While Jaworski's team had been connecting cables the sky had been changing. June and July were the rainy season. This year, though, rain was replaced by dry electrical storms that rolled like loose cannons down from the Jemez and across the valley. A pair of black clouds exchanged lightning bolts as they moved in an eerie calm towards the Hanging Garden; the thunder was too far away to hear. The entire mesa was falling quiet because orders were, no testing of high explosives while there was lightning and the chance of a power surge. Unperturbed, Jaworski led his men down to the control bunker for lunch.
"Coming?" Joe asked Harvey.
Harvey held up his clarinet. "Might as well stay here and practice. Then I'll sound the all clear."
"Good place. Next to a bomb on a hill in a storm."
"You said I needed practice. Besides, it helps me think."
On his way down, Joe glanced back. Harvey looked like a duckling beside a gray and ugly egg.
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 wild flowers were a brief, improbable splurge of colours - every shade of red, brilliant orange and madder - that turned and waved in any breeze that crossed the dun drabness of the mesa. They twined round the periscopes, overflowed and made the timber facing of the hill into terraces. Speculation claimed the flowers tapped a broken water pipe. Others said Jaworski came in the night with watering cans. At any rate, the Hanging Garden so thrived that the loading platform of the bunker built into the base of the hill seemed more a bower.
"It's one big 'if," Jaworski told Joe. "It's like Oppy had invited the greatest minds in the world to come and design the greatest'if'ever seen. But if it works… What was the estimate of the blast?"
"Five hundred tons of TNT. You'd know better than me."
"No one knows. Maybe ten times that. Or twenty times. Or forty times."
Jaworski asked Joe to join the team in the shadow of the loading platform and have 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. The bottles said on one side, "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 four-inch-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 doors. Joe took out his cigarette and lighter and walked towards the magazine to check the padlock on the latch. Joe had switched locks months before. This lock was his.
As he brought his cigarette to the flame, he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Magazine bunker, mesa, sky fused into one white light. The flames slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. 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 peony red, the fireball rise and expand in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air in his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the pain of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.
"Harvey!" Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. He heard Jaworski and the others following, yelling as they came.
The wooden table and steel sphere were gone, erased from the pad. The exposed cables had disappeared and the ground around the pad was baked and reverberating, without a weed or an ant, only a shimmer of the finest particles of graphite and gold. In a wider radius were glass and the metal commas of broken gauges. At the edges of the hilltop, the gilia and sage burned. Overhead, the black clouds were gone, as if blown out of the sky. The mountains rose and fell on heat waves. There was no Harvey.
"It was the lightning." Jaworski caught up with Joe. "An electrical surge."
"Cordite!" someone shouted and everyone dived to the ground.
Cordite was another hazard of the Hanging Garden. There was no more reliable explosive than slotted tube cordite, but it had the habit of blowing free of a blast, then catching fire and detonating at a later test. His face in the dirt, Joe saw smoke sputtering near a cable trench. It was the acetone in the cordite that smelled.
A figure rose from the trench. It held half a clarinet in one hand, half in the other. Its head looked like a sunflower, a carbon-smudged face in the centre of stiff blonde hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a moustache. The front of his shirt hung down over his belly, which sparkled with black and gold.
"Harvey!" Joe called. "Get down!"
Harvey dropped the separate halves of the clarinet as he stepped up to the smoldering cordite and, with elaborate fumbling, opened his fly. A pink organ popped into view. He hesitated, scanning the bodies lying around the test pad until he spotted Jaworski.
"I've thought about it. The plutonium core will be exactly the size of a croquet ball."
Then he played his golden stream upon the burning cord to the last faint whiff and the last triumphant drop, then sat down and rolled back into the trench.
7
"The Japanese soldier is fanatical and well trained. And confident. He has seized the Korean peninsula and he has routed the armies of China. He holds sway from Singapore to Saigon, and from Shanghai to Peking, dominating his larger, Asiatic counterparts and surprising the British. But - and this is a big but - he has yet to face the prepared forces of the United States and the Philippines."
Joe and some fifty recruits from the Philippine Army were assembled in the village plaza. Three lieutenants from Mac-Arthur's general staff had come to exhort them, taking turns on the concrete pad that served for the market. Today was market day, and behind the soldiers the vendors patiently waited in the mud. They bent under the weight of pots, knives, sharpening wheels, orange bags of saffron, wicker baskets of fish, bottles of quinine tablets, plaster saints, bolts of Dutch cloth, cages of fighting cocks. Selling coconut, breadfruit, green bananas, red bananas, tins of ghee, bricks of tea and coffee, cosmetics, love potions and douches. The villagers were small, brown, broad-nosed: men in loinclothes, women in grass shawls, babies riding hips. The previous day's rain rose from the nipa huts in a heavy vapour redolent of jasmine, rotting fish and pig shit. Flies swam in a shaft of light. The recruits had been issued shorts and bamboo rifles. Joe wore a flat campaign hat and Sam Browne belt. The lieutenants sported white pith helmets and sharp creases.
"And he has yet to fight American and Philippine Christians. The Japanese - whether Buddhist, Taoist or Hindu - regards life as cheap. His soul is his Emperor's, not his own."
The villagers, vendors and recruits nodded blandly. They spoke Tagalog, little Spanish, no English. Their eyes were on the barrio teniente, the village leader. When he nodded, they nodded. A dog wandered up to the pad, sniffed and pissed. In its cage, a cock ruffled and settled into green, iridescent feathers.
"It is your Christian duty to defend the Philippines. You recruits will be trained by the finest instructors in the US Army. They will be equipped with the most modern weapons. They will be led by the greatest general. You will be the bastion of Christian democracy in the Pacific. When the Japanese hordes descend on the Philippines, we will stop them on the beaches, we will push them back into the sea, we will sink their adventure to the bottom of Manila Bay."