Forbidden Area

by Pat Frank

  “Matter of fact,” said Major Price, “it’s happened a few times already without anybody pushing the panic button. And we’ve had a lot of snooper planes over Greenland and Alaska. More than normal. Maybe testing our radar net. Maybe just letting us get used to them.”

  “Right,” said Batt. “Anyway, these subs don’t have to enter our territorial waters until their final run in for their targets. At dusk they can be two hundred miles offshore, and two hundred feet down, and at first light, D-Day, be in firing position without ever having shown themselves.”

  “Machiavelli, junior,” Katharine said.

  “However,” Batt continued, smiling, “I still have some reservations about whether they can nail the Forrestal and our other big carriers. I’m afraid they won’t have much trouble knocking out the Sixth Fleet, in the Med. They have agents strung all the way from Gib to Stamboul, so they know the approximate location of Sixth Fleet carriers almost from day to day. The Mediterranean, after all, is narrow waters. Dangerous. But a task force in the Atlantic is an entirely different matter. Its location can be shifted six hundred miles every twenty-four hours.”

  Simmons said, “Assuming that the Forrestal and two or three other big carriers were loose on the high seas, would that alone deter the Russians?”

  “A carrier bomber can tote the same bomb as the B-Nine-Nine,” Batt said. “But they don’t have the range. Carrier planes can’t get to their heartland. Nor do they have the altitude and defensive equipment of the Ninety-Nine. They are intended to complement SAC, not replace it.”

  “Haven’t you answered your own question?”

  “I guess I have,” Commander Batt admitted, and sat down.

  “Anyone else?” asked Simmons.

  Jesse Price arranged his pipes in a row and said, “Me. Understand, I like this plan. It is feasible and practical and well within the Russian capabilities. It has unexpected elements of strength, such as leaving the major concentrations of our fighter and anti-aircraft defense strictly alone, immobilized while the blitz is going on. But the plan doesn’t contemplate the destruction of all of SAC. Our bases in England—and I’ll include the RAF strategic bombing bases along with ours—are in range of the Russian fighter-bombers and probably of the Baltic rocket sites. Scratch our British bases. I think we can also scratch our island bases in the Pacific. They’re sitting ducks for submarine-launched missiles. Maybe SUSAC will have trouble knocking out our fields in North Africa and Turkey, but I doubt it. The only thing that stumps me are the bases in our southern and southwest states. They’re just about as far as you can get from the U.S.S.R. Missiles from submarines may kill the ones close to big cities, but the enemy can’t hope to get them all. If only a few survive, the Russians win but they lose.”

  Simmons looked at Felix Fromburg and asked a question, “Could SAC be taken out of the play by sabotage?”

  The FBI man’s lips pursed as if to taste the words before he permitted them to leave his mouth. “No,” he said finally, “I don’t believe SAC can be successfully sabotaged. Security on SAC bases is more rigid than on any installations in the country, including the AEC and the U.S. Mint. It would have to be an inside job, and that I cannot imagine.”

  “Well,” said Simmons, “I say thank God for SAC.”

  The only telephone instrument in the conference room, a “hot line” from the Pentagon switchboard for matters urgent and official, rang. Simmons answered it, handed it to Price, saying, “For you, Major.”

  Price spoke his name into the phone, listened, said, “Thank you, Maude,” and hung up. Two small canyons appeared in his forehead above the hawk-beak nose, and his single eye narrowed. He turned to his colleagues and said, “Speaking of SAC, two B-Nine-Nines are missing. Vanished. Lost in the Gulf, like the one in November. That was my secretary, up in Air Force.”

  Sometimes, as now, Jess looked positively forbidding, Katharine Hume thought. She said, “Well?”

  “It could be collision,” said Price, “or navigation snafu.”

  They were all silent, thinking. Katharine said it, glancing at Felix Fromburg, “Or sabotage?”

  “Or sabotage,” Fromburg acknowledged. “I didn’t say it couldn’t happen. I just said I couldn’t conceive of it, which may only mean that I don’t have Katy’s imagination.

