IT TOOK BOOKER NEARLY THREE HOURS TO complete the delicate task of affixing the bonded outer layer of high explosives and detonators to the MK/B-61’s nuclear package. Working alone in the “operating room” cell deep in one of the Pantex plant’s Gravel Gerties, he was halfway through the procedure when Atkins told him by telephone hookup that they’d decided to go for a one-megaton shot.
“Consider it done,” the physicist said.
Compared with layering the high explosives, setting the yield was a simple procedure. By injecting a sufficient quantity of tritium-deuterium gas into the plutonium pit, Booker was able to boost the bomb’s yield from 500 kilotons to just over one megaton. The implosion process would heat the gas to the point where its atoms underwent fusion. The result was a jolt of high energy neutrons that produced the extra bang.
Booker finished up by using an overhead hoist to slip the nuclear package back into the missile’s center subassembly, its “hard case.” The unit contained an array of timers, electronic fusing, and firing circuitry. Weighing less than four “hundred pounds, the bomb resembled an elongated, slimmed-down trash can made of gleaming stainless steel.
Booker was drenched with sweat when he took off the lead apron and stepped into the hallway. The steel blast door clicked shut behind him. Atkins told him that Guy Thompson and other seismologists back in Memphis had recommended detonating the bomb in an abandoned coalmine.
“How deep?” Booker asked.
“About two thousand feet. I’ve been there. It’s a vertical shaft mine with two air vents.”
“Good. I can work with that,” Booker said. “But we’ll have to worry about venting.”
Atkins knew that was one of the main risks of an underground explosion, the possibility that radioactive debris and gases would escape into the atmosphere, venting from cracks that blew open in the ground.
It had happened before—sometimes with disastrous consequences. Massive amounts of “hot” dust, soot, and gas had contaminated the earth’s atmosphere.
One of the worst accidents, Booker explained, happened during a test code-named “Baneberry.” The device was detonated in December 1970 at the Nevada Test Site sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas. Booker had been there.
It was a relatively small shot—ten kilotons. At zero hour, the moment they fired the weapon, Booker had been sitting in the “red shack,” the control room three miles from the test site.
“The hole was too shallow. Only about five hundred feet deep. We’d stemmed it with sand and gravel after wiring the bomb. When it went off, I was watching the television monitors. You could see the ground ripple up and down as the shock wave moved toward us. It pitched us up in our chairs. Then all hell broke loose.”
The explosion ripped a gaping hole in the desert floor and sent a cloud of radioactive gas eight thousand feet into the sky. The cloud drifted as far as North Dakota.
“We’ll have to figure out how to collapse those air tunnels and the elevator shaft,” Booker said. “We won’t have time to backfill them.” He looked at Atkins. “This is going to be tricky.”
“How will you detonate the bomb?” Atkins asked.
“We used cable with all of our underground shots at the NTS,” Booker said. “That’s out of the question. The ground’s too active. One good earthquake, and the cable could snap.” He considered the options. “We might try a radio signal, but I’d worry about all the deflection—bouncing the microwave beam down a mine shaft.” He thought some more. “I’d opt for a timed charge.”
“Where would you set it?”
“As deep in the mine as I could go. I’d use a capacitor bank to produce the electrical charge that would start the firing sequence.”
“What happens after you set the timer?”
“You get the hell out of there as fast as you can,” Booker said. He didn’t smile. “The advantage of a timer is that it’s virtually foolproof. The disadvantage is that once it’s set and the bomb is armed, you can’t easily stop the process.”
Their immediate job finished, Booker and Atkins took the elevator up from the lower cell to the bunker’s main level. Carson, the plant manager, was waiting for them.
Atkins knew something was wrong as soon as he saw him. The man was holding several sheets of yellow paper with shaking hands. He looked like he’d just been given terrible news. He nervously pushed his reading glasses higher up on his nose.
“The president’s national security chief just called,” he said, his voice faltering. “Fighting has broken out between units of the Kentucky National Guard and the regular Army.”
“What!” Booker said.
