Forbidden Area

Four

AIRMAN 2/c Stanley Smith was fifteen minutes late reporting for duty on the midnight to 0800 shift at the Officers’ Open Mess, Hibiscus Base, Wednesday. It was unusual for Smith to be late, and Sergeant Ciocci, in charge of five cooks and food handlers, said only, “What held you up, Stan?”

“They took the bus apart at the main gate,” Smith answered. Not only had the Air Police checked the ID cards and leave passes on every man aboard the bus, including the driver, but they had opened every suitcase and parcel.

“It’s rough all over,” said Ciocci. “The way they act out on the line, you’d think somebody was stealing those Nine-Nines. I cut across a hard stand coming from Barracks Thirty-one and the next thing I knew I was flat on my face and a grease monkey was kneeling on my spine and had a forty-five against the back of my head. They didn’t let me up until Captain Kuhn came over from his quarters and identified me. Kuhn will be nasty tomorrow. They had to get him out of the sack.” Captain Kuhn was mess officer.

“I guess they’re nervous,” Smith said.

“They got a right to be nervous,” said Ciocci. “But why should they get nervous at one of their own sergeants? Makes me feel like I’m not wanted in the Air Force.”

Ordinarily the mess hall’s graveyard shift had little to do until the flight line came alive just before dawn. The mess was designed to feed six hundred officers simultaneously, but between midnight and 0500 only two tables, those nearest the kitchen, were set up. Between those hours they usually were called on to feed only Air Police officers coming off duty and pilots and navigators who had made a night crossing from England or Africa. Often there were hours when the mess hall, big as an auditorium, was entirely deserted. In those hours Sergeant Ciocci’s detail played two-bit poker, or sampled the pies and drank coffee and shot the breeze in the kitchen. At 0500 they began sending loaves of bread through the slicers and cooking hundreds of eggs for the early morning rush. One of them, usually Smith, made up the box lunches for the morning missions, under Ciocci’s supervision. The Air Force, always sensitive about what a man put in his stomach during flight, insisted that these lunches be carefully prepared. Each cardboard carton, once filled, was sealed and stamped with time and date. Across the seal, printed in red capitals, was: “THIS LUNCH MUST BE EATEN WITHIN SIX HOURS. THIS IS AN ORDER.” The medics had discovered that food deteriorated rapidly in the rarefied atmosphere of the upper altitudes.

This was no ordinary morning.

A stream of civilians, some in flight coveralls, others in bright sports shirts and slacks, invaded the mess, shepherded by Air Police. Twice as many Air Police as usual seemed to be on night duty. Smith knew that the civilians, most of them, were factory pilots and tech reps and slide-rule artists searching for bugs in the B-99. The other civilians would probably be Special Investigations men. Since most of them ordered dinners, he guessed that they had worked through the night, wringing out the 99’s out of sight and hearing, eight or ten miles up. A Colonel Lundstrom, a tall, blond man with the quiet dignity of assured authority, came in at two-thirty with Major Glick, the Chief Security Officer at Hibiscus. Smith had heard that Lundstrom was a wheel in Washington, and, since Lundstrom ate with Glick, it could be assumed that he was a wheel in security. Smith brought sandwiches for Lundstrom and Glick, and hovered about them with freshly made coffee, but he never heard a word of their conversation. One of the posters on the wall behind Lundstrom read, “The Biggest Gap In Security Is An Open Mouth.” It showed a beefy, garrulous officer yakking to a girl in a booth of a cocktail lounge. Lundstrom in no way resembled the officer in the poster.

At four-thirty there was a flap. Brigadier General Conklin, the base commander, came in with two other generals and a pink-cheeked captain, an aide. One of the generals was built like a barrel and was smoking a cigar. Smith recognized this three-star general as the Commander of SAC, by legend a hard character incapable of smiling, and he was not smiling now. The other general had four stars, and Smith knew he must be Keatton, the Air Force Chief-of-Staff. Both generals appeared rested and were cleanly shaven, and Smith guessed that they had been napping on a plane, probably a plush super-Connie with leather lounging chairs, office, and berths, and had shaved before landing. Conklin was unshaven and weary. He had not slept, except to drop his head on his desk for a few minutes when his eyes would no longer remain open, since his two B-99’s of the 519th Wing vanished Monday.

Such heavy brass had never been seen on the graveyard shift before, but Sergeant Ciocci knew what to do, although he was a bit flustered as to whom to address, the base commander or the commander of the whole damn’ Air Force. He compromised by bracing rigidly at attention, and speaking towards a point between them. “Sir, I guess you’ll want to eat in the Sky Room. I’ll have it set up right away, sir.” The Sky Room was a private dining alcove, for chicken colonels and general officers only, partitioned off from the mess hall.

“No, we’ll eat right here,” Keatton said. The generals and the aide sat down around the end of Table No. 2 and ordered; two scrambled, two sunny side up. Smith hurried into the kitchen and brought coffee. They would want coffee while waiting for their eggs and toast. It was a big flap, but he and Ciocci could handle it.

While they ate, Smith’s training compelled him to linger, attentively, close to the table. The generals would think him alert, as he was. He overheard some talk of compression blowouts which meant nothing to him. Once Keatton, tapping his spoon on the table, said, “I would swear it was sabotage if it wasn’t for that one yesterday out of Lake Charles.” To Smith, the remark was informative, and a pleasant relief.

