by Pat Frank
Jesse Price had not left the Pentagon since the conference and did not intend to leave at any time during the night and perhaps the following day. This was no hardship. The Pentagon is not an ordinary building. It is a city, walled and roofed. There are all sorts of shops on the ground level and several of its cafeterias operate around the clock. It has facilities for recreation, health, and cleanliness. There are cots in the duty offices and guardrooms, sleeping quarters in the deep shelters underground, and, of course, comfortable couches in the staff reception rooms, and the suites of the civilian hierarchy. It is possible to live in the Pentagon, with all the amenities, indefinitely.
All afternoon and into the evening Jesse Price shuttled between the Pentagon’s cerebral cortex, the habitat of the Joint Chiefs, and his own small office in an Air Force wing on the opposite side of the building, a quarter of a mile away, poking his long, beaked nose into various intelligence centers on four floors. To find out what is going on in the Pentagon, one needs not only a pleasing personality and some rank, but strong legs and a congenital sense of direction, for it is designed like a maze for the confusion of white rats. At nine o’clock Major Price returned to his office, sent his secretary home, and took off his size eleven shoes. His feet were swollen and his long shanks ached, but he had accumulated a number of facts as unrelated as they were disturbing.
The Pentagon is shaped like a spider web, and beyond its physical confines this shape extends along unseen lines of communication, so that the outer fringe of the web touches the far places of the earth—a shack on an ice island in the Arctic, a consulate in Azerbaijan, an observer on the Kurdish frontier, a naval attaché in Stockholm, an agent deep in the Eastern Zone of Germany, a Constellation nicknamed Pregnant Goose, bulging with radomes, flying in lonely darkness close to the North Pole. Something had ticked the web at all these places, and others.
A Russian reconnaissance plane had penetrated the air spaces over Greenland so deeply that interceptors were sent up from Thule. This was not unusual, but at the same time Russian multi-engined jets, very high and very fast, were probing Alaska and the wastes of northern Canada. Radar on Shemya, at the tip of the Aleutians, had picked up what seemed to be a whole squadron of aircraft maneuvering over the Komandorskis. For many months there had been little suspicious activity in the Far North. Now there it was, suddenly.
Major Price stripped off his socks and lifted his feet to his desk and rubbed the itching, corrugated skin. Was all this an accident of sighting? Was it intensified reconnaissance preparatory to an attack? Or was it a diversion, intended to focus the attention of the Pentagon on the northern strands of its web, and on the air? There was no sense in guessing.
Colonel Cragey and Steve Batt also had collected news, equally puzzling. The Intentions of the Enemy Group used its conference room only for the exchange of ideas and the search for conclusions. The physical preparation of its forecasts went on in another room equipped for the storage of classified documents, its phones monitored, its stenographers and researchers under the jurisdiction of the Top Secret Controllers. It was in this second room that Price had run into Cragey and Batt, and they had swapped information.
The Seventh Fleet, maintaining its vigil over Formosa, detected a shift in military strength in China. For a month there had been a buildup of junks and naval craft in the Chinese coastal waters. This had suddenly ceased. At the same time a squadron of medium jet bombers, believed manned by Russians, had vanished from Chinese coastal air bases.
“That’s strange enough,” Batt had said, “but hear this. We’ve lost about thirty Russian submarines. No radio intercepts. Same thing happened before Pearl Harbor, but that time we lost the Japanese carriers. Of course we often lose a flotilla of Russian subs when they’re in port and don’t send. Still, I’m worried, even if ONI isn’t.”
Navy had another worry. The carrier Forrestal, at sea with a destroyer screen west of Scapa Flow, reported it was being shadowed by a bogey. When the Forrestal catapulted interceptors, the bogey drifted away at great speed, indicating that it too was equipped with powerful radar and had spotted the launch. But the bogey could have been simply a fast trans-Atlantic jet airliner, minding its own business, so the matter was not pegged as serious.
