The Second Sun, page 6
An Army sedan met us at Union Station and took us to the Parker Place hotel, where we had already been reserved rooms. I got breakfast and then changed into my dress khakis—coat, shoulder boards, black tie, shirt collar insignia. I made a mental note to get over to Main Navy and turn over my current projects. To whom, I still wasn’t sure. I called my next-door neighbor, a retired civil servant, who’d been looking after my house in Chevy Chase whenever I expected to be away for long periods of time. I told him I’d be stopping by briefly that afternoon.
Damn, I thought, as that little voice started up. I ignored it.
Then I called Marianne at my office and told her I had some paperwork to turn in. To my surprise, she asked me where I was. I told her the Parker Place hotel, downtown.
“It’s all unclass, right? This paperwork?” she asked. I said yes.
“Please leave it with the hotel’s front desk, then, Captain,” she said. “A Main Navy driver will come pick it up in an hour.”
“Everything okay, Marianne?” I asked. She was being uncharacteristically formal.
There was a tiny pause on the line. “Yes, sir, everything’s okay. I guess. Our office is being disestablished. The other officers are being reassigned. I, myself, need to find a new position. It’s all been rather sudden.”
“Well, damn,” I said. “I didn’t know. Look—you need a recommendation, you let me know. You want to stay in OpNav?”
Another pause. “I don’t think so, sir,” she said. Now I was getting concerned. When Marianne and I spoke on the phone, there were no “sirs.” An exchange of faux insults, a dirty joke, but this was all wrong.
“Somebody right there?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, and thank you. I’ll send someone for those papers right away.”
“Got it, my friend,” I said. “Later, okay?”
“Yes, sir, and thank you again, Captain.” Click.
I hung up. What the hell was going on there? Admiral King was disbanding his insider posse? That didn’t sound like him, not at all. We’d had meetings twice a week in his inner office, usually after hours. We’d tell him what we’d been doing, individually, and he’d fire questions back at us. The vice CNO was usually in attendance, but none of the other staff. This was us-to-him information. Officially, we didn’t exist. We were not listed on the OpNav organization chart, and more importantly, we weren’t in the OpNav phone book. And, as I’d told Van Rensselaer, we weren’t involved in operational, win-the-war matters. Our remit was bureaucratic: the Army Air Forces wanted to become a separate service. How would this affect the Navy? OpNav’s carrier division was doing an end-around of the Navy staff, direct to certain congressmen, to get more carriers. There’d been rumors that the OpNav budget division had two budgets in play—one for consumption within the OpNav staff, another the fruit of quiet, back-channel negotiations with certain congressional committees, whose interest in steering Navy budget money to their districts was intense. Helpful stuff like that. Stuff the CNO needed to know without his entire staff knowing that he did know. When it came to bureaucratic power games, Admiral Ernest J. King was the consummate insider knife-fighter who took no prisoners.
The problem was that the Chief of Naval Operations was double-hatted, as the term went. He was also the commander in chief of the Navy. In wartime, that was a full-time job, especially now that the war in the Pacific was rising to a climax. Interservice competition for resources, influence, roles, and missions was also rising to a climax. Once Japan was defeated, as it surely would be, who was going to get what? Careers and commands were in play, not to mention vast sums of federal budget money. The senior officers who’d won the war in Europe and who were about to win the war in the Pacific would be given suitable honors, titles, and ranks—and then they’d be retired with the thanks of a grateful nation. It was the upcoming crop of generals and admirals who were positioning themselves for postwar power, and that would be a vicious competition indeed. That was the milieu in which I’d been working. But now I was enmeshed in something else altogether, something beyond huge, if Van Rensselaer were to be entirely believed. I was also clearly way out of my depth, sworn to serious silence, but, of course, more than a little bit intrigued.
My little inner voice squeaked.
“What?”
“You, sir, are getting out of your depth,” it said.
“So?”
“Run.”
