Alas, Babylon

Chapter 2

Randy left the house in time to see Missouri wedge herself under the wheel of the Henrys’ Model-A Ford, an antique—so certified with a “Q” tag issued by the state—but kept in perfect running order by Malachai’s mechanical ingenuity. “I haven’t finished but I got to go now,” she said. “Mrs. McGovern, she holds the clock on me. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

The Model-A, listing to port with Missouri’s weight, bounced down the pebbled driveway. Randy got into his new Bonneville. It was a sweet car, a compromise between a sports job and a hardtop, long, low, very fast, and a lot of fun, even though its high-compression engine drank premium fuel in quantity.

At eleven, approaching Orlando on Route 50, he turned on the radio for the news. Turkey had appealed to the UN for an investigation of border penetrations by Syria. Syria charged Israel with planning a preventive war. Israel accused Egypt of sending snooper planes over its defenses. Egypt claimed its ships, bound from the Black Sea to Alexandria, were being delayed in the Straits, and charged Turkey with a breach of the Montreaux Convention.

Russia accused Turkey and the United States of plotting to crush Syria, and warned France, Italy, Greece, and Spain that any nations harboring American bases would be involved in a general war, and erased from the earth.

The Secretary of State was somewhere over the Atlantic, bound for conferences in London.

The Soviet Ambassador to Washington had been recalled for consultation.

There were riots in France.

It all sounded bad, but familiar as an old, scratchy record. He had heard it all before, in almost the same words, back in ‘57 and ‘58. So why push the panic button? Mark could be wrong. He couldn’t know, for certain, that the balloon was going up. Unless he knew something fresh, something that had not appeared in the newspapers, or been broadcast.

Shortly before noon Florence Wechek hung her “Back at One” sign on the office door and walked down Yulee Street to meet Alice Cooksey at the Pink Flamingo. Fridays, they always lunched together. Alice, tiny, drab in black and gray, an active, angry sparrow of a woman, arrived late. She hurried to Florence’s table and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve just had a squabble with Kitty Offenhaus.”

“Oh, dear!” Florence said. “Again?” Kitty was secretary of the PTA, past-president of the Frangipani Circle, treasurer of the Women’s Club, and a member of the library board. Also, she was the wife of Luther “Bubba” Offenhaus, Chief Tail-Twister of the Lions Club, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce, and Deputy Director of Civil Defense for the whole county. He owned the most prosperous business in town, the Offenhaus Mortuary, and a twin real estate development, Repose-in-Peace Park.

Alice lifted the menu. It fluttered. She set it down quickly and said, “Yes, again. I guess I’ll have the tunafish salad.”

“You should eat more, Alice,” Florence said, noticing how white and pinched her friend’s face looked. “What happened?”

“Kitty came in and said she’d heard rumors that we had books by Carl Rowan and Walter White. I told her the rumors were true, and did she want to borrow one?”

“What’d she say?” Florence put down her fork, no longer interested in her chicken patty.

“Said they were subversive and anti-South—she’s a Daughter of the Confederacy—and ordered me to take them off the shelves. I told her that as long as I was librarian they would stay there. She said she was going to bring it before the board and if necessary take it up with Porky Logan. He’s on the investigating committee in Tallahassee.”

“Alice, you’re going to lose your job!” Kitty Offenhaus was the most influential person in Fort Repose, with the exception of Edgar Quisenberry, who owned and ran the bank.

“I don’t think so. I told her that if anything like that happened I’d call the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune and Miami Herald and they’d send reporters and photographers. I said, ‘Kitty, can’t you see your picture on the front page, and the headline—Undertaker’s Wife Cremates Books?’”

This was the most fascinating news Florence had heard in weeks. “What happened then?”

“Nothing at all. If I may borrow an expression from one of my younger readers, she left in an eight-cylinder huff.”

“You wouldn’t really call the papers, would you?”

