, the three soldiers take cover behind the center building. They peer toward the tower. Radhi comes out of the minaret, walks a few steps away and looks up at the observation deck. He sees nothing.
Lieutenant Nayif, clutching a rifle, squats on the cupola floor. He peeps through a small hole in the wall of the minaret, seeing Radhi below.
The three American soldiers resume their position at the door of the central building. Omar opens the unlocked door and all three rush in. There is no one inside. The inside walls are made of the same plain brick as the outside. The soldiers peer down into the square opening and see the smooth black top of the cubic reactor. Maktar exclaims, “Look at that mutha.” Salim goes to the doorway and signals a thumbs up to those still in the walkways.
Noon, the captain, and the three other soldiers—Abdi, Masud, and Yazuf—enter the building, carrying bags of equipment. Radhi, still facing the minaret, backs into the doorway, catching the captain’s attention. “Radhi, I want you to stay outside with Masud. There must be another entrance.”
Noon turns on his Geiger counter, which clicks rapidly. “Captain, we need to act quickly.” He looks down at the smooth surface of graphite bricks on the reactor top. Where are the holes for the control rods? You drop the rods from the top; gravity works for you to contain the reaction. He mentally chides himself. Oh, you silly goose! You’re still thinking like an engineer, not a terrorist.
Peering past the edges of the reactor, the captain can see only part of the floor below. “Abdi and Yuzuf, the flash grenades.” In the reactor cavern, a blinding light shatters four instruments on a nearby table. Maktar, Oman and Salim jump on top of the reactor and aim their M16s in arcs across the cavern, but don’t fire. Maktar yells up, “Nobody down here, captain.”
David, who has been standing about 30 feet from the chopper, runs back to the helicopter. “I think I heard explosions.” Latham is unfazed. “They’ll let us know if they need help.”
Maktar, Omar and Salim climb down ropes to the floor of the reactor caverns. Noon, now wearing his hood, steps down a rope ladder, the Geiger counter strapped around one arm, sill clicking rapidly. Noon examines the reactor, which is at one end of a room about 24 feet wide and 48 feet long. Five holes at the front of the reactor form points of a pentagram around a sixth hole in the center, which is about five feet from the floor. Wires from the reactor lead to the broken instruments. Noon peers into the dark, empty holes, then scans the room. “The control rods are gone.”
Omar jumps at the conclusion. “The truck.” Just as he thought. That white pilot—whatizname—is a trigger-happy asshole.
Whiffs of smoke rise from the demolished truck. Three scorched, contorted bodies sit in the cab. Control rod pieces, ranging from six inches to two feet, some melted, lie on the tilted truck bed or are strewn about the ground. Wind covers two pieces with sand. Yuzuf, the captain, and Abdi run up the wreck. Yuzuf touches a rod and flinches from the heat. “Shit.” He puts down his rifle, takes off his flak jacket and shirt. He rolls the shirt around his hand and uses it to gingerly pick up and cradle three foot-long pieces in the jacket. The captain and Abdi follow his example.
In the minaret cupola, Nayif examines, for the 18th time, a surrender pass showing a cartoon of two Iraqi prisoners eating a feast. The Arabic caption reads “Prisoners enjoy full meals and complete medical care.” He then pulls from his jacket a photo of himself, in a row of soldiers, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Nayif looks through the peephole and sees Yuzuf carrying the rod pieces toward the central building. Nayif chooses loyalty and the role of fedaie. He rises and points the rifle out the cupola window.
Two bullets rip Yuzuf’s chest. He drops the rods and collapses forward. Radhi, waiting near the central building, swivels, and fires at Nayif. Masud ducks under a walkway and takes a shot at the Iraqi. The captain and Abdi, about 50 feet behind Yuzuf, drop their rods and run behind the walkway arches. Latham starts the copter engine. David jumps into the chopper.
Radhi, who has retreated behind a corner of the building, fires three more rounds at the Iraqi. Hearing the approaching chopper, Nayif opens the cupola floor hatch and descends into the stairwell. Latham fires the anti-tank cannon, shredding the cupola to pieces. Nayif rushes down the stairs as debris showers on his head and shoulders. The chopper turns and approaches the minaret again. Cannon fire shatters another six feet of the structure. Nayif opens the floor hatch as bricks and plaster pour down on him. Latham blows away another section of the minaret.
In the cavern Noon looks up as Abdi and the captain peer into cavern. The captain calls down, “Watch out. This stuff is hot.” Noon, Omar, Salim and Maktar step back as nine rod pieces are hurled down into the cavern. Noon picks them up with his gloved hands and shoves them into the reactor holes. The three soldiers stand idly by. Abdi calls down to them. “Use your shirts.”
In the building above, the captain covers Yusuf’s body with a blanket, then joins Abdi, Radhi and Masud, who are again collecting rod pieces at the truck site. David watches the soldiers at the truck as Latham casually lights a cigarette. “Shouldn’t we be helping them?”
“You don’t want your hands on that stuff.”
In the reactor cavern, more rods tumble down to Noon and the soldiers. Salim follows one that rolls under a dingy Oriental rug hanging from a wall. He pulls the rug aside and discovers a tunnel entrance. He calls back to the others, “I’m going to check this out.” Salim picks up his rifle, switches from three-shot to single-shot, pulls a small flashlight from his belt, and enters the tunnel. He sees a ladder at the end of the tunnel, dimly lit from a light source at the left. The light goes out. Realizing he’s an easy target, Salim turns off the flashlight and slowly walks ahead.
The ladder is again lighted but from a source above. Salim rushes forward and sees Nayif atop the ladder, his body halfway through the hatch. Salim fires three rounds into his butt. Nayif, grasping at straws, falls back down the hatch, landing face up. Salim turns his flashlight back on and examines the body. He reaches into the soldier’s inside jacket pocket and pulls out the photo of Nayif shaking Hussein’s hand. He drops the photo to the floor and spits on it.
Back in the cavern, Omar pushes rod pieces into reactor holes. He’s not going to complain but he suspects something is wrong. He volunteered for this mission because he thought it would be a no-brainer. The Iraqis were a pushover. But now they were trying to fix something before it blew up. Nobody told them they were going to be a bomb squad. Noon’s wearing protective clothes. So, blacks are expendable, as usual.
Already hot under the hood, Noon feels a new flush of panic. If the uranium is concentrated in the center of the block, maybe only half or three-quarters of each rod length contains the cadmium suppressant. He may have been putting “blank” end pieces into the center of the reactor. Well, it’s too late now.
Standing next to the chopper, David watches Abdi, Masud and Radhi vainly search for more rod pieces. Latham, still in the pilot’s seat, is reviewing the Mission Data form. Sections I and II will be completed at the unit’s discretion. He’ll skip that. Secrecy is discretion. Section III is mandatory for all sorties. He scans the fuel column. David cautiously interrupts the colonel. “I have to find out what’s going on.” Latham sees the restless Davis shifting from leg to leg, as if he had just asked the teacher to go to the washroom.
David turns and runs to the mosque building. Inside, he finds the captain alone. “What’s going on?” asks David. “Noon says we don’t have enough rod pieces.” In the cavern, the Geiger counter still clicks rapidly. Maktar, Omar and Salim stand idly by. Noon yells up to David and the captain, “Not enough pieces are reaching the core elements.”
David stares at the top of the reactor, recalling every image of the cube: the Kaaba in Mecca, the Fermi block, the drawings of Hussein and the cube. The snake coming out, becoming a sword. The snake is the rod. The sword is a rod. “If we had a sword or something.” The captain suggests, “Or a bayonet?” The soldiers down below hear the remarks and fix bayonets to the ends of their carbines. They shove them into the reactor holes, pushing the rod pieces further toward the reactor center. The Geiger counter slows to two clicks per second.
Maktar, Salim and Omar grin spontaneously and give each other high fives. Noon pulls a dosimeter from his suit pocket and sees the needle in the red. “We’re finished here. Let’s get out.”
A half mile from the mosque, binoculars emerge from a mound of sand. A motorized radio antenna rises from the earth.
⸎ In an underground bunker in Baghdad, a glowering Saddam Hussein nervously pushes the wooden dowel in and out of the model reactor cube. Saddam sits at the head of the conference table; farther down the table are three generals to the right, three to the left. They stare ahead silently but one casts a furtive glance a Saddam, who continues to push the rod in and out.
In the bunker radio room, a young military aide is listening to a short-wave radio. He pulls the headphones off and gets up from the table. He walks down a winding metal staircase and through a narrow corridor. He approaches a guard who stands next to an armored bulkhead door, like that found in submarines. The guard turns the wheel on the door and opens it.
The aide walks over to Hussein, stoops down and whispers something in his ear. The aide leaves. After a moment, Saddam’s face turns livid. His hands clench and break the dowel in the cube. Saddam glares at the cube in one hand and the dowel piece in the other. He shakes the cube but the dowel piece inside the cube won’t come out. He holds the cube up to his face and peers into the hole. He bangs the cube on the table. Finally, he throws the cube down the length of the table, and it bounces off a wall. The generals cringe.
Chapter 12
The surviving soldiers from the raid occupy cots in a two-story metal warehouse in Al Khobar, a suburb of Dhahran. The building, two hundred feet long and fifty-five feet wide, had been converted into a barracks to house 120 soldiers, most from a single Army reserve unit. The total had been upped to 128 with the addition of the unnamed special unit. The unit’s eight cots, a two by four block, adjoin a wall near the center of the building.
Maktar and Radhi lie on their cots, zoning out to the music on their Walkmans. Oman is eating a bag of Famous Amos chocolate chips cookies. Masud and Salim exchange free throws, tossing a grapefruit-size basketball into a small hoop Velcroed to the wall.
Abdi gazes at one corner of the building where a clothesline of ponchos form a dressing room. Two white female soldiers, mid-twenties, duck behind the barrier. Abdi imagines them taking off their clothes and fondling each other’s breasts. His line of sight is broken by the captain walking by, carrying a bunch of bananas. Must have bought ‘em at Souk’s Supermarket, thinks Abdi. It’s a strange kind of military life—a barracks behind a shopping center. You can buy anything you want in Saudi Arabia, except booze and women.
Radhi takes off his headset and opens the hero bidding. “So Masud, what are you going to do now that you’ve save the world?”
“Heh, I’m going to Disneyland.”
“I want to do a shoe commercial,” says Maktar. “I stepped on Saddam’s rod with my Reebok.” The others laugh. Abdi unzips, “I want to meet Janet Jackson, so we can discuss the appropriate utilization of my control rod.” Maktar mimics a girl, “Ooh baby baby, keep it in, keep it in or I’ll melt down.”
“In your dreams,” says Omar. “The man’s gonna give us nothing.”
“They have to give us something. We saved their ass.” Salim seeks reassurance from their leader. “Right, captain?”
“We were told to keep this mission a secret. Nobody is going to brag about anything.” The door at the end of the warehouse opens, letting in a streak of afternoon sun. It’s Latham, wearing a backpack, and Noon, carrying a small suitcase. Omar mentally objects. What the shit do they want? Is the Englishmahn sending us on another mission?
As Lathan reaches their cots, the captain, already standing, salutes. The other soldiers stay at ease. Latham returns the salute. “Thank you, captain. Dr. Noon will be staying with your people tonight. I hope that isn’t an inconvenience.”
“Not at all, sir. Do you wish to join us?” The black soldiers bristle at the captain’s suggestion. “No, thank you. I will be staying elsewhere. I will be back in the morning for our formal debriefing.” Noon puts his suitcase on the cot that had been allotted to the now-dead Yuzuf.
Outside, Latham climbs the narrow exterior staircase of the warehouse. He treads softly on the metal roof, not sure if the creaking metal will be heard below. He finds an open, flat area among the duct work, removes his backpack, and pulls from it a string of red light bulbs. He untangles the cord and, with tape, secures the lights to the roof in the form of an “X” about eight feet across. He removes a battery powered timer from the backpack and plugs the light cord into the unit. He tests the lights.
⸎ Latham’s MI status gave him carte blanche to any equipment not committed to a specific mission. However, borrowing a Tornado required a plausible cover story: a clandestine flight into Iranian airspace to determine if Iraqi ground units were retreating into that country. Latham puts on his pilot’s mask and checks the instruments on the cockpit. The Tornado taxis on the airstrip.
⸎ Noon stands outside the barracks, taking a break from the boisterous American ambiance. He can’t figure it out. If their mission was so special, why was he and the others thrown into a building with scores of other soldiers? They should be honored guests at the Saudi’s best hotel. Noon spots a veiled woman behind the shopping center. Neva lowers the veil from her face and beckons Noon with her hand.
⸎ As Latham leaves Saudi air space, he switches off his IFF (identification, friend for foe) broadcast code and begins a low altitude run.
At 8:30 p.m., no one is sleeping in the barracks. A spirited nickel poker game is in progress, but the most noise comes from a group playing Trivial Pursuit. At 8:32, Latham completes his turn above a marshy area about fifty miles northeast of Basra, Iraq. He engages the afterburner and begins a 50-degree climb, accelerating to 2,200 m.p.h. At 8:38, Lathan nears the top of his fake missile trajectory. The Foxtrot battery north of Dharan detects the “missile” but takes no action as the “Scud” is outside the battery’s engagement zone. As Latham enters Saudi airspace, he reduces engine power, resumes normal flight, and switches his IFF back on.
