Stallion Gate (1987) by Martin Cruz Smith
GoodReads meta data is 384 pages, rated 3.66 by 1652 litizens.
Genre: thriller, krimi.
Verdict: overweight.
In arid New Mexico in early 1945 thousands toiled at a secret project. One peon was a New Mexico National Guard sergeant named Joe, an Indian of some ilk. Naturally, others call him Chief (and he does strut around like one at times).
The peons hate each others, GIs versus civilian contractors, white versus black, white versus red, Anglo versus European, residents versus interlopers, Yankee Doodles versus Red spies, pencil necks versus he-men, mathematicians versus physicists, Greasers versus Jews, everyone versus the local Indians, and on and on. There may be a war on with the prospect of a million more casualties to come, but these thousands have plenty of time for their endless, mutual animosities. True to life then.
The title speaks to the author’s contrivances. The test site was called Trinity and the trinity mountain peaks are mentioned early on and then forgotten as our protagonist insists on calling it Stallion Gate, and though there are references to wild horses in the vicinity none put in an appearance.
The author did a great deal of research and it is stuffed on the pages — about pottery, about Filipinos, about Indian spirits, about boxing, and about the physics, without any dramatic effect. Alas, sorry to say that, but it is true for this reader. Joe is a man among men, and among women who fall over themselves to get at him – every author’s wet dream. He is a boxer, a (modest) war hero, a man of his people, a thinker, a man who never sleeps, and who roams around this top hush hush facility at will because he alone is trusted by one and all.
His notional superior is a purebred cardboard.
Am I jaded? Perhaps. I read recently a leaner version of very similar story in Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos (1998), which seemed much less padded, and less boy’s own. It also offered a subtle account of the strange bedfellows General Grove and Dr Oppenheimer.
Mind you, there are some fine moments in Stallion Gate in the description of a sunrise or the reaction to the conscience of the scientists versus those million soon to be casualties, or for that matter the 70,000 casualties that had already been suffered on Japanese soil at Okinawa in the typhoon of steel. Had the Bomb been used earlier, many of those dead might have been spared along with the hundred thousand Japanese who died there.
There is a distant personal connection through the New Mexico National Guard which was deployed to the Philippines in 1941 just before the Japanese invasion. One of my in-laws was in their ranks, and he was not as lucky as Joe. Who, by the way, seems strangely incurious about the Filipinos who saved him. He talks of them as though they were a mere plot contrivance. Hmmm.