Alice spoke carefully, understanding fully that everything would soon be repeated. “I certainly would! But I don’t think I’ll have to. You see, publicity would hurt Bubba’s business. One third of Bubba’s customers are Negroes, and another third Yankees who come down here to live on their pensions and stay to die.” She lifted her bright, fiercely blue eyes and added, as if repeating one of the Commandments: “Censorship and thought control can exist only in secrecy and darkness.”

“And that was all?”

“That was all.” Alice tried her salad. “What’ve you been doing, Florence?”

Florence could think of no adventure, or even any news culled from the wire, that could compete with telling off Kitty Offenhaus—except her experience with Randy Bragg. She had pledged herself not to say anything about Randy to anyone, but she could trust Alice, who was worldly-wise in spite of her appearance, and who might even, when younger, have encountered a Peeping Tom herself. So Florence told about Randy and his binoculars and how he had stared at her that morning. “It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?” she concluded.

“It is unbelievable,” Alice said flatly. “But I saw him at it!”

“I don’t care. I know the Bragg boys. Even before you came here, Florence, I knew them. I knew Judge Bragg well, very well.” Florence remembered vague reports, many years back, of Alice Cooksey having gone with Judge Bragg before the judge married Gertrude. But that made no difference to what went on in the Bragg house now. “You’ll have to admit that those Bragg boys are a little peculiar,” Florence said. “You should have seen the cable Randy got from Mark this morning. Urgent they meet at McCoy today. Helen and the children flying to Orlando tonight—you know those children can’t be out of school yet and the last two words didn’t make any sense at all. ‘Alas, Babylon.’ Isn’t that crazy?”

“Those boys aren’t crazy,” Alice said. “They’ve always been bright boys. Full of hell, yes, but at least they could read, which is more than I can say for the children nowadays. Do you know that Randy read every history in the library before he was sixteen?”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with his sex habits,” Florence said. She leaned across the table and touched Alice’s arm. “Alice, come out to my house tonight for the weekend. I want you to see for yourself.”

“I can’t. I keep the library open Saturdays. That’s my only chance to get the young ones. Evenings and Sundays, they’re paralyzed by TV.”

“I’m open Saturday mornings, too, so we can drive in together. I’ll pick you up when you’re through tomorrow evening. It’ll be a change for you, out in the country, away from that stuffy room.”

Alice hesitated. It would be nice to visit with Florence, but she hated to accept favors she couldn’t repay. She said, “Well, we’ll see.”

When Alice returned to the library, three old-timers, too old for shuffleboard or the Lawn Bowlers Club, were bent over the periodical table. Like mummies, she thought, partially unwrapped. One of the mummies leaned slowly over until his nose fell into the fold of Cosmopolitan. Alice walked over to the table and made certain he still breathed. She let him nap on, smiled at the other two, and darted into the reference room, with its towering, topheavy stacks. From the first stack, religious and spiritual works in steady demand, she brought down the King James Bible. She believed she would find the words in Revelation, and she did. She read two verses, lips moving, words murmuring in her throat:

Alice put the Bible back on its shelf and walked, head down, to her cracked oak desk, like a schoolmarm’s desk on a dais, in the main hallway. She sat there, staring at the green blotter, at the antiquated pen and the glass inkwell, at the wooden file filled with readers’ cards, at the stack of publishers’ spring lists. Alone of all the people in Fort Repose, Alice Cooksey knew Mark Bragg well enough, and had absorbed sufficient knowledge of the world’s illness through the printed word, to understand that the books she had ordered from those spring lists might never be delivered. She had small fear of death, and of man none at all, but the formlessness of what was to come overwhelmed her. She always associated Babylon with New York, and she wished, now, that she lived on Manhattan, where one could die in a bright millisecond, without suffering, without risking the indignity of panic.

She picked up the telephone and called Florence. She would come out for the weekend, or even longer, if Florence was agreeable. When she set down the phone Alice felt steadier. If it came soon, she would have a friendly hand to hold. She would not be alone.

