“Pitt has been compared to other popular adventure heroes, but Cussler has created a one-of-a-kind …
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1990 by Clive Cussler Enterprises, Inc.
First Pocket Books printing July 1991
24 K.
Major Charles Dennings leaned against one of the twin tires of the starboard landing gear, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather flight jacket, and observed the activity around his aircraft. The entire area was patrolled by armed MP’s and K-9 sentries. A small camera crew recorded the event. He watched with uneasy trepidation as the obese bomb was delicately winched into the modified bomb bay of the B-29. It was too large for the bomber’s ground clearance and had to be hoisted out of a pit.
During his two years as one of the top bomber pilots in Europe, with over forty missions to his credit, he had never laid eyes on such a monstrosity. He saw it as a gigantic overinflated football with nonsensical boxed fins on one end. The round ballistic casing was painted a light gray, and the clamps that held it together around the middle looked like a huge zipper.
Dennings felt menaced by the thing he was to carry nearly three thousand miles. The Los Alamos scientists who assembled the bomb at the airstrip had briefed Dennings and his crew the previous afternoon. A motion picture of the Trinity test explosion was shown to the young men, who sat stunned in disbelief as they viewed the awesome detonation of a single weapon with the power to crush an entire city.
He stood there another half hour until the bomb-bay doors were swung closed. The atom bomb was armed and secure, the plane was fueled and ready for takeoff.
Dennings loved his aircraft. In the air he and the big complex machine became as one. He was the brain, it was the body, a unity he could never describe. On the ground it was another story. Exposed by the shining lights and beaten by the rain that became sleet-cold, he saw the beautiful ghostlike silver bomber as his crypt.
He shook off the morbid thought and hurried through the rain to a Quonset but for his crew’s final briefing. He entered and sat down next to Captain Irv Stanton, the bombardier, a jolly round-faced man with a great walrus mustache.
On the other side of Stanton, his feet stretched out in front of him, slouched Captain Mort Stromp, Dennings’ co-pilot, a complacent southerner, who moved with the agility of a three-toed sloth. Immediately behind sat Lieutenant Joseph Arnold, the navigator, and Navy Commander Hank Byrnes, the weapons engineer, who would monitor the bomb during the flight.
The briefing led off with an intelligence officer unveiling a display board showing aerial photographs of the targets. The industrial section of Osaka was the primary target. The backup, in case of heavy cloud cover, was the historic city of Kyoto. Directional bomb runs were advised as Stanton calmly made notes.
A meteorology officer displayed weather charts and predicted light headwinds with scattered clouds over the targets. He also warned Dennings to expect turbulence over northern Japan. Just to be on the safe side, two B-29s had taken off an hour earlier to scout ahead and report visual assessments of weather over the flight route and cloud cover above the targets.
Dennings took over as polarized welder’s goggles were passed around. “I won’t give you a locker-room pep talk,” he said, noting the relieved grins on the faces of his crew. “We’ve had a year of training crammed into one short month, but I know we can pull this mission off. In my humble opinion you’re the best damned flight crew in the Air Force. If we all do our jobs, we may well end the war.”
Then he nodded at the base chaplain, who offered a prayer for a safe and successful flight.
As the men filed out toward the waiting B-29, Dennings was approached by General Harold Morrison, special deputy to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan bomb project.
Morrison studied Dennings for a moment. The pilot’s eyes showed a weariness around the edges, but they glowed with anticipation. The general held out his hand. “Good luck, Major.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll get the job done.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second,” said Morrison, forcing a confident expression. He waited for Dennings to reply, but the pilot had gone silent.
After a few awkward moments, Dennings asked, “Why us General?”
Morrison’s smile was barely visible. “You want to back out?”
“No, my crew and I will see it through. But why us?” he repeated. “Excuse me for saying, sir, but I can’t believe we’re the only flight crew in the Air Force you’d trust to fly an atomic bomb across the Pacific, drop it in the middle of Japan, and then land at Okinawa with little more than fumes in the fuel tanks.”
“It’s best you know only what you’ve been told.”
Dennings read foreboding in the older man’s eyes and voice. ” ‘Mother’s Breath.’ ” He repeated the words slowly, without tone, as one would repeat the name of some unspeakable terror. “What warped soul came up with such a cockamamie code name for the bomb?”
Morrison made a resigned shrug. “I believe it was the President.”
Twenty-seven minutes later, Dennings gazed past the beating windscreen wipers. The rain had increased, and he could only see two hundred yards through the wet gloom. Both feet pressed the brakes as he ran the engines up to 2,200 rpm’s. Flight Engineer Sergeant Robert Mosely reported number-four outboard engine turning over fifty revolutions slow. Dennings decided to ignore the report. The damp air was no doubt responsible for the slight drop. He pulled the throttles back to idle.