  “No use getting excited until we know,” Price said. He still frowned.

  “I’m excited,” said Katharine. “It’s my Air Force, too. I’ve got a brother in it. On a SAC base in the Midlands.”

  “I think we should get this excited,” said Simmons. “I think we should get this forecast out as quickly as we can. If everyone is agreeable, I’ll turn it over to General Clumb, for distribution, right after the meeting.”

  “Does he have to see it?” Katharine asked. Clumb was not one of her favorite generals. Clumb had definite views on the role of women in the military establishment, which he had expressed, publicly and often. She, in turn, had quoted to him Clemenceau’s opinion that wars were far too important to be left in the hands of generals.

  “Yes, he has to see it,” said Simmons. “We operate under the aegis of his section, and the forecast has to go through channels, like everything else. Another thing—let’s try to answer, ‘When?’ Oh, we may be way off, but I think it’s up to us to try. Let’s scrape up everything pertinent in our own departments, and be back here at eight tomorrow.”

  “Eight!” said Raoul Walback. “Tomorrow?” He had been invited to play golf at Burning Tree that afternoon. He had intended to ask Katy to go dancing that evening. That was out, too. She would be communing with whatever oracles dwelt behind the blank white marble of the AEC, and he would be racing around the CIA’s haphazard cluster of old buildings walled off in Foggy Bottom, a highly secret compound known to its inmates as the “campus.” And the routine of the Walback household provided for breakfast at eight-thirty, and Raoul enjoyed his regularity.

  “Eight,” said Simmons.

  3

  The news of the missing B-99’s travelled more swiftly to the Pentagon in Washington than to the room of Airman 2/c Stanley Smith in Barracks 37, only a mile from Hibiscus Operations. Hibiscus was the newest of the super-bases constructed under the emergency budget. It covered an area of twenty-two square miles, enclosed by maximum security fencing, floodlit in the darkness hours. Around the perimeter, at intervals of five hundred yards, bulked concrete flak towers mounting the rapid-fire 75-millimeter Skysweepers, or smaller platforms with heavy machine guns. An elf couldn’t sneak into Hibiscus without a pass from the commanding general.

  Since one of the aims of SAC was to encourage re-enlistment, thus maintaining its skilled cadres of mechanics, technicians, and fliers, much thought and expense had been devoted to the comfort and happiness of the airmen. Hibiscus did not look like a military installation, but like a pastel-hued development freshly created in the tourist belt. Its theaters, clubs, and public rooms were air-conditioned. It had seven swimming pools, a golf course, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. Flame vine and bougainvillea softened the stark outlines of its ammunition dumps and restricted areas. Palms flanked the streets. Azalea beds and clumps of camellias were in their second year of growth and flower. Banks of hibiscus and gardenias shielded the barracks. True, this town also possessed a gray factory district composed of enormous shops and hangars, and an area forbidden to most of its 4,500 inhabitants—the flight line. On the flight line customarily rested between ninety and a hundred and twenty B-99’s, their wings drooping with tons of fuel.

  Barracks 37 did not resemble a barracks at all. It could have been an airy dormitory at the University of Miami, or an apartment house of small efficiency units at any one of a hundred new Florida subdivisions. Most of the men in Barracks 37, like Stanley Smith, were graduates of the Cooks and Bakers School and were rated as Food Service Helpers. They could not advance far in grade, and yet Barracks 37 was one of the most comfortable and coolest buildings at Hibiscus. The Air Force recognized the importance of it
s cooks, for it regarded the stomachs of its fliers with solicitude. If indigestion drops an infantryman in combat, the others in his fire team simply close ranks and assume his duty. Indigestion to a pilot or radarman at 55,000 feet can wreck a mission, or lose a $2,000,000 piece of equipment plus two hydrogen bombs. Conceivably, a stomachache could spare Moscow.

