He had ruled out that Faith knew Rivers
was at Los Alamos before she left San Francisco, because if she
did, she would have been ticketed through to Santa Fe on the
Chief
. Lyle estimated he would arrive
at Santa Fe well before Faith and since she couldn’t get clearance
into the Los Alamos Project there may well be no meeting at all.
But if she persisted and somehow made contact with Rivers then he
would have to go into town to see her. Lyle was confident that if
he got to Dan Rivers first, the likelihood of that happening was
remote.
On the long flight to New Mexico, over the
Allegheny Mountains, the Ohio River and on over Missouri’s rugged
Ozark Plateau and the windswept treeless plains of Oklahoma, Lyle
uncharacteristically avoided conversation. He sat alone, detached
from the cheerful camaraderie of his fellow passengers, his rancor
eating away at him, as he gazed out the window beside him into the
nothingness beyond.
By now he and Faith should have been in
Albany. Already his parents had been forced to postpone the lavish
reception they had planned for them. Over two hundred of the city’s
most prominent citizens had been told that after Faith’s long sea
voyage she had needed to rest in San Francisco for a couple of days
to recuperate and find her land legs. Lyle only hoped the lie
wouldn’t have to be perpetuated, or even expanded upon if his trip
to New Mexico was unsuccessful.
It wasn’t Faith’s irrational and
inconsiderate behavior that angered Lyle the most, or even Gus
Welenski’s backstabbing which had caused it in the first place.
What drove him to distraction was that she had cold feet about the
wedding and if she saw Dan Rivers she may even call it off. The
embarrassment that would cause him among his friends in Washington
and Albany was only exceeded by the prospect of the humiliation he
would suffer if they discovered she had passed him over for an
Indian. Lyle was dispelling the unpalatable thought for the
umpteenth time when the roar of the plane’s engines eased and the
pilot announced they were approaching the airfield at Santa Fe Lyle
checked his wristwatch. It was almost 1.30 p.m., local time.
A column of Army staff cars was lined up on
the runway apron when the DC-3 feathered its engines. The
passengers quickly transferred to the ground transport and in
minutes the VIP’s were speeding up the highway towards Espanola, a
small settlement twenty-five miles to the north. Near Espanola, the
column turned westward and travelled down a newly constructed
bitumen road. After a few miles, the motorcade was stopped at the
entrance to the Los Alamos Project, where heavily armed soldiers
carefully checked the visitors’ credentials.
Two years earlier the United States
government had set up the Los Alamos Project on a remote, two
hundred square mile volcanic crater in the centre of the Pueblo
Indian Reservation and constructed a sophisticated physics
laboratory for the purpose of developing the atomic bomb. As the
convoy entered the project, the driver of Lyle’s car explained that
the Valle Grande had been selected for the project because of it’s
remoteness and that the seven hundred thousand acres it covered
were bordered by deep canyons to the north and south and by rugged
mountain ranges to the east and west, making unauthorized access
all but impossible.
Although the project had been underway since
1942, there was still a lot of construction going on. Lyle noticed
many of the roadways on the site were still unpaved and ran over
compacted volcanic ash which the driver said was over a thousand
feet deep in places. Many other roadways were already paved or in
the process of being sealed. Lyle noticed several vehicles and
pieces of road building equipment bore the name of Mesa
Construction.
When the visitors arrived at the main
administration complex to begin their guided tour, Lyle told the
group he would be taking a short time out to see an old friend
elsewhere on the project and told his driver to take him to the
site office of Mesa Construction. The prefabricated metal building
was only a couple of miles away beside a construction worker’s
camp. There were just a few men inside the office. Lyle noticed
they were all Indians. One of them looked up from reading a
blueprint when he came in.
‘Can I help you, Colonel?’
‘I’m looking for Dan Rivers.’
‘Dan’s supervising some roadwork several
miles west of here,’ the young man said. He won’t be back until
just after quitting time. Can I give him a message?’
‘No. I’ll drive out and see him if you’ll
point me in the right direction.’
The young man opened the office door and
pointed to a road leading off toward the mountains. ‘Just keep
going down there Colonel until you see the road crew. Dan’s a tall
guy with long hair. I think he’s wearing a buckskin jacket and blue
denims.’
‘Thanks, but I know what he looks like. We
served together in the Pacific.’
