by Pat Frank
Smith watched the flight surgeon bring a packet of hypodermic needles out of his bag. He felt dejected. Perhaps he was wrong about the Americans. Perhaps they knew more about warfare than a man would realize. Either that, or they were so lucky you could think they were smart. His sleeve was being rolled up, and he gritted his teeth as the needle thudded into his arm, not gently.
Jesse left them, reeling. He was too exhausted to call Katy.
8
Had it not been for one man, or rather one man’s confidence in another man, the course of events and even the final result might have been different. The one man was Admiral Kitteredge, aboard the Coral Sea. When the admiral was ordered to load helicopters and sub-killing dive bombers instead of conventional jet bombers and fighters, and steam north, the admiral sensed a deeper disquiet in the Navy Department than the message text conveyed. To convert a powerful attack carrier, capable of strategic action against the enemy in distant waters, into an anti-submarine vessel was a drastic move. Kitteredge knew that a regular hunter-killer task force was just around the horn of the Florida Keys. What was the big rush? While the new loading was going on, the admiral went ashore to confer with Captain Clyde, the Mayport facilities commander. He especially wanted Clyde’s opinion of the queer story told by a Marine of the landing a few miles down the coast. The admiral knew Clyde, who had served with him in battleships, as a level-headed, sagacious man. The admiral was aware that except for one slip, on the day of Pearl Harbor, Clyde might have been an admiral also.
Captain Clyde was convinced that the Marine was telling the truth. It was no hoax, he insisted. So the admiral also was convinced. They discussed other matters, going all the way back to the Swedish report of submarines clearing the Skaggerak. Assuming that this force was headed his way, and also assuming that the radar sighting of what could have been a flotilla of subs had been accurate, and the real thing, the admiral visualized where those submarines would be on the curve of the Atlantic at the moment. Then he returned to his ship and wordlashed his force into a loading frenzy. As a result, Coral Sea and escorting destroyers were able to sortie from Mayport three hours ahead of the Navy Department’s optimum hour for sailing. Once in the open ocean, Kitteredge had the Coral Sea’s captain work up his ship to emergency speed, a most uneconomical effort not called for in his orders.
At first light on that Sunday, at a point three hundred miles off the Capes, he launched his helicopters. Thereafter the carrier and its destroyers and helicopters were able to probe an enormous swathe of ocean, more than a hundred miles wide, its length limited only by the ships’ speed.
The helicopters, in a scouting line stretching fifty miles on each flank of the carrier, behaved like bees darting from flower to white-capped flower, seeking nectar. Hovering close to the swells, they lowered a long proboscus of sound gear into the sea, listened for a few seconds for the stealthy beat of propellers beneath, and flew on to another sector.
Two hours after dawn one of the helicopters heard a new sound, something that should not have been there at all, the unmistakable murmur and hum of a submarine’s props whirling under electric or atomic power, deep, very deep, and quite fast. This helicopter called Coral Sea, and the carrier launched four more of what the Navy calls eggbeaters or whirlybirds, and the less romantic Army calls choppers. Soon these, too, buzzed the area, dipping, listening, triangulating, obtaining an exact fix, exact course, exact speed.
With the contact confirmed and pinpointed, the admiral assigned one destroyer and two dive bombers to the kill, and did not tarry. Without being informed by Washington, he was aware that if this was an all-out attack, the largest enemy concentration would lie still to the north, closer to the industrial heart of the country. He was also aware that if such a concentration existed, he had caught it off base, a day and a night’s run from the coast. But he must be quick. With darkness, his most efficient hours for killing would end.
At almost the same time that Coral Sea radioed news of its first contact to Washington, the accounts of what had happened at Hibiscus, Lake Charles, and Corpus Christi exploded in the Pentagon. The Navy was convinced. The plan for defense against submarine attack, involving all ships and naval planes and blimps on both coasts, went into effect. The search for B-99 survivors was abruptly dropped. Now it was proven that the bombers had been blown up, further search for survivors seemed hopeless. Besides, in wartime, casualties can be accepted, and this was already regarded as war.
