Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)

by Douglas Niles

  “Paulina!” he cried, sliding down from his perch on the still-moving tank; he would catch another ride after he had sent her on her way. “You’ve got to get out of here!” He took her arms in both his hands, holding her in a firm grip.

  Angrily she pulled away. “You are not my commanding officer!” she snapped. Then her tone softened. “But why do you talk like this?”

  Krigoff looked back up the road, half fearing that the marshal would be bearing down on him in a command car—or a Stalin tank! “I am on a mission for Field Marshal Zhukov himself—I am to observe the front, and report back.”

  “I know that he is here,” Paulina said slyly, winking her one eye. “I learned that he was coming to this front, and would inspect the battle. I came here, hoping to find you.”

  “But I have to go!” he pleaded.

  “Then take me with you. It’s not like I haven’t seen a battle before.”

  “No, it’s not,” sighed Krigoff, defeated. He waved peremptorily to another tank commander and, like a giant taxi, the T-34 rumbled to a stop so that the intelligence officer and the photographer could climb aboard. Then, with a surge on the accelerator, the tank lunged forward, rejoining the file rumbling toward the Americans.

  ABOARD MICKEY MOUSE EXPRESS, GERMANY, 1320 HOURS GMT

  “All right. The weather report is encouraging; about ten to twenty percent cloud cover over the target.” Tibbets sounded relaxed as he addressed the crew. After dozens of test drops, no doubt this was all routine to him. “I’d like to start climbing to altitude, General Groves, but your boys will need to get out of the bomb bay and into the pressurized compartment before we do. Is that gadget ready to go back there?”

  “Well?” Groves demanded, leaning through the hatch and shouting to Parsons and Freeman, who had just secured the outer shell over another set of testing equipment. “Are you guys ready to finish up with that thing?”

  Parsons held up two fingers. “Give us a couple more minutes, Paul,” Groves passed on. He watched as the weaponeer changed two plugs on the outside of the bomb, substituting green for red. These activated the battery; the bomb was now self-contained, with its own power source ready to trigger the detonators.

  One by one, the two weaponeers lifted themselves up and, with Groves’ help, crawled back into the waist compartment. When they were both sitting beside him, Groves clicked his mike. “They’re inside, and I’m getting the hatch secured. You can take us as high as you need to.”

  The B-29 began to climb, the angling very gradual to the men in the tiny, dark compartment. They took turns looking through the porthole at the bomb, which sat still and ominous in its cradle. There was no way even to check if it was still daylight outside of the airplane. Groves looked at his watch, couldn’t believe they’d only been flying for ninety minutes. He knew they had at least another hour to go.

  He spent the time thinking about everything that could go wrong. What if even one of the connections on the shaped charges failed to spark its split-second message of detonation? Or the battery failed? Or the radar, or the fuses, or any of a hundred other things? What if the plutonium itself, product of a massive industrial effort costing hundreds of millions of dollars, wasn’t pure enough?

  Any one of these problems could turn the Fat Man from a lethal explosive device into a plummeting hunk of expensive metal, about as dangerous as a good-sized boulder dropped out of the sky.

  How much work had gone into bringing it here? He thought of the lab at Los Alamos, some four thousand of the country’s most brilliant scientists, sequestered for much of the war. And the money! Huge industrial plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and along the Columbia River in the northwest. These were not simply factories. Each was a whole town—hell, a city, for Christ’s sake!—in its own right. They had been built, funded, and populated by the U.S. Government, simply for the sake of bringing this gadget into this place at this time.

  “We’re closing on the target.” Tibbets’ voice came through the intercom again. “Remember the drill—we’ll dive and turn as soon as we drop the thing, try to get as much space between us and the gadget as possible.”

  Groves was grateful for the prospect of action. He nodded grimly, watching through the porthole as the bomb bay doors slowly swung downward, admitting a wash of daylight into the center of the fuselage. Looking past the bomb he could see the ground, far, far below, dotted with patches of cloud at lower elevations. There was a swath of water there, a heartbreaking shade of blue.