The southern batteries of the 2nd Battalion, Alpha and Bravo, positioned at Dhahran Air Base, are directly responsible for intercepting any Scuds that threaten the base. However, Bravo had been ordered shut down for maintenance work on its radar system. The Alpha radar shows only aircraft flying in the vicinity. Over Al Khobar, Latham sees the lighted red “X” on the roof of the building and places it in the crosshairs on the fire-control display.
⸎ The original explanation for the barracks massacre: No Patriot was launched against the incoming “Scud” because the rocket appeared to be heading for an unpopulated area. Later, the Defense Department would assert that no Patriot was fired because the launch computer was down. Finally, the Defense Department would assert that Alpha detected no Scud because its Patriot radar computer, running full-time without a self-correcting rebooting, had accumulated a one-third second “surveillance range gate error” that caused the radar to miss the Scud by 700 yards.
Analysts noted another anomaly: the missile that hit the barracks was possibly the only Iraqi Scud that failed to break apart in flight.
The press was informed that, of the 28 killed and 98 wounded, 13 of the dead were from the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, an Army unit from Pennsylvania. Assignments of the other dead personnel were not released.
⸎ In a black void, a long thin streak of sunlight grows wider, as a chugging sound vibrates in the distance. David awakes in his London hotel room and turns toward Neva, who is watching him. “Hello, light of my life,” he says. “A penny for your thoughts,” Neva offers.
“Maybe I’m sleeping with an older woman.” She gently punches him on the shoulder. “You’re in trouble now. You better have a good explanation.”
“Whenever, I look at you, I see a Greek goddess. And since a goddess is immortal, she would be an older woman.”
“And what Greek goddess do you think I am?” David turns his eyes to the painting of the burning ships on the wall. “Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.” Neva smiles.
In the morning, Neva, dressed and wearing sunglasses, bends over and kisses David on the forehead. He stirs but doesn’t waken.
The surviving soldiers from the raid occupy cots in a two-story metal warehouse in Al Khobar, a suburb of Dhahran. The building, two hundred feet long and fifty-five feet wide, had been converted into a barracks to house 120 soldiers, most from a single Army reserve unit. The total had been upped to 128 with the addition of the unnamed special unit. The unit’s eight cots, a two by four block, adjoin a wall near the center of the building.
Maktar and Radhi lie on their cots, zoning out to the music on their Walkmans. Oman is eating a bag of Famous Amos chocolate chips cookies. Masud and Salim exchange free throws, tossing a grapefruit-size basketball into a small hoop Velcroed to the wall.
Abdi gazes at one corner of the building where a clothesline of ponchos form a dressing room. Two white female soldiers, mid-twenties, duck behind the barrier. Abdi imagines them taking off their clothes and fondling each other’s breasts. His line of sight is broken by the captain walking by, carrying a bunch of bananas. Must have bought ‘em at Souk’s Supermarket, thinks Abdi. It’s a strange kind of military life—a barracks behind a shopping center. You can buy anything you want in Saudi Arabia, except booze and women.
Radhi takes off his headset and opens the hero bidding. “So Masud, what are you going to do now that you’ve save the world?”
“Heh, I’m going to Disneyland.”
“I want to do a shoe commercial,” says Maktar. “I stepped on Saddam’s rod with my Reebok.” The others laugh. Abdi unzips, “I want to meet Janet Jackson, so we can discuss the appropriate utilization of my control rod.” Maktar mimics a girl, “Ooh baby baby, keep it in, keep it in or I’ll melt down.”
“In your dreams,” says Omar. “The man’s gonna give us nothing.”
“They have to give us something. We saved their ass.” Salim seeks reassurance from their leader. “Right, captain?”
“We were told to keep this mission a secret. Nobody is going to brag about anything.” The door at the end of the warehouse opens, letting in a streak of afternoon sun. It’s Latham, wearing a backpack, and Noon, carrying a small suitcase. Omar mentally objects. What the shit do they want? Is the Englishmahn sending us on another mission?
As Lathan reaches their cots, the captain, already standing, salutes. The other soldiers stay at ease. Latham returns the salute. “Thank you, captain. Dr. Noon will be staying with your people tonight. I hope that isn’t an inconvenience.”
“Not at all, sir. Do you wish to join us?” The black soldiers bristle at the captain’s suggestion. “No, thank you. I will be staying elsewhere. I will be back in the morning for our formal debriefing.” Noon puts his suitcase on the cot that had been allotted to the now-dead Yuzuf.
Outside, Latham climbs the narrow exterior staircase of the warehouse. He treads softly on the metal roof, not sure if the creaking metal will be heard below. He finds an open, flat area among the duct work, removes his backpack, and pulls from it a string of red light bulbs. He untangles the cord and, with tape, secures the lights to the roof in the form of an “X” about eight feet across. He removes a battery powered timer from the backpack and plugs the light cord into the unit. He tests the lights.
⸎ Latham’s MI status gave him carte blanche to any equipment not committed to a specific mission. However, borrowing a Tornado required a plausible cover story: a clandestine flight into Iranian airspace to determine if Iraqi ground units were retreating into that country. Latham puts on his pilot’s mask and checks the instruments on the cockpit. The Tornado taxis on the airstrip.
⸎ Noon stands outside the barracks, taking a break from the boisterous American ambiance. He can’t figure it out. If their mission was so special, why was he and the others thrown into a building with scores of other soldiers? They should be honored guests at the Saudi’s best hotel. Noon spots a veiled woman behind the shopping center. Neva lowers the veil from her face and beckons Noon with her hand.
⸎ As Latham leaves Saudi air space, he switches off his IFF (identification, friend for foe) broadcast code and begins a low altitude run.
At 8:30 p.m., no one is sleeping in the barracks. A spirited nickel poker game is in progress, but the most noise comes from a group playing Trivial Pursuit. At 8:32, Latham completes his turn above a marshy area about fifty miles northeast of Basra, Iraq. He engages the afterburner and begins a 50-degree climb, accelerating to 2,200 m.p.h. At 8:38, Lathan nears the top of his fake missile trajectory. The Foxtrot battery north of Dharan detects the “missile” but takes no action as the “Scud” is outside the battery’s engagement zone. As Latham enters Saudi airspace, he reduces engine power, resumes normal flight, and switches his IFF back on.
The southern batteries of the 2nd Battalion, Alpha and Bravo, positioned at Dhahran Air Base, are directly responsible for intercepting any Scuds that threaten the base. However, Bravo had been ordered shut down for maintenance work on its radar system. The Alpha radar shows only aircraft flying in the vicinity. Over Al Khobar, Latham sees the lighted red “X” on the roof of the building and places it in the crosshairs on the fire-control display.
⸎ The original explanation for the barracks massacre: No Patriot was launched against the incoming “Scud” because the rocket appeared to be heading for an unpopulated area. Later, the Defense Department would assert that no Patriot was fired because the launch computer was down. Finally, the Defense Department would assert that Alpha detected no Scud because its Patriot radar computer, running full-time without a self-correcting rebooting, had accumulated a one-third second “surveillance range gate error” that caused the radar to miss the Scud by 700 yards.
Analysts noted another anomaly: the missile that hit the barracks was possibly the only Iraqi Scud that failed to break apart in flight.
The press was informed that, of the 28 killed and 98 wounded, 13 of the dead were from the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, an Army unit from Pennsylvania. Assignments of the other dead personnel were not released.
⸎ In a black void, a long thin streak of sunlight grows wider, as a chugging sound vibrates in the distance. David awakes in his London hotel room and turns toward Neva, who is watching him. “Hello, light of my life,” he says. “A penny for your thoughts,” Neva offers.
“Maybe I’m sleeping with an older woman.” She gently punches him on the shoulder. “You’re in trouble now. You better have a good explanation.”
“Whenever, I look at you, I see a Greek goddess. And since a goddess is immortal, she would be an older woman.”
“And what Greek goddess do you think I am?” David turns his eyes to the painting of the burning ships on the wall. “Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.” Neva smiles.
In the morning, Neva, dressed and wearing sunglasses, bends over and kisses David on the forehead. He stirs but doesn’t waken.
⸎ Mars and Latham watch the Kuwait oil fires on the horizon. “What about the Iraqis?” Latham asks. “An understanding has been reached. If Saddam keeps the reactor weapon a secret, we will let him live and keep some of his foreign bank accounts.”
“And Winter?”
“He can’t keep his mouth shut.”
Latham walks away. Mars enters his tent. A 14-year-old Indian girl, borrowed from a sheik who owes him a favor, lays naked under a sheet on a cot. Mars unbuckles his belt and starts pulling it from the pant loops.
⸎ A young lieutenant swerves the recon “dune buggy” around the gutted Iraqi tanks and trucks. A clear patch of road lies ahead; two burning oil rigs are a couple of hundred yards to the right. Winter tries to focus on the map in the lurching vehicle. Is this the right way to the reactor mosque? He kicked himself for not bringing a GPS receiver.
He would be more interested in finding his way to some belly dancer’s pussy. If Americans are going to risk their lives, they should at least be able to fuck before they die. We got it in Italy, France, Korea, and Vietnam. Why were the Arab women off limits? It was that Muslim thing. Men always have to be on top, in sex and everything else. That must be it. If their women ever got a taste of American sex, they would never put up with the old stuff.
Winter thinks of his face snuggled between thighs, then grimaces. His tongue might not find anything. In some Islamic countries, they cut off clits. What’s the matter with these people? The mother takes her little girl to a female practitioner who chops it off. Then the feminists say it’s all the men’s fault.
Speaking over the clatter of an approaching helicopter, Colonel Winter entertains the driver with his wisdom. “I don’t know why we’re picking our noses in Kuwait. We could be in Baghdad in three hours and have Saddam on a meat hook.”
“Yes, sir.” The copter roar grows louder. “And I wouldn’t stop at Baghdad. I’d keep going—to Tehran and kick out all those ayatollahs. Then we’ll show these bastards how a real man fucks. These Abduls don’t know anything. They don’t know how to eat pu . . . His words are drowned by the roar of the Lynx which is now hovering only fifty feet above them. Winter looks back over his shoulder. “What the shit?”
A grappling hook at the end of a chain swoops under the roll bar; Winter and the driver duck their heads. The helicopter lifts the vehicle off the ground. Latham is at the controls, wearing an oxygen mask. The helicopter lifts the vehicle about eighty feet and heads into a cloud of oil well smoke. The buggy disappears into the black death, the chopper hovers above the churning cloud. A gasping, blinded Winter fires his side arm at the sound of the rotor; two shots bounce off the armored belly of the Lynx.
Latham waits three minutes, then carries the vehicle back to the road. The copter descends besides the road and Latham gets out. He checks the bodies. The faces are a solid mask of soot and oil. Latham removes the grappling hook from the roll bar.
“And Winter?”
“He can’t keep his mouth shut.”
Latham walks away. Mars enters his tent. A 14-year-old Indian girl, borrowed from a sheik who owes him a favor, lays naked under a sheet on a cot. Mars unbuckles his belt and starts pulling it from the pant loops.
⸎ A young lieutenant swerves the recon “dune buggy” around the gutted Iraqi tanks and trucks. A clear patch of road lies ahead; two burning oil rigs are a couple of hundred yards to the right. Winter tries to focus on the map in the lurching vehicle. Is this the right way to the reactor mosque? He kicked himself for not bringing a GPS receiver.
He would be more interested in finding his way to some belly dancer’s pussy. If Americans are going to risk their lives, they should at least be able to fuck before they die. We got it in Italy, France, Korea, and Vietnam. Why were the Arab women off limits? It was that Muslim thing. Men always have to be on top, in sex and everything else. That must be it. If their women ever got a taste of American sex, they would never put up with the old stuff.
Winter thinks of his face snuggled between thighs, then grimaces. His tongue might not find anything. In some Islamic countries, they cut off clits. What’s the matter with these people? The mother takes her little girl to a female practitioner who chops it off. Then the feminists say it’s all the men’s fault.
Speaking over the clatter of an approaching helicopter, Colonel Winter entertains the driver with his wisdom. “I don’t know why we’re picking our noses in Kuwait. We could be in Baghdad in three hours and have Saddam on a meat hook.”
“Yes, sir.” The copter roar grows louder. “And I wouldn’t stop at Baghdad. I’d keep going—to Tehran and kick out all those ayatollahs. Then we’ll show these bastards how a real man fucks. These Abduls don’t know anything. They don’t know how to eat pu . . . His words are drowned by the roar of the Lynx which is now hovering only fifty feet above them. Winter looks back over his shoulder. “What the shit?”
A grappling hook at the end of a chain swoops under the roll bar; Winter and the driver duck their heads. The helicopter lifts the vehicle off the ground. Latham is at the controls, wearing an oxygen mask. The helicopter lifts the vehicle about eighty feet and heads into a cloud of oil well smoke. The buggy disappears into the black death, the chopper hovers above the churning cloud. A gasping, blinded Winter fires his side arm at the sound of the rotor; two shots bounce off the armored belly of the Lynx.
Latham waits three minutes, then carries the vehicle back to the road. The copter descends besides the road and Latham gets out. He checks the bodies. The faces are a solid mask of soot and oil. Latham removes the grappling hook from the roll bar.
