Forbidden Area

Two

THE LOSS of a single jet bomber, and the presumed death of its crew, was front page news for only a day, even though the B-99 was the ultimate in military aircraft. The story dropped from the paper entirely after the search was discontinued. So long as men are born unequipped with wings, nature will occasionally slap them from the skies as a reminder that they were not designed to fly.

The Air Force was more than usually concerned, however. The B-99 was a reliable and sturdy aircraft. It could maintain altitude on four of its eight engines. This was the first operational B-99 to be lost.

There was no conceivable explanation for disaster. The plane had left Hibiscus Base with a flight plan calling for a rendezvous with a jet tanker after 3,500 miles of cruising over the Gulf. Its fuel replenished, it would then swing northwest to Salt Lake City and simulate dropping an H-bomb. The people of Salt Lake would know nothing of this macabre experiment, for the B-99 would be at 65,000 feet, out of sight and out of hearing, and would make its bomb run by radar. The contour of Salt Lake, on the radarscope, resembled that of a certain industrial complex locked in a pocket of peaks in the Urals. The crew and plane had accomplished this identical mission without incident a dozen times before. The procedure taxed plane and men to the same extent as an intercontinental bombing mission, come the day.

More than that, there had been no distress calls or warning of trouble. Nineteen minutes out of Hibiscus Base, which lies between Orlando and Tampa, this B-99 had reported that it was at 20,000 feet, on course, speed 550 knots, climbing towards its most efficient ceiling of 55,000, with everything normal. After that, silence—nothing. It was the mystery that annoyed General Keatton. Once, a long time before, he had led his shattered air division back to England with forty-two B-17’s missing from his formations. But he knew what had become of them. He had seen. This way, it was different. Long after it was officially announced that the search had been called off (it would have been cruel to keep the families in suspense because of a million-to-one hope) Keatton kept an air-sea rescue squadron quartering the Gulf. And the Air Force quietly offered a five thousand dollar reward to any fisherman or shrimper who could bring in a bit of wreckage, no matter how minute.

For there was something else, unpublicized.

The B-99 had been rushed into production in a crash program. It had replaced the B-47 and the B-52 on the assembly lines, and on every SAC base, not only because of superior speed, range, and altitude. The difference wasn’t that important. The bomb bay of the 99 was no larger than that of the 47. When you can hide a small-city-size atomic bomb under a plug hat the bomb bay doesn’t have to be big. The fuselage of the 99 was somewhat longer than that of the B-52. All that extra space was crammed with new and strange electronic defenders. A bomber has deadly enemies, anti-aircraft rockets such as the Nike, launched from the ground, and the Navy’s Sparrow, fired from interceptors, and these enemies are smart. They have small inhuman eyes that guide them relentlessly to the bomber. The human brain piloting the bomber cannot outthink or outguess a guided missile. The human brain may decide to dodge, climb, weave, or dive, but the missile’s quicker brain will seek him out and destroy him. It takes a machine to outsmart a machine. The electronic machines inside the B-99 could distract a Russian missile’s one-track mind. They could take the missile’s thoughts off its task, and might even persuade it to turn traitor, and to return to the ramp from whence it was launched.

It was Keatton’s belief that the peace of the world, at that moment, rested with the B-99. This had not been true in the era of good feeling a few years before, and it might not be true a few years hence. But in that November, it was the existence of the B-99 and its pulsing metal brains that insured unbearable retaliation. It would be catastrophic if the enemy got hold of a B-99. It would be the end. They could pick its brains, learn its habits, and then build rockets to ignore its electronic tongues.

In his still, carpeted office down the main corridor from the River Gate, Keatton could not tear his mind away from the grotesque possibility that the B-99 had been stolen. As chief of an organization that was planning, among other fantastic things, to create an inhabited artificial satellite of earth, he could never forget that anything can happen. Keatton had no illusions whatsoever concerning his own future in the event of war. Whatever happened, he was through. If the enemy strike succeeded, in all likelihood he would either die very quickly, or be executed later. If he was called upon to strike their cities first, his soul could not survive the trauma of being an instrument of death for twenty or thirty or fifty million human beings. The worst of it was that ninety-nine percent of them were plain, ordinary people with no voice or choice in the schemes and ambitions of the leaders. Just people who wanted to work a little, play a little, love someone, and eat plenty. He couldn’t even be sure his strike would get the men in the Kremlin. When it happened, the bastards would be somewhere else. But if it did come, he would like to be certain that he could win it. For a protégé of Hap Arnold and Tooey Spaatz, it was a professional matter.

He called in Colonel Lundstrom, the Chief of OSI, and ordered him to Florida, just in case. OSI meant Office of Special Investigations, Air Force. He told Lundstrom to dig into the background of every crew member of the lost B-99. 2

The matter of the missing bomber did not become of transcendent importance until the third Monday of December.

On that day the Intentions Group met to review the final draft of a Russian war plan they had been constructing for eighteen months. Their plan was not complete, for while they believed they knew the answer to “How?” and “Where?” they could not presume to know when. Not that morning, they couldn’t.

That it had required eighteen months to produce a facsimile of a Russian plan of attack was not surprising. They took it for granted that Russian staffs had been working on the original for at least five years. The skeletal draft was not wordy. The stapled copy, No. 6, that lay on the table before Katharine Hume contained only twenty-eight pages of typescript. It was called, simply: FORECAST OF RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION.

The philosophical basis for the forecast had been written by Simmons and Cragey. The Kremlin was aware that nothing could be decisive except what happened to the United States and its air power in the first twenty-four hours of war. Twice in the century the explosive industrial might of America had resolved world conflicts. It would again, if given time. To win a war, Russia had to destroy the industrial potential of the United States, and at the same time protect itself against atomic holocaust. So the plan began:

“OBJECTIVE: Destruction of 65-75 percent of the largest cities and industrial complexes, with populations; destruction of the Strategic Air Command; destruction of those carriers capable of mounting an attack on Russia proper.”

Since this objective, if fulfilled, would insure total victory, the plan could now follow the principle of war called “economy of force.” It discarded ground, sea, or air action in Europe and in Asia, with a single exception, unless directed at American air and naval bases. The exception was London. Other nations might be awed into submission by the blitz; the British, never.

Each time she read the first few pages of the forecast, as she had a hundred times as details were argued and altered, Katharine shivered. It was a plan ingenious and terrifying, but it would anger higher authority, particularly in the Continental Air Defense Command, and probably in the Army and Navy as well. Yet it was their duty to plan the destruction of the United States in the hope that someone else would think up a countermove to prevent it. It was not their duty to plan a defense. Indeed, Katharine wondered if defense were possible.

The guts of the forecast was that the main blow would be delivered not by air, as everyone anticipated, but by sea. Geography and the lethal trident of submarine, guided missile, and H-bomb, made their concept logical. Sixty-five percent of America’s heavy industry lay within three hundred miles of the sea, which meant within range of the old-fashioned German V-weapons. The Russians had much more efficient gadgets, and more of them, now. Several German rocket research establishments had fallen into Russian hands in 1945, along with thousands of technicians, tons of blueprints, acres of underground factories, and components by the carload. When the war ended the Germans had been working on a V-9, a two-stage rocket designed for transoceanic warfare. This work had not faltered, under Soviet direction.

To fathom the enemy’s intentions, it had first been necessary to determine his capabilities, and of course this had been the hardest part of the job. The Russians hold no open legislative hearings to decide whether their strategic air force shall have fifty or a hundred wings. Neither do they announce the composition of their Navy, or display motion pictures, publicly, of their new rockets.