9
On Sunday morning it was Katharine Hume’s custom to sleep late and breakfast on waffles, and it was the same in the Gresham household, and this Sunday was no different. Still in pajamas, she joined Margaret Gresham in the kitchen at ten o’clock. “Red’s not here,” Margaret said. “I don’t know what happened to him. He wasn’t due to fly today. If there was an alert, or anything, they’d call him, and I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“I did,” Katy said. “At least I think I did. I didn’t get up because I only heard it ring once.”
“Red must have answered,” Margaret said. She looked around the kitchen. There were no dirty dishes beside the sink, or crumbs on the table. She lifted the silvered percolator. It was cold, and empty. “He didn’t eat any breakfast. Maybe he had an early golf date and ate at the O Club.”
Katy knew that Margaret was expressing a hope rather than a belief, and she was glad Jess was no longer a pilot. It must be hell to wake up in the morning and not know whether your husband was playing golf, five minutes drive away, or a thousand miles out over the Atlantic, fifty thousand feet up, and sitting thirty feet from an H-bomb. “Maybe,” she said, but Margaret wasn’t listening. Her ears were tuned to something else.
The cluster of houses for married officers, alike as the aircraft they flew except for roof colors and shrubbery, was three miles from the flight line, and outside the glass-shattering takeoff zone, and yet the sound of air activity was always with them. After a time the ear grew calloused to the distant din of multijets, and sealed off the sound entirely, just as the city dweller’s ear ignores traffic noises, and the farmer never hears his own chickens. Now, Katy was aware of a change in the sound from the runways, a change in intensity, in volume, in urgency. Katy didn’t know what it meant, but Margaret did.
“A whole wing is going off,” Margaret said. “I guess I won’t see Red today.” She plugged in the waffle iron and began to mix batter. “You know what they do to us sometimes? They scramble the whole wing, or even the whole division, and the men don’t know whether it’s the real thing or not until they’re up in the air.” She looked at Katy. “You don’t think this could be the real thing, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Katy said, and thought of her brother, Clint, who would be with Red Gresham. She had no doubt, now, that there had been an alert, but she could not say this to Margaret, without also giving the reasons for her belief.
The radio in the kitchen was on, giving out Sunday music, more subdued than weekday music. The bright Florida sun stained the table, and outside the window poinsettias nodded their gaudy heads against the screen, as always at Christmas. The radio, like the thrum of the jets, ordinarily was an unobtrusive background. You were never aware of it until it changed its pattern. The music faded and the pattern changed. An announcer’s voice uttered that inevitable preamble to news of disaster, “We interrupt this program . . .”
They stood perfectly still, Margaret with a pitcher in one hand, spilling a trickle of batter on the smoking griddle.
“. . . to bring you a news flash from Washington. General Thomas Keatton, Chief-of-Staff of the Air Force, has just announced that the mysterious loss of nine B-99 bombers of the Strategic Air Command has been solved. According to General Keatton, all were destroyed by acts of sabotage committed by officers of the Red Army and Air Force. Three saboteurs have been captured. One of these has killed himself. Two others are now making a full confession. We will bring you further details as soon as they are received.”
Margaret Gr
esham turned off the electric waffle iron and set down the pitcher. There was no doubt at all, now, of the whereabouts of her husband. “Please excuse me, Katy,” she said. “I don’t feel hungry.”
“Neither do I,” Katharine said. Having a brother out there was bad, too.
nine
THERE WAS very little music on the air the rest of that day. Television was cut off entirely, and all radio shifted to the Conelrad stations, designed to confuse incoming bombers, but a crude World War II device at best, of no use against modern radar. And of course V-2 type rockets, fired from submarines, needed neither radio on which to home, nor radar to see, for their course and destination were pre-set.
At ten-eight Katharine and Margaret Gresham were listening when the Navy announced that three enemy submarines had been attacked and probably destroyed in the Atlantic, and another in the Pacific four hundred miles off Seattle. Other contacts had been reported.
