Stallion Gate — Martin Cruz Smith

This is a novel about the most important ten seconds in history.

Stallion Gate, a magnificent successor to Gorky Park, is a powerful sensual idyll, a blend of love and betrayal, of humor and cultures in collision, of jazz and war.

In a New Mexico blizzard, four men cross a barbed-wire fence at Stallion Gate to select the test site for the first automatic weapon. They are Oppenheimer, the physicist; Groves, the general; Fuchs, the spy. The fourth man is Sergeant Joe Peña, a hero, informer, fighter, musician, Indian.

Oppenheimer and Groves have hidden Los Alamos on a mesa surrounded by vast Indian reservations. It is the most secret installation of the war, the future encompassed by the past. To it come soldiers, roughnecks and scientists, including Anna Weiss, a mathematician and refugee from the Holocaust with whom Joe falls in love.