Cragey had contributed a G-2 summary. What was going on in Europe made even less sense than what had occurred in China. All along the Iron Curtain frontiers, Russian armor was pulling back from the borders. This was exactly the reverse of Red Army maneuvers in past times of tension. But who could say that this was a time of tension, except for the loss of the B-99’s, and the extraordinary air activity in the North? There had been no disturbing diplomatic incidents, or unusual political friction.
Price was pulling on his socks and shoes when the phone rang. It was General Keatton’s office. The general was holding a meeting, right away, on the B-99’s. He thought perhaps Major Price would like to attend.
Price said, “I’ll be right down.” This was what he had been waiting for—Keatton’s evaluation of the B-99 business. He finished tying his laces and started on the long hike north, leg muscles protesting and toes burning. He was no infantryman.
7
The relationship of General Keatton to Jesse Price was that of a father to a son—except that Price was only one of a hundred sons, each receiving, consequently, a tiny fraction of personal attention. Yet it was enough. It was a bond that held the devotees of the Air Force together, close as an Indian tribe that initiates its youth in pain and blood. The careful selection of protégés dated to the days of Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold, when the Air Force was fighting for its separate existence, and perhaps its life, against enemies domestic rather than foreign. When Hap Arnold found a young man dedicated to flight, his eyes on the stars and his feet on the ground, he made him his son, and the tradition had continued.
Jesse Price was chosen for this brotherhood after Keatton came to Italy in the summer of 1944 as a deputy commander of Fifteenth Air Force. Price, then a lieutenant in his early twenties, flying a lumbering B-24, had qualified himself by a single act, and the correct answer to a single question. When his squadron leader was shot out of the sky by an 88, Price had led the formation on to bomb the primary target, a refinery near Wiener Neustadt. Because of foul weather, the Fifteenth had radioed in flight permission to all groups to seek easier, secondary targets, and everyone else had. While he was pinning a star on Price, the general asked: “What made you go for the primary, son?”
The gawky lieutenant (you could tell he was still growing because his wrists extended two inches beyond the sleeves of his best jacket) had been embarrassed as an adolescent called upon for public recital of poetry. Finally he said, “Sir, I kept thinking that if we didn’t do it that day, we’d have to go back again.” He hesitated and went on. “And I don’t want to die for nothing. I don’t want to die for Rosenheim or Klagenfurt. If I get it, I want it to be for something big, like Wiener Neustadt.”
This answer had pleased Keatton, who had marked Price for the future. Just so other generals in other lands marked young officers for exceptional deeds, such as twice, with coolness and guile, blowing up German pillboxes on the eastern approaches to Berlin.
Jesse Price’s career would have ended after his misfortune over Korea except that Keatton had noted his name on the casualty lists. Instead of being invalided out of the Air Force after his release from the hospital in Japan, Price received orders to Washington. This particular major, Keatton had decided, even though deprived of an eye, still had spirit and a logical mind. The thing to do was train that mind. Send him to the National War College, send him to Russia, send him back to sop up more lore of the Far East. Assign him to the Intentions Group—Keatton called it “the unholy seven,” defended its functions, and was amused rather than angered when it blundered—and let him exercise his imagination. The Air Force would use this boy for the war of wits, the war of the future.
When Price walked into Keatton’s inner office he saw that he was
junior in rank to all there. The chairs drawn up to the general’s desk were occupied by other generals of three or two stars. Brigadiers stood. Inconspicuous against the wall were two lieutenant-colonels, no older than himself. He would have been a light colonel, also, except for his wound. Promotion came quickly to men commanding squadrons, slowly to men in hospital or flying a desk, out of sight and out of mind abroad. He found a slice of wall against which to lean beside Polk and Rankin, the light colonels.
The general was listening to the other generals. The general sat back in his chair, relaxed, with the flags of his country and his rank staffed behind him, his delicate, wrinkled hands patting the spot where his jacket stretched. The general was slight, and probably not more than five pounds overweight, but the excess was all in one place. His hair was white and sparse, his brows white and heavy, his eyes deep blue like the blue in the flags, his mouth straight, his teeth his own and fine.