The generals finished a second cup of coffee, lighted cigarettes, and rose. Keatton called Ciocci and said, “Sergeant, that was a good breakfast. Thanks for the fast service.”

After they were gone Ciocci told Smith, “Say, he’s a right guy, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” said Smith. “He looks human.” Except for a few glimpses of Conklin driving or walking around the base, these were the first American generals he had ever seen. He had never heard a Russian general or marshal thank a mess sergeant, who after all was nothing more than a servant, for anything, or even nod to one. Camaraderie between officers and men, he had been taught, led to slovenly discipline. On the base, he noted, they even played baseball and swam together. He had set this down as a weakness in the American military system.

At five o’clock Operations phoned. Twenty-four flight lunches would be required for the morning missions. Since each B-99 carried four officers, as well as three enlisted men, that meant six planes were going out. The enlisted men would receive an identical flight lunch from the airmen’s mess, except they wouldn’t have to pay. Officers paid forty cents a meal. It didn’t matter whether they sat down to a prime steak in the Open Mess or bought a carton with sandwiches to take into the air. It was always forty cents.

Smith, without being bidden, began to slice meat and cheese for the sandwiches. After a few minutes Ciocci joined him and started to pack, seal, and stamp the cartons. Each carton contained two sandwiches, an orange or apple, half-pint container of milk, and a slice of pie or cake.

At six o’clock a lieutenant and two sergeants, all with sidearms hooked to their belts, arrived to pick up the cartons. The lieutenant produced mess chits in payment, and counted the cartons that his sergeants carried to their jeep.

“No coffee?” Smith asked. He kept a dozen quart thermos bottles filled on a rack alongside the big urns.

The lieutenant glanced at his list and said, “No coffee.”

“Coffee’s free,” Smith reminded him.

“Well, I’ll take a jug for myself and the gang in the security shack.”

Smith lifted a thermos from the rack and handed it to him.

From then until eight, business was brisk. At eight the fresh kitchen crew took over. The bulk of the breakfasts would be served between eight and nine.

Smith tucked two thermos bottles under his arm and started back for Barracks 37 and sleep. He wondered whether his colleague at Lake Charles had been more successful than he, that morning. A few steps outside the mess hall he encountered Captain Kuhn. As Ciocci had predicted, Kuhn looked sulky. “Where are you taking that coffee, Smith?” the captain demanded.

“Over to the boys in Thirty-seven,” Smith said. He was surprised. He had been carrying a thermos or two back to the barracks every morning for months. Kitchen duty held little reward of rank or pay, but it was understood that the men who worked in the mess halls enjoyed certain prerogatives, such as eating all they wanted, when they wanted, and toting snacks to their barracks.

“Oh, okay,” said Kuhn. He understood this, too.

Smith walked on, reflecting on the constant danger, and his luck. Suppose Kuhn had ordered him to return the bottles to the mess hall? There could have been trouble, everything might have got screwed up. He had had only one other close call, on the day of the toothache.

It had been during basic training, and one of his back teeth hurt and his jaw was swollen, and he had gone to the post dentist, a captain, chubby and in his forties, like Kuhn. The captain, after finding a cavity festering under the gum line, treating and filling it, had taken a look at his other teeth and spotted the steel incisor.

“Say, that’s funny,” he’d said.

Smith, with his mouth pried wide, couldn’t ask what was funny.

“Didn’t know anybody in this country stuck stainless steel into a man’s mouth,” the dentist said, touching the metal with one of his tools.

Smith had tensed and jumped.

“That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Smith, with the captain’s hand out of his mouth, had enough presence of mind to say, “Yes, sir, it did, a little.”

“I thought only the Russians used stainless steel teeth,” the captain said. “Who put that one in for you?”

“I don’t remember his name. A dentist in Chicago. It was during the war.”

The captain seemed satisfied. “Oh,” he said. “We had all sorts of shortages during the war. And all sorts of substitutes. Guess that was it.”

That night, with a screwdriver and hammer, Smith had smashed out the stainless steel tooth. It showed that no preparations could be too careful, or even careful enough. The little slips could kill you.

When Smith reached his room, Phil Cusack was still asleep. Smith put the thermos bottles in his closet. Cusack wouldn’t disturb them. Cusack didn’t drink coffee, and anyway he understood that Smith didn’t like anything in his closet disturbed. Smith was exceptionally careful about Cusack. 2

As Airman Smith fell asleep, Robert Gumol was waking in his hotel room in Havana. It was a horrid process, accompanied by retching and pain. Gumol had had hangovers before. He had had a beaut, only a few weeks previously, in Atlantic City. But nothing like this. It was so bad that he tried to will himself back into the merciful paralysis of sleep. His condition wouldn’t allow it. He was inordinately thirsty, and his throat burned and was so swollen that he had trouble breathing. His eyes, also, were swollen, and the lids glued together. His lips were numb and puffed, his stomach in noisy turmoil. He knew he could not get back to sleep until he had a drink of water. If he could only get aspirin and water into himself, and keep it down, he might get back to sleep and wake up at some future time with sufficient strength to take a shower. By then he would have the shakes, but if he could only sleep a little longer, and shower, he might be able to hold down a whisky sour, or maybe some kind of an absinthe drink, and get through the morning.

