The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

morning he checked out from the Los Alamos National Laboratory for good.
     
    The Oval Office was just about as oval as Allan had imagined. And there he was, sitting across from his Los Alamos drinking partner.
    It turned out that the president was having some trouble with a woman whom he – for political reasons – couldn’t ignore. Her name was Soong May-ling. Perhaps Allan had heard of her? No?
    Well, she was the wife of the anti-communist Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek in China. She was also extremely beautiful, educated here in America, and a best friend of Mrs Roosevelt. She drew an audience of thousands wherever she turned up, and had even given a speech to Congress. And now she was hounding President Truman almost to death to ensure that he would make good on all the promises that she claimed President Roosevelt had made with regard to the struggle against communism.
    ‘I should have guessed that this was about politics,’ said Allan.
    ‘It’s pretty hard to avoid that if you are president,’ said Harry Truman.
    Just for the moment there was a brief period of calm in the struggle between the Kuomintang and the communists, for they were more or less fighting for a common cause in Manchuria. But soon the Japanese would surrender, and then the Chinese would certainly start to fight among themselves again.
    ‘How do you know that the Japanese are going to surrender?’ asked Allan.
    ‘You, of all people, ought to be able to work that out,’ answered Truman and immediately changed the subject.
    The president proceeded with what for Allan was a boring overview of developments in China. Intelligence reports said that the communists had the advantage in the civil war, and at the Office of Strategic Services there were questions about Chiang Kai-shek’s military strategy. He was concentrating on the towns, leaving the rural areas open for communist propaganda. The leader of the communists, Mao Tse-tung, would of course soon be eliminated by the Americans, but there was an obvious risk that his ideas might gain a foothold among the population. Even Chiang Kai-shek’s own wife, the decidedly irritating Soong May-ling, acknowledged that something had to be done. So she simply followed her own military course.
    The president continued to describe military strategy, but Allan had stopped listening. He looked absentmindedly around the Oval Office, wondering whether the windowpanes were bulletproof and where the door to the left might lead. He thought it must be difficult to drag the gigantic carpet out for cleaning… In the end, he felt he had to interrupt the president in case he started asking questions to make sure that Allan had understood.
    ‘Excuse me, Harry, but what do you want me to do?’
    ‘Well, as I said, it’s about stopping the communists’ freedom of movement in the rural areas…’
    ‘What do you actually want me to do?’
    ‘Soong May-ling is pushing for increased American weapons support, and now she wants even more equipment than what they’ve already been offered.’
    ‘And what specifically do you want me to do?’
    When Allan had asked the question for the third time, the president fell silent. Then he said:
    ‘I want you to go to China and blow up bridges.’
    ‘Why didn’t you say that right away?’ said Allan, his face brightening.
    ‘As many bridges as possible, so that you cut off as many of the communist roads as you can…’
    ‘It’ll be nice to see a new country,’ said Allan.
    ‘I want you to train Soong May-ling’s men in the art of blowing up bridges and that…’
    ‘When do I leave?’
     
    Although Allan was an explosives expert, and had rapidly and drunkenly become good friends with the future American president, he was still Swedish. If Allan had been the slightest bit interested in politics, he might have asked the president why he was the one to have been chosen for this mission. Had the president been asked he would have answered truthfully that the United States couldn’t be seen to support two parallel and potentially contradictory military projects in China. Officially they supported Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party. Now they were adding to that support on the sly with a whole shipload of equipment for blowing up bridges on a major scale, ordered and pushed through by Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, the beautiful, serpent-like (in the president’s view) and half-Americanised Soong May-ling. Worst of all, Truman couldn’t rule out that