Chapter 1
Los Alamos, New Mexico
June
“For that first fifteen seconds the sight [of the atomic bomb blast] was so incredible that the spectators could only gape at it in dumb amazement. I don’t believe at that moment anyone said to himself, ‘What have we done to civilization?’ Feelings of conscience may have come later.”
—Norris D. Bradbury
“Great events have happened. The world is changed, and it is time for sober thought.”
—Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War
Five hundred feet above the bottom of Ancho Canyon, Elizabeth Devane lay behind a screen of scrub oak and piñon, wondering if she could really stop the newest weapons test. Living among the other protesters in Santa Fe hadn’t helped her confidence in actually accomplishing something. She was fed up with pointless arguing, passing out leaflets, getting the brush-off from people.
Elizabeth didn’t like to call it “sabotage,” but this time the end would justify the means.
“What do you think?” Jeff’s voice came from behind her, carrying a nervous bite. “I see a rent-a-cop and a few guys packing up.”
Elizabeth didn’t turn. “Can you tell if they’re getting ready to leave?” She barely heard a sound as Jeff Maple crawled up beside her on his elbows. Thunder from an early New Mexican storm, still miles away, rolled into the canyon.
“Looks like they’re done with that NCP thing.”
“MCG,” corrected Elizabeth. “Get your acronyms right.” She squinted, wishing that she had packed her own pair of binoculars. “I can’t tell if they’re done with it or not.”
The Los Alamos workers moved away from the Magnetocumulative Generator and stood at the edge of the concrete pad. A cement apron stretched fifty feet on a side with the MCG in the center. The ten-foot-long explosive generator looked like a fat cigar with thick cables wrapped around its circumference; the wires ran across the pad to a conduit that plunged into the ground.
All details of the MCG test were classified, so Elizabeth didn’t really know what she and Jeff would be destroying—only that it was important.
Several of the men walked away from the pad to a bunker in the shadow of the canyon wall. Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and tried to make out the figures in the dimness, but the sun was just over the top of the Jemez mountains, shining between clouds into her eyes. She shook her head in disgust and took out her canteen. “I can’t see what they’re doing.”
“Whatever it is, they’re done for today. Do you think they’re going to shoot the test tomorrow?” Again Jeff’s voice sounded nervous.
“If they’re on schedule. That means we’ve got to do our work tonight.”
Jeff nodded. For now, they would have to wait. Nobody could see them this high up the canyon. She wished Jeff had known how to ride a horse; then they would not have needed to backpack all the way around the rear of the canyon, coming down from the narrows, to where the Los Alamos security strung only barbed-wire and chain-link fence to keep intruders away.
Elizabeth looked down at her freckled arms, trying to see if she had been sunburned during the day’s hike. Her skin was pale, and with her reddish hair she burned easily, but she had used liberal amounts of unscented sunblock. She tied her shoulder-length hair back with a leather thong to keep it away from her neck.
The men below moved out of the bunker shadows, unrolling a tarp over the scrub-covered ground. They raised two metal poles in the center and secured the tent over the MCG, protecting it against rain. Finally finished, the workers stepped over a small stream that ran through the canyon, then made for gray government pickup trucks parked in the dirt. Snippets of conversation drifted up from the canyon floor, echoing off the rocky walls. Everyone left; not even the rent-a-cop remained behind. The lab workers wouldn’t expect that anyone could get past the five-hundred-foot cliffs. Elizabeth waited until the last man left the pad, then rolled over to her side.
Jeff continued to watch the experimental site as Elizabeth studied his face. His red-framed glasses contrasted with tanned and dusty skin. A sheen of sweat lingered in his curly brown hair. She remembered how his lithe body had moved against her the night before, for the first time in many years. “Glad you came down from Berkeley, Jeff,” she said.
Jeff hesitated, then said softly, “Yeah, it’s nice to see you again. I still think about us a lot.”
“I knew I could count on you to help. Everyone else is just talk.”
“That’s what you always said about me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Not having second thoughts, are you?”
He snorted, then reached out to grasp her shoulder. “No way.” But his hand shook as he squeezed.
He looked up suddenly and extended his arm. “Look, I found an easier way to get down. Once it’s dark we can get going.”
“Yeah, if we can beat the rain.”