Something else was wrong. Somewhere out of the miasma of the night before something was very definitely wrong and his inner mind told him it would be best not to waken. He stretched out one numbed hand and felt the bed beside him. The señorita was gone. He sat straight up in bed and opened his eyes. The room was empty and so was the bathroom. The last thing he remembered was her fingers on his forehead, softly kneading. Then, some time later, he had heard a man’s voice speaking Spanish, as if far away, and the man’s voice was what was wrong, because no other man should have been in the room.

He got out of bed, lurched to the table in front of the French doors opening on the balcony, and swallowed a tumbler of water. The water in the ice bucket—what a fool he had been to drink champagne on top of rum—was still cold. He put his hands into the bucket and splashed water on his face and felt it roll cold down his swollen naked belly and trembling legs. He shook his head. Where was the brief case? Under the mattress, of course. If it was still under the mattress everything was going to be all right, because money could cure anything, even a hangover. With enough money you couldn’t be too unhappy for too long. He lifted the corner of the mattress. The brief case wasn’t there. He lifted the three other corners. It was gone. With an effort that left him gasping and wet with sweat, he dragged the mattress off the bed. The brief case was still gone. He staggered into the bathroom and threw up.

Had Gumol’s mind been working normally, he would not have taken the action that he now did. He would have written off the $385,000 as the inevitable penalty for allowing lust to black out his thinking processes. He would have caught a plane back to Philadelphia, announced to his wife that the Cuban deal was half completed, raided another safe deposit box, and departed again. All five boxes were loaded, and they were all in his name, and after all he was president of the bank. He could go to Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala—perhaps he should have chosen Guatemala in the first place—almost anywhere. But Gumol’s mind was not only inflamed by the ebbing fires of alcohol, but by a more potent drug. He didn’t realize it until later, but this was no ordinary hangover he suffered. He had been expertly mickey-finned, and he acted unreasonably, stupidly. His rage at his own weakness and carelessness he now deflected towards the girl. She had seemed such a companionable, merry girl, with such a funny accent and so supple and willing, and really pretty, even though her hair was bleached. The dirty, traitorous little whore! He’d get her! He picked up the phone in numb and shaking fingers and when the operator answered, he shouted, “Give me the manager! I’ve been robbed!” 3

At thirty-seven, Raoul Walback’s life divided into a succession of small and pleasant acts which when performed each day were woven into a protective screen against the savage and unpredictable world outside the big house on Massachusetts Avenue. His world could not be awry so long as the maid knocked on his door at seven-thirty exactly, bringing the morning paper and freshly squeezed orange juice, the glass bedded in a silver bowl of shaved ice. He read the first section of The Post and Times-Herald in bed, and took the second section to the bathroom, for the sports news and stock quotations. At eight o’clock, having shaved, he stepped on the scales and marked his weight on a chart. He always kept under 180. If he went over 180 he confined his lunch to chicken or tuna salad, with no mayonnaise, and a glass of skimmed milk, and skipped his five o’clock cocktail. Raoul’s doctor always congratulated him after his semi-annual checkup. “Raoul,” his doctor always said, “you’re going to live forever.”

Now Raoul wasn’t sure. If the forecast was accurate, truth was that if he remained in Washington he probably would not live for five more days. Being conversant with the inertia of big government, he had little faith in the ability of his colleagues to budge the Pentagon. And being a complete realist, aware of the importance of his own life, he did not plan to remain in a primary target area. So this morning was different from other mornings. He could not concentrate on the paper, for he was concerned with what to tell his mother at breakfast, and how to handle her. She was a widow, he an only son, and besides this they had the ties of mutual tastes and prejudices. But Henrietta Walback’s comprehension of the world outside northwest Washington had changed little in thirty years. For instance, Henrietta—she liked him to call her by her first name—did not understand security. To confide a secret to Henrietta was the same as setting it out, in mimeograph form, in the lobby of the National Press Club. So he must try to inveigle her to Front Royal without excitement, or the revelation of what impended. Otherwise she would get on the phone and spread the news to her friends. This would cause confusion, if not outright panic. And it would be traced to him, which would be unpleasant.

There were roses, as always, in a thin-stemmed vase on the breakfast table. As always, he sniffed them in appreciation before sitting down, and waited for his mother to say, “Aren’t they lovely this morning?”

After he said yes, they were lovely, she began her discussion of who was out of town, and who wasn’t, and of the Christmas receptions and parties.

He started after the decapitation of the breakfast eggs. “Henrietta,” he said, “I’m taking off until after the holidays. What say we drive up to Front Royal for Christmas?”

She looked at him in disbelief. “Did you say Front Royal—now—in December?”

“It’ll be lovely in the mountains. There’ll be snow, perhaps. We’ll have a white Christmas, just us two.”

“Raoul, you must have lost your mind. Front Royal is absolutely frigid in December. There’s no heat in the lodge except the open fireplaces. The place isn’t ready for us. We’d have to take blankets and goodness knows what else. Besides, I’m going to a very important luncheon Friday—the wife of the British ambassador will be there—and next week my calendar is full. So is yours, if I remember. And I have to start planning for our January dinner. We’ll have to hold the guest list to twenty-two unless you’d prefer to have it buffet. I think buffets have become gauche. They’re so easy to have. Anybody can have a buffet. Anyway, you’d better let me know soon whom you want to invite.”