NINE
ONI
Van Rensselaer called and said to meet him down in the lobby. I took a deep breath and went downstairs. There was yet another Army staff car waiting. A driver and an armed guard were in the front. We got in. Van Rensselaer sat in the right rear seat—the senior officer’s seat. I sat beside him. I was one year junior to him, so technically I was his subordinate. But as one Navy captain to another, I’d made a point of not recognizing that in our discussions. He was what we called a Washington ballerina. I was a combat-proven fleet officer, and people like me did not look up to officers who’d made their way entirely in Washington or other headquarters but who’d never faced and fought the actual enemy. It was petty, I realized, but that’s how I felt.
“We’re going to brief the president on the project,” he said.
I looked at the driver, who was pretending to be totally absorbed in his driving. All drivers eavesdropped. You wanted to find out what a general or an admiral was up to on any given day, ask his driver. The guard in the right front seat was scanning the raucous Washington traffic, looking for I knew not what.
“We?” I asked, being just a tad sarcastic.
He gave me a sideways look of impatience. I pretended that it had been an innocent question.
“We’re going to the EOB, not the White House,” he continued. “When we get there, I need you to get small and stay small. The project director is one Major General Leslie Groves, US Army. Between you and me, he’s a prick, but a brainy prick. Hundred percent Army green, all the way. Hates the Navy and all its works. Of the ramrod school of leadership. Brilliant at herding cats. Try not to attract his attention. Move quietly away when we get to the briefing room. Keep walking down the hall, but come back once the principals go in. There’ll be Secret Service there. When the president shows up, pretend you’re there for something else. I just need you to be kinda invisible, but available.”
“Well, hell, why don’t I just stay in the car, then,” I said.
He hesitated for a few moments. “Because I just might have to call you into the briefing.”
“You better tell me what for, so I can at least make some mental preparations.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. Start thinking about this: if the Japanese indeed have a ‘program’ underway, where is it? How close to fruition are they? Who could find that out? The Navy, perhaps? How would they do that? Where would they look? Like that. Driver, the west entrance, please. Then we’ll need you to wait.”
“Piece o’ cake,” I muttered. He smiled, but it was a condescending smile, as in we’re on my turf now, Oh Captain of the Ocean Seas. After that we stopped talking.
We arrived at the Executive Office Building five minutes later, drove through the Secret Service cordon, and parked on the west side of the building. The EOB was an impressive pile of marble and limestone in the French Second Empire style, which meant the outside was just a tad ornate. It had been commissioned by President Ulysses S. Grant, and for a while, it was the largest office building in the world. Both the president and the vice president had offices there, as well as the nascent National Security Council, whose staff had grown exponentially during the war. It was essentially across the street from the White House, where real office space was quite limited.
More Secret Service checkpoints and then we went up to the third floor and down a marble-tiled hallway to a conference room. The hallway had high-backed wooden chairs on both sides, along its full length, that looked like they’d come from a monastery choir. Our armed guard accompanied us, carrying two stuffed briefcases that I guessed contained Van Rensselaer’s briefing materials. The conference room was richly appointed, with a stage at one end and a large movie screen above the stage. An overhead slide projector sat on a small table just below the stage, with a chair for the guy who flipped the slides every time the speaker nodded. I’d used a setup like that back in OpNav when we had to do a formal presentation for the CNO that required graphics.
Van Rensselaer nodded to me at the doorway, which I assumed was my signal to become scarce. I saw the entrance to another conference room farther down the hall, so I went down to that entrance and grabbed a chair. A Secret Service agent came up and asked for ID. We’d been given some visitor badges downstairs, but I dutifully presented my ID card. He nodded and walked away. In about thirty minutes the hallway filled with Secret Service agents. One came and stood by me, between me and the entrance to the fancy conference room. Perfect, I thought. I nodded at him but he ignored me completely. The Secret Service guys all dressed and looked the same: very fit, close-cropped hair, two-piece suits with loose jackets to accommodate shoulder holsters, narrow ties, laced shoes, and the sunglasses. Even inside, the sunglasses. I’d been told that the sunglasses were worn so that bad guys couldn’t see where the agents were looking, which appeared to be everywhere. I’d also been told that they all dressed the same so that the covert agents, the ones who didn’t look like that, could mingle with crowds.