Yet something always comes through. And an intelligence analyst works in much the same way as an archeologist. Give him a small bone, and often he can reconstruct the whole animal. So it was that Commander Batt could say that Russia’s submarine fleet comprised six hundred vessels, of which half were capable of long-range action against the shores of North America. Of these, two hundred were equipped with hangars or rocket-launchers, or both. The rockets had a range of five hundred miles and could be dropped within two miles of target. Armed with an H-bomb, this was the same as a direct hit. The submarine-launched rockets would drop at a speed of 3,500 miles an hour. Interception was next to impossible.

Katharine guessed, conservatively, that the Russian stockpile of H-bombs stood at three hundred and the annual production had been stepped up to one hundred. A few of these bombs, designed to contaminate vast inland areas, might be rigged with U-238 or cobalt casing, although this seemed as unnecessary as poisoning elephant-gun bullets to shoot mice. The nominal, ten-megaton bomb would sink Manhattan Island, kill almost everyone in the other boroughs by blast and heat alone, and spread a radioactive cloud that would fall over an area of seven thousand square miles down wind. Rigged with U-238, the fallout area would be as big as the state of Pennsylvania, and perhaps uninhabitable for several years.

All vital coastal cities and such inland centers as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, Youngstown, and Bethlehem would be targets for the submarines. Katharine read:

“Because of the overriding importance of destroying the New York area—the largest financial, communications, population, and industrial complex in the world—special means can be used. In addition to submarines assigned, two seagoing tugs will put in through The Narrows a few hours before Zero. One will find a berth between Canal and 20th streets, North River. The other will dock between the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges. Each of these ships will carry an H-bomb, with time fuse, in its hold. Crews will be considered expendable. If the Red Navy considers this method will not in any way compromise the security of the whole plan, it can also be used on such first priority targets as Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Norfolk.”

The forecast estimated that the attack from the sea would kill forty million Americans, of whom thirty million would die in the first six hours.

But this was by no means all. So long as SAC existed, ready to retaliate from bases ringing the Soviet Union, the Kremlin still couldn’t win. So except for two wings assigned to hit Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Denver, St. Louis, Kansas City, and a few other inland centers, the whole strength of the Red Air Force was to be thrown against SAC bases the world over.

Jesse Price had made the estimate of the potentialities of Aviatsiva Dalnevo Deystviva, which he called SUSAC, the Air Force contraction for Soviet Union Strategic Air Command. Its principal weapon was the T-37, nicknamed Bison, an intercontinental bomber first displayed at the 1954 May Day celebration in Moscow. The T-37 was larger, and perhaps faster, than the B-47. It could carry the load of a B-52. But Major Price doubted that it possessed the electronic defensive gear of the B-99. He believed SUSAC had replaced all its obsolete, propeller-driven T-4’s with the T-37. Since the Russians had possessed twelve hundred T-4’s, it was safe to assume they would have at least an equal number of T-37’s.

The two wings assigned to hit Middle America would not cross the Arctic and approach the DEW line—the Distant Early Warning radar and interceptor net stretching from Alaska to Greenland—until after the strike from the sea. Thus the Air Defense Command would not be alerted until the instant of the main blow. The Air Defense Command, on which almost all hope of repelling nuclear attack now centered, was dispersed to protect the whole country. In the hours of shock and confusion following obliteration of the coastal cities, it would be called upon to defend the Midwest against concentrated attack. Price predicted that at least ten enemy bombers would get through. Ten bombers delivered to the proper targets would paralyze and poison the solar plexus of the nation.

Simmons, at the end of the long table, head bent, was touching a pencil to his pad, arranging his thoughts, as he had been taught, into a precise parade. He saw that the others waited for him to speak. “You’ve all read the forecast in this form, which I hope will be final,” he said. “Do you have any reservations?”

Commander Batt rose. Most of the others remained in their seats while talking, but Batt was accustomed to thinking, and speaking, on his feet. Since boyhood, Batt had been questioned on serious subjects by admirals, and when you spoke to an admiral you stood up, respectfully. Batt, a taut, neatly made man, was third generation Navy. His boyhood heroes had been Farragut and John Paul Jones and Decatur instead of Dick Tracy or Tom Swift. He had absorbed Mahan while still at Macdonough School and graduated from the Academy in 41, close to the top of his class. He finished flight training just too late for Midway, but in plenty of time for Santa Cruz and a dozen battles that followed. By the end of the war he had reached a conclusion, not novel but still unacceptable to most of his superiors, that the air was the dominant ocean. It was an ocean without bounds or shoals and Mahan’s theories could apply to the sky. Yet he remained all Navy, and he always tried to fit the Navy into the ever-shifting picture of a future war. He had been one of the first to advocate the use of carriers as mobile bases for strategic air war, had written an essay on the subject for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, and had seen his arguments adopted by his seniors. “I don’t want you to mistake me,” he began. “I like our plan, and yet—”

Jesse Price grinned. “Still worried about how to get your subs across?”

“No. It’s not that. At first I was skeptical about moving fifty to seventy-five submarines across the North Atlantic without their being spotted. But I kept thinking of Pearl Harbor and how the Japs got six carriers and a supporting fleet to within two hundred miles of Oahu with no sweat. And I thought of how much bigger a carrier is than a snorkel and periscope. So, as you can see in the plan, I staged most of the subs in the White Sea and at Murmansk. They slip through the Denmark Straits and come down from the north, keeping out of shipping lanes. If they started in mid-winter, say about now, when the weather was bad and trans-Atlantic traffic at a minimum, there wouldn’t be much chance of detection. A smaller flotilla sneaks out of the Baltic. They’ll be the ones bound for our Gulf coast. All of them can do most of their cruising on the surface, keep their radar going, and duck long before anything can see them. Even if one of two were spotted on our side of the ocean it would hardly be a casus belli.”

“Matter of fact,” said Major Price, “it’s happened a few times already without anybody pushing the panic button. And we’ve had a lot of snooper planes over Greenland and Alaska. More than normal. Maybe testing our radar net. Maybe just letting us get used to them.”

“Right,” said Batt. “Anyway, these subs don’t have to enter our territorial waters until their final run in for their targets. At dusk they can be two hundred miles offshore, and two hundred feet down, and at first light, D-Day, be in firing position without ever having shown themselves.”

“Machiavelli, junior,” Katharine said.

“However,” Batt continued, smiling, “I still have some reservations about whether they can nail the Forrestal and our other big carriers. I’m afraid they won’t have much trouble knocking out the Sixth Fleet, in the Med. They have agents strung all the way from Gib to Stamboul, so they know the approximate location of Sixth Fleet carriers almost from day to day. The Mediterranean, after all, is narrow waters. Dangerous. But a task force in the Atlantic is an entirely different matter. Its location can be shifted six hundred miles every twenty-four hours.”

Simmons said, “Assuming that the Forrestal and two or three other big carriers were loose on the high seas, would that alone deter the Russians?”

“A carrier bomber can tote the same bomb as the B-Nine-Nine,” Batt said. “But they don’t have the range. Carrier planes can’t get to their heartland. Nor do they have the altitude and defensive equipment of the Ninety-Nine. They are intended to complement SAC, not replace it.”

“Haven’t you answered your own question?”

“I guess I have,” Commander Batt admitted, and sat down.

“Anyone else?” asked Simmons.