She turned back to the canyon. Wisps of white steam—probably liquid nitrogen venting—came from the cables that ran up to the MCG under the tarp. Shadows extended over the entire mesa as the sun set; it looked like a race between the darkness and the clouds. The cliffs appeared steeper in the dusk.
As the last truck pulled out from the test site, guards chained and padlocked the gate behind them. Elizabeth waited for the truck to disappear from sight down the winding canyon road—it was a three-mile drive down to the main security gate at the highway.
“Still time to back out,” Jeff said hopefully.
Elizabeth’s eyes widened and she snapped at him. “I’m not backing out! If you and I don’t go tonight, all this testing is never going to stop. We have to make our point now, show them that we won’t stand for bigger and better weapons—the world doesn’t need the stuff anymore.”
Jeff smiled in the impish way that could always mollify her. “Just making sure you haven’t gotten too tainted by your trendy Santa Fe activists.” He didn’t sound convincing.
“Wimps,” she said with a scowl.
He surprised her by putting his hand behind her head and pulling her face to his. It was a spontaneous kiss, but not at all tentative. His skin was warm, and she ran her hand along his arm. They brushed tongues, lingered a moment, then broke off at the same time. “If we go now, we’re in it for good.”
“Then let’s get going,” Elizabeth said. “There’s nobody else around.”
O O O
The news of the accidental deaths at Los Alamos had shocked her—not so much from learning that the accident had been connected with the National Verification Initiative, but from the callous way in which the debacle had been covered up. A technician and some old scientist had died in the equipment foul-up; three other workers had suffocated when a fire-suppressant system dumped Halon into the sealed bay.
Five human beings had given their lives so a “test” of weapons technology could proceed. And what was the point anymore? The Berlin Wall had come down, the Iron Curtain rusted away. Iraq had been defeated in only a couple of months. Nuclear stockpiles were being dismantled around the world, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union behaved like friends. So why spend billions more dollars to develop super weapons? Were they afraid Brazil might send up a defensive shield to keep the U.S. from launching its own rockets?
She and her Berkeley activist friends, or even the Santa Fe members of the United Conscience Group, had different ideas about what the money might better be spent on—whether social programs, or AIDS research, or assisting the development of Third World countries. Even paying off the national debt would be a better use of the money!
After a beer or two, Jeff would argue that the real fear now lay in the second-generation players in the nuclear game, Iraq, South Africa, Libya, North Korea. Simple nuclear weapons technology was well-known and available, and if not for the extraordinary difficulties in extracting fissionable material such as uranium-235 or plutonium, any tin-pot dictator could make his own Bomb. By this point in his conversation, Jeff’s voice was usually rising. Any resourceful terrorist could put together a “crude” Scotch-tape-and-bubble-gum bomb that had a yield larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima back in 1945.
Elizabeth agreed it was only a lucky fluke that the United States and the Soviet Union had survived their nuclear adolescence; she wasn’t confident that every other country would be so well-behaved. She wished the things had never been invented in the first place. But how could you close Pandora’s Box after the lid had been blown sky-high?
Weapons scientists, like the ones at Los Alamos, continued to develop new methods of destruction, opening new Pandora’s boxes so that all generations to follow would have more and more to fear. The designers kept at their work, even after disasters like the recent capacitor accident, even if it required them to ignore the threat to human lives.
The official Los Alamos press release implied that nothing serious had happened. When the Challenger had exploded, NASA shut down for over a year—but when a major weapons program went wrong, the work barely paused. According to the news, a safety inspection and official inquiry would be scheduled “in the near future.”
It was just like the cover-up in Los Angeles. Ted Walblaken had been an old friend when Elizabeth had worked the books for United Atomics. But she had left the giant defense contractor right after Ted’s death, after United Atomics tried to assure the press, and Ted’s fellow employees, that it could not be proved a work-related radiation exposure had caused his cancer.
That had been a turning point for her. She felt as if someone had shaken her awake from a nightmare she hadn’t even known she was having.
And now this Los Alamos test was scheduled, hardly a week after five people had died in a lab accident. Shouldn’t all research have been shut down and reassessed? Nobody seemed to care.