  Airman Smith’s duties began at midnight and ended at eight in the morning, five days a week. He had asked for these odd hours and never requested a change. Smith was one of the quietest and oldest men in Barracks 37. Also, he was popular. He always had plenty of money, which was to be expected since he was one of the best poker players among the cooks, and never went out on tears and threw his dough around. It was known that he had a girl in Orlando, a doll. He was seen, sometimes, driving her car. He had Fridays and Saturdays off, choice days. A man who worked the midnight shift could pick his days. He was entitled to it. Smith never talked much about himself, or his girl. He was a solid man, and would surely make sergeant in a hurry.

  On this Monday Airman Smith was awakened at two in the afternoon by his roommate, Phil Cusack, who was still young enough to be troubled by acne. Cusack came from Morgantown, West Virginia. His father had been a miner and he would have been a miner also had it not been for the Air Force. Cusack had never lived so well, and so clean, before. He had no plans beyond the Air Force, except that he never wanted to go back to West Virginia.

  Smith was just stirring out of sleep when Cusack opened the door and said, his voice unnaturally high, “Hey Stan!” Usually, Cusack was careful not to disturb Smith until after he had shaved, because his roommate was grumpy when first awakened.

  Smith rolled over on his back and opened his eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Hell out on the flight line. Two more Ninety-Nines are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Twenty minutes out on this morning’s mission, and then no radio contact. Like they kept on climbing right into the sky. You ought to hear the crews at lunch. Ape sweat.”

  “Too bad,” said Smith.

  “Fourteen guys gone. Glad I’m fryin’, not flyin’.”

  Smith swung his legs out of bed and stretched. It had been so easy. He said, “Cusack, how about trotting downstairs and getting me a cold Coke?”

  “Sure,” Cusack said, and left.

  Smith shucked his pajama top and turned on the radio and shaved. Three scragged and he could get two more with the materiel he had on hand. Then he’d have to drive up to that beach between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine for resupply. His instructions were to start on the third Monday of December, and keep going. He was carrying out his orders. There had been no change except for the test requested the month before.

  Four weeks ago he had received a letter from Robert Gumol, president of the First National Bank of Upper Hyannis, Pennsylvania. The letter had been cagily composed, in case it should fall into the hands of the wrong Stanley Smith, or Hibiscus Base mail was being monitored. “If you are the Stanley Smith who has had some experience with Five-Star Electric,” the letter said, “please telephone me concerning a matter that may be of some benefit to you.”

  That evening Smith had called Gumol from a pay booth in Orlando. Three days later he was in Upper Hyannis on a seventy-two-hour pass. He had been hoarding his leave for such an eventuality.

  Gumol turned out to be a short, heavy-shouldered man, thick through the middle, probably in his late fifties, with the opaque china-blue eyes of a week-old baby, uneven dark splotches marring his pink skin. For a few minutes they chatted about the Florida climate, and other trivialities, in the office of the bank, feeling each other out, and then Gumol had said, “Now, concerning your mission—”

  “Everything seems to be going very well,” said Smith.

  “How many others came over with you?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Stanley Smith understood that Gumol was just making very sure of his identity, and he said, “Three.”

  “Right. Well, two of the others have been shifted around a good deal, and I haven’t heard a word from the third. That’s why I decided to call on you. The home office sent me word that it wants a test. On or about November fifteenth. If the test goes well, you are to continue as before.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s all the message.”

  “Very well. I understand.”

  “You can do it?”

  “Certainly.” Smith hesitated and added, “I wonder why they want a test?”

  Gumol squirmed in his chair and Smith noticed how short and inadequate his legs were, for his heft. When Gumol leaned back in the chair his feet did not quite touch the gray carpet. “To tell you the truth,” Gumol said, “I don’t exactly know what you’re going to do. I wish I did know. If something big is going to happen, they ought to give me time to make plans. They ought to let me know. Do you think anything big—I mean really big—is contemplated?”

  “All I know is what I’m supposed to do. I don’t ask questions.”