The talk, at this point, was technical. It concerned tons of fuel, wing stress factors, thickness of aluminum skin, pounds of pressure per square inch, and the inability of the human body to withstand a blowout at high altitudes, where the blood itself boils.
General Keatton spoke. “Is there any chance these two aircraft could have come together?”
A major-general, the A-3, Operations, held up a yellow sheet of teletype paper. “No, sir. I don’t think it’s possible. Here’s the tower log, sent in from Hibiscus. These two planes were to fly to Corpus Christi for a rendezvous with tankers, then swing north for a target run on Omaha at fifty thousand, then return to base. A milk run. Takeoff time for the first was oh-eight-twenty-seven. Takeoff of the second was four minutes later. They maintained the same speed and rate of climb, and, we can assume, about the same interval. At five hundred knots, they were about twenty miles apart. Weather, CAVU. They weren’t close enough together to see each other, but if they had got close enough, they certainly would have.”
“So mid-air collision is ruled out,” said Keatton. “Kidnapping is out too. I’ll admit that I considered the possibility that the enemy could have snatched that first one last month. But he can’t kidnap three B-Nine-Nines. Not from one base he can’t. Not with half my SI teams at Hibiscus. Not with Lundstrom there, eating out the Air Police. I’ll bet a red ant couldn’t have crawled out on the Hibiscus flight line this morning.” The general leaned forward, lifted his locked hands and brought them down on the bare, polished desktop, gently. “Know where that leaves us, gentlemen?”
They all allowed him to say.
“Structural failure or treason!”
He waited for them to absorb the word.
“I use the word treason rather than sabotage because if it was sabotage it had to be done by people in uniform, which makes it treason. It had to be treason within the Air Force.”
Jesse Price drew in his breath and held it. Neither he, nor anyone else in the room, stirred. They waited for Keatton’s next words.
“I hardly know which is worse, basic structural failure or treason. I hope it is only treason.”
Jesse thought he was hearing wrong, or that Keatton had got his phrases twisted, but the general continued:
“If it is treason it is probably localized to one base, and certainly we cannot lose too many planes. If it is structural failure it means every B-Nine-Nine on every base we own.”
Now Price understood the general’s reasoning, and the fear that had been in the back of his mind since the morning’s conference, when his secretary first phoned him the news, began to take form, as a shapeless dark cloud whirls itself into the deadly funnel of a tornado. If it was structural failure, Keatton would have to ground the B-99, which meant grounding all heavy bombers of SAC. There could be no other choice. Keatton would be called upon to obliterate, by a single order, the weapon of massive retaliation, the weapon that had maintained the peace of the world. If there was a weakness in the 99, Keatton could not send up his men in it until the weakness was ferreted out and corrected. The people wouldn’t stand for it.
The general spoke again. “I keep thinking of the British Comets—you remember—the first jet airliners. Two of them blew, one after the other, over the Med. Early in ’fifty-four, if I remember correctly. It was structure failure—metal fatigue. Take a piece of tin and bend it in your fingers, back and forth, back and forth.” The general’s frail fingers bent an imaginary piece of metal. “Finally, it snaps. It took the British months to find out where, and why. Meanwhile, all Comets were grounded.”
An elderly lieutenant-general, his face gray with overwork or poor health, spoke. He was Chief, Matériel Command, and he sat at Keatton’s elbow. “It can’t happen to the B-Nine-Nine,” he said. “We wrung them out for years before the first wing was formed. They don’t have bugs any more. They’re sturdy as the Four-Sevens. Sturdier, I think. And, sir, these three aircraft apparently were lost at between twenty and thirty thousand feet, long before they reached optimum altitude. They’ve bombed from sixty-five thousand. We’ve never had a pressure failure. The Nine-Nine is tight!”
Lieutenant-colonel Polk, standing beside Price, could not restrain himself. “All from that one base, too, sir!”