Jesse Price arranged his pipes in a row and said, “Me. Understand, I like this plan. It is feasible and practical and well within the Russian capabilities. It has unexpected elements of strength, such as leaving the major concentrations of our fighter and anti-aircraft defense strictly alone, immobilized while the blitz is going on. But the plan doesn’t contemplate the destruction of all of SAC. Our bases in England—and I’ll include the RAF strategic bombing bases along with ours—are in range of the Russian fighter-bombers and probably of the Baltic rocket sites. Scratch our British bases. I think we can also scratch our island bases in the Pacific. They’re sitting ducks for submarine-launched missiles. Maybe SUSAC will have trouble knocking out our fields in North Africa and Turkey, but I doubt it. The only thing that stumps me are the bases in our southern and southwest states. They’re just about as far as you can get from the U.S.S.R. Missiles from submarines may kill the ones close to big cities, but the enemy can’t hope to get them all. If only a few survive, the Russians win but they lose.”

Simmons looked at Felix Fromburg and asked a question, “Could SAC be taken out of the play by sabotage?”

The FBI man’s lips pursed as if to taste the words before he permitted them to leave his mouth. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t believe SAC can be successfully sabotaged. Security on SAC bases is more rigid than on any installations in the country, including the AEC and the U.S. Mint. It would have to be an inside job, and that I cannot imagine.”

“Well,” said Simmons, “I say thank God for SAC.”

The only telephone instrument in the conference room, a “hot line” from the Pentagon switchboard for matters urgent and official, rang. Simmons answered it, handed it to Price, saying, “For you, Major.”

Price spoke his name into the phone, listened, said, “Thank you, Maude,” and hung up. Two small canyons appeared in his forehead above the hawk-beak nose, and his single eye narrowed. He turned to his colleagues and said, “Speaking of SAC, two B-Nine-Nines are missing. Vanished. Lost in the Gulf, like the one in November. That was my secretary, up in Air Force.”

Sometimes, as now, Jess looked positively forbidding, Katharine Hume thought. She said, “Well?”

“It could be collision,” said Price, “or navigation snafu.”

They were all silent, thinking. Katharine said it, glancing at Felix Fromburg, “Or sabotage?”

“Or sabotage,” Fromburg acknowledged. “I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. I just said I couldn’t conceive of it, which may only mean that I don’t have Katy’s imagination.

“No use getting excited until we know,” Price said. He still frowned.

“I’m excited,” said Katharine. “It’s my Air Force, too. I’ve got a brother in it. On a SAC base in the Midlands.”

“I think we should get this excited,” said Simmons. “I think we should get this forecast out as quickly as we can. If everyone is agreeable, I’ll turn it over to General Clumb, for distribution, right after the meeting.”

“Does he have to see it?” Katharine asked. Clumb was not one of her favorite generals. Clumb had definite views on the role of women in the military establishment, which he had expressed, publicly and often. She, in turn, had quoted to him Clemenceau’s opinion that wars were far too important to be left in the hands of generals.

“Yes, he has to see it,” said Simmons. “We operate under the aegis of his section, and the forecast has to go through channels, like everything else. Another thing—let’s try to answer, ‘When?’ Oh, we may be way off, but I think it’s up to us to try. Let’s scrape up everything pertinent in our own departments, and be back here at eight tomorrow.”

“Eight!” said Raoul Walback. “Tomorrow?” He had been invited to play golf at Burning Tree that afternoon. He had intended to ask Katy to go dancing that evening. That was out, too. She would be communing with whatever oracles dwelt behind the blank white marble of the AEC, and he would be racing around the CIA’s haphazard cluster of old buildings walled off in Foggy Bottom, a highly secret compound known to its inmates as the “campus.” And the routine of the Walback household provided for breakfast at eight-thirty, and Raoul enjoyed his regularity.

“Eight,” said Simmons. 3

The news of the missing B-99’s travelled more swiftly to the Pentagon in Washington than to the room of Airman 2/c Stanley Smith in Barracks 37, only a mile from Hibiscus Operations. Hibiscus was the newest of the super-bases constructed under the emergency budget. It covered an area of twenty-two square miles, enclosed by maximum security fencing, floodlit in the darkness hours. Around the perimeter, at intervals of five hundred yards, bulked concrete flak towers mounting the rapid-fire 75-millimeter Skysweepers, or smaller platforms with heavy machine guns. An elf couldn’t sneak into Hibiscus without a pass from the commanding general.

Since one of the aims of SAC was to encourage re-enlistment, thus maintaining its skilled cadres of mechanics, technicians, and fliers, much thought and expense had been devoted to the comfort and happiness of the airmen. Hibiscus did not look like a military installation, but like a pastel-hued development freshly created in the tourist belt. Its theaters, clubs, and public rooms were air-conditioned. It had seven swimming pools, a golf course, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. Flame vine and bougainvillea softened the stark outlines of its ammunition dumps and restricted areas. Palms flanked the streets. Azalea beds and clumps of camellias were in their second year of growth and flower. Banks of hibiscus and gardenias shielded the barracks. True, this town also possessed a gray factory district composed of enormous shops and hangars, and an area forbidden to most of its 4,500 inhabitants—the flight line. On the flight line customarily rested between ninety and a hundred and twenty B-99’s, their wings drooping with tons of fuel.

Barracks 37 did not resemble a barracks at all. It could have been an airy dormitory at the University of Miami, or an apartment house of small efficiency units at any one of a hundred new Florida subdivisions. Most of the men in Barracks 37, like Stanley Smith, were graduates of the Cooks and Bakers School and were rated as Food Service Helpers. They could not advance far in grade, and yet Barracks 37 was one of the most comfortable and coolest buildings at Hibiscus. The Air Force recognized the importance of its cooks, for it regarded the stomachs of its fliers with solicitude. If indigestion drops an infantryman in combat, the others in his fire team simply close ranks and assume his duty. Indigestion to a pilot or radarman at 55,000 feet can wreck a mission, or lose a $2,000,000 piece of equipment plus two hydrogen bombs. Conceivably, a stomachache could spare Moscow.

Airman Smith’s duties began at midnight and ended at eight in the morning, five days a week. He had asked for these odd hours and never requested a change. Smith was one of the quietest and oldest men in Barracks 37. Also, he was popular. He always had plenty of money, which was to be expected since he was one of the best poker players among the cooks, and never went out on tears and threw his dough around. It was known that he had a girl in Orlando, a doll. He was seen, sometimes, driving her car. He had Fridays and Saturdays off, choice days. A man who worked the midnight shift could pick his days. He was entitled to it. Smith never talked much about himself, or his girl. He was a solid man, and would surely make sergeant in a hurry.

On this Monday Airman Smith was awakened at two in the afternoon by his roommate, Phil Cusack, who was still young enough to be troubled by acne. Cusack came from Morgantown, West Virginia. His father had been a miner and he would have been a miner also had it not been for the Air Force. Cusack had never lived so well, and so clean, before. He had no plans beyond the Air Force, except that he never wanted to go back to West Virginia.

Smith was just stirring out of sleep when Cusack opened the door and said, his voice unnaturally high, “Hey Stan!” Usually, Cusack was careful not to disturb Smith until after he had shaved, because his roommate was grumpy when first awakened.

Smith rolled over on his back and opened his eyes. “Yeah?”

“Hell out on the flight line. Two more Ninety-Nines are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Twenty minutes out on this morning’s mission, and then no radio contact. Like they kept on climbing right into the sky. You ought to hear the crews at lunch. Ape sweat.”

“Too bad,” said Smith.

“Fourteen guys gone. Glad I’m fryin’, not flyin’.”

Smith swung his legs out of bed and stretched. It had been so easy. He said, “Cusack, how about trotting downstairs and getting me a cold Coke?”

“Sure,” Cusack said, and left.