Elizabeth had stood in the Santa Fe office of the United Conscience Group, her fingers clenched around the newspaper clipping. The office had little furniture, a phone and a few desks, a poster on the wall showing the burned corpse of a Nagasaki victim sprawled above the slogan, “Technical Excellence Brought to You by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.” The United Conscience Group looked like a fly-by-night company in a low-rent office, but they had been active since the Gulf War.
Elizabeth scowled. If you could call this “active.”
Dave, Tim, and Marcia all reacted with suitable outrage at the news of the lab accident, then they made the appropriate “You’re not serious!” response when Elizabeth told them that the other weapons tests were going to continue on schedule at Los Alamos. She knew what would happen next.
Dave rubbed his hands together. “All right, people, we’ve got to get moving on this! Let’s contact the local radio stations, Albuquerque, too, to see if we can get on the air. Tim, why don’t you draft a few letters to the editor? Marcia, you want to draw up some flyers and get them printed? We’ll have to go out and hit the street corners. I’ll get on the phone and round up all the help we can get. Let’s nip this in the bud—time to make ourselves felt!”
Rah, rah, Elizabeth thought, then left the office before Dave could assign her some insipid duties. Letters to the editor? Flyers? Yeah, that would sure make people tremble in their seats and change the world; these guys must have thought they were back in the sixties. The United Conscience Group had never done anything but talk, and as the cliché said so appropriately, actions speak louder than words.
O O O
That afternoon, she and Jeff had scaled the ten-foot-high fence that encircled the remote testing site. The canyon terrain was too rugged for most people even to attempt to hike, though the restricted area lay only a few miles from the wilderness of Bandelier National Monument. No one had questioned Elizabeth and her companion as they left the old visitor’s center building, setting off for the backcountry.
From their resting spot partway down the canyon wall, Elizabeth surveyed the surrounding terrain. In the coming darkness, it was impossible to see into the depths of the canyon. “Keep a watch for headlights coming up the road. Patrols are the only surveillance they’ll use.”
“Yeah.”
Elizabeth pulled her backpack over her shoulders. The equipment inside clanked together. Jeff turned her around and fumbled with rearranging the chisels, hammer, and several sharp spikes so they would make no more noise. They each ate a trail bar in silence, then Jeff led the way down the tortuous route he had spotted.
She heard only his breathing as the two of them moved into the falling darkness. The shadows stretched longer, making it more difficult to find the appropriate handholds and footholds. The rocks felt warm against her skin, but they would cool rapidly at night. In little hollows along the cliffs, evening birds began to chatter with the sunset.
Time contracted for her. She followed Jeff, made sure she did nothing clumsy or stupid, focused her concentration on the ominous MCG equipment sitting under the tarp. She thought of it as a dragon waiting to be slain.
They finished their descent without incident. She shot a quick glance up to the top of the cliffs—she couldn’t see the craggy steepness they had just negotiated.
Rumbles from the approaching storm rolled down the canyon. Light from the full moon peering over the canyon rim splashed over the ground, lighting the rocks with an eerie glow. As the moon slipped behind the clouds they had to make their way by touch the last few hundred feet.
Jeff stood beside her on the cement pad, catching his breath. The tarp stood high enough on its metal support poles that they could easily stand under the rippling cloth. He flicked his glance from side to side. “Feels like we’re on stage. Let’s hurry up.”
Elizabeth shrugged the pack from her shoulders. She flicked on a flashlight and unzipped the back pocket, pulling out a pair of cotton gloves.
“What are those for?” Jeff whispered. She didn’t know why he kept so quiet—they would be making enough noise in a few minutes.
“They’ve got my fingerprints on file, when I was arrested at Livermore, remember?” She felt a flash of annoyance. The arrest had been a source of friction between them, over who was willing to go furthest for their beliefs.
Jeff didn’t reply, but stepped to the MCG. He put his hands on his hips; from the taut muscles on his back, Elizabeth could see he was angry. The tarp flapped in a breeze, making the support ropes creak.
The explosive device looked like a torpedo lying on the pad. Elizabeth walked around it, stepping over the thick cables that ran up from a manhole to the device. Jeff squatted by the opening and directed his light down inside.
“The wires run underneath the pad. Probably to the bunker.” One of the thick hoses leaked white vapor. He ran a hand along the hose, then jerked it away. “It’s cold as an iceberg!”