‘You’re a friend of Dan’s, sir?’
‘You might say that.’
The young Indian grinned. ‘Then maybe you
wouldn’t mind giving him this.’ He took a piece of paper from a
pigeon hole behind him. ‘It’s a message that came earlier from the
office in Gallup.’
Lyle took the note, put in his pocket and
walked outside to the car. As soon as it pulled away he took out
the note. His jaw hardened as he read it.
Dan, Your mother phoned. She said a Faith
Brodie was in Gallup looking for you on her way down east. She took
the midday train to Santa Fe. If you want to see her, she’ll be
looking for you at the station.
‘Have you ever been to Gallup on the train?’
Lyle asked his driver.
‘Once, sir.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘I think it was around six or seven hours,
sir.’
Lyle checked his wrist watch. Almost
one-thirty. Faith’s train was still several hours away. For a
moment he was tempted not to bother seeing Rivers at all. He had
expected to have to ask him if he had heard from Faith in order to
get the lay of the land before he could go ahead with his plan to
thwart any meeting. Now that was unnecessary. But he decided to
leave nothing to chance. He would stick to his original plan and
treat his interception of the message from Gallup as just a lucky
bonus which just happened to make things a lot easier.
The car carried on down the road until it
came upon a cluster of bulldozers and graders working the roadway.
Through a cloud of blowing ash dust, Lyle saw a surveying team
setting grade levels. The instrument man had seen the car
approaching and when he looked up from his lens, Lyle recognized
him immediately as Dan Rivers. Lyle told the driver to stop, got
out of the car and walked over to him.
‘Captain Rivers,’ Lyle smiled broadly and
held out his hand. ‘What a pleasure to see you again.’
Dan held out his hand and eyed Lyle
quizzically. ‘I’m sorry Colonel, but I can’t seem to place
you.’
‘You wouldn’t, Captain. You were unconscious
in a hospital bed in Australia when I saw you last. You’d just been
transferred ashore off a hospital ship. I must say your looking a
lot better today than you did in Brisbane that day.’
Dan still showed no sign of recognition.
‘I’m Lyle Hunter. I was Faith Brodie’s boss
at General MacArthur’s headquarters.’
‘Major Hunter.’ Dan’s lips parted in an
uncertain smile. ‘What are you doing at Los Alamos.’
‘It’s Colonel Hunter now, Dan. I was
transferred to the Pentagon a few months ago. I’m down here for the
day with a military delegation. I heard your name mentioned and
thought I’d come out and shake your hand. My congratulations on
your Medal of Honor.’
‘Thank you, Colonel.’ For a moment no one
spoke, then Dan said, ‘You mentioned Faith Brodie. How is she?’
‘She’s fine. She right here in the United
States. We’re to be married in a few days up in Albany.’
Dan drew a deep breath, then said softly, ‘I
thought that might be on the cards, Colonel. You’re a lucky man.
How long has Faith been over here from Australia?’
‘As a matter of fact she just arrived on the
west coast just a couple of days ago. She’s travelling east by
train. I wanted her to fly to New York but she said air travel
might be too dangerous.’
Dan shrugged. ‘That’s funny. She once told me
she enjoyed flying.’
‘She does. But she’s afraid she could get so
nauseous it could affect the baby’s health.
‘She’s pregnant?’
‘Almost six months now.’ Lyle said almost
apologetically. ‘Sometimes things don’t happen in the proper
sequence in wartime.’
Dan nodded. ‘Give her my best regards will
you, Colonel.’ He reached out and shook Lyle’s hand. ‘And my
congratulations. And thanks for dropping by. Now, I guess I’d
better get back to work.’
‘
It was good to see you again,
Captain.’ Lyle saluted smartly. ‘And I’d better get back to my
delegation.’
*
It was almost midnight. The
Walrus
lay anchored in less than
eight feet of water just inside the mouth of the MacArthur River.
Joe and Koko sat drinking tea and talking in low tones at the table
in the main cabin. Outside, the night was hot and clammy and very
still. At first, when darkness fell, the shrill chirping of
thousands of cicada insects in nearby mangroves had seemed
deafening but it hadn’t bothered Weasel who lay sleeping under a
mosquito net on the foredeck. Occasionally moonlight fell on the
telltale eyes of crocodiles, the only sign of the giant prehistoric
killing machines that lay submerged in the river awaiting
unsuspecting prey.
