“The captain is a powerful man in his own little realm.”

“Which is the Hill.”

“He really didn’t give you any names?”

“I suppose he’d tell you if he had a name in mind.”

“True.” Oppy gave Joe a conspiratorial grin. “Remember, the captain is an intelligence officer. It’s his duty to be paranoid.”

With the next set of flags, Oppy and Fuchs traded off.

“It must be interesting to be an Indian.” Fuchs followed Joe’s measured steps. “To be free of civilization, to live simply as men and women with nature.”

“You mean go naked?”

“No, I mean defy all bourgeois standards of behavior. You understand what I mean by bourgeois?”

Joe watched Oppy slowly stepping off the direction. A frail figure, his coat whipping around him. As he spread his arms, turning, holding flags, he seemed, in his ungainly way, to be dancing in the snow.

They created a model of the test site to come: red flags for directions, lettered stakes to indicate relative distances to control shelters, base camp, observation posts, evacuation roads, populated areas. By the time they gathered by the transit, the model’s Ground Zero, the snow had almost stopped. Groves’ manner was brisk and expansive, an engineer breaking ground. Waving his hand, he described the test tower, miles of wire, roads and trucks he saw in his mind. Oppy had brought a bottle of cognac, and even Groves, who usually drank nothing more than the smallest glass of sherry, accepted a ceremonial sip. Alone in the car, Joe radioed the convoy that was supposed to have met them hours before. He opened his own flask while he fished in the static. Vodka. Wartime distillers made vodka from potatoes, corn, molasses, grain, from ethene, methane and petrochemicals, from horse sweat and purified piss. Santa Fe liquor stores wouldn’t sell a bottle of anything unless you bought a bottle of vodka. Another subversive Communist connection.

“… difficulty … lost a drive wheel … soon, over.”

Joe repeated his map coordinates to the static and signed off. The general had missed his plane; he’d have to see Roosevelt another day.

Suddenly it was colder and darker. Clouds flowed by on either side, and directly above was a stream of evening stars. When Joe returned, he made a fire from cow chips he dug out of the snow. The other three, exhilarated from mapping the test site, were still sharing the cognac. It occurred to Joe that these minutes of waiting for the party from the base probably were the first moments of relaxation, of complete and powerless rest, that either Oppy or Groves had spent in years.