“Palomares has changed a lot since 1966,” Felip explained as we stood beside a high wire fence with several Beware Radiation signs on it. “Back then it was a dusty village of a few hundred people who made a living growing tomatoes. Now…” Felip’s voice trailed off, but it was obvious what he meant as he waved his hand toward the glistening Mediterranean. The blue water two kilometers away was just visible between white-painted villas and resort hotels lining the beach.
“It’s the Spanish miracle,” Felip continued, his voice heavy with irony. “In forty years, we have created one of the largest cities in Europe—in a long, thin strip from Gibraltar to France—and most of the residents are not Spanish. Tens of thousands of aged northern Europeans who want to retire in the sun live here year-round, and millions who want to escape for a couple of weeks in the summer visit. It’s probably easier to get fish and chips and English beer here than in Canada.”
“And Chad Everet wants to build a new resort here?” I pointed through the fence at the unpromising-looking scrub.
“He is a man of vision,” Felip said, “and he’s punctual.” I looked to where he was pointing and saw a cloud of dust rising from the dirt track we had followed from the main road.
“This isn’t one of the locations,” Laia said. She had been busy with Felip’s GPS ever since we’d arrived. Her brow was furrowed in concentration. “Are we wrong about the numbers being the bomb locations?”
“No,” Felip said. “None of the bombs fell here. The wind blew some plutonium contamination here from the explosion of number two. Look, I’m going to be tied up with this guy for a couple of hours. If you walk back into town, you pass the places where bombs number one and three fell. The GPS will tell you where. You can’t miss it: the road is Calle las Bombardas—the street of the bombers. There’s a café on the edge of town called Pedro’s. I’ll meet you there in about two hours.”
A sleek silver BMW Z4 pulled up beside Felip’s vehicle. The door opened and Chad stepped out and stretched. “Buenas tardes, señor Aguilar. ¿Cómo estás?” he said in a polished Spanish accent as he held out his hand.
Felip shook Chad’s hand and replied in equally flawless English. “I’m well, thank you. I trust you had no trouble finding us.”
“None at all. Always rely on the good old GPS.” Chad’s gaze flicked over Laia and rested on me. “And I believe I know you,” he said.
“We met on the plane,” I said as we shook hands. His hand was smooth and dry, even in the afternoon heat. It made my hand feel grubby and clammy.
“I remember. Good to meet you again, Steve. And this must be your friend from Barcelona.” He shook hands with Laia.
“My daughter, Laia,” Felip said. “They’re just heading into town to do some looking around while we get on with business.”
“Perfect,” Chad said, flashing his expensive teeth. “You kids have fun.”
“Thanks,” I said as Laia and I turned and headed toward the road.
“What a smooth operator,” Laia said as soon as we were out of earshot.
“He’s the most boring person I’ve ever met,” I said. “And there’s something about him I don’t trust.”
“Yeah, he’s too smooth,” Laia agreed. “Still, if he helps the people of Palomares get all the radioactivity cleaned up, that’s good.”
I nodded. “The area looks pretty depressed.” The low, dry hills around us were crisscrossed by truck and ATV trails. Strange pieces of rusted machinery dotted the landscape, and farther off I could see broken-down walls and chimneys from what I assumed were abandoned factories. It looked like a film set from an end-of-the-world movie.
“More than two thousand years ago, this was one of the richest places in the world. There are hundreds of old mines in the hills around here, and the silver from them made Carthage the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean—until the Romans defeated them and took over the mines, and then they became the most powerful nation.”
“Has there been mining more recently?” I asked, looking at the ruins in the distance.
“Some,” Laia said, “but nothing like in ancient times.”
We walked along the dirt road in silence for a while, just happy to be together. Then something that had been nagging at the back of my mind crystallized. I stopped. “Chad knew my name.”
“You met him before,” Laia pointed out. “You must have told him on the plane.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I barely said anything to him on the plane. He did all the talking. Even then, I didn’t trust him.”
“Maybe Felip told him,” Laia said as we began walking again. “He must have said we’d be here with him for the meeting.”
“I guess,” I said, “although I can’t see why Felip would mention my name. And anyway, don’t you think it’s quite the coincidence that the person who sat beside me on the plane should turn up here for a business meeting with Felip?”
“Coincidences happen. What are you suggesting—that there’s a huge conspiracy around your visit here? That’s even wilder than our interpretation of your grandfather’s code. There’s no conspiracy, and whatever happened all those years ago is forgotten. It’s interesting to try and work it all out, but that’s all.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. What Laia said made sense, but there had to be something else going on. The coincidences were piling up, and the only common link I could see was Grandfather’s coded message.
