Fallout Stallion Gate

By R.Z. Sheppard

The building and testing of the first atom bomb is one of the century's great stories. So it takes a bit of nerve to turn this modern Promethean tale into a popular thriller, especially if the hero is a Pueblo Indian Army sergeant who is also a prizefighter, jazz pianist and catnip to the ladies.

Martin Cruz Smith is no stranger to risky fusions. He is the author of Gorky Park, a story of Communists and furriers. Scientists and Indians seem just as incongruous, even though the two groups actually did share the stage at a critical moment in history. Smith, who is half Pueblo Indian, has a good grip on the Southwest, a region that drew many artists and intellectuals decades before J. Robert Oppenheimer suggested Los Alamos, N. Mex., as an ideal research and engineering site for the Manhattan Project. Ground zero on July 16, 1945, was more than 150 miles south of Los Alamos at a spot designated Trinity. Hundreds of years earlier, Spanish explorers named the place Jornada del Muerto, Dead Man's Journey.

Sergeant Joe Pena knows the way, and because of that he has been released from Leavenworth, where he was imprisoned for sleeping with an officer's wife. His assignment is to be Oppenheimer's driver and liaison with the native American population. As a well-traveled boxer and musician, Pena straddles two cultures. Oppenheimer calls him a "bebop Indian," though this is not an adequate description. But then, Los Alamos is a breeding ground of misapprehensions. Captain Augustino, the project security officer, is convinced that "Oppy" is passing information to the Soviets, while Klaus Fuchs, a real spy, fails to arouse the captain's suspicion. Anna Weiss, a mathematician who has escaped the Holocaust, gives the impression that she is frigid and unflappable. In fact, she is Pena's playmate and leads a rich, neurotic secret life.

Pena, Augustino, Weiss and most of the other major characters in the novel are purely fictional. Oppenheimer, Fuchs, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves and other walk-ons bear the names of actual people. The author is conspicuously selective about players who are not wholly owned subsidiaries of his imagination. For example, there is a part for Harry Gold, a confessed spy and Government witness in the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But missing from the book is David Greenglass, Ethel's brother and an Army machinist on the Manhattan Project who later testified that he had provided Gold and the Rosenbergs with atomic secrets.

Strictly speaking, there are no sins of omission in fiction. A novelist can leave out whatever he wishes. But having dealt with Los Alamos espionage, Smith risks breaking his illusion of authenticity by neglecting key figures. He is far more effective with Pena, racked between his heritage and his ambitions. The sergeant is a winning creation, even though he stretches belief by conducting a lot of personal business as a noncom assigned to a supersecret project: trysting with Fraulein Weiss, trying to buy a nightclub, getting into shape for a high-stakes boxing match, taking care of Indian affairs and sidetracking Captain Augustino's plot to make Oppenheimer look like a Soviet spy.

Obviously Stallion's Gate is not meant to be taken too literally. There is a touch of the folk hero about Pena as he moves across the New Mexican landscape. A conscious stylist, Smith relies strongly on emotional echoes and calibrated suspense. He also seems keenly aware of his story's film potential. No producer will be confused by the tense hunting scene, the Indian dance that mocks the white man's efforts to saddle atomic energy, the Rocky-like prizefight that pits Pena against a younger opponent, an eerie trip with a radioactive cargo, and a climactic battle to the death next to the Bomb in the last minutes before the blast. Smith is also capable of subtler effects. His spare prose shapes images that contain haunting affinities: wild horses and Army jeeps; rattlesnakes and coils of electrical cable; the lustrous surfaces of ceremonial pottery and the polished plutonium core of the atom bomb.

Smith is less successful when he contemplates the meaning of it all. "We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history," says one character, benefiting from the hindsight of fiction. Records of the actual event contain revealing statements that defy the imagination. Said a general to the scientist who had called the century's most resonant countdown: "What a wonderful thing that you could count backward at a time like this!"