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Book #5 of the Mogi Franklin Series
Mogi Franklin and his sister Jennifer are delighted to be attending a high school science conference in New Mexico amidst a hundred thousand acres of meadows, mountains, rivers, and volcanoes far older than recorded time. But their focus quickly changes when they learn of the disappearance fifty years ago of a plane with two hundred pounds of plutonium—and of the terrorist nations vying today to find it in those same mountains.
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Read two chapters
Library of Congress Control Number 2017945951 Distributed by SCB Distributors, (800) 729-6423
Chapter 1
Denver, Colorado, August 24, 1963
A small plane was pulled into a hangar at a private airport north of Denver. The tall doors rolled shut, and two heavily-armed men took their positions outside.
A half-dozen technicians began loading the plane with metal cases that had been delivered an hour earlier from the Rocky Flats Plant, Denver’s nuclear fuels manufacturing facility only a few miles away. The cases, each about the size of a suitcase, needed to be more than three hundred miles south, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by daybreak.
The eight-passenger, twin-engine Beechcraft had five seats removed to accommodate the load. Each case, specifically designed for transporting nuclear materials, was marked with the glaring black-and-yellow markings: “DANGER!” and “RADIATION
—HANDLE WITH CARE!” Inside each case, thin sheets of nuclear material were layered with lead shielding. Surrounded by an airtight barrier and packed securely, each case weighed more than a hundred pounds.
In total, the cases held two hundred pounds of highly refined plutonium, the key ingredient inside a nuclear weapon, enough to keep the researchers and bomb designers at Los Alamos busy for a year in the fierce, day-to-day battles of the Cold War.
The Soviets had just exploded a 58-megaton bomb, almost 3000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and more powerful than any weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal. A small tidal wave of panic swept through the White House and the Pentagon, and now everybody was hopping. The pressure for bigger bombs and more of them had increased like steam in a kettle. If the United States were to keep its lines of defense strong, if it were to maintain that precious perception of nuclear superiority, it needed more missiles, more warheads, and bigger booms.
And they needed it yesterday.
The pilot and co-pilot of the Beechcraft worked the checklist. Major Henry Samples, an Air Force flight commander, was the pilot. He had flown everything with wings, and there wasn’t a better man to fly the backcountry skies of Colorado and New Mexico.
Christopher Johnson was the co-pilot, an experienced ex-military flyboy with the added advantage of being a materials expert at the lab in Los Alamos. It was routine for him to go along with secret shipments of nuclear materials around the United States or over to the atomic test islands in the Pacific. He was confident and casual. Settling in his seat, he was already relaxing for what he expected would be a short, easy flight.
The third man in the plane was a typical government babysitter. He’d be CIA or FBI or some other three-letter branch of the government and would sit silently in his seat, always with a nervous look and a suspicious eye.
Chris Johnson watched a second plane on the other side of the hangar. Identical to the one he was in, showing the same aircraft identification markings on the outside, it was being loaded with a set of six identical yellow cases with identical markings, exactly matched to the cases being loaded into his plane. One set of the cases held the plutonium; the other set held sheets of useless lead.
The pilots and co-pilots didn’t know which cases were which, and they assumed the babysitters didn’t know either. Only the guys in the big offices at Rocky Flats knew which plane carried the real stuff. As might be expected, the three men inside the second plane wore uniforms identical to Henry, Chris, and the other man. The smallest detail was identical. At least, those were the rules.
But Chris Johnson always managed to have one small difference—a flyer’s insignia pinned on his jacket. He never flew without it, pinning it on when no one was looking. It was the traditional flyer’s pin, two silver wings surrounding a red “A” for aviator. He had received the pin upon graduation from flight school. Becoming a pilot had meant a lot to him and to his wife, Mary. Going to flight school wasn’t easy when you were married, and it took both of them to get him through.
He wore the pin for her.
During the taxiing out to the runway, the crews of the planes went over the switching procedures. They would fly together, one in front of the other, and at least once during the flight, the planes would switch positions. It was unplanned and could happen at any time. Either of the government agents— the “third man”—could issue a command to exchange positions, and the pilots would obey. Dreamed up by some security guy in Washington, it gave an air of devilish trickery to the operation and added to the illusion of absolute security for any congressman to whom it was explained.
The pilots thought it was nonsense.
The two planes motored onto the runway, lined up, pushed their engines to the max, and lifted off in perfect cadence. As soon as they left the airport airspace, the babysitter spoke and Henry slipped in behind the now-designated lead plane.
The ground crew listened as the drone of the planes faded into the quiet of the night sky.
The flight plan was simple: out to the southwest, above Highway 285, slide over the peaks of the Mosquito Range, go dead south through the Arkansas River basin, over the bump of Poncha Pass, past Alamosa on the left, down the Rio Grande valley, and into the Los Alamos airport.
Chris looked at the clock on the instrument panel and quickly calculated the time schedule for the rest of the night. A couple of hours to the Los Alamos airport; a few minutes to unload; the inspection of the cases, along with the umpteen pieces of paper that had to be completed and signed; and the required debriefing session with the transport chief. After that, the lab’s storage people would take over and he’d be out of there.
