Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [94]
Soon Butcher’s involvement was almost forgotten, which was just as well considering the number of dead bodies he left at the Chapel of the Red Apocalypse.
There hadn’t been too much trouble over the three Japanese zoot-suiters.
All of them were petty hoodlums who escaped from, or avoided detention in, the internment camps. No one was sorry to see them go. The dead white man, Albert Storrow, could have proved to be a big problem. But he had clearly been shot down with one of the Tommy guns, by one of the zoot-suiters, so Butcher was off the hook for that. Storrow’s wife, Elina, also considerately helped matters by getting herself diagnosed as a raving lunatic. The fat woman had evidently been unhinged by the death of her husband and after listening to a few days of her ravings, the Army handed her over to the civilian authorities to lock up in some California bug house.
Butcher had got out of it with his nose clean.
The only disturbing aspect was the missing body. Butcher had been busy 165
returning Ray to Los Alamos, so he hadn’t been present when the Army intelligence team had swept in to secure the chapel. He only read about it in the form of telexes. The initial reports were somewhat confused and it was some days before he’d discovered that only three dead Japanese-Americans had been found at the scene. The punk called Imperial Lee, last seen lying lifeless at the bottom of the red well, was missing.
Everyone assumed that Butcher had just got it wrong. ‘Anyone might make a mistake like that,’ General Groves had said, offering Butcher a cigar. Instead of summoning Butcher, Groves had actually done him the honour of visiting him in the Major’s shabby corrugated hut. Plus, a cynic might observe that by not officially ordering Butcher in for a briefing, Groves was keeping him well and truly out of the limelight.
The cigar was presumably to compensate Butcher for the General taking all credit for Lady Silk’s arrest. ‘You simply got the number of dead Japs wrong,’
said Groves. ‘Not so surprising when the bullets are flying.’ In the General’s tone and in his eyes there was also the implicit suggestion that Butcher was trying to make himself look like some kind of John Wayne hero, shooting it out with four of the enemy and getting them all. Even three was pushing it.
Butcher knew he wasn’t mistaken. He’d got the numbers right, regardless of how many bullets were flying. But he decided to keep his mouth shut about it. He shared a beer with the General and that was that.
Imperial Lee couldn’t do much harm now that he was dead.
What did it matter if his body had disappeared?
Butcher soon settled back into his routine at the Hill. Oppenheimer’s team was frantic as Trinity approached and Butcher resumed the thankless task of keeping an eye on the eggheads. Klaus Fuchs’ behaviour had begun to seem suspicious to him and he gradually rose to number one on Butcher’s hit parade of surveillance subjects, although he could never seem to get anything concrete on the kraut. That was the worst aspect of this assignment. The scientists working on the Hill were considered so vital to the war effort that Butcher would have to catch one virtually in the act of murder to put him behind bars.
This fact had been hammered home when, unbelievably, Ray Morita and the Doctor and his female assistant were all allowed to resume work on the Hill as if nothing had happened. Butcher had been particularly looking forward to nailing the Doctor after that business with the Indians and the peyote. But it had turned out that the little weasel was some kind of undercover British agent. He had credentials that were verified at the highest level. Apparently he’d been assigned to Los Alamos to do virtually the same job as Butcher. And General Groves had known all about it.
166
Of course nobody had bothered telling Butcher.
Still, he told himself he could at least take comfort in the fact that the business was over now and, with Trinity looming, he’d soon never have to worry about Ray Morita or the Doctor again.
But the affair