Castle Bravo

by Karna Small Bodman

  RONGELAP, THE MARSHALL ISLANDS–

  EARLY FEBRUARY, 1954

  “Please take me with you!” the young girl pleaded with her lover as tears streamed down her face. “I’m so scared. I don’t want to be here when the bomb goes off. Please!”

  The Navy sailor cradled her in his arms, rocking her back and forth as he would a child while she sobbed. He wanted to take her. She was his treasure. She was the best thing he had found in his sorry life serving in the Seventh Fleet. But there was no way. He’d never get permission to take a woman with him. He couldn’t marry her, even if he wanted to. He still had years to go on his enlistment. And she was so young. Hell, they were both young. But what does age have to do with it when you find a gorgeous girl swimming in a lagoon and you’re deployed to build structures on some God-forsaken island? She had to be the best looking thing he had seen in years. Better than the ones back in Iowa, that’s for sure. So they got involved. But what now?

  “Maelynn, you know I can’t take you with me now,” he murmured as he stroked her hair. “It’ll be okay. Don’t worry. We’ve got a whole fleet of ships out here, thousands of people setting up these tests. Do you think we’d be here if it wasn’t safe?”

  She reached up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Our chief says that many people have had to be moved off the other islands. It’s been going on for years. And nobody knows when they can go back. If it’s so safe, why can’t they go back? I don’t understand.”

  “We just want to be sure everything is okay before we let the people back on those islands. Sure we’ve been testing a bunch of stuff out here. Our mission has been to set up the tests and show the world what we’ve got so there will never be another war. You don’t want another big war, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, haltingly. “The Japanese were so bad, everyone was happy when the Americans came to our islands. But you dropped big bombs on Japan so the world already knows what you have. I don’t understand why you have to show the world any more of them.”

  “It’s called deterrence.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “It means that if everybody knows we have these weapons, no other country will attack us again. There won’t be a World War Three because we could fight back with bombs that are just too devastating.”

  “You keep using words I don’t know. De-va-stating?”

  “It means really bad.”

  “But you just said I would be okay when the next bomb goes off. How can I be safe if the weapons are so devas … devas …”

  “Devastating?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled as she started to cry again.

  “Honey, please don’t cry. This next bomb will go off over a hundred miles away on Bikini Atoll. As I said, you’ll be just fine.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a package. “But look. I brought this for you. It’s my rations, all that I could carry this time. And here’s my canteen. I want you to have them. And just … uh … just take care of yourself. Okay?”

  She examined the package and the canister and looked up into his eyes. “Will you come back to me?”

  “I hope so.”

  “But you have to. If you don’t, my family ….my people ….”

  He tipped her chin up and stared into her deep brown eyes. “Your family? Your people? What are you talking about?”

  She turned away, refusing to meet his gaze. She hesitated for a long time.

  “Maelynn, what is it? What’s wrong? Something about your family? Are they sick? Are they all right?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s me. It’s us. It’s the … it’s the …”

  “It’s the what?”

  “It’s the … the baby,” she whispered.

  He felt like he’d just been dealt a sucker punch. A baby? Maelynn was going to have a baby? His baby? He knew he didn’t have to ask. Of course it was his baby. It had to be. It had only been a short time since he’d been coming to the island to work on the installation of weather stations and other monitoring devices, but whenever he could manage it, he stole away to spend time with her. And now she was going to be the mother of his child. When she mentioned her family, he knew that they were very proud. They had their own ways and as an unmarried and unclaimed mother, she would be shunned, possibly disowned. What the hell was he going to do?

  He hesitated, thought for a moment and then said, “Maelynn, look at me. I have an idea.”

  She turned to him, her face anxious and still wet with tears. “What can we do?”

  He reached over and pulled a ring off his finger and handed it to her. “This is my class ring. Here, take it. See? It has my initials on the inside of the band.”

  She peered at the ring as he held it up to the light and saw the initials PVC clearly marked for Peter Van Cleve.

