hints that the weapon was done, that it would be tested soon, and suddenly the Russian was gone
as though there were nothing further of value left at Los Alamos. He was too far behind the
Russian. Japan was too far behind the Americans, one man and a country stumbling along
picking up crumbs from an international spy feast that had just begun in Lisbon and could too
easily end here, before he and Japan had more than a taste of the meal.
“I’m sorry,” said Ana.
Kestrel realized that she had said it several times. He curbed his thoughts and fears with the
discipline that was as much a part of him as his slanting eyes. “It’s not your fault that I came here
too late, knowing too little.”
Ana spoke hesitantly, as if she were afraid to disturb him. “Takagura has many contacts in
Siexicali. And I – my family lived in San Francisco before they were driven into concentration
camps.”
Kestrel listened to the bitterness in Ana’s voice. Hatred was the reason she had abandoned the
country of her birth. Hatred, a gift for languages and administrative skills worthy of a person
twice her age had made her invaluable to Takagura Omi’s espionage and import business. But
hatred was a dangerous thing in a spy. He was grateful that he did not have to use Ana beyond
her capacity as translator and go-between. He had the active spy’s distrust of untrained agents.
“Takagura trusts Refugio’s greed,” said Kestrel. “I’m forced to do the same.”
“He said he’ll call from Mexicali when he knows more of what Masarek wants. Perhaps I should
stay with you until then.”
“Why?”
“Refugio will have to speak Spanish so that Masarek won’t understand what’s being said. But
you don’t understand Spanish.”
Kestrel smiled wryly. “Again, I find you invaluable.” He touched her hand.
Ana’s pleasure at the compliment and touch was as transparent as her eagerness to stay with him.
“You’ll have time to tell me about Japan. I’ve never been to my country.”
“First, I need to know more about America.”
Ana frowned and looked away. “What do you need to know?”
“Does Takagura have men in San Francisco?”
“It’s been very hard since Pearl Harbor. They locked up the Japanese, you know,” Ana said
stiffly.
“Yes, I know.” He also knew that Japan had overnight lost most of its information network on
the West Coast.
“All of Takagura’s contacts who are still free are Mexicans. Refugio’s cousins. In fact, Takagura
arranged to sell my father’s flower shop to the Reyes brothers after my father was sent to
Manzanar. Refugio’s cousins paid almost nothing, but,” she shrugged, “even that was more than
most Japanese got for their property.”
“Does the name ‘Magord’ or ‘Amgordo’ mean anything to you?”
Ana frowned and repeated the words to herself several times. After a few moments she shook
her head. “Are they Spanish words?”
“They are the same word, and probably Spanish. I believe it’s the name of a place in New
Mexico, a desert area, probably on or near a military installation. It’s probably, but not
necessarily, convenient to Los Alamos.”
“Where is the map I brought you yesterday?”
While Ana cleared cups and teapot off a low table, Kestrel got the map. He spread it out,
concealing the table’s intricate mother-of-pearl inlays. Ana knelt and looked at the map. Her
eyes were-very dark against the pale background of her rice-powdered face. The hair framing her
cheeks was black, gleaming, untouched by silver. She bent closer to the map until her breath
almost touched his hand as he traced a road that followed the Rio Grande toward Los Alamos.
Page 28
“Amgord… Magordo,” muttered Kestrel. His finger moved over such place names as La Mesa
a?d Las Cruces, Truth or Consequences and Socorro, Albuquerque and – “Algodones? No, it
was gordo or gord, not godo.”
He traced the road through Santa Fe to Los Alamos and then on north, but found nothing. He
traced down along the west side of the Rio Grande, ranging out 200 miles or more and then on
down to the border. The only place name he paused over was Mogollón.
“That’s high country,” said Ana. “Forest, not desert.”
Kestrel read the map’s legend and reached the same conclusion. He began searching the area
east of the Rio Grande and north to the New Mexican border.
“Alamogordo.” Kestrel stopped, measuring the sound of the word against what the soldier had
said. The “gordo” sounded right. Magordo could correspond to “ – mogordo.” It was as close
to a match as he had come, but he was not entirely satisfied. His glance moved on, looking for a
closer correspondence.
There was no other place name that had the sound of “gord” or “gordo” in it.
