Helmsworth said, “Initial cargo manifests show ten crates leaving Livermore. Each crate held ten Davy Crocketts. Ten times ten is a hundred, which was the number of bombs we trained with. Later cargo manifests show the same ten crates going home again, each one with the same ten bombs inside. Ten times ten is a hundred. All accounted for. All properly delivered and safely stored inside the United States. All subsequently checked and physically examined and counted in front of witnesses. There are exactly one hundred in our possession.”
Reacher said, “So what was the error?”
“Those were the cargo manifests. A hundred out, and a hundred in. They matched all known army paperwork. But years later at the Livermore lab someone found an unsent invoice for an eleventh crate. Ten more Davy Crocketts. There was no coherent delivery paperwork. The production figures were ambiguous. It was possible an eleventh order was filled.”
“But not paid for. Which is unlikely. Which means the invoice was probably the error. Possibly why it was never sent.”
“That was the initial conclusion,” Helmsworth said. “Unfortunately the crate manufacturer had contradictory evidence, from an unlikely source. An apprentice’s log showed eleven crates had in fact been built. The foreman of the shop had signed off on them all. The eleventh crate wasn’t in the crate factory. It wasn’t at Livermore. And if ten more bombs had been built, they weren’t at Livermore either. So where the hell were they? Did they even exist? Half the argument was philosophical. The other half was better safe than sorry. So they started searching. Didn’t find anything. Not at home, and not overseas. Maybe the apprentice was wrong. But then the foreman had to be wrong, too. They went back and forth.”
“Until?” Reacher said.
“It was a split committee. The majority said the ambiguous production figures should be read the other way around, and that therefore the eleventh order had not been manufactured in the first place, and that the invoice was incorrectly raised. Or fraudulently raised, perhaps.”
“That sounds like a threat, to make the problem go away.”
“Perhaps it was.”
“What did the minority think?”
“That Livermore wouldn’t have ordered the extra crate unless it had bombs to put in it. The crates were prototypes of a standardized system. They were modified inside to carry the load. But on the outside they all looked the same. The error could have been in the delivery paperwork. The crate could have left Berkeley and gone to the wrong destination. Or the right destination with the wrong product description. The inventory codes were very complicated. A single-digit mistake could have been fatal.”
“That’s a lot of could-haves,” Reacher said. “That’s a cascade of three separate errors. Wrong delivery paperwork, wrong inventory code, and the invoice was never sent.”
“Every year we were spending billions of 1950s dollars on millions of tons of equipment. The sample size was enormous. It was a frenzy. There was scope for every kind of error. How long have you served, major?”
“Twelve years.”
“You ever known anything go wrong?”
Reacher glanced down at his pants. Marine Corps khakis, sewn in 1962, shipped in 1965, to the wrong branch of the service entirely, undiscovered for thirty years.
He said, “We’re talking about nuclear weapons here.”
Helmsworth said, “In our history we’ve had a total of thirty-two accidentally launched, fired, detonated, stolen, or lost. We closed the files on twenty-six of them. The other six were never traced or recovered. They’re still missing. We know those numbers for sure. They’re solid. Another ten isn’t outside the bounds of possibility. Especially given their nature. Davy Crocketts were small and mass-produced. They were not glamour weapons. They were treated like regular everyday ordnance.”
“How good was the search?”
“We looked everywhere. Literally everywhere in the world. We didn’t find them. So the majority view prevailed. They never existed in the first place. The invoice was an intended fraud, but someone got cold feet and never submitted it.”
“What was your personal opinion?”
“We were preparing for a land war against the Red Army in Europe. We had hundreds of supply depots all over Germany. The largest was bigger than some of their cities. The smallest was bigger than a football stadium. I thought the majority was sticking its fingers in its ears and singing la-la-la.”
“Would Arnold Mason have been involved in the search?”
“Almost certainly. This was years later, don’t forget. Those were the guys who actually knew what they were looking for.”
“So those were the stories young Horace Wiley heard. The missing crate. Ten lost bombs as big as Hiroshima. Buried treasure.”