Atkins felt like sitting down. He was numb. To his knowledge nothing like that had happened since the Civil War, American troops fighting other American soldiers. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the horror of what that meant.
Looking at his scribbled notes, Carson said, “The governor of Kentucky has ordered National Guard units to oppose any attempt to explode a nuclear device in his state. They’ve been instructed to use deadly force if necessary. There’s been shooting in western Kentucky between guardsmen and units of the 101st Airborne. The fighting is continuing sporadically.”
“Any casualties?” Atkins asked.
The plant manager nodded. “On both sides. I don’t have any numbers.”
All this meant a drastic change in plans. Instead of waiting until morning to leave, Booker and Atkins had been ordered to depart immediately. Originally, they’d planned to fly. Now they were going to ride back with the bomb in a tractor trailer.
“Why don’t we fly?” Atkins asked. “It’ll take another half day to drive back to Kentucky.”
“They’re worried about a rocket attack when the plane lands,” Carson said. “There aren’t that many landing places and they’re probably under surveillance. Apparently some of the guard units in Kentucky are equipped with shoulder-fired SAM rockets. The fear is a plane would be too good a target. They’ll know what it’s carrying, and they’ll be watching for it.”
“When do we leave?” Booker asked.
“In fifteen minutes,” the plant manager said. “We’ve already sent out two decoy convoys. I’d suggest you get something to eat.”
The gray eighteen-wheeler was already waiting for them outside the Gravel Gertie, its engine running. Guards in military fatigues were lined on both sides of the vehicle, weapons at the ready. The big rig looked as though it had logged a lot of miles. The fenders were coated with red, Texas dust.
“The truck is armored,” Carson said. “Its communication system allows it to be tracked continuously by satellite.” The convoy would also include two vans. “These vehicles will be operated by DOE couriers who have authority to shoot to kill.”
At exactly 1:30 in the afternoon, they rolled through a back gate at the Pantex plant. A cold wind knifed across the east Texas prairie, blowing rain against the windshield. Atkins and Booker sat behind the driver and a guard who had an automatic rifle nestled between his legs. The semi was flanked by two beige vans. They’d also have an air escort—Air Force helicopters and fixed wing aircraft that patrolled the highway along their route, all 780 miles of it.
Within twenty minutes, the truck was on Interstate 40, skirting Amarillo. The Oklahoma border was a one-hour drive to the east.
The bomb was in a padded container in the back of the trailer. It was strapped down, the container bolted to the floor and padlocked. Three armed guards rode with it.
“It’s going to be a fast ride,” the driver said, glancing over his shoulder at his two passengers. “We want to be across the Missouri line in five hours. As soon as we get out of the Amarillo traffic, we’re gonna open it up. You might want to try to catch a few winks. It’s a long drive.”
Atkins settled back into his seat. The compartment behind the driver was equipped with a bunk bed, a tiny bathroom, and a television console. He watched the rain and sleet beat on the windshield and listened to the wipers click back and forth. During the last twenty-four hours, he’d only managed a couple of catnaps. Normally the sound of the rain would have been enough to help him drift off. Not this time.
He knew he wasn’t going to sleep.
CHANDLER. Bristow. Sapulpa.
The driver was as good as his word, blasting by the small Oklahoma towns that lined the highway at more than eighty miles an hour. He picked up Interstate 44 just east of Oklahoma City. Three hours later, they were approaching the Missouri line.
The guard seated next to the driver occasionally spoke by radio to the helicopters and other aircraft shadowing the small convoy. They’d also picked up several more vehicles near Oklahoma City, four vans that had driven up from Fort Sill.
“They’re carrying two teams of Special Forces troops,” the driver said. “They’re gonna hang with us until we get to the Mississippi.”
Unable to relax or get his mind off Thompson’s cryptic message about Elizabeth, Atkins asked Booker about some of the nuclear test shots he’d witnessed. More than an attempt to make conversation, he was genuinely curious.