It would be mid-morning when he got home. A little nap and he’d be ready for a weekend in Albuquerque. With the latest pressures from the bureaucrats, he had been riding transport planes too often for Mary’s liking. She was tired of his being gone. With a baby on the way, it was even worse. Maybe he could make it up to her this weekend. In fact, he didn’t have anything significant on Monday; maybe it was time for a little R&R in the big town.
It was a superb night to fly. The upper air currents were calm; the lights below were few and the sky clear. No winds buffeted them as they slid over the mountaintops and into the river valley. A steady tailwind had them ten minutes ahead of schedule when Poncha Pass silently slipped by below them.
Chris looked out on the ocean of stars. Without a moon, he couldn’t quite make out where the dark of the land became the dark of the sky. The plane in front flew with normal lights; the second plane, behind by 500 yards, flew with lights off, appearing only as a dark patch of nothing against the stars of the night sky. Henry watched the quiet town of Alamosa in the distance, and then gingerly maneuvered around the big bump known as San Antonio Mountain. They were in New Mexico and just
about home.
As the two planes steadily droned over the New Mexico- Colorado border, the government man in the back—“Bill” as he had given his name—unzipped his flight jacket, reached under his armpit and removed his pistol. Inserted into a hidden sleeve inside the holster was a smaller device, a transmitter that he now quietly slid into his palm.
“Time to switch,” he said quietly, leaning forward.
Henry Samples picked the radio handset off the console, pressed the button, and spoke a few words. Increasing his speed as he pulled back on the control, he moved the plane directly above the plane in front of him, ready for the other plane to decrease speed and settle in behind.
As Henry moved directly over the first plane, the government babysitter, who was no babysitter at all, pressed a small button on the transmitter. If anyone on the ground below had been listening, the noise of the two planes would have suddenly grown much quieter.
Quieter by half.
Only one plane continued. The engines of the lower plane suddenly quit and the controls were rendered useless. The lower plane slammed into the valley floor below.
Henry was puzzled by the lack of a voice in his earphones. He tried several calls to the other plane before he felt the cold barrel of a pistol pressed into his neck. “Bill,” who had inched up to the space between the seats, gave simple instructions.
“Go into a steep dive, level at eight thousand feet, and turn west. Now. Leave the lights off.”
It was a convincing threat, and Henry did as he was told. Chris sat in bewildered stillness as the gun barrel moved across the space and now rested behind his own neck.
Eight thousand feet. In a country of ten- and eleven-thousand-foot mountains, that meant flying just above tree height through the dark canyons that twisted like the run of a bobsled.
Two hundred miles south, the radar at the big airport in Albuquerque had picked up the two planes as they came over San Antonio Mountain and into the broad expanse of the Rio Grande valley. As the sweep hand on the radar console rotated slowly around, two little blips moved down the green screen. The radar operator had been told to watch for the blips but not to communicate or call for their identity. The Los Alamos airport would let him know if they needed him.
So, it was only with casual interest that he watched the two blips become one. He was a little more interested when the blip blinked a bright green spot one moment and didn’t appear at all the next. He was wondering if he should tell somebody when, out his window, the hangars of Kirtland Air Force Base next door lit up like a Christmas tree, and a screeching wail of a scramble siren shattered the quiet of the night. Before he understood what was going on, two fighter jets roared down the runway with an emergency clearance.
It was only a minute or two from the disappearance of the last blip on the screen to the time the fighter jets shot into the air. It took seven minutes more for them to cover the hundred and sixty miles to the location of the last blip, but it was enough time for one plane, three men, and two hundred pounds of the most dangerous metal on earth to vanish into thin air.
A half-dozen technicians began loading the plane with metal cases that had been delivered an hour earlier from the Rocky Flats Plant, Denver’s nuclear fuels manufacturing facility only a few miles away. The cases, each about the size of a suitcase, needed to be more than three hundred miles south, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by daybreak.
The eight-passenger, twin-engine Beechcraft had five seats removed to accommodate the load. Each case, specifically designed for transporting nuclear materials, was marked with the glaring black-and-yellow markings: “DANGER!” and “RADIATION
—HANDLE WITH CARE!” Inside each case, thin sheets of nuclear material were layered with lead shielding. Surrounded by an airtight barrier and packed securely, each case weighed more than a hundred pounds.
In total, the cases held two hundred pounds of highly refined plutonium, the key ingredient inside a nuclear weapon, enough to keep the researchers and bomb designers at Los Alamos busy for a year in the fierce, day-to-day battles of the Cold War.
The Soviets had just exploded a 58-megaton bomb, almost 3000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and more powerful than any weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal. A small tidal wave of panic swept through the White House and the Pentagon, and now everybody was hopping. The pressure for bigger bombs and more of them had increased like steam in a kettle. If the United States were to keep its lines of defense strong, if it were to maintain that precious perception of nuclear superiority, it needed more missiles, more warheads, and bigger booms.
