But a week later the Japs didn’t sail into Manila Bay: they wiped out the air bases at Clark Field and Iba, landed at Vigan and Legaspi, at each end of Luzon Island, and started marching toward Manila in the middle. Joe remembered one of his recruits who pissed on a bomb, a dud that had torn through the bell tower of a church. It was an act of frustration because the ammo for antiaircraft was so old and corroded that it detonated under five thousand feet. Mitsubishi bombers flew at six thousand and dropped bombs all day long. So the recruit stood on the edge of the hole the bomb had made in the sacristy and unleashed his personal torrent of scorn down onto the dud. He was big for a Filipino, in a loose shirt, shorts, American boots. Joe was having a smoke by the altar. Only, it wasn’t a dud; the bomb had a time-delayed fuse. High explosive expanded at about ten thousand feet per second (that’s all explosions were, expanding gases), but Joe always believed there must have been some moment, however brief, of shock, understanding and disappointment in the boy’s mind before the bomb turned the church tower into the barrel of a gun, and him into the projectile that was shot up through it. Some moment, some understanding. If brief, at least bright.

Across the mesa, an afternoon caravan of MPs moved slowly, avoiding each rock and possible snake. As the men and horses passed out of sight, Joe slipped out from under a piñon tree and down the chute of the Hanging Garden to the loading apron. He flipped a whittled stick in one hand. The control bunker was empty. He had thirty minutes before he was supposed to be at one of Oppy’s rare parties back on the Hill.

He had replaced the padlock on the magazine bunker months before. He’d left a key inserted, and the scientists meticulously guarded it as if they were carrying out strict Army security. He opened the lock with his own copy of the key, squeezed through the door, shut it, turned on a flashlight and set it on the shelf. On both sides were shelves of meters, gauges, yaw cards, film magazines, copper and alloy tubes. In a cage in back were the high explosives. Joe could make out Torpex, Baratol, Comp B, Pentolite, all TNT-based explosives. Also cordite, Primacord, smoke pots, gelignite, primers and Navy powder. The cage went from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling, and its door had a combination lock. With his arm, he could reach over the cage top and nearly touch the high explosive.