The Longest Night (2 page)

A
day later, after two and a half weeks on the road, Paul and Nat and their daughters made it to Idaho Falls, where they'd been assigned to a small yellow house in a neighborhood near downtown. There was no base housing, so military personnel lived scattered among civilians. Paul began reactor training the day after they arrived, while Nat stayed behind in the empty house with the girls bouncing off the walls. He felt bad about leaving her with so much work, though slightly relieved to get out of the house, even if starting the new job made him nervous.

It took another week for their boxes to arrive, all their belongings jumbled into weird combinations. Each day when Paul got home from work, it seemed that another item or two had been put in its proper place—towels appearing in a cabinet that had, when he'd left that morning, been bare, the blender suddenly standing on the countertop—but this was moving at a slower pace than he'd expected. He tried to be patient. He knew Nat was busy with the girls.

He had three weeks of in-class training and observation, then his first week of work on the reactor itself. The CR-1 was as small and simple as everyone said, a reactor that could be run by just three enlisted men. They worked in shifts, and Paul's first shift had been the overnight with two other guys: a lead man, Franks, and a young enlisted named Webb, who was as new as Paul was. They sweated on a hot reactor floor that churned and groaned with steam, then took breaks outside in a world that felt quieter than the dawn of time. The desert at night looked endless in every direction, pitch-black at ground level with stars overhead, suspended in swaths of nebulous cream.

Now, having finished his training and his first week on the reactor, Paul stepped out into the cool morning air, breathing in the tang of sagebrush and the steamy bitterness of coffee in its paper cup. The modest promise of the weekend sat before him, two days without a lick of work. He liked thinking about it even as the sweat on his forehead began to dry from the last shift. He wedged an unlit cigarette between his lips, patted his pocket for his Zippo. Any minute now the blue government bus would pick him up for the fifty-mile ride back into town, but he couldn't yet see it on the horizon. Behind him, the CR-1 pumped clouds into the quiet sky, living its vigorous, inanimate life; ahead of him, stretched somewhere across nine hundred square miles of desert, were the thirty or so other reactors at the testing station. He saw a glint of light off a couple of them, but had never visited and did not know their crewmen. All of them were bigger than his own reactor, busier, more prestigious.

The CR-1 was the prototype for compact, portable units the army was building in the Arctic Circle, run by just two or three men. Its appearance was underwhelming: It looked like a silo. It was three stories tall, with smooth, windowless, shiny steel walls, and if it hadn't been built on testing station land, no one would have thought a nuclear reactor was housed inside. This was, from a strategic standpoint, a plus: The reactors modeled on its design would be small, cheap, easy-to-build units that could be assembled on-the-spot across the Arctic, where American soldiers would wait, able to hit pay dirt pretty much anywhere in Russia if the Soviets did anything stupid.

“Does it make you feel bad?” Nat had asked on the drive to Idaho, in a moment of reflection. “All those missiles pointed at the Russians, and none of them has ever done anything to us?”

The question had silenced him for a moment. It was just like Nat to think about the other side: sweet, and also impractical. He could still see her concerned brown eyes, the rumple in her brow when she'd asked. Nat, who'd almost never left San Diego, a place so beautiful and floral that it hardly seemed real; Nat, whose skin was permanently divided into tan and white parts from all the teenage hours she'd spent on the beach, who was smart and funny but as apolitical as a wedding or a waterfall: The thought of their American missiles must have saddened her, or she wouldn't have put the question to Paul. This rankled him a bit because it felt like a judgment, but it also filled him with a contradictory little swish of love for her when the memory came back to him later at work.

He rarely thought about
the Soviets
. There was plenty of rhetoric going around about them: tough talk, blustery threats. He figured most Russians were probably fine and it was their government that caused problems. Starving its own people, letting the economy go to hell. It wasn't his job to analyze such things. His job was simply to do his job: to walk onto a reactor floor and keep the machine running, keep the feedwater valves pumping and the rod drive seal from leaking and the pressure from getting too high or too low.

This testing station land, they'd learned in reactor school, had once been populated by Indians, then by the Mormons who built Idaho Falls, and was later used as the Minidoka internment camp for Japanese Americans during the war. After that it spent several years as an artillery proving ground for all branches of the military, with explosives of every kind blasted across the scrub. Sometimes the operators caught Mormon kids sneaking over the chain-link fence on a dare, hunting for the six-inch slugs left from weapons trials.

Paul alternated between the steaming welcome of his coffee and the brisk lung burn of the cigarette, thought of Nat home without him, sleeping on the floor because they still didn't have a damn bed. The cross-country move and the start of his new job hadn't made for an easy time. He felt they'd just performed some marathon stunt, like climbing Mount Everest together, only to roll down the other side and land in a dusty pile of their own belongings. His new career as a nuclear operator, after eight often dull and frustrating years in petroleum supply, was supposed to offer all manner of benefits: more prestige, pay bonuses, endless opportunities. So far most of these had not materialized, and he certainly didn't feel that he and Nat were growing closer. He had no idea if his great personal gamble would work, and, finally in Idaho with reactor school behind him and his young family in tow, no going back, did the gravity of what he'd risked wash over him.

