Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online

round, about throwing up in the second.
    “Pretty good fighter, your brother.”
    “A good boy.” The old man glared at the son with him.
    Joe passed the pack around again. The Apaches examined the lighter, a Zippo.
Battery C, 200th Coast Artillery
was engraved on one side.
    “Bataan.” The son handed it back.
    The father looked up. “Good weather. Bombers can’t fly and it’s easy tracking in the snow.”
    Joe didn’t see any signs. He was a fair tracker, but he was no Apache.
    “Better you get the horses than no one.”
    Finally the Navajo shivered and lowered his rifle. The four men smoked, contemplating the quiet between the low sky and snow-covered ground. Then the father and son killed their butts and nodded to Joe. The Navajo followed. The three, the Navajo on the outside, movedoff to the north, making a wide arc around the car. Wouldn’t that have been an interesting end to the atom bomb, though—Groves and Oppy gunned down in the snow in return for sheep?
    Joe opened the general’s door. “I don’t think they recognized you, sir. I told them they were trespassing on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range and would have to leave.”
    “Seemed a little touch and go,” Oppy said.
    The Apaches and their friend were already moving out of sight, not so much getting smaller as disappearing between points of snow. The real horizon could be five hundred yards, a thousand, a mile. Oppy emerged from the car, lit his cigarette and Fuchs’, too, with a flourish of relief. Groves stepped onto the snow and tilted his head back to perform a professional sweep of the four directions.
    Oppy spread the map over the hood. “This is where we are. Latitude 33-40-31, longitude 106-28-29.”
    “So where is that?” Groves asked.
    “East are the Oscura Mountains.” Joe pointed. “South, Mockingbird Gap; west, three volcanoes the locals call Trinity; north, Stallion Gate.” Each way was a wall of white.
    Where Joe had pinned the map down with his finger, Fuchs made an X with a soft pencil and drew a perfect freehand circle around it.
    “If this is Ground Zero, the point of detonation, we will desire a distance of ten kilometers, or six miles, to the first control shelters.”
    Groves set a surveying transit in the snow. With the three legs planted firmly, the air bubble sat in the middle of the transit level. Flat ground. Confidence was on the general’s face; he sniffed the air with anticipation. The errant party from Alamogordo was forgotten.
    “Just the way we chose Los Alamos,” he called to Oppy, “the top men on the spot.”
    While Groves sighted through the transit telescope, Joe paced off fifty yards with a tape, flags, stakes. Oppy and Fuchs paced off another direction.
    When Groves waved, Oppy set a red flag at Joe’s feet.
    “Captain Augustino tells me there’s a spy on the Hill,” Joe said.
    “Did he say who?” Oppy looked up with the eyes of an innocent.
    “No,” Joe lied.
    “No names at all?”
    “Let’s say the person was just a security risk.”
    “He’d have to be pulled off the project.”
    “His reputation?”
    “Ruined. No names?”
    “Let’s say I wanted off the Hill. Say I wanted combat.”
    “That’s an Army matter, Joe. The Hill is an Army base, after all. You’d have to go to the head of military administration.”
    “That’s Augustino again.”
    “The captain is a powerful man in his own little realm.”
    “Which is the Hill.”
    “He really didn’t give you any names?”
    “I suppose he’d tell you if he had a name in mind.”
    “True.” Oppy gave Joe a conspiratorial grin. “Remember, the captain is an intelligence officer. It’s his duty to be paranoid.”
    With the next set of flags, Oppy and Fuchs traded off.
    “It must be interesting to be an Indian.” Fuchs followed Joe’s measured steps. “To be free of civilization, to live simply as men and women with nature.”
    “You mean go naked?”
    “No, I mean defy all bourgeois standards of