Raoul saw that indirection was impossible. Shock treatment was required. “What would you say,” he asked, “if I told you that an H-bomb was going to drop on Washington Monday morning?”

Henrietta applied butter and marmalade to a thin sliver of toast. “Why, I’d say ridiculous. I was talking to Genevieve Snavely only yesterday afternoon at the Comptons’ bridge. She’s the wife of the Senator from Mississippi, you know, and she and the senator were gone all summer and most of the fall on a trip around the world. The senator is on some sort of committee. You should see the lovely silk brocades and shantung gowns she brought back from Hong Kong. Got them for nothing, really absolutely nothing. Anyway, Genevieve told me that nobody speaks of war any more. Not only that, but she met a Russian refugee in Tokyo who told her that he didn’t believe the Russians had an H-bomb at all. Just a lot of bluff. She said she had the most wonderful time everywhere and that some of the hotels in Turkey and Lebanon and places like that were as modern as the Statler, and that almost everyone she met spoke English. Imagine.”

Raoul smiled. No use trying to shock Henrietta, because Henrietta’s mind was equipped with a built-in censor to block unpleasant realities, just as Gus, the chauffeur-butler, shooed peddlers from the door. Henrietta heard and read only what she wanted to hear and read, and therefore she was as serene and happy as any woman in Washington. He would have to try something else. “To tell you the truth, Henrietta,” he said, “I was hoping to take Katy Hume to Front Royal with us.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Walback. “So that’s how it is. I should have guessed. Well, of course you’ll need a chaperone. I’ll be delighted. Such a lovely girl. So healthy-looking. And, really, from quite good family, isn’t she?”

“Her father was a very distinguished scholar,” Raoul said.

“Do you know anything about her mother?”

“Nothing, except that she had one.”

“I believe she said her mother was from Virginia. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“Infallible. This morning I’ll drop by the bank, and then I’ll call on her.”

“I think that’s very nice. When do you want to leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning! I couldn’t possibly be ready by tomorrow morning! Why, I’ll have to send regrets to half a dozen people.”

Raoul realized that Henrietta could be rushed only so fast. “Well, we’ll make it Friday. There’s a lot of shopping I have to do, and that I can do better in Washington than in Virginia. We’ll have to take both cars because we’re going to have quite a load. Gus can drive yours.”

Henrietta said nothing, although this sounded like a very considerable expedition. When she thought it over, she was certain that Raoul planned to marry the Hume girl quietly in Front Royal, and, blessed boy, wanted his mother to be there. It would be a very proper elopement and would cause quite a stir in her set. She would pretend surprise, and not buy presents until she made up her mind as to what Katharine needed. 4

That morning Katharine had phone calls from Colonel Cragey, Felix Fromburg, and Simmons. She realized, with some pride, that they automatically and without any spoken agreement regarded her as the clearinghouse for their information. Simmons was senior, but the group’s vigor centered in her. At noon Raoul arrived carrying a pigskin dispatch case. “Going somewhere?” she asked.

“Depends,” he said. He dropped the bag on her desk, sat down in her swivel chair, and swung around to face her. “Hear anything?” he asked.

“Yes. Nothing good. Nothing even hopeful, except from Steve Batt. Navy won’t interfere in Clumb’s action, but Navy will send a hunter-killer group into the North Atlantic if and when the ships can be detached from present duty. They’re helping the Air Force look for B-Ninety-Nine survivors.”

“What about Cragey?”

“Poor fellow. He bumped into the wrong General in G-2. The General was a classmate of Clumb’s at The Point. Cragey’s on the way home to Charlottesville, more or less in disgrace.”

“He could be worse off,” said Raoul. “And Simmons?”

Katharine detected an unusual tenseness in Raoul. She wondered about the reason. She lighted a cigarette and stretched her legs out on the couch before she replied. “Simmons said that most of the people in authority at State are out of the city. Simmons got the brush from one who wasn’t. Now he’s writing memos. He doesn’t believe he can get any action, because it’s hard to get action in State without meetings and conferences, and with Christmas coming next week it’s difficult to get people together.”

“And Fromburg?”

“He’s beside himself. Waited all afternoon to see the FBI’s counter-espionage chief. Finally he talked to an assistant who just happened to be looking around for more people to do field security checks. Welcomed Felix with open arms and tried to put him to routine snoopin’. Felix refused. Says he’ll wait in his chief’s outer office until eternity if he has to. That’s exactly how long he may have to wait.”

“I had somewhat the same experience in CIA,” Raoul said. “We’re not getting anywhere and we’re not going to get anywhere. Not in time. The people of this country are going to catch hell, Katy, and they deserve it. They’re selfish, and stupid, and blind. We’re in the fumbling hands of the bourgeois. The solid middle class is up on the pedestal. It’s solid—all right—through the ears.”

