by Pat Frank
“You like the Air Force?”
“Maybe it can save us,” he said. “Maybe.” He finished his drink, rose, and stretched. When he stretched, his arms seemed too long for his frame, and altogether he seemed too large and unwieldy for the apartment. His eye took in the opened books on her desk, the notebook and pencils, and the fact that she still wore the gray suit. “Katy,” he said, “why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours?”
“Do you by any chance have a place in the mountains?” she asked.
“No,” he said, looking puzzled. “I don’t have anything but an apartment no bigger than this. But I do have a car and I can take you out to eat. I hate to eat alone.”
“Just wait a minute,” she said, “while I comb my hair.”
6
After that, for more than a year very little happened. It was an era of comparative peace, with no shooting wars such as the half-forgotten wars of Korea and Indo-China. There was much talk of disarmament, although no nation actually disarmed. There was much talk of neutrality, although few governments were actually neutral. Russia was quiet except when internal convulsions, hidden like earthquakes at the bottom of the sea, ruffled the flat surface exposed to men’s eyes.
Americans were concerned with automobile production, the new television shows, the national road-building program, the possibility that antibodies could be stimulated to fight cancer, and the new space satellite.
The Intentions Group concentrated on its impossibly bold divination of events to come.
Katharine Hume dined out quite often, sometimes with Raoul Walback and sometimes with Jesse Price. Since she also entertained them in her apartment, she added a collection of cookbooks to her library.
Stanley Smith enlisted in the Air Force without difficulty, applied for a rating as Food Service Helper, and passed his aptitude tests easily. After ninety days of basic training he was promoted to Airman 2/c and requested and received assignment to the Strategic Air Command.
Henry Hazen survived boot camp, was trained as a radar operator at Quantico, and was then shipped to Camp Pendleton, California, preparatory to overseas duty.
Nina Pope got a job as a stenographer in a St. Augustine real estate office. In mid-November of the following year, when she was dating an automobile salesman and memory of the night in the dunes had dimmed to the proportions of a bad dream, a B-99 on a training flight from Hibiscus Base, Florida, vanished without trace in the Gulf of Mexico.
two
THE LOSS of a single jet bomber, and the presumed death of its crew, was front page news for only a day, even though the B-99 was the ultimate in military aircraft. The story dropped from the paper entirely after the search was discontinued. So long as men are born unequipped with wings, nature will occasionally slap them from the skies as a reminder that they were not designed to fly.
The Air Force was more than usually concerned, however. The B-99 was a reliable and sturdy aircraft. It could maintain altitude on four of its eight engines. This was the first operational B-99 to be lost.
There was no conceivable explanation for disaster. The plane had left Hibiscus Base with a flight plan calling for a rendezvous with a jet tanker after 3,500 miles of cruising over the Gulf. Its fuel replenished, it would then swing northwest to Salt Lake City and simulate dropping an H-bomb. The people of Salt Lake would know nothing of this macabre experiment, for the B-99 would be at 65,000 feet, out of sight and out of hearing, and would make its bomb run by radar. The contour of Salt Lake, on the radarscope, resembled that of a certain industrial complex locked in a pocket of peaks in the Urals. The crew and plane had accomplished this identical mission without incident a dozen times before. The procedure taxed plane and men to the same extent as an intercontinental bombing mission, come the day.
More than that, there had been no distress calls or warning of trouble. Nineteen minutes out of Hibiscus Base, which lies between Orlando and Tampa, this B-99 had reported that it was at 20,000 feet, on course, speed 550 knots, climbing towards its most efficient ceiling of 55,000, with everything normal. After that, silence—nothing. It was the mystery that annoyed General Keatton. Once, a long time before, he had led his shattered air division back to England with forty-two B-17’s missing from his formations. But he knew what had become of them. He had seen. This way, it was different. Long after it was officially announced that the search had been called off (it would have been cruel to keep the families in suspense because of a million-to-one hope) Keatton kept an air-sea rescue squadron quartering the Gulf. And the Air Force quietly offered a five thousand dollar reward to any fisherman or shrimper who could bring in a bit of wreckage, no matter how minute.
