War and Remembrance (97 page)

Digger Brown looked every bit the king of the hill that he was: tall, massive, healthy, with a thatch of grizzled hair, with a year of battleship command under his belt (Atlantic service, but good enough), and now this top post in BuPers. Digger had flag rank in the bag. Pug wondered how he must seem to Brown. He had never been overawed by his fast-moving old friend, nor was he now. Much passed unspoken as they shook hands and scanned each other’s faces. The fact was, Pug Henry made Captain Brown think of an oak tree in his own back yard, blasted by lightning yet still vigorous, and putting forth green shoots each spring from charred branches.

“That’s hell about Warren,” Brown said.

Henry made an elaborate business of lighting a cigarette. Brown had to get the rest spoken. “And the
California,
and then the
Northampton.
Christ!” He gripped Pug’s shoulder in awkward sympathy. “Sit you down.”

Pug said, “Well, sometimes I tell myself I didn’t volunteer to be born, Digger, I got drafted. I’m all right.”

“And Rhoda? How’d you find her?”

“Splendid.”

“What about Byron?”

“Coming back from Gib to new construction, or so I hear.” Pug cocked his head at his old friend, squinting through smoke. “You’re riding high.”

“I’ve yet to hear a gun go off in anger.”

“There’s plenty of war left out there.”

“Pug, it may be a reprehensible sentiment, but I hope you’re right.” Captain Brown put on horn-rimmed glasses, thumbed through dispatches on a clipboard, and handed one to Pug. “You asked me about this, I believe?”

FROM: CINCPAC

TO: BUPERS

DESIRE ASSIGNMENT STAFF DUTY THIS COMMAND VICTOR
(
NONE
)
HENRY

CAPTAIN USN SERIAL 4329 EX CO NORTHAMPTON X NIMITZ

Pug nodded.

Brown unwrapped a stick of chewing gum. “I’m supposed to quit smoking. Blood pressure. It’s got me climbing the walls.”

“Come on, Digger, are my orders to Cincpac set?”

“Pug, did you wangle this on the trip home?”

“I didn’t wangle it. Spruance sprang it on me. I was amazed. I thought I’d catch hell for losing my ship.”

“Why? You went down fighting.” Under Pug’s hard inquiring look, Digger Brown chewed and chewed. The big body shifted in the swivel chair. “Pug, you ducked Cincpac staff duty last year, according to Jocko Larkin.”

“That was then.”

“Why do you suppose you were recalled with Class One air priority?”

“You tell me.”

Slowly, with a portentous air, Brown said,
“The
…
Great
…
White
…
Father.
“ Then more lightly, “Yessir! The boss man himself. You’re supposed to report in to him soonest, in full feathers and war paint.” Brown laughed at his own humor.

“What’s it about?”

“Oh, blast, give me a butt. Thanks.” Brown dragged at the cigarette, his eyes popping. “You know Admiral Standley, I believe. The ambassador to Russia, that is.”

“Sure. I went there with him last year on the Harriman mission.”

“Exactly. He’s back for consultations with the President. Even before the
Northampton
was lost, Rear Admiral Carton was telephoning us from the White House in a big sweat about you. Standley was inquiring about your availability. Hence the Class One priority.”

Pug said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “Nimitz should draw more water around here than Standley does.”

“Pug, I have my instructions. You’re to call Russ Carton for an appointment to see the President.”

“Does Carton know about the Cincpac dispatch?”

“I haven’t told him.”

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t asked.”

“Okay, Digger. I’m asking you to notify Russ Carton about that Cincpac dispatch. Today.”

A brief contest of cold stares. With a deep drag on the cigarette, Digger Brown said, “You’re asking me to get out of line.”

“Why? You’re derelict in not telling the White House Cincpac wants me.”

“Christ on a bicycle, Pug, don’t give me that. When that man up on Pennsylvania Avenue snaps his fingers, we jump around here. Nothing else signifies.”

“But this is just a whim of old Bill Standley’s, you say.”

“I’m not sure. Tell Russ Carton about Cincpac yourself when you see him.”