The Air Police sergeant at McCoy’s main gate questioned Randy, and then allowed him to call Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hart, a squadron commander, and friend of Mark’s. Hart had been to Fort Repose to fish for bass, first as Mark’s guest, and later, on several occasions, as a guest of Randy, so he was something more than an acquaintance. Randy said he had had a wire from Mark to meet him at noon, and Hart said, “He whistled through here yesterday. Didn’t expect him back so soon. Anyway, drive to Base Ops. We’ll go out on the line and meet him together. Let me talk to the Air Police. I’ll clear you through.”

Driving through the base, Randy sensed a change since his last visit, the year before. Physically, McCoy looked the same. It felt different. The Air Police questioning had been sharper, and more serious. That wasn’t the difference. He realized something was missing; and then he had it. Where were all the people? McCoy seemed almost deserted, with less activity, and fewer men and fewer cars than a year ago. He saw no other civilians. He saw no women, not even around the clubs and the BX. The most congested area on the base was the steps and lawn in front of the alert barracks opposite wing headquarters, where standby crewmen, rigid and stiff in pressure suits, talked and smoked. Trucks, tail gates down, were backed to the curb. Drivers slouched over their wheels as if they had been there a long time.

He drove onto Base Operations and parked close to the flight-line fence. Last year he had seen B-47’s, tankers, and fat transports stretching their wings, tip to tip, the length of the line-miles. Now, their numbers had dwindled. He counted fewer than twenty B-47’s, and guessed that the wing was in Africa or Spain or England on ninety-day foreign duty. But this could not be so, because Paul Hart, winner of bombing and navigation trophies, a Select Crew Aircraft Commander, would have led the flight.

Hart, a stocky, bandy-legged man with punched-in nose, a fighter’s chin, and an easy grin, met him at the door of Operations. “Hi, Randy,” he said. “Just checked the board. Mark will touch down in eight minutes. How’s the fishing?”

“It’s been lousy.” He looked up at the wind sock. “But it’ll get better if this high sticks around and the wind holds from the east. What’s he flying?”

“He’s not flying anything. He’s riding soft and plush in a C-One-thirty-five—that’s the transport version of our new jet tanker—with a lot of Offutt brass. Other brass, that is. I hear he gets his star soon. Only promotion I’ll ever get is to a B-Five eight.”

“Penalty for being a hot pilot,” Randy said. “What’s going on around here? Looks like a ghost town. You boys shutting up shop?”

“You haven’t heard about SAC’s interim dispersal?”

“Vaguely, yes, on some of the commentaries.”

“Well, we’re not shouting about it. We try to keep half the wing off this base, because where we’re standing right now is a primary target. We farm out our planes to fighter fields and Navy fields and even commercial airports. And we try to keep ten percent of the wing airborne at all times, and if you look down there in front of the jumbo hangar you’ll see four standby Forty-sevens, bombed up and ready to go. Damn expensive way to run an air force.”

Randy looked. They were there, wings drooping with full tanks, bound to earth by slender umbilical cords, the starter cables. “I didn’t mean the planes so much as the people,” Randy said. “Where’s everybody?”

“Oh, that.” Hart frowned, as if deciding how much could be said and what words to use. “The papers know about it but they aren’t printing it,” he said finally, “and the people around Orlando must know about it by now so it can’t be any great secret. We’ve been on sort of a modified alert for four or five weeks. Maybe I should call it a creeping evacuation. We’ve cleared the area of all civilian and nonessential personnel, and we’re encouraging everybody to move their families out of the blast zone. You see, Randy, we can’t expect three to six hours’ warning any more. If we’re lucky, we might get fifteen minutes.”

Randy nodded. He noticed long red missiles slung under the wings of the standby B-47’s. He recognized them, from the newspaper photographs, as the Rascal, an air-to-ground H-bomb carrier. “Is that red baby much help?” he asked.

“That red baby,” Hart said, “is what we call the crew-saver. The Russkies are no dopes. They’ll try to stop us with missiles air-to-air and ground-to-air, beam-riders, heat-seekers, sound finders, and, for all I know, smellers. It’ll be no milk run but with the Rascal—and some other gadgets—we don’t have to write ourselves off as a kamikaze corps. We won’t have to penetrate their inner defense zones. We can lay off target and let that red baby fly. It knows where to go. Do you know what?”