“I realize that,” said the general, “but we can’t take any chances. We’ve got a hundred tech reps and factory men flying to Hibiscus tonight. Suppose they do find structural failure? Where are we? We’re without a strategic air force. Begging pardon of the Navy, we’ve had it. So we’ve got to prepare a reserve SAC to take over. We’ve got two thousand Fifty-Twos and Forty-Sevens mothballed, lined up on every desert in Arizona. How long will it take to bust ’em out?”
They all looked at the elderly lieutenant-general, whose name Price could not recall, for he was one of those plodding rear echelon generals, whose name never appeared on orders or in Time or Newsweek, who kept the airplanes flying. “On a crash program,” said the lieutenant-general, “using everything I’ve got and some things I haven’t got but I’ll get, I can have a hundred Forty-Sevens flyable in a week, two hundred more and two hundred Fifty-Twos flyable in two weeks, and the whole reserve fleet unzipped in sixty to eighty days.”
“Well, get going on it. Not tomorrow morning. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant-general. He got out of his chair, with definite physical effort, and left the room. Jesse Price thought, I’d hate to be in that old man’s shoes. A gallant old man, a tired old man with troubles he had not brought to the meeting.
“So I guess that wraps it up for tonight,” said the general. “I don’t know of anything else we can do.” He stood up, and the meeting was over, and those of lower rank, that is, brigadiers and under, began to file out. Jesse stayed, hoping that the knot of brass around the desk would part and disperse. He wanted to be alone with Keatton for just thirty seconds. He wanted to urge Keatton to read the Intentions Group’s forecast. Then he realized how silly it would sound, at that moment. The general had solid troubles aplenty. He had no time to read a Russian war plan, hypothetical and nebulous, really no more than fantasy. And yet—
Lieutenant-colonel Polk came back into the general’s office and touched Price’s elbow. “The list is just now coming through,” he said. “Want to see it?”
They walked together through the reception room and into the message center annex where a row of teletype printers clattered out dispatches, in clear, from the commands. Price watched the names march out in neat oblong groups, just like flight assignments for the next morning’s mission, except that for these names there were no more mornings. Price read: “LT.COL.HOWARD DINK (PILOT).” He said aloud, “Dinky!”
“Know him?” asked Polk.
“Yes. Italy.” This was all he said, in no way indicative of all he felt, the quick, sick emptiness, as if part of his own life had been removed. For six months their cots had been side by side in the same faded brown tent. Every morning they swung their feet into the same cold mud, oozing out from under the duckboards. They played poker across the same blanket, shared thei
r combat whisky ration, took their leave together in Bari, tried to make the same girls, and on mission after mission flew in the same seven-plane box and faced the same death, which makes men brothers.
“Too bad. Know any of the others?”
Jesse forced himself to read the other names. “No.” He turned away, although he knew he was being impolite, and trudged back towards his own office.
He sat down at the desk and tried hard not to think about Dinky.
Wasn’t there someone else he knew in the 519th? The wing was just back from England. Somebody’s brother was in the 519th. Of course, Katy’s! Thank God the name Hume wasn’t on the list too.
Whenever Jesse Price thought of Katy he thought of the round curve of her thigh next to his at the conference table, of her smooth fingers and changeable eyes, and of his desire and need for her. He did not think of it as love, for when you admit you love a woman, even in your secret mind, you have committed yourself. As a consequence, you must try to possess her, and thus expose yourself to failure and rebuff. This was a risk he preferred not to take. He was sensate of his liabilities, his seared face, the insecurity of being a one-eyed major, his small hope of promotion or advancement in the future. Also, he was pretty sure there was some sort of a liaison between Katy and Raoul, and he was not a poacher. So long as he was not in love with Katy he could enjoy the warmth of her company, the stimulus of her intellect, and the pride of having her at his side in public places, which he recognized as salve to his ego. He had never been one for platonic friendships, but now he was fearful of staking what he had for something he probably could not attain. They dined together several times each week, and sometimes he took her dancing or to a movie or the ballet. On two Saturdays they had flown to New York together to see a show, but they had returned on the midnight plane.