Kestrel’s glance came back to Alamogordo, testing the place against what the soldier had said. It
was in the desert. It bordered on two large military reservations, one of which was almost
exclusively used as a firing range. From the map, it looked to be a desolate stretch of land,
suitable for testing dangerous new weapons.
“Is that it?” said Ana, looking at the area under Kestrel’s hand. “Jornada del Muerto,” she
murmured. “It must be a terrible place to be called that.”
Kestrel looked at the map. The northwestern area of the reservation was labled Jomado del
Muerto. “What does it mean?”
“Journey of Death.”
Oddly, Kestrel smiled. It was a site and a name a samurai would have chosen for using deadly
weapons. But the military reservation covered almost 3,000 square miles. Where in all that
emptiness would the test be held? And how elaborate would the preparations be? lne soldier had
mentioned bunkers and wires and a tower. The wires could be used to hook into a power
supply, if the weapon was a lethal beam of light. The tower could be used either for observation
or as a target. Yet, the use of bunkers suggested a concentrated blast, an explosion from a bomb
rather than a death ray.
Whatever the weapon, construction had taken place recently, and that meant trucks to haul
materials and people, and roads for the trucks to move on.
“Those young soldiers,” Kestrel said, looking up from the map, “the ones who said they had
been building a road through hell and were thirsty enough to drink the Rio Grande dry… were
they working out of Fort Bliss?”
“No. Socorro.”
“Odd. They were soldiers, not scientists or technicians?”
“Yes, but they probably were building roads for the Los Alamos people. Everyone is told to say
Socorro, never Los Alamos.”
Kestrel looked at the map again. Socorro was north-northwest of Alamogordo. Between the
two towns was a dirt road skirting the desolate military reservation. If the soldiers were actually
working from Socorro, building roads to transport people and equipment for the Los Alamos
test; and if Rubia’s soldier had told the truth about the test location being north of Alamogordo;
then the test itself would probably be held in the upper third of the military reservation.
That still left 1,000 square miles.
“Flat,” murmured Kestrel. “He said it was the ‘flattest, hottest desert this side of hell.’”
The contours on the map were skimpy, but mountain peaks were marked on the range that ran
diagonally through the reservation. Either Salinas Peak or Oscura Peak would give a good view
of the remaining flatlands. Salinas Peak was more west of Alamogordo; Oscura Peak was more
north. It might be the place to watch the test from.
But the question remained: How soon was “soon”?
Page 29
Juarez
60 Hours Before Trinity
Finn drove through Juarez automatically, his mind still absorbing the ramifications of what he
had learned in Los Alamos. Weapons were as old as man. People had been shifting and
reshifting the balance of power ever since the first time a hairless ape grabbed a stone and
crushed his enemy’s skull. All the weapons that had come since that moment were simply
refinements of the original idea of lenghtening the reach and efficiency of the human arm. Yet –
One bomb. One plane. One hell of a bang.
Finn’s hands tightened on the wheel as he guided the speeding car. He recognized that bombing
cities was a rational military tactic, no more or less cruel than a scorched earth strategy which left
the enemy starving, civilian and soldier alike. As a means of avoiding a grueling, gruesome,
inch-by-bloody-inch invasion of Japan, the atomic bomb was without parallel.
But so many dead, so quickly, lifetimes measured in milliseconds.
And would there be others, like the experimenter, who would not be lucky enough to die in the
first raw white instant of power?
Finn slowed and turned on to a street leading to the oldest part of Juarez. The city was quiet, its
life hidden from the afternoon sun. The second stories of most buildings overhung the sidewalk,
creating tunnels of shade for the few pedestrians. The square was overhung with large, soft-green
pepper trees that cast feathery shadows on the baked clay ground. Water tumbled down a stone
and tile fountain.
The car’s tires made no sound as Finn turned onto the sandy unpaved street that led to his
house. He stopped the Ford in front of an old adobe with a faded canvas awning protecting its
one large window. Finn got out and closed the door quietly.
He crossed the small patch of sand serving as a front lawn. The house belonged to his father’s
friend, an official in the Mexican government. Finn had furnished the adobe with a solid oak
kitchen table, chairs, and a leather-sprung bed with a mattress filled with corn shucks and a few
sprigs of sage. It was the kind of bed he had been raised on, the bed that he had dreamed about
in the nightmare hammocks of Burma. The bed was crisp, dry, and smelled of the desert.