  He wondered how many people were about to die.

  “I’d like to lead us in a little prayer,” Tibbets said. “If you’ll recite with me: Our Father, who art in heaven—”

  “Paul,” Groves snapped, cutting him off over the intercom. “Shut up.”

  He didn’t worry about hurting the man’s feelings. He remembered his earlier thought: This wasn’t the sort of thing you prayed about.

  A minute later they were leveled out and flying straight. There seemed to be no flak, no sign of enemy fighters. The bombardier was counting off the distance to target … “Ten thousand yards … nine thousand yards …” They were down to a thousand yards when Groves heard a squawk of alarm in Tibbets’ voice.

  “Look at—!”

  The headphones went dead.

  “What was that? What is it Paul? Talk!” the general demanded, but all he could hear was static. There was no response, no connection in his intercom set. Then he felt the shift in equilibrium. He couldn’t believe his eyes as he looked through the porthole, saw the ground through the bomb bay doors canting slowly to the side. Those doors were coming up, closing!

  Furiously he pulled at his headphones, worked the switch on his microphone. Nothing, no sound, no explanation.

  But the Mickey Mouse Express was sure as hell turning away from the target.

  POTSDAM, 1333 HOURS GMT

  The columns of tanks were pushing through Potsdam now, lined up front to back with barely a meter’s gap between them on the two widest avenues. They streamed past the elegant hotel and broad parks, and despite the smoke from the monstrous barrage Marshal Zhukov could see the columns stretching for kilometers in both directions. The guns continued to roar, and the sound remained as beautiful to the marshal as ever before.

  The clouds had thickened, and the summer afternoon seemed to be growing chilly. The great soldier thought, a little wistfully, of summers long past, of fishing and hunting and living the life of a peaceful man. Someday, he would return to that life. For now, there was a war to win.

  The sun came out again, and his momentary melancholy vanished. The Second Guards Tank Army was moving forward, at last.

  Nearby, men were looking up at the sky, and Zhukov glanced upward, then raised his binoculars. The aircraft up there was unique, strangely beautiful. He studied the silver bomber through his field glasses, certain it was American, but he had never seen one like it before. It was large, and incredibly high in the air. When he scanned the sky, he saw a couple more of them. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any other Allied aircraft nearby.

  A new round of explosions erupted from the nearby guns, and the marshal’s attention turned back to the important business of war.

  ABOARD MICKEY MOUSE EXPRESS, POTSDAM, GERMANY, 1338 HOURS GMT

  Groves furiously plugged and unplugged his intercom cable, and finally after one particularly savage thrust the blur of static gave way to normal background noise. He heard Tibbets and the navigator discussing coordinates.

  “What the hell happened? Why did we turn away?” Groves demanded.

  “Oh, hi, General. Guess we lost you for a moment there. Sorry about—”

  “Just tell me why we didn’t drop the goddamn bomb!”

  “Clouds, sir.” The pilot’s tone was formal and stiff. “A patch of overcast obscured the target, but there was clear sky beyond, blowing in with the breeze. So we’re coming around for another pass.”

  Groves leaned back against the bulkhead, weak with relief. He waited, he
ard the countdown start again, and this time he crossed his fingers as it proceeded … “Two thousand yards … one thousand yards … five hundred yards …” The bombardier’s voice droned flat over the intercom.

  “Bombs away!”

  The general wasn’t even watching as the bomb dropped free, but he felt the airplane lurch suddenly upward, then heard the engines break into a full-throttle roar as Tibbets nosed the Mickey Mouse Express into a dive.