Katharine had never heard Raoul speak this way before. As a matter of fact, she had never heard him express any clear-cut social or political opinions. His use of the word bourgeois angered her. It was a propaganda word. British and French aristocrats had found it useful, in the nineteenth century, in expressing contempt for Americans. The Communists had adopted it for the same purpose in the twentieth. She took off her glasses, like a small boy who has been called a fighting word. “I’ve never thought about it much,” she said, “but I guess I’m middle class and I suppose that makes me bourgeois.”

“Quite the contrary,” Raoul said.

“Don’t think this country is selfish or stupid, because it isn’t. Complacent we may be, and overly optimistic, and even blind. The people of this country haven’t been conditioned to its desolation. There has been no fighting on this soil for a hundred years. Total catastrophe is outside their experience and beyond their imagination. Except for the few of us whose job it is to think of nothing else. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman whose guts have been wrenched apart—or his family wiped out—by a one-ton bomb has some idea of what thirty million tons of TNT might be like. Not much, but some. He doesn’t understand radiation, perhaps, but he understands the thermal effect, and blast. And there are survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who understand all of it. We understand none, except for a handful of us—those few million veterans who actually have heard and seen and felt and smelled war. So for most of us the danger is theoretical, not real. You can tell a child, over and over, that a rattlesnake is dangerous. But if the child has never seen any kind of snake, doesn’t know what one looks like, he may try to pet a rattler. Perhaps that is stupidity.”

“Now, Katy,” Raoul said, “I didn’t come over here to get into a philosophical argument. Mother and I are going to our place in the mountains Friday. We want you to come with us.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you and I want you to be safe.”

The merit of evacuating the big cities, when attack seemed near, had been discussed by everyone in the Pentagon. The idea was not foreign to her. Indeed, it had been agreed that for the inhabitants of cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, flight was the only practical form of civil defense. Yet, now that she was being asked to run away, the thought was stunning and abhorrent. It was one thing to speak dispassionately of mass evacuation, and to expect to be part of it. It was quite another thing to sneak off. That wasn’t flight, but desertion in face of the enemy. It was like clawing your way aboard the first lifeboat to leave a sinking ship. She said, “Raoul, you can’t mean it.”

“Certainly I mean it. We may be able to ride out this thing in Front Royal.”

Katharine sat up straight and looked at him, and he looked different, and she knew he would never look the same to her again. “You’re a fool,” she said. “You can die in Front Royal, too. A little slower, perhaps, but you’ll die. If the wind is from the northeast you’ll be blanketed by fallout from Washington or Baltimore or both. If it’s from the northwest you’ll catch it from Pittsburgh. The wind doesn’t blow that won’t kill you.”

“You’re wrong,” Raoul said. “I’ve thought of everything. There’s a deep cellar under the lodge. My father used it for hanging game and storing wine and cheeses and vegetables. An old-fashioned cold room. It’ll be adequate protection against radiation, particularly if we spread a layer of earth between tarps on the floor overhead. And everything we need, we’ll have. Stayed up last night typing a list.” From his inside coat pocket he brought out folded pages. “Let’s check it over.”

“I’d rather not,” she said.

He examined his list with satisfaction. “Canned goods enough to last a year. Went by a wholesale grocery house this morning. A truckload of stuff is on the way now. Whisky, cigarettes, medical supplies, knives, axes, candles, ammunition, fishing tackle, even mousetraps. When we get up there Friday, first thing I’ll do will be buy a side of beef and load up the freezer with meat.”

She laughed at him. “How long do you think you’ll have electricity in Front Royal—or any other small town for that matter? Who’s going to worry about hauling coal so Front Royal will have its electricity? And I suppose your lodge has an electric kitchen, hasn’t it? Hard to cook on an electric stove without current.”

“Katy, you underestimate me. We have our own generator. Rural light systems are always uncertain. Another thing I’m going to do, Friday, is get the garage filled with drums of gasoline.”

“You certainly have thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Now most people would forget finances. But once New York is gone, the whole financial system of the country will crumble. Bonds, stocks, insurance policies, bank accounts—all useless. There’ll be a general moratorium on debts, and only cash will be worth anything. So this morning I converted a hundred thousand in governments into cash. I have it right here.” He tapped his dispatch case.

She shook her head. “Wrong, Raoul, dollars won’t be worth their weight in canned beans.”

“Beans or dollars,” he said, “we’ll have ’em both.”

Katharine got up from the couch and started to pace, as she always did when angry or excited. “One thing you haven’t thought of—people.”

“What do you mean, people?”

“The people around Front Royal aren’t going to like you very much, Raoul. You’ll have everything and they’ll have nothing. They aren’t going to like you at all, and maybe they’ll start spreading the wealth, beans or dollars or whatever you’ve got. Then there’ll be other people—city people like me—who will escape the blast and fire and swarm out over the countryside. They’ll be hungry. They’ll want part of that side of beef.”

Raoul’s mouth set, and she saw how thin, like a skate’s, his mouth could be, and how flinty his eyes. He said, “They put a foot on my property and I’ll shoot ’em down like rabbits!”

“Will you, now?”

“Yes, I will. We owe it to ourselves to stay alive. We’re the ones who have a right to live. I’m not a snob, social or intellectual. It’s just an old law—survival of the fittest.”

“Not we,” she said. “Only you.”

