Forbidden Area

by Pat Frank

  She had tried to keep her voice low. She realized she hadn’t succeeded.

  Price said, “It’s the best I can give you.”

  Simmons, disturbed at this friction, began, “Now, Katy—” but it was Fromburg who broke the tension. “Major Price’s answer is good enough for our purposes,” Fromburg said, his dark, active eyes begging Katharine for caution. “But it’s not exactly what I was trying to get at. Even if they know the ICBM is coming up, how can they risk war now? How could they win it?”

  Colonel Cragey stirred. Just as Simmons knew Russia, Cragey knew China. He was China-born, the son of a missionary. He had fought in the Far East, for the Chinese against Japan, against the Chinese in Korea. He didn’t look like a fighter. He looked like what he was primarily, a professor, and he wore his uniform as an amateur actor wears an uncomfortable costume. He had been lecturing on the Orient at the University of Virginia when, for the second time, the Army called him out of reserve, this time to serve on the Intentions Group where a specialist on the Orient was needed. He said, “I’ll try to catch that one. Maybe the Kremlin can’t help itself. The Kremlin has an unmanageable tiger by the tail. Name of China. Six hundred million people. Peiping controls twice as many people as Moscow and won’t be run by Moscow. The rulers of Peiping have something they call face. It’s more important to them than country, than party, than their life. They’ve sworn they were going to drive us out of the East. They couldn’t get away with it and they lost face and they have to get their face back, even if it means war.”

  “Go ahead,” Simmons encouraged him.

  “If Russia fails to support China, the whole Communist world will fly apart. Yet if Russia is dragged into war on China’s tail, they’ll surely lose because we’ll be on a war footing, and ready. In either case the men at the top in the Kremlin would surely be purged. They would die, personally. So Russia has to plan a war it can win. That means a one-day blitz. In one day they must create a hundred Pearl Harbors.”

  “They have to do a little more than that,” said Major Price. “First they have to eliminate SAC. A hundred Pearl Harbors won’t save Russia if SAC is still around.”

  Commander Batt leaned forward. “SAC and the Navy,” he amended. “Of course, like the Air Force we’re in a transition period. We’re changing our weapons systems. For us, too, rockets are the ultimate answer, A screen of sea-to-air rockets to protect our carrier striking force. That’s what we’ve got to have.”

  “Very well,” said Simmons. “It’s too late to get technical.” One of his duties, as senior in the group, was to fend off the endless arguments between Navy and Air. “Let’s assume that the Russians decided to launch their peace offensive at the January, ’fifty-five, meeting of the Presidium, but at the same time they began preparations for their alternative, war. At some time in the recent past they decided the peace offensive was faltering. I think operations were initiated as soon as this occurred, and I think these operations, preliminary or paramilitary operations, are now going on. What are they? How do they plan to strike? That’s all we have to figure out.” Simmons smiled, an admission that he recognized, as they all did, that their task was impossible. And the meeting was over.

  Felix Fromburg, as security officer for the group, stayed for a few minutes after the others left. He drew dark blue curtains across the walls to shield the maps. He tore the notes and doodles from the scratch-pads. It was said that a man’s unconscious doodling revealed his character. Simmons’ pad, as usual, reflected his neat mind. Single, numbered words represented the subject they had discussed. Major Price always covered his pad with airplanes and rockets, although on this day there was something new—the profile of a girl. Colonel Cragey had drawn an oldtime fortification, a walled city with a moat. Raoul Walback’s squiggles consisted of tiny stars and crescents all grouped in one corner of the paper. Commander Batt had drawn rowboats and fishes. Now what was so subconscious about that? Maybe he was trying to be too Freudian. Batt probably wished he was out on the Severn, fishing. On Katy Hume’s pad was some sort of an equation with symbols Fromburg couldn’t decipher. He folded them all up and dropped them into the burn bag. His job as security officer was finished for the day. In a way, he thought, it was all very silly.