Chapter 13
Part of the mosque arcade has been knocked down. The center building has been demolished. A man in a radiation suit sits in the cab of a crane, which is lifting a pallet of graphite blocks from the hole in the earth. Standing about a hundred yards from the mosque, Latham and Mars watch two men in radiation suits cart graphite blocks from the mosque perimeter to a truck. Latham asks, “What about Compton? Do I need to kill him?”
“I was hoping he would learn something from Neva,” replies Mars.
“That isn’t happening.”
In a faraway place, the threat to David is observed. A hiss of breath escapes from dark burgundy lips. Metallic-gray cheeks quiver. The queen’s eyes open. The white knight has made his allotted number of oblique moves. It is time to remove him from the board.
⸎ Portable lights mounted on six-foot poles illuminate the mosque and the three tents pitched about 150 yards away. The largest tent is for the recovery crew. Latham and Mars have their own smaller tents. Latham sleeps naked under a black blanket. First, the oil smoke, then the storm clouds, then the night. There is no sun to protect him.
A black gown billows at Neva’s knees. Wind whips sand around her bare feet. A very long black snake, an inch in diameter, moves between her feet. The snake enters Latham’s tent. Neva walks toward the remains of the mosque. In the bowels of the mosque cavern, a four-foot-high stack of blocks remain.
Latham is enjoying what he thinks is a dream. The oily coils squeeze and swirl around his penis and balls, while he feels the squirming in his rectum: a lot in, a little out, a lot in, a little out. He barely notices the cramps that begin to fill his belly. The blanket slides off the cot.
Neva looks at the stars reflected in the mosque well. A shooting star crosses the darkness.
Latham feels a fullness in his chest. The coils dance faster around his slowly dripping shaft. Latham can’t breathe. Every muscle in his body strains. The semen explodes in the dead desert air.
Neva drops a coin in the water. Her face ripples in a dozen waves.
Latham’s eyes are fixed on the peak of the tent. The snake’s head emerges from his gaping mouth.
⸎ Two men in desert camouflage emerge from Latham’s tent, carrying his covered body on a stretcher. Mars then leaves the tent. He places his head above his brow, blocking out the bolt of sunlight that has broken through the shroud of oil fires. He searches the horizon for someone who might be watching him.
⸎ A black Bentley heads down the busy London street. David is riding in the back seat with Major Hedley. A soundproof window separates them from the driver. “I suppose your work here is finished,” says Hedley. “It may just be beginning,” says David. “Sooner or later, every nation that can make a nuclear pile will figure out it has a nuclear weapon.”
“That is something I don’t understand. Why not sooner than later? Why didn’t someone think of this weapon years ago?”
“We lacked a metaphysical perspective. A nuclear bomb demonstrates male qualities: a bright, focused burst of energy: a tiny sun. In mythology, the sun is the male god, the earth is the goddess.”
“And the nuclear reactor is the female?”
“You’re catching on. The reactor is aroused by pushing fuel and control rods in and out. A meltdown is a wild, continuous release of energy, like a multiple orgasm. She kills through radiation poisoning. Poison is the classic female weapon.” Hedley laughs. “Ha. That is certainly one way of looking at it.”
“It’s the yin/yang of nuclear weapons. We went through the male cycle. Now we are seeing the female aspect.”
“So, nobody thought of this before because most weapons are made by men?”
“That would be the simplest explanation.”
“Well, it all sounds very creative to me.”
David gazes out the window of the limousine. “I think there may be something larger at work here.”
The Bentley reaches Heathrow. The driver starts unloading David’s luggage. Hedley and David wait on the sidewalk. “So, do you plan to take a bit of time off when you get back to the States?”
“I was hoping something might keep me here.”
“Neva?”
“That obvious?”
“We had you followed.”
“So, do you know where she lives?”
“Actually, she always gave my people the slip. I wish she were working for us. She would be the perfect spy.”
“Well, she just left. She didn’t leave a number or anything.”
David and Hedley walk toward the terminal doorway. The driver, with David’s luggage on a hand truck, follows. “Maybe she wants someone more adventurous than me. I don’t live in the fast lane. I’m usually on the side of the road with my hood up.” Hedley gives a polite chuckle. As David waits at the boarding gate, he wonders if he should have mentioned to Hedley his expanded theory of nuclear sexuality. David had discovered gay and lesbian nuclear power.
The hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear device, is a union of male and male: a male atomic bomb triggers an even greater male explosion, a kind of nuclear sodomy. The original H-bomb consisted of a phallic-like cylinder with an “anal” sleeve. Ignition of the fission ball excited the cylinder elements: a membrane of U238 arouses the tissue of lithium deuteride, forcing the eruption of U236 or plutonium inside a urethra-like tube.
At the other end of the nuclear spectrum, the fusion reactor—a nearly self-sustaining, infinite source of power—shows even greater female dynamics than the dark goddess of the fission reactor. However, efforts to control and contain the energy of such a reactor have proven extremely difficult.
Of the two paths of fusion reactor research, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement fusion, David believes the former appears more promising because magnetic confinement uses a chamber in the form of a torus or donut, a “female” geometric shape: all curves and no straight phallic lines. A “lesbian” fusion reactor would utilize some form of double torus: female on female.
But that may not be enough. Back in the late 1970s, a lesbian told him that love between two women was phony. He didn’t press for an explanation but later, in his research on fusion, he ran across the terms lesbian fusion and lesbian bed death. Psychologists observed that over time, sexual activity, particularly genital contact, among many lesbian couples would decline and even become non-existent, a phenomenon dubbed “lesbian bed death.” One theory held that “fusion” between lesbians resulted in an emotional connection that resembled incest and thus inhibited sexual expression. Another explanation was that absent a male force, women revert to a passive sexuality. Thus, to sustain a continuous flow of energy, a fusion reactor must also incorporate a male force, a phallic instrument that skewers the double torus, like a churro piercing two donuts.
David decided that the sexual character of nuclear power was more than a clever metaphor: It was evidence of an intelligent design of the universe, a design that includes a place for gays and lesbians.
⸎ A London cab pulls up to a section of row houses. Neva gets out. She is wearing a stole and a black strapless dress. She walks toward the noisy flat where every light is on and climbs the stairs to the doorway. The front room is filled with well-dressed party goers, all holding wine or liquor glasses. In one corner, a young man plays classical music on a violin. A burly Indian man opens the door. “May I see your invitation?” Neva removes her sunglasses and slips past the doorman.
The hostess is exchanging gossip with two women in the front room. She rubs her arms and shivers. “Pardon me a minute.” She walks over to the doorman, who is still holding the door open. “Couldn’t we just close this?” She pushes on the door. As the doorman’s hand on the knob moves, he wakes up. The hostess eyes him curiously.
At the end of the hallway, Neva emerges from a bathroom, no longer wearing her eyeglasses. A maid greets her. “Your stole, ma’am?” Neva hands it to her. “Yes, thank you.”
A few men and women take notice of her, the women with disapproving expressions. One turns to her male companion. “Who invited her?” Neva quickly scans the room then walks into an adjoining den. In this room, there are men talking, two standing near her and two at the other end of the room, next to a bookcase. The latter are a gray-haired Englishman and Stavros Nomikos, a dark, earthy Greek in his early sixties.
The Englishman complains about his naval misfortunes. “You would think with the war coming to an end, the rates would come down faster. I have three ships waiting to get into the Gulf.”
“Yes, Lloyds can be unreasonable. But that’s what the market will bear.” Insurance is not his main concern. Nomikos is more interested in assuring the cooperation of selected custom officials and other bureaucrats. His most important cargo is measured in kilos, not tons. He beholds Neva. “This cannot be possible.” Neva approaches him.
“Young woman. Young beautiful woman. You bear a wonderful resemblance to a woman I once met. Her name—it was Neva.” Neva extends her hand. “My mother. I am Ofra.” Nomikos kisses her hand. “We are blessed she had a daughter.” He turns to the Englishman. “Let us talk more later. I have some memories to catch up with.” His rival casts an envious glance at Ofra and walks away. “I am Stavros Nomikos. Did your mother ever mention me?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But that is understandable. You mother had many suitors.” Nomikos sips his drink.
“She had many friends,” Ofra replies. “Ari, Lee, Tina, Nikos, even Vergotis.”
“We all wondered where Neva went to. And why is such a beautiful woman without a companion tonight?
“My friend has left for the States. I won’t be seeing him for a while.”
“A most unfortunate man.”
“Perhaps I should renew some of my mother’s old acquaintances. What business are you in?”
“I own a fleet of ships.”
“Oh, I have always been intrigued by men who own ships.” She slips her arm around his. “Perhaps one will name a ship after me.” Nomikos smiles at the charming manipulation.
⸎ October 1963. Been a year since the missile crisis. What had been an emergency—Jack spending all his time with the advisors, with the circle of men—was becoming the norm. Days getting cold again. Her bed is cold. A cold white house. The elegance is getting stale, each room heavy with the history of Presidents plotting battles and the pacing of neglected, mad wives. Her restoration had been cheapened by the mistresses Jack tracked through the house. Cheap heels stamping on her rugs. Legs crossing on her chairs. Bimbo butts screwing on her sheets.
She must get away again. If she would only drift away, drifting under a warm blue sky. A Greek sky, with naked gods prancing among white billowing clouds. She lies in a bikini on the deck of the Christina. Somebody asks, “Do you want to go ashore?” No, she’ll stay. She knows the others are leaving. Franklin, Lee, Artemis, Princess Irena. Neva, in a pale blue shirt and dark blue shorts, stands at the railing, looking out to sea. Ari steps out on the deck. Neva leaves, giving him a knowing smile. He approaches the chaise lounge. She can feel his grand, natural warmth, so unlike Jack’s practiced charm. His strong hand enfolds hers. “You will want to take a nap before the party tonight.”
Part of the mosque arcade has been knocked down. The center building has been demolished. A man in a radiation suit sits in the cab of a crane, which is lifting a pallet of graphite blocks from the hole in the earth. Standing about a hundred yards from the mosque, Latham and Mars watch two men in radiation suits cart graphite blocks from the mosque perimeter to a truck. Latham asks, “What about Compton? Do I need to kill him?”
“I was hoping he would learn something from Neva,” replies Mars.
“That isn’t happening.”
In a faraway place, the threat to David is observed. A hiss of breath escapes from dark burgundy lips. Metallic-gray cheeks quiver. The queen’s eyes open. The white knight has made his allotted number of oblique moves. It is time to remove him from the board.
⸎ Portable lights mounted on six-foot poles illuminate the mosque and the three tents pitched about 150 yards away. The largest tent is for the recovery crew. Latham and Mars have their own smaller tents. Latham sleeps naked under a black blanket. First, the oil smoke, then the storm clouds, then the night. There is no sun to protect him.
A black gown billows at Neva’s knees. Wind whips sand around her bare feet. A very long black snake, an inch in diameter, moves between her feet. The snake enters Latham’s tent. Neva walks toward the remains of the mosque. In the bowels of the mosque cavern, a four-foot-high stack of blocks remain.
Latham is enjoying what he thinks is a dream. The oily coils squeeze and swirl around his penis and balls, while he feels the squirming in his rectum: a lot in, a little out, a lot in, a little out. He barely notices the cramps that begin to fill his belly. The blanket slides off the cot.
Neva looks at the stars reflected in the mosque well. A shooting star crosses the darkness.
Latham feels a fullness in his chest. The coils dance faster around his slowly dripping shaft. Latham can’t breathe. Every muscle in his body strains. The semen explodes in the dead desert air.
Neva drops a coin in the water. Her face ripples in a dozen waves.
Latham’s eyes are fixed on the peak of the tent. The snake’s head emerges from his gaping mouth.
⸎ Two men in desert camouflage emerge from Latham’s tent, carrying his covered body on a stretcher. Mars then leaves the tent. He places his head above his brow, blocking out the bolt of sunlight that has broken through the shroud of oil fires. He searches the horizon for someone who might be watching him.
⸎ A black Bentley heads down the busy London street. David is riding in the back seat with Major Hedley. A soundproof window separates them from the driver. “I suppose your work here is finished,” says Hedley. “It may just be beginning,” says David. “Sooner or later, every nation that can make a nuclear pile will figure out it has a nuclear weapon.”
“That is something I don’t understand. Why not sooner than later? Why didn’t someone think of this weapon years ago?”
“We lacked a metaphysical perspective. A nuclear bomb demonstrates male qualities: a bright, focused burst of energy: a tiny sun. In mythology, the sun is the male god, the earth is the goddess.”
“And the nuclear reactor is the female?”
“You’re catching on. The reactor is aroused by pushing fuel and control rods in and out. A meltdown is a wild, continuous release of energy, like a multiple orgasm. She kills through radiation poisoning. Poison is the classic female weapon.” Hedley laughs. “Ha. That is certainly one way of looking at it.”
“It’s the yin/yang of nuclear weapons. We went through the male cycle. Now we are seeing the female aspect.”
“So, nobody thought of this before because most weapons are made by men?”
“That would be the simplest explanation.”
“Well, it all sounds very creative to me.”
David gazes out the window of the limousine. “I think there may be something larger at work here.”
The Bentley reaches Heathrow. The driver starts unloading David’s luggage. Hedley and David wait on the sidewalk. “So, do you plan to take a bit of time off when you get back to the States?”
“I was hoping something might keep me here.”
“Neva?”
“That obvious?”
“We had you followed.”
“So, do you know where she lives?”
“Actually, she always gave my people the slip. I wish she were working for us. She would be the perfect spy.”
