Helmsworth paused again.
Then he nodded. He hitched his chair in and sat forward. He said, “I’ll tell you what happened to me, and then I’ll tell you what else was going on. This was Europe in the early 1950s. We knew the battle plan. The Red Army would advance through the Fulda Gap in strength and depth. Our first job was to stop their spearhead and then prevent reinforcement. Which we planned to do by targeting roads and bridges behind their lines. To halt their incoming armor. Maybe also power plants and other large items of infrastructure. To degrade their capability. Except the Air Force was unreliable. Back then there were no smart bombs. A bridge is a very small target. We needed certainty. We raised a couple of engineer companies. They were regular combat paratroops trained in demolition. The idea was they would jump with an explosive charge, and hike or if necessary fight from the landing zone to the target, and affix the charge with great precision, to the bridge support or the power plant wall, or whatever it may be. That was the plan. Back then a paratrooper with an explosive charge on his back was the smartest bomb we had.”
“Good work,” Reacher said.
“Not really. What’s the maximum they could carry on their backs?”
“From an LZ to a target? A hundred pounds, maybe.”
“Which was the problem. A hundred pounds of TNT doesn’t put a scratch on a bridge support. It’s a firecracker. And a power plant is even bigger. So we put the human smart bomb technique on the back burner for the time being. Pending improvements to portable ordnance. Which were generally slow back then. The glamour was all at the other end of the scale. Which was the stuff I didn’t know at the time. Los Alamos was busier than ever. They were working on the hydrogen bomb. They tested it just before I graduated West Point. On Bikini Atoll, in March of 1954. It was a fifteen megaton explosion. By far the most powerful in all of recorded history. It was five times more powerful than all the bombs dropped on Germany and Japan in World War Two put together, including the atom bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Probably more powerful than all the ordnance ever exploded in the whole world before. All in one split second. It was a big-ass explosion, people. So big no one ever seriously thought about going bigger. They thought the atmosphere would catch on fire. Not that I knew any of that stuff at the time.”
Reacher said, “When did you find out?”
“Later in the 1950s. Things were going crazy by then. We found out other things, too. For example, we found out we had two secret nuclear labs, not just one. Not just Los Alamos. There was another place. They had a theory at the time. It was behind everything the Department of Defense ever did back then. In their words they believed rivalry fosters excellence and is imperative for supremacy. It was written in stone. So they gave Los Alamos a rival. It was called Livermore. Near Berkeley, in California. There were smart people working there right from the start. They saw there was no point in designing a bigger bomb. So they went the other way. They designed smaller bombs. They got better and better at it. Eventually they built a whole new nuclear weapons system around a very neat new warhead called the W-54.”
“Good to know,” Reacher said.
“Now go back to my original problem. A guy carrying a hundred pounds on his back was no good to me. But I was a commander with a tactical problem to solve. My target list included major civil engineering projects. Roads, bridges, viaducts, power plants, infrastructure. Could a guy carry two hundred pounds on his back?”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But not very far.”
“Still not good enough. Still just a firecracker. What about four hundred pounds?”
“No.”
“What about a ton? Could a guy carry a ton of TNT on his back?”
“Obviously not.”
“What about ten tons? Or a hundred tons? Or a thousand tons? Or fifteen thousand tons? Could a guy carry fifteen thousand tons of TNT on his back?”
Reacher said nothing.
Helmsworth said, “In the end that was what they offered us.”