  4

  When Katharine Hume stepped out of the River Gate she paused on the entrance walk and shook her head as one does to rout a nightmare in the reassuring sunlight. To her right the Jefferson Memorial rose like a white bubble against the cobalt sky. To her left the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in serene splendor, the nearest thing to a temple that her countrymen had erected to mortal man. Two girls in white shorts, carrying tennis rackets, brushed past her. From the river she could hear the dissonance of racing outboards. Overhead an airliner lowered its undercarriage and gracefully wheeled into the glide path for National Airport. A tiny foreign car, a girl and golf bags inside, came to a stop directly in front of her. A young lieutenant with the patch of SHAPE on his sleeve came down the steps two at a time, kissed the girl, climbed into the car, and they laughed and drove off. Katharine wished she were the girl in that car. I don’t live in a real world, she thought. That air-conditioned vault inside isn’t real. It’s grisly. It’s out of Dante. Real people make love and have babies and worry about bus fares and PTA politics and the starling plague. She lifted her face to the sun. If you brought the sun down to earth, and touched it to Washington, the result would be about the same as the kiss of the enemy’s thirty-megaton bomb. That also was a fact, true and real, but few people were troubled. A half million of the untroubled would be away from Washington that afternoon. They would be up in the Shenandoahs and clustered on the beaches from Jersey to the Carolinas and three foursomes deep on every hole of every golf course within fifty miles, or perhaps only walking, by twos, in Rock Creek Park. They could live in the present while she stirred the muddy cauldron of the future. She felt a hand on her arm and Raoul Walback said, “Give you a lift, Katy?”

  She said, “Thanks, Raoul,” and walked with him to his car. She felt better. It had been bitterly lonely, there for a moment.

  They were crossing Arlington Bridge when he said, “Doing anything tonight, Katy?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a heavy date with a couple of books on biophthora.”

  “That’s a big word.”

  “It has a big meaning. The destruction of life—all life, that is. It’s from the Greek.”

  “Katy, why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours? How’s about driving up to my place in the mountains?”

  “I’m not playing any one night stands this season.”

  He drove in silence until they reached Dumbarton Road and pulled up in front of the red brick apartment building, saved from ugliness and uniformity by shrubbery and vines, in which she lived. Then he said, “I’ll make you another proposition. Let’s get married.”

  She had realized that one day he would ask and she would have to answer. At first there had been lunches in the Pentagon cafeterias, and then dinners at Hall’s and Herzog’s and Normandy Farms, and then dancing at the Shoreham. There had been a quite proper professional weekend visiting the Crageys in Charlottesville. She had been invited to dine at the Walback home, a marble mausoleum big as an embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, and she had been presented to his mother, an authentic Washington cave dweller. Yet now that the question had been put she found herself off guard, with no answer ready. In a city where unmarried young women outnumber eligible males three to one, this was unfortunate. “Are you serious?” she asked, to gain time.

  “Absolutely.”

  He was handsome enough, goodness knows. He was witty and companionable. They danced well together, a definite indication, he claimed, that they would get along fine in bed. He deferred to her at the conference table, a tonic for her ego. He was rich. Katharine didn’t remember her own mother, who had died when she was nine, very clearly, but she did remember one thing her mother had said: “Katy, it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one.” This
had been said, half in jest, at the dinner table at the end of a polite argument over a bill at Woody’s. Her father was not poor. His salary, as Military Curator of the Library of Congress, was considerably above the average paid government workers. But he was poor according to the standards of people like the Walbacks. It was curious that out of the total advice her mother must have given her, this alone she recalled exactly. Yet she found it necessary to say, since she was resolutely honest, “Raoul, I’m not sure I love you. If I loved you, we’d be on the way to the mountains right now. You wouldn’t have to bribe me with marriage.”

  “You haven’t given me a chance, really, to find out whether you love me or not.”