“Well, she just left. She didn’t leave a number or anything.”
David and Hedley walk toward the terminal doorway. The driver, with David’s luggage on a hand truck, follows. “Maybe she wants someone more adventurous than me. I don’t live in the fast lane. I’m usually on the side of the road with my hood up.” Hedley gives a polite chuckle. As David waits at the boarding gate, he wonders if he should have mentioned to Hedley his expanded theory of nuclear sexuality. David had discovered gay and lesbian nuclear power.
The hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear device, is a union of male and male: a male atomic bomb triggers an even greater male explosion, a kind of nuclear sodomy. The original H-bomb consisted of a phallic-like cylinder with an “anal” sleeve. Ignition of the fission ball excited the cylinder elements: a membrane of U238 arouses the tissue of lithium deuteride, forcing the eruption of U236 or plutonium inside a urethra-like tube.
At the other end of the nuclear spectrum, the fusion reactor—a nearly self-sustaining, infinite source of power—shows even greater female dynamics than the dark goddess of the fission reactor. However, efforts to control and contain the energy of such a reactor have proven extremely difficult.
Of the two paths of fusion reactor research, magnetic confinement and inertial confinement fusion, David believes the former appears more promising because magnetic confinement uses a chamber in the form of a torus or donut, a “female” geometric shape: all curves and no straight phallic lines. A “lesbian” fusion reactor would utilize some form of double torus: female on female.
But that may not be enough. Back in the late 1970s, a lesbian told him that love between two women was phony. He didn’t press for an explanation but later, in his research on fusion, he ran across the terms lesbian fusion and lesbian bed death. Psychologists observed that over time, sexual activity, particularly genital contact, among many lesbian couples would decline and even become non-existent, a phenomenon dubbed “lesbian bed death.” One theory held that “fusion” between lesbians resulted in an emotional connection that resembled incest and thus inhibited sexual expression. Another explanation was that absent a male force, women revert to a passive sexuality. Thus, to sustain a continuous flow of energy, a fusion reactor must also incorporate a male force, a phallic instrument that skewers the double torus, like a churro piercing two donuts.
David decided that the sexual character of nuclear power was more than a clever metaphor: It was evidence of an intelligent design of the universe, a design that includes a place for gays and lesbians.
⸎ A London cab pulls up to a section of row houses. Neva gets out. She is wearing a stole and a black strapless dress. She walks toward the noisy flat where every light is on and climbs the stairs to the doorway. The front room is filled with well-dressed party goers, all holding wine or liquor glasses. In one corner, a young man plays classical music on a violin. A burly Indian man opens the door. “May I see your invitation?” Neva removes her sunglasses and slips past the doorman.
The hostess is exchanging gossip with two women in the front room. She rubs her arms and shivers. “Pardon me a minute.” She walks over to the doorman, who is still holding the door open. “Couldn’t we just close this?” She pushes on the door. As the doorman’s hand on the knob moves, he wakes up. The hostess eyes him curiously.
At the end of the hallway, Neva emerges from a bathroom, no longer wearing her eyeglasses. A maid greets her. “Your stole, ma’am?” Neva hands it to her. “Yes, thank you.”
A few men and women take notice of her, the women with disapproving expressions. One turns to her male companion. “Who invited her?” Neva quickly scans the room then walks into an adjoining den. In this room, there are men talking, two standing near her and two at the other end of the room, next to a bookcase. The latter are a gray-haired Englishman and Stavros Nomikos, a dark, earthy Greek in his early sixties.
The Englishman complains about his naval misfortunes. “You would think with the war coming to an end, the rates would come down faster. I have three ships waiting to get into the Gulf.”
“Yes, Lloyds can be unreasonable. But that’s what the market will bear.” Insurance is not his main concern. Nomikos is more interested in assuring the cooperation of selected custom officials and other bureaucrats. His most important cargo is measured in kilos, not tons. He beholds Neva. “This cannot be possible.” Neva approaches him.
“Young woman. Young beautiful woman. You bear a wonderful resemblance to a woman I once met. Her name—it was Neva.” Neva extends her hand. “My mother. I am Ofra.” Nomikos kisses her hand. “We are blessed she had a daughter.” He turns to the Englishman. “Let us talk more later. I have some memories to catch up with.” His rival casts an envious glance at Ofra and walks away. “I am Stavros Nomikos. Did your mother ever mention me?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But that is understandable. You mother had many suitors.” Nomikos sips his drink.
“She had many friends,” Ofra replies. “Ari, Lee, Tina, Nikos, even Vergotis.”
“We all wondered where Neva went to. And why is such a beautiful woman without a companion tonight?
“My friend has left for the States. I won’t be seeing him for a while.”
“A most unfortunate man.”
“Perhaps I should renew some of my mother’s old acquaintances. What business are you in?”
“I own a fleet of ships.”
“Oh, I have always been intrigued by men who own ships.” She slips her arm around his. “Perhaps one will name a ship after me.” Nomikos smiles at the charming manipulation.
⸎ October 1963. Been a year since the missile crisis. What had been an emergency—Jack spending all his time with the advisors, with the circle of men—was becoming the norm. Days getting cold again. Her bed is cold. A cold white house. The elegance is getting stale, each room heavy with the history of Presidents plotting battles and the pacing of neglected, mad wives. Her restoration had been cheapened by the mistresses Jack tracked through the house. Cheap heels stamping on her rugs. Legs crossing on her chairs. Bimbo butts screwing on her sheets.
She must get away again. If she would only drift away, drifting under a warm blue sky. A Greek sky, with naked gods prancing among white billowing clouds. She lies in a bikini on the deck of the Christina. Somebody asks, “Do you want to go ashore?” No, she’ll stay. She knows the others are leaving. Franklin, Lee, Artemis, Princess Irena. Neva, in a pale blue shirt and dark blue shorts, stands at the railing, looking out to sea. Ari steps out on the deck. Neva leaves, giving him a knowing smile. He approaches the chaise lounge. She can feel his grand, natural warmth, so unlike Jack’s practiced charm. His strong hand enfolds hers. “You will want to take a nap before the party tonight.”
Chapter 14
Leslie is again lying on the couch in Dr. Linh’s office, but Seka has moved her chair to an arm’s length of Leslie, who wonders if this new closeness is some therapy strategy. The drapes are closed. Leslie is still fighting Seka’s interpretation. “There is something strange about these memories.”
“Your dreams?” Seka asks and corrects. “I can see what other people are doing when I’m not there.”
“Like a fly on the wall?”
“Like I was God and watching people.”
“And what does the Goddess Leslie see?”
⸎ Leslie looks down at the reflecting pool at Fermi Hall. The sun emerges from behind a field of clouds then bursts across the pool. Leslie raises her hand to block the blinding reflection. The brightness fades. In the water, a crowd of white, heavy-set people are moving, zombie-like, toward her. Their clothes are shredded, and their faces and arms are bloodied and burned. They reach out to her. She reaches back to Seka, to the warm safety of the couch. “I see people dying.”
What do they want? She doesn’t know them. She can’t help them. Or she won’t help them. She backs away from the pool. The zombies disappear.
Leslie walks into the atrium of Fermi Hall. She passes the guard then pauses and gazes at the small trees and bushes. Something is missing. Something hard and black. The guard calls to her. “Dr. Carney.” She turns around. “Your radiation badge.” She looks down at the silver-dollar size red button on her blouse. The normally off-white square on the button has turned medium gray. “It’s gray. You’ve been spending too much time outside.”
“Uh, thank you,” replies Leslie. She takes the elevator to the top floor. She pauses before entering her office. Why is she feeling so off-balance today? Maybe because too much is happening too quickly. Haynes is pushing her to make the report. The secret project has taken a year out of her life but now, in the last five days, she is rethinking everything.
She sits down and opens the bottom left file in her desk. She reaches behind the files to pull out a brown paper bag. It contains a half-empty bottle of Finnish vodka and a small glass. She pours herself a shot and gulps it down, then returns her private treasure to the file.
Leslie turns on the Mac. It asks for her password. Off-center again; she must think a while before she can remember it. She opens a computer file named “PEACH.” On the screen appears a sphere with a third of it sliced along the vertical axis. From the core outward are the following: a pearl-size sphere labeled “initiator,” a tennis ball-size layer labeled “Pu239,” two more layers designated as “reflector layers,” and the remainder of the sphere labeled “explosives.” The explosives are divided into 30-degree wedges. On the surface of the sphere, at the middle of each wedge, is a small plug marked “detonator.”
Leslie reaches from the other today to the new today, to Seka. “I see the present, the way the present used to be. The future I created when the other me killed Fermi. Haynes and I were going to change the world. We were designing the first atomic bomb. We thought we were heroes.”
A warbling siren rouses the occupants of the building. Another damn drill. Leslie quickly closes the top-secret file and turns off the computer. She gets up and opens a small closet. Inside hangs a white protective suit and hood. She takes out the suit and looks at the pant legs, then her skirt. “Oh, shit.” She starts removing her skirt.
Leslie joins the dozens of other people in radiation suits who are entering buses in the parking lot. The siren ends.
Her bus heads into a hilly area then pulls off the main street onto a long driveway. The bus approaches a parking lot surrounded by a grassy area. A half dozen buses are already parked. As people emerge from the buses, they take off their hoods. Some mill around the vehicles and talk while others walk down the park paths.
Leslie heads up a paved walkway to the monument. She stands in front of the smooth, mirror-like black granite surface, one face of a large cubic stone six feet-square and eight feet high. Hundreds of names are engraved on the block, one of nine stones in the memorial park. Leslie reaches about six inches above eye level and touches one of the named: CHARLES CARNEY. The love is fading. An old memory of her father is growing, a memory she does not like. She no longer wants to kill Russians.
Leslie turns to Haynes, standing next to her, close but emotionally distant. “Maybe he’s not worth killing for. I had a dream. I saw people dying. Their skin was hanging from their faces. They were begging me to help them.”
“Maybe you were dreaming about cancer, about your surgery.”
“No. It’s a message from God. We’re not supposed to make the bomb. I have to stop this from happening.”
“You can’t stop scientific progress.”
“I can if I tell the media.”
Haynes grasps for some reason behind her behavior. “Listen, is this really about us? I know I’ve been busy.” Leslie’s jaw tightens. “It’s about knowing pain. It’s something you wouldn’t understand.”
An amplified screech catches their attention. A memorial park employee is testing the microphone at a podium. Haynes walks to the podium. Lab staff members, holding suit hoods in their hands, gather in a crescent around the lab director. “Someday we won’t need these drills. I had a dream. The Son of God became the bright Suns of God. They flew down from heaven on the wings of rockets. They burned away the cancer that is communism.”
⸎ Leslie avoids him as they take seats on the bus. Haynes fears she has become a loose cannon. What was it, her drinking, the surgery? For the good of the country, he should have kept fucking her; she wouldn’t have become hysterical. He might have to finish the mission without her.
Haynes chides himself when he returns to his office. The floppy disk with the gaseous-diffusion schematic is still on his desk. He places it in a desk drawer and locks it. The key ring has five keys, including a small black one. Hayes phones a member of the Front.
The object of Haynes’ disaffection is in the ladies’ room, trying to tease life back into a wig flattened by the radiation hood. Seka is next to her. “So how are you and Haynes coming along?” Leslie doesn’t reply. “What happened to ‘He’s the only man who really understands me?’”
“Things change. I was just a piece of meat. Now that the best parts are gone, he wants to move on to someone else.”
“Have you let him know how angry you are?”
“I’ve started.”
“Well, you should do whatever seems right. Don’t let anybody stop you.”
Leslie stops fiddling with the wig. Seka always seems to know what she’s thinking. It’s like she’s been there forever. “How long have we known each other?” Seka only states a fact. “I’ve been working here two years.”
“It seems longer.” Leslie decides to pay a visit to the Neutron Therapy Lab.
⸎ In the field above the accelerator, Haynes walks with Leon Mars. “I’m glad you could come on such short notice.” Mars replies, “All this talk about God and dreams. She sounds like a very disturbed woman.”
“You won’t hurt her, will you?” Mars assures him, “No. At this point, I would be more worried that she would hurt herself. We can keep her tucked away. You will have to say she took an unannounced vacation.”
“But how long can you do that?”
“I’m hoping for no more than a year. I suppose I can tell you now. If your report is favorable, we can start building the diffusion series within days, and constructing the gadget within weeks. Somewhere in the desert, a half-mile hole has already been drilled. If the test is successful, the Front is prepared to replace the administration in Washington.”
⸎ Leslie walks up the sidewalk to the front door of her house. In the yard next door, children are playing, catching her attention. As one child frolics, the hood on his parka falls back, uncovering a bald head. Chemotherapy, probably for some radiation-caused cancer. So, what else is new? She fumbles through the purse and finds the keys.
Leslie leaves her purse in the living room and walks to the greenhouse at the rear of the house. She pulls two tomatoes off a stalk. They are safe to eat but streaked with yellow.
In the kitchen, a dull butcher knife squeezes the tomato; seeds and pulp spill onto the plastic cutting board. Leslie sharpens the knife on the stone. The knife cuts cleanly through the tomato. She tosses the wedges into a soup dish, then chops sprigs of celery and parsley and adds them to the mix. She drips a tablespoon of Italian dressing on the salad. She eats alone at the dining room table with no TV or newspaper to focus her thoughts. Twilight drains the remaining warmth from the room.
