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“Sure,” I said. “I’m fascinated, and it’s not even my history.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, one of my regulars — oh, stop,” she scolded, kicking me slightly under the table for wiggling my eyebrows—“one of my regulars used to be Ed Westcott, the photographer who took all the pictures in those notebooks. His job was to document it, capture the Manhattan Project on film, for posterity. Unlike anybody except maybe General Groves or Colonel Nichols, Westcott could go wherever he wanted, see whatever he wanted, and photograph whatever he wanted. Pretty amazing, when you think about it. He had a stroke a couple of years ago, and he has trouble speaking, so he doesn’t get to the library much anymore. But he’s lucid, and he emails. So I emailed your picture to him. I also sent it to Ray Smith, who writes history columns about Oak Ridge history for two newspapers. I figured if anybody might recognize that barn, it’d be either Ray or Ed.” She paused and leaned back so she could study my reaction to what she’d said so far.
Or maybe she was just leaning back so the high school kid could set our drinks on the table. My Coke came in a paper cup; her beer arrived in a frosted-glass mug. Evidently Big Ed or his successors had considered beer to be higher than Coke on the beverage chain. She hoisted the mug in my direction, so I raised my cup to toast. “To historical detective work,” I said, and we tapped the glasses together. The paper cup did not produce a particularly satisfying sound or feel, but the gesture still felt celebratory. “And was either of these regulars of yours able to shed light on the mystery of the barn?”
She reached down, and without taking her eyes off my face, she slid the blurry photo off the magazine. I looked down and there it was, printed on the page. Set against a hillside was a simple, windowless wooden barn with a tall, thin silo at one end. I was not looking at a photograph; I was looking at an illustration, something like an architectural rendering. As I read the accompanying story, I heard myself saying “hmm” and “hmm” repeatedly. The “barn,” I read, was not a barn at all, though it was carefully designed and built to look like one. It was the camouflaged entrance to an underground storage bunker for bomb-grade uranium-235, the precious product Beatrice had helped sift from tons of uranium-238. The entire quantity of U-235 Oak Ridge produced during World War II would have fit easily — lethally, but easily — into a couple of shoe boxes. But producing that U-235 had required hundreds of scientists, tens of thousands of laborers, and hundreds of millions of scarce wartime dollars. The nation — though only a handful of people knew it — had bet hugely on this roll of the scientific dice. Small wonder, then, that General Groves wanted to hide it well.
The silo beside the barn was actually a guard tower of reinforced concrete, the article explained. Looking closely at the illustration, I saw windows — bulletproof glass, the text noted — tucked beneath the silo’s overhanging metal roof. Beneath the windows were small slits in panels of thick steel: firing ports for machine guns.
I picked up the scan of Novak’s photo. The quality was terrible, but not so terrible as to keep me from seeing that the proportions of the building and the silo were the same as those of the uranium bunker. The perspective was different, to be sure — the illustration had been drawn from a ground-level perspective, while Novak’s photo had been shot from somewhere above, looking down through a gap in the trees. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even the silo’s roof — an odd, octagonal hat of a roof, rather than the round dome found atop most silos — was a dead-on match.
Our food arrived, so I scooped up the magazine and the print. The two aluminum platters filled the tabletop. The sauce was steaming, the cheese was molten, and the wedges of pizza were immense. After he’d set down the trays, our server handed us two plastic forks, flimsier than I’d ever seen before, and two tiny paper plates — saucers, really — for the massive, messy slices of pizza. Big Ed, I thought, is up there somewhere, and he’s laughing at us.
And that, too, was okay with me.
* * *
We departed laden with leftovers, the boxes heavy and already beginning to sag from the grease as we crossed the street and walked into the parking lot adjoining the football field. I had rolled up the photo and the magazine, which she told me to keep, and tucked them in a hip pocket. I didn’t feel authorized to tell her details, but I said there might be someone buried near the spot where the photo was taken.
“I knew it,” she said.
“How?”
“Dead people are your thing,” she said. “They’re what you do. They’re what you care about. If you’re going to this much trouble, it’s for a dead person.” On their face, the words might have seemed like an insult or an accusation, but there was nothing in her tone to suggest she’d meant them that way. They were simply how she saw me, and the assessment was accurate, if un-sentimental.
“And what’s your thing? Books?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. I have a master’s in history, actually; I did my thesis on the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge.”
“Did you grow up in Oak Ridge?”
She shook her head. “Louisiana,” she said.
“What got you interested in Oak Ridge history?”
“A family connection,” she said. “My father. And my grandmother.”
“Was she one of the calutron girls separating uranium at Y-12?”
“No,” she said. She hesitated. “She was involved with the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project. The work they did at the Graphite Reactor.”
“Physicist? Chemist?”
She shook her head. “Nothing that fancy,” she said. “Listen, I should go. Thanks for the pizza and the company.”
“My pleasure,” I said. “On both counts. Where are you parked?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I live just up the hill. I’m walking.”
“Let me drive you,” I offered. She shook her head.
“There’s a shortcut through the football field,” she said. “It’s close, and I like the walk.”