  “Now, don’t misunderstand me,” Gumol said. “I don’t want to know your job. Far from it. I was just thinking of something bigger than any one man, or four men, can do, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Smith, “but I don’t have the answer.”

  “Do you by any chance need extra money?” asked Gumol.

  Gumol knew very well that Smith would have asked for money, had he needed it. So Smith understood, correctly, that this was an offer of money in exchange for information. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. He wanted to ask the location of his roommates from Little Chicago, and the identity of the one from whom nothing had been heard. He did not think it politic to do so.

  Gumol said, “Well, whatever you’re up to, good luck. I expect I’ll be able to guess on the fifteenth.”

  Smith smiled and said, “Yes, I expect you will.”

  And he had flown back to Florida.

  Now that the plan was operating successfully, with three planes behind him, he too was wondering whether anything bigger would happen. SAC would find the disappearance of two more 99’s big enough. There had been a flap over the first one, with SI men all over the base. Hibiscus would really be in an uproar this day. He decided that this would be a good night to lay low and do nothing, and let Gregg Palmer, Masters, and Johnson carry the ball. If they were in a position to operate, it would take the heat off Hibiscus. It would spread the risk, and make things simpler for himself, and possibly for the others as well.

  Smith asked himself, again, why that test in November? He thought he could guess. Military machines, being civilization’s most massive organizations, were sensitive to the laws of motion and inertia. They cannot move instantly into top speed from a standing start. His experience in the engineers’ regiment had taught him this. A battle did not begin when the artillery opened its barrage and the infantry rose from its positions and charged. A battle began when the bridging was brought up, the roads strengthened to support tanks, the ammunition dumps replenished, and partisans struck in the enemy rear. He could envision a meeting of generals in the Kremlin, and one of them saying: “Before we start this, I’d like to know whether our saboteur teams can perform their mission.” Then the order had gone out to him, via Gumol, and he had succeeded. The great locomotive had not yet begun to move, but the exploit of November had set its wheels to spinning.

  Cusack came back with the Coke and Smith said, “What’s at the movies tonight?”

  4

  Robert Gumol did not guess the exact nature of Smith’s mission when the first B-99 vanished on November 15. He realized, of course, that Smith must have had something to do with the disappearance of the aircraft, but at first he believed that Smith, somehow, must have stolen the bomber and delivered it to his Fatherland.

  Gumol changed his mind on the third Monday in December. Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, just as he was about to lock his desk and leave the bank, he heard t
he news that two more bombers were missing from Hibiscus. All he said to Kirkland, his cashier, was: “Something must be wrong with them.”

  Thirty minutes later he joined Al Kauffman, hardware, Lou Stone, real estate, and Pete Kenney, Presto Markets, for golf at the Upper Hyannis Country Club. His game was more abysmal than usual, he couldn’t break 110, and he lost eighteen dollars in the nassau. In the locker room, afterward, he drank two double Scotches. They failed to cheer him. Instead of going directly home from the club he returned to the bank. He sat at his desk and stared at the Rotary Club plaque on the wall, but he was trying to look into the future.

  Robert Gumol had come to the United States with his father, a Petrograd banker, at the age of thirteen. The year was 1914, and the world was at war. Everyone thought it would be over in a few months. Unless it was over swiftly, all the warring nations would be bankrupt. No one dreamed that for the next forty-odd years there would be little peace, and that governments would be so constituted that the support of wars would be their principal business. Gumol, senior, was sent to the United States on behalf of the Czar’s treasury, selected for the mission because he spoke fluent English and had married a Scotswoman with banking connections in America. For three years the Gumols lived in hotels in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Papa Gumol bartered Imperial Russian bonds for dollars, for torpedoes, for bandages and gas masks. Most of his colleagues returned to Russia before the revolution, and perished. But Gumol, senior, with prescience of the terror abuilding, managed to remain in America. After the capitulation of Russia he set up a private bank in Philadelphia, specializing in foreign exchange. At first, he did not do well.