  Katharine inspected him as she never had before. You look at a man differently after he suggests that you live with him for the rest of your life. Raoul did everything properly, everything right. His courtliness was a little something extra, like the dimple in the clean buttress of his chin. She had no doubt that their life together would be a symphony of gracious living, as glossy and impeccable as the color plates in Town and Country and House and Garden. Yet when she projected her thoughts ahead, she was disquieted. He would want her to quit her job, and eventually she would have to because there would be children. She would find her political discussions confined to discreet chitchat at receptions, and her research downgraded to equations involving boiled water, evaporated milk, Karo syrup, and pablum. He would want her to live in the Massachusetts Avenue house, at least for a year or two, but she doubted that twenty rooms would be big enough for both her and Raoul’s mother. Or fifty. She would find herself Mrs. Walback, junior, the one who had tried such an odd career, now producing grandchildren for the Mrs. Walback. She wondered whether, at this moment in history, she wanted children at all. The first legacy that a child should have was a reasonable chance to grow up. She said, “Sorry, Raoul, but I’m going to stay Katy Hume.”

  He put his hand on her arm. He was so very civilized, Raoul was. She would bet that he never took a girl without verbal permission. “Think it over some more,” he said. “I’m going to ask again. Perhaps if we tried it out—”

  “Are you sure that what you want isn’t simply a twirl with a girl?”

  “Plenty of girls in Washington,” he said. “What I want is a wife. I’m choosy. I want you.”

  “That’s a very pretty speech,” she said. “I’ll put the matter on the agenda.”

  5

  Katharine Hume’s apartment was as unorthodox, for a young woman, as her job. Dominating the living room, claiming most of two walls, was an enormous L-shaped desk, built to her specifications from drafting-table boards. Books were stacked on the desk. Books rose to the ceiling above it. Books monopolized most of the remaining wall space, and even narrowed the entrance corridor. From her father she had inherited a minuscule estate but one of the finest private military libraries in the country. She constantly augmented it, and acquired an impressive scientific library of her own. She never loaned a book, she never asked for any other gift, and when in New York she spent her days prowling for books on Fourth Avenue as most women scout for gowns and fur bargains on Fifth. On H-Parity Day she was reading a history of the German General Staff, Nettleship’s book on biophthora, and Sturtevant’s papers on the same subject. Her furniture, an old-fashioned sofa with graceful lines, a few still-sturdy Hepplewhite chairs, a Queen Anne lowboy—all was from the family house in Alexandria. The furniture seemed adrift, the individual pieces scattered like lifeboats in a sea of books.

  She read through the late dusk until at last she could no longer ignore hunger and was forced to face a penalty of spinsterhood—the dreary alternatives, cook for herself or eat out alone. There is no joy in cooking for oneself. Even the juiciest roast is tasteless unless spiced with a friend’s praise. And eating in the gayest and most intimate French restaurant, alone, is an experience cold and cheerless as spreading a cloth on a marble counter in a bank. What she needed was a roommate, but the apartment wasn’t big enough for both a roommate and her books. That, or a permanent guy. Trouble was, the commission’s security people would frown on either a roommate or a beau unless they were provided with security clearances as aristocratic as her own. That limited the possibilities considerably. As if she talked in her sleep, or brought home classified documents. Being a logical and farsighted woman, she realized that if Raoul allowed her to eat alone often enough, she’d marry him, mother and all.

  She had minute steaks in the refrigerator. She had decided to cook one of these, open a can of peas, and dine at her desk, when someone knocked. She supposed it was Callie Kantor, who worked for Interior and lived down the hall and sublimated, so she said, by raising parakeets and walking to work every morning. If it was Callie, she’d invite her out for a lobster dinner. “Come in,” she called, and opened the door.

  Major Price came in, bulking ominous and piratical in the shadowed hallway, his cap tilted over his eye patch and scar. He lived only a few blocks away, on R Street, and he had been to her apartment with a few of the others for a Sunday brunch two weeks before. She was not surprised at his call. The relations of seven people who three days a week face each other across a conference table, as equals, are naturally informal. She said, “Sit down, Jess, and I’ll make you a drink. Bourbon?”