And they needed it yesterday.
The pilot and co-pilot of the Beechcraft worked the checklist. Major Henry Samples, an Air Force flight commander, was the pilot. He had flown everything with wings, and there wasn’t a better man to fly the backcountry skies of Colorado and New Mexico.
Christopher Johnson was the co-pilot, an experienced ex-military flyboy with the added advantage of being a materials expert at the lab in Los Alamos. It was routine for him to go along with secret shipments of nuclear materials around the United States or over to the atomic test islands in the Pacific. He was confident and casual. Settling in his seat, he was already relaxing for what he expected would be a short, easy flight.
The third man in the plane was a typical government babysitter. He’d be CIA or FBI or some other three-letter branch of the government and would sit silently in his seat, always with a nervous look and a suspicious eye.
Chris Johnson watched a second plane on the other side of the hangar. Identical to the one he was in, showing the same aircraft identification markings on the outside, it was being loaded with a set of six identical yellow cases with identical markings, exactly matched to the cases being loaded into his plane. One set of the cases held the plutonium; the other set held sheets of useless lead.
The pilots and co-pilots didn’t know which cases were which, and they assumed the babysitters didn’t know either. Only the guys in the big offices at Rocky Flats knew which plane carried the real stuff. As might be expected, the three men inside the second plane wore uniforms identical to Henry, Chris, and the other man. The smallest detail was identical. At least, those were the rules.
But Chris Johnson always managed to have one small difference—a flyer’s insignia pinned on his jacket. He never flew without it, pinning it on when no one was looking. It was the traditional flyer’s pin, two silver wings surrounding a red “A” for aviator. He had received the pin upon graduation from flight school. Becoming a pilot had meant a lot to him and to his wife, Mary. Going to flight school wasn’t easy when you were married, and it took both of them to get him through.
He wore the pin for her.
During the taxiing out to the runway, the crews of the planes went over the switching procedures. They would fly together, one in front of the other, and at least once during the flight, the planes would switch positions. It was unplanned and could happen at any time. Either of the government agents— the “third man”—could issue a command to exchange positions, and the pilots would obey. Dreamed up by some security guy in Washington, it gave an air of devilish trickery to the operation and added to the illusion of absolute security for any congressman to whom it was explained.
The pilots thought it was nonsense.
The two planes motored onto the runway, lined up, pushed their engines to the max, and lifted off in perfect cadence. As soon as they left the airport airspace, the babysitter spoke and Henry slipped in behind the now-designated lead plane.
The ground crew listened as the drone of the planes faded into the quiet of the night sky.
The flight plan was simple: out to the southwest, above Highway 285, slide over the peaks of the Mosquito Range, go dead south through the Arkansas River basin, over the bump of Poncha Pass, past Alamosa on the left, down the Rio Grande valley, and into the Los Alamos airport.
Chris looked at the clock on the instrument panel and quickly calculated the time schedule for the rest of the night. A couple of hours to the Los Alamos airport; a few minutes to unload; the inspection of the cases, along with the umpteen pieces of paper that had to be completed and signed; and the required debriefing session with the transport chief. After that, the lab’s storage people would take over and he’d be out of there.
It would be mid-morning when he got home. A little nap and he’d be ready for a weekend in Albuquerque. With the latest pressures from the bureaucrats, he had been riding transport planes too often for Mary’s liking. She was tired of his being gone. With a baby on the way, it was even worse. Maybe he could make it up to her this weekend. In fact, he didn’t have anything significant on Monday; maybe it was time for a little R&R in the big town.
It was a superb night to fly. The upper air currents were calm; the lights below were few and the sky clear. No winds buffeted them as they slid over the mountaintops and into the river valley. A steady tailwind had them ten minutes ahead of schedule when Poncha Pass silently slipped by below them.
Chris looked out on the ocean of stars. Without a moon, he couldn’t quite make out where the dark of the land became the dark of the sky. The plane in front flew with normal lights; the second plane, behind by 500 yards, flew with lights off, appearing only as a dark patch of nothing against the stars of the night sky. Henry watched the quiet town of Alamosa in the distance, and then gingerly maneuvered around the big bump known as San Antonio Mountain. They were in New Mexico and just
about home.
As the two planes steadily droned over the New Mexico- Colorado border, the government man in the back—“Bill” as he had given his name—unzipped his flight jacket, reached under his armpit and removed his pistol. Inserted into a hidden sleeve inside the holster was a smaller device, a transmitter that he now quietly slid into his palm.
“Time to switch,” he said quietly, leaning forward.
Henry Samples picked the radio handset off the console, pressed the button, and spoke a few words. Increasing his speed as he pulled back on the control, he moved the plane directly above the plane in front of him, ready for the other plane to decrease speed and settle in behind.
As Henry moved directly over the first plane, the government babysitter, who was no babysitter at all, pressed a small button on the transmitter. If anyone on the ground below had been listening, the noise of the two planes would have suddenly grown much quieter.
Quieter by half.
Only one plane continued. The engines of the lower plane suddenly quit and the controls were rendered useless. The lower plane slammed into the valley floor below.
