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PART I OF A TRILOGY

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Walter Cates had owned his new Rambler for twelve days before his wife discovered its principal design defect.

It held too much.

That was not how Walter saw it. Walter regarded the cargo capacity of a 1961 Rambler Classic Super Cross Country as one of the automobile’s stronger arguments for continued American leadership of the free world. The rear seat folded. The rear window rolled down. There was a roof rack for whatever could not be persuaded inside. American Motors had apparently designed the thing around the proposition that a family should be able to leave home without first deciding which possessions it loved least.

Martha Cates saw matters differently. She believed that any visible empty space inside a station wagon represented unfinished packing.

By seven-thirty on the morning of January 19, the Sonata Blue and Frost White Rambler sat in the driveway of their Fort Stockton home with its tailgate down while Walter attempted to solve a three-dimensional puzzle involving four suitcases, a Thermos, two blankets, a toolbox, Martha’s sewing bag, a grocery sack of sandwiches, another sack containing things nobody remembered packing, Nancy’s pillow, Tommy’s collection of comic books and a coconut cake Martha had made for her sister Ruth.

Walter stepped backward and surveyed his work.

“Full.”

Martha appeared behind him holding the cake.

“It is not.”

“I can’t see out the back.”

“You have two mirrors.”

“That isn’t why they put glass back there.”

Martha handed him the cake.

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Walter looked at the cake. Then he looked into the Rambler. Then he looked at Martha, who had been his wife for seventeen years and consequently had the tactical advantage of knowing precisely how long she could remain silent before he surrendered.

Walter moved the toolbox.

The cake went in.

Their twelve-year-old son Tommy and nine-year-old daughter Nancy were already established on the folding rear bench, where an international boundary had been negotiated along the upholstery seam. Tommy’s territory extended from the left door to the middle stitching. Nancy controlled everything east of there. Both nations had already accused the other of aggression.

Walter closed the tailgate, walked around the car once and allowed himself a final moment of satisfaction.

He had spent six months shopping for that Rambler. Ford had been too big. Chevrolet had been too ordinary. Plymouth looked, in Walter’s opinion, as though the styling department had been given a deadline after somebody had already started drinking. The Rambler was sensible, economical and just unconventional enough to make Walter feel he had discovered something other men had overlooked.

The Classic Super Cross Country was finished in Sonata Blue with a Frost White roof, blue-painted fifteen-inch steel wheels, chrome hubcaps and wide whitewalls. It had dual side mirrors, chrome bumpers with overriders, a roof rack and small fins rising from the rear quarter panels, proof that even American Motors understood there was only so much dignity the public would tolerate in 1961.

Inside, everything seemed blue. The split front bench had a headrest on Martha’s side, an innovation Walter had demonstrated to at least six neighbors whether they had expressed interest or not. The two-spoke steering wheel framed a 120-mph speedometer flanked by fuel and temperature gauges. The Weather Eye kept the cabin warm.

The AM radio kept the cabin mostly quiet.

The selling dealer had turned the knobs, checked the antenna, turned the knobs again and finally announced that reception in West Texas could sometimes be “temperamental.”

Walter believed the radio was defective.

Martha believed the dealer was.

Beneath the hood sat 195.6 cubic inches of American Motors inline-six, painted blue to match the body and supplied by a single-barrel carburetor. It sent its modest ambitions to the rear wheels through a column-shifted three-speed manual transmission with overdrive.

Walter particularly liked the overdrive.

Martha had heard about the overdrive.

Several times.

At eight-fourteen, Walter backed the Rambler into the street, selected first gear and pointed its chrome grille toward North Carolina.

Four days and roughly seventeen hundred miles separated Fort Stockton from Ruth and Earl Sutton’s house near Goldsboro.

The Cates family intended to enjoy every one of them.

They had no idea that five days later they would be grateful simply to be alive.

The trip east became everything Walter had imagined when he signed the papers on the Rambler.