A small commotion erupted down at the other end of the hallway and here came President Harry S. Truman. He was a fast walker, making some of his aides and escorts scramble just to keep up with him. His most prominent feature at a distance were large eyeglasses, which exaggerated the size of his eyes. Behind him came a portly Army major general. That must be Groves, I thought. The small crowd swept into the fancy conference room. The door closed and quiet resumed. Time to think, I told myself.
If the Japanese have an atomic weapon project, where is it?
How’s about: Japan? The home islands. Honshu, probably, where the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University was located. Van Rensselaer had said it took battalions of scientists, chemists, physicists, math wizards, Nobel Prize winners, and also huge amounts of electricity, uranium, and other exotic elements to make an atomic bomb.
Except, ever since November 1944, B-29s had been bombing Tokyo and other major cities. Their targets had been aircraft plants, dockyards, shipyards, railroad junctions—the usual targets—in the hope of destroying the enemy’s ability to wage war. So: if there’d been a large, secret weapons development program going on in Tokyo, would that have escaped the wrath of the B-29s? Especially after that firebombing raid in February of this year, which had incinerated most of central Tokyo and was rumored to have killed a hundred thousand people?
How about the rest of the home islands? Hokkaido, Shikoku, Kyushu, and maybe even Okinawa?
I had no data. I knew nothing. Who did? The OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch, which used diplomatic-channel intelligence? The Office of Naval Intelligence, known as ONI? I’d been briefed on all of these organizations when I came back to Washington, but, given my minor role in OpNav, had never interacted with any of them.
Please don’t call me in there, I prayed.
Van Rensselaer had to know that I wasn’t the guy to brief the president on how the Navy could help find the Japanese weapons program, if one even existed. Besides, that old man could have been screwing with us. Our weapons program, idiot. And yet: he’d been aboard a German U-boat filled with uranium. And a Nazi jet-powered fighter plane in a box, as a bonus.
“Captain Bowen?” I looked up. A civilian was standing in front of me. “Would you come in, please?”
“Oh, shit,” I mumbled. I got a brief sympathetic look from the civilian, who was wearing a White House badge, and followed him back to the presidential briefing room. Inside there were far more people than I’d seen go in. The president was at one end of the table, close to the stage. General Groves was seated directly across from him. I didn’t recognize any of the other individuals seated around the table, although some of them looked like academics. He led me to a chair at the back of the room and then left. Van Rensselaer was banging away up on the stage and pointing to an organization chart on the screen that seemed to include the entire government. The president had an occasional question but I couldn’t hear him. Only Van Rensselaer had a microphone.
I scanned all those faces, and realized they were just a bit bored. Heard this all before. All except Groves, whose gleaming eyes were fastened on the president, and as I studied Truman’s face, somewhat shielded by those thick eyeglass lenses, I realized that he was furious and getting madder by the second. Told you, my little voice sneered, triumphantly. I’d tuned Van Rensselaer’s voice out while I was doing this but then heard him say something about the Bomb being capable of igniting the earth’s atmosphere and extinguishing all life. That jerked me almost physically back to his briefing.
“Most of our physicists have dismissed that notion as ridiculous,” he said. “But there is one factor in its favor: the temperatures created by this nuclear reaction will exceed the temperatures extant in the sun, however briefly. Until we test both devices, the uranium and the plutonium devices, and are able to measure those temperatures, we won’t know.”
The president said something.
“The tests are scheduled for late June, early July,” Van Rensselaer said. “Out in the New Mexico desert. We’re finishing site selection right now. As currently planned, the first test will involve the gun design. The second test, the implosion design. The gun design, as I said, would use highly concentrated uranium. The implosion device will involve plutonium, which, theoretically, should be even more powerful than the uranium device. But which one we test first will depend on which type we can assemble first. That equation contains a lot of unknowns.”