  “Tell your family that we were secretly married by my captain. Tell them that the captain of a ship has the right to perform marriages in my country. Tell them that you are my wife and that I will come back for you. Tell them now before they know about the baby.”

  She stared at the heavy gold ring and gingerly took it out of his hand. Then she wiped her eyes and paused for several seconds. “Finally,” she said, “Yes. I pledge my life to you. You pledge to me?”

  He nodded.

  She fingered the ring and looked up with a hopeful gaze. “Yes,” she said. “Now I will be wife and mother. I will care for your child until you come back for me.”

  Now what? He could hardly take her back to Maquoketa, Iowa. Not even after the war. She could never live in the cold and the snow. Not after living among palm trees, eating coconuts and swimming in blue lagoons. Or could she? He took her in his arms, held her close and felt her warm breath on his neck. Maybe he could work it out. Maybe he could teach her his ways as she had taught him hers. Maybe after the government had exploded enough bombs and cleaned up the mess, maybe he could find a way to have her in his life. He said a silent prayer that he could figure out a way to pull it off.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Maelynn, I will do everything in my power to come back for you. I give you my promise.”

  On board Joint Task Force-7 – February 28, 1954

  “Captain, here are the readings from our weather station. They’ve been checking surface wind direction and barometric conditions every hour and upper-level conditions every two hours.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Remember, the earlier report said they expected no significant fallout for the populated Marshall Islands but …”

  “But what?” the captain barked impatiently.

  “But the midnight briefing now says winds at 20,000 feet are blowing west from Bikini toward the inhabited islands. Looks like they’re heading toward Rongelap.”

  “Heading west? I can’t believe this!” The captain looked down at his classified papers and said in a frustrated tone, “We’ve got over 42,000 military and civilian personnel working on this testing program, seven ships monitoring everything from blast elevation to electricity bursts and you’re telling me that some guy at some weather station is concerned because the winds at some altitude are blowing a bit west? Is he suggesting we should stand down?”

  “That’s what it looks like … uh … sir.”

  “Get the command group together and we’ll go over this one more time. This is our biggest test so far and even this one may not match the bomb the Soviets tested. And when was theirs?” The captain stared off into space and then answered his own question. “It was two years ago. Two whole years and we’re still trying to play catch up ball.”

  “I know, sir. But the islands …”

  “Those nearby atolls were evacuated ages ago, and so I can’t imagine any fallout …”

  “But Rongelap, sir. We didn’t tell the chief to take any sort of precautions there.”

  “Precautions? It’s over a hundred miles away. Besides, what precautions could they take? Hide behind a palm tree? Bury themselves in a sand dune?
Get Serious.”

  “Maybe they should have been evacuated too.”

  “So now you’re a radiation expert?” the captain asked in an irritated tone.

  “No, sir. Sorry, sir. It’s just that we’re all …”

  The captain softened his tone. “I know we’re all over-worked, over-wrought, over-everything on this mission. But we have our orders and unless there are truly extenuating circumstances, our orders are to detonate at dawn.”

  Bikini Atoll – 6:45 AM, March 1, 1954

  The blinding flash of light was followed by a fireball of intense heat shooting up to the sky at the rate of 300 miles an hour. The earth shook and the ocean churned as water temperatures hit fifty-five thousand degrees. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated by the United States government measured fifteen mega-tons, one thousand times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Within minutes a monstrous cloud of nuclear debris formed twenty miles up in the air and then a white, snowy ash began to fall on twenty-two fishermen aboard a Japanese fishing boat named “Lucky Dragon.” It was the unluckiest day of their lives.

  The ash also rained down on Rongelap where the lagoons turned yellow and dead fish began to float to the surface. Maelynn was hiding inside her family’s hut, clutching the rations with one hand and holding the gold ring in the other. What had happened? When she peered out at dawn, it was as if two bright suns were rising in the East. And when the ground began to shake, she was afraid that an earthquake had hit their precious island. She was scared. She wondered when her mother would come back from fishing. Maelynn was about to go out to look for her when suddenly, the older woman ran into the hut, her hair covered with white dust.

