Chapters (48)
“I just can’t decide how subtle you are.”
“Well.” Joe flipped the butt and watched the wind snatch it into the dark. “If the dud works, I think you got the right angle and the right wind now to carry radiation all the way to Amarillo.”
Oppy turned away to lean on the rail. His clothes snapped around him like a sheet. At first, Joe thought Oppy was having a pneumonic spasm, but when he turned around he was laughing. Either tears or rain was running down his cheeks.
“You’re right. I’ll call it off.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. “Let’s go down together.”
“My orders are to baby-sit the beast. You go.”
After Oppy climbed down and drove away with Groves toward South-10,000, Joe went into the shed, made a seat for himself out of the ropes on the floor and lit a dry cigarette. Half the shed was taken up by the bomb, its loops of cables, its cradle. The bomb that was dropped on Japan would be stuffed into a teardrop casing with tail fins just narrow enough to slip through the bay of a B-29. Otherwise, it would be the twin of this one: same dull gray shell; interlocking, inward-aiming lenses of explosive; warm and silvery Dragon’s heart. From the firing unit emerged the single coaxial cable that dropped through the floor and down the tower to the open switch in the “privy,” a switch that wouldn’t be closed for a week now if Oppy’s estimate was correct. The FM receiver still mixed shelter communications with the Voice of America, and Paul Robeson intoned “The Volga Boatmen” while someone read off a checklist of gammameters. It was about two hundred miles from Antonio to El Paso, four hours of travel for Anna and passengers. But any rain meant washouts, so the time could be doubled. Didn’t matter. It would be a week before another test and he’d have Augustino in a sling before then. He’d drive Groves back to the Albuquerque Hilton himself tomorrow and fill him in on the captain. Augustino could deny everything, but the captain would be nailed by the same item he wanted to nail Oppy with.
At midnight the word came over the radio receiver: “Zero Hour has been postponed. Due to weather conditions, Zero Hour has been postponed from 0200 to 0400. Zero Hour is now 0400.”
Two hours? Joe asked himself. Oppy postponed the shot only from 2:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M.? Well, the weather wasn’t going to improve, he thought. Wind hit the tower broadside. The lamp swayed and the bomb in its cradle seemed to shuffle like a fat man on short legs.