Raoul looked up, startled, and slipped the list back into his pocket. “Katy, this isn’t the time for you to try to be a heroine. Think it over. I still have an awful lot of things to buy. I’ll be back tomorrow. At one, say? Lunch at the Mayflower?”

She said, quietly, “When you come back, tomorrow or any time, I won’t be in.”

After he was gone she felt nauseated, as if she had picked a firm, ripe fruit from a ribboned basket, and bitten into worms. 5

At ten o’clock that morning a B-99 had taken off from a SAC base near Corpus Christi, Texas, on an interesting mission. In its belly was a concrete replica, in weight and size, of a twenty-megaton H-bomb. Its flight plan called for it to fly out over the Gulf for fifteen minutes, at low altitude, turn 180 degrees, and then arrow back to shore. It would pass inland between Galveston and Sabine Pass at an altitude of less than a thousand feet, and maximum speed. It would stay on the deck for another hundred miles, then climb to 55,000 feet, and fly on a plotted zigzag course to Kansas City. It would simulate the bombing of Kansas City from 65,000. The mission, in type of terrain to be crossed, speed and altitudes maintained, and duration, approximated a flight from a SAC base in Turkey across the Black Sea to the Russian coast between Tuapse and Sochi, then on to Gorki on the Volga. It was a very practical mission. The B-99 was to attempt to sneak in from the Gulf at less than a thousand feet to avoid the eyes of coastal radar, which is subject to blindness when a plane hides behind the curvature of the earth. It was primarily a test of fuel consumption and speed at this inefficient low altitude, and of Texas radar defenses as well.

Operations at Corpus Christi was in touch with this plane on its flight out over the Gulf, and radar picked it up as it made its turn for the dash back to the coast. Radar lost it before it raced over the shore line at 600 knots, its afterburners flaming, but Corpus Christi, of course, kept in touch with the aircraft commander. Over Lufkin, Texas, the B-99 began to climb, as if Russian coastal defenses had been evaded, and the danger now was interceptors. Thirteen minutes later the pilot’s voice, recorded on tape at Corpus Christi, said, “This is Georgia Peach . . . am approaching Red River at Angels two five . . . repeat two five . . . two five thousand feet . . . speed . . .”

They never learned what his speed was, because that was the last message Georgia Peach sent.

In a few minutes, at Corpus Christi, at Fort Worth, and the other big fields in Texas, they knew they had another. They had a vanishing jet bomber like the three from Hibiscus and the one from Lake Charles.

But this one was not quite the same.

It was over land, not water. It was witnessed. And there was a human survivor, although the B-99 itself was shredded into bits of metal that fell like silvery rain over a five-mile area not far from Texarkana. Except for the eight engines. They came down like smoking meteors.

This B-99 was making a contrail, a clean white chalk line across the pale blue blackboard of the winter sky, so that many eyes were turned up to it, and saw it happen. Most of them agreed that they saw a red flash and then an explosion. Or perhaps it was two explosions, a small one and a big one later. The witnesses spoke of a ball of orange fire and a black cloud where there had been no cloud before, but, being eyewitnesses, none of their stories were exactly alike. Some told exactly what they saw, but most related what they thought they should have seen, or allowed their memory to be influenced by the tales of others.

All agreed that out of the cloud a number of specks fell. When it was five or ten thousand feet above the ground—the guesses of the witnesses naturally differed—one of these specks changed shape. A filmy white parachute mushroomed above it, and, swinging gently, it floated to earth. The survivor, Master Sergeant George Lear, radarman, fell within five hundred yards of the 3-X ranchhouse and received immediate first aid. Both eyes were blackened, his scalp lacerated, his hands and face burned, his body bruised, and he was stunned and suffering from shock. But he was alive, and by the time the rescue helicopters and intelligence teams arrived on the scene he was able to talk.

Georgia Peach was fitted with ejector pods, and to this Lear owed his life. An ejector pod is a plastic capsule which encloses an airman’s seat. The front section is open so he can perform his duties. If it becomes necessary to abandon the aircraft, he pulls a lever at his side, a cowl drops to complete the closure of the capsule, and an explosive charge ejects the pod into space, exactly as a shell is fired from a gun. It is a desperate and dangerous means of escape, but it gives a man a chance. The pod protects his body, and prevents him from being pulverized by a six- or seven-hundred-mile-an-hour blast of air. However, within ten seconds, at very high altitudes, he must remember to put on his oxygen mask. Then he must remember not to leave the pod until the speed of his fall is slowed by heavier atmosphere. And after he pushes the pod aside in mid-air he should allow himself to fall to within ten thousand feet of earth before pulling his parachute ripcord. After that, he should look around for a hospitable spot on which to land, guide himself to this landing by manipulating his shroud lines, and remember to absorb the shock by rolling like a cat as his feet touch.

Master Sergeant Lear was the first B-99 crewman called upon to do all these things and he didn’t remember any of them. All he knew was that suddenly there was fire all around him and a tremendous noise and he was kicked hard in the rear. The next he knew he was holding on to his shrouds, swinging like a pendulum. That was all he knew. All.

A tremor ran through the communications ganglia of the Air Force. A hundred questions, a few answers, a few commands whined and hummed over the wires. From Hibiscus to the Pentagon, thence to the SAC command post in Omaha, finally to Fort Worth, the teletypes chattered an admonition from General Keatton. The intelligence teams standing by at the Texarkana hospital should rush, by fastest plane, all of Lear’s clothing, and his parachute, to the Wright Field research laboratories.