“N.G. He must get the word from BuPers.”

Captain Brown sullenly avoided his eyes. “Who says he must?”

Victor Henry intoned as in a language drill,
“Ich muss, du musst, er muss.
“

An unhappy grin curled Brown’s mouth and he picked up the chant, “Wir
müssen, ihr müsst, sie müsst.
“

“Müssen,
Digger.”

“Müssen.
I never could hack German, could I?” Brown pulled deeply on the cigarette and abruptly ground it out. “God, that tasted good. Pug, I
still
think you should find out first what the Great White Father wants.” He hit a buzzer in an annoyed gesture. “But have it your way. I’ll shoot a copy to Russ.”

The house was warmer. Pug heard a man talking in the living room.

“Hello there,” he called, very loud.

“Oh, hi!”, Rhoda’s cheery voice. “Back so soon?”

A deeply tanned young officer was on his feet when Pug walked in. The mustache puzzled him, then he put together the blond hair and the bright new gold half-stripe of a lieutenant commander. “Hello there, Anderson.”

Pouring tea at a table by the fire, Rhoda said, “Sime just stopped by to drop off Maddy’s Christmas present.”

“Something I picked up in Trinidad.” Anderson gestured at the gaily wrapped box on the table.

“What were you doing in Trinidad?”

Rhoda gave the men tea and left, while Anderson was telling Pug about his destroyer duty in the Caribbean. U-boats had been having fat pickings off Venezuela and the Guianas, and in the Gulf of Mexico: oil tankers, bauxite carriers, freighters, and passenger liners. Emboldened by the easy pickings, the German skippers had even taken to surfacing and sinking ships with gunfire, so as to save torpedoes. The American and British navies had now worked up a combined convoy system to control the menace, and Anderson had been out on that convoy duty.

Pug was only vaguely aware of the Caribbean U-boat problem. Anderson’s tale made him think of two large photographs in the Navy Building, showing Eskimos bundled in furs watching the loading of a Catalina flying boat in a snowstorm, and Polynesians naked but for G-strings staring at an identical Catalina moored in a palm-fringed lagoon. This war was a leprosy spreading all over the globe.

“Say, Anderson, weren’t you working with Deak Parsons at BuOrd on the AA proximity fuse, advanced hush-hush stuff?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why the Sam Hill were you shipped off to the Caribbean on an old four-piper?”

“Shortage of deck officers, sir.”

“That fuse is fantastic, Sime.”

The bright blue eyes glowed in the brown face. “Oh, has it gotten out to the fleet?”

“I saw a demonstration off Noumea against drone planes. Sheer slaughter. Three out of three drones splashed in minutes. Downright spooky, those AA bursts opening up right by the planes every time.”

“We worked pretty hard on it.”

“How the devil did Deak Parsons get a whole radio signal set inside an AA shell? And how does it survive a jolt of muzzle velocity, and a spin in trajectory of five hundred times a second?”

“Well, sir, we figured out the specs.
The
industry fellows said, ‘Can do,’ and they did it. As a matter of fact, I’m going down to Anacostia now to see Captain Parsons.”

Victor Henry had never liked any of Madeline’s gosling suitors, but this one looked pretty good to him, especially by contrast with Hugh Cleveland. “Any chance you can come and have Christmas dinner with us? Madeline will be here.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you. Mrs. Henry’s been kind enough to invite me.”

“She has? Well! Give Deak my regards. Tell him SoPac’s buzzing about that fuse.”

In the stuffy office of the Naval Research Laboratory, looking out over the mud flats to the river, Captain William Parsons complimented Anderson on his suntan, and nodded without comment at Pug Henry’s message. He was a man in his forties with a wrinkled pale brow and receding hair, run-of-the-mill in appearance but the most hardworking and brilliant man Anderson had ever served under.

“Sime, what do you know about uranium?”

Anderson felt as though he had stepped on a third rail. “I’ve done no work in radioactivity, sir. Nor in neutron bombardment.”

“You do know that there’s something funny going on in uranium.”

“Well, when I did my postgrad work at Cal Tech in 1939, there was a lot of talk about the fission results of the Germans.”

