The Second Sun, page 17
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Although I’m sure Groves was aware of my mission by then.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “I asked Van Rensselaer if anyone knew about your vacation out to Korean waters. He told me to keep digging and to focus on recent intelligence by asking the OSS and SACO to poll their agents in China, Korea, and Manchuria.”
“In other words, he didn’t answer your question. Typical—Svengali to the last.”
She nodded, then raised her empty glass. We took a break. I stayed with Scotch; she switched to a liqueur involving Scotch. The dining car was thinning out and it was full dark outside as we rumbled east through the Rockies toward Kansas.
“I have this vague memory,” I said, “that Oppenheimer once said something rather opaque. Kinda like that no one in government or the military would understand what ‘the project’ had accomplished until they used it. The way he said it made him sound like he was having some regrets, in the humanitarian sense.”
“We’re at war with the original implacable enemy,” she said quickly. “Humanitarian issues are of no consequence. Look at what we found about what the Germans had been doing to European Jews. And what we already know that the Japanese have been doing to captive nations and prisoners of war. I told Van Rensselaer that the fruits of my labors convinced me the Japanese were trying hard to get an atomic bomb and that the president should flatten the bastards at the first opportunity.”
I smiled at her fierce aggression. “What did he say?”
“He said, with a very straight face, that he’d inform the president, forthwith.”
We both laughed, but then the amusement drained away. From what I was hearing, in the not-too-distant future a Japanese city would be subjected to total annihilation by atomic fire. Maybe even two or even three of them. For all our efforts, hers and mine, that didn’t bear thinking about. A wave of fatigue rolled back over me. Bernard brought drinks and we both subsided into our own thoughts and enjoyed the clickety-clack as the darkness rushed by. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were rushing toward something unspeakable.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE SUN BOMB
Things happened quickly after the Hiroshima bombing. Russia declared war on Japan and sent those Manchurian divisions south into northern Korea, aiming at that vast industrial complex farther south. Truman told the country and the Japanese that he would immolate every city in Japan until they came to terms—our terms—on unconditional surrender. People in the Manhattan Project knew that this threat could eventually be carried out. Americans everywhere were still trying to digest the significance of an atomic bomb when the second one was dropped on Nagasaki. Janet told me she nearly cried when she heard about Hiroshima—she’d been there during her sabbatical years in Japan. The best news for all those in uniform was that the invasion probably wasn’t going to happen, and certainly not in the month of August. Truman might be bluffing, but I was willing to bet that any survivors in those two cities were more than ready to fold.
In the event, after Nagasaki the emperor ordered his people and his armies to surrender. The Second World War was officially over. We learned later that the surrender had been a close-run thing. The militarists in charge of the Japanese government and armed forces had been ready to assassinate the emperor in order to force the entire nation to fight to the death to uphold bushido. The emperor, having finally been told in gory detail what had happened to the two cities, got the jump on them and sent out the surrender message to the Allies and then made a public radio broadcast in Japan. After that broadcast, the Japanese people, having been drilled since infancy into utter subservience to their god-emperor, whatever they thought about bushido, fell into respectful line. Many of the prospective assassins had committed suicide, or had been shot.
On September 2nd, the Japanese signed the surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. General Douglas MacArthur became the military governor of Japan. And then began the extremely difficult process of standing down from the largest and most brutal war in the history of the entire world. MacArthur himself acknowledged the role of the atomic bomb in his final statement about the war to the entire world at the end of the signing ceremony. We have had our last chance, he said. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system to resolve international conflict, Armageddon will be at our door. And that was before any Americans got a good look on the ground at what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Van Rensselaer contacted me by phone a week after the signing of the surrender. I had been staying with Janet at her home on the Potomac, catching up on sleep and renewing our acquaintance in ways that were mutually satisfying. I had just finished my first cup of coffee for the morning, and it hadn’t had any effect whatsoever. Janet had left around six thirty to get to work. He politely asked after my health, mental and physical. I told him I was a bit numb, probably like most Americans. We’d been at war for so long that nobody knew quite what to do when it finally stopped. From everything I’d read, the Brits were in a similar state of emotional confusion. They’d been at it for two years longer than we had, but their country was wrecked. Upbeat, defiant, jubilant that it was over, but economically wrecked nonetheless. I did not envy the victorious statesmen in all the Allied governments. Educated people understood the lessons of the punitive Versailles treaty after the First World War. Something different had to be done this time. And then, of course, loomed the increasingly dreaded fact of the atomic bomb. Van Rensselaer was going to go to Japan to see for himself, and he wanted me to come along. I told him that I had zero interest in that.
“Take Oppenheimer and the Nobels,” I told him. “They might find the experience informative.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” he said. “I’ll need Waring, too—she is fluent in Japanese and also knows the culture. The president concurs. You’re right: there’s an entire herd of people who want to go, want to see what happened. He wants a couple observers whose career future does not depend on what they see or what they say. He learned a thing or two from FDR, who always had his own people who could go and see, whatever it was about, and then come back to tell him the God’s honest truth. He doesn’t want politicians and he doesn’t want professional voyeurs. Remember that it was your report, person-to-person, and the stuff that Waring dug up that convinced him to use the Bomb.”