The intelligence officers had already thought of this, and when the order came the clothing was packed and ready. While Master Sergeant Lear couldn’t tell them anything, his clothing might tell them much. 6

From the moment that Corpus Christi reported that it had lost contact with a B-99 bearing the operational name of Georgia Peach, until a jet fighter was flying to Ohio with Lear’s clothing, Major Price stayed close to the communications center in Air Force. There was, really, nothing else for him to do. Until he was re-assigned to other duty by General Keatton, or someone countermanded General Clumb’s order dissolving the Intentions Group, he was a spectator.

He sent his secretary home at four, and then sat at her typewriter, attempting to phrase a personal message to Keatton that could go through official channels from the Pentagon to Hibiscus. Nothing he wrote made much sense, when he imagined the Chief-of-Staff, snowed under by the mounting emergency, reading it. Finally he condensed all that was ludicrous into one sentence. “OPERATIONAL PRIORITY X CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET,” he wrote. “FROM MAJOR PRICE, DETACHED DUTY, TO GENERAL KEATTON X I THINK RUSSIANS WILL ATTACK US MONDAY MORNING X DO BE CAREFUL.” He laughed, ripped the paper out of the typewriter, and tore it into shreds. Then, out of habit, he dropped the pieces into the carton on which was stencilled: “Secret Waste.”

At dusk, frustrated and edgy, he left the Pentagon and drove back to Georgetown. He idled his car down Dumbarton, although this was not the quickest way home. Katy Hume’s apartment was on Dumbarton, and in recent months, with more and more frequency, he had felt a compulsion to use the street. Now, he looked up at her apartment. Her lights were on. Raoul Walback’s big blue sedan wasn’t parked on the block. Jesse Price dropped in to see Katy whenever he could think of an excuse, but he made it a point not to intrude when Raoul was there.

He needed to talk to her. She had, he realized, become a necessity to him. When a day passed without seeing her, he felt out of sorts and lonely. He parked around the corner and walked to her apartment.

When she answered his knock he sensed at once that something was wrong. When he had left her the night before she had seemed tired, physically, but still vibrant and full of fight. Katy had two things he greatly admired in a woman as well as a man, drive and bounce. Now the drive and bounce seemed missing. The corners of her face were etched with tiny lines as if she were suppressing physical pain. She looked listless, tired, beaten. She didn’t say she was glad to see him, or offer him a drink. All she said was, “Don’t tell me about the one today. I heard it on the radio.”

He put his big hands on her shoulders and said, “Come on, Katy, snap out of it. I think we’re going to get an answer out of this one.” Her shoulders were round and warm. Quite beyond his volition, as naturally as if she belonged to him, he pulled her close. Surprisingly, she put her face against his chest, and he could feel her body seeking his, molding herself to him. He crushed her. He kissed her hair, her eyes, and then she lifted her open mouth to his. Finally she moved her lips away and whispered, “I can’t breathe. I’m not going to run away, Jess. We’ve got all night. We’ve got a lifetime of nights, if you want me.”

He said, “I want you.”

She kissed him again, hungrily, for she had suddenly remembered something. A lifetime could mean fifty years—or five days. She said, “Why didn’t you ever do this before?”

“Never thought you wanted me to.”

“You could have tried.”

“I don’t poach, and Raoul had signs all over the place: ‘Posted—Keep Off.’”

“I guess he did, didn’t he?” She walked over to the couch and sat down, tucking her legs under her. “Today I ripped the signs down.”

He followed her to the couch and sat beside her and she let her head fall over on his shoulder as if it were the only natural place for it to rest. The lines of tension and weariness were erased from her face. She looked assured, ready. He sniffed at her hair. “You smell like a woman,” he said, and kissed her again.

She thought of the first time she had been kissed on this couch, when she was fifteen, or maybe it was fourteen, by the boy who lived across the street, and bore the improbable name of Gaston, and who in two years had seemed much too young for her. There had been others, quite a few when you got right down to it. But it was much too cramped for adult love-making with a man as big and sort of wild as Jess. She didn’t want to let him out of her arms but she wished he would pick her up and carry her into the bedroom. That’s what she wanted, but at the same time she hoped he wouldn’t because their first night should be a big thing. She supposed it was Victorian, but if they went to bed together now it would be a little too sudden, a night that might tarnish, and that they might prefer to forget later. If there was to be a later, after Christmas Eve. She said, finally, “We’ve got to stop because when you make love to me I can’t think and I have to think. Don’t you want to hear about Raoul?”

“No.”

She held him away. “I really don’t want to talk about Raoul, but we do have to talk about the forecast, and the B-Ninety-Nines, and Keatton. I don’t know how you feel, but right now, more than anything else, I want to live. I want to live a long time. Raoul was up here today. He asked me to go away with him to his place in Front Royal. With his mother. You see, come next Monday, he wants to be sure that he’ll go on living. I turned him down. I despised him for it. But if you asked me to do the same thing right now, I’d say yes. Isn’t that strange?”