It was not fast. A 195.6-cubic-inch six attached to a station wagon full of luggage, children and coconut cake had no particular interest in rearranging the known laws of acceleration. Walter did not care. He shifted through first, second and third with the deliberate satisfaction of a man operating something mechanical rather than merely requesting that machinery do something on his behalf.

Once they were rolling comfortably, he engaged the overdrive.

He glanced at Martha.

She continued looking through the windshield.

“Feel that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the overdrive.”

“I know.”

“Engine’s turning slower now.”

“You explained that yesterday.”

“I was just pointing it out.”

“You pointed it out in Odessa.”

Walter decided the children might appreciate the information more.

They did not.

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Still, the Rambler made a fine traveling companion. Its four-wheel drum brakes stopped it when asked, the Weather Eye kept January outside where it belonged, and the wide whitewalls soaked up enough highway irregularities that Nancy could sleep against the door without acquiring a concussion.

Texas became Louisiana. Louisiana became Mississippi.

The family stopped at service stations where uniformed attendants filled the tank, checked the oil and washed the windshield while Walter stretched his legs. Occasionally an attendant raised the hood, which invariably brought Walter around from the other side of the car.

“New Rambler?”

“Twelve days.”

“Six?”

“One ninety-five point six.”

The attendant would nod.

Walter would nod.

Two American men had exchanged all information necessary to establish diplomatic relations.

At night they stayed in roadside motels where Tommy and Nancy immediately disputed ownership of whichever bed the other had chosen. In restaurants they ate hamburgers, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and pie. Walter kept a small notebook in the glove compartment in which he recorded every gasoline purchase and calculated mileage with the seriousness of a physicist measuring atomic decay.

Martha teased him about it.

Walter explained that this was how a man knew whether he had made a sound automotive investment.

Martha said she had married hers.

Walter suspected this was not entirely complimentary.

The useless radio occasionally produced a song for thirty seconds before dissolving into static. At night it sometimes found distant stations, voices drifting into the Rambler from cities they could not see. A preacher appeared somewhere in Louisiana and stayed with them for almost forty miles despite Walter’s attempts to find music.

“He must have a powerful transmitter,” Walter said.

“Maybe the Lord has overdrive.”

Walter looked at her.

Martha smiled through the windshield.

The children laughed.

That was the trip east.

Everything was funny because nothing had happened yet.

America itself seemed to share the mood.

John F. Kennedy had just been elected president. He was forty-three years old, younger than Walter thought a president ought to be, and had spoken at his inauguration about a new generation assuming responsibility for the country.

The country certainly felt new.

New highways were spreading across it. New subdivisions stood where fields had been. Television antennas rose above rooftops. Jet aircraft crossed the sky. Rockets were being tested. Automobiles arrived every autumn with more glass, more chrome and increasingly improbable claims about the future.

There was another future overhead, though, and occasionally Tommy spotted it first.

“B-52!”

Walter would lean toward the windshield and look up.

Sometimes there was only a contrail. Once, crossing Mississippi, Walter saw the swept-wing shape clearly enough to identify the bomber himself.

Tommy knew the numbers. Boys did.

Eight engines. More than 160 feet long. Nearly a 185-foot wingspan. Almost half a million pounds fully loaded. Designed to fly enormous distances carrying enormous bombs.

To Tommy, it was magnificent.

To Walter, it was reassuring.

The Russians had nuclear weapons. America had nuclear weapons. The Russians had bombers. America had B-52s. Somewhere within that arithmetic, Americans had been told, lay safety.

It was the strange bargain of the age. Schoolchildren practiced ducking beneath desks in case atomic bombs began falling on American cities while their parents took comfort in knowing American bombers were prepared to return the favor.

Nobody spent much time examining the contradiction.

They were too busy living.

Walter Cates had a new Rambler.

His family was going to North Carolina.

And the coconut cake was still intact.

They reached Ruth and Earl Sutton’s house near Faro on Sunday, January 22.