  POTSDAM, 1339 HOURS GMT

  Fat Man tumbled downward, quickly stabilized by rear fins so that the blunt, round nose pointed toward the ground. It plummeted through the air with increasing speed, following the immutable laws of physics defined by Newton and Galileo several centuries earlier. Gravity carried it toward earth, accelerated falling speed even against the pressure of surrounding air. For ten thousand feet it fell, altimeter ticking away, recording the elevation as it plunged ever faster. Twenty thousand feet of free fall, still straight and true, and nearly thirty thousand feet …

  At sixteen hundred feet above the ground, the relevant laws of physics took on a new dimension. No longer was it Newton and Galileo who had paved the way for this moment. The workings of the gadget passed now into the realm of the Curies, of Einstein and Rutherford, of Niels Bohr, and Robert Oppenheimer. The greatest scientific experiment in the history of warfare had come to this point, where a century of theory, decades of practical work, and several years of intense and expensive manufacture, converged in the German sky.

  The detonators around the outside of the Composition B case fired in a precise blast, thirty-two simultaneous charges igniting the large shell of explosive into an intensely forceful pressure. Because of the design of the charges, the great impetus of this explosion was directed inward, focused to create even compression around the basketball-sized sphere of tamped uranium, the middle layer of this complex bomb. The wave of pressure squeezed the dense metal into a superpressurized ball. Within that ball, a core of plutonium that had been about the size of a softball was instantaneously crushed to something on the order of a hickory nut.

  This core was now an impossibly dense substance. Indeed, for an infinitesimal time, the composition of this hickory nut resembled the primordial stuff of the universe in all its seething fury, the eruption of all mass poised to commence.

  And then the atoms within that core began to come apart, a few of them at first, then more in the next wave, and more, and more again, and all of these waves and a hundred, a thousand more of them, happening in the space of time it takes a beam of light to travel from a handheld flashlight to the ground. There was unprecedented energy compressed, momentarily coiled here in the air over this German city, and it could not remain thus.

  All that energy would have to escape. It escaped first as light, a searing blast of radiation more brilliant, more intense, than any brightness the surface of the planet had ever known. This light blazed with tremendous power, as if a cosmic furnace had split open to reveal the core of the sun.

  The searing flash cooked Marshals Zhukov and Konev, who were standing on the open plaza. It penetrated the stone and plaster of the headquarters building of the First Ukrainian Front to cook the bodies of all those within. It washed over the fields, and along the avenues, and it killed tens of thousands of men of the Second Guards Tank Army, in that still-tiny fraction of a second when the chain reaction occurred.

  The radiation was intense enough to boil internal organs, to dry and shrivel the bodies of nearly all within a kilometer of the blast. The resort hotels, the slaughterhouse that had housed the CCA headquarters, the open parklands with their hundreds of guns, were seared into ash simply by the radiant wash of that brilliant white light. Images of people and things were seared into concrete walls, permanent shadows painted by the radiation of the initial chain reaction.

  More milliseconds passed. By now the material of the core was exploding, expanding, already scattered beyond its impossible density. The chain reaction was over. But the effects of the dispersing energy had barely begun.

  The place in the sky where the reaction occurred was a churning ball of fire, air heated to an impossible degree, expanding with convulsive violence, blasting outward at a speed faster than the eye could follow. A shock wave spread, visible as a ripple in the air—had there been any living being close enough to see. The shock wave tore into the charred stone of the buildings and blasted them flat. It picked up tanks and guns and trucks and men, those that had been far enough—a kilometer, say—away to survive the flash, and scattered them like toys, crushing and tangling the columns of the army, and the city itself.

  And only after the shock wave passed did the superheated air surge across the ground, and the lethal fires commence … .

  “What was that?” Alyosha Krigoff was looking toward the north, where the Americans were fighting from the edge of the forest, when the world turned unnaturally bright, as if an impossibly immense photographer’s flash had been fired behind him.

  He turned to Paulina. She had been looking in the opposite direction, toward the flash of light. Now she groaned and slumped to the ground, clasping her hands to her remaining good eye.

  Krigoff knelt at her side, and was shocked to see that her face was bright red, like a monstrously sudden case of sunburn. Even worse was the sound of her voice, croaking with a fear he had never heard there before.