Henry was puzzled by the lack of a voice in his earphones. He tried several calls to the other plane before he felt the cold barrel of a pistol pressed into his neck. “Bill,” who had inched up to the space between the seats, gave simple instructions.
“Go into a steep dive, level at eight thousand feet, and turn west. Now. Leave the lights off.”
It was a convincing threat, and Henry did as he was told. Chris sat in bewildered stillness as the gun barrel moved across the space and now rested behind his own neck.
Eight thousand feet. In a country of ten- and eleven-thousand-foot mountains, that meant flying just above tree height through the dark canyons that twisted like the run of a bobsled.
Two hundred miles south, the radar at the big airport in Albuquerque had picked up the two planes as they came over San Antonio Mountain and into the broad expanse of the Rio Grande valley. As the sweep hand on the radar console rotated slowly around, two little blips moved down the green screen. The radar operator had been told to watch for the blips but not to communicate or call for their identity. The Los Alamos airport would let him know if they needed him.
So, it was only with casual interest that he watched the two blips become one. He was a little more interested when the blip blinked a bright green spot one moment and didn’t appear at all the next. He was wondering if he should tell somebody when, out his window, the hangars of Kirtland Air Force Base next door lit up like a Christmas tree, and a screeching wail of a scramble siren shattered the quiet of the night. Before he understood what was going on, two fighter jets roared down the runway with an emergency clearance.
It was only a minute or two from the disappearance of the last blip on the screen to the time the fighter jets shot into the air. It took seven minutes more for them to cover the hundred and sixty miles to the location of the last blip, but it was enough time for one plane, three men, and two hundred pounds of the most dangerous metal on earth to vanish into thin air.
Chapter 2
Los Alamos, New Mexico, Present Day
So that’s what the famous atomic bomb looked like—a giant football with fins.
There were two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II. The big one, called Fat Man—identical in appearance to the empty casing Mogi Franklin was standing next to—had been dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The other bomb, called Little Boy, was about a third the size of its big brother, and its empty casing was behind him. It had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima a few days before. Between the two, they represented the only nuclear weapons in the history of mankind to be used in war.
Mogi’s fingertips tingled at the cold of the painted metal as he ran his hands up and down and around the smooth, glossy surface of Fat Man, standing on his tip-toes to touch the top, leaning over and still not touching the bottom.
He stood back and took a couple of pictures with his phone. He was glad he and Jennifer had signed up for the program. The National High School Institute for the Environmental Sciences was being held at the Valles Caldera Conference Center in New Mexico, right in the middle of a hundred thousand acres of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and surrounded by a ring of eleven-thousand-foot mountains. Twenty-four students from middle schools and high schools in Utah and Arizona had been invited to the week-long, government-sponsored program to introduce them to careers related to the environment.
“You’d better hurry up, dweeb,” Phil Agnew said as he walked by, slapping the back of Mogi’s head.
Mogi whipped around as he watched the big kid walk off. At nineteen, Phil worked as a summer assistant at the institute and was a chaperone for the visit to the museum.
Mogi burned a little with the slap but let it go. If Phil was picking on him, then Phil was picking on everybody. It had taken Mogi less than a minute at the conference center to recognize that Phil was a jerk. He was bossy, insulting, and rough, and seemed offended that he had to lower himself to a job that involved working with “kids.”
Classic jerk.
He and Jennifer had arrived that morning. Brother and sister, they were from Bluff, Utah, close to the Four Corners area where the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. It was bare rock country—hundreds of square miles of bare sandstone, with solitary mesas rising a thousand feet out of the desert floor and an uncountable number of craggy, twisting canyons.
Mogi was fourteen and tall for his age, but his muscles had not yet caught up with his bones, so he was gangly and spindly and a little bit awkward, which is to say, normal for his position in life. He took after his mom’s side of the family in his looks and his shyness, but seemed to be a sum of both families on the brain side: he was way smarter than most of the people around him. Quick-minded, mentally disciplined, and orderly, he had a natural talent for solving puzzles.
After he and Jennifer had gotten settled into the dorms, attended the program’s orientation, and had lunch at the conference center’s dining hall, they and the others were shuttled to the science museum in Los Alamos, about twenty miles to the east, over a mountain pass.
The museum featured the history of the town and the Manhattan Project, the super-secret effort during World War II to design, build, and drop an atomic bomb. Nobody in the world knew what was going on until they dropped the first one in August of 1945.
More than seventy years after the town of Los Alamos was created to house the Manhattan Project's scientists and their families, the original wooden shacks and the wooden water tower that was famous for freezing during the winter had been replaced with more than eight hundred modern buildings across forty-three square miles. The Los Alamos National Laboratory had become a world-class research organization dedicated not only to nuclear weapons development, but also environmental science, metallurgy, space, computers, computer modeling, chemistry, genetics, health, and many other research areas.
“Have you started your list? I’ve already got six things. Betcha that’s more than you’ve got.”