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Ruth was outside before Walter had completely stopped the car. Martha opened her door and the two women met halfway across the yard, hugging, laughing and talking simultaneously with the astonishing efficiency of sisters who had not seen each other in nearly four years.

Earl came around from behind the house wiping his hands on his trousers.

He hugged Martha.

He shook Walter’s hand.

Then he saw the Rambler.

“Well, look at that.”

Walter smiled.

There are compliments a man appreciates because of what is said, and others he appreciates because of where the other man is looking when he says them.

Within five minutes the hood was open.

Walter showed Earl the blue inline-six. Earl admired the engine compartment. Walter explained the single-barrel carburetor and three-speed transmission. Earl sat behind the wheel and looked through it at the speedometer.

“Hundred and twenty?”

“That’s what it says.”

“You had it there?”

“Not unless somebody pushes me out of an airplane.”

They laughed.

Later the luggage came out. Ruth admired the Rambler’s roll-down rear window. Martha demonstrated the folding seat. Earl inspected the roof rack.

The coconut cake had survived Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and most of North Carolina without becoming a coconut casserole.

This was regarded as a family achievement.

The Sutton house stood along a rural road amid fields, gum trees and tall pines not far from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Aircraft were simply part of the landscape. Ruth hardly noticed them. Earl occasionally identified one by sound.

Tommy noticed every one.

Whenever jet engines rolled across the sky, he ran outside.

“You’re going to wear that door out,” Martha told him.

“They’ve got B-52s here.”

“They had B-52s in Texas.”

“Not this close.”

He was right.

The bombers seemed impossibly large when they were low enough to see clearly. Their eight engines announced them long before the aircraft crossed overhead, and their swept wings seemed too thin to carry something so enormous.

Earl told Tommy that Strategic Air Command operated from Seymour Johnson. Bombers flew missions at all hours.

“Get used to them,” he said.

Tommy could not imagine getting used to B-52s.

Two nights later, he learned there were worse possibilities.

At 10:56 on the morning of January 23, a B-52G lifted from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.

The Cates family did not see it depart.

Walter and Earl were in Goldsboro looking through a hardware store. Martha and Ruth were shopping. Tommy and Nancy had discovered that traveling seventeen hundred miles merely allowed parents to drag children through unfamiliar stores.

The bomber belonged to Readiness Crew R-10 of the 4241st Strategic Wing. Eight men were aboard for what was supposed to be a twenty-five-hour qualification mission, a long flight over the Atlantic intended to demonstrate their ability to perform the airborne-alert missions becoming central to America’s nuclear strategy.

The principle was simple enough to terrify anyone who examined it closely.

If Soviet missiles destroyed American airfields in a surprise attack, bombers already airborne could still retaliate. Strategic Air Command therefore intended to keep nuclear-armed B-52s continuously in the sky. Those airborne-alert missions would evolve into what became known as Chrome Dome.

The B-52 leaving Seymour Johnson carried two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear bombs.

Walter Cates spent that afternoon buying a screwdriver.

Had somebody explained precisely what was flying above his sister-in-law’s house, he might have skipped the screwdriver.

Nobody did.

The family returned to Faro before dark. Ruth cooked pork chops. Nancy complained about green beans. Tommy told Earl he had seen another B-52.

After supper Walter and Earl stood beside the Rambler while Earl smoked a cigarette. They discussed Kennedy, automobiles, taxes and whether Earl ought to buy a station wagon.

Walter rubbed a spot from the Rambler’s hood with his handkerchief.

Above them, somewhere beyond sight, Readiness Crew R-10 was discovering that its bomber was losing fuel.

A lot of fuel.

The B-52 was directed back toward Seymour Johnson. As the problem worsened, the aircraft became increasingly difficult to control. The crew struggled with a machine carrying fuel for eight jet engines and something far more consequential through the darkness above North Carolina.

Shortly before midnight, Walter and Martha went to bed.

The children were already asleep.

The Sutton house became quiet.

And above Faro, the bomber began coming apart.

