Second Nature

Chapter 4

4 

Col. Jack Eberhard could never sleep before an important military operation. He sat alone in the living room of his officer's quarters, a one-bedroom adobe bungalow inside the secured perimeter of the Redstone Military Laboratories compound, one of a cluster of top-secret installations within the White Sands Missile Range. His digital watch read 03:19. In another hour, technicians in blue spacesuits would swarm through the isolation lab preparing the subject for transportation to the detonation site. 

First, the subject would be hard-frozen in a Lucite-walled tank of liquid nitrogen, sealed inside a stainless steel container, then loaded into a specially-fitted Heavy Humvee. By dawn, the Humvee would be rumbling down a utility road deep inside the White Sands Test Range. The restricted zone covered more than 3,000 square miles of white gypsum sands, black lava flows, sunburnt grasslands, rugged hills and sandstone canyons-an area bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Across this habitat of jackrabbits and mule deer, sidewinders and Gila monsters, the Humvee would transport its frozen cargo to ground zero. 

As team leader, Eberhard would be riding shotgun, circling high above the desert in an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control Systems jet aircraft. In case of a major screw-up, he would remote-detonate a W80 nuclear warhead mounted inside the Humvee.  

If the nuke failed to explode, a B-2 Stealth bomber, patrolling from an even higher orbit, would launch a W80-tipped cruise missile from its weapons bay.  

And as final failsafe, a trailer-launched Pershing II guided missile with a 400-kiloton kick would be stationed near the foot of Salinas Peak, keeping a wary radar-eye locked on the slow-moving Humvee. 

At 06:00, the cargo would arrive at Omega Test Site, a place marked by sand heat-fused into jagged lakes of glass. The Humvee would descend by elevator to a concrete vault at the base of a six-story deep, steel-reinforced shaft. Helicopters would then evacuate all on-site crew. Checklists would proceed to countdown.  

At 07:00, a hydrogen bomb would detonate with the violence of 50 million tons of TNT, and Eberhard's worries would vaporize. When the rumbling earth settled, all that would remain of Gen would be a chunk of radioactive glass buried deep below the dunes. 

Eberhard sipped Seagram's Scotch on the rocks from a ceramic beer stein printed with the words, "Class of '68," above the logo of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Two Mission-style oak chairs with matching lamp tables were the living room's only furniture. A fire of cedar logs in the hearth washed the room in an undulating, ruddy glow.  

Eberhard enjoyed gazing at fires; it reminded him of his teen-age years as an Eagle Scout, and he found it a meditative way to relax. Nights in the desert were cool enough that he could indulge in a small blaze in the fireplace even now, at the start of summer. A work crew delivered wood to the backyard of his bungalow weekly, but Eberhard chopped and split the logs himself. The Redstone complex did not have a gym, and swinging an axe and sledge kept him in shape. 

A burning log shifted and dropped in a cascade of golden sparks. Eberhard swallowed ice-cold Scotch and smiled. He liked this house, built in traditional hacienda style, with open ceiling beams of cedar logs that projected through the outside walls. In the 1940s, a number of famous figures from the Manhattan Project at nearby Los Alamos had used these quarters as a place to relax. Rumor had it that Oppenheimer, Fermi and the gang had partied in this very room. EINSTEIN SCHLAFTE HIER-German for "Einstein slept here," was carved in neat block letters into the bed's headboard, but that had been somebody's gag; maybe Richard Feynman, the practical jokester among the physicists who built the atomic bomb. 

On the room's left wall hung a display case with a Jicarilla Apache eagle feather headdress; the right wall held a framed collection of several dozen arrowheads and spear points. A 95-year-old Navaho rug, woven in the black-and-gray "eyedazzler" pattern, covered the red oak flooring in front of the fieldstone fireplace. Over the mantle hung a large framed display of military medals, stark against a backdrop of black velvet.