D
UST ON THE HORIZON
caught Paul's eye, but it wasn't the slow plume the government bus always made; it was a lower, faster-traveling cloud, and as it got closer he saw it was pulled by a flashy cream-colored car. The car was the only eye-catching thing on the whole barren desert. It looked almost like a mirage the way it gleamed, speeding along the flat highway.

Behind Paul the door to the reactor building opened and his shift leader, Specialist Franks, stepped out. He stood beside Paul and lit his own cigarette, watching the approaching car from beneath heavy eyebrows.

“Who's that?” Paul asked, pointing with his cigarette.

Franks looked surprised. “You haven't met Master Sergeant Richards? He's the day-shift supervisor.”

“I've only worked the night shift,” Paul said. The car grew louder now as it came closer, its engine a steady, throaty rumble.
This
was their Master Sergeant, this man in the unexpectedly beautiful car? Paul had been told that Richards, who supervised the day shift, worked next door to them in the Admin building but spent most of his time drinking in his office. Supervisors were notorious for boozing their days away on remote assignments like the CR-1; to be stuck in a leadership position on this tour was considered something of a punishment.

But the car was a showstopper, a pearly Cadillac Coupe de Ville, '57 or '58. It pulled up in front of the chain-link gate, front-loaded and pristine as a palomino. Didn't seem like Richards was feeling
too
sorry for himself.

Paul said, “I thought we were all supposed to ride the bus.”

“We are,” said Franks. “But that does not deter Sergeant Richards from driving his own car when he damn well pleases. He's not shy about it, either, as you can see.”

“No kidding.”

Franks strode over to let the car in the gate. Paul tried not to betray too much curiosity as Richards parked and stepped out, waggling his khaki cap down onto his head. He had assertive blue eyes and early graying hair that gave him an air of authority beyond his rank.

When Richards reached them, Paul and Franks stood a little straighter, echoing one after the other, “Good morning, Master Sergeant,” “Master Sergeant.”

“ 'Morning,” Richards said, looking up at the steam that pumped from the reactor into the chilly morning air. “How was the night, fellows? Will I go in there and find a logbook that agrees with me?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Franks.

“Glad to hear it. Where's the young guy?”

“Webb? Latrine, I guess.”

As if on cue, the door opened and Specialist Webb, the last of their three-man crew, flew out. He was a tall, jointy, young-looking fellow with a missing tooth on one side that hollowed his cheek in. He spotted Richards and pulled up crisply. “Good morning, Master Sergeant.”

“That john on fire, son? You came out of there like a bat out of hell.”

“No, Sergeant. It wasn't on fire, Sergeant. I thought I'd missed the bus.”

Richards chuckled. “Well, don't get your knickers in a twist about it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Say, Collier,” Richards said with a smirk, “why don't you come inside with me? We've never had our little welcome-aboard chat.”

Paul hesitated. There was the matter of the bus: He could see it on the horizon now, a blue dot wending its way toward them. It was eight
A.M.
and another one wouldn't be by until the end of the next shift, eight hours away. Of course the master sergeant knew this. But it was their first meeting, and Paul didn't think he had much choice other than to say “Yes, Sergeant” and follow Richards into the administration building.

The Admin building seemed an even lonelier place to work than the reactor itself; it was a long, low wooden portable left over from WWII, with tall, narrow windows. Inside, a hallway divided two rows of thin-walled offices, five on each side. Richards's rank and name had been typed onto a small manila square and tacked to a door on the right, which he pushed open to reveal a modest desk piled with endless disheveled papers. Behind the desk was a file cabinet and a dusty American flag that sagged slightly along the back wall. Richards stepped behind the desk and sat down on a small, creaky black folding chair. He linked his fingers behind his head and leaned back a little, watching Paul, who settled into an identical chair opposite.

“So, we finally get a chance to talk,” Richards said, as if he'd been pursuing Paul unsuccessfully for days. “What do you think of this place? The CR-1, is it like you expected?”

“Just about,” Paul said. “Things are going fine. Thank you for asking.”

“Good. And how's your family? Your wife like it here?”

“She seems to.”

“Excellent. You've got to keep your wife happy, you know.”

Paul nodded uncertainly. On Richards's desk he spotted a framed photo of an elegant red-haired woman holding a child. With the woman's curled hair, pearl earrings, and soft, cultivated smile it could have been a picture cut from a magazine, but the toddler on her lap wore the unfocused expression and irregular eyebrows of a normal, non-movie-star child. “Your family?” Paul asked, pointing.

Richards flashed his self-regarding, deep-dimpled smile. “So I'm told.”

“It's a nice photo.”

“Thank you.” The sergeant stretched in his chair. “So, do you go home and brag to your wife that you work on the smallest reactor the army's got?”

“I don't really mind it,” Paul said, unsure why his wife, whom Richards had never met, kept coming up. The CR-1's size didn't bother him. He'd rather work in a quiet building than in one of the big-name operations on-site, with all the lab men and scientists around, asking the operators for coffee and treating them like janitors.