Leslie fills a tumbler with ice and retrieves a bottle of vodka from a kitchen cabinet. She takes the drink to the living room and turns on a table lamp, then pulls a scrapbook from a bookcase. She sits on the sofa and opens the album, flipping through her life framed on black pages: photos as a baby, as a child with her mother and father, as a high school graduate, and as a young woman in the backyard, her right hand holding a trophy to her bosom and the left grasping a rifle braced on her hip. She looks up at the brass marksmanship trophy on the fireplace mantle: a woman on one knee, rifle at her shoulder. In the album, the color college graduation photo has faded, graying her black gown and mortarboard, and her father’s navy-blue suit.
On the next page is a small newsletter article, “Dr. Leslie Carney Joins Fermilab Staff.” She turns a page and unfolds a newspaper article. A headline screams “Nuclear War!” The words “Soviets Attack New Chicago, Los Angeles, New York” run below the banner. A photo of smoke rising from a cargo ship spans six columns. Atop the column of copy is another subhead: “Russian ships disguised as Panama-registered bulk carriers.” The date on the newspaper is April 26, 1986.
Leslie refolds the newspaper and turns the page. A newspaper obituary, “Radiation Deaths,” lists her father’s name, highlighted with a yellow marker, among hundreds who died that week. She turns the next pages, all blank and black.
⸎ The Russian attack was not immediately provoked, but the Politburo had been smoldering for two decades, humiliated by Kennedy’s successful invasion of Cuba and the obliteration of North Vietnam. The U.S. arming of rebels in Afghanistan sprayed lighter fluid on the hotheads in the Kremlin.
The war had not gone well. America had vulnerable coasts, and the ship getting to New Chicago via the Saint Lawrence Seaway was a surprise. The Soviet Union’s ports of Leningrad and Odessa were sequestered by European peninsulas and Vladivostok was shielded by Sakhalin, Japan, and Korea. No avenging ships reached the Soviet cities.
The reactor assault was followed by a brief war in Germany that killed about 60,000 on each side. The Soviets withdrew from Hamburg but kept West Berlin. The German landscape was dotted with abandoned villages and military bases, polluted by artillery shells that dispersed nuclear wastes.
In 1950, a successful fission reactor test was eventually performed. The potential of a nuclear fission bomb had been known by both sides, but no one had dared test such a risky device. Furthermore, the industrial infrastructure needed to separate U235 and plutonium seemed impractical, like building five cities to make a bomb that would destroy one.
After the 1942 meltdown in Chicago, papers of the deceased physicists were transferred to Washington. A physicist not in that group, Edward Teller, issued a report stating that the first fission bomb could be the last one; the reaction might consume every atom in the atmosphere.
After the 1986 North Atlantic War, both the Soviet Union and the United States were poised to resume research into the bomb, but mutual interests put a moratorium on development. The Soviet Union realized that in a bomb production race, the United States still had the superior production capability, and did not want to spend the next decades waiting for the other shoe of vengeance to drop. Both sides agreed to on-site inspections to prevent establishment of uranium diffusion factories.
The 1988 election had put Michael Dukakis in the White House. The Republican Party was narrowly defeated but its extremist cousin, The Patriot Front, maintained a covert infrastructure in the federal government and the military. It was a Front operative, a clerk in the Energy Department, who found a report from an obscure physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, suggesting only a three in a million chance that a nuclear bomb would destroy the world.
The information was entrusted to two Front members, Drs. Haynes and Carney, who were to confirm the calculations and create blueprints for the weapon and diffusion plants. A contractor was diverting enriched uranium from a reactor it operated in Ohio. An oil company would construct covert diffusion sites at several refineries and was already digging a half-mile shaft in the Nevada desert for a bomb test.
The Front pursued a circular logic. If its surreptitious bomb-making efforts were undetected, they assumed that their Soviet counterparts were having just as much luck.
If the underground test proved successful, the coup would be initiated, and the purification would begin. The traitors in the White House, Congress, and the media would be eliminated. America’s space program would be converted to military use.
⸎ Leslie pulls into the empty parking lot at the war memorial. She leaves the car and walks up to a group of stones. She gazes up at a clear, cool sky filled with stars and waits for a sign from God. A shooting star passes by. This is her chance to change history. She doesn’t understand this feeling: a feeling that she has always carried the world on her shoulders. She gets back into the car and drives to the lab.
The guard takes no special note of Dr. Carney’s entrance or the empty shopping bag she is carrying. Many of the physicists have night shifts to gain access to the fixed target experimental areas.
At her desk, Leslie takes one last look at the “Peach” file, then trashes it and the files on the two backup floppies. She knows that isn’t enough; trashing only sends the file back to shared memory. She opens a complex document, the large schematic of the five accelerators, and begins copying it until it consumes all the disk space.
She takes a swig of vodka straight from the bottle then walks over to the small closet. Inside is the radiation suit and a white lab coat she had filched from the Neutron Therapy Lab that afternoon.
Leslie, wearing the lab coat, enters Dr. Haynes’ vacant outer office. The clock says 9 p.m. She is carrying the department store bag, filled with her regular clothes. She knocks on Dr. Haynes’ door. “Who is it?”
“Leslie.”
“Come in.”
She sets the bag down in the outer office and enters. She sits on the sofa facing the desk. Haynes gives her a quick glance. “Isn’t that something of a cliché—the scientist is a white lab coat?”
“I want to be taken sheer-ishly as a scientist.”
“Maybe we should talk later.” Haynes feels pity and a small bit of revulsion. He keeps his eyes on the computer screen. Leslie asks, “Do you think God wants us to kill millions of Russians? Maybe if we just wait long enough, the Soviet Union will fall apart.”
“Where did you get that idea, in your dreams?”
Leslie crosses her legs, takes off one black shoe and drops it on the floor. She recrosses her legs and drops the other shoe. “I must say I admire your ded-icashion.” She stands up, walks behind Haynes, and starts to massage his shoulder. A new schematic is on the screen: at one end of a bullet-shaped casing is a ball, a fission bomb, which will initiate reactions along the elements in the cylindrical casing. Haynes is already thinking ahead—to a Superbomb. A ring of keys is on his desk. “Does that feel good?”
“Well, yes.” Haynes will play along. If he waits long enough, maybe she will pass out on the sofa. “You’re working too hard. If we spent more time in bed, maybe we would spend less time building things to kill people.” Haynes doesn’t reply.
“Turn around.” Haynes slowly turns his chair around. Leslie has unbuttoned the coat. She pulls it open. Haynes jerks his eyes away in revulsion.
“See, they don’t look so bad, do they? She puts her hands to her chest. “See, I still have a nipple left. Didn’t you like sucking on this one?” Haynes, his faced turned red, quickly turns his chair around and locks his eyes on the screen. “I think that’s enough.”
Leslie runs the fingers of her left hand through his sparse hair. Haynes cringes. “My poor daddy. Did your little girl scare you?” Her right hand reaches into her coat pocket. She begins to pull the kitchen knife from the pocket but hesitates. She gazes blankly ahead, reaching for something, a flicker of memory—a memory of killing. Reaching, reaching. Now it’s lost. But so is her anger. She silently mouths the words “I can’t.” She steps back from Haynes’ chair and releases the iron grip on the knife. She can barely lift the empty hand from her pocket. Her right arm goes limp. She struggles to rebutton the coat with her left hand.
Haynes turns his chair around as Leslie rushes out the door.
⸎ Leslie speeds down the road home, sobbing behind the wheel. Her street clothes are still in the bag on the passenger seat. At the lab, Haynes has returned to working at the computer. In a corner of the room stands a glowering, gray-haired Seka in a black robe and hood, her hands clenched at her sides. She casts frustrated eyes at the ring of keys on the desk. One is an old black key. A gust of wind shuffles papers on the desk. Haynes turns around and sees nothing.
Leslie, still wearing the lab coat, sits on the sofa in her living room, sipping vodka, listening to violin music on the stereo, and watching a fire in the fireplace.
A mental film of what she should have done keeps running through her head. She slits Hayne’s throat. Blood sprays on her hands, arms, and the lab coat. She takes the coat off, cleans herself off in his mini-kitchen sink, then dons the clothes she left in the bag in the outer office. She pushes the chair with Haynes’ body away from the desk. She dumps all his nuclear research files and searches for any hard copies in his desk files.
The computer files may be hidden somewhere, in a locked application or a in a system subfile. No matter. She unplugs the monitor and places the computer in the shopping bag. Take it home. Put computer in oven at five hundred degrees for two hours. Stuff as many clothes and personal care products into suitcases and bags as possible. Place in trunk of car. Drive into another neighborhood and strip plates from a car parked on the street.
Return to work in morning. Police will arrive and interview her. They will quickly note her visit in the guard’s night log, but it would be a couple of days before they have enough information to arrest her. At lunch, go to bank and withdraw as much cash as possible. Leave at two, claiming depression at Haynes’ death. Go home, change plates in garage, and drive out of town. From there, her plan gets a bit fuzzy. Both the FBI and the Front would be looking for her.
So, what was Plan B? She couldn’t bear to see Haynes again. Tomorrow morning, she will call in sick, then try to figure it out. But something about this night seems familiar. The fear, anxiety, humiliation—sitting here paralyzed, trying to figure out what to do, putting off a decision. What made her think she could actually kill someone?
⸎ In the computer room in the heavens, Seka pulls up a program with two windows: History 6.1, containing a file marked “Leslie,” and History 6.2, with a file marked “Lee.” Seka moves the Leslie file inside the Lee file.
⸎ Leslie becomes conscious of a dull roar. What was that? She gets up and turns off the stereo. Water is running in the bathroom. She must have turned on the shower, then forget about it. She walks into the bathroom. The water is running from the faucet into the almost full tub. For a moment, she sees in the water the accusing, pained faces in the reflecting pool. She has failed them.
But this isn’t right. She showers; she never takes a bath. She turns off the faucet, then reaches for the knife in her pocket. The hands are upon her. Two grab her right wrist and arm, two grab her left arm. The knife clatters on the floor. Black latex hands, black wet suit arms. A gasp reaches for a scream, but a black plug is forced into her mouth as two more hands muzzle her face. Her wig falls off. She flails her legs and feet, but they only bang painfully against the side of the tub.
⸎ Leslie, her eyes open but unseeing, thrashes her arms about. Seka, bending over the couch and holding Leslie’s wrists, tries to restrain and calm her. “Leslie, Leslie, don’t fight it. Let it happen.”
⸎ They jerk her coat off. Hands grab her ankles. She is forced down on her knees. Her flesh strains against the anticipated groping and penetration. Instead, a sharp pain pierces her left wrist. She turns to see one black hand holding the kitchen knife, the other pushing her forearm and bleeding wrist into the water.
Now, they wait. Hands patiently grip her arms. Knees pin down her legs. Two other hands hold her shoulders down. She stops struggling. She has failed; what more is there to do? One of the assailants pulls her left wrist out of the red water to see if the bleeding has stopped. It hasn’t. Her limbs are cramped, then numb. The gag is removed; the rubber taste lingers in her mouth. The hands lift her and gently lower her into the tub. The three black specters leave the room.
In the living room, tired flames sputter in the fireplace. Seka, wearing a long white gown, walks toward the bathroom. Leslie sees a swirl of white in the corner of her right eye. She feels an arm cradle her head. A blurred face comes into focus. It is Seka. “Don’t give up now. We aren’t finished yet.” Leslie surrenders to the dark. She was dying or she was rescued; she could take either one.
Leslie is again lying on the couch in Dr. Linh’s office, but Seka has moved her chair to an arm’s length of Leslie, who wonders if this new closeness is some therapy strategy. The drapes are closed. Leslie is still fighting Seka’s interpretation. “There is something strange about these memories.”
“Your dreams?” Seka asks and corrects. “I can see what other people are doing when I’m not there.”
“Like a fly on the wall?”
“Like I was God and watching people.”
“And what does the Goddess Leslie see?”
⸎ Leslie looks down at the reflecting pool at Fermi Hall. The sun emerges from behind a field of clouds then bursts across the pool. Leslie raises her hand to block the blinding reflection. The brightness fades. In the water, a crowd of white, heavy-set people are moving, zombie-like, toward her. Their clothes are shredded, and their faces and arms are bloodied and burned. They reach out to her. She reaches back to Seka, to the warm safety of the couch. “I see people dying.”
What do they want? She doesn’t know them. She can’t help them. Or she won’t help them. She backs away from the pool. The zombies disappear.
Leslie walks into the atrium of Fermi Hall. She passes the guard then pauses and gazes at the small trees and bushes. Something is missing. Something hard and black. The guard calls to her. “Dr. Carney.” She turns around. “Your radiation badge.” She looks down at the silver-dollar size red button on her blouse. The normally off-white square on the button has turned medium gray. “It’s gray. You’ve been spending too much time outside.”
“Uh, thank you,” replies Leslie. She takes the elevator to the top floor. She pauses before entering her office. Why is she feeling so off-balance today? Maybe because too much is happening too quickly. Haynes is pushing her to make the report. The secret project has taken a year out of her life but now, in the last five days, she is rethinking everything.
She sits down and opens the bottom left file in her desk. She reaches behind the files to pull out a brown paper bag. It contains a half-empty bottle of Finnish vodka and a small glass. She pours herself a shot and gulps it down, then returns her private treasure to the file.