Smith shucked his pajama top and turned on the radio and shaved. Three scragged and he could get two more with the materiel he had on hand. Then he’d have to drive up to that beach between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine for resupply. His instructions were to start on the third Monday of December, and keep going. He was carrying out his orders. There had been no change except for the test requested the month before.

Four weeks ago he had received a letter from Robert Gumol, president of the First National Bank of Upper Hyannis, Pennsylvania. The letter had been cagily composed, in case it should fall into the hands of the wrong Stanley Smith, or Hibiscus Base mail was being monitored. “If you are the Stanley Smith who has had some experience with Five-Star Electric,” the letter said, “please telephone me concerning a matter that may be of some benefit to you.”

That evening Smith had called Gumol from a pay booth in Orlando. Three days later he was in Upper Hyannis on a seventy-two-hour pass. He had been hoarding his leave for such an eventuality.

Gumol turned out to be a short, heavy-shouldered man, thick through the middle, probably in his late fifties, with the opaque china-blue eyes of a week-old baby, uneven dark splotches marring his pink skin. For a few minutes they chatted about the Florida climate, and other trivialities, in the office of the bank, feeling each other out, and then Gumol had said, “Now, concerning your mission—”

“Everything seems to be going very well,” said Smith.

“How many others came over with you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Yes, I know.”

Stanley Smith understood that Gumol was just making very sure of his identity, and he said, “Three.”

“Right. Well, two of the others have been shifted around a good deal, and I haven’t heard a word from the third. That’s why I decided to call on you. The home office sent me word that it wants a test. On or about November fifteenth. If the test goes well, you are to continue as before.”

“That all?”

“That’s all the message.”

“Very well. I understand.”

“You can do it?”

“Certainly.” Smith hesitated and added, “I wonder why they want a test?”

Gumol squirmed in his chair and Smith noticed how short and inadequate his legs were, for his heft. When Gumol leaned back in the chair his feet did not quite touch the gray carpet. “To tell you the truth,” Gumol said, “I don’t exactly know what you’re going to do. I wish I did know. If something big is going to happen, they ought to give me time to make plans. They ought to let me know. Do you think anything big—I mean really big—is contemplated?”

“All I know is what I’m supposed to do. I don’t ask questions.”

“Now, don’t misunderstand me,” Gumol said. “I don’t want to know your job. Far from it. I was just thinking of something bigger than any one man, or four men, can do, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” said Smith, “but I don’t have the answer.”

“Do you by any chance need extra money?” asked Gumol.

Gumol knew very well that Smith would have asked for money, had he needed it. So Smith understood, correctly, that this was an offer of money in exchange for information. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. He wanted to ask the location of his roommates from Little Chicago, and the identity of the one from whom nothing had been heard. He did not think it politic to do so.

Gumol said, “Well, whatever you’re up to, good luck. I expect I’ll be able to guess on the fifteenth.”

Smith smiled and said, “Yes, I expect you will.”

And he had flown back to Florida.

Now that the plan was operating successfully, with three planes behind him, he too was wondering whether anything bigger would happen. SAC would find the disappearance of two more 99’s big enough. There had been a flap over the first one, with SI men all over the base. Hibiscus would really be in an uproar this day. He decided that this would be a good night to lay low and do nothing, and let Gregg Palmer, Masters, and Johnson carry the ball. If they were in a position to operate, it would take the heat off Hibiscus. It would spread the risk, and make things simpler for himself, and possibly for the others as well.

Smith asked himself, again, why that test in November? He thought he could guess. Military machines, being civilization’s most massive organizations, were sensitive to the laws of motion and inertia. They cannot move instantly into top speed from a standing start. His experience in the engineers’ regiment had taught him this. A battle did not begin when the artillery opened its barrage and the infantry rose from its positions and charged. A battle began when the bridging was brought up, the roads strengthened to support tanks, the ammunition dumps replenished, and partisans struck in the enemy rear. He could envision a meeting of generals in the Kremlin, and one of them saying: “Before we start this, I’d like to know whether our saboteur teams can perform their mission.” Then the order had gone out to him, via Gumol, and he had succeeded. The great locomotive had not yet begun to move, but the exploit of November had set its wheels to spinning.

Cusack came back with the Coke and Smith said, “What’s at the movies tonight?” 4

Robert Gumol did not guess the exact nature of Smith’s mission when the first B-99 vanished on November 15. He realized, of course, that Smith must have had something to do with the disappearance of the aircraft, but at first he believed that Smith, somehow, must have stolen the bomber and delivered it to his Fatherland.

Gumol changed his mind on the third Monday in December. Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, just as he was about to lock his desk and leave the bank, he heard the news that two more bombers were missing from Hibiscus. All he said to Kirkland, his cashier, was: “Something must be wrong with them.”

Thirty minutes later he joined Al Kauffman, hardware, Lou Stone, real estate, and Pete Kenney, Presto Markets, for golf at the Upper Hyannis Country Club. His game was more abysmal than usual, he couldn’t break 110, and he lost eighteen dollars in the nassau. In the locker room, afterward, he drank two double Scotches. They failed to cheer him. Instead of going directly home from the club he returned to the bank. He sat at his desk and stared at the Rotary Club plaque on the wall, but he was trying to look into the future.

Robert Gumol had come to the United States with his father, a Petrograd banker, at the age of thirteen. The year was 1914, and the world was at war. Everyone thought it would be over in a few months. Unless it was over swiftly, all the warring nations would be bankrupt. No one dreamed that for the next forty-odd years there would be little peace, and that governments would be so constituted that the support of wars would be their principal business. Gumol, senior, was sent to the United States on behalf of the Czar’s treasury, selected for the mission because he spoke fluent English and had married a Scotswoman with banking connections in America. For three years the Gumols lived in hotels in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Papa Gumol bartered Imperial Russian bonds for dollars, for torpedoes, for bandages and gas masks. Most of his colleagues returned to Russia before the revolution, and perished. But Gumol, senior, with prescience of the terror abuilding, managed to remain in America. After the capitulation of Russia he set up a private bank in Philadelphia, specializing in foreign exchange. At first, he did not do well.

In the early days of the revolution, when the ruble was devoid of honor in the court of currencies, and the Bolshevik regime unrecognized in the United States, Papa Gumol was approached by a personal emissary of Lenin. As a result, certain Romanoff crown jewels were converted into dollars, and several shipments of machine tools and tractors reached the port of Odessa in time to bolster the first five-year plan. From that day, the house of Gumol was a chattel of the U.S.S.R., for the jewels had entered the country without benefit of customs.

In 1931 the Gumols built a fifteen-room Tudor home in Upper Hyannis, a suburb close enough to the Main Line to be both respectable and expansible. In 1933 Russia and the United States resumed diplomatic relations. The Gumols, thinking that their usefulness to the Soviets would now end, and their dealings in foreign exchange prove less profitable, bought and reorganized the tottering Upper Hyannis bank. They were wrong about the Soviets. A man from the re-established Russian embassy paid them a visit and informed them that their continued co-operation would be both remunerative and necessary. Dealings with the embassy would remain strictly secret, as had dealings with unofficial agents in the past. After his father died, Robert Gumol continued this relationship.

Gumol’s function was at once that of a post office and a bank. Although he handled large sums not his own, or listed to any depositor, there was never any trouble with the bank examiners. Most of the embassy business was in cash, and for cash safe deposit boxes are adequate. Upon occasion he was called upon to convert various currencies into dollars, these occasions usually following Russian absorption of small countries, or the acquisition of a satellite. Money conversion aroused no suspicion. The Gumols had always specialized in foreign exchange.

