Tracking the wire to the furnace room in the basement, he found a new electrical connection off the junction box and a radio hidden behind a bin of soft New Mexican coal. He took the radio and neatened up the books. By the time he left there was no sign of his visit or the captain’s, nothing but resonance, a fading disturbance like two trails in a cloud chamber.

13

Utah sky was different. Scrubbed clean. Saline. Instead of vultures, gulls.

Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, was different from Los Alamos because Douglas was so quiet. No booms from a mesa, no Indians, no women. Just the olive-drab lethargy of the rearmost echelon post in the United States Army.

The motor pool was a Quonset hut with open wings of galvanized steel over shadows and the glow of welders. Joe and Ray Stingo waited at the pumps. A noon sun lifted the reek of gasoline off the macadam. Ray’s pompadour, usually sculptured with Wildroot, hung like crepe.

“Chief, you should’ve fought.”

“They asked for you and me.”

“Why?”

Joe walked to the other side of the gas pumps rather than argue. He and Ray had flown in from Santa Fe the night before, and all the way Ray had asked the same question.

“The Texas kid killed Shapiro,” Ray said.

“That’s what I heard.”

Ray stalked Joe around an oil can. “Captain Augustino must’ve wanted you to fight.”

“The captain never said anything to me about it.” Joe hadn’t spoken to Augustino since Oppy’s cocktail party the week before. “Look, while Oppy’s still in Washington I’m available for this.”

“But what about me?”

“You’ll be okay.”

A convoy rolled toward the pumps. Army sedan, truck, ambulance and tail sedan had started out the day before in Hanford, Washington, and had come five hundred and fifty miles. Fort Douglas was where the teams switched.

“Too late,” Ray moaned.

The schedule was strict. As soon as the lead sedan was at the first pump, four CIC lieutenants jumped out and a fresh quartet took their place. Mechanics swung wearily out of the repair truck, a slope-fendered Dodge 6×6. The two men Joe and Ray were replacing pulled the ambulance hand brake together and jumped out. Joe and Ray climbed in, Joe behind the wheel. The rear of the ambulance was green Army. No white cross, no cots, no stretchers, no medicine. Only two fold-down seats and, farther back and taking up most of the space, an open steel square, four feet to a side, bolted to the floor and braced to the walls. Restraining straps of 1,000-pound-test nylon reached inward from the eight corners of the square and hooked at the center onto a suspended 50-pound spun-steel canister. The canister was lined with graphite and lead, and carried, inside a hollow of moderating water, a ten-gram lead-coated, stainless steel capsule of jellylike plutonium nitrate that drivers called the slug.