John Travers had come up behind him. John was from somewhere south of Flagstaff, Arizona. Not giving Mogi a chance to answer, the boy turned and walked quickly away. That was OK, since Mogi wasn’t about to show him his blank notebook page. The students’ first assignment was to make a list of ten items at the museum that were connected to an environmental issue.
Making a list wouldn’t be a problem, Mogi thought. Lists are one thing that I’m good at. He kept looking at the war exhibit. The display around the bomb casings had copies of different newspapers from the World War II era. Armies all over the place, concentration camps, the shelling of London, the bombing raids on Berlin, the incredibly complex ship battles at sea in the Pacific, the horrific combat on various islands, the massive reaction of America to Pearl Harbor. It presented a picture of the utter gruesomeness of war.
Mogi passed under a mock-up of a cruise missile hanging from the ceiling and walked in front of another display. Large, white letters caught his eye: “Nuclear Weapons Accidents.” There have been about thirty accidents involving U.S. nuclear weapons: several bomber crashes, a Minuteman missile blowing up in its silo in Arkansas, and one bomb whose holding mechanism snapped during a flight, causing the bomb to rip right through the bottom of the airplane. Several bombs had been accidentally or deliberately dropped at sea. None caused a nuclear explosion, and most of the accidents ended with the bombs being recovered.
But not all. One time, a B-52 bomber from the Strategic Air Command had a major engine failure and was going to crash into the Pacific Ocean. The crew released a pair of bombs just before the airplane hit the water because it was “safer” than keeping them inside a crashing plane. The crew survived, but the bombs were never found.
They’re still there, Mogi thought—still at the bottom of the ocean.
“You’d better hurry.” It was Jennifer. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before we have to be back on the bus.” She knew that if she didn’t keep reminding him, her brother would read every word of every poster. He wouldn’t notice anything until they turned off the lights.
Jennifer was seventeen, three years older than Mogi, and definitely took after her father. Shorter than her brother by a half-foot, with thick, brown hair cut short, she was strong, athletic, physically graceful, had a keen sense of compassion, and loved being around people. If Mogi was the obsessive analytical, adventurous problem-solver, Jennifer was the cautious, emotionally-centered people-person. He pushed her to do more than she thought she ought to; she pulled him back to what was reasonable.
“OK, OK, I’ll get to it.” He really wanted to read more, but Jennifer had a point. Maybe he could come back before the week was up.
Mogi moved to the next display: “Nuclear Espionage: The Spies Within.”
The sign was in bold red letters against a black background and hung above a wall covered with pictures and captions. A smaller sign introduced it as a new exhibit. It featured stories about spies over the years. There were spies everywhere—every nation had theirs, the United States had ours—all the time. There were even spies working within the Manhattan Project itself, working right alongside the scientists and technicians in Los Alamos and other secret places across the United States. With the end of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union in the ’80s, many details were just being learned about the Soviet spy network in the states. Espionage was a game that every nation played. That was normal business between enemies, and sometimes even friends.
There was a gasp behind him.
“I can’t believe they did that! This is absolutely wrong! They are not going to get away with this!”
A woman behind him had swung around on her heel, dropping a notebook on the floor as she did so. She headed toward the entry desk where a receptionist sat.
It was Dr. Simpson, the head of the Institute’s summer program who had given the orientation talk before lunch. She supervised all the activities at the environmental science camp. She worked for the lab as an environmental scientist and managed several of the lab’s other high-school programs. Overall, she seemed really nice, calm, easy-going, and smart.
She certainly wasn’t calm now.
He watched her as she marched up to the receptionist and bombarded her with questions. “What do you mean putting up something like that? There is no proof! Where’s the museum director? I want to see him right now.”
Everyone was staring at her, trying to act as if they weren’t. Dr. Simpson, or Nancy, as she wanted the students to call her, was ushered off behind a door marked Staff Only, and the crowd watched as the door swung closed. Mogi picked up her notebook. He would give it to her later.
What had made her so angry? He looked at the exhibit about the spies. Whatever it was, it had to be right in front of him—she had been reading the same display.
It was an enlargement of an old photograph, showing what seemed to be a warehouse with a group of men standing around a forklift. A circle was superimposed on a large, metal shelf behind the men. On the shelf were six yellow containers about the size of large suitcases. Only the one in front could be fully seen. It had a large radiation sign on the side.
The text under the photograph read:
Largest Theft of Plutonium in History
In August of 1963, United States Air Force Major Henry Samples and Los Alamos Laboratory materials scientist Christopher Johnson accomplished the daring theft of two hundred pounds of refined plutonium, the largest hijacking of nuclear materials in American history. During a transfer of plutonium from the Rocky Flats manufacturing facility near Denver, Colorado, to Los Alamos, the two men diverted a cargo plane to a secret rendezvous with Russian conspirators high in the Jemez Mountains west of Los Alamos. Under the cover of night, they delivered the plutonium to Russian agents who then smuggled it to the Soviet Union. The two men escaped in the plane and were never seen again. In 1968, in a photo deliberately leaked to the United States government, the Russians revealed that they had, indeed, scored a clear victory of espionage over the American nuclear community. Samples and Johnson were convicted, in their absence, of high treason against the United States.