At intervals, thereafter, the radio repeated orders from service heads for all soldiers, sailors, and airmen off duty or on leave to report to their stations and bases and ships at once. Katharine felt that she had to call Jess. She had to know what was going on. Knowing nothing of what had occurred at Hibiscus during the night and early morning, she guessed that he had returned to the BOQ at two or three in the morning, slept for a few hours, and been awakened again when Clint was routed out of bed for the alert. So he would be back in Air Division headquarters, either in Conklin’s office or at the exec desk. She went into the hallway and picked up the telephone and asked the base operator for headquarters.
“Is this an official call?” the operator snapped.
“No, but—”
“Sorry.” The phone clicked. So she was cut off from it. She was, after all, only a woman, a woman without duties, of no use in this emergency. She returned to the kitchen and found Margaret Gresham using a dish towel on her face. But not crying, not openly. “I tried to call Jess,” Katharine said. “They wouldn’t put me through.”
“We’ll just have to wait,” Margaret said, “and listen.”
Ten minutes later the Director of Civil Defense spoke. While no enemy aircraft had been sighted on any of the polar approaches to North America, and the situation was still unclear, he felt it his duty to order the evacuation of the ninety-two primary target cities. He hoped everyone would keep calm and listen to the President’s words. The President would speak to the nation at noon.
Katharine opened the kitchen door and looked up. She could count four B-99’s wheeling and climbing against the clean blue sky, and she could hear others. Clint and Red Gresham might be in one of those planes, but she had no way of knowing. Otherwise, she could detect nothing unusual. Two children left the house next door and mounted bicycles, careful not to dirty their Sunday clothes. Their mother, probably, had not turned on the radio that morning, so, for her, life proceeded as usual. The whole country, she supposed, was in a sense like an enormous battlefield. One person could see only a minuscule part of it, and that imperfectly. Margaret called, “I guess we might as well eat. It’s going to be a long day.”
Commander Stephen Batt was in a position to know more. He had driven to Washington early that morning, expecting something, and something had happened. He had gone to the liaison office of the Eastern Sea Frontier, which he judged would be a quickly spurting fountainhead of information on any action at sea. Again, he was right. Patrol bombers, blimps from Lakehurst, Brunswick, and Key West, shore-based dive bombers, and all available surface craft were speeding out to sweep the Eastern Approaches. The carrier Shangri-La, just arrived in Boston to give the crew Christmas leave after a month in Artic waters, turned around and raced out to sea with half a crew. It took on helicopters and key personnel at a rendezvous two hundred miles offshore, a feat which Batt suggested and helped arrange. The hunter-killer task force vacated the Gulf, rounded Key West, and streaked northeast.
Even in the Pentagon it was difficult to grasp the scope of events that followed the Civil Defense Director’s suggestion that the principal cities be evacuated. Of course no one kept calm, and yet the panic that had been feared, and expected, failed to develop. Since it was Sunday, the cities were already empty of commuters. It was Christmas vacation, with children home from school, and so the mindless terror that results when families are disunited in time of crisis was not a problem. When the news came, no business was being conducted except the sale of Christmas trees, gasoline, and Sunday papers. Families were either at home, at church, or on the highways.
Everything that could move on four wheels took to the roads, but this happened, on a lesser scale, on every bright Sunday, even in winter, providing the day was not too cold. There was simply more Sunday driving, and more exasperating traffic jams, than on any other Sunday in history.
Two million people tried to get off Manhattan Island at approximately the same moment, and by all previous estimates this should have resulted in disaster and carnage. But it was Sunday, and a transportation system capable of handling three or four millions in the weekday rush hours, while momentarily flustered, was not disorganized or strangled. Within a few hours the highways radiating from the New York area were black with refugee armies.
It was the countryside, not the cities, that suffered heavily. The city dwellers, in cars, trucks, busses, riding bicycles, and afoot, moved across the landscape like hordes of locusts or migrating army ants. Stocks of food vanished from the roadside inns and diners, then from suburban super-markets, and finally from the most remote country stores. The smarter owners and managers of grocery and hardware stores opened their doors and disposed of their stock in a manner more or less orderly. In some communities windows were smashed and there was looting, for there is a lawless element that waits to prey on its fellow humans in any disaster. Remembering the shortages of the World War II, housewives bought up all the cigarettes and coffee they could find. Whisky almost instantly was selling at a premium, and so were shovels. Millions were digging in.
