Bones of Betrayal
BY Jefferson Bass
To Oak Ridge,
and to the men and women
of the Manhattan Project,
humanity’s most daring and desperate endeavor
PART ONE
There will be a city on Black Oak Ridge…. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion, and the earth will shake. Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. I’ve seen it. It’s coming.
—Tennessee backwoods preacher
John Hendrix, circa 1900
CHAPTER 1
THE COLORFUL TENTS CROWDING THE CLEARING WHERE I stood wouldn’t have looked out of place at a carnival or Renaissance fair. It would be an interesting irony: a Renaissance fair—a “rebirth” fair—here at the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, the one place in the world that revolves around the study of the dead and how they decay.
The tents—white, red, green, yellow, blue—jostled for space at the Anthropology Research Facility. Decades earlier, an FBI agent had dubbed the UT facility “the Body Farm” after seeing the corpses scattered throughout the three wooded acres. The nickname had stuck, and now it was even inspiring a spin-off nickname: a former UT graduate student was now setting up a similar research facility in San Marcos, Texas. Even before her first research cadaver hit the ground, the Texas facility was being called “the Body Ranch.”
Several of the tents huddled together were supported by inflatable frames, the rest by spidery arcs of geometric tubing—Quonset huts, twenty-first-century style. Normally there were no tents here; normally the brightest splash of color, apart from the grass and the leaves on the trees, was a large blue tarp draped over our corrugated-metal equipment shed and its small, fenced-in concrete pad. The tents—whose festive colors belied the barren winter landscape and bitter cold of the day—had been erected just twenty-four hours earlier, and twenty-four hours from now they would be gone again. Despite the carnival look, the tents were a stage for the acting out of a nightmare scenario, one of the darkest events imaginable: an act of nuclear terrorism.
A nude male body lay faceup on a gurney within the largest of the tents, his puckered skin gone gray and moldy from three weeks in the cooler at the morgue at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, visible just above the Body Farm’s wooden fence and barren treeline. Fourteen other bodies—selected and stored over the preceding month—were locked in a semi-tractor-trailer parked just outside the fence. The fifteen bodies were stand-ins for what could be hundreds or thousands or even—God forbid—tens of thousands of victims if nuclear terrorists managed to inflict wholesale death in a U.S. city somewhere, someday.
Five people surrounded the gurney. Their faces and even their genders were masked by goggles, respirators, and baggy biohazard suits whose white Tyvek sleeves and legs were sealed with duct tape to black rubber gloves and boots. One of the white-garbed figures held a boxy beige instrument in one hand, and in the other, a metal wand that was connected to the box. As the wand swept a few inches above the head, then the chest and abdomen, and then each arm, the box emitted occasional clicks. As the wand neared the left knee, though, the clicks became rapid, then merged into a continuous buzz. Having spent my childhood shivering through the Cold War—practicing “duck and cover” during civil defense drills, as if my wooden school desk could shield me from a Soviet hydrogen bomb—I was well acquainted with the urgent clicking of a Geiger counter.