“What?”

Paul Hart’s smile had vanished, and he looked older, and when he spoke it was gravely. “When the whistle blows, I’ll have a better chance if I’m in my aircraft, headed for target, than if I’m sitting at home with my feet propped up, drinking a Scotch, and Martha rubbing the kinks out of my neck—and our little place on the lake is five miles from here. So I’m a man of peace. I wish Martha and the kids lived in Fort Repose.”

Randy heard the low whine of jet engines at fractional power and saw a cigar-shaped C-135 line up with the runway in its swoop downward. Presently it wheeled into a taxi strip and braked in front of Operations. A flag, three white stars on a blue field, popped out of the cockpit, indicating that a lieutenant general was aboard, and alerting McCoy to provide the courtesies due such rank.

The three-star general was first down the ramp, his pink cheeked aide scurrying about his heels like an anxious puppy. Mark was last off Randy waved and caught his eye and Mark waved back but did not smile. Coming down the ramp and across the concrete, knees bare in tropical uniform, Mark looked like a slightly larger edition of Randy, an inch taller, a shade broader. At thirty feet they looked like twins, with the same jet hair, white teeth behind mobile lips, quizzical eyes set deep, the same rakish walk and swing of shoulders, cleft in chin and emphatic nose with a bony bump on the bridge. At three feet, fine, deep lines showed around Mark’s eyes and mouth, gray appeared in his black thicket, his jaw thrust out an extra half-inch, his face was leaner. At three feet, they were entirely different, and it was apparent Mark was the older, harder, and probably wiser man.

Mark put one hand on Hart’s shoulder and the other on Randy’s, and walked them toward the building. “Paul,” he told Hart, “you better get with General Heycock. He’s hungry and when he gets hungry he gets fierce. How about helping his aide dig up some transport and get him over to the O Club? We’re only here to gas up. Takeoff is in fifty minutes.”

Hart looked up and saw three blue Air Force sedans swing up the driveway. “There’s the General’s transport right there,” he said, and then, realizing that Mark had tactfully implied he wanted to be alone with his brother, added, “But I’ll go along to the O Club, and get the mess officer on the ball.” He shook hands and said, “See you, Mark, next time around.”

“Sure,” Mark said. He turned to Randy. “Where’s your car? I’ve got a lot to say and not much time to say it. We can talk in the car. But first let’s get some candy, or something, inside Ops. We didn’t load any flight lunches at Ramey.”

The front seat of the Bonneville was like a sunny comfortable private office. Randy asked the essential question first: “What time do Helen and the children get in?”

Mark brought a notebook out of his hip pocket. “Three thirty tomorrow morning, local time, at Orlando Municipal. Carmody—he’s Wing Commander at Ramey—has a friend in the Eastern office in San Juan. He ramrodded it through for me. The plane leaves Omaha at seven-ten tonight. One change, in Chicago.”

“Isn’t that a little rough on Helen and the kids?”

“They can sleep all the way from Chicago to Orlando. It’ll be just as tough on you, meeting them. The important thing is I got the reservation. This time of year, it took some doing.”

“What’s the great rush?” Randy demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Contain yourself, son,” Mark said. “I’m going to give you a complete briefing.”

“Have you told Helen yet?”

“I sent her a cable from San Juan. Just told her I’d made reservations for tonight. She’ll understand.” He squinted at the gaudy dials and gleaming knobs on the dash. “Some buggy you’ve got here, Randy. Won’t be worth a damn to you. About Helen, she and I thrashed all this out long ago, but she won’t like it. Not at all will she like it, now that the time has come. But I’ll have her on that plane if I have to truss her up and send her air freight.”

Randy said nothing. He simply tapped the car clock, a reminder.

“Okay,” Mark said, “I’ll brief you. First strategic, then tactical.” He pushed a peanut-butter cracker into his mouth, found his pen, and began to sketch in his notebook. He drew a rough map, the Mediterranean.