The only other furnishings were lamps, a telephone and a stove. On a rack in a corner of the
single room, which contained the bed and the kitchen, were a 12-gauge pump shotgun, an M-l
carbine with a canvas shoulder strap, and a long-barreled Remington. Opposite the rack, three
swords hung on the bare adobe wall. Two of the swords were Japanese, the short and the long
sword of a samurai. The third sword was Mexican, a ceremonial saber inlaid with silver and
gold.
Even in the diffuse light that entered through the small panel windows set in the thick adobe
walls, the swords shone with bright, hard light. The Japanese swords combined elegance and
balance with efficiency; the Mexican sword combined pride and wealth with a killing edge. It had
been carried into battle against gringo invaders by a Mexican Creole general who had died at the
hands of Finn’s great-grandfather. The sword’s handle was bound in gilt-braided cord after the
manner of its time.
Pride and violence, the twin obsessions of the cultures that had forged the swords. And now a
new culture, a new weapon, a weapon that was made not of steel but of an unbelievably rare
element, a metal that could end a war and begin a world.
Finn stood just inside the door, letting the coolness of the house wash over him. Before he could
close the door, the telephone rang imperiously and Ghost, his cat, streaked into the room. He
shut the door and answered the phone with a quickness that echoed the cat’s.
“Bueno,” he said.
Finn recognized the voice at the other end of the line, a woman’s voice, cool and precise,
professionally remote. Sarah Campos was the chief operator at the phone exchange in El Paso.
All calls from Juarez to the United States, and vice versa, went through her switchboard. She,
Page 30
like Finn, was paid by the American government.
“You will want to know about new voices?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Finn waited, so focused on Sarah’s call that he barely noticed the cat stropping itself on his
boots.
“There were two. Yesterday. Both British. One was the man I told you about before, the one
who calls from that little town close to the cottonwoods.”
“Yes.” Socorro was the town closest to Los Alamos. Finn had mentioned the anonymous caller
to Groves, suspecting that the man might be one of the British scientists working in Los Alamos.
“Did you recognize the second man?”
“It was a woman. She was calling from the Mexican side, a public phone booth.”
“What did they say?”
“Not much that I could understand. They spoke English at first, then they switched to another
language, very hard and deep in their throats. I think it was German. It sure wasn’t Chinese or
Japanese. The woman spoke the language very well. The man had problems. He used English,
too. It sounded like they were planning a trip to New York.”
“Oh?”
“They kept talking about Manhattan and the Bronx, and something about not being able to ship
stuff directly to the Bronx. He finally said in English, ‘Look, it can’t be done from here!’ He was
angry.”
For a moment Finn forgot to breathe. Then he drew in air silently and said, “Anything else?”
“No. They didn’t talk very long.”
“If you hear any more from them, let me know right away.”
Finn replaced the receiver very slowly, but his mind was racing and his skin was hot with more
than desert heat. Russian sounded enough like German to confuse an untutored ear. Masarek
was in Juarez with a woman who had a British accent. Two priceless pieces of silver-white metal
were on their way to San Francisco.
General Groves had been very wise to keep the route of the Bronx shipment secret; otherwise it
seemed that the Russians were set to intercept the shipment. Without the uranium, the war
would not end short of a grueling invasion of Japan, an invasion that would culminate in 2
million casualties and a Russian world.
Ghost yeowed bleakly, as though she shared Finn’s thoughts. Her front paw touched the toe of
his boot and the tip of her tail flicked across his knee.
“Hello, Ghost.”
The cat sat on her haunches, inspecting the room as though seeking mice in its corners or lizards
on its clay walls. Then her turquoise eye met Finn’s and she yeowed again. She was poised,
healthy and obviously a recent mother.
“Hungry?”
Ghost looked away disdainfully. She could survive without Finn, which was the only reason he
had allowed her into his life. Since Burma, he had permitted no living thing to depend on him.
Finn straightened swiftly, found a small can of evaporated milk in the kitchen and punched two
holes in the can with his pocket knife. He poured the viscous fluid into a saucer and stepped
aside.
Ghost’s nose moved and her whiskers twitched as the thick scent of milk washed over her. She