  “I’m blind,” she said, somewhere between a gasp and a sob.

  Groves felt the Mickey Mouse Express lurch underneath him, and he knew they were all about to die. He could hear the metal crumpling, certainly identified the lethal sounds of the wings coming off. He gripped the edge of his seat, knowing that they were about to start falling, hoping his fear didn’t register on his face.

  But somehow the big airplane stayed in the air, lurching on, engines churning at a fever pitch. A second shock wave washed over them, as violent as the first, and still they didn’t come apart. He heard sounds of awe from Tibbets and the flight crew, hoped that the cameras—both aboard this plane and in the two trailing B-29s—would function properly.

  “God damn,” he said under his breath, amazed in spite of himself. “The son of a bitch worked.”

  Lukas Vogel had been living in a culvert below a road in the west end of Berlin. Hunger had forced him into a rare daylight outing today. He was startled by the flash, and then stood at the side of the road, just above his culvert, watching in awe and horror as a pillar of black smoke billowed into the sky. Within that column of smoke he saw flashes of red and yellow flame, eerily bright.

  He could only imagine that these were the fires of Hell.

  “Jesus Christ!” Patton cried, as Sergeant Mims struggled to control the car. Braking, the driver pulled over.

  “I’m sorry sir—I couldn’t see.”

  “No kidding, son—me either,” said the general, blinking against the white spots that still lingered in his eyes. They had been driving in the direction of the blast, and even from fifteen miles away it had been a flash of unbelievable intensity.

  “I’m okay now, General. It just took me by surprise.”

  “Drive on, then.” Patton was trying to grasp the significance of what he had just seen. He understood immediately:

  This was the kind of power that would change the world. Indeed, it already had.

  The forest brightened for a sudden, startling instant. When the flash had passed, it seemed to Ballard that the woods, mostly dense pines, were darker then ever. He strained to see through the branches, but had followed Wakefield’s orders so that he was well back from the open parkland. He reminded himself to stay low, hoped that the men would remember the admonition.

  “What was that?” asked Smiggs, who had been sitting beside Ballard, both of them leaning against the bank of a dry ravine.

  “I don’t know,” Ballard said. “But I think it might mean that we just won.”

  They heard a sound like thunder, deep and resonant, and it came on with speed and fury. Trees cracked and toppl
ed, limbs flew through the air, and everyone who had been poking out after the flash immediately dove flat into whatever shelter he could find. The force of the blast passed in a moment, and now they heard a general roar, like a distant storm, coming from the direction of Potsdam.

  Ballard and Smiggy climbed out of the ravine and pushed forward through the woods, quickly finding and following a trail leading toward the edge of the forest. More men of CCA crept from their foxholes, falling in behind the two officers, or making their way forward through the woods.

  They came to the edge of the trees, but it was like they were looking at a place that was not on the world they had left behind. A churning wall of dust billowed into the sky, drifting closer to them even as they watched. It was a hundred, maybe two hundred feet high, and utterly impenetrable—a murk so thick that it concealed every detail.

  Even so, Ballard sensed that in the heart of that storm there was unspeakable heat, unimaginable fire. Overhead, the fire was visible as glowing flashes in the column of smoke that still climbed skyward. It looked over them like a shadow, inspiring a deep and abiding fear.

  There was some movement on the open ground, figures emerging from the murk, coughing, staggering, falling down. These were Russian soldiers, men who had been on the point of the attack—and thus well forward of the blast’s epicenter.

  The first man, moaning in an almost musical fashion, came closer, and Ballard saw that he was missing his skin.

  The churning heat of the explosion lingered in the form of fire, natural combustion established in the presence of anything burnable within reach of that fiery force of destruction. The clouds of dust and smoke spread outward, a ring several miles wide, while the column of smoke rose ten miles into the air, and then billowed into the broad shape of a mushroom.