Two hundred pounds of plutonium. The Fat Man bomb across the room hadn’t used anywhere close to that.
“Mogi!” his sister called, coming up behind him. “We’ve got to go. They’re calling us to the bus. Come on.”
Walking in the direction of the front door, Mogi weaved his way around other exhibits. He weaved right into Phil Agnew.
“Get a move on, dweeb, or we’re going to leave you behind. I guess they let anybody over ten into these conferences. What am I going to have to do to make you understand how to follow orders, huh?”
Mogi turned away as quickly as he could and walked in a different direction. He looked at exhibit titles as he passed by so he'd have something to write on his list. The Human Genome, Waste Handling (that was environmental), Medical Research, Nuclear Power from Lasers (that’s probably one), Fluid Modeling, Electric Cars (that’s another one), Oil Recovery, Air Monitoring and Wildlife Surveys and Radiation Exposure and Paper Recycling and In Ground Vitrification (what?).
Stepping onto the bus, Mogi sat in one of the front seats since the other seats behind were taken. Dr. Simpson came in last and slid into the seat beside him. She was still flushed with emotion.
“Uh, I have your notebook,” he said, handing it to her.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I was quite an embarrassment.”
“Nah. I don’t think anybody noticed,” he lied. He really wanted to know more, but figured it wasn’t any of his business. On the other hand, if he didn’t ask, he’d never know.
“I was just wondering,” he began in a halting voice, “what you thought of the display about the spies. I thought it was pretty interesting.”
“Well, it’s interesting if you’re not concerned with the truth. I get so irritated with these people. Did you read the part about the stealing of the plutonium? By two men who disappeared with the plane?” she asked.
“Yeah. About two hundred pounds.”
“Well, they didn’t steal anything. Neither one of them could have ever done that. They were good and loyal men. These people have the story all wrong.”
She stared out the window as the bus passed through the main part of town, over a bridge, and then headed toward the mountains.
“Just because they never found the plane doesn’t mean that they defected to Russia. They know the photo in the warehouse is a fake and they still can’t see past their noses to admit that maybe everything else is wrong, too. They won’t even consider that the plutonium wasn’t stolen.”
Did she mean the photo had been doctored or staged? Why would Russia want us to think they had stolen the shipment if they hadn’t?
“But I can’t prove anything well enough to convince anybody,” she said as she turned to him and then turned back to the window. “But I know it wasn’t them.”
She turned to him again. “Christopher Johnson, the scientist from the lab?”
Mogi nodded. Samples and Johnson.
“He was my father.”
Dr. Nancy Simpson became silent and Mogi turned his attention to the bus as it swayed along the winding road. As they lifted out of the flat mesas, the highway grew steeper, narrower, and cut a contour across the sloping sides of the mountains. The forest became more dense. Mogi could see pine trees that were easily a hundred feet tall. Crossing over the pass and coming down into the valley surrounded by the peaks, he looked across several miles of broad, knee-high grass. The preserve had some of the biggest elk herds in the United States, as well as an abundance of deer and bear and mountain lions.
Watching the scenery as it went by, he tried to recall more of the orientation talk, but his mind kept wandering back to the woman beside him.
The biggest theft of plutonium in history and I’m sitting next to the crook’s daughter.
Why did she think everyone was wrong?
So that’s what the famous atomic bomb looked like—a giant football with fins.
There were two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II. The big one, called Fat Man—identical in appearance to the empty casing Mogi Franklin was standing next to—had been dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The other bomb, called Little Boy, was about a third the size of its big brother, and its empty casing was behind him. It had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima a few days before. Between the two, they represented the only nuclear weapons in the history of mankind to be used in war.
Mogi’s fingertips tingled at the cold of the painted metal as he ran his hands up and down and around the smooth, glossy surface of Fat Man, standing on his tip-toes to touch the top, leaning over and still not touching the bottom.
He stood back and took a couple of pictures with his phone. He was glad he and Jennifer had signed up for the program. The National High School Institute for the Environmental Sciences was being held at the Valles Caldera Conference Center in New Mexico, right in the middle of a hundred thousand acres of the Valles Caldera National Preserve and surrounded by a ring of eleven-thousand-foot mountains. Twenty-four students from middle schools and high schools in Utah and Arizona had been invited to the week-long, government-sponsored program to introduce them to careers related to the environment.
“You’d better hurry up, dweeb,” Phil Agnew said as he walked by, slapping the back of Mogi’s head.
Mogi whipped around as he watched the big kid walk off. At nineteen, Phil worked as a summer assistant at the institute and was a chaperone for the visit to the museum.
Mogi burned a little with the slap but let it go. If Phil was picking on him, then Phil was picking on everybody. It had taken Mogi less than a minute at the conference center to recognize that Phil was a jerk. He was bossy, insulting, and rough, and seemed offended that he had to lower himself to a job that involved working with “kids.”
Classic jerk.
