Authors: Paul Lally
‘Hang on, everybody, going up.’
I yanked back on the controls as hard as I could. The clipper began reaching for the clouds, exchanging precious airspeed for equally precious altitude. Another burst of enemy tracer fire streaked past us, but the rounds curved harmlessly away beneath us as we clawed for the sky.
‘Got a deflection shot?’ I said.
‘Worth a try.’
I glanced at the altimeter and the approaching cloud bank.
‘Six hundred more feet and we’re home free. Can you do it?’
In answer the plane shuddered from the vibration of the fifty-caliber machine gun. Two short bursts, and then a sustained one. I couldn’t see what was happening, but Ava, had a clear view to the rear.
‘He’s hit! No wait, he’s not. He’s turning away.’ I said. ‘He’ll be back.’
Orlando chuckled. ‘Come to Joshua you sinner.’
The first welcoming wisps of cloud streaked past the windscreen.
‘We’re almost there. C’mon baby, you can do it.’
‘Permission to cut fuel?’ Mason said nervously.
‘Not yet. He’s got to see us go into the clouds on fire. Otherwise he’ll call out the dogs.’
More clouds, even more, and then bumpy darkness as we entered the vapor-filled sanctuary at last. I kept us climbing while I counted slowly to ten, and then ordered the fuel dump valve closed. He wouldn’t follow us in, fearing a collision. By now I imagined him on the radio, crowing about how he attacked us and sent us into the clouds, a shot-up, flaming wreck about to crash.
‘Mr. Mason, when you get a second,’ I said, trying to make my voice calm and composed like just another flight to Buenos Aires. ‘Work me up some new fuel numbers, will you? I don’t think what we lost will affect our overall range, but I want to be sure.’
His voice was on the high and on the tight side, but to his credit, still calm cool and collected. ‘Not a problem, captain.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And captain?’
‘Yes?’
‘Nice idea, sir.’
‘Thanks. Nice execution. Let’s hope it worked.’
Ava dropped into the right-hand seat, with Ziggy close behind who fluttered around us, flushed and excited, recounting blow by blow what had just happened, as if we hadn’t been there. But he eventually ran out of adjectives and adverbs and stood there panting.
‘Do me a favor, Ziggy.’
‘Name it, captain.’
‘Take this flashlight. Make a complete tour of the plane and check for damage. Check the fuselage walls, the wings, stop at every compartment window and look out. I think we made it out in one piece. But find out for sure and report back to me, okay?’
‘Aye, aye, captain.’
He dashed off and we both let out a sigh of relief at his absence.
‘Busy hands are happy hands,’ Ava said finally.
We spent the next five minutes re-establishing cockpit discipline. Ava, as always, was precise and focused as she dialed in the autopilot heading, re- trimmed the controls, replaced pencils in their proper place, folded bits of paper and stowed them away, tightened her flight harness and sat there looking at the instrument panel, alert for the slightest deviation from the norm.
I couldn’t resist. ‘Too bad Pan Am doesn’t hire female pilots.’
‘They will one day. Good ideas have a way of happening.’
‘Like this one?’
She laughed.
We flew on instruments through the murky blackness for another half-hour; the compass, turn-and-bank indicator, altimeter, and artificial horizon the only trustworthy friends standing between us and flying upside down and spinning out of control. Instruments are like good friends: you have to trust them implicitly, sometimes even more than you trust yourself.
At first I thought I was imagining the cloud layer might be thinning out, so I kept my mouth shut.
But a few minutes later Ava said, ‘Is it me, or are we getting out of this soup?’
A few more endless minutes passed. The wings started bumping and flexing more and more, which meant were encountering small, individual cloud formations floating inside the general murk. Then a wave of silvery moonlight washed into the cockpit as we broke free from the clouds like breaking free from the water.
But instead of sparkling waves, a smooth, undulating sea of cloud vapor glided beneath us, stretching out as far as the eye could see. No way to tell how long this respite would last, so I left Ava in charge and hurried back to get a star fix. By now Orlando had returned to the engineering station and he smiled at me as I passed by.