  “Don’t come near me,” she cried out to her young daughter. “It came from the sky.”

  “It looks like fire ash,” Maelynn said.

  “I tried to wash it off but the sea is covered too.”

  Maelynn held out the canteen. “Here is water from my husband. You can wash your hair.”

  “No! No! We need it for drinking.” She shook her head, reached for a piece of cloth and tried to brush off the white particles. “You stay there. I don’t know what this is, but I am feeling strange. I think I may be sick.”

  The next day the children played in the ash that was now two inches deep. Then they too became sick to their stomachs. Maelynn’s mother looked pale. Her hair started to fall out in large clumps as she lost her strength. She stared at her daughter and clutched her throat. “What is happening? The people are terrified. Everyone is getting sick. It must be from the bomb our chief told us about. It must be the ash, the water.”

  “Here, mother. Drink from the canteen,” Maelynn said, leaning over the woman who now was moaning in pain.

  She took a small sip and pushed it away. “You save. Save for yourself and for the baby. And you stay here. Inside the hut. And you wait. We all will wait. We will wait for the Americans to come back. Surely, they will come back and save us all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  UCLA CAMPUS, LOS ANGELES—PRESENT DAY

  “Is seat taken?” the young man asked in halting English.

  “Nothin’s reserved in this cafeteria.” Pete Kalani said, looking up from his textbook. “You new around here?”

  “Yes, I’m here on exchange program. I see you around, and want meet you when I see T-shirt,” the young man said, pulling out a chair with one hand, and setting his tray of food on the long metal table with the other.

  Pete glanced down at the writing on his black cotton shirt emblazoned with the letters S.A.I.N.T.S. across the front. Instead of a dot over the “i” there was a small mushroom cloud. “My T- shirt? What about it?”

  “I’ve heard about group. It’s anti-nuke group?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That’s what I think when I see. But what does S.A.I.N.T.S. mean?”

  “It stands for the Society of American and International Nuclear Test Survivors,” Pete said, taking a sip of his iced tea. “You’ve heard of us?”

  “I saw video on YouTube.”

  “Which one? We put a ton of them out there,” Pete said.

  “The one showing people with radiation. It was like ours.”

  “Yours? Your what?”

  “Oh, I explain. My name is Nurlan. Nurlan Remizov. I am foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan,” he said as he grabbed his sandwich and took a bite.

  “That’s in Russia, right?”

  “We were part of Russia. Old Soviet Union. No more. We independent now,” he said with a hint of a smile on his broad face.

  “That’s cool,” Pete said. “So what do you mean our video is like yours? You guys make videos about radiation?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. You see Soviets tested nuclear bombs in my country, and many of our people have bad times. Babies born wrong … it sad.”

  Pete stared at Nurlan. When he first saw the guy, he thought he might be an American Indian with his round face, slightly oriental eyes that were almost black, and straight inkjet hair. He had no idea what people from Kazakhstan looked like. Maybe they all looked like Indians. But what the heck. Here was a guy who knew about the S.A.I.N.T.S. A guy who seemed to have the same history he did. Was this guy for real? He wondered.

  “Wait a minute,” Pete said. “My family is from the Marshall Islands where the Americans set off tons of nuclear weapons a long time ago. A lot of my relatives got horrible diseases from the fall-out. Are you saying that you and your family are nuclear test survivors too?”

  “Me? Some things.” He pointed down at his leg. “Bones not so good. Radiation troubles last long time. Go through family. Tests done long time ago and my family suffered because they were in test places. They not told what happens. No warnings. Nothing. Maybe Soviets thought no one there. I don’t think that. They must know. They no care.”

