by Pat Frank
She hung up the phone, wondering at the boldness of her invitation, trying to analyze her feelings. He certainly wasn’t the type that needed mothering. He was at least as self-sufficient as herself. The truth was, she decided, that she simply felt better when he was around. The days on which she didn’t see him at all, those days seemed empty. This feeling for Jess was not new, but she could not tell exactly when it had begun.
As Jesse left the Pentagon, the guards were busy collecting the day’s secret waste. One of the bags, taken from the Joint Chiefs’ wing to the incinerators in the basement and burned, contained nineteen of the twenty existing copies of FORECAST OF RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION.
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 t
he 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 com
plete 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.”