Leslie turns on the Mac. It asks for her password. Off-center again; she must think a while before she can remember it. She opens a computer file named “PEACH.” On the screen appears a sphere with a third of it sliced along the vertical axis. From the core outward are the following: a pearl-size sphere labeled “initiator,” a tennis ball-size layer labeled “Pu239,” two more layers designated as “reflector layers,” and the remainder of the sphere labeled “explosives.” The explosives are divided into 30-degree wedges. On the surface of the sphere, at the middle of each wedge, is a small plug marked “detonator.”
Leslie reaches from the other today to the new today, to Seka. “I see the present, the way the present used to be. The future I created when the other me killed Fermi. Haynes and I were going to change the world. We were designing the first atomic bomb. We thought we were heroes.”
A warbling siren rouses the occupants of the building. Another damn drill. Leslie quickly closes the top-secret file and turns off the computer. She gets up and opens a small closet. Inside hangs a white protective suit and hood. She takes out the suit and looks at the pant legs, then her skirt. “Oh, shit.” She starts removing her skirt.
Leslie joins the dozens of other people in radiation suits who are entering buses in the parking lot. The siren ends.
Her bus heads into a hilly area then pulls off the main street onto a long driveway. The bus approaches a parking lot surrounded by a grassy area. A half dozen buses are already parked. As people emerge from the buses, they take off their hoods. Some mill around the vehicles and talk while others walk down the park paths.
Leslie heads up a paved walkway to the monument. She stands in front of the smooth, mirror-like black granite surface, one face of a large cubic stone six feet-square and eight feet high. Hundreds of names are engraved on the block, one of nine stones in the memorial park. Leslie reaches about six inches above eye level and touches one of the named: CHARLES CARNEY. The love is fading. An old memory of her father is growing, a memory she does not like. She no longer wants to kill Russians.
Leslie turns to Haynes, standing next to her, close but emotionally distant. “Maybe he’s not worth killing for. I had a dream. I saw people dying. Their skin was hanging from their faces. They were begging me to help them.”
“Maybe you were dreaming about cancer, about your surgery.”
“No. It’s a message from God. We’re not supposed to make the bomb. I have to stop this from happening.”
“You can’t stop scientific progress.”
“I can if I tell the media.”
Haynes grasps for some reason behind her behavior. “Listen, is this really about us? I know I’ve been busy.” Leslie’s jaw tightens. “It’s about knowing pain. It’s something you wouldn’t understand.”
An amplified screech catches their attention. A memorial park employee is testing the microphone at a podium. Haynes walks to the podium. Lab staff members, holding suit hoods in their hands, gather in a crescent around the lab director. “Someday we won’t need these drills. I had a dream. The Son of God became the bright Suns of God. They flew down from heaven on the wings of rockets. They burned away the cancer that is communism.”
⸎ Leslie avoids him as they take seats on the bus. Haynes fears she has become a loose cannon. What was it, her drinking, the surgery? For the good of the country, he should have kept fucking her; she wouldn’t have become hysterical. He might have to finish the mission without her.
Haynes chides himself when he returns to his office. The floppy disk with the gaseous-diffusion schematic is still on his desk. He places it in a desk drawer and locks it. The key ring has five keys, including a small black one. Hayes phones a member of the Front.
The object of Haynes’ disaffection is in the ladies’ room, trying to tease life back into a wig flattened by the radiation hood. Seka is next to her. “So how are you and Haynes coming along?” Leslie doesn’t reply. “What happened to ‘He’s the only man who really understands me?’”
“Things change. I was just a piece of meat. Now that the best parts are gone, he wants to move on to someone else.”
“Have you let him know how angry you are?”
“I’ve started.”
“Well, you should do whatever seems right. Don’t let anybody stop you.”
Leslie stops fiddling with the wig. Seka always seems to know what she’s thinking. It’s like she’s been there forever. “How long have we known each other?” Seka only states a fact. “I’ve been working here two years.”
“It seems longer.” Leslie decides to pay a visit to the Neutron Therapy Lab.
⸎ In the field above the accelerator, Haynes walks with Leon Mars. “I’m glad you could come on such short notice.” Mars replies, “All this talk about God and dreams. She sounds like a very disturbed woman.”
“You won’t hurt her, will you?” Mars assures him, “No. At this point, I would be more worried that she would hurt herself. We can keep her tucked away. You will have to say she took an unannounced vacation.”
“But how long can you do that?”
“I’m hoping for no more than a year. I suppose I can tell you now. If your report is favorable, we can start building the diffusion series within days, and constructing the gadget within weeks. Somewhere in the desert, a half-mile hole has already been drilled. If the test is successful, the Front is prepared to replace the administration in Washington.”
⸎ Leslie walks up the sidewalk to the front door of her house. In the yard next door, children are playing, catching her attention. As one child frolics, the hood on his parka falls back, uncovering a bald head. Chemotherapy, probably for some radiation-caused cancer. So, what else is new? She fumbles through the purse and finds the keys.
Leslie leaves her purse in the living room and walks to the greenhouse at the rear of the house. She pulls two tomatoes off a stalk. They are safe to eat but streaked with yellow.
In the kitchen, a dull butcher knife squeezes the tomato; seeds and pulp spill onto the plastic cutting board. Leslie sharpens the knife on the stone. The knife cuts cleanly through the tomato. She tosses the wedges into a soup dish, then chops sprigs of celery and parsley and adds them to the mix. She drips a tablespoon of Italian dressing on the salad. She eats alone at the dining room table with no TV or newspaper to focus her thoughts. Twilight drains the remaining warmth from the room.
Leslie fills a tumbler with ice and retrieves a bottle of vodka from a kitchen cabinet. She takes the drink to the living room and turns on a table lamp, then pulls a scrapbook from a bookcase. She sits on the sofa and opens the album, flipping through her life framed on black pages: photos as a baby, as a child with her mother and father, as a high school graduate, and as a young woman in the backyard, her right hand holding a trophy to her bosom and the left grasping a rifle braced on her hip. She looks up at the brass marksmanship trophy on the fireplace mantle: a woman on one knee, rifle at her shoulder. In the album, the color college graduation photo has faded, graying her black gown and mortarboard, and her father’s navy-blue suit.
On the next page is a small newsletter article, “Dr. Leslie Carney Joins Fermilab Staff.” She turns a page and unfolds a newspaper article. A headline screams “Nuclear War!” The words “Soviets Attack New Chicago, Los Angeles, New York” run below the banner. A photo of smoke rising from a cargo ship spans six columns. Atop the column of copy is another subhead: “Russian ships disguised as Panama-registered bulk carriers.” The date on the newspaper is April 26, 1986.
Leslie refolds the newspaper and turns the page. A newspaper obituary, “Radiation Deaths,” lists her father’s name, highlighted with a yellow marker, among hundreds who died that week. She turns the next pages, all blank and black.
⸎ The Russian attack was not immediately provoked, but the Politburo had been smoldering for two decades, humiliated by Kennedy’s successful invasion of Cuba and the obliteration of North Vietnam. The U.S. arming of rebels in Afghanistan sprayed lighter fluid on the hotheads in the Kremlin.
The war had not gone well. America had vulnerable coasts, and the ship getting to New Chicago via the Saint Lawrence Seaway was a surprise. The Soviet Union’s ports of Leningrad and Odessa were sequestered by European peninsulas and Vladivostok was shielded by Sakhalin, Japan, and Korea. No avenging ships reached the Soviet cities.
The reactor assault was followed by a brief war in Germany that killed about 60,000 on each side. The Soviets withdrew from Hamburg but kept West Berlin. The German landscape was dotted with abandoned villages and military bases, polluted by artillery shells that dispersed nuclear wastes.
In 1950, a successful fission reactor test was eventually performed. The potential of a nuclear fission bomb had been known by both sides, but no one had dared test such a risky device. Furthermore, the industrial infrastructure needed to separate U235 and plutonium seemed impractical, like building five cities to make a bomb that would destroy one.
After the 1942 meltdown in Chicago, papers of the deceased physicists were transferred to Washington. A physicist not in that group, Edward Teller, issued a report stating that the first fission bomb could be the last one; the reaction might consume every atom in the atmosphere.
After the 1986 North Atlantic War, both the Soviet Union and the United States were poised to resume research into the bomb, but mutual interests put a moratorium on development. The Soviet Union realized that in a bomb production race, the United States still had the superior production capability, and did not want to spend the next decades waiting for the other shoe of vengeance to drop. Both sides agreed to on-site inspections to prevent establishment of uranium diffusion factories.
The 1988 election had put Michael Dukakis in the White House. The Republican Party was narrowly defeated but its extremist cousin, The Patriot Front, maintained a covert infrastructure in the federal government and the military. It was a Front operative, a clerk in the Energy Department, who found a report from an obscure physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, suggesting only a three in a million chance that a nuclear bomb would destroy the world.
The information was entrusted to two Front members, Drs. Haynes and Carney, who were to confirm the calculations and create blueprints for the weapon and diffusion plants. A contractor was diverting enriched uranium from a reactor it operated in Ohio. An oil company would construct covert diffusion sites at several refineries and was already digging a half-mile shaft in the Nevada desert for a bomb test.
The Front pursued a circular logic. If its surreptitious bomb-making efforts were undetected, they assumed that their Soviet counterparts were having just as much luck.
If the underground test proved successful, the coup would be initiated, and the purification would begin. The traitors in the White House, Congress, and the media would be eliminated. America’s space program would be converted to military use.
⸎ Leslie pulls into the empty parking lot at the war memorial. She leaves the car and walks up to a group of stones. She gazes up at a clear, cool sky filled with stars and waits for a sign from God. A shooting star passes by. This is her chance to change history. She doesn’t understand this feeling: a feeling that she has always carried the world on her shoulders. She gets back into the car and drives to the lab.
The guard takes no special note of Dr. Carney’s entrance or the empty shopping bag she is carrying. Many of the physicists have night shifts to gain access to the fixed target experimental areas.
At her desk, Leslie takes one last look at the “Peach” file, then trashes it and the files on the two backup floppies. She knows that isn’t enough; trashing only sends the file back to shared memory. She opens a complex document, the large schematic of the five accelerators, and begins copying it until it consumes all the disk space.
She takes a swig of vodka straight from the bottle then walks over to the small closet. Inside is the radiation suit and a white lab coat she had filched from the Neutron Therapy Lab that afternoon.
Leslie, wearing the lab coat, enters Dr. Haynes’ vacant outer office. The clock says 9 p.m. She is carrying the department store bag, filled with her regular clothes. She knocks on Dr. Haynes’ door. “Who is it?”
“Leslie.”
“Come in.”
She sets the bag down in the outer office and enters. She sits on the sofa facing the desk. Haynes gives her a quick glance. “Isn’t that something of a cliché—the scientist is a white lab coat?”
“I want to be taken sheer-ishly as a scientist.”
“Maybe we should talk later.” Haynes feels pity and a small bit of revulsion. He keeps his eyes on the computer screen. Leslie asks, “Do you think God wants us to kill millions of Russians? Maybe if we just wait long enough, the Soviet Union will fall apart.”
“Where did you get that idea, in your dreams?”
Leslie crosses her legs, takes off one black shoe and drops it on the floor. She recrosses her legs and drops the other shoe. “I must say I admire your ded-icashion.” She stands up, walks behind Haynes, and starts to massage his shoulder. A new schematic is on the screen: at one end of a bullet-shaped casing is a ball, a fission bomb, which will initiate reactions along the elements in the cylindrical casing. Haynes is already thinking ahead—to a Superbomb. A ring of keys is on his desk. “Does that feel good?”
“Well, yes.” Haynes will play along. If he waits long enough, maybe she will pass out on the sofa. “You’re working too hard. If we spent more time in bed, maybe we would spend less time building things to kill people.” Haynes doesn’t reply.
“Turn around.” Haynes slowly turns his chair around. Leslie has unbuttoned the coat. She pulls it open. Haynes jerks his eyes away in revulsion.
“See, they don’t look so bad, do they? She puts her hands to her chest. “See, I still have a nipple left. Didn’t you like sucking on this one?” Haynes, his faced turned red, quickly turns his chair around and locks his eyes on the screen. “I think that’s enough.”
Leslie runs the fingers of her left hand through his sparse hair. Haynes cringes. “My poor daddy. Did your little girl scare you?” Her right hand reaches into her coat pocket. She begins to pull the kitchen knife from the pocket but hesitates. She gazes blankly ahead, reaching for something, a flicker of memory—a memory of killing. Reaching, reaching. Now it’s lost. But so is her anger. She silently mouths the words “I can’t.” She steps back from Haynes’ chair and releases the iron grip on the knife. She can barely lift the empty hand from her pocket. Her right arm goes limp. She struggles to rebutton the coat with her left hand.
Haynes turns his chair around as Leslie rushes out the door.
⸎ Leslie speeds down the road home, sobbing behind the wheel. Her street clothes are still in the bag on the passenger seat. At the lab, Haynes has returned to working at the computer. In a corner of the room stands a glowering, gray-haired Seka in a black robe and hood, her hands clenched at her sides. She casts frustrated eyes at the ring of keys on the desk. One is an old black key. A gust of wind shuffles papers on the desk. Haynes turns around and sees nothing.