‘Nice job back there,’ I said.
‘All in a day’s work, brother.’
I looked at his beaming face and said, ‘We’ve come a long way from that jail cell.’
He frowned. ‘But not much further to go before the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.’
I left him to his Bible-world and went to the astrodome, with Ziggy once again tagging along as my official mascot. Once done, I peeled him off, returned to the chart table and made the necessary calculations. That last run-in had cost us time and fuel for sure, but surprisingly we had not drifted too far off course. Numbers are to a navigator what instruments are to a pilot: at some point you either trust them or you don’t. So I did.
Professor Friedman’s voice pulled me out of my calculations. ‘Captain, a minute of your time, please?’ As always, his smooth, pudgy face was drawn and concerned as he stood next to me.
‘What’s cooking?’ I said.
‘Pardon me?’
‘I mean, what’s on your mind?’
‘Oh, yes, I see. English is not the easiest language,
Ja?’
‘
Jawohl
.’
He leaned closer and pitched his voice low. ‘It’s about the device.’ My heart sank. ‘Problems?’
He fluttered his hands soothingly. ‘Not really. It’s just that I am going to need more time than I planned to arm it. For some reason the fusing mechanism is proving stubborn.’
‘How so?’ I said, as if I had a clue what he was talking about. But sometimes feigned interest gives the other person confidence to solve the problem by talking about it out loud, and I wanted to give this guy every bit of confidence I could.
He clasped his hands together as if praying. ‘As you know, to be doubly sure of success, the fusing mechanism operates on a combination of factors; barometric pressure and radio proximity being the primary ones.’
‘Uh, huh.’
‘And when the output signal from the amplifier reaches the required amplitude to fire the thyratron, and the barometric reading confirms it, the device will explode.’
‘You lost me after ‘thyratron.’’
He smiled. ‘The details are not important. What is important is that working on it under these conditions is especially trying. I’m used to a quiet laboratory.’ ‘And I’m used to quiet flights to Buenos Aires. Maybe when all this is over, we both can go back to what we’re used to do.’
He considered this in silence. I had never met a man who paid such close attention to what you said and then deliberated forever before answering. As if my words had to pass through some complicated mechanism inside his head that took apart every syllable, turned it this way and that, analyzed alternative meanings, averaged out possible interpretations and then finally arrived at a response suitable for the moment.
‘That is highly unlikely,’ he finally said. ‘As General Patton said, now that the Genie is out of the bottle, it is our task to smash the bottle and slow him down.’
‘I wish we could kill him instead.’
‘Impossible, I’m afraid. Because the genie, you see, is people like me, like Einstein, Niels, Szlislárd, and Bohr - scientists who looked too far, probed too deeply and as a result, got what we prayed for.’
‘You prayed for this shit?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Scheisse.’
He winced slightly, and I felt sorry for him. But not for long. Anger returned and I tried to stop myself but couldn’t. ‘Didn’t any of you bastards ever think that splitting atoms wasn’t the brightest thing in the world to do?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t know this, but the bomb they dropped on Washington D.C. killed my wife and kid.’
He looked at me like I’d hit him with a baseball bat and that’s just what
I wanted. I was convinced he’d never answer me after this, and for that matter I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, so I turned away and pretended to continue with my navigational computations. But what I was really trying to do was scramble back into the present and out of the past which was burning me up inside. They says time heals all wounds, but it takes a hell of a lot longer when they’re radioactive.
After a while I got so absorbed in my fuel calculations that I actually managed to forget about the professor. That’s why I jumped slightly when he finally spoke.
‘I am deeply sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you. I got work to do. Excuse me.’
‘May I say something more?’
I nodded carefully.
He bit his lip, his eyes bright with tears.
‘I cannot hope you will understand my world any more than I can understand yours.’ He waved his hand around the flight deck. ‘All of this work by so many people to create a piece of machinery that can fly through the air. It is a miracle, nicht war? But tell me, where are the men who dreamed of flying? I do not mean the Wright brothers, they were the builders. I mean the dreamers: Icarus, Daedalus, Archimedes, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the ancient Chinese. Those are the ones who set all of this into motion.’