“The first was Mike out on Elugelab Island in 1952,” Booker said, rousing himself from a catnap. “It had a couple of firsts. The first hydrogen bomb, the first yield over one megaton. It was way over. Mike yielded 10.4 megatons. Only one other shot since then has even come close. When we got the primary and secondary all set up, I swear the thing looked more like a small oil refinery than a bomb. It completely vaporized the island.”
The fireball left a crater two hundred feet deep and a mile across, a blue hole punched into what had once been an atoll lagoon. Birds turned to cinders in midair. An island fourteen miles to the south was incinerated. Trees were stripped of bark. Animals of their skin.
“It was an incredibly dirty bomb,” Booker said. “No one really knew how big it was going to be. No one could have imagined… The cloud reached 57,000 feet in two minutes. The stem was thirty miles high. The top eventually billowed out like a huge umbrella one hundred miles wide. Mike scared the bloody shit out of us.”
“Where were you at zero hour?” Atkins asked.
“On an old World War II minesweeper thirty miles away. I was up on deck and had dark glasses on. The heat felt like someone had opened an oven door in my face. The shock wave was spectacular, a long, loud clap of thunder. I waited a couple minutes until I thought it was safe and whipped off my glasses. I had no idea… You can’t imagine how big it was. The enormousness of the fireball. It blotted out the sun. The cloud looked like it was going to roll right over us.”
Booker reclined in his seat. The soft glow of a reading light in the overhead console left his face in shadows. “I got my first dose of radioactivity on the Mike shot,” he said. “You think I would have learned my lesson, but I let it happen again ten years later. That time I really did it up good.”
When Atkins asked what had happened, Booker folded his hands on his chest. He sat there a few moments before he began. “It was at the NTS in 1962. The Sedan shot. We set off a 104-kiloton device at a depth of 635 feet. We must have been out of our minds to do it so shallow. It was part of the Plowshare Program to show that nuclear explosions could be used for such peaceful purposes as digging canals and God knows what else. The bomb blew a 320-foot-deep crater a quarter-mile wide and sent columns of dirt, stone, and highly radioactive dust 12,000 feet into the air. Seven and a half million cubic yards of debris went up. All of it red hot. The ceiling was twice what we’d predicted.”
Booker described how they’d penned up thirty beagles in wire cages at distances between twelve and forty miles from ground zero. Their mouths were taped shut so they wouldn’t ingest the fallout.
“All but two of those dogs died,” Booker said.
The bomb team waited out the explosion in the red shack several miles away. “I went back to the blast site way too soon,” Booker said. “The place was a lot hotter than I’d been told.”
Booker stared at Atkins, blinking in the dim light. Then he said, “They told me I’d gotten about two hundred roentgens. I found out a couple years later through back channels that I’d actually received a whole-body dose of nearly four hundred roentgens.”
Atkins knew that a roentgen measured the amount of exposure to gamma rays. Four hundred roentgens was a lot of radiation.
Guessing his thoughts, Booker said, “Six hundred is usually lethal.”
“Doesn’t it affect bone marrow?” Atkins said.
There was a strange look on Booker’s face. “It can cause leukemia,” he said, turning off the overhead light. Atkins could hear his deep, regular breaths in the darkness.
“I’ve been in remission for two years, but it’s starting to come back,” Booker said. “My white blood cells are a mess. Most of the time, like right now, I feel fine, but I can tell I’m slipping, losing energy in bits and pieces. The doctors say I could live another three to five years. Or maybe a lot less.”
“Why are you doing all this?” Atkins asked. He didn’t know what else to say.
Booker leaned closer and spoke in a whisper so the two men in the front of the cab couldn’t overhear him.
“They lied to me,” he said. “The government, my superiors. They all lied, and I’m going to die because of it. They’ve lied to the American public for years about the effects of the radiation clouds that blew across the country in the fifties and sixties. They lied about the high rates of leukemia and sterility and cancer in Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Lied about what caused it. I made my peace with myself over that a long time ago. Had to or I would have gone crazy. But I swear to God, whatever happens in the next few days, I’m not going to let anybody lie about it.”