Mark doesn’t cerebrate until he has a pen in his hand, Randy thought, and can see a map. Probably makes him feel comfortable, like he’s holding a pointer in the SAC War Room.

“The key is the Med,” Mark said. “For three hundred years the Russians have tried to pry open the Straits and debouch into the Mediterranean. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Czar Alexander, they all tried it. Now, more than ever, control of the Med means control of the world.”

Randy nodded. Conquerors knew or sensed this. Caesar had done it, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Hitler failed. “If Xerxes had won at Salamis,” he said, “we’d all be speaking Persian—but that was a long time pre-Sputnik, and pre-ICBM. I thought the fight, now, was for control of space. Who controls space controls the world.” Mark smiled. “It can also happen just the other way around. We—by we I mean the NATO coalition—aren’t going to be allowed time to catch up with them in operational IC’s, much less control space. Now don’t argue with me. We have their War Plan.”

Randy took a deep breath and sat up straight.

“For the first time Russia has bridgeheads in the Mediterranean—here, here, and here—” Mark drew ovals on the map. “They have a fleet in the Med as powerful as ours when you match their submarine strength against our carriers. They have Turkey ringed on three sides, and if they could upset the Turkish government, and force capitulation of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, they would have won the war without fighting. The Med would be theirs, Africa cut off from Europe, NATO outflanked on the south, and one by one all our allies—except England—would fall into their laps or declare themselves neutral. SAC’s bases in Africa and Spain would be untenable and melt away. NATO would fold up, and the IR sites we’re planning never be finished.”

“That was their gambit in ’fifty-seven, wasn’t it?” Randy asked.

“You have a good memory, Randy, and that’s a good simile. The Russians are great chess players. They rarely make the same mistake twice. Now, today, they’re making moves. It’s the same gambit—but with a tremendous difference. In ’fifty-seven, when it looked like they were going to make another Korea out of Turkey, we warned the Kremlin that there’d be no sanctuary inside Russia. They took a look at the board and resigned the game. Then in ’fifty-eight, after the Iraq king was assassinated, we grabbed the initiative and landed Marines in Lebanon. We got there fastest. They saw that we were ready, and could not be surprised. They were caught off balance, and didn’t dare move. This time it’s different. They’re ready to go through with it, because the odds have changed.”

“How can you know this?”

“Remember reading about the Russian General who came over, in Berlin? An air general, a shrewd character, a human being. He brought us their War Plan, in his head. This time, they’re not resigning the game. They’d still like to win the war without a war, but if we make any military countermove, we’re going to receive it.”

For a moment, they were both silent. On the other side of the flight-line fence, three ground-crewmen were throwing a baseball. Two were pitching, an older sergeant, built like Yogi Berra, catching. The plate was a yellow parachute pack. The ball whirred and plopped sharply into mitt. “That tall boy has a lot of stuff,” Randy said. Again, he felt he moved in the miasma of a dream. Something was wrong. Either Mark shouldn’t be talking like this, or those airmen shouldn’t be throwing a baseball out there in the warm sunlight. When he lit a cigarette, his fingers were trembling again.

“Have a bad night, Randy?”

“Not particularly. I’m having a bad day.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to get worse. Here’s the tactical part. They know that the only way they can do it is knock off our nuclear capability with one blow—or at least cripple us so badly that they can accept what retaliatory power we have left. They don’t mind losing ten or twenty million people, so long as they sweep the board, because people, per se, are only pawns, and expendable. So their plan—it was no surprise to us—calls for a T.O.T. on a worldwide scale. You get it?”

“Sure. Time-on-target. You don’t fire everything at the same instant. You shoot it so it all arrives on target at the same instant.” Mark glanced at his watch, and then looked up at the big jet transport, still loading fuel through four hoses from the underground tanks. “That’s right. It won’t be Zero Hour, it’ll be Zero Minute. They’ll use no planes in the first wave, only missiles. They plan to kill every base and missile site in Europe and Africa and the U.K. with their T-2 and T-3 IR’s. They plan to kill every base on this continent, and in the Pacific, with their IC’s, plus missiles launched from subs. Then they use SUSAC—that’s what we call their Strategic Air Force—to mop up.”