“Then I’ll walk you home. I’ll carry your pizza, since you don’t have any books.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” she said. “Oak Ridge is very safe. Well, except for the occasional bizarre murder.”
I laughed. “At least let me walk you partway. Till we get past the dark place where the monsters lurk.” I tugged gently at the pizza box.
She relented, and we ambled up a paved ramp to the level of the football field. At the far end of the field she angled upward onto a footpath that led to another large, grassy field. Like the football field, this one was also nestled in a natural bowl, but this bowl was surrounded by trees rather than grandstands. The lights of 1940s-vintage houses shone through the barren trees. “This is a practice field,” she said. “The football team does workouts here; soccer leagues use it, too.” At the far end of the practice field, the woods closed in tightly. “Watch your step,” she said. “There’s a deep hole there. A big storm sewer starts there. Runs under the fields and all the way down the hill to the Turnpike. You fall in there, we might not find you till the spring rains washed you out near the Federal Building.”
I peered down into the darkness but I couldn’t see much. “You been spelunking in there? Sounds like you know your way around.”
“Only on paper,” she said. “I have maps. Well, the Oak Ridge Room has maps — the old Manhattan Project drawings from when they first laid out the roads and sewers. I’m probably the only person alive who thinks a 1945 map of the storm-sewer system is interesting.”
“Some of us like dead people, some of us like sewer maps,” I said. “It takes all kinds. I find it interesting that you find those interesting.”
She pointed to an opening in the treeline. “There’s the sidewalk up to my street,” she said. “Thanks again. It was lovely.”
Before I knew it was happening, she made a quick move toward me and kissed my cheek. Then she darted away, through the gap in the trees, into the darkness.
“Wait,” I called. “Your pizza.
”
I listened for footsteps, but all I heard was the winter wind soughing through the empty arms of the branches. The wind was chilly, but my cheek felt warm.
CHAPTER 27
The vehicles began gathering just inside the security checkpoint on Bethel Valley Road at 10 A.M., which was late enough to let the morning ORNL traffic die down and — mercifully — allow the sun to knock the frost off the morning. I’d called Thornton and Emert the night before, and — at their insistence — had phoned Arpad as well to see how quickly we could orchestrate a search near the old uranium bunker.
An ORNL security vehicle was already waiting, idling on the shoulder of the road, when Miranda and I cleared the checkpoint. I tucked in behind the white SUV and shut off the engine. Miranda fished a sheaf of folded pages from her pocket. “Here, read this,” she said.
I unfolded the page. It appeared to be a printout off the Internet — a biography of George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos explosives expert who had triggered the blowup between Miranda and Thornton. A small photo of Kistiakowsky, at the top of the article, showed a balding man with deep-set eyes and a slightly sour expression, or maybe just a serious one. The photo was Kistiakowsky’s ID badge photo from Los Alamos. I scanned the beginning of the article. “Hmm,” I said. “Another Russian.”
“What, you thought ‘Kistiakowsky’ sounded Irish?”
“I dunno; maybe Polish,” I said. “I’m just saying, there sure were a lot of comrades running around Los Alamos.”
“No way this guy was a Commie,” she said. “He was an anti-Commie, see?” She pointed to a paragraph describing how Kistiakowsky had fought in the White Army against the Reds before escaping to the West. “But skip ahead, to page two,” she directed. During the Cold War, page two informed me, President Eisenhower had asked Kistiakowsky to improve America’s planning for nuclear war. Despite resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Strategic Air Command, Kistiakowsky had overhauled the war plans and created the National Nuclear Target List — a coordinated list that assigned specific Soviet and Chinese targets to specific U.S. bomber wings and nuclear-armed sub-marines.
I was puzzled by Miranda’s excitement. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This guy’s career seems to embody everything you’re opposed to. The National Nuclear Target List? I’d think you would consider that a doomsday to-do list.”
“It is,” she said, “but look.” She pointed triumphantly to the last paragraph of the bio. Kistiakowsky ended his career, the article said, by leading a group called the Council for a Livable World, opposing nuclear testing and campaigning to ban nuclear weapons. She’d highlighted the paragraph in pink — a fitting color, I thought — and added a note in the margin reading, “Great minds think alike!”
“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s some major ideological ammo you’ve got there — ten megatons, at least. You gonna drop that on Thornton today?”
She shook her head. “No need to,” she said, smiling slightly. “It came in the mail the day after the flowers. He highlighted that part. He wrote that in the margin.”
The age of miracles was not over after all, it seemed. Then, somewhere underneath my initial surprise and delight, I felt the stirrings of something unpleasant. Was it jealousy? Surely not. I shook it off.
Just then Arpad’s Subaru wagon arrived from the opposite direction, making a tight U-turn to pull in behind the security SUV and my UT truck. A couple of minutes later Emert’s Oak Ridge police car arrived, followed shortly by a white Ford F-150 pickup. The Ford had an extended cab, a shell over the bed, and an abundance of decals and bumper stickers reading K-9 and SEARCH & RESCUE.
Arpad got out of the Subaru and came to my window. “That’s Cherokee, the cadaver dog, in the white truck,” he said.