The president asked another question, a short one.
“Sir, we have the best minds the country can muster working on this project. We have spent hundreds of millions assembling the materials, machines, factories, people, and installations getting this thing done on an incredible scale. There is one building at Oak Ridge that is one mile long. All of this multiyear effort is based upon the intellectual achievements of Nobel Prize–winning physicists, chemists, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and far-seeing thinkers that goes back to the Curies in France during the late 1800s. We are confident, but, as I’ve heard about Missourians, the ‘show me’ day will tell the tale.”
For the first time during the meeting, I saw Truman smile. It was a grim smile, to be sure. If the Manhattan Project failed to show him, there’d be hell to pay. Then the president stood up.
“I’m angry, as you can tell, but not at you,” he said, loud enough that the entire room could hear. “I was never informed about this project, but that’s not your fault. I’m behind you, and this project, one hundred percent. To think that you have managed to harness the basic building blocks of everything on earth is beyond amazing. Now: what was the intended destination of that uranium you found on that submarine? The stuff you sent to Oak Ridge?”
“Japan? Mr. President,” Van Rensselaer quipped. It took a moment for the joke to register, and then the audience laughed appreciatively.
“And so it shall be, gentlemen,” Truman said, moving his suddenly hard gaze around the table. “As soon as possible, please.”
TEN
THE NAVY
The president and his entourage left the conference room. General Groves and Van Rensselaer conferred for a few minutes and then headed out. Suddenly Groves stopped, looking right at me.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I stood up. “I’m Captain Wolfe Bowen, US Navy, General.”
Van Rensselaer quickly intervened. “Captain Bowen was with me when we opened up that German minelayer. The shipyard commander called him when the boat was first brought in, and he was present for the discovery of the uranium and the conversation with the Jap scientists.”
“He has access?” Groves demanded, obviously getting angry. “I didn’t approve that.”
“I understand, sir, but—”
“No goddamned ‘buts,’ Van Rensselaer,” Groves spat. “I am the only one who approves access. I did not approve this Navy captain’s access. What the hell, over?”
I was suddenly tired of this guy’s arrogance. “Did Captain Van Rensselaer tell you what the Japanese scientists said at the hospital in Portsmouth, General?”
Groves’s face went red. Apparently a mere Navy captain did not dare to address a major general without permission. Van Rensselaer’s face was a study in embarrassment. I decided to press on.
“They said that the uranium onboard that U-boat was destined for the Japanese weapons program. Did you know the Japanese had a weapons program, General?”
Groves’s eyes went wide. I could see that he was about to start blustering, because obviously he had not been given this little tidbit of bad news. I cut him off.
“So the obvious questions are: where is it, how far along is it, does it even exist, and if it does, what are they planning to do if they get a bomb? Especially if they manage that before we get a bomb, right, General? Maybe wait for invasion day and all those fat and happy invasion ships gathered in one place, and then turn one loose?”
Groves’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “What the fuck are you talking about, Captain?” he spluttered. The three colonels behind him were positively wide-eyed. One began to back away.
“Informed speculation, General,” I said. “It may all be bullshit, but: there’s no getting around that inconvenient submarine, loaded to the gills with uranium and two Japanese academics, fresh from Berlin, destined for Japan. Suppose it is true. Can the Manhattan Project find their project? You heard about a one-mile-long building at Oak Ridge. Have the Army Air Forces seen anything like that in Tokyo? So maybe it’s not in Tokyo. China, perhaps? Korea? It sounds to me like you’ve got your hands full making our bomb. You’re gonna need some help out there in the western Pacific Ocean, or in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, if you want to find out if this is true. You’re going to need the Navy. Captain Van Rensselaer has had the foresight to reach out to the Navy. I work directly for Admiral King. I’m your way into your friends on the Navy staff.”
