The Hanging Garden got its name from the scarlet gilia, paintbrush and yarrow that had taken root and flourished in the turned soil of the hillside. The wildflowers were a brief, improbable splurge of colors—every shade of red, orange and madder—that turned and waved in any breeze crossing the dun drabness of the mesa. They twined around the periscopes, overflowed and made the timber facing of the hill into terraces. Speculation claimed that the flowers tapped a broken water pipe. Others said that Jaworski came in the night with watering cans. Whichever, the Hanging Garden so thrived that the loading platform of the bunker built into the base of the hill seemed more a garden bower.

Jaworski asked Joe to join the team in the shadow of the loading platform for lunch. But the Hungarian was a devotee of Spam and all there was to drink was milk. The Army had decided that milk counteracted the health hazard of working with TNT, so it supplied tubs filled with ice and bottles of fresh milk. On one side the bottles said, “Buy War Bonds!” Since the siege of Stalingrad, another side said, “Praise Russia!” Joe stayed alone on the apron, the only place at the Hanging Garden where smoking was allowed.

The two clouds drifted closer. He looked for a bowed veil of rain, but it wasn’t there, just the sudden step of lightning two miles off. On the mesa road he could see MPs on horseback searching for cover. Directly across the apron was a magazine bunker. It had twin fourinch-thick doors and was set at an angle in its own earth mound so that any accidental explosion would be directed away from the control bunker, NO SMOKING was painted in red above the door. While Joe took out his cigarette and lighter he walked close enough to check the padlock on the magazine latch. It was slashed. He had switched locks months before. This lock was his.

As he brought his cigarette to the flame, Joe felt his hair rise on the back of his neck. The flame slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. Bunker, mesa and sky fused into one white bolt. He didn’t have time to look up at the top of the Hanging Garden—that was illusion—but he felt it erupt, the light turning from white to red, the fireball rising and expanding in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air from his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the ache of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.

“Harvey!” Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. Jaworski and the others followed, yelling as they came.