“No kidding,” I said. “He’s a good driver.”
“You want to come meet him?”
“Sure,” I said. “Miranda? Want to meet the famous Cherokee?” We walked back toward the truck; as we passed the Oak Ridge police car, Emert and his boss, Lieutenant Dewar, opened the front doors and fell in behind us. The ORNL guard leapt out and joined the procession.
The driver’s window on the Ford whisked down. “Uh-oh,” said a folksy voice from inside. “Looks like I’m in big trouble.” The door opened and a man stepped out and raised his hands in the air, then laughed and shook hands all around. Cherokee’s chauffeur — his trainer and handler, Roy Ferguson — stood a little over six feet tall. He looked about sixty; he wore bifocals and a scholarly look — not surprising, since he had a Ph.D. in education — but he talked and joked like a country boy. Roy and his wife Suzie owned a business, 20/20 Optical, in Sevierville, but it was hard to imagine how their volunteer activities left time to fit eyeglasses. They raised guide dogs—“leader dogs”—for the blind, Arpad said, and held Lion’s Club fund-raisers to save eyesight in developing countries. They also worked with a search-and-rescue team to find missing people, dead or alive. Normally Roy would have been accompanied by five or ten other team members, but in this case Arpad and Thornton and Emert preferred to keep the search as low-profile as possible.
Thornton’s unmarked FBI sedan showed up ten minutes after everyone else. The agent pulled alongside the group chatting by the road and rolled down his passenger window. “Hey, guys,” he called out. “Sorry I’m late. There was a wreck on I-40, and it took me a while to get past.”
“You should ask Uncle Sam to give you a blue light,” I said, though I was pretty sure he had one in the glove box, or a pair built into the grille of the car.
“Nah,” he said, “that would just give me an exaggerated sense of self-importance.” He flashed a crooked, self-deprecating grin that could have been lifted straight from the face of Indiana Jones, and I started to forgive him for keeping us all waiting. Then I noticed him reach down toward the console and hoist a big Starbucks cup to his lips. He tipped the cup only slightly, which meant that it was still nearly full. A wreck on I-40—yeah, right, I suddenly thought. That coffee’s probably still piping hot. And he probably practices that grin in front of the mirror.
The rest of us returned to our vehicles, and with the Lab’s security guard in the lead, our caravan headed west on Bethel Valley Road toward the main complex. Well before we got there, though, the white SUV turned right, up a gravel road marked WALKER BRANCH WATERSHED. The single lane of gravel meandered beside a small stream — Walker Branch, I guessed it to be. A few hundred yards later, we reached a small clearing tucked into the base of the ridge. Parked along a gravel pad were a handful of vehicles, including two government-green pickup trucks labeled TENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY. Across the road from the miniature parking lot was a blue corrugated-metal building which could have passed for a machine shop or farm building, except for the state seal and TWRA logo beside the windowless steel door. The security guard parked in front of the door, turned on his flashers — maybe out of habit, or maybe to tell the rest of us that he’d only be a moment — and ducked into the building. He emerged a minute or so later, accompanied by a uniformed TWRA officer, who glanced at our convoy, waved us on casually, and then disappeared back into the metal building.
As Miranda and I reached the end of the structure, I saw something that caused me to slam on the brakes. The truck slithered to a quick stop, and close behind me I heard another set of tires — Arpad’s tires — rasping across the gravel as he, too, locked his wheels. “Look,” I said to Miranda, pointing up and to our right. Just beyond the end of the shedlike building rose a tall, cylindrical structure — a concrete silo — capped with an octagonal metal roof. Tucked beneath the roof’s overhang were grimy horizontal windows and rusting steel gunports. The state wildlife officers were housed in what had once been a top secret uranium storage bunker, although the charming wooden barn that had once disguised the bunker’s entrance had been replaced with a boring blue box.
My adrenaline surged. In the blink of an eye, history had jumped off the page and become alive to me. This
tiny speck of East Tennessee woods had once been a top-secret installation, heavily guarded and cleverly camouflaged. Oak Ridge’s eighty thousand wartime workers — and the Manhattan Project’s hundreds of millions of scarce dollars — had funneled into a small bunker tucked beneath this isolated hillside. I suddenly thought of an immense magnifying glass, focusing the rays of the sun into one tiny, intense point of light and heat and energy. The uranium-235 stored under the watchful eyes in this concrete tower had been such a focal point. It was here that the genie of atomic energy was squeezed into the smallest of bottles, so it could be unleashed later with devastating force.
I looked at Miranda; I wanted to express everything that had just raced through my mind — the sense of awe and humility and excitement that had gripped me in an instant — but I wasn’t sure I was capable of it. She studied my face for a moment, then looked again at the stained concrete with the filthy windows and rusting gunports. “Yeah,” she said. “Pretty damn amazing, huh?”
“Pretty damn amazing,” I agreed. Behind us, a car horn tooted briefly. I took my foot off the brake and made my way back to the present, back to the caravan of vehicles, and back to the task at hand: searching for an unknown and unreckoned casualty of the Manhattan Project.