In the co-pilot’s seat to the right of Dennings, Mort Stromp acknowledged the control tower’s clearance for takeoff. He lowered the flaps. Two of the crew in the waist turrets confirmed the flap setting.
Dennings reached over and switched on the intercom. “Okay, guys, here we go.”
He eased the throttles forward again, compensating for the tremendous torque by slightly advancing the left engines over those on the right. Then he released the brake.
Fully loaded at 68 tons,
The four 3,350-cubic-inch Wright Cyclone engines strained at their mountings, their combined 8,800 horsepower whipping the 16.5-foot propellers through the wind-driven sheet of water. Blue flame erupting from exhaust manifolds, wings enveloped in a cloud of spray, the great bomber roared into the blackness.
With agonizing slowness she picked up speed. The long runway stretched out in front of her, carved out of the bleak volcanic rock and ending at an abrupt drop eighty feet above the cold sea. A horizontal bolt of lightning bathed the fire trucks and ambulances spaced along the runway in an eerie blue light. At eighty knots Dennings took full rudder control and advanced the right engines to their stops. He gripped the wheel grimly, determined to get the
Three quarters of the runway passed, and she was still glued to the ground. Time seemed to dissolve in a blur. They all felt as though they w re flying into a void. Then suddenly the lights of the jeeps parked beside the end of the runway burst through the curtain of rain.
“God almighty!” Stromp blurted. “Pull her up!”
Dennings waited another three seconds, and then he gently eased the wheel toward his chest. The B-29’s wheels came free. She had barely clawed thirty feet out of the sky when the runway vanished and she struggled over the forbidding water.
Morrison stood outside the warmth of the radar but under the downpour, his four-man staff dutifully standing behind him. He watched the takeoff of
An engine was slightly out of tune. One or more of its eighteen cylinders was not firing continuously.
Fearfully, Morrison listened for some sign the bomber was not going to lift off. If
Morrison exhaled a tense sigh. Only then did he turn his back on the miserable weather and walk inside.
There was nothing to do now but send a message to General Groves in Washington informing him that Mother’s Breath was on her way to Japan. Then wait and hope.
But down deep the general was troubled. He knew Dennings. The man was too stubborn to turn back with a bad engine. Dennings would get the
“God help them,” Morrison muttered under his breath. He knew with dread finality his part of the immense operation didn’t stand a prayer.
“Gear up,” ordered Dennings.
“Am I ever glad to hear those words,” grunted Stromp as he moved the lever. The gear motors whined and the three sets of wheels rose into their wells under the nose and wings. “Gear up and locked.”
As the airspeed increased, Dennings dropped the throttle settings to save on fuel. He waited before beginning a slow and gentle climb for altitude until the airspeed touched 200 knots. Unseen off the starboard wing, the Aleutian Island chain slowly curled northeast. They would not sight land again for 2,500 miles.
“How’s that number-four engine?” he asked Mosely.
“Pulling her share, but she’s running a tad hot.”
“Soon as we hit five thousand feet, I’ll drop her back a few rpm’s.”
“Wouldn’t hurt, Major,” Mosely replied.
Arnold gave Dennings the course heading they would maintain for the next ten and a half hours. At 4,900 feet Dennings turned control over to Stromp. He relaxed and stared into the black sky. No stars were in sight. The plane was feeling the turbulence as Stromp threaded it through the ominous mass of thunderclouds.
When they finally cleared the worst of the storm, Dennings unbuckled himself and climbed out of his seat. As he twisted around, he could see through a port window below the tunnel leading to the waist and tail section of the plane. He could just make out a piece of the bomb suspended in its release mechanism.
The crawl tunnel had been narrowed to receive the immense weapon into the bomb bay and was a tight fit. Dennings wiggled through past the bomb bay and dropped down on the opposite end. Then he swung open the small airtight door and slipped inside.
Pulling a flashlight from a leg pocket, he made his way along a confined catwalk running the length of the two bomb bays that had been modified into one. The weapon’s huge size made for an incredibly snug fit. Its outer diameter measured less than two inches away from the longitudinal bulkheads.
Hesitantly, Dennings reached down and touched it. The steel sides felt ice cold to his fingertips. He failed to visualize the hundred thousand people it could burn to cinders within a short second, or the ghastly toll from burns and radiation. The thermonuclear temperatures or the shock wave from the Trinity test could not be sensed in a black-and-white movie film. He saw it only as a means of ending a war and saving hundreds of thousands of his countrymen’s lives.