Tommy woke because his bedroom wall turned orange.

For several seconds he remained beneath the blankets, trying to understand why morning had arrived on the wrong side of the house.

Then came the sound.

The windows rattled. Something struck a roof or tree nearby. Nancy woke and called his name from the other bed.

Another concussion rolled through the house.

Walter appeared in the doorway wearing trousers and an undershirt.

“Everybody up.”

Martha was behind him fastening her robe.

“What happened?” Tommy asked.

Walter looked toward the window.

“I don’t know.”

That frightened Tommy more than the explosion.

Fathers knew.

That was part of the arrangement.

They knew why the car made a noise. They knew which road to take. They knew whether a storm was dangerous and what to do when a fuse blew. Walter Cates saying I don’t know meant something had happened beyond the boundaries of the ordinary world.

They went outside.

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The sky beyond the trees was burning.

Flames climbed higher than the pines, turning the winter landscape orange and black. The smell of fuel reached them. Somewhere in the darkness, smaller fires burned where pieces of the aircraft had fallen.

“My God,” Earl said.

Nobody needed to ask what had crashed.

They knew the sound of B-52s.

Now they knew the sound one made when it stopped being an airplane.

Before long helicopters were overhead. Searchlights moved across fields. Military vehicles appeared on rural roads. Men with flashlights began knocking on doors and ordering residents away from the area.

Walter did not pack the Rambler.

He loaded it.

There was a difference.

The same suitcases he had arranged so carefully in Fort Stockton were thrown through the tailgate. Blankets followed. Shoes. Coats. Martha’s sewing bag. Nancy climbed into the rear seat holding one shoe while Martha searched for the other.

Walter started the engine.

The little six came alive immediately.

Twelve days earlier he had listened carefully for every tick and vibration because the Rambler was new.

That night he heard nothing except aircraft, voices and the pounding of his own heart.

He selected first and pulled into the road.

Behind them, fire illuminated the trees.

The children turned to look through the rear window.

“Face forward,” Martha said.

They did.

Walter shifted into second, then third. The Rambler carried them away from the Sutton house through a darkness filled with emergency vehicles and military personnel.

Nobody mentioned the overdrive.

Morning made things worse.

Darkness had allowed imagination to limit the disaster to whatever each person could picture. Daylight supplied facts.

A B-52 had broken apart and crashed near Faro. Wreckage was scattered across fields and woods. Sections of aircraft hung from trees. Fuel had burned. Members of the crew had been killed.

Then the rumors began.

The bomber had been carrying something.

Bombs.

Not ordinary bombs.

Nuclear bombs.

At first Walter did not believe it. The idea seemed too absurd. Nuclear weapons belonged in photographs of Pacific test islands and newspaper stories about Russians. They belonged beneath bombers flying toward places whose names Americans had trouble pronouncing.

They did not belong in tobacco fields beside family houses in North Carolina.

But military activity around the crash site told its own story. Areas were sealed. Specialized teams arrived. Questions received careful answers or none at all.

One weapon had descended beneath a parachute and landed among trees close to homes along Big Daddy’s Road.

The other had not.

It had struck a tobacco field at tremendous speed and buried itself in the earth.

Walter stood beside the Rambler when Earl brought him the latest word. Martha and Ruth were inside. Tommy was close enough to hear.

“Two of them?” Walter asked.

Earl nodded.

Walter looked toward the road, then beyond it toward the trees.

“Atomic bombs?”

“Hydrogen.”

Neither man spoke for several seconds.

Walter knew enough about that word.

Everybody did.

Tommy looked toward the sky where, only two days earlier, he had searched eagerly for B-52s.

Walter put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the house.

Behind them sat the Sonata Blue Rambler, road dust still clinging to its white roof, packed and ready if they were told to leave again.

Walter had driven seventeen hundred miles to show his children another part of America.

Instead, America had shown them something.

Two hydrogen bombs had fallen out of the sky.

And one of them had landed practically next door.

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