He was never approached by American Communists, or Amtorg, or front organizations. His only contacts were with discreet representatives of the embassy, or the consulates, and approved people who looked and acted like Americans, but who he sensed were Russian. All was done with such precision, and so infrequently, that he felt perfectly secure. He felt secure, that is, so long as he pleased his masters. There was never any doubt in his mind what would happen if they suspected the slightest carelessness or deviation.

It was not until the late ’forties, when Stalin’s implacable hatred of America became apparent, that Gumol grew jumpy. By then, of course, it was too late. Had he attempted to excuse himself from his functions, or shown any weakness, he would certainly have been murdered.

Had he sought the protection of the FBI or Treasury Department, and told the whole story, his life might have been saved, true. But he would be ruined and perhaps jailed. His son at Penn and his daughter at Bryn Mawr would have been disgraced, children of a traitor. Now even the alternative of confession was beyond possibility. If implicated in the loss of the bombers, and the death of the crews, he would be executed. Accessory before the fact. He might be lynched.

And everyone in Upper Hyannis would tell you that Robert Gumol was certainly a leading citizen, a member of all the big committees and a director of the Community Chest, and quite a democratic guy, to boot, for a banker. He enjoyed a drink and a good story in the club locker room. He had even been seen at a couple of stag movies. And when he was in New York or Chicago or Havana on a convention he really did the town. Nobody would ever imagine him a second generation spy.

The hell of it was, he thought, that he actually hated communism and socialism and had said so in dozens of speeches, one of them at the bankers’ regional convention in Atlantic City only the week before.

The Commie bastards were crazy, starting something now, just when things seemed to be rocking along so well, and even dealings in their currency were returning to profitable normalcy. He tried to recall everything he knew about the Russians.

Gumol had only met one big-shot Russian commissar in his life. It was in 1930, on a trip abroad with his father. In Berlin they had been introduced to Dmitri Manuilsky, chief of the Comintern, and engaged in a fight to establish Communist rule in the Reichstag. He remembered Manuilsky as a careless, cynical Bohemian, living it up in a Berlin gayly decadent and falsely gay. Manuilsky had been friendly to the Gumols, but contemptuous of Americans generally. Gumol recalled, exactly, one thing Manuilsky had said:

“Today we aren’t strong enough to attack. Our time will come in twenty or thirty years. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep, so we will begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtones and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to co-operate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down we will smash them with our clenched fist.”

And Manuilsky had brought his fist down on the table, and the glasses and bottles had jumped and quivered. What Manuilsky had said, there in Berlin, was now part of history, for he had repeated the same thing in an address at the Lenin School of Political Warfare the next year and Gumol had read it in The Inquirer.

Recalling Manuilsky’s statement, and knowing what he did, knowing that saboteurs had destroyed three of the best bombers the United States had and undoubtedly would get more, it looked like a big war was coming. Such extensive sabotage was surely an act of war, wasn’t it? He asked himself a question, “What’ll war do to me?” The answer was easy. It would kill him.

It would probably kill him right there in Upper Hyannis. He had no illusions that his contacts at the embassy would give him warning. At war’s instant, his usefulness ended. He doubted, knowing their passion for secrecy, that all the Russians themselves, in Washington and the consulates, would get warning. He tried to recall what that Civil Defense man had told Rotary about the H-bomb, after the AEC had come out with the dope on fallout and radiation, but he couldn’t quite get it straight in his mind. Whatever the man had said, Upper Hyannis was much too close to Philadelphia. At best, Gumol’s survival would depend on the vagaries of the wind and whether he was in the bank, or at home, when it happened. If he was in the bank, he might live in the vault for a day or two until the fallout was over. Maybe.

Suppose there was a war and the Americans won? He’d be just as dead. They’d get access to the Russian records, or some of the Russians in Washington would talk, and they’d find out all about him. He hated to think what Americans, after an atomic war, would do to traitors. He said, to himself, aloud, “What in hell’s going to happen to me?”

The glimmer of an idea entered the dark dungeon of his helplessness. If he could only get out of the country! If he could get out of the country for a few weeks he might ride it out. He could see which way the cat jumped. And when war came, whatever happened, he would be rid of her.

He hated her, and he had hated her for years and would have divorced her long ago, in spite of the children, except that he suspected she knew something. You cannot live with a woman for twenty-eight years without her learning almost everything. He had never told her a word, and yet he was quite sure she knew, and would blab if he left her. This ill wind coming might blow him some good. It was a chance—the chance of a lifetime.

This was not the first time he had thought of skipping out and leaving her. His favorite daydream was escape from the conspirational net in which he was gilled, and from his wife. He had considered it very carefully. It was not an easy thing to do. It was very difficult for a man of his prominence to vanish. If there was a public alarm, it would be impossible. A banker, widely known and often photographed, could not change his identity and erase his spoor in a small world, laced with pervasive and efficient communications. Were it not for the Russians, he might flee his wife. There were countries in the world where leaving a wife is no crime, and from which he could not be extradited. Quitting a lifelong job of espionage was quite another matter. In countries where extradition laws are loose, murder also can be casual. Until this moment there had seemed no solution. But now he could take a perfectly logical trip, which would raise no alarm or chase, and he doubted that he would have to come back. If the big thing didn’t happen, nothing was lost. The situation, at worst, would be as before.

Gumol’s daydreams had not been barren. He knew, at least, how to begin.

He picked up his largest brief case from the floor next to the file cabinet, walked out into the bank’s lobby, and chatted for a moment with Liggett, the partially crippled watchman. He went into the basement and unlocked the safe deposit cage. Five of the larger safe deposit boxes were in his own name. He opened one of these and started packing the brief case. He first put in all the thousand dollar bills, two hundred of them, and eight packages of hundreds. Then he crammed in fifties, twenties, and even tens, counting as he worked. When the case was full it contained $385,000. Whatever happened, that should be sufficient.

He returned to his office and thought what he must do next. The thought of returning home, to Ruth, was repugnant. She’d guess something was up. She never missed. He lifted the telephone, dialled his home number, and told the maid he wanted to speak to Mrs. Gumol. When she answered he said, “Ruth, dear, I’ve got to go to Havana right away.”

“Havana!” Her voice, as always, was like an iron file on tin.

“They’re floating a big bond issue down there. I think I can get in on it—get the Pennsylvania distribution.”

“You’ve never done anything like that before.”

“Lots of things haven’t been done before.”

“You’re not still at the bank, are you?”

“Yes, I’ve been talking long distance most of the afternoon.”

“I thought you had a golf date.” In her voice was triumphant suspicion.

“Well, after golf, I mean.”

She said, “Robert, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. Anyway, it’s seven o’clock and we’re going out for dinner.”

So he was a liar! He was furious, but he strained the anger from his voice, and forced himself to speak impersonally, as when turning down a ne’er-do-well’s request for a loan. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go by yourself, Ruth. I’ve got to catch the first plane I can get from Philly.”

“You mean you’re not even coming home to pack?”

“No. I’m not coming home to pack. Only be gone a few days. It’s possible to buy clothes in Havana, you know.”

“But Robert!”

“I’ll wire my address when I get there. Goodbye, Ruth.” He hung up, and leaned back in his chair. He discovered that his hands trembled, and he was breathing heavily. He assured himself that it was excitement, not his heart. Old Doc Blandy had told him to take off weight and cut out golf entirely. Blandy was nuts. Golf was his only recreation, and exercise, and how could a man lose weight by cutting out exercise? What must he do next, now? The bank. That would be simple. A bank didn’t question your motives, call you a liar, or talk back. Not when you owned it, it didn’t. In recent years he had entrusted Gifford, his cashier, with almost all the routine, while he travelled about as much as he could. A man could live elegantly, while travelling, at no cost. He lived on an expense account, and it didn’t even cost the bank anything, really, because of the tax structure. Everything came off the top. Everything, even call girls, if you knew how to squeeze them in under the column headed Entertainment. Gumol penned a note:

“DEAR GIFF—

“Ran into a heart specialist today who advised me to take a rest. Decided to go to Havana for a week or two. When I’m down there I’ll investigate opportunities in Latin-American exchange, so the whole trip can come off the top.” That would sound authentic to Gifford, he thought.

