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“Off,” Okamoto said. Teerts obediently descended from the train, followed by the Nipponese officer and the stolid guard. After so long on the jouncing railway car, the ground seemed to sway beneath his feet.
At his captor’s orders, he walked up a gangplank and onto one of the ships; the claws on his toes clicked against bare, cold metal. The floor (the Big Uglies had a special word for it, but he couldn’t remember what the word was) shifted under his feet. He jumped into the air in alarm. “Earthquake!” he shouted in his own language.
That was not a word Major Okamoto knew. When Teerts explained it, the Nipponese let out a long string of the yips the Big Uglies used for laughter. Okamoto spoke to the guard in his own tongue. The guard, who had hardly said three words all the way down from Harbin through Chosen, laughed loudly, too. Teerts glared at one of them with each eye. He didn’t see the joke.
Later, when out of sight of land the ship really started rolling and pitching, he understood why the Big Uglies had found his startlement at that first slight motion funny. He was, however, too busy wishing he was dead to be amused himself.
A rowboat took Colonel Leslie Groves across the Charles River toward the United States Navy Yard. The Charlestown Bridge, which had spanned the river and connected the yard with the rest of Boston on the southern bank, was nothing but a ruin. Engineers had repaired it a couple of times, but the Lizards, kept knocking it down.
The ferryman pulled up under what had been the northern piers of the bridge. “Heah y’aah, friend,” he said in broad New England accents, pointing to a set of rickety wooden stairs that led up to Main Street.
Groves scrambled out of the rowboat. The steps squeaked under his weight, though he, like most people, was a good deal lighter than he would have been had the Lizards stayed away. The fellow in the boat was backing oars, heading south across the river for his next ferry run.
As Groves turned right onto Chelsea Street, he reflected on how natural his ear found the Boston accent, though he’d not heard much of it since his days at MIT more than twenty years before. The country had been at war then, too, but with a foe safely across the ocean, not lodged, all through the United States itself.
Naval ratings with rifles patrolled the long, high wall that separated the Navy Yard from the town behind it. Groves wondered how useful the fence was. If you stood on Breed’s Hill (where, history books notwithstanding, the Americans and British had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill), you could look right down into the Yard. The colonel was, however, long used to security for security’s sake. As he approached, he tapped the shiny eagle on the shoulders of his overcoat. The Navy guards saluted and stood aside to let him enter.
The Yard was not crowded with warships, as it had been before the Lizards came. The ships-those that survived-were dispersed up and down the coast, so as not to make any one target too attractive to bombardment from the air.
Still berthed in the Navy Yard was the USS Constitution. As always, seeing “Old Ironsides” gave Groves a thrill. In his MIT days, he’d toured the ship several times, and almost banged his head on the timbers belowdecks: any sailor much above five feet tall would have knocked himself silly running to his battle station; Glancing at the tall masts that probed the sky, Groves reflected that the Lizards had made the whole Navy as obsolete as the tough old frigate. It was not a cheery thought.
His own target lay a couple of piers beyond the Constitution. The boat tied up there was no longer than the graceful sailing ship, and much uglier: slabs of rust-stained iron could not compete against Old Ironsides’ elegant flanks. The only curves sweeter than a sailing ship’s, Groves thought, are a woman’s.
The sentry who paced the pier wore Navy uniform, but not quite the one with which Groves was familiar. Nor was the flag that flapped from the submarine’s conning tower the Stars and Stripes, but rather the Union Jack. Groves wondered if any Royal Navy vessels had used the Boston Navy Yard since the Revolution took Massachusetts off George III’s hands.
“Ahoy the Seanymph!” he called as he strode up to the sentry. He was close enough now to see that the man carried a Lee-Enfield rifle, not the Springfields of his American counterparts.
“Ahoy yourself,” the sentry answered; his vowels said London, not Back Bay. Make yourself known, sir, if you’d be so kind.”
“I am Colonel Leslie Groves, United States Army. Here are my identification documents.” He waited while the Englishman inspected them, carefully comparing his photograph to his face. When the sentry nodded to show he was satisfied, Groves went on, “I am ordered to meet your Commander Stansfield here, to pick up the package he’s brought to the United States.”
“Wait here, sir.” The sentry crossed the gangplank to the Seanymph’s deck, climbed the ladder to the conning tower, and disappeared below. He came out again a couple of minutes later. “You have permission to come aboard, sir. Watch your step, now.”