Leslie, still wearing the lab coat, sits on the sofa in her living room, sipping vodka, listening to violin music on the stereo, and watching a fire in the fireplace.
A mental film of what she should have done keeps running through her head. She slits Hayne’s throat. Blood sprays on her hands, arms, and the lab coat. She takes the coat off, cleans herself off in his mini-kitchen sink, then dons the clothes she left in the bag in the outer office. She pushes the chair with Haynes’ body away from the desk. She dumps all his nuclear research files and searches for any hard copies in his desk files.
The computer files may be hidden somewhere, in a locked application or a in a system subfile. No matter. She unplugs the monitor and places the computer in the shopping bag. Take it home. Put computer in oven at five hundred degrees for two hours. Stuff as many clothes and personal care products into suitcases and bags as possible. Place in trunk of car. Drive into another neighborhood and strip plates from a car parked on the street.
Return to work in morning. Police will arrive and interview her. They will quickly note her visit in the guard’s night log, but it would be a couple of days before they have enough information to arrest her. At lunch, go to bank and withdraw as much cash as possible. Leave at two, claiming depression at Haynes’ death. Go home, change plates in garage, and drive out of town. From there, her plan gets a bit fuzzy. Both the FBI and the Front would be looking for her.
So, what was Plan B? She couldn’t bear to see Haynes again. Tomorrow morning, she will call in sick, then try to figure it out. But something about this night seems familiar. The fear, anxiety, humiliation—sitting here paralyzed, trying to figure out what to do, putting off a decision. What made her think she could actually kill someone?
⸎ In the computer room in the heavens, Seka pulls up a program with two windows: History 6.1, containing a file marked “Leslie,” and History 6.2, with a file marked “Lee.” Seka moves the Leslie file inside the Lee file.
⸎ Leslie becomes conscious of a dull roar. What was that? She gets up and turns off the stereo. Water is running in the bathroom. She must have turned on the shower, then forget about it. She walks into the bathroom. The water is running from the faucet into the almost full tub. For a moment, she sees in the water the accusing, pained faces in the reflecting pool. She has failed them.
But this isn’t right. She showers; she never takes a bath. She turns off the faucet, then reaches for the knife in her pocket. The hands are upon her. Two grab her right wrist and arm, two grab her left arm. The knife clatters on the floor. Black latex hands, black wet suit arms. A gasp reaches for a scream, but a black plug is forced into her mouth as two more hands muzzle her face. Her wig falls off. She flails her legs and feet, but they only bang painfully against the side of the tub.
⸎ Leslie, her eyes open but unseeing, thrashes her arms about. Seka, bending over the couch and holding Leslie’s wrists, tries to restrain and calm her. “Leslie, Leslie, don’t fight it. Let it happen.”
⸎ They jerk her coat off. Hands grab her ankles. She is forced down on her knees. Her flesh strains against the anticipated groping and penetration. Instead, a sharp pain pierces her left wrist. She turns to see one black hand holding the kitchen knife, the other pushing her forearm and bleeding wrist into the water.
Now, they wait. Hands patiently grip her arms. Knees pin down her legs. Two other hands hold her shoulders down. She stops struggling. She has failed; what more is there to do? One of the assailants pulls her left wrist out of the red water to see if the bleeding has stopped. It hasn’t. Her limbs are cramped, then numb. The gag is removed; the rubber taste lingers in her mouth. The hands lift her and gently lower her into the tub. The three black specters leave the room.
In the living room, tired flames sputter in the fireplace. Seka, wearing a long white gown, walks toward the bathroom. Leslie sees a swirl of white in the corner of her right eye. She feels an arm cradle her head. A blurred face comes into focus. It is Seka. “Don’t give up now. We aren’t finished yet.” Leslie surrenders to the dark. She was dying or she was rescued; she could take either one.
Chapter 15
October 21, 1959. Leslie hears a loud knocking at the door. Even with her thoughts slipping from her body, she senses that something is wrong. The knocking was too far away to be the bathroom door but too close to be the front door. “Lee, are you in there? Are you all right?” Leslie doesn’t recognize the woman’s coarsely accented voice. Someone twists a doorknob, and a latch opens. She drifts off.
Leslie sees light globes on the ceiling passing by her. She is lying on a gurney and being pushed somewhere. The lights grow fuzzy.
She slowly wakes up. She first notices the whiteness: the coarse white sheets, the white bed rails, the white walls, the nurse’s white uniform. The nurse has a pretty but broad face with large lips. Her face seems even bigger because her blond hair is pulled back in a bun. Leslie turns her head and sees beds to the left and right of her. The nurse notices the patient is awake and walks toward a doctor standing at the end of the room. The doctor approaches and picks up the chart hooked to the end of the bed. “You are better today, Lee.”
That coarse accent again. Could be Slavic. He has a widow’s peak of thin, gray hair. “It’s Leslie.” She is surprised at the odd timbre in her own voice.
The doctor looks again at the chart. “It says Lee here. How are you feeling?”
“I . . . where is this?”
“You are in hospital in Moscow. We hope you can go home soon.” So, he’s Russian. “Home.”
The doctor walks away. Leslie pulls her hands out from under the sheet. Her left wrist is bandaged and there is a small bandage on the bend in her right arm, probably where they had poked an IV. What is this? The hair on her arms, the wrong hands. Leslie raises the hand to her face and feels stubble. Her hands reach down and find that thing between her legs. “Oh, God.”
Touching the penis makes her realize another sensation is pressing at her conscious: Her bladder is full. Leslie swings her legs off the side of the bed and sits up. She feels woozy. She stands. The nurse rushes to her bed. “What are you doing?”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Let me bring you pan.”
“No, I need to get out of bed. I’m all right.”
Leslie takes a couple of steps. She can do this. The nurse walks with her to the bathroom and waits as Leslie goes inside. Leslie turns on the light in the closet-size room. There is a toilet, sink and mirror. She looks in the mirror and sees a young man with thinning deep brown hair, pale skin, and a weak chin. It is the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. She tries to smile and sees a smirk.
She sits on the toilet. She can’t focus. She can’t make anything happen. Worse, she knows the nurse is waiting for her. She stands up and points it at the toilet water. Nothing. She can hear that another person has joined the nurse outside. Now two people are waiting for her. Leslie decides to come back later and try again. She flushes the toilet and quickly rinses her hands.
An hour later, the nurse leaves the ward. Leslie quickly gets up. She feels stronger—or is that just nervous energy? She sits on the toilet again. She waits. Maybe she can force it to happen. She strains. A quarter-second of stream comes out, then stops. Is this how it’s going to be: strain, then wait, strain, then wait? A hand jiggles the door. Damn it, now somebody is waiting again.
Leslie returns to bed. She barely touches her dinner and takes only a sip of water. No point in filling her bladder even more. She waits until everyone in the ward is asleep. Now, she would be alone, with time to relax. She returns to the toilet and waits. Her mind starts to wander . . . She is discovering a memory. She rocks on the seat, her teeth gripping her fist. She waits to catch her breath, waiting for the panic to stop. She can’t talk to anyone yet. She can’t let anyone touch her. When she collects her thoughts, when she calms down, she will go to the police.
Her muscles relax. She urinates. Leslie is exhilarated by the stream of relief. Now it seems so easy, so obvious. She would have no trouble doing it again. She rinses her hands and washes her face. With each step back to her bed, she remembers more: the fireball over Chicago, the black car in the field. The toothpicks in the donut. She falls into bed, totally relaxed.
Leslie feels the weight against the mattress. She awakens in the darkness to see Seka sitting on the side of the bed. “You failed me. You didn’t kill Haynes.”
“What am I doing here?”
“We have another chance to change history.”
“When will all this end?” Her spirit is growing tired of all these migrations. “When we get it right.”
“What happened to the man in this body?”
“He is still there. When you next sleep, he will return. You will be his inner woman. You will see everything he sees; feel everything he feels. You will have children.”
“Children?”
“You will be a father. If you’re going to play God, you need to know the hearts of men.” Seka puts her hand on Leslie’s head. “Now go to sleep. I have to tidy up the mess you left.” Being a father. Not a bad way to have children, Leslie thinks. Hold and cuddle them whenever you want. Let the woman go through labor and change the diapers.
⸎ On the computer screen is a red map of the Soviet Union, with little yellow explosions on twenty cities—part of Haynes’ report for the Front. More than tit for tat. If we destroy only three cities, the Communists can rebuild and make their own bomb. Haynes gets up from the chair and stretches his arms. He dials the lobby guard. Leslie has left. Haynes will have to call Mars again in the morning. She has gotten completely out of control. He walks to the window and draws open the shades. He looks at the stars. What the . . .? Some kind of light show fills half the sky. A jagged pattern of white lines bounces like a Slinky across the sky.
In the heavens, a ragged pattern, a screen saver program, careens across the computer screen. Neva drags the “History 6.1 file to the trash can icon at the bottom left corner of the screen. A message pops up. “Do you really want to trash History 6.1?” There is a “Yes” and a bolder “No” box below the message. Neva clicks on “Yes,” pulls down the menu list under “Special,” then clicks “Empty Trash.”
Haynes is still watching the night sky. The show of lines has disappeared, but he waits for a possible second act. What’s next, fireworks? A bright, narrow crevice of light appears. Haynes flinches in the brightness. Stars in the sky fall into the crevice. He has only a moment to comprehend the impossible. What is this, a white black hole? The building rumbles; furniture dances on the floor. The office window shatters and a wind sucks everything toward the growing light. Haynes clutches to a bookcase. The papers, then the phone, the computer, and desk fly out the window. Books bounce off his head; his glasses are ripped from his face.
His feet are in the air. His fingers grasp the corner of the bookcase, which is now sliding toward the window. The air is sucked out of his lungs. The fingers let go. In the night, Haynes’ body is but a speck in a crowded stream of bodies, boulders, uprooted trees, and chunks of building hurling toward the light. Finally, nothing remains but the white crevice in the black space. The crevice closes.
⸎ Leslie lies on the couch, drained and exhausted. Seka persists in deconstructing her experience. “Why did you turn into a man? Did you feel you were no longer a woman?”
“What?”
“You lost your womb. You lost your breasts. You lost your hair. You felt like you were turning into a man.”
“I turned into a man because I needed to change history. This isn’t a dream. This is for real.”
October 21, 1959. Leslie hears a loud knocking at the door. Even with her thoughts slipping from her body, she senses that something is wrong. The knocking was too far away to be the bathroom door but too close to be the front door. “Lee, are you in there? Are you all right?” Leslie doesn’t recognize the woman’s coarsely accented voice. Someone twists a doorknob, and a latch opens. She drifts off.
Leslie sees light globes on the ceiling passing by her. She is lying on a gurney and being pushed somewhere. The lights grow fuzzy.
She slowly wakes up. She first notices the whiteness: the coarse white sheets, the white bed rails, the white walls, the nurse’s white uniform. The nurse has a pretty but broad face with large lips. Her face seems even bigger because her blond hair is pulled back in a bun. Leslie turns her head and sees beds to the left and right of her. The nurse notices the patient is awake and walks toward a doctor standing at the end of the room. The doctor approaches and picks up the chart hooked to the end of the bed. “You are better today, Lee.”
That coarse accent again. Could be Slavic. He has a widow’s peak of thin, gray hair. “It’s Leslie.” She is surprised at the odd timbre in her own voice.
The doctor looks again at the chart. “It says Lee here. How are you feeling?”
“I . . . where is this?”
“You are in hospital in Moscow. We hope you can go home soon.” So, he’s Russian. “Home.”
The doctor walks away. Leslie pulls her hands out from under the sheet. Her left wrist is bandaged and there is a small bandage on the bend in her right arm, probably where they had poked an IV. What is this? The hair on her arms, the wrong hands. Leslie raises the hand to her face and feels stubble. Her hands reach down and find that thing between her legs. “Oh, God.”
Touching the penis makes her realize another sensation is pressing at her conscious: Her bladder is full. Leslie swings her legs off the side of the bed and sits up. She feels woozy. She stands. The nurse rushes to her bed. “What are you doing?”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Let me bring you pan.”
“No, I need to get out of bed. I’m all right.”
Leslie takes a couple of steps. She can do this. The nurse walks with her to the bathroom and waits as Leslie goes inside. Leslie turns on the light in the closet-size room. There is a toilet, sink and mirror. She looks in the mirror and sees a young man with thinning deep brown hair, pale skin, and a weak chin. It is the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. She tries to smile and sees a smirk.
She sits on the toilet. She can’t focus. She can’t make anything happen. Worse, she knows the nurse is waiting for her. She stands up and points it at the toilet water. Nothing. She can hear that another person has joined the nurse outside. Now two people are waiting for her. Leslie decides to come back later and try again. She flushes the toilet and quickly rinses her hands.
An hour later, the nurse leaves the ward. Leslie quickly gets up. She feels stronger—or is that just nervous energy? She sits on the toilet again. She waits. Maybe she can force it to happen. She strains. A quarter-second of stream comes out, then stops. Is this how it’s going to be: strain, then wait, strain, then wait? A hand jiggles the door. Damn it, now somebody is waiting again.
Leslie returns to bed. She barely touches her dinner and takes only a sip of water. No point in filling her bladder even more. She waits until everyone in the ward is asleep. Now, she would be alone, with time to relax. She returns to the toilet and waits. Her mind starts to wander . . . She is discovering a memory. She rocks on the seat, her teeth gripping her fist. She waits to catch her breath, waiting for the panic to stop. She can’t talk to anyone yet. She can’t let anyone touch her. When she collects her thoughts, when she calms down, she will go to the police.