He and Jennifer had arrived that morning. Brother and sister, they were from Bluff, Utah, close to the Four Corners area where the borders of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. It was bare rock country—hundreds of square miles of bare sandstone, with solitary mesas rising a thousand feet out of the desert floor and an uncountable number of craggy, twisting canyons.
Mogi was fourteen and tall for his age, but his muscles had not yet caught up with his bones, so he was gangly and spindly and a little bit awkward, which is to say, normal for his position in life. He took after his mom’s side of the family in his looks and his shyness, but seemed to be a sum of both families on the brain side: he was way smarter than most of the people around him. Quick-minded, mentally disciplined, and orderly, he had a natural talent for solving puzzles.
After he and Jennifer had gotten settled into the dorms, attended the program’s orientation, and had lunch at the conference center’s dining hall, they and the others were shuttled to the science museum in Los Alamos, about twenty miles to the east, over a mountain pass.
The museum featured the history of the town and the Manhattan Project, the super-secret effort during World War II to design, build, and drop an atomic bomb. Nobody in the world knew what was going on until they dropped the first one in August of 1945.
More than seventy years after the town of Los Alamos was created to house the Manhattan Project's scientists and their families, the original wooden shacks and the wooden water tower that was famous for freezing during the winter had been replaced with more than eight hundred modern buildings across forty-three square miles. The Los Alamos National Laboratory had become a world-class research organization dedicated not only to nuclear weapons development, but also environmental science, metallurgy, space, computers, computer modeling, chemistry, genetics, health, and many other research areas.
“Have you started your list? I’ve already got six things. Betcha that’s more than you’ve got.”
John Travers had come up behind him. John was from somewhere south of Flagstaff, Arizona. Not giving Mogi a chance to answer, the boy turned and walked quickly away. That was OK, since Mogi wasn’t about to show him his blank notebook page. The students’ first assignment was to make a list of ten items at the museum that were connected to an environmental issue.
Making a list wouldn’t be a problem, Mogi thought. Lists are one thing that I’m good at. He kept looking at the war exhibit. The display around the bomb casings had copies of different newspapers from the World War II era. Armies all over the place, concentration camps, the shelling of London, the bombing raids on Berlin, the incredibly complex ship battles at sea in the Pacific, the horrific combat on various islands, the massive reaction of America to Pearl Harbor. It presented a picture of the utter gruesomeness of war.
Mogi passed under a mock-up of a cruise missile hanging from the ceiling and walked in front of another display. Large, white letters caught his eye: “Nuclear Weapons Accidents.” There have been about thirty accidents involving U.S. nuclear weapons: several bomber crashes, a Minuteman missile blowing up in its silo in Arkansas, and one bomb whose holding mechanism snapped during a flight, causing the bomb to rip right through the bottom of the airplane. Several bombs had been accidentally or deliberately dropped at sea. None caused a nuclear explosion, and most of the accidents ended with the bombs being recovered.
But not all. One time, a B-52 bomber from the Strategic Air Command had a major engine failure and was going to crash into the Pacific Ocean. The crew released a pair of bombs just before the airplane hit the water because it was “safer” than keeping them inside a crashing plane. The crew survived, but the bombs were never found.
They’re still there, Mogi thought—still at the bottom of the ocean.
“You’d better hurry.” It was Jennifer. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before we have to be back on the bus.” She knew that if she didn’t keep reminding him, her brother would read every word of every poster. He wouldn’t notice anything until they turned off the lights.
Jennifer was seventeen, three years older than Mogi, and definitely took after her father. Shorter than her brother by a half-foot, with thick, brown hair cut short, she was strong, athletic, physically graceful, had a keen sense of compassion, and loved being around people. If Mogi was the obsessive analytical, adventurous problem-solver, Jennifer was the cautious, emotionally-centered people-person. He pushed her to do more than she thought she ought to; she pulled him back to what was reasonable.
“OK, OK, I’ll get to it.” He really wanted to read more, but Jennifer had a point. Maybe he could come back before the week was up.
Mogi moved to the next display: “Nuclear Espionage: The Spies Within.”
The sign was in bold red letters against a black background and hung above a wall covered with pictures and captions. A smaller sign introduced it as a new exhibit. It featured stories about spies over the years. There were spies everywhere—every nation had theirs, the United States had ours—all the time. There were even spies working within the Manhattan Project itself, working right alongside the scientists and technicians in Los Alamos and other secret places across the United States. With the end of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union in the ’80s, many details were just being learned about the Soviet spy network in the states. Espionage was a game that every nation played. That was normal business between enemies, and sometimes even friends.
There was a gasp behind him.
“I can’t believe they did that! This is absolutely wrong! They are not going to get away with this!”
A woman behind him had swung around on her heel, dropping a notebook on the floor as she did so. She headed toward the entry desk where a receptionist sat.
It was Dr. Simpson, the head of the Institute’s summer program who had given the orientation talk before lunch. She supervised all the activities at the environmental science camp. She worked for the lab as an environmental scientist and managed several of the lab’s other high-school programs. Overall, she seemed really nice, calm, easy-going, and smart.