“No. It’s not so strange. I feel the same way. And Monday you may find yourself somewhere safe, or safe as you can get. I won’t ask you. I’ll take you. Because I’m damned if I’m going to die now that I’m just beginning to five.”

“Tell me about that bomber that blew up over Texas,” she said.

He rose, straightened his jacket, and felt in his pocket for a pipe. “Okay,” he said, “back to earth. But let’s not be sensible adults too long, Katy. If all we’ve got is a few days—at least only a few days before the lights go out—we’re going to fly.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “We’ll fly.”

“There are two new and interesting facts about the loss of this last Nine-Nine. The first four all blew within eighteen to twenty-five minutes after takeoff. This one blew fifty-nine minutes after takeoff. Why? The complete communications log from Corpus Christi tower hadn’t come in when I left the office, but when it does I have a hunch it’ll tell us something.” Jesse Price lighted his pipe and stared out of the window, not at anything except the image building in his own mind. “Second thing is, a man survived. If there had been structural failure, and sudden decompression of the crew’s quarters, he and everyone else would have been sucked out through that hole, squeezed into sausages. He wouldn’t have been shot out in his pod. In decompression, death is almost instant.”

“Shot out in a pod? Is that what happened? It wasn’t on the radio.”

“It won’t be,” he said. “The enemy hasn’t been informed, as yet, that the B-Nine-Nine has been modified for escape pods. Anyway, this indicates to me that it was an internal explosion, and that the explosion triggered this radarman’s pod. So before he could burn or disintegrate when the second explosion—all that fuel—came, he was shot out into space.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means it could be sabotage.”

“Jess, you’ve got to go to Hibiscus and tell that to Keatton!”

He laughed. “Honey, General Keatton must have figured that out about four hours ago.”

“You don’t know what he’s figured out, Jess. And maybe if you could get in to see Keatton you’d get a chance to tell him about Clumb, and the forecast.”

Jesse shook his head. “You don’t understand. At this moment Keatton is the busiest man in the world. His air force is blowing up around his ears. He won’t have time to see me, and if he did see me and I started telling him about our brawl with Clumb, and the forecast, he’d throw me out.”

“Unless you showed him that blowing up SAC was part of the plan. You said yourself that the only way they could get away with it was to put SAC out of action. Aren’t they doing it?”

Jesse thought it over and shook his head again, no. “They can’t blow up SAC. You’ve got to be practical. Five planes in two weeks? That’s nothing. We could lose that many in five minutes through one error in navigation at a refueling rendezvous. In one raid on Schweinfurt, the Eighth Air Force lost ninety-nine B-Seventeens. That didn’t stop them from smearing most of Germany before they were through. Anyway, Keatton has half the technicians in the Air Force down at Hibiscus. One more man won’t help, and I don’t see what one man can do.”

Katharine stood up, stepped to the window, and whirled, so that she stood directly before him and his eye could not evade her angry face. “You make me sore! You want to know what one man can do? I’ll tell you. One man, name of Klaus Fuchs. Came to this country to work at Los Alamos. Among other things, he worked on the original planning for a thermonuclear weapon. Then he left us, with everything neatly filed in his head. He went back to Europe and turned it all over to the Russians. If it wasn’t for Klaus Fuchs—and a few others—I wouldn’t be wondering whether you and I will be cinders by Monday night. That’s what one man can do, and did!”

Jesse said nothing.

“I think you’re better than Klaus Fuchs,” she said. “I hope you are. Anyway, it’s always been one man. It’s never anyone else. It’s always you.”

He said, “You’ll go with me?”

“Of course.”

At midnight they sat side by side on an airliner leaving National Airport. They held hands, and kissed as soon as the overhead lights were out. The stewardess was certain they were newlyweds.

At Jacksonville they got out to stretch their legs and in the grimy terminal building Jess bought a paper. There was nothing new from Texarkana or Hibiscus or Washington. But there was a two-column editorial, captioned: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE B-99?”, on the front page. The lead paragraph read: “Americans have been understandably disturbed by the mysterious loss of four of the new B-99 jet bombers. Now comes the news that a fifth has blown up over Texas. The Air Force, while conducting extensive safety tests of the eight-engined intercontinental bombers at Hibiscus Base, has made no announcement as to the cause of any of these mishaps. Since security measures are notoriously stringent around bases of the Strategic Air Command, and since the missions of the five doomed planes originated at three separate bases, the possibility of widespread sabotage seems remote. The inescapable conclusion is that the B-99, perhaps in some small detail that can quickly be remedied, is defective.”

The editorial said that thirty-four airmen had already died and others would certainly die unless the cause of the disasters was discovered.

It spoke of the present equable international situation, with the Russian divisions pulling back from the Western Europe borders, and the Chinese Communists quiet in Southeast Asia. The renewal of strict censorship of Moscow dispatches was not necessarily ominous. It might only reflect internal conflicts within the Kremlin, and a power shift in the Presidium.

The editorial concluded: “Why not ground the B-99 until it is proved safe? Let SAC replace the B-99, for the time being, with the B-47’s and B-52’s, efficient aircraft presently in mothballs.”

Jesse was silent as they walked back towards their plane. Katharine said, “Well?”

“Maybe that’s the answer,” he said. “The Russians aren’t going to destroy SAC. They’re going to let the American people do it.”