“Can they get away with it?”

“Three years ago they couldn’t. Three years hence, when we have our own ICBM batteries emplaced, a big fleet of missile toting subs, and Nike-Zeus and some other stuff perfected, they couldn’t. But right now we’re in what we call ‘the gap.’ Theoretically, they figure they can do it. I’m pretty sure they can’t we may have some surprises for them—but that’s not the point. Point is, if they think they can get away with it, then we have lost.”

“I don’t understand.”

“LeMay says the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one. Our whole raison d’etre was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose. I think we lost some time ago, because the last five Sputniks have been reconnaissance satellites. They’ve been mapping us, with infrared and transitor television, measuring us for the Sunday punch.”

Randy felt angry. He felt cheated. “Why hasn’t anybody everybody been told about this?”

Mark shrugged. “You know how it is—everything that comes in is stamped secret or top secret or cosmic or something and the only people who dare declassify anything are the big wheels right at the top, and the people at the top hold conferences and somebody says, ‘Now, let’s not be hasty. Let’s not alarm the public.’ So everything stays secret or cosmic. Personally, I think everybody ought to be digging or evacuating right this minute. Maybe if the other side knew we were digging, if they knew that we knew, they wouldn’t try to get away with it.”

“You really think it’s that close?” Randy said. “Why?”

“Two reasons. First, when I left Puerto Rico this morning Navy was trying to track three skunks—unidentified submarines—in the Caribbean, and one in the Gulf.”

“Four subs doesn’t sound like enough force to cause a big flap,” Randy said.

“Four subs is a lot of subs when there shouldn’t be any,” Mark said. “It’s like shaking a haystack and having four needles pop out at your feet. Chances are that haystack is stiff with needles.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, as if the glare hurt, and when he spoke again his voice was strained. “They’ve got so blasted many! CIA thinks six hundred, Navy guesses maybe seven fifty. And they don’t need launchers any more. Just dump the bird, or pop it out while still submerged. The ocean itself is a perfectly good launching pad.”

Randy said, “And the other reason?”

“Because I’m on my way back to Offutt. We flew down yesterday on a pretty important job—figure out a way to disperse the wing on Ramey. There aren’t enough fields in Puerto Rico and anyway the island is rugged and not big enough. We’d just started our staff study when we got a zippo—that’s an operational priority message—to come home. And two thirds of the Ramey wing was scrambled with flyaway kits for another place. I made my decision right then. I just had time to arrange Helen’s reservation and send the cables.”

Mark spoke more of the Russian General, with whom he had talked at length, and whom apparently he liked. “He isn’t a traitor, either to his country or to civilization. He came over in desperation, hoping that somehow we could stop those power crazed bastards at the top. He doesn’t think their War Plan will work any more than I do. Too much chance for human or mechanical error.” Mark used phrases like “maximum capability,” and “calculated risk,” and “acceptance of any casualties except important people,” and “decentralization of industry and control, announced as an economic measure, but actually military.”

Randy listened, fascinated, until he saw three blue sedans turn a corner near wing headquarters. “Here comes your party,” he said. “Anything else I ought to know?”

Mark brushed cracker crumbs and slivers of chocolate from his shirt front. “Yes. Also, there’s something I have to give you.” He found a green slip of paper in his wallet and handed it to Randy. “Made out to you,” he said.

Randy unfolded the check. It was for five thousand. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

“Cash it—today if you can. Don’t deposit it, cash it! It’s a reserve for Helen and Ben Franklin and Peyton. Buy stuff with it. I don’t know what to tell you to buy. You’ll think of what you’ll need as you go along.”

“I did start a list, this morning.”

Mark seemed pleased. “That’s fine. Show’s you’re looking ahead. I don’t know whether money will help Helen or not, but cash in hand, in Fort Repose, will be better than an account in an Omaha bank.”