For there was something else, unpublicized.
The B-99 had been rushed into production in a crash program. It had replaced the B-47 and the B-52 on the assembly lines, and on every SAC base, not only because of superior speed, range, and altitude. The difference wasn’t that important. The bomb bay of the 99 was no larger than that of the 47. When you can hide a small-city-size atomic bomb under a plug hat the bomb bay doesn’t have to be big. The fuselage of the 99 was somewhat longer than that of the B-52. All that extra space was crammed with new and strange electronic defenders. A bomber has deadly enemies, anti-aircraft rockets such as the Nike, launched from the ground, and the Navy’s Sparrow, fired from interceptors, and these enemies are smart. They have small inhuman eyes that guide them relentlessly to the bomber. The human brain piloting the bomber cannot outthink or outguess a guided missile. The human brain may decide to dodge, climb, weave, or dive, but the missile’s quicker brain will seek him out and destroy him. It takes a machine to outsmart a machine. The electronic machines inside the B-99 could distract a Russian missile’s one-track mind. They could take the missile’s thoughts off its task, and might even persuade it to turn traitor, and to return to the ramp from whence it was launched.
It was Keatton’s belief that the peace of the world, at that moment, rested with the B-99. This had not been true in the era of good feeling a few years before, and it might not be true a few years hence. But in that November, it was the existence of the B-99 and its pulsing metal brains that insured unbearable retaliation. It would be catastrophic if the enemy got hold of a B-99. It would be the end. They could pick its brains, learn its habits, and then build rockets to ignore its electronic tongues.
In his still, carpeted office down the main corridor from the River Gate, Keatton could not tear his mind away from the grotesque possibility that the B-99 had been stolen. As chief of an organization that was planning, among other fantastic things, to create an inhabited artificial satellite of earth, he could never forget that anything can happen. Keatton had no illusions whatsoever concerning his own future in the event of war. Whatever happened, he was through. If the enemy strike succeeded, in all likelihood he would either die very quickly, or be executed later. If he was called upon to strike their cities first, his soul could not survive the trauma of being an instrument of death for twenty or thirty or fifty million human beings. The worst of it was that ninety-nine percent of them were plain, ordinary people with no voice or choice in the schemes and ambitions of the leaders. Just people who wanted to work a little, play a little, love someone, and eat plenty. He couldn’t even be sure his strike would get the men in the Kremlin. When it happened, the bastards would be somewhere else. But if it did come, he would like to be certain that he could win it. For a protégé of Hap Arnold and Tooey Spaatz, it was a professional matter.
He called in Colonel Lundstrom, the Chief of OSI, and ordered him to Florida, just in case. OSI meant Office of Special Investigations, Air Force. He told Lundstrom to dig into the background of every crew member of the lost B-99.
2
The matter of the missing bomber did not become of transcendent importance until the third Monday of December.
On that day the Intentions Group met to review the final draft of a Russian war plan they had been constructing for eighteen months. Their plan was
not complete, for while they believed they knew the answer to “How?” and “Where?” they could not presume to know when. Not that morning, they couldn’t.
That it had required eighteen months to produce a facsimile of a Russian plan of attack was not surprising. They took it for granted that Russian staffs had been working on the original for at least five years. The skeletal draft was not wordy. The stapled copy, No. 6, that lay on the table before Katharine Hume contained only twenty-eight pages of typescript. It was called, simply: FORECAST OF RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION.
The philosophical basis for the forecast had been written by Simmons and Cragey. The Kremlin was aware that nothing could be decisive except what happened to the United States and its air power in the first twenty-four hours of war. Twice in the century the explosive industrial might of America had resolved world conflicts. It would again, if given time. To win a war, Russia had to destroy the industrial potential of the United States, and at the same time protect itself against atomic holocaust. So the plan began:
“OBJECTIVE: Destruction of 65-75 percent of the largest cities and industrial complexes, with populations; destruction of the Strategic Air Command; destruction of those carriers capable of mounting an attack on Russia proper.”