‘They wanted to fly. What did you guys want?’
‘A new form of energy. And we found it. But Hitler wanted power and he took it from us.’
‘They’re the same damned thing.’
‘No they are not. One gives life, the other death. Controlled energy release from atomic fission creates heat, from which we can make steam to make electricity. But when that same energy is released uncontrolled as explosive, raw power it brings destruction to unfortunate, innocent people, including your family.’
‘And now we’re about to do the same thing.’
‘If I am successful in my task and the bomb works properly, we will kill people in a few hours. How many I am not sure. But if General Patton is to be believed, the storage facility will be deserted and perhaps no one needs to die. I hope so. There has been too much death and so little life, that...’
He fell silent. We looked at each other for a brief moment. Then he looked away, unable to face me. He turned to leave but I placed my hand on his shoulder.
‘I’ll do my best to get us there, professor. You do your best too, okay?’
‘Jawohl, Yes, okay.’
‘Tell me something; if we manage to destroy the plutonium, then what?’
He already had his answer on the shelf, waiting for someone like me to ask the sixty-four dollar question:
‘If we dreamers were smart enough to split the atom, we are smart enough to build a new bottle to put the Genie back inside, so that he can work peacefully. But we need time to do it. And that is something only America can give us.’
Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.
W
e left Oregon and crossed over into Washington State at 1:46 a.m.
My charts indicated the state boundary line on paper, but Nature doesn’t work that way. It’s all one piece, one planet, all connected and interdependent. It’s people who are the holdouts. Some worse than others, but all of us laboring under the illusion that something as complicated and diverse as the world can be corralled, subjugated, and bent to our will.
Hitler believed he could do it in a global way. Goering, Himmler, Mussolini, Tojo and the rest of their other toadies were riding on the same hateful bandwagon. And us? God willing and nature permitting, we were going to run that damned bandwagon off the road and into a ditch.
Despite being jumped by the compliance fighter, the Dixie
Clipper
, wounded and battered bird that she was, remained on course and on target. Time to ‘Initial Point’ was just under ninety minutes. Engines running smoothly. Rate of fuel loss not increasing. Our gamble of leaving Boulder Dam with full tanks was paying off.
Mason was now stationed forward at the bombardier station in the nose, while Professor Friedman continued working on arming the bomb in the tail. I would leave them alone for now. They had enough to do without my looking over their shoulders. But by the same token, I didn’t want them to feel isolated from the crew. As small as we were, we were still a team.
Ava said, ‘What if it’s socked in?’
‘Weather forecast calls for clear skies.’
‘What’s the temperature spread?’
Then it clicked in my mind. ‘You’re thinking fog?’
‘Could happen if the dew point’s against us.’
‘We’ll go in fast and low and use the chute delivery.’
‘That’s dangerous.’
‘Mind telling me what isn’t dangerous about any of this?’
‘You’re right.’ She bit her fingernail.
‘Don’t worry. The chute will work just fine if we need to use it.’
‘Quit being the mighty captain with me, okay? You’re such a lousy actor sometimes.’
‘The others don’t seem to notice.’
‘That’s because they don’t do it for a living. I do.’
She was right, of course. The idea of strapping a parachute onto an atomic bomb and lobbing it out at low altitude seemed farfetched as hell. Yet Patton and his team were confident of a workable alternative delivery method, and during the briefings had shown us films of successful trial drops. Instead of the bomb falling at terminal velocity from ten thousand feet, we’d roar in at about one thousand feet, drop the bomb and its large chute would slow its fall to a crawl, and delay detonation long enough for us to escape major effects of the blast. The chute was compact, easy to attach and, with luck, it would do what it was designed to do: save our lives while taking a minimum of others.
The plan was for the Sons of Liberty insiders to scram the reactor around 1:00 am. The McGraw brothers were supposed to have radioed them of our change of planes right after we took off. Had the message been acknowledged? Were they out of harm’s way? No way to know for sure. And besides, I already had too many fish to fry and couldn’t add that one to the skillet.