‘What will you do if the Horan brothers put
up a fight, Joe?’ Koko asked.
‘I plan to seize their boat at Black
Rock Landing before they come downstream. After hauling their skins
to town they’d have gone to the hotel. They’re still there now I
expect, drunk as lords and looking to pick a fight. They probably
won’t even head down to Black Rock Landing till after dawn.’ Joe
smiled wryly. ‘And when they get there, we’ll already be aboard
the
Groote Eylandt Lady
waiting for them.’
‘And what if things don’t go according to
plan? They’re croc-shooters, so we know they’ve got guns. And if
their spies as well, they’ll be ready to use them.’
‘We’ve got guns too Koko and we’ll use them
if we have to. But I don’t think it will come to that.’
‘But if it does. Will you let me have a
gun?’
Joe looked warily over the rim of his tea mug
at Koko. ‘You know I can’t do that. You’re supposed to be a
prisoner on this boat.’
‘But if they opened fire on us, I’d be in the
thick of it. Surely you’d let me defend myself?’
‘Of course I would, if it came to that. But
it’s not going to, so it doesn’t matter.’
Koko stared into his empty tea mug. ‘Joe, I
have a bad feeling about these men. If they’re cornered in this
river they will do anything to escape. If anything should happen to
me. I want you to promise me when you go back to Darwin you’ll lay
my mother to rest properly. I only had time to lay her in a shallow
grave. It’s under the only frangipani tree in her garden.’
‘But nothing is going to happen to you,’ Joe
interjected quickly. He stood up from the table. ‘Now you’d better
turn in. I’ll take the watches with Weasel. I’ll wake you before we
head up to Black Rock Landing.’
‘But if something does happen, you must
promise me you will rebury her.’
‘Very well, Koko,’ ‘Joe said gently. ‘You
have my word.’
‘There is a little cellar underneath the
cottage, Joe. I would like you to bury her there. My father built
it when I was a baby as a safe place for my mother to hide in case
there was any trouble when he was away with the pearling fleet. He
also used it as a place to ferment and store his saki and keep
valuables. There are even things there that my mother brought with
her from Japan. They always said it was their private place and I
was never allowed down there. That is where I would like her final
resting place to be.’
‘But the cellar wont exist any more, Koko. At
least not as the private place you have in your mind. I’ve told you
before, what the Japanese didn’t destroy in the Darwin bombings,
the civilians and the military either stole or vandalized.’
‘But no one would even know the cellar is
there. There’s no door. The only way in is by lifting heavy
hardwood floorboards. It takes time.’ Koko sighed despairingly.
‘The Horans must have burst into the cottage with no warning,
otherwise, she would have had time to hide. ‘You must believe me,
Joe. No one will have discovered the cellar.’
‘
All right, Koko,’ Joe said. ‘I believe
you. And one day when this war is over, we’ll all go back to Myilly
Point together. But right now, you better get some
shuteye.’
*
Dan was sitting on the tailgate of his red
International pick-up truck outside Mesa Construction’s office,
sharing a cold drink and conversation with some of his employees
when the Army staff cars drove by on their way back to Santa
Fe.
Lyle Hunter sat in the rear of the last car
and he wound down the window and gave Dan a friendly wave. Dan
waved back and watched the motorcade of high ranking officers
disappear into a cloud of swirling ash dust. It was just after 5
p.m. and for a moment he pondered the enormous cost of transporting
so many men so great a distance for such a short period of time. He
took another swallow of his bottle and decided something very big
must be going on in the scientists’ laboratories at Los Alamos.
Then his thoughts turned back to the conversation he had with Lyle
Hunter earlier in the afternoon and he knew that sleep may not come
easy that night.
*
Faith had plenty of time on the train to
ponder her future and contemplate whether she might see Dan at the
station in Santa Fe. Along the way she reflected on her meeting
with Dan’s mother. After Shona Rivers’ revelation that Dan had gone
to Brisbane only to learn from Sergeant Peterson, and probably with
a generous serve of innuendo, that she was at Point Danger with
Lyle, she became convinced Dan wouldn’t be at the station even if
he did get a message that she was coming.