“This is where the first bomb fell.” We had reached a narrow paved road, and Laia was standing looking at a shallow streambed. “It’s the one that landed intact because its parachute opened in time to slow its fall. So if bomb number five is the plutonium core from one of the four known bombs, then it’s not from this one. The tail section of the B-52 landed up there.” Laia pointed up the small valley. There was nothing to show that anything unusual—especially one of the most serious nuclear accidents ever—had disturbed this unremarkable spot. Only the flickering numbers on the GPS and what we had learned from Felip and a couple of quick Internet searches told us where we were and what had happened here.
“What must it have been like that day?” I wondered out loud as we walked on. “An explosion in the sky, then flaming wreckage, bodies and four nuclear bombs raining from the heavens on this sleepy village. I read on one of the websites that one of the first Americans to arrive found the villagers picking up pieces of the dead crew members and trying to work out which part went with which body.”
We walked in silence, imagining the horror of that January morning. The focus of what we’d read had always been on the four nuclear bombs and the search for them. The human element had often been missed. Seven men—the entire four-man crew of the refueling plane from Morón Air Base and three of the B-52 crew—had died, their bodies horribly mutilated, either in the fiery explosion or the fall from 30,000 feet. Large pieces of flaming wreckage had landed all around the village—miraculously, missing the local school and any houses. In seconds, the lives of everyone in an entire community had changed forever.
It was a horrifying tragedy, but I couldn’t get my personal worries out of my mind. DJ and the others had certainly discovered something about Grandfather that he had managed to keep secret from his close family. Had it been something sinister? I wondered what the cousins were doing and what they had discovered. I made a mental note to text DJ that evening to let him know what we had found out so far. I wished I could talk to him. He was always so rational and sure. Even when he was wrong, he sounded right, and that was comforting. But he wasn’t here. He was chasing his own mysteries in England.
“Do you think Grandfather might have been the saboteur at Morón?” I blurted out.
Laia stopped and stared at me. “You don’t honestly believe that could be possible, do you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’m really confused. Grandfather certainly had a whole secret life, and someone thought he was a traitor.”
“Steve, sometimes you think too much,” Laia said. “Can you see the young man who fought against the Fascists being a traitor?” I shook my head. “Or the old man who put so much thought into giving each of his grandsons the perfect task?” Again I shook my head. “Then those are the things you have to hold in your mind. The grandfather you knew couldn’t be a traitor, so whoever wrote that must be wrong.”
“I guess so,” I said. I loved Laia for being so certain, but it wasn’t that simple. “What do we really know about what the world was like back in 1966? People thought the world was on the brink of destruction and that all they had to look forward to, if they were lucky, was surviving in a nuclear wasteland. Revolution was in the air. What if Grandfather tried to sabotage something at the air base to bring attention to the dangers of the Chrome Dome project and it went horribly wrong?”
“I can’t believe that,” Laia said, her eyes boring into me until I felt distinctly uncomfortable. “Your grandfather would never have done anything that put people’s lives in danger, even for what he thought was a good cause.”
I stopped myself from pointing out that in his journal from 1938, he had talked about possibly shooting an enemy soldier. That had been in a war though. That was different, wasn’t it?
We walked on and found the site where bomb number three had fallen. Again, there was nothing to see at the GPS location—but then, this bomb had exploded, so there hadn’t been much to see even in 1966. “If what we’re calling bomb number five—the plutonium trigger bomb—had been part of this bomb, or of bomb number two,” I said, “and they both exploded when they hit the ground, how could there have been a trigger bomb thrown into the hills?”
Laia looked at the dry ground thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “Everyone assumes that bombs two and three exploded when they landed. That makes sense with bomb number two, because it spread a lot of plutonium over a very large area, but with bomb number three, there was very little contamination.”
“Perhaps the explosion wasn’t as bad.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps bomb number three broke apart in the air. If that happened, then the plutonium core could have gone anywhere.”
I looked up into the peaceful blue sky, trying to imagine bits of the most powerful bombs the world had ever seen flying all over the place. “Maybe we’ll find out when we go to location five tomorrow.”
“I hope so,” Laia said, “but right now, we’re at the edge of town. Pedro’s can’t be far, and I could use a cold drink.” She glanced at her watch. “Felip won’t be here for over an hour; maybe we could go and look for bomb two after our drink.”
“Great idea,” I said. We set off, talking happily about nothing in particular, both of us relieved to spend a few minutes not discussing death and destruction. We were in among the neat whitewashed houses when a black SUV with tinted windows appeared around the corner ahead of us.