George Washington's Ghost

“So,” Santa Anna prompted, leaning forward, “did you find these Hellish things in the samples Don Rodrigo recovered from Sonora?”

Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena nodded.

“Yes, in places, in concentrations many thousands of times higher than that which one would expect to find in the environment. Mapping the ‘fallout’, abnormal results were identified at seven sites father than twenty statute miles from the nearest identified test site.”

None of the men spoke for some moments.

“Do we know how big the bombs they tested at the Eye of Diablo were?” Santa Anna posed, running a hand through his hair.

He had looked at Don Rodrigo, who, in turn had glanced, tight-lipped to the only physicist in the room.

The Professor of Nuclear Science at the University of Cuernavaca pondered this, his face a mask of concentration as his brain clicked methodically through the relevant algorithms and coefficients.

“I cannot be precise, even though Don Rodrigo was most particular in his surveying of the test sights. However, other scientists in England and Berlin, and I believe at the Academy in Paris, have published papers on the kind of explosive yields predicted by a minimum critical mass of very pure enriched U235. All their calculations are expressed in thousands of tons – or kilotons – of standard high explosive equivalence. From this, and the dimensions of the blast circles and craters, I estimate a range of explosions in the low tens, to the high thirties of kilotons…”

“Ten to thirty thousand tons of high explosive?” Santa Anna objected, as if he wished it was not so.

“Yes, General. Not of dynamite or gunpowder, but something like the most potent military grade substances, which would be between three and four times as potent as old-fashioned dynamite. Out of idle curiosity I parsed the numbers for the explosion, probably caused by a meteorite from outer space, as posited by my learned colleague, Don Rodrigo, which created the Eye of the Devil crater which, as I am sure you know is three-quarters of a mile wide and about five hundred feet deep even now after thousands of years of erosion and back-filling with wind-blown sand…”

A scowl was forming on the face of the Chief of Staff of the Mexican Army.

The physicist smiled apologetically.

“The number I came up with was, plus or minus a megaton – that is a million short English tons – that the ultra-high-speed impact caused an explosion equivalent to about ten million tons of the most powerful non-atomic high explosive known to science.”

The others were staring at him.

Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena did not notice.

“Anybody looking at the fireball from thirty miles away would have been blinded for life. Everybody within twenty miles of the impact would probably have been killed or very seriously injured. Had the debris cloud thrown fifty to sixty miles into the atmosphere by the meteoritic impact been radioactive everybody for about a thousand miles downwind would have been heavily contaminated…”

“That’s very interesting, Professor,” the President of the Republic said quietly.

“Yes, isn’t it,” Arturo agreed, lost in his thesis. “Do you remember I mentioned about Plutonium earlier? Well, my preliminary work strongly supports the hypothesis that at least one of the tests in northern Sonora was of a bomb utilising isotopic material with the properties of P239.”

Suddenly, the three other men in the room knew things were going to get worse and really did not want to hear about it, not then, not until they had had a stiff drink and an opportunity to get their mind around what they had already learned that afternoon.

The physicist ploughed on.

“If one built a Plutonium bomb inside a Uranium bomb the explosion of the outer, Uranium bomb might, theoretically you understand, implode the Plutonium core of such a weapon and lead to a fusion chain reaction like that which powers the Sun. In that event, it is conceivable that one might construct a bomb with an explosive potential equivalence of much more than just ten megatons!”

Chapter 27

Friday 5th May

Viano do Castelo, Portugal

Yesterday, when Melody had finally got back to the old hotel overlooking the Atlantic after a lonely, day-long journey by road and rail from Lisbon, she had been in a very odd mood.