  “I think the people in Washington knew too,” Pete said with a scowl. “Bastards. I hate them. I hate the government. They make promises they don’t keep. They set off bombs that killed people. And my own grandmother was on an island when radiation fall-out hit the place. She was pregnant with my mother at the time.”

  “But, she lived.” Nurlan said.

  “Yes. Just barely. After a while she and some of the others made their way to Hawaii. But right after my mother was born, my grandmother got polio.”

  “What happened to mother?”

  “She was okay at first. I guess it takes a while for some things to go wrong. Anyway, she married my dad. He’s Hawaiian. And she eventually got cancer and died when I was ten.”

  “I sorry for that,” Nurlan said. “Same things happened my country.”

  Pete shook his head as he continued to stare at Nurlan. “I can’t believe this. We have a group. We sometimes stage rallies or sit-ins when there’s some sort of government hearing. But I had no idea there were people over in your part of the world with the same problems.”

  “Oh yes. We have meetings now too. We could not do them at first. But when we got independence, it was easier to do things. We have rallies now like you in West. We learned from your protests.”

  “Are they doing any good?”

  “Maybe. We get press to come now.”

  “We don’t get any press coverage now. I mean, there aren’t any tests going on. This government has had a ban on atmospheric testing for a while. Though I wouldn’t put it past them to do it again,” Pete said. “Right now we’re trying to get money for our people. We call it reparations.”

  “Can you get that? Soviets never give people anything.”

  “We’ve been trying for years. They keep appointing commissions, passing legislation, making promises, but then they forget to put up the money. It’s getting so bad we want to find a way to really get their attention and fight back.”

  “Fight back?” Nurlan leaned across the metal table and said in a low tone, “We have to … as people say … compare notes.”

  CHAPTER
FIVE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Tripp Adams headed across Key Bridge toward Georgetown. He was used to gridlock on this particular span over the Potomac River but at eight o’clock at night, the commute traffic was over, and now he guessed that most of the folks leaving Arlington, Virginia, were going into town for dinner. That’s where he was headed, not to one of the trendy restaurants on M Street, but over to Samantha’s condo where he figured she was putting together something simple. She usually said that with her crazy schedule, dinner ended up being whatever she could broil. That was fine with him. He didn’t really care about the food, he just wanted an evening alone with her.

  He remembered first seeing her many years ago on campus at Princeton when he was a senior and she was a freshman. How could he ignore the tall, gorgeous girl with the long brown wavy hair and striking green eyes? They both had classes in geology so he saw her in the halls on occasion. But back then, he was intent on graduating, getting out of New Jersey and joining the Navy, and he wasn’t about to get involved with a nineteen-year-old even if she did have a body that would stop traffic.

  As luck would have it, a dozen years later, he was now vice president of GeoGlobal Oil & Gas and had been sent to head up their Washington, D.C. office. He had hired a top lobbyist, Godfrey Nims, to handle the Hill while Tripp had worked with the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Interior and the White House on a whole host of issues. He had met Samantha when a band of foreign agents from Venezuela had managed to cross the border and sabotage some of their natural gas pipelines. He and Samantha had collaborated, along with a number of government agencies, to find the culprits and put a stop to the havoc.

  In the midst of all that turmoil, he had fallen for the brainy brunette, and that was quite a switch from his usual routine of playing the field. His buddy at the office, Godfrey Nims, had always given him a hard time about dating what he called “Fancies” or “FNC’s.” He said Tripp’s dates all had long blond hair and great legs and looked like Fox News Clones. But as soon as Samantha came onto the scene, all that had changed. Not only was she great to look at, she was one smart lady. Washington was filled with bright women, but this one made him feel … what did she make him feel? Comfortable. Maybe that was it. They could be in the same room or driving somewhere, and they didn’t have to talk all the time. Just being there was enough. Something else he liked was when she showed her rather off-beat sense of humor. Sometimes she had it. Lately, though, she had been so focused on her job and problems dealing with some of the egos in the White House, it was hard to get her to cool it and relax once in a while.