Her muscles relax. She urinates. Leslie is exhilarated by the stream of relief. Now it seems so easy, so obvious. She would have no trouble doing it again. She rinses her hands and washes her face. With each step back to her bed, she remembers more: the fireball over Chicago, the black car in the field. The toothpicks in the donut. She falls into bed, totally relaxed.
Leslie feels the weight against the mattress. She awakens in the darkness to see Seka sitting on the side of the bed. “You failed me. You didn’t kill Haynes.”
“What am I doing here?”
“We have another chance to change history.”
“When will all this end?” Her spirit is growing tired of all these migrations. “When we get it right.”
“What happened to the man in this body?”
“He is still there. When you next sleep, he will return. You will be his inner woman. You will see everything he sees; feel everything he feels. You will have children.”
“Children?”
“You will be a father. If you’re going to play God, you need to know the hearts of men.” Seka puts her hand on Leslie’s head. “Now go to sleep. I have to tidy up the mess you left.” Being a father. Not a bad way to have children, Leslie thinks. Hold and cuddle them whenever you want. Let the woman go through labor and change the diapers.
⸎ On the computer screen is a red map of the Soviet Union, with little yellow explosions on twenty cities—part of Haynes’ report for the Front. More than tit for tat. If we destroy only three cities, the Communists can rebuild and make their own bomb. Haynes gets up from the chair and stretches his arms. He dials the lobby guard. Leslie has left. Haynes will have to call Mars again in the morning. She has gotten completely out of control. He walks to the window and draws open the shades. He looks at the stars. What the . . .? Some kind of light show fills half the sky. A jagged pattern of white lines bounces like a Slinky across the sky.
In the heavens, a ragged pattern, a screen saver program, careens across the computer screen. Neva drags the “History 6.1 file to the trash can icon at the bottom left corner of the screen. A message pops up. “Do you really want to trash History 6.1?” There is a “Yes” and a bolder “No” box below the message. Neva clicks on “Yes,” pulls down the menu list under “Special,” then clicks “Empty Trash.”
Haynes is still watching the night sky. The show of lines has disappeared, but he waits for a possible second act. What’s next, fireworks? A bright, narrow crevice of light appears. Haynes flinches in the brightness. Stars in the sky fall into the crevice. He has only a moment to comprehend the impossible. What is this, a white black hole? The building rumbles; furniture dances on the floor. The office window shatters and a wind sucks everything toward the growing light. Haynes clutches to a bookcase. The papers, then the phone, the computer, and desk fly out the window. Books bounce off his head; his glasses are ripped from his face.
His feet are in the air. His fingers grasp the corner of the bookcase, which is now sliding toward the window. The air is sucked out of his lungs. The fingers let go. In the night, Haynes’ body is but a speck in a crowded stream of bodies, boulders, uprooted trees, and chunks of building hurling toward the light. Finally, nothing remains but the white crevice in the black space. The crevice closes.
⸎ Leslie lies on the couch, drained and exhausted. Seka persists in deconstructing her experience. “Why did you turn into a man? Did you feel you were no longer a woman?”
“What?”
“You lost your womb. You lost your breasts. You lost your hair. You felt like you were turning into a man.”
“I turned into a man because I needed to change history. This isn’t a dream. This is for real.”
Chapter 16
In the passenger jet, David opens the briefcase on his lap and gazes wistfully at the copy of Neva’s Greek passport.
The night drive to Vacaville from Oakland International gives him time to mull over his relationship with Neva. There seems to be a pattern: a couple of weeks with young women; several months with older women. Parenthood seemed daunting yet David was too settled to be a playboy. Many women thought he was a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe he could put that in a personal ad: “Male stick-in-the-mud seeks female stick-in-the-mud. Object: Rub sticks together.”
According to white psychologists, there should be millions of black men like him. Without a man in the house, weren’t all those black kids supposed to become mama’s boys? Book worms, socially inept, not athletic? America should be filled with black computer nerds and accountants. Apparently, black men had nothing to do with Freud. David had never seen a movie or a TV show where a black person visited a psychologist. He figures it’s a kind of racism. Hollywood doesn’t thing black people are complex enough to be neurotic.
Then he remembers a movie with Sidney Poitier as a psychologist treating a self-loathing white racist played by Bobby Darin, who kept dreaming that he was slipping down a drain, like that woman’s blood in Psycho. Must have been written by some white liberal who thought racism was a mental illness. Except that meant most white people were mentally ill, so the concept had limited usefulness.
⸎ Upon his return home, the coincidences hit David: two of the pictures on the wall. “Landscapes” by Eric Van Straaten: a photo of a Stonehenge-like collection of rocks backlit by some bright, unseen light. His own “black stones” and the light from his dream.
The other picture—well, he had a hard time explaining that to a lot of people, especially his mother. Six years ago, when he and the Magellan Council were still in West L.A., he had rented his first unfurnished apartment. He liked high-tech furniture: glass, leather, metal. He decorated his living room and dinette in black, gray, white, and primary yellow. When he started shopping for pictures, that kind of strong yellow wasn’t easy to match.
He finally settled on a portrait by Patrick Nagel, who used to do illustrations for Playboy. It was a serigraph of a white female model with platinum gray hair, wearing a black coat and black sunglasses, with a gray and yellow background. If he correctly recalled his mother’s comment on seeing it, she had said something close to “What the shit did you spend your money on?” Now, of course, it reminds him of Neva; even the face is larger than life.
He turns on the TV. On Channel 4 is The Tonight Show with guest host Jay Leno, who is introducing new “toys” inspired by the Gulf War. One is the “Saddam Hussein Ant Farm,” showing tanks above the sand, and below, little bunkers for ants. Next, he introduces a new toy for Russian children, a three-eyed “Mr. Chernobyl Head.”
⸎ Two years ago, the Magellan Council had moved to its new headquarters in Napa County. The three-story sandstone building sits amid a dozen oak trees, a hilly lawn and two rose gardens. Local civic leaders praised the Italian Renaissance architecture. David quipped to coworkers that tourists would stop to inquire about a tour of the Magellan Winery.
David has a small office in Research. He is doing a new search of early Islamic history when he is called to the director’s office. “He’ll see you in the rose garden,” says Laura, the administrative assistant. She is a handsome English woman in her early 50’s. David had pondered asking her to lunch, but that might be trespassing on executive territory.
Leon Mars, wearing a green gardener’s apron over his $600 gray suit, snips a select few white roses off a chest-high bush. He lifts his head momentarily to acknowledge David’s presence. “I have been reading your report. Or should I say your fantasy?” David stiffens his back. “You seem to attribute a great deal to this Neva woman.”
But David is confident of his assessment. “I don’t think the reactor weapon was Saddam’s idea. I think she put it in his dream. I think she tricked him into starting a war he would lose.” Mars tosses a rose from into a wicker basket on the ground. “How was she supposed to put this idea into his dream? Hypnosis? Drugs?”
“I don’t know, except that, after I met her, I started having dreams too.”
“Oh, yes, you write about a light in the ceiling. What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I think there is some sort of pattern. She once told me “The conqueror will become the conquered.” Iraq beat up on Kuwait, we beat up on Iraq. Maybe something will happen to us one day.” Mars cups an off-white bloom in his hand and frowns at the color. “Oh yes, I can see that. Saddam Hussein’s whore is going to defeat the United States.” He crushes the rose in his fist.
David does not like that characterization of Neva, even if it is largely true. But he presses on. “I suppose, in that context, it does seem unlikely.”
“Well, if you ever meet this Neva again, you can ask her how she plans to do it.” He drops the crushed rose to the ground. “Do you plan to see her again?”
“I don’t see how. I don’t know how to reach her.”
“I think we’re finished here.” David leaves.
Mars returns to his office with his basket of roses. He opens a folder on his desk and examines a page marked: TAPE—TRANSCRIPT. LOCATION: STERLING HOTEL LONDON. SUBJECTS: DAVID COMPTON, NEVA DEUMAS. He reads the lines.
DAVID: “How come we never go to your place?”
NEVA: “I like to keep secrets too. So, have you been to London before?”
DAVID: “No, but I’ve seen pictures of it.”
Mars picks up the phone and dials a three-number extension. “How soon can you wire Compton’s house?”
In the passenger jet, David opens the briefcase on his lap and gazes wistfully at the copy of Neva’s Greek passport.
The night drive to Vacaville from Oakland International gives him time to mull over his relationship with Neva. There seems to be a pattern: a couple of weeks with young women; several months with older women. Parenthood seemed daunting yet David was too settled to be a playboy. Many women thought he was a stick-in-the-mud. Maybe he could put that in a personal ad: “Male stick-in-the-mud seeks female stick-in-the-mud. Object: Rub sticks together.”
According to white psychologists, there should be millions of black men like him. Without a man in the house, weren’t all those black kids supposed to become mama’s boys? Book worms, socially inept, not athletic? America should be filled with black computer nerds and accountants. Apparently, black men had nothing to do with Freud. David had never seen a movie or a TV show where a black person visited a psychologist. He figures it’s a kind of racism. Hollywood doesn’t thing black people are complex enough to be neurotic.
Then he remembers a movie with Sidney Poitier as a psychologist treating a self-loathing white racist played by Bobby Darin, who kept dreaming that he was slipping down a drain, like that woman’s blood in Psycho. Must have been written by some white liberal who thought racism was a mental illness. Except that meant most white people were mentally ill, so the concept had limited usefulness.
⸎ Upon his return home, the coincidences hit David: two of the pictures on the wall. “Landscapes” by Eric Van Straaten: a photo of a Stonehenge-like collection of rocks backlit by some bright, unseen light. His own “black stones” and the light from his dream.
The other picture—well, he had a hard time explaining that to a lot of people, especially his mother. Six years ago, when he and the Magellan Council were still in West L.A., he had rented his first unfurnished apartment. He liked high-tech furniture: glass, leather, metal. He decorated his living room and dinette in black, gray, white, and primary yellow. When he started shopping for pictures, that kind of strong yellow wasn’t easy to match.
He finally settled on a portrait by Patrick Nagel, who used to do illustrations for Playboy. It was a serigraph of a white female model with platinum gray hair, wearing a black coat and black sunglasses, with a gray and yellow background. If he correctly recalled his mother’s comment on seeing it, she had said something close to “What the shit did you spend your money on?” Now, of course, it reminds him of Neva; even the face is larger than life.
He turns on the TV. On Channel 4 is The Tonight Show with guest host Jay Leno, who is introducing new “toys” inspired by the Gulf War. One is the “Saddam Hussein Ant Farm,” showing tanks above the sand, and below, little bunkers for ants. Next, he introduces a new toy for Russian children, a three-eyed “Mr. Chernobyl Head.”
⸎ Two years ago, the Magellan Council had moved to its new headquarters in Napa County. The three-story sandstone building sits amid a dozen oak trees, a hilly lawn and two rose gardens. Local civic leaders praised the Italian Renaissance architecture. David quipped to coworkers that tourists would stop to inquire about a tour of the Magellan Winery.
David has a small office in Research. He is doing a new search of early Islamic history when he is called to the director’s office. “He’ll see you in the rose garden,” says Laura, the administrative assistant. She is a handsome English woman in her early 50’s. David had pondered asking her to lunch, but that might be trespassing on executive territory.
Leon Mars, wearing a green gardener’s apron over his $600 gray suit, snips a select few white roses off a chest-high bush. He lifts his head momentarily to acknowledge David’s presence. “I have been reading your report. Or should I say your fantasy?” David stiffens his back. “You seem to attribute a great deal to this Neva woman.”
But David is confident of his assessment. “I don’t think the reactor weapon was Saddam’s idea. I think she put it in his dream. I think she tricked him into starting a war he would lose.” Mars tosses a rose from into a wicker basket on the ground. “How was she supposed to put this idea into his dream? Hypnosis? Drugs?”
“I don’t know, except that, after I met her, I started having dreams too.”
“Oh, yes, you write about a light in the ceiling. What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I think there is some sort of pattern. She once told me “The conqueror will become the conquered.” Iraq beat up on Kuwait, we beat up on Iraq. Maybe something will happen to us one day.” Mars cups an off-white bloom in his hand and frowns at the color. “Oh yes, I can see that. Saddam Hussein’s whore is going to defeat the United States.” He crushes the rose in his fist.
David does not like that characterization of Neva, even if it is largely true. But he presses on. “I suppose, in that context, it does seem unlikely.”
“Well, if you ever meet this Neva again, you can ask her how she plans to do it.” He drops the crushed rose to the ground. “Do you plan to see her again?”
“I don’t see how. I don’t know how to reach her.”
“I think we’re finished here.” David leaves.
Mars returns to his office with his basket of roses. He opens a folder on his desk and examines a page marked: TAPE—TRANSCRIPT. LOCATION: STERLING HOTEL LONDON. SUBJECTS: DAVID COMPTON, NEVA DEUMAS. He reads the lines.
DAVID: “How come we never go to your place?”
NEVA: “I like to keep secrets too. So, have you been to London before?”
DAVID: “No, but I’ve seen pictures of it.”
Mars picks up the phone and dials a three-number extension. “How soon can you wire Compton’s house?”
Image First nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago, 1942, public domain