Since this objective, if fulfilled, would insure total victory, the plan could now follow the principle of war called “economy of force.” It discarded ground, sea, or air action in Europe and in Asia, with a single exception, unless directed at American air and naval bases. The exception was London. Other nations might be awed into submission by the blitz; the British, never.
Each time she read the first few pages of the forecast, as she had a hundred times as details were argued and altered, Katharine shivered. It was a plan ingenious and terrifying, but it would anger higher authority, particularly in the Continental Air Defense Command, and probably in the Army and Navy as well. Yet it was their duty to plan the destruction of the United States in the hope that someone else would think up a countermove to prevent it. It was not their duty to plan a defense. Indeed, Katharine wondered if defense were possible.
The guts of the forecast was that the main blow would be delivered not by air, as everyone anticipated, but by sea. Geography and the lethal trident of submarine, guided missile, and H-bomb, made their concept logical. Sixty-five percent of America’s heavy industry lay within three hundred miles of the sea, which meant within range of the old-fashioned German V-weapons. The Russians had much more efficient gadgets, and more of them, now. Several German rocket research establishments had fallen into Russian hands in 1945, along with thousands of technicians, tons of blueprints, acres of underground factories, and components by the carload. When the war ended the Germans had been working on a V-9, a two-stage rocket designed for transoceanic warfare. This work had not faltered, under Soviet direction.
To fathom the enemy’s intentions, it had first been necessary to determine his capabilities, and of course this had been the hardest part of the job. The Russians hold no open legislative hearings to decide whether their strategic air force shall have fifty or a hundred wings. Neither do they announce the composition of their Navy, or display motion pictures, publicly, of their new rockets.
Yet something always comes through. And an intelligence analyst works in much the same way as an archeologist. Give him a small bone, and often he can reconstruct the whole animal. So it was that Commander Batt could say that Russia’s submarine fleet comprised six hundred vessels, of which half were capable of long-range action against the shores of North America. Of these, two hundred were equipped with hangars or rocket-launchers, or both. The rockets had a range of five hundred miles and could be dropped within two miles of target. Armed with an H-bomb, this was the same as a direct hit. The submarine-launched rockets would drop at a speed of 3,500 miles an hour. Interception was next to impossible.
Katharine guessed, conservatively, that the Russian stockpile of H-bombs stood at three hundred and the annual production had been stepped up to one hundred. A few of these bombs, designed to contaminate vast inland areas, might be rigged with U-238 or cobalt casing, although this seemed as unnecessary as poisoning elephant-gun bullets to shoot mice. The nominal, ten-megaton bomb would sink Manhattan Island, kill almost everyone in the other boroughs by blast and heat alone, and spread a radioactive cloud that would fall over an area of seven thousand square miles down wind. Rigged with U-238, the fallout area would be as big as the state of Pennsylvania, and perhaps uninhabitable for several years.
All vital coastal cities and such inland centers as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, Youngstown, and Bethlehem would be targets for the submarines. Katharine read:
“Because of the overriding importance of destroying the New York area—the largest financial, communications, population, and industrial complex in the world—special means can be used. In addition to submarines assigned, two seagoing tugs will put in through The Narrows a few hours before Zero. One will find a berth between Canal and 20th streets, North River. The other will dock between the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges. Each of these ships will carry an H-bomb, with time fuse, in its hold. Crews will be considered expendable. If the Red Navy considers this method will not in any way compromise the security of the whole plan, it can also be used on such first priority targets as Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Norfolk.”
The forecast estimated that the attack from the sea would kill forty million Americans, of whom thirty million would die in the first six hours.