She certainly wasn’t calm now.
He watched her as she marched up to the receptionist and bombarded her with questions. “What do you mean putting up something like that? There is no proof! Where’s the museum director? I want to see him right now.”
Everyone was staring at her, trying to act as if they weren’t. Dr. Simpson, or Nancy, as she wanted the students to call her, was ushered off behind a door marked Staff Only, and the crowd watched as the door swung closed. Mogi picked up her notebook. He would give it to her later.
What had made her so angry? He looked at the exhibit about the spies. Whatever it was, it had to be right in front of him—she had been reading the same display.
It was an enlargement of an old photograph, showing what seemed to be a warehouse with a group of men standing around a forklift. A circle was superimposed on a large, metal shelf behind the men. On the shelf were six yellow containers about the size of large suitcases. Only the one in front could be fully seen. It had a large radiation sign on the side.
The text under the photograph read:
Largest Theft of Plutonium in History
In August of 1963, United States Air Force Major Henry Samples and Los Alamos Laboratory materials scientist Christopher Johnson accomplished the daring theft of two hundred pounds of refined plutonium, the largest hijacking of nuclear materials in American history. During a transfer of plutonium from the Rocky Flats manufacturing facility near Denver, Colorado, to Los Alamos, the two men diverted a cargo plane to a secret rendezvous with Russian conspirators high in the Jemez Mountains west of Los Alamos. Under the cover of night, they delivered the plutonium to Russian agents who then smuggled it to the Soviet Union. The two men escaped in the plane and were never seen again. In 1968, in a photo deliberately leaked to the United States government, the Russians revealed that they had, indeed, scored a clear victory of espionage over the American nuclear community. Samples and Johnson were convicted, in their absence, of high treason against the United States.
Two hundred pounds of plutonium. The Fat Man bomb across the room hadn’t used anywhere close to that.
“Mogi!” his sister called, coming up behind him. “We’ve got to go. They’re calling us to the bus. Come on.”
Walking in the direction of the front door, Mogi weaved his way around other exhibits. He weaved right into Phil Agnew.
“Get a move on, dweeb, or we’re going to leave you behind. I guess they let anybody over ten into these conferences. What am I going to have to do to make you understand how to follow orders, huh?”
Mogi turned away as quickly as he could and walked in a different direction. He looked at exhibit titles as he passed by so he'd have something to write on his list. The Human Genome, Waste Handling (that was environmental), Medical Research, Nuclear Power from Lasers (that’s probably one), Fluid Modeling, Electric Cars (that’s another one), Oil Recovery, Air Monitoring and Wildlife Surveys and Radiation Exposure and Paper Recycling and In Ground Vitrification (what?).
Stepping onto the bus, Mogi sat in one of the front seats since the other seats behind were taken. Dr. Simpson came in last and slid into the seat beside him. She was still flushed with emotion.
“Uh, I have your notebook,” he said, handing it to her.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “I’m afraid I was quite an embarrassment.”
“Nah. I don’t think anybody noticed,” he lied. He really wanted to know more, but figured it wasn’t any of his business. On the other hand, if he didn’t ask, he’d never know.
“I was just wondering,” he began in a halting voice, “what you thought of the display about the spies. I thought it was pretty interesting.”
“Well, it’s interesting if you’re not concerned with the truth. I get so irritated with these people. Did you read the part about the stealing of the plutonium? By two men who disappeared with the plane?” she asked.
“Yeah. About two hundred pounds.”
“Well, they didn’t steal anything. Neither one of them could have ever done that. They were good and loyal men. These people have the story all wrong.”
She stared out the window as the bus passed through the main part of town, over a bridge, and then headed toward the mountains.
“Just because they never found the plane doesn’t mean that they defected to Russia. They know the photo in the warehouse is a fake and they still can’t see past their noses to admit that maybe everything else is wrong, too. They won’t even consider that the plutonium wasn’t stolen.”
Did she mean the photo had been doctored or staged? Why would Russia want us to think they had stolen the shipment if they hadn’t?
“But I can’t prove anything well enough to convince anybody,” she said as she turned to him and then turned back to the window. “But I know it wasn’t them.”
She turned to him again. “Christopher Johnson, the scientist from the lab?”
Mogi nodded. Samples and Johnson.
“He was my father.”
Dr. Nancy Simpson became silent and Mogi turned his attention to the bus as it swayed along the winding road. As they lifted out of the flat mesas, the highway grew steeper, narrower, and cut a contour across the sloping sides of the mountains. The forest became more dense. Mogi could see pine trees that were easily a hundred feet tall. Crossing over the pass and coming down into the valley surrounded by the peaks, he looked across several miles of broad, knee-high grass. The preserve had some of the biggest elk herds in the United States, as well as an abundance of deer and bear and mountain lions.
Watching the scenery as it went by, he tried to recall more of the orientation talk, but his mind kept wandering back to the woman beside him.
The biggest theft of plutonium in history and I’m sitting next to the crook’s daughter.
Why did she think everyone was wrong?