“What sort of talk?”

“Wild talk, Captain, about superbombs, also about atomic-powered propulsion, all very theoretical.”

“D’you suppose we’ve left it at that? Just a theoretical possibility? Just a promising freak of nature? With all the German scientists working around the clock for Hitler?”

“I hope not, sir.”

“Come with me.”

They went outside and hurried with heads down toward the main laboratory building, through a bitter wind blowing from the river. Even at a distance, an eerie hissing and whistling sounded from the lab. Inside, the noise was close to deafening. Steam was escaping from a forest of freestanding slender pipes reaching almost to the very high roof, giving the place the
dank warmth of the Caribbean. Men in shirt-sleeves or coveralls were pottering at the pipes or at instrument panels.

“Thermal diffusion,” Parsons shouted, “for separating U-235. Did you know Phil Abelson at Cal Tech?” Parsons pointed to a slender man in shirtsleeves and tie, about Anderson’s age, standing arms akimbo at a wall covered with dials.

“No, but I heard about him.”

“Come and meet him. He’s working with us in a civilian capacity.”

Abelson gave the lieutenant commander a keen look when Parsons explained over the noise that Anderson had worked on the proximity fuse. “We’ve got a chemical engineering problem here,” Abelson said, gesturing around at the pipes. “That your field?”

“Not exactly. Out of uniform I’m a physicist.”

Abelson briefly smiled and turned back to his instrument panel.

“I just wanted you to see this setup,” Parsons said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The air outside seemed arctic. Parsons buttoned his bridge coat to his chin, jammed his hands in his pockets, and strode toward the river, where nests of gray Navy ships rode to anchor.

“Sime, you know the principle of the Clusius tube, don’t you?”

Anderson searched his memory. “That’s the lab tube with the doughnut-shaped cross-section?”

“Yes. That’s what Abelson’s got in there. Two pipes one inside the other, actually. You heat the inside pipe and chill the outside one, and if there’s a liquid in the space between, the molecules of any lighter isotope will move toward the heat. Convection takes them to the top, and you skim them off. Abelson’s put together a lot of giant Clusius tubes, a whole jungle of them in series. The U-
₂₃₅
gradually cooks out. It’s damned slow, but he’s already got measurable enrichment.”

“What’s his liquid?”

“That’s his original achievement. Uranium hexafluoride. He developed the stuff and it’s pretty touchy, but stable enough to work with. Now, this thing is getting pretty hot, and BuOrd wants to station a line officer here. I’ve recommended you. It’s a shore billet again. You young fellows can always get sea duty if you prefer.”

But Sime Anderson had no seafaring ambitions. He had gone to the Academy to get a superior free education. Annapolis had stamped him out in the standard mold, and on the bridge of a destroyer he was just another OOD; but inside this standard replacement part a first-class young physicist was imprisoned, and here was his chance to leap out. The proximity fuse had been an advance in ordnance, but not a thrust into a prime secret of nature. Abelson with his messy array of steam pipes was hunting big game.

At Cal Tech there had been speculation about a U-235 bomb that could
wipe out a whole city, and of engines that could drive an ocean liner three times around the world on a few kilograms of uranium. Among Navy men the talk was of the ultimate submarine; power without the combustion that needed air. This was a grand frontier of applied human intelligence. A more mundane inducement occurred to young Anderson. Stationed in Anacostia, he could see a lot more of Madeline Henry than he had been doing. “Sir, if the Bureau considers me qualified, I’ve no objection.”

“Okay. Now what I’m going to tell you next, Anderson, blows away on the wind.” Parsons rested his elbows on an iron railing that fenced off a rocky drop to the river. “As I said, our interest is propulsion, but the Army’s working on a bomb. We’re excluded. Compartmentalized secrecy. Still, we know.” Parsons glanced at the younger man, hurrying his words. “Our first objective and the Army’s are the same, to produce pure U-
₂₃₅
. For them the next step is making a weapon. A battery of theoreticians is already working on that. Maybe some fact of nature will prevent it. Nobody can say for sure yet.”