I took a moment to consider, mostly, how to get out of this. I’d had well enough of going halfway around the world to do a job of work. And yet, I was an American naval officer, whose commission as a captain was signed by the president of the United States, in my case by FDR.
“I’d go on one condition,” I said.
Van Rensselaer snorted. “Navy captains don’t—”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting him. “I want the president himself to tell me what he expects from me—us—if we go. Like you said, there will be lots and lots of scientists, doctors, high-ranking officials, generals, admirals, who are eventually going to go out there and see for themselves. If we’re going as his eyes, I want to hear it from him. Use the term: ‘show me.’ He’ll go along.”
“Your impudence passeth all understanding,” he growled. “No deal.”
“Then I won’t go. You go. I understand why you’d want me to after the past three, four years, but at this point, I’m ready to hang it up and subside into the ooze somewhere. I’ve done my goddamned duty. As for Waring, she might agree to it, but you’re gonna have to ask her. I can’t speak for her.”
“One wonders,” he snapped. “You’re living at her home, aren’t you?”
That pissed me off. “Screw you,” I said, surprising myself. “And the white horse you rode in on. The emergency is over, remember? The Navy, hell, all the services, are gonna have to shed hundreds of senior guys like me. And you. Captains and colonels, especially. I volunteer to retire from active duty. One less guy for the next hump board to send a Dear John letter to. I do not want to see what your precious gadget did to a Japanese city.”
Then I hung up. The phone rang back immediately. I ignored it. It wasn’t my number, after all, and Janet was, conveniently, at work. There’d been no Navy hump board organized yet, but I knew there would be. A hump board was just what it sounded like. If you graphed the numbers of captains, commanders, lieutenant commanders on a straight line, you’d see a big hump at the senior end. As long as all those senior guys were still on active duty, the junior officers coming up could never get promoted, since the total number of senior ranks was limited by law, and that number depended on the total number of enlisted men in the force. Soon, several hundred thousand enlisted people would be coming home for discharge. Draftees, volunteers, even career sailors. The war was over; we no longer needed a million men under arms. Each service would then have to convene a commissioned officer hump board, which would decide who stayed on and who got to retire, as in, within ninety days, if you please, sir.
I realized I was more than ready. Something about this atomic bomb had gotten to me. It had changed everything having to do with war, as even MacArthur had alluded to. Armageddon next time. After twenty years of being a professional warrior, I guess I’d lost my taste for it in the face of that dreadful rising fireball. It had ended the war. Good for you, atomic bomb. Now let go of me.
Janet got home—her home, just as Van Rensselaer had nastily called it in his cheap shot—at six that evening. I told her what had happened between Van Rensselaer and me, and about the new mission to Japan.
“I know,” she said. “He called me at ONI. Actually, he called my boss, who congratulated me on the opportunity to represent ONI on the first ‘strategic survey’ of defeated Japan. I told him I was afraid of the residual radiation that just had to be there, just like the guys at the Trinity site told us in terms of going out to the tower to see what was left. The admiral drew a blank, so I explained it to him, and told him I did not want to go. He was shocked—the career opportunity of a lifetime, and more like that. Obviously, I knew a lot more about what might be lurking out there in the cinder field that Hiroshima is now, so he said he’d inform Van Rensselaer. That’s how we left it. And by the way, my dear captain, you look like you got shot at and missed, shit at and hit.”
“That good, huh?” I said, gamely, although the description fit. “I slept almost the whole day; I wonder when this wears off.”
“I need a long, hot shower,” she said. “Maybe you could do my back.”
“Only if you carry me up the stairs,” I whimpered.
“You can do it,” she said brightly. “There’s a future in it, if that helps?”
“I’d probably fall asleep the moment the hot water hit me.”
She sighed and then began to take her uniform off, piece by piece, as if I wasn’t even there. She left her underwear—which was not, I discovered, exactly regulation—on. Then she walked slowly up the stairs. I groaned and followed, hoping the fancy balustrade would stand up to my pulling my way upstairs. Things got much better after that.
The house was interesting. Three levels and built like one of those Frank Lloyd Wright things I’d seen in Life magazine. The ground floor was built into a hillside and contained a spacious entrance-cum-lobby, a two-car garage, and a storage area. The entrance was accessed from the front by a circular driveway that came up from the main road running along and above the river. The second floor was the main entertainment area, with a large living room overlooking the river gorge across the full width of the house, which protruded six feet over the front walls. The windows were floor-to-ceiling on the front and sides. Toward the back was a dining room, kitchen, and a pantry big enough for a caterer. There was a see-through fireplace situated between the living room and the dining room. The third floor had the master bedroom and bath, and two guest bedrooms with their own baths. This floor also extended beyond the walls, so that each floor above the entrance was cantilevered above the one below. The master bedroom windows gave one a view of the entire river gorge below and the Virginia side of the Potomac Palisades. Part of the overhang deck was screened off as a balcony off the master bedroom. There was a streetcar line that ran parallel to the old C&O Canal and the main road, which went out to an amusement park called Glen Echo.