When the President spoke at noon, no one was so busy in flight that he did not listen. The President said there was no doubt an attack on the United States was underway. He declared Martial Law.
He said he believed the attack would fail, for the enemy had been caught off balance. Each hour brought news of contacts with submarines, and their destruction. The battle going on was taking place far at sea.
The Navy had taken precautions against strange surface craft invading the harbors. All ports had been closed except to military traffic and ferries.
He emphasized that no bombs had yet fallen on American soil, and he was confident that bombers could not penetrate the Continental Air Defense screen to the north.
But his words were directed to the Kremlin as well as to the people. Cable communications to Moscow were dead, and he had not heard from the American embassy all morning. Therefore he felt it necessary to supplement normal diplomatic communications.
“More than half the long-range bombers of the Strategic Air Command are now aloft,” he said. “Some are now within striking range of the Russian cities. They are armed with thermonuclear weapons that can utterly destroy the Soviet Union.”
The world heard the President pause. “We have another weapon,” he continued. “It is called the Intercontinental Ballistics Missile, or ICBM. It is a rocket. Combined with the H-bomb, it is the ultimate weapon. It cannot be shot down. It cannot be deflected from its path by electronics. Fired from this continent, it can reach and obliterate an enemy target city within forty minutes. We have several batteries of such rockets—we call them the Atlas I—emplaced and aimed. One is now aimed at Moscow.
“If there is no capitulation within a reasonable time—I should think three hours is reasonable—there will be no Moscow. Shortly thereafter, there will be no Russia.”
The President’s revelation, in a sense, was hopeful. But millions, listening in their cars, or in strange farmhouses far from their warm and familiar apartments and homes in the cities, or stubbor
nly remaining in those cities to guard those homes, asked a question:
“Why not now? Why wait? It’s a war, isn’t it? Why give them a chance?”
2
It was already night in Russia when it was noon in Washington. There had been no hint to the Russian people, naturally, of imminent war. Clark Simmons, ever since the first bulletins came in from Hibiscus, had been sitting at his short-wave receiver in the library of his home in Chevy Chase, listening to Radio Moscow. While the President was speaking at noon, Radio Moscow was broadcasting a speech by the Minister of Agriculture, praising certain Heroes of the Land on the collective farms in Kazakhstan.
For forty-five minutes thereafter Radio Moscow maintained its regular programs and then, without explanation, went off the air. Simmons leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to analyze, from his knowledge and experience, what was occurring in the Kremlin. Later, he learned that in part he was right.
The world outside could not guess, but a chill such as comes with a wind from the steppes had swept through Russian cities. Not all Russians were listening to the Minister of Agriculture. A few, at the moment the President spoke, were listening to the Voice of America and the BBC, which re-broadcast his speech from the powerful transmitters in London. In a land where news has been censored, suppressed, and juggled for generations, the whisper supplements and sometimes replaces newspaper and radio. In time of crisis this is invariably true.
In Moscow the whisper spread through a family, and then ran like a flash fire through a whole building. Suddenly all the telephone exchanges were clogged with private calls. It was the same in Leningrad, Kiev, Chita, Alma-Ata, Stalingrad, Vladivostok, all the great cities, the target cities.
Strangely, in view of the absolute threat, there was no mass evacuation of these cities. The people of Russia had never been allowed to contemplate the possibility. The rule of the Presidium was omnipotent, the Red soldier and airman invincible. Error by the high command was unthinkable, and it would be an error if American planes could reach the cities. Thus it must always be in the monolithic state. Thus it had been in Nazi Germany, when Goering had said, “If one British bomb falls on Berlin, you can call me Meyer.” So to speak of America’s mastery of the new weapons, or the possibility of enforced flight, was defeatism. It was not allowed. People who spoke of evacuation were subversive, and enemies of the state. In the Russian cities the civil populations could only wait in dumb fear, without guidance.
