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Authors: Martin Cruz Smith
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As he brought his cigarette to the flame, Joe felt his hair rise on the back of his neck. The flame slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. Bunker, mesa and sky fused into one white bolt. 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 red, the fireball rising and expanding in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air from his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the ache of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.
“Harvey!” Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. Jaworski and the others followed, yelling as they came.
The wooden table and steel sphere were gone, erasedfrom 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 from 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 dove 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 center of stiff blond hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a mustache. 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 poppedinto 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 last triumphant drop.
7
“The Japanese soldier is fanatical, 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 Peiping, 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. Taking turns on the concrete pad that served for the market, three lieutenants from MacArthur’s general staff had come to exhort them. Behind the soldiers the vendors waited patiently 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, coconut, breadfruit, green bananas, red bananas, tins of ghee, bricks of tea, coffee, cosmetics, love potions and douches. The villagers were small, brown, broadnosed:men in loincloths, women in grass shawls, babies riding hips. The previous day’s rain rose from the nipa huts in a heavy vapor 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.
As he brought his cigarette to the flame, Joe felt his hair rise on the back of his neck. The flame slewed sideways, sucked from the lighter. Bunker, mesa and sky fused into one white bolt. 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 red, the fireball rising and expanding in the majestic silence of compressed eardrums as even the air from his lungs seemed to fly out. Then the ring of the shock wave moved, the ache of sound returned, a puddle of sand rained on the apron.
“Harvey!” Joe shouted as he ran up the chute to the test pad. Jaworski and the others followed, yelling as they came.
The wooden table and steel sphere were gone, erasedfrom 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 from 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 dove 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 center of stiff blond hair, just a touch of red at the nose, like half a mustache. 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 poppedinto 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 last triumphant drop.
7
“The Japanese soldier is fanatical, 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 Peiping, 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. Taking turns on the concrete pad that served for the market, three lieutenants from MacArthur’s general staff had come to exhort them. Behind the soldiers the vendors waited patiently 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, coconut, breadfruit, green bananas, red bananas, tins of ghee, bricks of tea, coffee, cosmetics, love potions and douches. The villagers were small, brown, broadnosed:men in loincloths, women in grass shawls, babies riding hips. The previous day’s rain rose from the nipa huts in a heavy vapor 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.
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