But this was by no means all. So long as SAC existed, ready to retaliate from bases ringing the Soviet Union, the Kremlin still couldn’t win. So except for two wings assigned to hit Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Denver, St. Louis, Kansas City, and a few other inland centers, the whole strength of the Red Air Force was to be thrown against SAC bases the world over.
Jesse Price had made the estimate of the potentialities of Aviatsiva Dalnevo Deystviva, which he called SUSAC, the Air Force contraction for Soviet Union Strategic Air Command. Its principal weapon was the T-37, nicknamed Bison, an intercontinental bomber first displayed at the 1954 May Day celebration in Moscow. The T-37 was larger, and perhaps faster, than the B-47. It could carry the load of a B-52. But Major Price doubted that it possessed the electronic defensive gear of the B-99. He believed SUSAC had replaced all its obsolete, propeller-driven T-4’s with the T-37. Since the Russians had possessed twelve hundred T-4’s, it was safe to assume they would have at least an equal number of T-37’s.
The two wings assigned to hit Middle America would not cross the Arctic and approach the DEW line—the Distant Early Warning radar and interceptor net stretching from Alaska to Greenland—until after the strike from the sea. Thus the Air Defense Command would not be alerted until the instant of the main blow. The Air Defense Command, on which almost all hope of repelling nuclear attack now centered, was dispersed to protect the whole country. In the hours of shock and confusion following obliteration of the coastal cities, it would be called upon to defend the Midwest against concentrated attack. Price predicted that at least ten enemy bombers would get through. Ten bombers delivered to the proper targets would paralyze and poison the solar plexus of the nation.
Simmons, at the end of the long table, head bent, was touching a pencil to his pad, arranging his thoughts, as he had been taught, into a precise parade. He saw that the others waited for him to speak. “You’ve all read the forecast in this form, which I hope will be final,” he said. “Do you have any reservations?”
Commander Batt rose. Most of the others remained in their seats while talking, but Batt was accustomed to thinking, and speaking, on his feet. Since boyhood, Batt had been questioned on serious subjects by admirals, and when you spoke to an admiral you stood up, respectfully. Batt, a taut, neatly made man, was third generation Navy. His boyhood heroes had been Farragut and John Paul Jones and Decatur instead of Dick Tracy or Tom Swift. He had absorbed Mahan while still at Macdonough School and grad
uated from the Academy in 41, close to the top of his class. He finished flight training just too late for Midway, but in plenty of time for Santa Cruz and a dozen battles that followed. By the end of the war he had reached a conclusion, not novel but still unacceptable to most of his superiors, that the air was the dominant ocean. It was an ocean without bounds or shoals and Mahan’s theories could apply to the sky. Yet he remained all Navy, and he always tried to fit the Navy into the ever-shifting picture of a future war. He had been one of the first to advocate the use of carriers as mobile bases for strategic air war, had written an essay on the subject for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, and had seen his arguments adopted by his seniors. “I don’t want you to mistake me,” he began. “I like our plan, and yet—”
Jesse Price grinned. “Still worried about how to get your subs across?”
“No. It’s not that. At first I was skeptical about moving fifty to seventy-five submarines across the North Atlantic without their being spotted. But I kept thinking of Pearl Harbor and how the Japs got six carriers and a supporting fleet to within two hundred miles of Oahu with no sweat. And I thought of how much bigger a carrier is than a snorkel and periscope. So, as you can see in the plan, I staged most of the subs in the White Sea and at Murmansk. They slip through the Denmark Straits and come down from the north, keeping out of shipping lanes. If they started in mid-winter, say about now, when the weather was bad and trans-Atlantic traffic at a minimum, there wouldn’t be much chance of detection. A smaller flotilla sneaks out of the Baltic. They’ll be the ones bound for our Gulf coast. All of them can do most of their cruising on the surface, keep their radar going, and duck long before anything can see them. Even if one of two were spotted on our side of the ocean it would hardly be a casus belli.”