Randy kept on looking at the check, feeling uncomfortable. “But suppose nothing happens? Suppose—”

“Spend some of it on a case of good liquor,” Mark said. “Then if nothing happens we’ll have a wonderful, expensive toot together, and you can laugh at me. I won’t care.”

Randy slipped the check into his pocket. “Can I tip off anybody else? There are a few people—”

“You’ve got a girl?”

“I don’t know whether she’s my girl or not. I’ve been trying to find out. You don’t know her. New people from Cleveland. Her family built on River Road.”

Mark hesitated. “I don’t see any objection. It is something Civil Defense should have done weeks—months ago. Use your own judgment. Be discreet.”

Randy noticed that the jet transport’s wings were clear of hoses. He saw the three blue sedans pull up at Operations. He saw Lieutenant General Heycock get out of the first car. He felt Mark’s hand on his shoulder, and braced himself for the words he knew must come.

Mark spoke very quietly. “You’ll take care of Helen?”

“Certainly.”

“I won’t say be a good father to the children. They love you and they think you’re swell and you couldn’t be anything but a good father to them. But I will say this, be kind to Helen. She’s—” Mark was having trouble with his voice.

Randy tried to help him out. “She’s a wonderful, beautiful gal, and you don’t have to worry. Anyway, don’t sound so final. You’re not dead yet.”

“She’s—more,” Mark said. “She’s my right arm. We’ve been married fourteen years and about half that time I’ve been up in the air or out of the country and I’ve never once worried about Helen. And she never had to worry about me. In fourteen years I never slept with another woman. I never even kissed another woman, not really, not even when I had duty in Tokyo or Manila or Hong Kong, and she was half a world away. She was all the woman I ever needed. She was like this: Back when I was a captain and we were moving from rented apartment to rented apartment every year or so, I got a terrific offer from Boeing. She knew what I wanted. I didn’t have to tell her. She said, ‘I want you to stay in SAC. I think you should. I think you ought to be a general and you’re going to be a general.’ There’s an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general. I guess there wasn’t quite enough time, but had there been time, she would’ve had her star.”

Randy saw Lieutenant General Heycock walk from the Operations building toward the plane. “It’s time, Mark,” he said. They got out of the car and walked quickly toward the gate, and Mark swung an arm around Randy’s shoulders. “What I mean is, she has tremendous energy and courage. If you let her, she’ll give you the same kind of loyalty she gave me. Let her, Randy. She’s all woman and that’s what she’s made for.”

“Stop worrying,” Randy said. He didn’t quite understand and he didn’t know what else to say.

Heycock’s aide fidgeted at the end of the ramp. “Everybody’s in, Colonel,” he said. “The General was looking for you at lunch. The General wondered what happened to you. He was most anxious—”

“I’ll see the General as soon as we’re airborne,” Mark said sharply.

The aide retreated two steps up the ramp, then waited stubbornly.

They shook hands. Mark said, “Better try to catch a nap this evening.”

“I will. When I get home shall I call Helen and tell her you’re on the way?”

“No. Not much use. This aircraft cruises at five-fifty. By the time you get back to Fort Repose, we’ll be west of the Mississippi.” He glanced down at his bare knees. “Looks like I’ll have to change into a real uniform on the aircraft. I’d look awfully funny in Omaha.”

“So long, Mark.”

Without raising his head, Mark said, “Goodbye, Randy,” turned away, and climbed the ramp.

Randy walked away from the transport, got into his car, and drove slowly through the base. At the main gate he surrendered his visitor’s pass. He turned into a lonely lane outside the base, near the village of Pinecastle, and stopped the car in a spot shielded by cabbage palms. When he was sure no one watched, and no car approached from either direction, he leaned his head on the wheel. He swallowed a sob and closed his eyes to forbid the tears.

He heard wind rustle the palms, and the chirp of cardinals in the brush. He became aware that the clock on the dash, blurred, was staring at him. The clock said he had just time to make the bank before closing, if he pushed hard and had luck getting through Orlando traffic. He started the engine, backed out of the lane into the highway, and let the car run. He knew he should not have spared time for tears, and would not, ever again.