The advice was not wasted; Groves did not pretend to be a sailor. As he carefully descended into the submarine, he was glad he’d lost some weight. As things were, the passage seemed alarmingly tight.
The long steel tube in which he found himself did nothing to ease that feeling. It was like peering down a dimly lit Thermos bottle. Even with the hatch open, the air was closed and dank; it smelled of metal and sweat and hot machine oil and, faintly in the background, full heads.
An officer with three gold stripes on the sleeves of his jacket came forward. “Colonel Groves? I’m Roger Stansfield, commanding the Seanymph. May I see your bona fides, please?” He examined Groves’ papers with the same care the sentry had given them. Returning them, he said, “I hope you will forgive me, but it has been made quite clear that security is of the essence in this matter.”
“Don’t worry about it, Commander,” Groves said easily. “The same point has been impressed upon me, I assure you.”
“I don’t even precisely know what it is I’ve ferried over to you Yanks,” Stansfield said. “All I know is that I’ve been ordered to treat the stuff with the utmost respect, and have obeyed to the best of my ability.”
“Good.” Groves still wondered how he’d gotten roped into this atomic explosives project himself. Maybe the talk he’d had with the physicist-Larssen? was that the name? — had linked him and uranium in General Marshall’s mind. Or maybe he’d complained once too often about fighting the war from behind a desk. He wasn’t behind a desk any more, and wouldn’t be for God only knew how long.
Stansfield said, “Having turned this-material-over to you, Colonel Groves, is there any way in which I can be of further assistance?”
“You’d have made my life a hell of a lot easier, Commander, if you could have sailed your Seanymph to Denver instead of Boston,” Groves answered dryly.
“This is the port to which I was ordered to bring my boat,” the Englishman said in a puzzled voice. “Had you wanted the material delivered elsewhere, your chaps upstairs should have told the Admiralty as much; I’m sure we would have done our best to oblige.”
Groves shook his head. “I’m pulling your leg, I’m afraid.” No reason for a Royal Navy man to be familiar with an American town that, to put it mildly, was not a port. “Colorado is a landlocked state.”
“Oh. Quite.” To Groves’ relief, Stansfield didn’t get mad. His grin showed pointed teeth that went well with his sharp, foxy features and hair that was somewhere between sandy and red. “They do say the new class of submarines was to have been capable of nearly everything, but that might have challenged it even had the advent of the Lizards not scuttled its development.”
“Too bad,” Groves said sincerely. “Now I have to transport the stuff myself.”
“Perhaps we can make matters a bit easier,” Stansfield said. One of the Seanymph’s ratings fetched up a canvas knapsack, which he presented to Groves with a flourish. Stansfield went on, “This arrangement should make rather easier transporting the saddlebag contained inside, which is, if you’ll forgive the, vulgarity, bloody heavy. I?
?d not be surprised to learn it was lined with lead, though I’ve been studiously encouraged not to enquire.”
“Probably just as well.” Groves knew the saddlebag was lined with lead. He didn’t know how well the lead would shield him from the radioactive material inside; that was one of the things he’d have to find out the hard way. If this mission took years off his life but helped defeat the Lizards, the government had concluded that was a worthwhile price to pay. Having served that government his entire adult life, Groves accepted the estimation with as much equanimity as he could muster.
He shrugged on the knapsack. His shoulders and back did indeed feel the weight. If he had to haul it around for a while, he might even end up somewhere close to svelte. He hadn’t been anything but portly-or worried about it-since his West Point days.
“I assume you have plans on how to reach, ah, Denver with your burden there,” Stansfield said. “I do apologize, for my limited ability to help you in that regard, but we are only a submarine, not a subterrene.” He grinned again; he seemed taken with the idea of sailing to Colorado.
“Can’t talk about that, I’m afraid,” Groves said. “By rights, I shouldn’t even have told you where I’m going.”
Commander Stansfield nodded in understanding sympathy. He would have been even more sympathetic, Groves thought, had he known just how sketchy the American’s plans were. He’d been ordered not to fly toward Denver; a plane was too likely to get knocked down. Not many trains were running, and even fewer cars. That left shank’s mare, horseback, and luck-and as an engineer, Groves didn’t take much stock in luck.
Complicating matters further was the stranglehold the Lizards had on the Midwest. Here on the coast, they were just raiders. But the farther inland you went, the more they seemed to have settled down to stay.