That night we sat on the third-story balcony, pretending we could see the Potomac through the thick stand of trees along the C&O canal. The traffic out on Canal Road had thinned considerably by seven thirty. She’d lit an anti-mosquito coil on the coffee table to attract any mosquitos getting through the screening. Some locusts were buzzing away out there somewhere in the dark, although it was nothing like a full-fledged outbreak. It was hot and uncomfortably humid—late summer in Washington, when anyone with any sense at all and enough money left town until mid-September. People tend to forget that our capital was built upon a swamp. Summers here would remind you of that fact, especially along the remains of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
Down in the living room a radio station was playing a Brahms symphony quietly, which I thought was something of an offense to the composer. I loved so-called classical music. Benny Goodman and other contemporary music left me cold. I wasn’t sure what Janet liked, but the Brahms was a good sign. Suddenly a pair of white headlights turned into her circular driveway. Shit, I muttered. Had to be Van Rensselaer. But then two more cars, big ones—Cadillac limousines, I guessed—followed the first one up the driveway and stopped by her front door. Janet was in a summer bathrobe and nothing else; I had on slacks and a sport shirt. She fled for the bedroom while I went downstairs. Opening the door, I discovered a small crowd of what had to be Secret Service men, complete with dark glasses, even at nightfall, wearing three-button suits and identical ties. Behind them came a spry man who zipped up the steps, making his oversize glasses bounce on his nose.
I smothered a holy shit! and stepped briskly back away from the door so that the president and some of his Praetorian Guard could come in.
“Mr. President,” I began, louder than necessary, so that Janet might hear me say it upstairs. “Welcome, sir.”
He smiled, put out a strong handshake, and looked around for a second at the spacious main entrance hall. I took him upstairs to the living room, where he headed for the nearest armchair.
“Captain,” he said, sitting down. One of the agents trotted up the stairs to the second floor. He better knock, I thought.
“I’m told you don’t want to go to Japan on another special mission for me,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Not quite, Mr. President,” I replied. “I’m still trying to get over my last one. A Navy doc told me it had something to do with traveling through so many time zones. I’ve been mostly sleeping since I got back, and I am well and truly ‘whupped.’”
“I know that feeling,” he said. “I had to go meet Uncle Joe Stalin in Persia and it took me a couple of days to get back on my horse. I understand you traveled to the Philippines by B-29?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Although it was a pretty spiffy B-29.”
“Nothing like the one I’ve got, I’ll betcha,” he said. “Where’s Commander Waring?”
Janet came down the stairs as if on cue. She’d changed into a summer dress and applied some minimal warpaint. A red-faced Secret Service guy followed her down the stairs. Must not have knocked. Truman stood up and greeted her.
“Mr. President,” she said with a smile. “Welcome to my home. I’m guessing we’re going to take a little trip, then?”
Truman grinned. “Smart and beautiful,” he said. “I certainly hope so. And let me tell you two why. You know who General Marshall is, undoubtedly.”
We both nodded. Who didn’t?
“He has come to me with a plan for what to do with the so-called postwar world. Both Europe and East Asia are wrecked. Germany is flattened. Angry, but flattened. Japan is, well, I’m not sure yet. China is engulfed in civil war. Russia has been bled dry but is frothing at the mouth with communism. South America is infested with escaping Nazis. India? Not even the Brits know what’s happening there, although Churchill knows they’re going to have to hand it over to the natives. America alone stands free and mostly undamaged. It’s a brand-new world, and only America has the resources to reshape it. And the biggest stick Teddy Roosevelt could have ever wished for.
“General Marshall, genius that he is, proposes that we set the world back up on its feet. That we rebuild Germany, that we recognize all those former colonies who want to stand up their own nation-states, that we re-form the Japanese state into something that looks more like a parliamentary democracy than an imperial dictatorship, and that we pay very close attention to the rise of communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Russia.”
“We rebuild Germany and Japan?” I said. “With American tax dollars? After we’ve spent—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “It’s a pretty heady proposal, I know. But I assume you’re familiar with the terms of the armistice with Germany in 1919? And the unfortunate consequences of that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I am. I’m also familiar with that theory. But selling such an idea to the American people? While the bodies are still coming home? And every major newspaper predicting a massive recession once all those GIs come home when the wartime factories are shutting down nationwide?”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks, Captain. This is what presidents of the United States wake up to every morning. Understand?”
I apologized. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to challenge—”
“Yes, you did, but no offense taken. But the challenges, as you term them, are enormous. Worldshaking. We have to get it this right, this time. And surely you know why.”
I remembered MacArthur’s words. Next time, Armageddon. I nodded.
