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.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JANUARY 19
4:25 P.M.
THE PRESIDENT STARED IN GRIM SILENCE AT THE aerial photographs arrayed on his desk. One showed the wreckage of an Army Huey burning in a field in western Kentucky. Others were tight close-ups of Kentucky National Guard tanks dug into position at key intersections in that part of the state.
“How many units have declared loyalty to Governor Parker?” he asked.
“We think no more than five,” said Meg Greenland, his national security adviser. “About seven hundred men in all. They control twenty-five heavy tanks and two helicopter squadrons. They’ve also attracted some paramilitary types.” She looked hard at the president, who was studying the enlarged photographs taken a few hours earlier by air reconnaissance. “Injuries are estimated at just over one hundred.”
“How many killed?” Ross asked.
“At least thirty,” Greenland said. “That includes about sixteen men from the l0lst Airborne and other units