“Told my wife the trip was strictly business because I didn’t want to alarm her. Please see to it that she continues to think so. I will send my address as soon as I get there. Will probably stay at the Nacional, as usual.”

He signed his name and thought of something else. “P.S.,” he wrote. “Let’s keep this in the family. Don’t tell anyone that I’m in Havana.” More than anything else, he was afraid the Russians might suspect he had skipped. If they knew where to find him, they could compel him to return. Or kill him.

Gumol re-read the note. The handwriting was shaky. Perhaps that was just as well. Gifford knew about his slight heart murmur and would think he was really ill. He wasn’t ill at all. He was just a little excited, perhaps a little frightened. If the Russians, or anyone, learned he was leaving the country with all this cash—he patted the brief case and forced himself to think of something else.

There was that girl in Atlantic City. Maybe she’d go for an all-expenses-paid tour of Havana. No, that would be stupid. If he took her to Cuba, he might be hooked with her—forever. Anyway, Havana was alive with women, young and easy. From now on, he was going to live.

Robert Gumol caught a night flight out of Philadelphia and changed in Washington for Havana. He congratulated himself on being the first to foresee what was coming, and to get out from under. Actually, he wasn’t. 5

Katharine Hume spent that afternoon and most of the evening at the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking the answer to “When?” Every day Air Force and Navy planes cruised the upper altitudes between Japan and Alaska, and over the northern rim of Canada and Greenland, trapping samples of air. At seismograph stations circling Russia men watched for a tremor that was not a natural grumbling of the earth. Even the smallest atomic explosion—if any could be called small—could be detected. Its location would be fixed by triangulation, its strength estimated and composition analyzed from radioactive particles carried beyond the bounds of the Soviet Union by a constant ally, the west wind.

In the past year Britain had tested two of its new H-bombs in the frigid and unpeopled waters southwest of Australia. The United States had ignited a twenty-megaton shot at Eniwetok. In Nevada several new anti-aircraft rockets, armed with a core of fissionable material no larger than a golf ball, had been tried out. One such rocket would sponge a whole formation of bombers from the sky. In Russia there had been three nuclear explosions. They were so minor that nobody had bothered to announce them. Russia had tested no more H-bombs. So the intelligence evaluation of the AEC, at that moment, was that the world was comparatively normal. She gathered nothing new. The AEC felt no cause for alarm.

Katharine Hume left the AEC before ten o’clock and walked home through the fog settling over the Potomac basin, head down, wishing she had worn a topcoat, thinking. The world wasn’t normal at all. Each nuclear shot raised the atmosphere’s background radiation a jot. She had access to the latest figures. To her they were frightening, yet she no longer mentioned her fears to her superiors, or checked her computations with her colleagues. Trouble was, she knew she could never produce an unchallengeable paper to offer them. You could prove the deleterious effect of excessive radiation on generations of fruit flies. You could make fairly accurate predictions of the effect on mice if you bred and studied them for years. But people were different. It would be a century or two before all was known of Hiroshima. With people, all you could do was make an informed guess, because often the mutations would not appear for generations.

It was not fashionable or safe to tread in this forbidden area. Once she had been publicly rebuffed by a commissioner, no less, as “a beautiful young woman engrossed in her genes.” Once she had overheard a remark made to Kevin Lane, whom she was dating at the time, by another junior administrator. “I hear,” the other man had said, “that Katy wears a lead chastity belt.” Kevin had laughed at the crudity, and she had never gone out with him again. She suspected that one of the reasons she had been assigned to the Intentions Group was her insistence in pursuing a subject disagreeable to men whose principle raison d’être was the designing and testing of bigger and better bombs. While the AEC admitted her ability, still it was embarrassing to have her around, dropping barbed questions about future generations, if any, into the solemn pools of scientific deliberation. So she had learned to keep silent.

She stopped at the corner delicatessen and bought cottage cheese and herring pickled in cream, and the early edition of the morning paper. She went up to her apartment, undressed, showered, and washed her hair. She put on a pair of men’s broadcloth pajamas, loose and comfortable, and settled down at the coffee table to eat and read. The paper’s double-banner headline said:

NAVY JOINS AIR FORCE

IN HUNT FOR LOST PLANES

She started reading the story. “All Navy and Coast Guard ships south of Norfolk, and in the Gulf, have joined the Air Force in the search for two B-99 bombers of the 519th Wing. . . .”

She shook the paper. It was impossible. It must be a typographical error. Then she remembered, chillingly, that SAC wings were rotated every sixty or ninety days between bases at home and abroad. Her brother was in the 519th.

She forced herself to hunt for names. There were none. She found a paragraph that began: “Names of the fourteen missing airmen were withheld, pending notification of next of kin.”

The paper fell to the floor and she stared at the telephone, waiting for it to ring, begging it to keep its silence. They were very close, she and her brother, Clint. With both her mother and father gone, Clint was all that was left. He was what maintained the Humes as a family. He was, in every sense, a big brother. He had made it possible for her to finish Sarah Lawrence and go on to M.I.T. He had financed her post-graduate year, urged her on to win her doctorate. He had inflated her confidence until she had courage enough to apply for a job with the Atomic Energy Commission. Then he had staked what influence he had, and enlisted the support of friends of their father, to make sure that she was not turned down because of sex or age. Outwardly, he was casual with her, but when all the rest of the world quaked and shifted, he was a rock.

She thought of Clint, while watching the phone. She watched it for perhaps ten minutes before it rang. 6

It is said that the state of the world can be judged by the number of windows illuminated in the Pentagon at night. When lights burn only in the cubicles of the duty officers and in the code rooms and communications centers on the upper floors, then the world is at peace. In time of crisis, such as the beginning of the Korean War, the French agony in Indo-China, and the week when an invasion fleet massed off Formosa, the building is ablaze. On this foggy night more than half the windows, including all the Air Force corridors, signalled their yellow alert. For the first time in years, the United States was uneasy.

Jesse Price had not left the Pentagon since the conference and did not intend to leave at any time during the night and perhaps the following day. This was no hardship. The Pentagon is not an ordinary building. It is a city, walled and roofed. There are all sorts of shops on the ground level and several of its cafeterias operate around the clock. It has facilities for recreation, health, and cleanliness. There are cots in the duty offices and guardrooms, sleeping quarters in the deep shelters underground, and, of course, comfortable couches in the staff reception rooms, and the suites of the civilian hierarchy. It is possible to live in the Pentagon, with all the amenities, indefinitely.

All afternoon and into the evening Jesse Price shuttled between the Pentagon’s cerebral cortex, the habitat of the Joint Chiefs, and his own small office in an Air Force wing on the opposite side of the building, a quarter of a mile away, poking his long, beaked nose into various intelligence centers on four floors. To find out what is going on in the Pentagon, one needs not only a pleasing personality and some rank, but strong legs and a congenital sense of direction, for it is designed like a maze for the confusion of white rats. At nine o’clock Major Price returned to his office, sent his secretary home, and took off his size eleven shoes. His feet were swollen and his long shanks ached, but he had accumulated a number of facts as unrelated as they were disturbing.