  “With water. I saw your lights were on. I wanted to talk.”

  “Go ahead, talk.” She went into the kitchen alcove and brought out ice and glasses and mixed drinks at her combination tea table and portable bar.

  “I want to explain about this morning.”

  “Not necessary,” she said. “Felix was right. You gave us all the information we required.”

  “I just don’t believe in telling anyone—anyone at all—about future operations. Only ones who should know are the people who have to know to do their jobs.”

  She handed him a drink and said, “Sit down, there.” She indicated the sofa. She sat at her swivel chair at the desk so her head was higher than his, an advantage if this talk was to be serious. “That reasoning is valid,” she said, “up to a point. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes, there is,” he said. “There was a wing of B-Two-Nines on Okinawa in ’fifty-one. They were briefed to go up the Korean west coast and hit the Yalu bridges. Everybody in the wing was briefed. Not just the nine crews who were to make the strike. The night before the strike we lost a reconnaissance plane up there. Some of the crew bailed out, and were captured. They were good men, I suppose, but they talked. God knows what the Commie interrogators did to them. Anyway, when the nine B-Two-Nines got over the Yalu they were jumped by sixty Migs. We lost three up there, three more were washed out in forced landings in Japan, and one of the three that got back to Okinawa had its hydraulics shot out and blew up after a belly landing. We never ran unescorted B-Two-Nines up to the Yalu again. If we had got those bridges, just at that time—”

  “A personal experience?” she asked.

  “Yes. It was my squadron. I blew at Okinawa. The burned child dreads the fire.” He touched the scar with his fingers.

  She ran her tongue along her lips. “I understand. But suppose the information I requested had been essential to our plans, our forecasts that were coming up? What then?”

  “I don’t think you’d get it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you couldn’t do anything with it. Our group has neither responsibility nor authority. It can’t act, but there is always the possibility it might leak.”

  She was angry all over again. She stared down into his single, unwavering, disconcerting gray eye. She told herself that this was, after all, an unofficial discussion, and he was a guest in her house, and she must not lose her temper. “Go on,” she challenged.

  “What makes you think that in our echelon we are better equipped to divine the intentions of the enemy than the people right at the top, say the National Security Council?”

  She was on her feet. “I’ll tell you why! Because we haven’t anything else to do
! It is precisely because we have no responsibility or authority, or administration either, to worry about, that we can do this thing. The people at the top have a million things to do. They can’t devote all their time to the enemy.”

  “Stop pacing up and down like a leopard,” he said. “Sit down and take it easy.”

  “I won’t take it easy. I’m mad. Take the Secretary of Defense. Next to the President and perhaps the Secretary of State he’s the most important man in the country. He runs three departments, each five times as big as General Motors. These departments are designed to do different things in different ways, and there is more rivalry between them than there is, say, between Oldsmobile and Buick. If you were running fifteen General Motors, but each one more complex than General Motors, do you think you could spend all your spare waking hours reading everything that has ever been written, including all the classified files, about the schism between the Army and the Party in Russia, as Simmons did last week?”

  “Well, you have a point,” Price said. “That’s something I hadn’t considered.”

  “If you don’t believe in the Intentions Group,” she demanded, “why did you join it?”

  “If you’ll sit down I’ll tell you. You make me nervous.” She sat down, irritated by the ring of military command in his voice, but obeying nevertheless. “Two reasons,” he said. “First, Keatton asked me to.” Keatton was General Thomas Keatton, Commander of the Air Force. “Secondly, the Air Force hasn’t any place in its T.O. for one-eyed pilots. They don’t let one-eyed pilots fly a B-Nine-Nine, which is what I ought to be doing to earn my pay. But they will let a one-eyed Pilot sit in on the Intentions Group, and I want to stay in the Air Force.”