Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [95]
So it was that, with the firing unit now attached to the gadget and mere hours before the thing was scheduled to be detonated, Butcher was told to expect the arrival of Lady Silk on the Hill to be photographed with General Groves. There was no suggestion, of course, that she be photographed with Butcher. He ground his teeth and finally convinced himself there was no point being bitter, although the publicity would no doubt have helped tremendously with the sale of his books.
Butcher would be responsible for security during Silk’s visit. He had to make sure, for example, that the girl didn’t spring up with a pair of sharpened chopsticks and assassinate the General by propelling them through his hairy ears into the centre of his swollen head. But it turned out that there was little danger of that. When she arrived, Silk proved to be a cowed, frightened little figure and despite her considerable natural beauty the photographers had to work hard so she didn’t just look drab in the pictures. The lightbulbs flashed and Butcher stood on the sidelines and watched. When they had finished glorifying General Groves, they handed the girl back over to Butcher for safe keeping. As he left the General’s quarters he heard Groves joking about the phone call he needed to make to the governor of New Mexico. He was notifying the governor that it might be necessary to evacuate the entire state, if the explosion was more ‘successful’ than they anticipated (Fermi was taking bets that all of New Mexico would go up in flames).
Butcher stepped out into the cool night air with the girl at his side. Lady Silk had been scheduled to reach the Hill at midnight but had arrived two hours late. This hardly mattered, since everyone at Los Alamos was now working around the clock and had pretty much given up any notion of sleep before the Trinity detonation. But it did mean that, with one thing or another, it had been three in the morning before the Groves’ publicity circus got under way, and it was now after four o’clock, on the morning of Monday 16 July 1945.
He set off back towards his quarters with the girl at his side. Butcher took a 167
good look at her as they walked. The haughty figure he had glimpsed through the basement window was now gone. The Japanese Songbird had become a bedraggled little sparrow. Butcher wondered if this was the consequence of the weeks of interrogation she’d undergone. Maybe she’d cracked. But everything he’d heard had indicated the opposite.
Silk had stuck unswervingly to her story, that she had been kidnapped and taken somewhere and had never betrayed her country. The guys who’d questioned her said she was so convincing that they almost believed it. Or believed that she believed it.
Maybe she was another candidate for the laughing academy, like Elina Storrow.
In any case, he was stuck with her until about noon, when a jeep would be coming to pick her up and take her back into custody. He unlocked the door of his tin hut and ushered the girl inside. Butcher had no worries about her trying to escape. Her spirit seemed too comprehensively crushed for there to be any chance of that. His main worry was what the hell to do with her for the next few hours. His hut was sparsely furnished, with a narrow bed, a desk and two wooden chairs. Butcher growled at the girl to sit down on one of the chairs and he took the other one, behind the desk. He didn’t want anybody sitting on the bed. It might give the girl the idea that she could pull some kind of a Mata Hari number on