The Pentagon is shaped like a spider web, and beyond its physical confines this shape extends along unseen lines of communication, so that the outer fringe of the web touches the far places of the earth—a shack on an ice island in the Arctic, a consulate in Azerbaijan, an observer on the Kurdish frontier, a naval attaché in Stockholm, an agent deep in the Eastern Zone of Germany, a Constellation nicknamed Pregnant Goose, bulging with radomes, flying in lonely darkness close to the North Pole. Something had ticked the web at all these places, and others.

A Russian reconnaissance plane had penetrated the air spaces over Greenland so deeply that interceptors were sent up from Thule. This was not unusual, but at the same time Russian multi-engined jets, very high and very fast, were probing Alaska and the wastes of northern Canada. Radar on Shemya, at the tip of the Aleutians, had picked up what seemed to be a whole squadron of aircraft maneuvering over the Komandorskis. For many months there had been little suspicious activity in the Far North. Now there it was, suddenly.

Major Price stripped off his socks and lifted his feet to his desk and rubbed the itching, corrugated skin. Was all this an accident of sighting? Was it intensified reconnaissance preparatory to an attack? Or was it a diversion, intended to focus the attention of the Pentagon on the northern strands of its web, and on the air? There was no sense in guessing.

Colonel Cragey and Steve Batt also had collected news, equally puzzling. The Intentions of the Enemy Group used its conference room only for the exchange of ideas and the search for conclusions. The physical preparation of its forecasts went on in another room equipped for the storage of classified documents, its phones monitored, its stenographers and researchers under the jurisdiction of the Top Secret Controllers. It was in this second room that Price had run into Cragey and Batt, and they had swapped information.

The Seventh Fleet, maintaining its vigil over Formosa, detected a shift in military strength in China. For a month there had been a buildup of junks and naval craft in the Chinese coastal waters. This had suddenly ceased. At the same time a squadron of medium jet bombers, believed manned by Russians, had vanished from Chinese coastal air bases.

“That’s strange enough,” Batt had said, “but hear this. We’ve lost about thirty Russian submarines. No radio intercepts. Same thing happened before Pearl Harbor, but that time we lost the Japanese carriers. Of course we often lose a flotilla of Russian subs when they’re in port and don’t send. Still, I’m worried, even if ONI isn’t.”

Navy had another worry. The carrier Forrestal, at sea with a destroyer screen west of Scapa Flow, reported it was being shadowed by a bogey. When the Forrestal catapulted interceptors, the bogey drifted away at great speed, indicating that it too was equipped with powerful radar and had spotted the launch. But the bogey could have been simply a fast trans-Atlantic jet airliner, minding its own business, so the matter was not pegged as serious.

Cragey had contributed a G-2 summary. What was going on in Europe made even less sense than what had occurred in China. All along the Iron Curtain frontiers, Russian armor was pulling back from the borders. This was exactly the reverse of Red Army maneuvers in past times of tension. But who could say that this was a time of tension, except for the loss of the B-99’s, and the extraordinary air activity in the North? There had been no disturbing diplomatic incidents, or unusual political friction.

Price was pulling on his socks and shoes when the phone rang. It was General Keatton’s office. The general was holding a meeting, right away, on the B-99’s. He thought perhaps Major Price would like to attend.

Price said, “I’ll be right down.” This was what he had been waiting for—Keatton’s evaluation of the B-99 business. He finished tying his laces and started on the long hike north, leg muscles protesting and toes burning. He was no infantryman. 7

The relationship of General Keatton to Jesse Price was that of a father to a son—except that Price was only one of a hundred sons, each receiving, consequently, a tiny fraction of personal attention. Yet it was enough. It was a bond that held the devotees of the Air Force together, close as an Indian tribe that initiates its youth in pain and blood. The careful selection of protégés dated to the days of Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold, when the Air Force was fighting for its separate existence, and perhaps its life, against enemies domestic rather than foreign. When Hap Arnold found a young man dedicated to flight, his eyes on the stars and his feet on the ground, he made him his son, and the tradition had continued.

Jesse Price was chosen for this brotherhood after Keatton came to Italy in the summer of 1944 as a deputy commander of Fifteenth Air Force. Price, then a lieutenant in his early twenties, flying a lumbering B-24, had qualified himself by a single act, and the correct answer to a single question. When his squadron leader was shot out of the sky by an 88, Price had led the formation on to bomb the primary target, a refinery near Wiener Neustadt. Because of foul weather, the Fifteenth had radioed in flight permission to all groups to seek easier, secondary targets, and everyone else had. While he was pinning a star on Price, the general asked: “What made you go for the primary, son?”

The gawky lieutenant (you could tell he was still growing because his wrists extended two inches beyond the sleeves of his best jacket) had been embarrassed as an adolescent called upon for public recital of poetry. Finally he said, “Sir, I kept thinking that if we didn’t do it that day, we’d have to go back again.” He hesitated and went on. “And I don’t want to die for nothing. I don’t want to die for Rosenheim or Klagenfurt. If I get it, I want it to be for something big, like Wiener Neustadt.”

This answer had pleased Keatton, who had marked Price for the future. Just so other generals in other lands marked young officers for exceptional deeds, such as twice, with coolness and guile, blowing up German pillboxes on the eastern approaches to Berlin.

Jesse Price’s career would have ended after his misfortune over Korea except that Keatton had noted his name on the casualty lists. Instead of being invalided out of the Air Force after his release from the hospital in Japan, Price received orders to Washington. This particular major, Keatton had decided, even though deprived of an eye, still had spirit and a logical mind. The thing to do was train that mind. Send him to the National War College, send him to Russia, send him back to sop up more lore of the Far East. Assign him to the Intentions Group—Keatton called it “the unholy seven,” defended its functions, and was amused rather than angered when it blundered—and let him exercise his imagination. The Air Force would use this boy for the war of wits, the war of the future.

When Price walked into Keatton’s inner office he saw that he was junior in rank to all there. The chairs drawn up to the general’s desk were occupied by other generals of three or two stars. Brigadiers stood. Inconspicuous against the wall were two lieutenant-colonels, no older than himself. He would have been a light colonel, also, except for his wound. Promotion came quickly to men commanding squadrons, slowly to men in hospital or flying a desk, out of sight and out of mind abroad. He found a slice of wall against which to lean beside Polk and Rankin, the light colonels.

The general was listening to the other generals. The general sat back in his chair, relaxed, with the flags of his country and his rank staffed behind him, his delicate, wrinkled hands patting the spot where his jacket stretched. The general was slight, and probably not more than five pounds overweight, but the excess was all in one place. His hair was white and sparse, his brows white and heavy, his eyes deep blue like the blue in the flags, his mouth straight, his teeth his own and fine.

The talk, at this point, was technical. It concerned tons of fuel, wing stress factors, thickness of aluminum skin, pounds of pressure per square inch, and the inability of the human body to withstand a blowout at high altitudes, where the blood itself boils.

General Keatton spoke. “Is there any chance these two aircraft could have come together?”

A major-general, the A-3, Operations, held up a yellow sheet of teletype paper. “No, sir. I don’t think it’s possible. Here’s the tower log, sent in from Hibiscus. These two planes were to fly to Corpus Christi for a rendezvous with tankers, then swing north for a target run on Omaha at fifty thousand, then return to base. A milk run. Takeoff time for the first was oh-eight-twenty-seven. Takeoff of the second was four minutes later. They maintained the same speed and rate of climb, and, we can assume, about the same interval. At five hundred knots, they were about twenty miles apart. Weather, CAVU. They weren’t close enough together to see each other, but if they had got close enough, they certainly would have.”