“Probably liquid nitrogen.”
“Is it dangerous?”
She made a deprecating comment about Humanities majors, but Jeff didn’t hear her.
Elizabeth touched the MCG itself, half expecting the cylinder to rear up, expose teeth and devour her. Nothing happened. She glanced back at Jeff. “Come on. Looks like this is all set up. Keep away from the wires and just smash as much as you can.”
“We should have brought those explosives.” He looked at the large machine. “Would have made this a lot easier.”
“This will be more … personal. Think of it as smashing an abandoned car.”
Elizabeth took the hammer and chisel and a handful of spikes from her pack. Jeff had a hand sledge and a rubber-handled hatchet. She followed the vapor-emitting hose to where a series of wires ran around the MCG’s circumference. She wanted to destroy the thing, but her own curiosity made her try to figure everything out. She had enough of a physics and engineering background that she should be able to identify the pieces of equipment at least.
Though her MBA had come after she left United Atomics, after Ted Walblaken had died of his cancer, Elizabeth had taken an undergraduate degree in physics from Berkeley. She knew the basics behind the MCG. Explosives compressing magnetic fields could be used to power exotic strategic weapons. This device here would be only a simple test run before the big scale-ups to be conducted at the Nevada Test Site. But she and Jeff could never have broken into the giant Nevada complex. Here the security seemed ridiculously lax.
But why use liquid nitrogen in the setup? The MCG didn’t need it. Unless it was for something else …
She followed the cable to the front of the device. The cable split off to an array of solenoid rings.
Jeff joined her, no longer sounding nervous; he hefted his sledge. “Let’s do it.” The tarp ropes made sharp noises as the wind gusted. A growl of thunder rumbled far overhead. “That storm is going to make this like something out of Wagner.”
“I’d rather hear Rush,” Elizabeth said. “Their song about the Manhattan Project might be appropriate right now.” She pointed at the array. “I bet that feed line supplies liquid nitrogen to this solenoid—a superconducting magnet. Whatever they’re testing needs this to drive it.”
“I’ll start at the other end.” He didn’t seem interested in what the device did or how it worked. That didn’t surprise her.
Elizabeth turned for her tools as thunder exploded from the clouds above. Picking up the chisel and hammer, she decided to keep the nitrogen line intact—let that be the finale—and go after the magnet. Whatever damage she could do to the delicate magnet section would slow down the test. And if Jeff could smash the MCG itself, then the Department of Energy would have to invest time and money in constructing another one. A breach of the vacuum chambers, a distortion of the conducting walls, severed wires—anything could cause enormous damage to such a complicated setup.
Maybe by then somebody would get the point.
From the size of the device, the Los Alamos scientists must have packed a thousand pounds of high explosive around the various sections. The explosive must be nonvolatile, she thought, with the way the men had worked around the area. And if they had left it overnight, then it must not be any worse than leaving TNT secured. Nothing to worry about.
Outside, the wind whipped through the canyon, rattling the brush and creaking the tent poles. Hadn’t there been a big storm the night before the first atomic test back in World War II? She seemed to recall they had almost canceled the shot because of it. If the Manhattan Project scientists had failed back then, she mused, she would not need to be here now.
Elizabeth used the chisel to pry away the casing surrounding the magnets. She could hear Jeff banging away at the bottom of the MCG, tearing insulators from the conductive layers. Broken glass tinkled as he brought the sledge down on a diagnostic panel. The storm covered their noises, but it would be hell to climb back up the canyon wall.
Jeff pounded the long spikes through the vacuum chamber walls. Elizabeth jammed her chisel into the magnet and pried down on the solenoid connections. She looked up and saw Jeff raising the sledge above what looked to be the self-contained core of the MCG device, the chamber that held everything trapped within. A volley of lightning skittered across the sky, backlighting the scene with a silver and white glare. Jeff had a studied look on his face as he brought the sledge down …
Her eyes barely had time to react to the explosion belching along the metal cylinder as everything blew up around Jeff. Blue-white afterimages mixed with the purple splotches blazing from inside her eyes. She couldn’t hear a thing—it all happened so fast. A wave of distorted force swept over her, like a gigantic fist hurling her out of the universe—
***