“So mid-air collision is ruled out,” said Keatton. “Kidnapping is out too. I’ll admit that I considered the possibility that the enemy could have snatched that first one last month. But he can’t kidnap three B-Nine-Nines. Not from one base he can’t. Not with half my SI teams at Hibiscus. Not with Lundstrom there, eating out the Air Police. I’ll bet a red ant couldn’t have crawled out on the Hibiscus flight line this morning.” The general leaned forward, lifted his locked hands and brought them down on the bare, polished desktop, gently. “Know where that leaves us, gentlemen?”

They all allowed him to say.

“Structural failure or treason!”

He waited for them to absorb the word.

“I use the word treason rather than sabotage because if it was sabotage it had to be done by people in uniform, which makes it treason. It had to be treason within the Air Force.”

Jesse Price drew in his breath and held it. Neither he, nor anyone else in the room, stirred. They waited for Keatton’s next words.

“I hardly know which is worse, basic structural failure or treason. I hope it is only treason.”

Jesse thought he was hearing wrong, or that Keatton had got his phrases twisted, but the general continued:

“If it is treason it is probably localized to one base, and certainly we cannot lose too many planes. If it is structural failure it means every B-Nine-Nine on every base we own.”

Now Price understood the general’s reasoning, and the fear that had been in the back of his mind since the morning’s conference, when his secretary first phoned him the news, began to take form, as a shapeless dark cloud whirls itself into the deadly funnel of a tornado. If it was structural failure, Keatton would have to ground the B-99, which meant grounding all heavy bombers of SAC. There could be no other choice. Keatton would be called upon to obliterate, by a single order, the weapon of massive retaliation, the weapon that had maintained the peace of the world. If there was a weakness in the 99, Keatton could not send up his men in it until the weakness was ferreted out and corrected. The people wouldn’t stand for it.

The general spoke again. “I keep thinking of the British Comets—you remember—the first jet airliners. Two of them blew, one after the other, over the Med. Early in ’fifty-four, if I remember correctly. It was structure failure—metal fatigue. Take a piece of tin and bend it in your fingers, back and forth, back and forth.” The general’s frail fingers bent an imaginary piece of metal. “Finally, it snaps. It took the British months to find out where, and why. Meanwhile, all Comets were grounded.”

An elderly lieutenant-general, his face gray with overwork or poor health, spoke. He was Chief, Matériel Command, and he sat at Keatton’s elbow. “It can’t happen to the B-Nine-Nine,” he said. “We wrung them out for years before the first wing was formed. They don’t have bugs any more. They’re sturdy as the Four-Sevens. Sturdier, I think. And, sir, these three aircraft apparently were lost at between twenty and thirty thousand feet, long before they reached optimum altitude. They’ve bombed from sixty-five thousand. We’ve never had a pressure failure. The Nine-Nine is tight!”

Lieutenant-colonel Polk, standing beside Price, could not restrain himself. “All from that one base, too, sir!”

“I realize that,” said the general, “but we can’t take any chances. We’ve got a hundred tech reps and factory men flying to Hibiscus tonight. Suppose they do find structural failure? Where are we? We’re without a strategic air force. Begging pardon of the Navy, we’ve had it. So we’ve got to prepare a reserve SAC to take over. We’ve got two thousand Fifty-Twos and Forty-Sevens mothballed, lined up on every desert in Arizona. How long will it take to bust ’em out?”

They all looked at the elderly lieutenant-general, whose name Price could not recall, for he was one of those plodding rear echelon generals, whose name never appeared on orders or in Time or Newsweek, who kept the airplanes flying. “On a crash program,” said the lieutenant-general, “using everything I’ve got and some things I haven’t got but I’ll get, I can have a hundred Forty-Sevens flyable in a week, two hundred more and two hundred Fifty-Twos flyable in two weeks, and the whole reserve fleet unzipped in sixty to eighty days.”

“Well, get going on it. Not tomorrow morning. Now.”

“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant-general. He got out of his chair, with definite physical effort, and left the room. Jesse Price thought, I’d hate to be in that old man’s shoes. A gallant old man, a tired old man with troubles he had not brought to the meeting.

“So I guess that wraps it up for tonight,” said the general. “I don’t know of anything else we can do.” He stood up, and the meeting was over, and those of lower rank, that is, brigadiers and under, began to file out. Jesse stayed, hoping that the knot of brass around the desk would part and disperse. He wanted to be alone with Keatton for just thirty seconds. He wanted to urge Keatton to read the Intentions Group’s forecast. Then he realized how silly it would sound, at that moment. The general had solid troubles aplenty. He had no time to read a Russian war plan, hypothetical and nebulous, really no more than fantasy. And yet—

Lieutenant-colonel Polk came back into the general’s office and touched Price’s elbow. “The list is just now coming through,” he said. “Want to see it?”

They walked together through the reception room and into the message center annex where a row of teletype printers clattered out dispatches, in clear, from the commands. Price watched the names march out in neat oblong groups, just like flight assignments for the next morning’s mission, except that for these names there were no more mornings. Price read: “LT.COL.HOWARD DINK (PILOT).” He said aloud, “Dinky!”

“Know him?” asked Polk.

“Yes. Italy.” This was all he said, in no way indicative of all he felt, the quick, sick emptiness, as if part of his own life had been removed. For six months their cots had been side by side in the same faded brown tent. Every morning they swung their feet into the same cold mud, oozing out from under the duckboards. They played poker across the same blanket, shared their combat whisky ration, took their leave together in Bari, tried to make the same girls, and on mission after mission flew in the same seven-plane box and faced the same death, which makes men brothers.

“Too bad. Know any of the others?”

Jesse forced himself to read the other names. “No.” He turned away, although he knew he was being impolite, and trudged back towards his own office.

He sat down at the desk and tried hard not to think about Dinky.

Wasn’t there someone else he knew in the 519th? The wing was just back from England. Somebody’s brother was in the 519th. Of course, Katy’s! Thank God the name Hume wasn’t on the list too.

Whenever Jesse Price thought of Katy he thought of the round curve of her thigh next to his at the conference table, of her smooth fingers and changeable eyes, and of his desire and need for her. He did not think of it as love, for when you admit you love a woman, even in your secret mind, you have committed yourself. As a consequence, you must try to possess her, and thus expose yourself to failure and rebuff. This was a risk he preferred not to take. He was sensate of his liabilities, his seared face, the insecurity of being a one-eyed major, his small hope of promotion or advancement in the future. Also, he was pretty sure there was some sort of a liaison between Katy and Raoul, and he was not a poacher. So long as he was not in love with Katy he could enjoy the warmth of her company, the stimulus of her intellect, and the pride of having her at his side in public places, which he recognized as salve to his ego. He had never been one for platonic friendships, but now he was fearful of staking what he had for something he probably could not attain. They dined together several times each week, and sometimes he took her dancing or to a movie or the ballet. On two Saturdays they had flown to New York together to see a show, but they had returned on the midnight plane.

He wondered whether he should call her. She would know, by now, that the missing bombers were out of the 519th and he doubted that the names of the crews had yet been released. In that case she would be very worried. Worry wasn’t the right word. There is no torture like uncertainty.

He dialled her number and she answered instantly, as if she had been sitting by the phone, poised to pounce at its ring. She said, “Yes?” Her voice was strained.

“Katy? Jess.”

“Yes?”

He sensed her fear and phrased his words carefully. “It’s all right, Katy. Everything’s all right. Your brother didn’t go in. He wasn’t on the list.”

He could hear the choked sob. She said, “I was so scared!”

He said, “I still am.”